The Xenobiotic Invasion

by Theo Varlet

  It did not tale long, however, for a incident to provoke the denouement of the crisis, however, by bringing matters to a head.

  We had been silent for ten minutes, consuming cigarettes. Suddenly, she leaned toward me.

  “Don’t look now, but those two men chatting at the fourth table on my right—from the way they’re looking at me, they must be journalists!”

  I waited 30 seconds, and then paraded a nonchalant glance around me, without seeming to pause on anyone in particular.

  Indeed, two seemingly well-to-do young men, making an awkward effort of dissimulation that only made it more manifest, were studying my companion. One of them, Petit Marseillais in hand, was showing the other the photograph of “Miss Aurore Lescure with her apparatus.” Visibly, both were comparing the features in the picture with those of the young woman sitting beside me—and the nodding of their heads, sly glances and whispering behind their hands testified that they had perceived the astonishing resemblance

  I tried to calm her down.

  “Yes, they’re evidently talking about you, Mademoiselle, but they’re not journalists—and even if they were, even if they had the audacity to approach you, don’t worry: I’m here. I’ll tell them that one does not impose interviews on people who don’t want give them.”

  “It’s obvious that you don’t know American journalists, Monsieur Delvart! How many times I’ve been obliged to furnish them with information when I had no desire to do so! I’ve been obsessively harassed for hours on end; one of them, in order to extort a story from me, accompanied me in an airplane from Columbus to Chicago; another dressed up as a waiter in a restaurant…and I’m convinced that reporters are just the same in France, and that they’ll be even more tenacious than their colleagues in the States, now that I’m famous and have important reasons for avoiding them. Oh, look—the tall one’s going into the café. That’s to phone a newspaper to say that he’s seen Aurore Lecscure and ask them to send a photographer. Let’s go, I beg you.”

  Her agitation troubled me; her fear was contagious.

  After all, who can tell? Perhaps she’s right. I can’t risk poisoning our journey with fear of reporters by keeping her there.

  I call the waiter and pay him, and we leave, while the man left alone at the fourth table starts to rise to his feet and then sits down again with a gesture of annoyance.

  After 100 meters of rapid walking, we turn into the Rue Saint-Ferréol and slow down.

  Aurore takes me by the arm momentarily and squeezes it, in a spontaneous gesture of gratitude. “Oh, thank you, Delvart—you’re very kind.”

  That amicable familiarity, falling on my irritation at seeing her keep secrets from me—me, who would cut off my hand for her—plays the role of detonator. So much the worse if it’s a gaffe, and to hell with the “Mademoiselle”—sulky, rebellious, and desperately affectionate, I burst out: “But after all, Aurore, why are you so afraid of journalists? Forgive my brutal frankness, but it isn’t possible…I have too high an opinion of you to admit that it’s a question of pride…the paltry fear of having to admit that your flight wasn’t entirely successful—that you didn’t get as far as the Moon, as the article in the Marseillais claims.”

  “The good opinion you have of me is correct—you’re not mistaken. It’s by no means a matter of pride.”

  Overwhelmed by the flood of passers-by, we have stopped in front of a shoe-store. Aurore is no longer smiling. She looks me full in the face with her large limpid eyes, as if to read my mind. In a slightly interrogative tone, she goes on: “Delvart, you’re on my side, truly? I can trust you?”

  “Remember the confession I made to you yesterday, which you mocked…Mademoiselle. That’s my response.”

  “I won’t keep any more secrets from you. You ask me why I’m afraid of journalists? I’ll ask you a different question: weren’t you astonished to read that false information so rapidly? Or, to put it better, the intentionally-misleading fraudulent claim that I had reached the Moon?”

  “I thought it was a matter of a journalist making up sensational copy…or rather, the America Agency taking advantage of the announcement of your departure from Columbus to launch the rumor. There’s still time to rectify...”

  “That explanation’s theoretically plausible—but how could someone making things up know that I had landed near Marseilles?”

  “Your cablegram...”

