“Pass me the scalpel,” said Courtois. “This cohesion seems bizarre to me.”
“You’ve found something else?” Monsieur Le Tellier asked him.
“Wait,” said Monsieur Courtois. “Let me work. It really is! I expected it. Oh, these spiders…they’re not simply united by the enlacement of their legs; they’re also held together by nervous tissue. Each presents two external nervous papillae, connected to a center—a brain, medulla or ganglion—which fulfill the function of electrical contacts, or power-points, as you prefer. The spiders connect themselves to one another by means of these nervous contacts!”
“Heaven and Earth!” said Monsieur Le Tellier. “But if they can weld themselves together in that fashion, the entire arachnid species can form a variable quantity of collective beings, as it pleases, or become a single immense animal endowed with a single mind, a single will and a single sensibility: a gigantic ball, or rather an interminable cordon, a chaplet…”
“Like a tapeworm!” said Monsieur Monbardeau. “That’s also composed of organisms arranged in sequence…”
“The sarvants resemble water,” said the Duc d’Agnès, “which scatters into innumerable droplets, but can form a single ocean. We’re no longer sperm whales, doctor; these people are titans, when they wish to be.”
“Yes, titans,” said Monsieur Courtois. “Multiform proteans! These elected to borrow our stature in order to try to deceive us; they had a choice between all possible conformations; they were able to amalgamate into any plastic combination, and thus become several large colony-creatures, many small social beings, or remain a host of separate individuals.”
“These spiders are nothing, in sum,” Monsieur Le Tellier observed, “but units of construction, like the cells of our own bodies—since after all, a human being is only a collection of elements. The difference is that our cells have no personality, no independence, while among the sarvants, each free element is an individual. This biological type realizes a social chimera: the co-operative State. The superaerian people enjoy the ideal republic: one for all and all for one. It’s admirable.”
“It’s disgusting!” said the Duc d’Agnès.
“All modes of life are admissible,” said Monsieur Courtois, “and this one, which subordinates the preponderance of a race to the practice of solidarity, isn’t without grandeur.”
“Bah!” said Monsieur d’Agnès. “Preponderance over toads!”
“That’s true!” said Monsieur Monbardeau. “We’re forgetting the toads! Shall we study them a little now? I’m curious…each one of them, remember, was doing the work of an ox, and that’s an accessory mystery, in which, in spite of everything, I suspect the involvement of a science…”
He ran to the motor creatures then, and experienced the regret of observing that their decomposition was proceeding with an unfortunate rapidity. An odor of formic acid,53 given off by the ice, pricked his nose and made him weep. Bubbles of mephitic gas were making glug-glug noises in the water of the melting ice. The lid of one of the boxes was thrown off, with a bang and a stink.
“The sarvants must be brutes,” declared the Duc d’Agnès, “to have treated God’s creatures like that!”
“First of all,” Monsieur Le Tellier said, by way of contradiction, “you don’t know whether these toads might have been delighted to find protection, shelter and subsistence, at the price of a labor doubtless proportionate to their strength. Personally, I think that the sarvants are not evil, since they thought that we would do no harm to creatures that resembled us…”
“Oh, certainly!” mocked the doctor. “The most obtuse animal knows perfectly well that wolves don’t eat one another!”
“Of wolves, that’s true. Not of humans.”
“In any case,” murmured the Duc d’Agnès, “the sarvants don’t stop at martyrizing those who don’t resemble them!”
“And what if they don’t know what suffering is?” replied the astronomer. “Have you thought of that? We, who suffer, claim that some animals are ignorant of pain. In the end, what do we know?”
“Perhaps,” suggested the blind man, “they adopted our appearance knowing, on the contrary, that there is nothing humans fear more than other humans? But let’s hurry—putrefaction is taking hold of these remains.”
“Which is annoying,” sighed Monsieur Le Tellier. “I would have liked to submit them to experiments in radiography and make molds of them.”
