The Xenobiotic Invasion

by Theo Varlet

  AN INTERVIEW WITH MISS AURORE LESCURE, THE WOMAN WHO HAS BEEN TO THE MOON...

  Poor girl! She’s been discovered! The reporters have got to her. They’ve extracted lies from her…but when? Last night? I only left her at the door of the Métropole at 11:45 p.m.!

  As I read, however, the aguish ebbs away; I realize that the interview is no more authentic than the preceding article. It’s Cheyne’s plan, which is continuing and developing. Not a word of this has been pronounced by my Aurore of yesterday. First of all, this photograph of her in the bonnet she’s no longer wearing. And where did the interview take place? Cassis? Marseilles? Paris? The reporter doesn’t say. He keeps quiet “at Miss Lescure’s request”—that “Miss” again, which she began by correcting to “Mademoiselle”—to avoid fatiguing her with too many visits from his colleagues, because “she is still very shaken by the shock of her abrupt landing.” Oh, if the reporter had seen her trotting around Marseilles and Paris with me! Here’s a photograph of the species of diving-suit that she had to put on in order to leave the Rocket and walk around on the Moon. Here are the gold nuggets collected during her “lunar landing.” He thinks himself witty, the reporter who finds the phrase grotesque.15 Three lines on the “meteorite trawl,” but nothing about the harvest she reaped in actuality…the only one! Ah! And to finish, the businessman, who is showing his true colors, at arm’s length:

  The Moon Gold Mining Co, Ltd., founded by Lendor J. Cheyne with a capital of $30 million, is about to issue news of a prodigious means of impulsion. In spite of the doubling of the advertized capital, the shares, issued at $20 and previously quoted on the New York Stock Exchange at $40, went up to $60 yesterday. Monsieur Cheyne, who is presently sailing for France aboard the Berengaria with Monsieur Oswald Lecure, the inventor of the Rocket and father of Miss Aurore, will disembark at Cherbourg tomorrow afternoon. He intends to organize an exhibition of the MG-17 at the Champ-de-Mars, and a new departure for the Moon as soon as the young astronaut is fully recovered. In the meantime, he informs us by radiotelephone, he is busy setting up a European subsidiary of the Moon Gold Company, based in Paris, in order to allow French investors to share in the evident dividends that the shareholders on the company will soon be receiving.

  Good! The lamp in my studio, by means of which I’m reading, is beginning to darken and redden. It’s quite dark—a day of Parisian “fog,” and I had to switch on the light as soon as I awoke…fleeing the bedroom, where the bulb at my bedhead is still encrusted with the lichens born yesterday evening, shriveled now, which the concierge will clean up...

  Here in the studio, the new lichens, of a more vivid vermilion and a further increased energy of development, are already sheathing the wires and forming a felt-like network on my lamp. There first reproductive vesicles are popping and projecting their impalpable powder…and the odor is nauseating! And I’m itching again!

  There’s no reason for it to stop. The only means would be for me to go without light—but I’ll need it this afternoon, with that cataclysmic sky, to begin Aurora’s portrait. Will I have to fish out my old oil lamp?

  Oh, too bad! Too bad about that, too bad about everything! Another two days! In the meantime—in the marvelous meantime, without any hope of intimacy with Aurore...

  But I don’t have to meet her until 11:30, just like yesterday, at the same place. And it’s only 8 a.m. What shall I do until then? Stay here in the studio? And watch the lichen grow on the lamp? Oh no—I’d go mad! Or try to work by the oil-lamp? No, I can’t; I’m too impatient, too agitated. I need to go out, to walk in the streets.

  Instead of going to visit my dealers, however, as I ought to do, I decide to go and see my uncle Frémiet, the photographer. I’ll arrange with him to take a dozen pictures of Autrore. With those, even if she only sits for me once or twice, today and tomorrow, I’ll be able to continue—I daren’t say “finish”—her portrait from memory. Without being as gifted as Alma-Tadema, who painted from memory faces and locations that he’d seen several years before, I have a good visual memory, above average...

  My uncle lives a long way away, at the far end of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, which means I have to spend an hour doing nothing but traveling, on the Metro and by bus...

