The Xenobiotic Invasion

by Theo Varlet

  “And what are they, pray?”

  “Oh no! I’ve drafted a full article this morning, in order that I can be left in peace. Read it in the special edition of L’Intransigeant.”

  I was doubtless about to utter some harsh words, but Aurore made haste to take the receiver away from me.

  “Monsieur le Professeur, I grant that you have every right to publish your conclusions, even if that premature revelation will cause me inconvenience. But you’ll surely accord me the pleasure of seeing the results of your experiments in your laboratory?”

  There was a tormented groan at the other end of the wire. Then: “So be it; I owe you that. I’m very busy; hold on which I consult my appointments. I can give you 25 minutes this afternoon, at 3:30 p.m. Be prompt.”

  And he hung up.

  We looked at one another. A bitter rictus raised the corners of Aurore’s lips.

  “That scientist of the Institut de France is as bad as American scientists. They gladly forget the real author of any discovery that comes into their hands. It wouldn’t take much for Monsieur Nathan to think of himself as the father of the cosmozoans.” With a sigh of regret, she added: “I wish to God that were true!”

  Before leaving the Post Office, I asked for Frémiet’s number. His deep baritone voice answered.

  “Oh, it’s you, young Gaston. What’s new since yesterday? You’ve read the papers, eh? It’s amazing! I received the first journalist at six this morning—15 have come already, with photographers and cinematographers. The house is full of magnesium fumes…and it’s still continuing on the lamps…and it’s winning. There’s only my boy who’s jubilant, with his radio jam, as he calls it.”

  I put a brake on the old man’s enthusiasm. “I only have one thing to say to you, Uncle—it’s about the prints of Miss Constantin. When can I come by to pick them up?”

  “With all this to-do…let’s say the day after tomorrow, in the morning—hold on, let’s do better. Come for lunch at noon on that day and bring your client; she’s made quite a hit with your aunt…and me too.” He chortled jovially. “Tee hee! Congratulations, my lad—she’s a real cracker, your little...”

  I interrupted hastily “Miss Constantin is here, on the other receiver; she thanks you for your kind invitation, Uncle, but she’ll no longer be in Paris the day after tomorrow...”

  Alas, in having recourse to that little white lie, I didn’t think that I was so good at predicting the future.

  We had lunch at the Taverne Royale, at the back of the room in order to avoid seeing the automobiles in the street trailing their goiters of lichen. The establishment was free of contamination, and the wall-lights above our heads were glowing clearly.

  Like me, Aurore made an effort to forget the haunting, and during the meal we almost succeeded. I held forth to my companion about painting, and once again I admired in her the combination of unexpected knowledge and sound judgment, along with the ingenuous simplicity of a child. Already, in my studio the previous day she had appraised my canvases with a astonishing instinctive taste. This time, she talked about ancient and modern painters, citing their names and the works she had seen in American museums or in reproduction...

  That 23-year-old knew everything: sciences and arts, Latin and Greek. She was a modern female Pico della Mirandola, with an additional intellectual modesty that as adorable. One might have thought that she was listening to herself talk—no, as if it were natural to take a just pride therein, but in a semi-indulgent, semi-irreverent fashion. She listened as a gladly-amused witness to the phenomenon of her own universality. After some dazzling flight of intellect she would fall silent with a smile on her youth and in her eyes with the milky sclerotics, as if to excuse herself and say: “Don’t make too much fun of me; I’m not doing it on purpose; it’s not my fault if I have an infallible memory and an intelligence capable of comprehending everything!”

  But Aurore, girl fallen from the sky, you also have—I sense it—a heart made to be moved in unison with mine, ready to vibrate on the same wavelength as that of your “good comrade.” You’re refusing to listen to it, your heart. Will the day ever come when you’ll permit total accord to be established? One day? But today is the last day of out fallacious intimacy—perhaps an adventure with no tomorrow, of which al that will remain to my will be your unfinished portrait...

