The Xenobiotic Invasion

by Theo Varlet

  My father and I, as I say, are still bound to Cheyne by contract. As you know, he has given us our temporary liberty, but he does not mean to put an end to our reciprocal engagements. Now, I only made incidental mention of these engagements in Marseilles, when I told you that my father and remain dependent on Cheyne until my marriage to him. It is now necessary that I explain them to you…while abstaining from passing judgment on my father, who consented to sign them.

  By the contract that binds us mutually, Lendor J. Cheyne appoints himself as my father’s “manager,” settles his debts, furnishes a laboratory at his own expense, and assures him an annual salary of $10,000, as the technical director of the Moon Gold Company—in exchange for which the Company acquires the exclusive right to exploit, in general, all his patents anterior to the signature of the contract, in particular those relating to astronautics and synthetic oil. With respect to inventions to come, my father did the right thing, and it’s to me that future patents will revert.

  Furthermore, there is between Cheyne and myself a reciprocal engagement of marriage. By this marriage, which will give me a 50% share in the benefits of the Moon Gold Company, of which I am presently only a salaried employee, I will cede to my husband in compensation 50% of the returns on my father’s new inventions.

  Although he claims to be a misogynist, Lendor is fond of me—and, I would have said before meeting you, my friend, fond enough for the marriage not to be solely a business arrangement and for the association perhaps to be, on my side, if not happy, at least tolerable.

  Cheyne’s side of the arrangement, even deducting the compensations that he accords us, already seems profitable, but he has every confidence in my father’s genius and he will not let go at any price of the possibilities of his future discoveries. He has given us temporary leave, but we remain salaried employees of the Moon Gold Company.

  I cannot see any possibility of his releasing me from that engagement of marriage. In any case, were he to offer to do so, I would hesitate, I spite of…what you know…for it would be against my father’s interests.

  “You will judge, I hope, my dear Gaston, as I do, that fate has acted in our best interests, to lessen our suffering, by preventing us from seeing one another in the flesh. That is better for both of us, for our peace of mind as for mine. I know that you love me; you know that my coldness is only apparent and obligatory; that beneath the camaraderie of which I gave evidence from the first day we met, a more tender sentiment has developed, involuntarily and almost without my knowing it. I confessed that to you once; that is already too much. I do not want to expose myself to the necessity, to the danger, of telling you again, face to face, as would have been bound to happen had I come to see you today.

  A few days of reflection will permit you to envisage the situation with more serenity, but I shall not renounce seeing you again—alas, I cannot. Until then, my dear, too dear, friend.

  AURORE

  P.S. I will have to come back to Paris before long. The exact date depends on the success of our research.

  Standing before the easel, from which the recently-begun portrait as looking at me, lit by the wan daylight of the rainy morning of October 23, I reread the letter, written on the Hôtel Métropole’s headed notepaper and bearing the postmark of the Gare d’Austerlitz at 22:19.

  Having left yesterday evening, my beloved must now be at Eyguzon, in the process of setting up her laboratory...

  A severe blow, that letter; but the Aurore I know, with her sharp and penetrating sense of duty and her moral conscience as un-American as mine, could not have acted otherwise, and I shall not think about her any more, wishing to respect her word, which considers it a blessing of fate not to have to see me again. Far from discouraging me, that rereading completes the rout of the anxious uncertainties against which I struggled all night. I have, in the reaffirmation of her love for me, too many motives for rejoicing and hope.

  The firm intention that she attributes to Cheyne of demanding the fulfillment of the promise of marriage does not disconcert me overmuch. Aurore undoubtedly does not know yet what I have learned from Géo: that Cheyne has fallen under Luce’s spell. Whatever Géo thinks about it, the question of financial interest will not weigh heavily in the balance, if Luce takes it into her head to marry him. However American he might be, Cheyne is not a polygamous Mormon—and besides, the Mormons are no longer polygamous—so, if he marries Luce de Ricourt, he will liberate Aurore Lescure from her promise, which will set her free...free to follow her secret penchant, free to marry me...

  Given the accelerated velocity at which events are progressing, if that is to happen, it can’t be long delayed...

  And what if someone were to inform Aurore of the turn that relations between her fiancé and our friend Luce are taking…? But I reject the suggestion, which has emerged from perverse depths of the sector of infamy that even an honest conscience contains.

  Wait, then, and hope. Well, so be it. I shall be patient. That will be easy: a few days without seeing her, and perhaps the recompense in the end...

  Patience! It’s not just me who will need that! The Matin brought up by the concierge with the post, which I unfold, demands it of Parisians, and the whole of France!

  USE OF ELECTRICITY PROHIBITED IN PARIS… PUBLIC SAFETY DECREE… NEWSPAPERS WILL CEASE TO APPEAR...