  Why did she choose the Terminus Saint-Lazare as a meeting-place again? Because she wants to visit the Galeries Lafayette again with a view to restocking her wardrobe? She doesn’t neglect feminine coquetry, but makes fun of famous couturiers; the presentation of mannequins and the fittings dear to snobbery irritate her. She’s rather choose a ready-made costume, and she has such a harmonious figure, such an innate elegance, that any “confection” whatsoever, which would make any other woman look a fright, suits her marvelously. Without wasting any time, or spending a great many dollars, she buys her own clothes...

  I was a quarter of an hour early, and, while seeking to clear my conscience with respect to her in the café, I perceived at first glance that things weren’t quite right with the electric lighting, which was all on, in view of the fog. Near the door, there was a waiter on a stepladder, in the process of furiously dusting a dirty bulb, stained with a layer of red dross. The lichen! And I could smell the characteristic odor in the air. At the back of the room to the right, two electricians were similarly perched next to an active chandelier deprived of one of its bulbs, scraping a vermilion felt off the wires with harsh straps, which was almost immediately renewed beneath their fingers. The bulbs and fittings with which they were not yet busy were in various stages of invasion. The reddish light of the worst-affected was scarcely piercing the vegetal crust.

  Some of the customers—who were numerous, given that it was the hour for aperitifs and the weather was bad—were watching the operation with intrigued and disapproving eyes. Others were pretending to ignore the ill-timed cleaning work. An old military gentleman wearing medals was quarreling with a waiter and pointing above his head at lamps velveted with crimson mold, the impalpable powder from which was floating in his “mandarin.”

  This disturbance didn’t end there though. The majority of people in the café, clients and staff alike, were scratching themselves, with varying degrees of discretion according to their temperament and level of education. They were scratching themselves while casting suspicious, anxious or menacing glances at their neighbors.

  “It’s disgusting!” protested one plump bearded citizen, furiously. “Manager—send for the insecticidal powder!”

  A revolution was rumbling, which the managers, frightened by always dignified, were attempting to appease, helping the waiters to wipe the tales, change the bulbs and, despairing of the cause, protect the drinks with the aid of saucers inverted over the glasses.

  Aurore came toward me, darting consternated glances over the agitation, and allowed herself to be conducted to a banquette.

  “Here too!” she said. “Do you know, my dear Gaston, that it’s the same in the Galeries Lafayette, from which I’ve just come? The store is full of ladders, electricians and firemen. In spite of that, one can hardly see any longer, and clouds of red dust are falling from the light-bulbs. Everyone’s scratching, and the salesgirls are packing up the clothes on many of the floors. It’s terrible, this invasion! It’s starting at my hotel. I was able to avoid switching on the light in my room, but the lichen has manifested itself in the neighboring ones. A manager stopped me in the hallway to ask me whether I’d been inconvenienced by the “mosquitoes.” Bellboys going past in the corridors were carrying fly-sprays!

  “But that’s not all—something more serious is happening at my hotel. Someone must suspect my identity; my effects have been searched, and the trunk.”

  “Which contains the pieces removed from your rocket?”

  “Yes: the outlet of the ejection-pipe, the liquid hydrogen compressor and the gravimeter. For a scientist, those accessories speak volumes. There’s also the trademark, Moon Gold Patented, on the gravimeter. It seems to me to be the prelude to an interview…not like the one in this morning’s
newspaper—a real one.”

  “Come on, Aurette, don’t be so quick to get anxious...”

  “Oh, I’ve made my decision—don’t try to reassure me; it’s futile. I know what I’m going to do. I’ll tell the story of my voyage, but without mentioning the Moon, since that’s already been done. The journalist can conclude what he likes from that. It’s cowardice on my part, I know, but I’m afraid for my father. I’m too scared. Cheyne is capable of anything. I received a wireless telegram from him this morning in which he says: Resistance futile. Be careful. And in fact, he’s found the means to break me, with that fake interview. Thanks to that, the decision has been taken away from me; I’ve been put out of the game. Worse still, since I’ve read it, it seems to me that I no longer count, that my destiny is playing out independently. The real Aurore Lescure has her own life, in the newspapers and the conversations of all the human beings on the planet; it’s her that’s interviewed and photographed. I almost envy her; she, at least, hasn’t brought meteorites back to Earth—but she’s stolen my personality. I’m no more than a myth, a vain shape sitting at this café table…a lie preparing to tell lies. I despise myself.”

