The Blue Peril

by Maurice Renard

  The President of the Republic said nothing.

  “Just a minute! A few more words, I beg you!” Monsieur Le Tellier said, overriding the exclamations. “All of that’s irrational. Which of you has ever planned to mount a peaceful invasion of the world of fish? To colonize the submarine steppes and liquid pampases? You know full well that the sarvants profess nothing for us but simple scientific curiosity.”

  “The rest will come!”

  “Certainly not. Or, at least, only in the far future, when we ourselves are entertaining dreams of conquest with regard to the sea-bed—and by then, we shall be ready to receive the Invisibles.

  “For the moment, what is at stake is no more than a matter of defending ourselves in case further explorations threaten us—or threaten unfortunate Bugey, which all evidence suggests is at the bottom of the sarvants’ sea. That is the question. Now, I claim that, if we give it a little thought, the question will no longer seem urgent!”

  (General movement.)

  “Convinced by reason that the spiders do not at this moment—and doubtless never have had—any but oceanographic motives with respect to a world in which they can only survive awkwardly clad in isolating armor or cloistered in subaerian diving-bells, as we can in deep water, I declare that years will pass before they recommence their attempted museum—and I can prove it.

  “Come on, gentlemen—do you think they attach any great importance to human fishing, this immense invisible population which has, for that purpose, only constructed one single vessel? Yes, only one! You are not unaware of the fact that, since the wreck of the aeroscaph, there have been no further abductions. We are, therefore, dealing with a rather modest enterprise by a group of sarvant scientists—some of those which, I assume, play the role of brains in their singular assemblages. Well, tell me, have the results of that campaign been encouraging for them? It has failed completely. On the one hand, the subaerian has been lost, with all hands; on the other hand”—here the orator’s voice was hampered by restrained sobs—“on the other hand, gentlemen, their captives…excuse me…their captives are dying with fr…frightful rapidity. The members of the government are better placed that anyone to tell you with what horrible frequency cadavers are now falling from the sky on to poor Bugey…

  “Blinded by my own tears and deceived by my own grief, I was briefly able to believe in the enormity of the Blue Peril; I was able to believe that it threatened all humankind henceforth—but I am edified. The sarvants are not about to renew an attempted aerium that has fallen victim to a naval catastrophe and the lack of success of the breeding program.

  “What shall we do? Let us prepare for the future, however distant it seems—and let those whose relatives are in the spiders’ claws wait courageously for their bodies to fall!”

  Monsieur Le Tellier sat down heavily, like a traveler at the end of his journey. His colleagues surrounded him and shook him by the hand. Amid the noise of their compliments, the Minster of War was heard to say, obstinately: “The sarvants must be destroyed!”

  The President of the Republic, emerging from a reverie, then said in a heavy Gascon accent: “Hey, tell us something, Monsieur Le Tellier. You, who are the Christopher Columbus, the Vespucci of this America—or better still, the Le Verrier of this Neptune—tell us something. These territories superimposed over ours, these people beneath whom we have been living all this time…tee hee, isn’t that sentence absurd…?”

  “Everything seems absurd, Monsieur le Président, when it is entirely new and very strange, and when we suddenly perceive it, unexpectedly, without a chain of events or reasoning having led us to it progressively, by way of successive faint surprises or gradual small enlightenments, whose sum nevertheless constitutes an extreme amazement and a more profound knowledge.

  “There’s also a question of vocabulary. For instance, what if you had declared to a Roman of yesteryear, to the most intelligent and poetic of Romans—Horace for example—or to a Greek, the wisest of the Greeks—Aristotle, if you like—the simultaneous lyrical and scientific statement: ‘One day, O masters, lightning will be employed to propel galleys?’ At those words, Monsieur le Président, I can now see Aristotle smiling and Horace shrugging his shoulders…however, the sentence that you claimed to be absurd just now will be as simple and natural in a few years time as saying today, 2000 years after Horace and Aristotle: ‘There are electric boats.’ ”

  The President of the Republic resumed his Elysian reverie

  “The sarvants must be destroyed!” intoned the well-known minister.

  The session continued, and was ended with an order of the day “inviting the Chambers to vote funds for the study of projects to combat a new arachnid expedition, however improbable.”