  The gravity of the situation no longer permits delay until the Chambres reassemble on October 25. Overcoming yesterday’s hesitations, the Conseil des Ministres, which met again last night, has, without exceeding constitutional legality, issued a decree, immediately ratified by the President of the Republic, which will take effect at noon today. Under the terms of the decree, which will be found further on in extenso, the use and production of electricity in all its forms are prohibited in Paris and the Département de la Seine, and in all parts of the region contaminated by the Xenobiota. The appearance of the lichen in any location whatsoever will automatically bring the immediate application of that measure into force. The only exceptions are the sources of electrical energy—including those alimenting the transmitters of the Eiffel Tower, the telegraph and telephone network, etc.—which the government deems it necessary to maintain in activity in the national interest. These electricity generators will be equipped with special devices, such as refrigeration chambers, that will prevent them from posing any danger of contamination to the vicinity.

  There is a temporary exception for the low-output batteries serving to power wireless receivers.

  The declaration to the Mairie of contaminated buildings is obligatory within two hours of the appearance of the Xenobiota, under penalty of a minimum fine of 100 francs. The objective of this declaration has is to slow down the propagation of the epidemic to healthy regions. While awaiting the arrival of municipal employees charged with carrying out a more complete disinfection, the declarer is obliged to ensure the isolation of the infected building, vehicle or individual, and their provisional sterilization with the aid of one of the products thus far recognized as efficacious: a solution of bleach or simple salt water. The organized services, municipal and others, may make advantageous use of chlorine in a gaseous state, and vapors of bromine or iodine, and other products that will be put at their disposal in sufficient quantities by the authorities.

  In Paris and the contaminated regions, this declaration will facilitate the operations of sterilization, which will be carried out on a large scale and methodically during the yet-to-be-determined period of time when the use of electricity will be suspended.

  The original text of the decree submitted to the Conseil called for the prohibition of the use and production of electricity throughout France, without distinction between healthy and infected regions. The Conseil has retreated, with good reason, from the absolutism of this measure, but the difference of treatment applied to contaminated regions and others raises a serious problem with regard to communications. If it were practically possible to raise barriers around the contaminated regions analogous to those
on our present frontiers, all would be well, but that is impossible. It is therefore necessary to realize the best approximation, by reducing to a minimum passage from contaminated regions to others. The enormous diminution of motorized transport required by the application of the decree will facilitate the solution of the problem. Surveillance posts will be established on major roads at the exits from contaminated zones, in order to verify or ascertain the need for a disinfection and complete sterilization of vehicles or individuals.

  At departure-points from Paris, in the railway stations, where a reduced train-service can be maintained, this sterilization will be assured by the vigilance of the railway companies.

  A special police force is to be instituted for the struggle against the Xenobiota. While waiting this organization, the existing police and the gendarmerie, with the auxiliaries that they consider it useful to recruit, will be responsible for applying these prescriptions. The task will be difficult and arduous, and the government is counting on the patriotism of everyone to facilitate it.

  The further extension obtained by the scourge in the last 24 hours permits an appreciation of the extent to which the Conseil’s hesitation in not promulgating this degree a day earlier is regrettable.

  Here, in fact, are the population centers in which the lichen has been observed since yesterday: in the south-east, Nîmes, Montpellier, Grasse and Mention; in the south-west, Bayonne; in the north, Amiens, Le Havre and Dunkerque. Around Paris the extension is no less evident, and the list of localities that it would be necessary to enumerate is a long one. African France has also been affected; the Lichen has made its appearance in Tunis and Oran.

  In Paris itself, this measure, taken sooner, would have impeded the birth of a particularly harmful generation of Xenobiota, which became manifest yesterday in various places, including the electricity substations, where it attacks the coils of transformers and had resulted in short-circuits and considerable damage.

  Let us repeat that the situation is serious—tragic, even—but not desperate. Before falling silent—for a few days only, we hasten to say, for steam-engines will be installed with all possible speed to replace the electric motors of our rotary printing-presses—the Press has a duty to exhort the public to bear this stern ordeal with a patriotic calm and dignity.

  The eyes of the world, which has broken off material communications with us almost in its entirety, are on France, and it knows from hour to hour, by courtesy of the wireless telegraph what is happening here, and what attitude the French people are adopting. Whatever each individual’s political opinion might be, we must all form a sacred unity, in the superior interests of France and civilization entire, and submit without complaint, stoically, to the consequences of the decree. That is the only means of cutting sort the propagation of the scourge and rendering ourselves masters of it before the contamination is universal.

  Instead of allowing national life to be impeded by a progressive, and ultimately complete, paralysis that will then be of long duration, it is a question of voluntarily bringing about an immediate, but partial and temporary, pause.

  It is necessary to recognize, as has already been said, that in the last 50 years, electricity has already become, a trifle prematurely, the queen of our civilization, its essential motor. Everything in our present technology depends on electricity, everything is linked to the functioning of certain items of electrical apparatus. With the suppression of electricity, all of Paris will come to a stop.

  The means of transport—the Metro, tramways, electrified railways—have already been virtually abolished. If motor vehicles have been able to circulate until this morning it is because the intensity of their sources of electricity—batteries, accumulators, magnetos and dynamos—are weak enough only to engender varieties of the lichen that lack exuberance and are relatively benign. These varieties, however, produce spores like the others, the descendants of which risk becoming calamitous. In a few hours, the streets of Paris will cease to be contaminated by this mode of diffusion.

