by Theo Varlet
I knew that she was the daughter of a French-Canadian, but it was a delightful surprise nevertheless to hear her express herself in French. Her voice, still very weak, had a clear and pure tone, as enchanting as her slight accent, brisk and perfumed with ancient France. Absorbed in my delight, I left the doctor to answer her.
“You’re in the south of France, Miss, between Marseilles and Toulon, four kilometers from Cassis, where I shall transport you, to my clinic. I’m Doctor Tancrède Alburtin, at your service—and this is my friend Gaston Delvart, renowned painter. Your apparatus, save for a broken window, does not seem to have suffered overmuch damage. I suppose we shall have to leave it where it is, for it must weigh several tons...”
Her brow furrowed, she was listening with an effort of concentration that was visibly exhausting her. She had difficult replying.
“No, the fuel-tanks are empty; it only weighs 400 kilograms. If you please, Messieurs, have it put in a safe place, hidden from reporters. It mustn’t…and please, fetch out the green box marked Meteorites right away, and my pigskin valise. Oh, what luck! You’re not journalists. Please, prevent the journalists from interviewing me...”
Her voice faded into an indistinct murmur. Her eyelids closed, and with a slight sigh she let her head fall back on to the carpet of pine-needles. We saw her features relax, and she lost consciousness again.
Alburtin took her pulse. Seeing that I was anxious, he said: “Don’t worry, Delvart. This was predictable—the reaction. She’s suffering from nervous exhaustion. It’s quite natural, after her session as a interplanetary pilot. This time, though, let’s not leave her here. A featherweight—I can carry her to the car by myself. You go get the green box and the valise that she was asking for. The apparatus is too heavy too cumbersome for my rattletrap; there’s no great risk in letting it stay where it is until tomorrow morning. It can’t be seen from the road and it’ll be dark soon.”
On the battlefield, Alburtin had bravely transported many a wounded man heavier than a slender young woman. Rediscovering his vigor and skill of yesteryear, he took the inert body in his arms and started walking toward the road, at a slow but sure pace, without stumbling, in spite of the pebble-strewn ground cluttered with brushwood.
After a momentary rebellion, I let him carry the precious burden away, and resigned myself to serve the castaway from space in another fashion. Returning to the shell, I plunged into its noxious atmosphere again and searched for the “green box.” I discovered it lodged in the ceiling of the cockpit, held in place by spring-loaded brackets. I unhooked it. An inscription in ink left no doubt as to its identity: Meteorites collected in the interplanetary void between 1000 and 4000 kilometers above the terrestrial surface, October 15, between 14:00 and 14:35.
As for the pigskin valise, it was at my feet, among other objects displaced by the shock of landing and the subsequent adjustment of position. I picked it up without taking the trouble to examine the rest. I was in a hurry to get back to the woman who had fallen from the skies. I barely took time to close the round metal hatch over the manhole and screw it down. With the green box in one hand and the valise in the other I plunged into the brushwood in pursuit of Alburtin.
Loading the car wasn’t easy. The doctor regretted having brought his little sports car instead of his professional saloon. The roadster had four seats, but they were arranged in individual buckets where it was impossible to lay the unconscious young woman down. After several fruitless attempts to make her comfortable, I was obliged to resolve to hold her like a child, half-extended, on my knees, with her torso against my breast and her head in the hollow of my right arm, wedged against the back of the seat—a slightly improper attitude from the viewpoint of uniformed spectators.
We only had four kilometers to travel, but dusk was only beginning to fall, and as luck would have it we encountered no less than three tourist buses whose occupants—foreigners—darted surprised, ironic or scandalized glances at us as we flew past, which clearly said: “So uninhibited, these amorous French!”
Only one acquaintance of Dr. Alburtin’s—Cassis’ great viticulturalist Monsieur Botin, whose Renault overtook us on the outskirts of the town—took a longer look, slowed down and asked: “An accident, Doctor?”
“Yes—I’m taking an injured woman to my clinic,” the Doctor replied, evasively.