  How shall I live on, after having verged on the possibility of happiness, of marvelous harmony…?

  At 2:15, as we were finishing our coffee, the special edition of the Intran arrived. Professor Nathan’s article!

  Fallen back from out heaven into immediate reality, leaning over the paper, side by side, we read.

  VIII. A Xenobiotic Invasion

  Science has revealed and put at the service of humankind, on a gigantic scale, forces that had only been fugitive or unperceived phenomena before, hidden or unutilizable, and as it makes progress, with an ever-accelerating thrust, we must expect to see the emergence more novelties foreign to our anterior notions. One may say without paradox that that the further the manifestations of science go, the more contrary they are to the natural order of things.

  From this viewpoint, the cryptogamic invasion from which several parts of Paris are presently suffering must be considered in the context of the most recent scientific progress. One can safely predict that it will rapidly curb the turbulent manifestations of the “lichen” and, sooner or later, extract useful applications therefrom, as it has done with all its previous conquests.

  Everyone endowed with the slightest speculative curiosity will be legitimately interested to learn that this proliferation of unknown vegetation is not a fortuitous occurrence, a lusus naturae,17 but one of the results of the first astronautical expedition to have vanquished weight and surpassed the limits of the terrestrial atmosphere.

  Almost all the articles that have been written about Mademoiselle Aurore Lescure’s flight have dealt complacently with the nuggets of “lunar” gold collected by the young astronaut, but none has judged worthy of comment the harvest of meteoric dust carried out by her in the void of interplanetary space.

  Now, for science, these nuggets are a negligible matter. For several years now, we have known for certain, by virtue of the spectroscope, about the presence of gold deposits on our satellite, and it tells us nothing more to have real specimens on Earth, even by the kilo or the ton. Speculation alone will find its reckoning therein…in the beginning, at least, before the superabundance of the yellow metal causes its price to collapse.

  For science, the only result of the expedition that counts—but a result of primordial importance—is the tangible demonstration that the existence of cosmozoans is not merely a hypothesis, but a grandiose reality. Mademoiselle Lescure’s flight brings a definitive solution to one of the most anguishing problems of cosmogony: that of the appearance of life on our planet.

  Let us briefly recall the history of that theory.

  As early as 1821, the first person—a Frenchman, the Comte de Montlivault—had the idea that fragments of heavenly bodies, projections of lunar volcanoes charged with seed-germs, might have encountered the Earth and populated it.18

  In 1865, a German scientist, Dr. H. E. Richter, gave substance to this hypothesis, imaging that our world was in perpetual communication with the stars via the intermediary of stones falling from the sky: bolides or meteorites. As these bolides often contain carbonaceous substances that appear to originate from the decomposition of extraterrestrial organisms, Richter thought that these celestial stones might sometimes contain whole and healthy seed-germs. These seed-germs, set free when the stones explode in consequence of the shock of their impact, could have inseminated the Earth.

  The same theory was defended a few years later by the illustrious scientist Lord Kelvin; the physiologist Preyer and the physicist Helmholtz allowed themselves to be influenced by his ideas.19 They called the concept the hypothesis of cosmozoans, a name that has survived.

  In our day, the botanist Philippe Van Tie
ghem and the geologist Stanislas Meunier are enthusiastic supporters of this hypothesis, to which the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius has given a new form by supposing that the sidereal seed-germs, the cosmozoans, are not enclosed in bolides but circulate in space in a naked state in the form of meteoric dust, propelled by the pressure of light. Dr. Paul Becquerel, on the other hand, denies that these seed-germs could resist the destructive action of ultra-violet light.

  The appearance of the lichen brings us irrefutable proof that there really exist, scattered in infinite space, seed-germs susceptible of giving birth to a vital creation on a heavenly body, in certain conditions.

  But then, one might say, if these seed-germs exist, why is our Earth not continually inseminated by them? Why has the proliferation of this cosmic vegetation, which I shall call xenobiotic, from the Greek xenos, foreign—foreign to the Earth, that is—and bios, life, not taken place before today?