  XVII. A New Message from Tiburce

  The astronomer left the Elysée overwhelmed by fatigue. He had had to make a violent effort of self-control in order to appear optimistic at the conference session. His parental grief and scientific reason were at war. It is a noble action, but a torture, to paint the future of others in pleasant colors when the future confronting oneself is like a black hole.

  He went home demoralized, considering that his task was finished, and no longer thinking of anything but seeing Mirastel again, where Dr. Monbardeau had preceded him. Monsieur Le Tellier wanted to be there—what an infernal torment the thought was!—when, in the rain of cadavers falling upon Bugey…

  Oh, that hellish thought, which kept coming back to him unrelentingly, and which he never found the horrible courage to complete…

  Monsieur d’Agnès was waiting for him in the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The sight of him was not calculated to cheer the poor man up, so sharp was the memory of thwarted cherished plans, and so somber was the Duc’s expression…

  He opened up his despair to Monsieur Le Tellier. No engineer had left him the slightest illusion. The invisible world was impregnable, according to the Faculties. It was driving him to neurasthenia. By night, nightmares frightened him with superaerian visions—vivisections, scandalous marriages, workshops of human naturalization, etc.—and his thoughts remained imbued with delirium by day. He had not escaped the phobia of the invisible that tormented all impressionable people at that time and made them grope their way alone in broad daylight, so that the streets everywhere seemed full of blind men. And when the Duc d’Agnès watched the agitation of passers-by from his window, he thought he was looking through the panes at a collection of fish in an aquarium! “If there only remained the tiniest chance!” he said, suddenly, with an ashamed half-smile…

  Monsieur Le Tellier raised his arms and let them fall back, as a sign of helplessness, and the Duc d’Agnès went on, stammering: “Yes, I know full well…one would have to be mad, wouldn’t one? As mad as…ahem!...as Tiburce, for example. Ah, nothing disconcerts that one! Hmm…”

  He took out a letter, with an emphatic gesture. “I got…ahem!...he sent me this.”

  “No—don’t make me look at that letter. Ah! I scarcely think about him anymore, your Tiburce. It’s true—one would have to be an imbecile still to believe in these benevolent chimeras! Ah, the enviable cretin! Fold up your piece of paper, my friend—it would make me feel ill.”

  “Evidently!” conceded the Duc d’Agnès. Even so, he re-read Tiburce’s insane message, for his own benefit.

  (Item 845)

  Bombay, 3 August 1912.

  I still have every hope, my dear friend, although I have a great deal of bad luck against me, and the cleverest man in the world: Hatkins.

  You will recall that I embarked in pursuit of a certain Hodgson and his daughter, whom I suspected of being Hatkins and Mademoiselle Le Tellier. I found them in Singapore with surprising ease. They were an old protestant pastor and his elder sister! The ostentation with which they were not hiding immediately alerted me to a trap; the two old people were accomplices that Hatkins had disembarked at the same time as him and who, from then on, had taken the borrowed names under which the American and Mademoiselle Le Tellier h
ad been known on the ship. While I occupied myself with them, Hatkins and his companion were fleeing. They were still fleeing; it was, therefore, increasingly certain that it was them.

  By deduction, I discovered the route they had taken, Since their arrival, only two steamships had sailed, one for Calcutta, the other for Madras. My familiar spirit whispered “Calcutta” to me. I went there and I learned, by means of bribery, that no one disembarked therefrom resembled, at close range or from afar, the person whose resemblance I wanted to find.

  Having smoked a few pipes, I recognized my error, and thought I would pick up the trail in Madras. I therefore set out to sea again, after a considerable delay, In Madras, however, I had the satisfaction of realizing that my intuition had not been mistaken; two young Moldavians of the masculine sex had just taken a train for Bombay, under the name of the brothers Tinska, after having stayed for a few days at a hotel. It is true that they had not come from the east, from Singapore, by sea, but from the north, from Hyderabad, by land—but what did that matter? Is not Tinska an anagram of Hatkins, minus the H?

  I had them!