The dangerous bends as we entered Cassis saved us from having to say more and we separated from our questioner, who continued along the road to Marseilles. I could count on Alburtin to observe the discretion that the young woman had asked of us. There were, in any case, no other interrogations to deflect. The 50 meters of the Rue Droite that we had to travel were deserted, and when we arrived at the door of the clinic there was not a single human face in the vicinity.
Those few minutes since the Belle-Fille pass had passed for me like a dream, in which I forgot my role as a nurse. I held that castaway from space, that angel materialized from the screen, like a conquest, or a prey, in the intoxication of a miraculous interval, without giving any thought to the fact that the moment must eventually end. I made an effort to be as unreal myself as a character on film, to live a cinematic episode...
I came back to reality when, the car having stopped, Alburtin and a nurse took my exciting burden from my arms in order to carry her into the house. Mechanically, I leapt on to the sidewalk and prepared to follow them. Alburtin, however, who was in the lead—walking backwards along the corridor, carrying the upper part of the young woman’s body while the nurse held her legs—said: “Stay and have dinner with jus, Delvart—my wife will keep you company. I’ll come back down in five minutes to bring you news.”
While Madame Alburtin came to the door with a welcoming smile, I hid my irritation and disappointment by taking the pigskin valise and the box labeled Meteorites from the car.
With regard to the doctor’s wife, the habitual custodian of the clinic’s professional secrets, I did not feel bound to hold anything back, and once at table with her with a glass of port, I told her about the astonishing encounter, with no other reticence than keeping quiet about my intimate sentiments.
The lady did not seem to appreciate the beauty of the adventure as I did, however. A practical and shrewd woman, she saw it primarily as a godsend for her husband, whose name would be associated in the newspapers with the landing of the interplanetary rocket.
“Let’s see,” she calculated, fixing her dark and pensive yes on me. “It’s ten past seven, the Post Office is closed, but we can find someone to go to Marseilles. Your friend Monsieur de Ricourt won’t refuse, and to draft a press release we have Monsieur Blanc, the schoolmaster, who’s the regional correspondent of the Petit Marseillais.”
The doctor’s wife was speaking in such a clear and decisive tone, organizing her publicity in advance, that I was almost intimidated. Too bad, though, if I made her an enemy—Aurore’s tranquility was the most important thing.
“I regret, Madame, that the principal interested party, Miss Lescure herself, asked us urgently to protect her from any interviews.” By way of conciliation, I added: “Perhaps she’ll lift the ban tomorrow, though—the Doctor will let us know.”
I didn’t have to weather the storm that I saw brewing in my companion’s expression; Alburtin came into the dining-room, and I knew by his wife’s resigned sigh that he was the real master of the house, and that his word would be law.
“Now let’s eat!” he exclaimed. “Excuse me for having made you wait, Delvart, but I thought it best to X-ray our young miss. Nothing broken, no displacement of the internal organs, no visible fractures or lesions. As I thought, it’s just nervous fatigue that caused her second loss of consciousness. She only came round to pronounce a few sentences, and fell almost immediately into a reparative sleep. She’s now slumbering peacefully in the care of Madame Narinska, the chief nurse. We’ll let her sleep around the clock.”
“You haven’t interviewed her, then, Doctor?” I asked, deliberately, with a sideways glance at
his wife.
“Certainly not! Firstly, she renewed her plea that nothing should be communicated to the newspapers until further notice, and secondly, she obliged me to take a $50 banknote—‘for my expenses’ she specified, and for the transport of her apparatus…with which we’ll occupy ourselves tomorrow, as well as her third request, to cable her father as soon as the Post Office opens.”
During dinner, Madame Alburtin attempted to seize the initiative again and insidiously pronounced the names of Monsieur Blanc and the Petit Marseillais, but the Doctor, with a calm and implacable authority, told her the version of the story that was to be put about in order to satisfy curiosity: a simple aviation accident.
“That will also explain the transportation here of the apparatus, which can pass in a pinch for some sort of plane.”
It was agreed that I would go to Belle-Fille in the morning with the local truck-driver to collect the shell and the parachute.
“As for Ricourt, if you see him this evening at your hotel, take care to feed him the same fable…and the name of the aviatrix is Aurette Constantin—that’s the signature she used on her cablegram.”