“You won’t have the time.”
“Let’s at least try to find out how they make up for the lack of blood circulation and respiratory function, by disaggregating that human simulacrum.”
The rising Sun found them bent over the little corpses—which were invisible, light and repulsive, and difficult to retain, liable to flatten themselves against the ceiling at the slightest false move. The results of their night’s work, however, are much too technical to report in this popular account—whose clarity, besides, would not be reinforced in the least.
Thus terminated the memorable night of September 6 and 7, 1912, the worthy sequel to a Friday forever to be celebrated in the annals of science.
XVI. De Profundis Clamavi 54
The morning papers vanished as soon as they appeared. Everyone was expecting to read a full explanation of the phenomenon of the grand boulevard—the previous evening’s papers having related it in confused and irrational terms—but had the disturbing experience of only buying, even in the best papers, a surplus of incoherent ramblings and contradictions. They gave a passable account of what had happened at the Grand Palais, but they followed that information—already very frightening—with inept commentaries and highly fantastic explanations. In the excited public mind, everything concerning the aeroscaph became a little clearer, but the notion of the superaerian world remained tenebrous and ghostly.
The instinct of the people warned them that something serious had happened. Paris was in a ferment. The shops were deserted. Crowds besieged the ministries one by one, without knowing to which of them they ought to have recourse, in the circumstances. People imagined that the government was keeping secrets and mounting pretences, electing to remain silent; they wanted the truth. To the bobbing of Chinese lanterns in front of the Chambre des Deputés, a hundred thousand people demanded it.
A delegate was sent to Monsieur Le Tellier to ask him to instruct the nation. At four o’clock, there was a gratuitous distribution of a bulletin printed in haste, which included the astronomer’s response (item 821). It did not conceal anything, but merely undertook to be stoical.
It was then that the Blue Peril became manifest in all its horror and all its formidable implications—when it was clearly stated that above humankind, on an invisible globe more immense than the Earth and enveloping it everywhere, lived another race of intelligent beings, which seemed to have attacked us; a race redoubtable by virtue of its location, its might, its way of life, its genius and its invisibility, which put a metaphorical blindfold upon us.
All humankind shared the same fear, and its excitement was bizarrely aggravated by the fact that the two known forms of the creatures of the void exactly duplicated those of the most repulsive terrestrial animals—a repulsion to which centuries of daily acquaintance had not been able to render humans insensible.
The fate of the prisoners ceased to interest public opinion; people feared too many calamities for themselves. The repulsive meddling of toads and spiders in our affairs preoccupied everyone’s thoughts—for it is important to note that, at the outset, the popular mind did not differentiate between the sarvants and their dynamic livestock. In spite of the information provided by Monsieur Le Tellier, the assurance of an imminent invasion persisted for a long time; the army expected to be mobilized at any moment.
Within 24 hours the panic became worldwide. An avid thirst for science developed everywhere, even in the most backward tribes. The ignorant had themselves initiated in the rudiments of optics and meteorology; clerks extended their knowledge to the remotest arcana. Display
ed by bookshops, Jean Saryer’s Essai sur l’invisible sold out in multilingual editions. Le Journal, the Daily Mail, the New York Herald, the Novoye Vremya and the Gazette de Cologne offered Monsieur Le Tellier fortunes for authorization to publish the red notebook, but he refused.
The end of the world, feared for several months, seemed suddenly to have arrived. The churches, temples, synagogues, pagodas and mosques were overflowing with horrified multitudes moved to instinctive fervor, and the taverns produced drunkards by the dozen. The banks, silent and abandoned, could not attract a burglar. There were unanimous prostrations, followed by universal overexcitement. One might have thought that the nervous systems of all humans were in communication, like those of the Invisibles. The despondency extended throughout the family of Eve, prey to that unjustified fear of extermination. People admitted that the time had come.