  Without dawdling, I leapt on to the express to Bombay, where I counted on finding Mademoiselle Le Tellier dressed as a boy—but there, in the confusion of the city, it was impossible to pick up the trail of my pseudo-Moldavians. This morning, however, after a thousand false steps and setbacks—for I do not have Sherlock Holmes’s ability to command admiration and deference—I discovered at the Cook Agency that a Greek party composed of four individuals—two young couples, the Yeniserlis and the Rotapoulos—had just embarked for Basra at the far end of the Persian Gulf. From Basra, they intended to travel overland through Mesopotamia to Constantinople, in order to return from there to Greece.

  I’m sure that the Monbardeau-d’Arvières have rejoined Hatkins and Mademoiselle Le Tellier, and that the other Greeks are them! They have furnished the agency with a wealth of unnecessary details about what they intend to do and not to do. They’ve said to themselves: “Tiburce will never think that it’s us, since we’re not hiding anything.” And, indeed, they’re not even trying to hide the fact that they’re two men and two women! Anyone else but me would have abandoned that excessively clear trail—but a good cat catches a good rat! I have the better of them, and I’m heading for Basra tonight.

  A superb chase! Via America, Japan and Indochina I’ve gone more than half way around the world. Before they’ve looped the loop, I’ll have caught up with them. I’m conscious of having been hot on their heels, tracking them so implacably that they haven’t been able stop where they wanted to, and that I’m forcing them to return to Europe, where we shall be their masters! Sursum corda, my dear friend!

  To you in all affection; and in the hope that Mademoiselle d’Agnès might care to find homage to her devotion herein.

  Tiburce

  When the Duc d’Agnès had finished reading this preposterous missive, Monsieur Le Tellier glimpsed a slight gleam in his eye. “Ah!” he said, folding his arms. “Do you, by chance, retain any doubt on the subject of the stupidity of this amateur policeman?”

  Monsieur d’Agnès blushed. “Doubt? Alas, how do you expect any doubt to remain? I know from a reliable source that Mr. Hatkins is in New York. I’ve read Robert Collin’s journal, who saw the person we’re already mourning among the sarvants. After that, how can you believe that I have any faith in letters from Tiburce, who claims to be following them around the world? I realize, however, that…yes, momentarily, that joyful tone, that nimble assurance…and then again, Monsieur, we are always tempted to believe that which causes us grief, and, you see, when I think that Mademoiselle Marie-Thérèse might have gone with Hatkins…”

  “You’d like it better if she were in the aerium,” said Monsieur Le Tellier, bitterly.

  “Oh, Monsieur, what are you saying! Have pity on me. All my anxieties, all my jealousies, all my eternal martyrdom, rather than one tear on your daughter’s eyelashes!”

  And the Duc continued in that vein for some time, confessing his love and his illness in an enervated, raucous and vacillating voice, with the melodramatic emphasis that causes the exaltations of the finest life to resurface in the tone of bitter tirades.

  XVIII. The Appearance of the Invisible

  The departure of the scientist whose authority had dominated the Parisian phase of the Blue Peril permitted a project that the astronomer had always opposed to be put into execution—we are referring to the admission of the public to the Grand Palais. Monsieur Le Tellier had not opposed it on principle, but he had argued, with reason, that admission ought to be free and that, in any case, it was necessary to wait for the aeroscaph to cease to be invisible, at least in part, by virtue of the intermediation of paint or some other procedure.

  Unfortunately, the public complained—which is to say that three or four publicists caused them to complain. The moment was foreseeable when the question would become an election issue and, even though the subaerian still refused to accommodate any coating that would render it visible, it was decided to give the public access at five centimes a head, the profits going to the Bugist disaster-victims. The entry fee was only imposed to prevent overcrowding.

  From the first day, Sunday, September 22, Monsieur Le Tellier’s predictions were fulfilled. All that the crowd could see was a high and solid barrier defending an unoccupied enclosure, with policemen guarding the interior. It was a clear case of paying to see nothing. In the obtuse soul of the multitude, the idea took shape that “one ought to be able to see, somehow, that the damn thing was invisible!” They wanted to see! And they were furious at seeing nothing for their ten sous.