  As for aircraft, their case is special, and they might be tolerated without danger. As they circulate in the air, protected from any new contamination, it is easy to sterilize their dynamos immediately before departure. That is what has already been done for a day or two at Le Bourget and Issy-les-Moulineaux, in order to avoid the clogging of the engine’s spark-plugs leading to mid-air breakdowns, infinitely more dangerous than those of motor vehicles can be on the ground of our streets.

  Communications? Without the telegraph, we know, no more intensive rapid railway traffic. Telephone cables are still resistant, but since yesterday, the perforating species of lichen we mentioned above has been invading the relays, eating away the insulation and corroding the wires carrying continuous traffic. The suppression of the service—at least for the public—will avoid the destruction of those costly cables, whose planning and placement takes years. In Paris, the functioning of “pneumatic tubes” depends on pumps that maintain the void necessary for the propulsion of the capsules.

  Industry? In modern factories, most apparatus for lifting and handling, at least, is electric. If they do not come to a complete halt, production there will be badly hampered and slowed down.

  Without electricity, it is obvious, there is a more or less complete paralysis of the nervous and muscular systems of our social body.

  And human thought, too, is affected in its living sources by the suppression of newspapers; it hardly matters, in fact, that linotypes will still be able to ensure the composition of text, and even their printing, as soon as the rotary presses are immobilized by the cessation of their motive force.

  Without electricity, Paris and all the contaminated regions are deprived of lighting worthy of the name, deprived of means of transport, deprived of rapid communications with the external world, of newspapers and, let us add, of cinemas and theaters. That means another 200,000 inhabitants of Greater Paris reduced to idleness...

  The article continued with a summary list of occupations that would be deprived of work, first completely—electricians, Metro and tramway workers, taxi and delivery drivers, cinema and theater staff and newspaper workers, from the editor-in-chief to the office cleaner—and second partly: railway employees, telegraphists and telephonists, post-office employees, metallurgists and workers in various industries…not to mention the suburbanites too distant from Paris to be able to get to work.

  Furthermore, the initial favorable measure taken by the administrators of the Metro and tramways granting temporary half-pay to laid-off workers was not to be extended, for the expense would be too great…and how long would it need to be continued?

  One question worried me. It was all very well to stop the machinery of civilization in order to slow down the development of the lichen, but how were all the nuclei of contamination to be destroyed? Bleach did not seem to be very effective, to judge by the Metro, where it had not been possible to prevent the lightning-fast growth of the Lichen. Even if the other methods were more effective, it would require weeks or months to sanitize the whole of Paris.

  I searched the various dailies that still appeared that morning, but I did not find any satisfactory response to that enigma. Was the government keeping its effective means of combat secret? With what end? There was every reason to publish it. Was it counting primarily, as an auxiliary in the fight against the Lichen, on a reduction in the vital activity of the Xenobiota during its enforced dormancy, or on the possibility that the seed-germs unaffected by the disinfection would lose their ability to germinate after a few days, as Nathan had supposed in his Intran article, and that the cessation of electricity would automatically bring about the extinction in Paris of the cosmic creation? Was it hoping for an early frost? Or had the Conseil des Ministres, believing in the intrinsic efficacy of the decree simply by the fact of its promulgation, voted for it in a moment of irreflective enthusiasm, as the Convention and the Comités de Salut Public were once wont to do? One was tempted to believe that, on reading the detailed acc
ount of the tumultuous debates of the night sitting.

  In that case, though, would the decree be obeyed by people who were asking themselves the same question as I was, and not finding any better response?

  XIV. The Great Shutdown

  The week of the Great Shutdown was a singular period for me too—a lacuna. Being deprived of the daily society of Aurore, who had transported me, in the space of ten days, to the Sinai of a new and marvelous life, her absence hollowed out a great void within me, as if she had taken away with her the only interesting part of my personality. Sentimentally, I was in a state of flux and uncertainty; my anticipations of the future succeeded one another, different from one hour to the next, with no fixed point to which I could cling.

  I did not even have, to draw a ring around that inconsistency, the armature of exterior routine. I fell back into a social life as disorganized as mine, or even more so, in temporary suspense. I was uninterested in my personal future, my work. Even my resolution to continue Aurore’s portrait in her absence, with the aid of the documentary photographs, evaporated...

  I lived in the hope of receiving news or the return of my beloved. I became an impartial witness, a disinterested observer—and I think most people were experiencing, each on his own account and for reasons other than mine—an analogous impression. We were waiting...

  For that period, as for the preceding one, I have no pretention of writing the history of the invasion of the Lichen. Others, better qualified, have taken responsibility for that with a literary talent that I do not have. I have talked about it thus far solely as a factor in my personal adventure with the importer of the cosmozoans. I shall continue to do the same—but my own fate, for the duration of the Great Breakdown, was immersed in the social scheme.