When we had taken coffee, the doctor’s wife withdrew to make her regular tour of the clinic. In a falsely detached tone, Albertin proposed: “Suppose we cast an eye over the meteorites in the famous green box that Miss Lescure had us bring?” He anticipated my objection by adding: “Surely she wouldn’t mind.”
I sensed the indelicacy of the project, but if Alburtin was driven by scientific curiosity, I too was avid to see the meteorites that the young astronaut had brought back from her expedition. Without making any reply, I followed Alburtin, who led me to his laboratory.
The green box, in embossed and lacquered metal, somewhat reminiscent of a small ice-cream pail, had a lid sealed by a simple bolt, with no trick to it. At the bottom of the receptacle there was a layer of fine black granules. Alburtin picked up a pinch with a glass spatula. It was nothing much to look at: like fine coal dust whose particles were hardly visible.
“Shall we both take a look under the microscope?” the Doctor proposed.
I declined the offer. I’m not a scientist. It was sufficient for me to learn from my friend’s explanations that the dust must be a specimen of the cosmic matter that drifts freely through space.
“A specimen of inestimable scientific value, for when those grains are caught by the Earth in its orbit, like a cloud of mosquitoes, friction in the layers of the atmosphere ‘strikes’ them like matches and volatilizes them as shooting stars. Bolides, which are heavier pebbles, probably of another sort, sometimes resist the blaze and reach the ground, but no one in the world has ever held in his hand the slightest parcel of the meteoric dust that you see here.”
Alburtin, naturally, wanted to know more, and to experiment to that end. I watched him, with his index-finger at the corner of his mouth and his brow furrowed, meditatively contemplating the little spoonful of black granules. He reminded me of a difficult and suspicious patient examining a dose of a new medicine before taking it.
“You aren’t going to eat it?” I joked.
Alburtin’s features relaxed into a smile. “No, not eat it, but...after all, why not? A few grams more or less; the miss can easily spare me that…I want to see what happens when this meteoric dust is exposed to X-rays.”
And without further ado, the radiologist proceeded to set up his experiment. He poured the pinch of black dust into a tiny porcelain cup, put it on a stand and placed it under the X-ray tube, which was as large as a football and set on an articulated pedestal. He turned a commutator; a solenoid hummed; sparks crackled; the tube lit up...
I looked on, mechanically attentive, as if watching a conjuring trick.
“Well?” I said. “Is that all?”
“That’s all for the moment, I suppose. These few decigrams of meteoric dust are bathed in a torrent of X-rays, where I’ll leave them all night. It’s more than probable that nothing will happen, but there’s one chance in ten thousand that something will. What? You’re asking too much. If I knew, it wouldn’t be interesting. The whole pleasure of experimentation is the revelation of something new…something unexpected. We’ll see tomorrow.”
I took my leave, with no suspicion of the enormous, immeasurable importance that the results of the little experiment, apparently so anodyne and insignificant, that I had seen begun before my eyes was to have. And Dr. Tancrède Alburtin had no more suspicion than I did that, in exposing those few black granules to his X-Ray tube, he was assuming a responsibility of capital importance with respect to France and the world, and triggering the explosion of a worldwide calamity—a calamity initiated by the actions of Miss Lescure, her father and, in general, everyone who had collaborated, intimately or at a distance, with the launching of Rocket MG-17 and the importation to Earth of the meteoric powder.
After leaving Alburtin’s house I took the back roads in order to go directly to the harbor and the Hôtel Cendrillon, where I was staying. I thus avoided passing in front of the terrace of La Réserve, where, in view of the mildness of the evening, I would have run the risk of encountering the Ricourts with their usual gang of “Montparnos.” Luce and Géo would not have failed to ask me why they hadn’t seen me at dinner, and I had no desire to furnish Luce with explanations in front of those people. Besides, didn’t I have to prove that I was a free man? A beach flirt ought not to become so tyrannical as to oblige one to account for one’s every action!