Everyone told himself that it was the sad termination of so many efforts and victories, and knew again the incessant distress that gripped the hearts of our ancestors when human beings were nothing but feeble mammals perennially exposed to the monumental aggression of mastodons, which they feared without respite and the obsession of which never left them. That terror, suddenly awakened from a 20,000-year sleep, must have been as supreme in prehistoric times as love, for to experience it was to recognize it. More numerous than in any time of eclipse or cometary visitation, gazes fixed on the apparent void, where the fall of humankind was inscribed in invisible characters. But the human tenants of Earth had not even been dethroned—they had never reigned! They had believed themselves to be masters, while another race—industrious, ingenious and absurd—remained their superior, to the point of fishing for them!
Humiliation of humiliations!
Man, no longer being MAN, bowed down, gripped by stupor. He accepted his lot. He felt a great compassion for himself, in confrontation with the iniquity of which he thought himself the victim. And the priests in the pulpits preached in the following fashion:
“From the depths of the abyss we have cried to Thee, Lord, our desires, our suffering and our love; and we were like subterranean beasts. Yes, all the more profound in being beneath an unsuspected world. Were those to whom Thou hast given the kingdom of the Earth, not therefore the sons of clay transfigured by the breath of Elohim? Our prayers, in rising to Thy glory, to the highest of the Heavens, have traversed the universe that it has pleased Thee to interpose between us; but more than ever, O Lord, we cry out to Thee, from the utmost depths of the abyss, our keener desires, our rekindled suffering and our magnified love!”
The evening spider signified chagrin, like that of the morning; both were crushed as soon as they were perceived.55 Furious pursuers hunted them and stamped on them senselessly. Fear made the non-existent urge forth. Everywhere, people saw faucheux and phrynés; hallucinated Mexicans saw atocalts, Africans imagined that the stars were luminous galeodes, and Victor Hugo’s poem was realized in reverse, for the radiant sun paradoxically evoked the dazzling shadow of some titanic Sisyphus: Et l’homme, du soleil, faisait une araignée.56
In all the rural regions of the five continents, toads and frogs were massacred, from the delicate green frogs of our meadows to the ignoble pipas57 of Brazil, which are hopping abscesses.
And then, suddenly, there was a turnabout. Humankind pulled itself together, with an abrupt surge of energy. Lay and religious preachers alike cried that, after all, nothing certified the superiority of the sarvants; that their technology, at the end of the day, was less advanced than ours in certain respects, with its risible spheres and its toad-motors; that it was necessary to defend the surface against their incursions and to mobilize all the engines of destruction that our science had constructed and would construct.
It is well-known that human beings in herds are strange beasts, lunatic, sheep-like and Panurgian.58 The reaction took effect swiftly. An exaggerated confidence supplanted the excessive demoralization. The basilicas emptied, to the profit of the theaters; fashionable shops welcomed an influx of customers and rethreaded needles ran competitively through pongees, shantungs and other silken fabrics. Everything started again. Following the example of a first syndicate for the defense of the territory, others were formed; posters were stuck up in profusion. Public meetings were added to conferences. The world’s capital cities seemed lacking in illumination when it was announced that in France, the Council of Ministers was about to deliberate in combination with the Academy of Sciences—an eminently salutary measure which all other States proposed to imitate.
We shall briefly recall the French mixed session: that historic assembly, model of future parliaments, anticipating the day when scientific experts will replace politicians completely. It opened at the Elysée on Wednesday, September 11, and began with a discussion. (Official record, item 943).
Reflecting the national conviction, which he shared, the Minister of War proposed to examine without circumlocutions the surest, most expeditious and radical means of destroying the superaerian continents. He added that it was important to do so as soon as possible, before the sarvants had constructed further aeroscaphs. He mentioned colossal mortars and explosive projectiles—but his speech was cut short. The Minister for the Colonies interrupted him and demanded what right he had to bombard this country, which could, in time, undoubtedly be conquered, perhaps annexed, and might, at the very least, be rewarded by a protectorate. The worst that he could permit himself to foresee was the massacre of the indigenes, although it would be preferable, in his opinion, to enslave them. But to devastate the invisible land from top to bottom?—never! There must be very appreciable unknown riches up there. On his own account, he nursed the hope that France would one day be augmented by this beautiful possession, more extensive than the entire surface visible on maps of the world.