  Her tone was distressing. Although she was trying to laugh, I sensed that she was embittered, almost demoralized.

  “If you tell lies, my dear, it’s out of devotion, to save your father. For me, you’re the most noble of women…and the only reality that matters.”

  She straightened up slightly, but looked around, without appearing to have heard me.

  “It’s me, however, who is the origin of this calamitous disturbance—and what proves that I’m a myth is that I can’t quite believe, as yet, that I’m really responsible.”

  The café was emptying. In spite of all the efforts of the electricians and the staff, the invasion of lichen was gaining speed, and half the light-bulbs, encased in red, were only giving out an infernal glow Weary of scratching and drinking crushed-brick powder, the furious customers were decamping one after another.

  Fleeing the catastrophic spectacle in our turn, I dragged my companion away.

  Taxi…Poccardi’s, in the Rue Favart.

  Limpid and bright on immaculate tablecloths, the gilded light of lamps is already making us feel better. A bottle of Chianti and one of Capri white, finocchi, sole Milanaise, lasagna au parmesan, gorgonzola, cassata siciliana: with that menu, optimism is reborn. Everything will work out; the incidents caused by the cosmozoans will be inconsequential; Nathan or someone else will rapidly discover a means of preventing the growth of the lichen outside laboratories, where it will merely be a subject of scientific study...

  And, drinking coffee amid cigarette smoke, we end up cheering ourselves up with the illusion that all those worthy people at the Terminus had, of being subject to an invasion of fleas. A trifle drunk, Aurore almost resigns herself to letting people believe that she has been on the Moon. Will she not indeed be there a few months hence—a year at the most? Even the arrival of her father and her fiancé the day after tomorrow is not such a bad omen as I imagined; it won’t interrupt our friendship. Aurore will introduce me to them, and when all three of them return to America, why shouldn’t I accompany them? I’ll have great success over there, like so many French painters, and I’ll earn a lot of dollars, which is not to be disdained...

  Even the Heavens did their bit, clearing for an hour; the natural light in my studio was sufficient, and I had no need to light up for the sitting. In three hours of good work, I made a detailed sketch for Aurore’s portrait. Then we went to see my uncle Frémiet to have the photographs taken.

  That wasn’t all—my morning visit had already produced its effect, and I observed it with a certain guilt and a fit of irritation: I was a germ-carrier! The poor fellow certainly had no suspicion of it while he carefully wiped the spotlights that modern photographers habitually use to illuminate the subject with a damp cloth. He turned the commutators while looking at his apparatus with visible apprehension.

  “Damn it!” he murmured, after a minute, tugging at his long beard. “It’s starting again! It’s crazy! Since noon, there’s been no means of keeping a bulb clean for five minutes once it’s lit. Fungus is forming on them, as you can see. I’ve never heard mention of anything like it! And the dust! The diabolical dust that spoils the plate—I hardly dare open a shutter.”

  Aurore shot me an interrogative glance. Should she tell my uncle what was happening? I shook my head violently behind his back, shrugging my shoulders and raising my eyebrows to express impotence. What good would it do to tell the truth, since we had no remedy to offer?

  “Let’s move quickly,” the photographer requested.

  And, modifying the subject’s pose between each shot according to my instructions, he took a dozen pictures: full face, profile, three-quarters, from various more-or-less elevated angles, as is usual in such cases.

  By the tenth shot, the spotlight bulbs, invaded by the fateful coral lace, were only yielding two thirds of their luminosity.

  My uncle clicked the switches angrily. “If this goes on, damn it, I’ll have to close the shop!” But his natural insouciance soon got the upper hand, and, taking me to one side, he recovered his jovial bonhomie to invite me to “take pot luck.”

  “You’re very kind, Uncle,” I demurred, “but I’ve already invited my client, Mademoiselle Aurette Constantin, to dine with me in town...”