  “It was explicitly sent from Cassis. Why keep quiet about a precise detail that would have increased its probability? No. Did you notice the detail of the gold nuggets that I’m supposed to have collected from the lunar surface? And the allusion to Moon Gold’s hopes? Listen—that rumor was launched by the Company itself…by Lendor J. Cheyne, my fiancé, who had it put out by the agency in order to electrify public opinion and the shareholders. The name of Cassis isn’t mentioned because Cheyne doesn’t want me to be interviewed too soon…because he wants to make sure of my complicity first, with regard to journalists. That complicity was formally demanded of me, in the cable I received yesterday, to which I haven’t yet replied. It was demanded of me again; I’ve always refused it until now.”

  “Perhaps Monsieur Cheyne believes that you did, in fact, reach the Moon?”

  “He knows perfectly well, as does my father, that it would be impossible with the apparatus and fuel reserves at my disposal. He’s so well aware of it that he took care to supply me, against my will, with gold nuggets, in the hope that I’d end up capitulating and making myself an accomplice to his fraud—that I’d prove flexible, at least out of filial love. My poor father, so good, so full of genius, but so fallible!”

  She uttered a sob of distress; I saw that she was ready to melt into tears, right there, in the midst of the passers-by. Already, one old lady had stopped in front of the shop-window to look at us.

  Gently, I placed my hand on my companion’s arm, to calm her down. “Poor girl! Your pain tears me up. Pull yourself together; let’s take a few steps without saying anything—come a little further on, away from the crowd, into the harbor.”

  I drew her away, supporting her with my arm, for she was trembling. On the Quai des Belges, I installed her on the terrace of an almost-deserted café and obliged her to drink a few drops of Madeira. Only then did I continue.

  “So your father has agreed to support Monsieur Cheyne’s…premature claims.”

  “Wait—let me tell you about him first. My father is an exceptional scientist—the new Edison, as he’s recognized today, since Lendor has ‘rationalized’ the exploitation of his genius. But my father, a true inventor, would never have been able to profit from his discoveries on his own. He’s never bothered abut that—on the contrary, his researches have swallowed up all his capital, and that which I inherited from my mother. He ended up bankrupt, two years ago, loaded with debts, worse than ruined. Them, in order to be able to continue his work, which were his very life—and, as he saw it, to remake the fortune of which he’d deprived me—renouncing his independence as a researcher, he accepted the propositions of a big businessman in the United States, Lendor J. Cheyne, who appointed himself as his ‘manager.’

  “You understand better now what kind of man my father is. He’s purely an inventor. He sees scarcely any difference between today’s reality and tomorrow’s, as soon as both of them can be expressed in corrected drafts—and he’d already established those of the MG-22 rocket, which will, indeed, be capable of reaching the Moon, when we possess an explosive more powerful than atomic hydrogen—a discovery in which my father believes. Only numbers count, for him; the rest—what the vulgar call ‘facts’—is unimportant. My father, I can confess to you, has no moral sensibility. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, he’s a kind of lay saint; his private life is perfectly innocent, but the social domain escapes him entirely; there, he loses any notion of good and evil, justice and injustice. That’s why he only sees Lendor Cheyne’s fraud as a legitimate anticipation…an extrapolation, as one says in the sciences…since the final result is
assured and imminent.

  “Lendor J. Cheyne, too, is convinced that my father’s genius will overcome the final obstacles that still separate us from the conclusive success—that two or three years hence, four at the most, someone, either me or someone else, will land on the lunar surface and bring back specimens of the gold whose indisputable presence has been revealed by the spectroscope. It’s only a question of money, he says—and the facts thus far have proved him right. It’s by virtue of the dollars lavished on costly experiments and trials that we’ve already realized yesterday’s flight of 1/20th of the trajectory—18,000 kilometers out of 380,000. Supported by sufficient financial resources, science and determination can do anything. But the public faith that furnishes those resources needs more vulgar bait than rational certainty. To obtain the indispensable credit from the public, one needs to nourish its faith with illusions and anticipations. One has the right to deceive it, in its own interests—that’s Lendor J. Cheyne’s thesis: the justification he offered for his plan, when he made me party to it.