A flirt! Luce de Ricourt! And I laughed sarcastically. Oh, Mademoiselle Lucy, you think you hold in servitude, thanks to your beauty of a red-haired Danae, the generous young painter that you bully and exploit, the Tonton around whom you run rings…but you’ll see tomorrow whether he still takes any notice of you!
All Luce’s teasing, the hardness of her heart, and the incompatibilities that separated us, come back to me at once during the solitary walk that I take to the end of the pier, under the stars—and I detest her, I reject her empery; for me, there is only woman in the world from now on: Aurore Lescure, the girl fallen from the sky; Aurore, the dawn of a new life...
III. A Walk to the Coves
At 7 a.m., I rang the doorbell at the clinic. In response to my inquiry, a nurse gave me a report on Miss Lescure’s condition: she had spent an excellent night; no temperature; she would doubtless get up today, but she was still asleep...
“Would you like to see the doctor?” the nurse added.
“No need—don’t disturb him. I’ll come back later.”
My expedition to Belle-Fille pass with a truck and three men was completed without any inconvenience. No one had gone into the pine-wood since the previous evening, and Rocket MG-17 was resting quietly on its bed of rock and brushwood. Transporting it to the road was relatively easy because, in spite of its dimensions—3.5 meters long by 1.2 meters in diameter, its bullet-like shape permitted it to be rolled like a barrel over the flatter sections. What gave us the most trouble was the immense parachute, spread over a dozen different trees; it was necessary to cut some of the suspension cables and abandon them, entwined in the branches.
My summary explanation—a new model of aircraft that had suffered an accident—was accepted without difficulty and satisfied the truck-driver and his assistants. More important to them were the generous gratuities I distributed to them, in addition to the agreed price, when everything had been put into a shed in the doctor’s courtyard. For a tip like that, they would have picked up and transported an inhabitant of the Moon without asking too many questions.
When the truckers had gone, Albutin—who had supervised the garaging—said to me in a strange manner: “By the way, Delvart, there’s news.”
My heart skipped a beat. “She’s taken a turn for the worse…Miss Lescure?”
“No, no! She’s doing very well. She’s having breakfast. I wanted to confine her to the chaise-longue for at least half a day, but no chance! She wants to get up. No, it’s not her—I’m talking about my little exper
iment.”
“The meteorites?”
“The meteorites. They’ve…grown. Like mushrooms. That black powder evidently includes unknown seeds, which have germinated under the influence of the X-rays. Plants, I suppose, not catalogued, of extraterrestrial origin. Botanists will erect a statue to Miss Lescure...”
We went up to the laboratory. Under the active X-ray tube the porcelain vessel that had contained a pick of meteoric dust the day before had now almost disappeared under a reddish spongy mass comparable to a polypary,9 overflowing on to the tabletop. And the mass was active, as if seething. In places, blisters were forming, with an imperceptible effort, swelling like bubbles. Before our eyes, the two largest ones burst, with a tiny explosion, like those mushrooms known as puffballs, and a find cloud of brick-colored dust was already staining a part of the table.
“Curious, eh?” said the doctor. “And what about this?”
He pointed to the conductive wires leading to the tube. One their white silk sheath there were red patches, plaques of mould, as large and thick as lentils.
“It resembles a lichen. I’d give a great deal to have a better grasp of botany.”
Even for a layman like me, the spectacle of that strange manifestation of life had an appeal to curiosity—but I was thinking primarily of the glory that the young astronaut would derive from it.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Come in!” Alburtin shouted.
His wife appeared in the doorway, pushing Aurore Lescure by the shoulder, with an affectionate gesture.
“Tancrède, I’ve brought someone who’s come back to life, and absolutely insisted on getting up. Good day, Monsieur Delvart—excuse me, my nurses are asking for me. Until later.”
She closed the door behind her.
Bare-headed, crowned by her mahogany hair like a Botticelli page, this was another variant from the two exemplars of Aurore Lescure with which I was familiar: the pilot in the leather flying-suit with a fastened helmet circling her face, seen on the screen, and the castaway from space that I had carried here yesterday in my arms. Was this the true one, in her little cachou dress, whose long legs, clad in Havana silk, and invisibly muscular, gave an impression of discreet and supple energy?