  A riot broke out. “It’s a trick! It’s theft!” The existence of sarvants was no more than a confidence trick designed, in the final analysis, to cheat the taxpayer yet again. All the workers in their Sunday best recalled the enormous sums sent to aid Bugey from all points in France and abroad, of which the distribution committee had only paid out 3,746.95 francs. Even those who had accepted the invisible object in the Carrefour Louis-le-Grand no longer admitted it now that they had paid out their five-centime piece in order to contemplate it.

  In response to an order, the policemen struck the resonant aeroscaph.

  “Ooh! Ooh! Conjuring tricks! Robert Houdin! Ooh! Ooh! Conjuring tricks! Enough! Enough! Shameful!”

  Carrying out a second order, the policemen readjusted the ropes around the subaerian…

  Then the officers went up on to the occult platform, and walked up and down on it, without support, like the stars in the infinite subtlety…

  Then someone went to fetch the molds of the propeller and the pincer-basket…

  Then a dozen citizens were invited to come and touch the aeroscaph…

  But nothing could convince the crowd, which saw conjuring tricks everywhere. The Grand Palais was filled with an incredible racket. The public was seething like a fermenting puddle; if it had believed in the reality of the vessel, it would have attempted to smash it into pieces. Scuffles broke out here and there; a few brats were crushed. It was necessary to refund the money.

  The prestige of the Blue Peril had been struck an irreparable blow. The following day, the opposition’s newspapers claimed that it had not only been a swindle, but a stratagem to distract civic attention from the ever-worsening social situation. The ruling party had made use of this unworthy distraction as it had sometimes made use of the threat of war, as fallacious as the menace, or the very existence, of invisible lands. And when the chemist Arnold, of Stockholm, announced triumphantly to the world that he had found the much-desired paint and thus caused the fragment of the aeroscaph that France had entrusted to him to become invisible, democracy refused to see anything therein but a further item of Machiavellian charlatanry. “What a hoax! They’re going to put a new coat of paint on some old decommissioned submarine and exhibit it as the invisible aeroscaph covered in the celebrated arnoldine! Bravo, Tartuffes! But we know what you’re up to!”

  Thus wa
s born the legend of the Blue Peril—which was, however, actual and genuine history.

  Arnoldine, meanwhile, really had been discovered. The Swedish chemist came to Paris without losing a minute. He brought the fragment of aeroscaph on which so many compounds had proved their inefficacy before the victorious amalgam. Arnold had been careful only to paint half of it; it was, therefore a bar half-invisible and half-yellow—a magnificent canary yellow. The first disappointment, however, was that the Chambers refused to vote it the slightest subsidy. Secondly, an attempt to establish a limited company with a capital of 400,000 francs for the painting of the aeroscaph failed miserably.

  Arnold showed himself to be nobler than an entire population. He took responsibility for the considerable expenses—for the paint was worth more than 3000 francs a liter—and manufactured arnoldine in quantity.

  Normally, painting hides things; now, painting was about to display things.

  When everything was ready, Arnold convened a scientific congress around the vessel to witness this new kind of varnishing, such as the Grand Palais had never seen before. Belloir set up his scaffolding, surrounding the invisible apparatus with a circle of planks…

  On the appointed day, which fell on October 5, in front of a gallery of cosmopolitan celebrities, the Scandinavian donned a white smock and applied the first brush-stroke. The cinematographers and snapshot-takers described a great circle; pots of arnoldine were distributed in all directions; an orchestra played a heroic march, Little by little, the invisible became visible.

  As if the cream-charged brush had the gift of creating them, all the details of the vessel surged forth in mid-air, one by one. First there were the terrible pincers, the frightful secaturs and the terrible basket in the form of a landing-net, with its mesh of mail—all three at the ends of articulated shafts extending by means of sliding sleeves. The machinery then exhibited its complications of finesse and entanglement, its countless peculiar spheres, and its deserted boxes in which mechanized batrachians galloping on the spot had produced the vessel’s motive force. The drive-shaft was seen to elongate, become a long tube, and crown itself with a propeller as yellow as itself, as yellow as the machinery and the pincer-secaturs. Arnold’s brush was seen to paint, in the same atmosphere, the round protuberances of disorderly instruments, some elementary and voluminous in appearance, others infinitely complex and multiple—whose delicacy, alas, was coated over by the arnoldine.