  Because the atmosphere, entirely gaseous as it is, opposes an insurmountable barrier to these seed-germs, and plays the role of a protective screen with regard to the Earth, which preserves it against the invasion of other types of life, whose seed-germs are disseminated in space. Because the cosmozoans that the Earth encounters in its course through infinite space do not reach the surface; they are stopped by the atmosphere, the friction of which “strikes” them like matches and volatilizes them; they are shooting stars.

  Everything happens as if the creation that has implanted itself on our globe—the “biosphere,” as cosmologists put it; which is to say, the totality of the living world, animal and vegetable—had been put into sealed jar since its origin, in order to evolve there according to its own destiny: an isolation that one can interpret, as one chooses, as a wise precaution of the Creator or as a combination of favorable and natural circumstances. For it could be—it seems highly probable—that the cosmozoans floating in space are not identical in nature in the various sectors of space.

  Without going as far as to say that the essential properties of matter, such as gravitation, vary according to the zones of space, numerous scientists, invoking the Einsteinian “curvature of space,” and the fact scientifically established, among others, in 1927 by Monsieur Gheury de Bray that the velocity of light diminishes,20 have cast doubt on the assertion that natural laws, as we know them on Earth, are valid throughout the entire cosmos. It is probable that the laws regulating life in the various stellar steams are diverse, that life is manifest in forms and with modalities entirely unforeseen by us. On planets orbiting Sirius, for instance, the cosmozoans that inseminated them during their creation might give them organisms of a chemical formula in which the carbon chains that reign here are replaced, let us say, by compounds of silicon, or even nitrogen, as Eugène Turpin has suggested.

  Admitting, with the magnificent dualistic theory of Monsieur Belot,21 that the Earth was given birth by pulsatory waves during the penetration of the “protosun” into the Galactic Nebula, it would have captured and put in shelter beneath the bell-jar of its atmosphere the vital seed-germs harvested in that distant sector of the universe.

  Since then, during the millions of centuries that separate us from life’s debut on our planet, the other living seed-germs, the new cosmozoans, that the Earth has encountered in its course are, for us, as if non-existent. At the very most, one might admit that the barrier of the atmosphere has been forced, at some moment in the past by a bolide, a crack in which might have enclosed a few cosmozoans and protected them from burning. That is possible, theoretically—but the new creation must have been ephemeral, for no trace of any such event remains in the geological strata.

  To any objection, therefore, to the notion that there is a great multitude of excess seed-germs, a prodigal supply of billions and trillions of stray cosmozoans, some of which might land on a star ready to receive them, we respond that nature, in its infinite exuberance, does not make paltry and utilitarian calculations. The law of least effort is an anthropomorphic invention. Even before our eyes, in the realm of terrestrial things, nature spreads its seeds, eggs and spores with an immeasurable prodigality, the vast majority being destroyed, annihilated without any profit for life. Each female cod or herring lays more than a million eggs, a termite queen hundreds of thousands, and when one things also of the winged seeds of elm-trees, the spores of mushrooms...

  But how many of nature’s seemingly unavoidable vetoes have already been transgressed by science? The MG-17 Rocket has infringed this prohibition and, thanks to the ingenuity of its pilot, who was able to collect them, has brought back to Earth a provision of meteoritic seed-germs.

  Nevertheless, if science had not intervened once more after their arrival on terrestrial soil, the cosmozoans captured by Mademoiselle Lescure would not have developed in the present natural conditions. Just as every terrestrial seed requires a certain temperature and determined level of humidity and light, these cosmozoans need, in order to develop, radiations that only exist in the light of suns during their ardent youth; they were destined for a planet receiving torrents of X-rays from its central star, and fields of electromagnetic induction of various intensity. For millions of centuries, neither the Earth nor the Sun has answered to this definition. But is it not the prerogative of science to break the apparent course of natural conditions?