  In spite of the material success that has made him, belatedly, the most renowned photographer on the Left Bank, Père Frémiet has always remained a trifle Bohemian and abrupt. He replied, as much for Aurore’s benefit as mine: “In town! Why, Monsieur my nephew, do you think you’re on the far side of Panama in my Latin Quarter? Invite Mademoiselle Constantin to share some thin soup with your old blockhead of an uncle. Your aunt won’t tolerate a refusal, and I dare say that you won’t eat better at the restaurant.”

  The prospect scarcely filled me with joy, but Aurore, amused by my uncle’s joviality and perhaps curious to see a bourgeois Parisian abode, accepted, and I had to give in.

  That was how we came to dine at the Frémiets’ that evening. Save for matters of politics or religion, in which she limited herself to sighing and raising her eyes to heaven in response to her husband’s subversive or irreverent opinions, my aunt treated all his decisions as oracles; she welcomed the stranger I brought without any ill-grace, and did not take long to warm to her on seeing her enjoy her cuisine—for Madame Frémiet was justly proud of her cordon-bleu talents.

  Scarcely half way through the meal, however, an impetuous development of lichen invaded the light-bulbs and their suspending wires, from which the red powder snowed abundantly on to the dishes; it was necessary to give up on electric lighting to light the oil-lamps kept in reserve in case of power-cuts. My uncle met the misfortune with a brave face and tried to guide his annoyance, as well as the itching by which he was devoured. Young Oscar Frémiet, a 13-year-old enfant terrible, who complained loudly about being “tortured by fleas,” got a clip round the ear.

  My aunt was particularly fearful for her dishes, but the cheese soufflé was no less delicious for being eaten by the light of the oil-lamp. A bottle of Heidsieck was opened in honor of my “client” and the conversation turned to current events. Naturally, there was mention of “Miss Lescure,” and our hosts piled up unwitting gaffes. My aunt, a good housewife, not knowing whether the Moon was any further away than Marseilles, believed what the papers said unquestioningly, but my uncle, argumentative by nature, affected skepticism.

  “Tall stories! Which will serve, you’ll see, to extract money from credulous fools. Me, I agree with Clémentel-Vault, who said in so many words in yesterday’s Journal: ‘The nuggets don’t convince me at all. Even if Miss Lescure had brought back from her lunar journey a testimonial certified by a Selenite mayor, I still wouldn’t believe it!’”

  Aurore was embarrassed. So, even though I generally abhor the wireless, I welcomed young Oscar as a liberator when he proposed that we listen
to the concert at the Eiffel Tower.16 Even if he never acquires any other claim to glory, he will always have the honor of probably having been the first human to discover the gustatory properties of the new variety of lichen born in the long waves of the Tower. In the middle of listening to Debussy’s Jardins sous la Pluie, we heard him cry: “Oh, Papa! It’s just like raspberry jam! You ought to taste it too…and you, Tonton, and you, Mademoiselle!”

  And he scratched with the tip of his index-finger, which he had just licked, in order to offer us a little of the ruby red gelatinous substance swathing the lamps of his station.

  “Disgusting child!” exclaimed Madame Frémiet. “Leave that dirt alone, Dodo—it’s surely poisonous!”

  More curious with regard to novelties, Père Frémiet consented to taste, prudently, a crumb collected by his own finger-nail.

  “Indeed, the stuff’s not bad at all—but all the same, if it’s going to grow everywhere...what can it be? What can it possibly be?”

  Aurore and I had the honor of being presented with the unknown and suspect foodstuff on saucers, with silver teaspoons

  Young Oscar had said it: it was entirely similar, in both taste and consistency, to an exquisite raspberry jelly.

  VII. One More Day!

  The following day—October 20—news of the inexplicable vegetal invasion was displayed in all the morning newspapers, displacing other news, including that of the voyage to the Moon and the Moon Gold Company. Excelsior published an entire page of particularly suggestive photographs depicting the struggle against the invasion of lamps and wires at the Galeries Lafayette, the Terminus Saint-Lazare, the Hôtel Métropole, the Paramount cinema and the Institut.

  Obviously! Places in which Aurore and I had spent some time and spread spores, separately or together, since our arrival in Paris…but the Institut? Oh—Nathan, of course! He too was a germ-carrier now, as much as and more than us, since he must have devoted himself to the intensive cultivation of the lichen in his laboratory!