The physicist Salomon Kahn tried to intervene then, but the Minister of Labor entered into the discussion. After a compliment addressed to his two colleagues—admiring them both for having shown, for once, the spirit of his own department, and congratulating the Minister of War for being bellicose and the Minister for the Colonies for being a colonizer—he announced that he, the Minister of Labor, was about to voice the sentiments that ought to have emerged from the mouth of the Keeper of the Seals, the Minister of Justice. And he proved that the idea of colonization was not admissible, from the triple viewpoint of the law, jurisprudence and justice, because the plains of the void already belonged to human beings. (Prolonged sensation.)
“You know,” he said, “that any landowner is the owner not only of the ground but also the subsoil of his property. Since the extension of aerial navigation, you will recall, the upward extension of property has been symmetrically recognized—the ownership of that portion of the air that is above the ground. All the space that is above my field belongs to it; thus, I am the owner of a portion of the superaerian territory. If my field is round, I own a circle of the invisible continent on high—but that circle is slightly larger than that of my field because, gentlemen, that which we possess when we possess a terrain is not a surface but a volume. To buy a round field is not to buy a circle of land; it is to buy a limitless cone of fire, rock, soil, atmosphere and void, the apex of which is at the center of the Earth—where all properties, coming together, decline to nothing—and the base of which is at infinity. The planets and stars, gentlemen, can only gravitate by passing from one of these conical divisions of the ether, of which we are the possessors, to another. In the same way, to sell a square field is not to sell a square of arable land; it is to sell a regular four-sided pyramid…”
The President of the Republic said nothing.59
“I demand the floor,” said Monsieur Le Tellier.
It was ceded to him; silence fell.
“Gentlemen,” he began, “before annihilating or colonizing the invisible world, scientific France has decades of work to do. No bomb can reach a height of 50 kilometers, at least usefully—for, if it got that far, its explosion in the void would only produce insigni
ficant damage. On the other hand, in falling back to Earth with the force of bolides, its unexploded shrapnel would provoke irreparable misfortunes. So much for annihilation.
“Let us look at colonization. The technology at our disposal cannot transport us to such a height; above a height of about 25,000 meters from the surface, the air is too rarefied to sustain our balloons, airplanes or helicopters. Trying to fly there is like trying to swim in fog—folly.
“Even if we knew how to build a ship as light, precise and resistant as the aeroscaph—or if the refitted aeroscaph were taken back into service—it could only take up six men at a time. And it would be necessary to know how to maneuver it! In any case, the aeroscaph cannot be repaired, we are powerless to reproduce it, and any motor we put in place of the bufonic dynamos—if you will pardon the barbaric neologism—would be too heavy.
“Then again, gentlemen, how would we survive up there? I know that we have respiratory apparatus to counter asphyxia, but what diving-suit has been invented to counteract decompression? What hermetically-sealed and yet articulated suit of armor?
“No, no, we cannot think of demolishing the superaerian continent—which might perhaps, in any case, play a fundamental role in the economy of the planet. It might be a precious condenser of solar heat, whose disappearance might perhaps be followed by that of the terrestrial fauna, including a certain degenerate, tyrannical and vicious orang-utan that is very dear to our egotism.
“And we can no more think of colonizing that world, since it is beyond our reach, given that it is only in utopian dreams that we possess Jules Verne’s Columbiad and H. G. Wells’s cavorite.
“What shall we do, then? Yes, what shall we do? Are we going to allow ourselves to be fished, to the last man? They will colonize us, if we don’t colonize them?”
The Blue Peril Page 29