  Scientific civilization has rendered possible the artificial reconstitution of these conditions at various points. Torrents of X-rays are poured forth at will by radiologists’ tubes; fields of electromagnetic induction of varying intensity reign around light-bulbs, in the vicinity of conductive wires, accumulators, dynamos and so on—on condition, of course, that the apparatus is functioning and the current flowing.

  My experiments, actively pursued for 48 hours—the details of which I shall spare the public, reserving them for my communication to the Académie—have demonstrated that the birth and evolution of these cosmic creatures takes place at two distinct times.

  Firstly, under an X-ray tube, the meteoric seed-germs, extracted from their multimillennial inertia, begin to germinate and yield a primary rudimentary tissue, almost uniquely composed of reproductive spores that I shall call B spores. That is the primordial phase, the trigger-finger of creations, the privileged moment of the Fiat Vita! that cosmozoans—these cosmozoans, at least—must encounter in order to propagate on a heavenly body.

  Secondly, once that initiation has been effectuated, the X-rays becme unnecessary. From the initial tissue produced under their influence the B spores are born, which disperse, and to which it is sufficient to encounter an electromagnetic field to germinate in their turn and produce the lichen, the Xenobiota, whose evolution continues indefinitely, through successive generations.

  But this evolution, which occurs in electromagnetic fields, presents an exceptional characteristic that science has not yet had an opportunity to observe in our own biocosm, the élan vital22 of which is depreciated, almost at the end of its course: the effervescence, the quasi-frenetic haste of this creation in its nascent state, which is rushing to the conquest of new forms.

  Is this a matter of the speed appropriate to this creation—the speed at which the xenobiota reproduce, at the beginning of the evolution, on a virgin planet that they have just inseminated? That is quite possible, but we have no means of verifying it. In any case, their “time”—the rhythm that presides over their development—has nothing in common with that of the life that is familiar to us. It is the accelerated, hectic time of a creation at the debut of its conquest. Hours are, from its viewpoint, equivalent to centuries or millennia for terrestrial species. In a few hours, the successive generations of the xenobiota evolve as much as the large animal and vegetable species of our creation have evolved in the course of an entire geological period.

  For the best point of comparison we can find to give some idea of that frenetic cadence it is necessary to seek in the world of micro-organisms for bacteria and protozoa that have remained similar to what they were in the beginning, whose generations succ
eed one another today with a fantastic rapidity, with no common measure with the order of duration that measures the development and reproduction of higher animals—mammals and humans. Certain bacteria, for example, reproduce after an hour, and compensate for their smallness with that rapidity of multiplication. At a rate of one generation per hour, two descendants per individual, and so on. Ferdinand Cohn has calculated that one bacterium, in a favorable environment, can produce several million individuals per day—and if those individuals were all to escape the causes of destruction, the geometric progression continuing, the total number of descendants would reach, in four and a half days, one decillion, 1038 individuals—1 followed by 38 zeroes—or, to put it another way, the volume of all the water contained in the world’s oceans.

  That is a calculation, but in the same order of facts, examples of abrupt explosions of life—“waves” of life as the naturalists of old used to put it—have not entirely disappeared from the present-day world, even among organisms significantly superior to bacteria. Sometimes, in a few hours, at privileged points on the Earth, myriads of algae, insects, spiders or small vertebrates are seen to appear and become abundant. Thus “ephemerae,” on certain summer evenings cover the banks of rivers with their cadavers to a depth of several centimeters. One can also cite “rains” of frogs and “clouds” of locusts.

  In 1889, the naturalist Dr. William Carruthers23 observed a migration of locusts over the Red Sea, born in the space of several hours, which flew over for the entire day of 25 November, which implies a cloud of 2.4 x 1012—240 trillion—individuals, 5,967 square kilometers in extent and weighing 4.10 x 107—41 million—tonnes, a figure of the same order as that of all the copper, zinc and lead extracted in the course of the entire 19th century: 4.47 x 107.