  “I ought to add one more thing, which is that my father, in spite of his fallacious title of Technical Director of the Moon Gold Company, is, by virtue of the contract that he imprudently signed with his manager, absolutely at Lendor’s mercy. Lendor wouldn’t hesitate to sack him coldly, like a simple foreman, while keeping his plans and taking possession of his inventions, if he doesn’t find the two of us to be docile collaborators, following his orders…or if I refuse to make him, by becoming his wife, the legal co-owner of all the patents he’s already using in the name of the Moon Gold Company. To be dismissed like that, at my father’s age, would kill him.

  “Such is my situation. Lendor J. Cheyne wants to impose on my father and me the obligation of supporting the fable that the Moon has been reached at the first attempt. My father has agreed to that. I haven’t. I believe in the supreme authority of the truth…or rather, so far as I’m concerned, it’s an atavistic question of moral propriety. Logically, I admit that Lendor’s opinion might be tenable, and I don’t condemn it, from a business viewpoint. I’m convinced that success is inevitable and imminent, that we’re on the eve of making the journey. My first great flight has only reinforced that conviction—but I’d deem myself to be soiled, personally dishonored and unworthy to pilot the Rocket if I cheated, and didn’t declare the actual results obtained, and nothing more...

  “And yet, I love the task I’ve taken on—one day to be the first representative of humankind to take possession of the lunar soil; I’d be heartbroken to be replaced in that enterprise. And then again, I love my father, and wouldn’t want to cause him the slightest difficulty. Now, if I talk, if I allow myself to be interviewed. I’ll infallibly tell the truth, give the lie to the newspapers’ fiction. The Moon Gold Company will collapse in a gale of laughter and universal scandal. To avenge himself, Lendor will, as he’s threatened, sack my father, which will be the end of him...

  “You see now, my dear Delvart, why I fled Cassis, and why I begged you to get us away from the Café Riche as soon as possible...”

  She breathed deeply, ravaged by anxiety, but now mistress of herself. Her cheeks, beneath their pale flesh tone, had taken on a vivid redness; her eyes lost in the spectacle of the Old Port and the swing bridge, which she did not see, she considered the cruel and atrocious case of conscience momentarily. Then she looked at me, holding back her distress, as if she were glad to have confessed the truth to me, and not hoping for any help from me other than the comfort of my impotent sympathy.

  I did not dare lavish banal words of encouragement upon her. In a concentrated ne, into which I attempted to inject the fervor and sincerity of my sentiments, I said: “Aurore…permit me to call you that…I can’t see any remedy for the situation you’ve just explained to me…not yet. But if we think about it, and if we can talk about it again later, perhaps we’ll find a means of getting out of it. You can count on my absolute devotion.”

  She listened to me gravely and stoically. “Thank you. I accept your help. But what can you and I, or anyone, do? My situation is inextricable.”

  In the silence that followed between the two of us, amid the racket of the traffic—the bells of the trams and the horns of the automobiles—shouts reached us: “Get the Paris newspapers, arrived his morning by airplane…Matin, Journal...”

  The vendor advanced, his sheaf of papers under his arm. I bought two of them.

  MOON REACHED…even larger letters than in the Marseillais; the same photograph, but more distinct, of “Miss Lescure with her apparatus,” the same text, slightly expanded; a new paragraph, announcing that “the inventor of the Rocket, Oswald Lescure, and Lendor J. Cheyne, have embarked for Europe with a view to organizing astronautical exhibitions and creating a subsidiary of the Moon Gold Mining Co. Ltd.”

  Aurore folded up the papers, mechanically taking care to hide her portrait. She sighed. “Oh, he’s clever, my fiancé. He intends to confront me with a fait accompli, by means of the immediate diffusion of the false news. He’s counting on muzzling me until his arrival, and finding me in a few days’ time resigned to support his abuse of trust. What can I do?”

  “You can, at any rate, keep quiet, if you can avoid the journalists.”

  “And talk, if they succeed in catching up with me?”

  I reflected momentarily, then said: “So talk. You do have a subject on which you can allow yourself to be interviewed, truthfully: the collection of meteorites, and the experiment carried out on them by Dr. Alburtin…while awaiting those of Professor Nathan. That’s a scientific discovery of the greatest importance. You said so yourself.”

  I was aware of the insufficiency of the solution I was proposing, and to prevent my companion from objecting, I played for time. “By the way, what have you done with the green box? You haven’t left it behind in Cassis?”

  “It’s in the trunk, in the left luggage office—but I also have a phial in my handbag, here, containing specimens of the vegetation generated in the doctor’s laboratory.”

  That diversion deflected us from the hotter topic. It continued to preoccupy us, but by tacit agreement we dropped the question for the moment.

  During lunch at the Restaurant Pascal—oysters, a sumptuous bouillabaisse, washed down with white Cassis wine and an old Chateauneuf-du-Pape—one point of protocol was firmly established. Once again, I had just addressed her simply as “Aurore,” when I saw her frown. I was troubled.

  “Excuse me—I thought you had given me permission...”

  “Yes, yes…but it’s because people might hear. Aurore...no. Say Aurette instead. That’s what my comrades at university called me.”

  I breathed again. But the “comrades” depleted my pleasure slightly: that familiar appellation was not granting me any special privileges. Slyly, I offered myself a small compensation. “All right: Aurette, not Aurore. But at the École des Beaux-Arts, they called me Gaston, not Delvart.”

  “Gaston? Yes that’s better. I didn’t think of that.”

  Well, that’s progress. If she still considers me a mere comrade, at least she’s leaving me the illusion of a closer intimacy.

  As for the demands she made to pay half the bill, and a little later, at the station, to reimburse me for her ticket—if he had had to pay for those two first-class tickets, the aspirant Don Quixote’s wallet would have been within a few francs of running dry.

  The journey from Marseilles to Paris was completed without incident—but what an awful train that 2 p.m. express is! No sleeping-cars, nor a restaurant car. We had to get pre-packed meals, which were execrable, at the Lyons-Perrache buffet. And the fleas! Our compartment must have been infested by them. The previous day’s itching at the Hôtel Cendrillon took hold of me again, more violently, and Aurore was scratching too. The third passenger, a taciturn Englishman, similarly seemed prey to fleas, and he darted indignant glances at us, as if we were responsible.

  And we were!

  I was later to discover the origin of that epidemic o
f pruritus. Aurore had opened the wide-necked phial in order that we might examine the red “mold” from Alburtin’s house in the palm of her hand, and the impalpable dust it expelled. That dust was made up of microscopic spores, and those spores, as the population of Paris was soon to learn from experience, constituted a redoubtable “itching powder.”

  Furthermore, thanks to the obstinacy of the Englishman in reading his magazines, the electric lights in the compartment had burned all night long, to add to our inconvenience—and by the time we arrived, their bulbs were covered with a sort of coral-colored lattice-work.

  V. At Professor Nathan’s Residence

  Paris at 5 a.m., beneath pale electric lights, in darkness and—on exiting the station—rain...

  “Porter!” The luggage in a taxi...

  “The Hôtel Métropole!”

  A somnolent clerk gave my companion a form, which she filled in, and “Mlle. Aurette Constantin of Montreal (Canada)” was allotted room 127.

  “Sleep well, my dear Aurette. We’ll meet at half-past eleven, at the Terminus Saint-Lazare Café!”

  At the door of the elevator, she turned round once more to send me an amicable smile, and I went back to the taxi.

  “Rue Cortot. Yes, behind Sacré-Coeur, off Rue Caulaincourt.”

  The cupolas of the Basilica had scarcely begun to stand out in the first light of dawn when I rang the bell, and the door only opened on my third attempt. It was necessary for me to negotiate with the somnolent concierge, who was not expecting my return for another fortnight, and did not want to admit that it was really me.

  A sentiment of abandonment and discouragement oppressed me on finding myself back in my studio. I switched on all the lights, but the untidiness of the room, carelessly left as it was, with its scattered canvases, ended up inspiring me with disgust. Suddenly, I perceived the folly of my return. Another one of those “whims” for which my late father had so often reproached me! “Hothead!” he said, rightly. “Artistic temperament,” as my mother had proffered, with more indulgence. I had never been any different, that was for sure!