The Revolt of the Machines

by Brian Stableford

  There is, however, nothing that invites interpretation as a symptom of hysteria or neurosis, I thought.

  They were looking at me with so much insistence, though, that it was necessary to find an explanation for such strange coincidences at all costs.

  I hazarded: “Telepathy….”

  Then, spotting André, who was hanging on to his grandmother’s dress, looking up at her with eyes full of affection, I added: “And that child, just now, in the middle of our walk, suddenly affirmed to me that you were in Paris….”

  There was a silence, which Madame Forbe, forgetting her suffering with the aid of the distraction, broke to say: “It’s a contagious disease, then, and it will be necessary to try to cure Augustine, who claims….”

  At the same moment, by chance or because the incriminated individual was listening behind it, the door of the room opened and Augustine, our cook, came in.

  She seemed to be in a state of high excitement, and immediately affirmed that she was ready to face up to the inconveniences of a third-class railway journey to the heart of the département of the Charente, which was her native region.

  “Let’s see,” I said, when she fell silent. “It appears that you’ve had a dream. That’s no reason….”

  Poor Augustine’s nostrils flared in an expression full of disdain. “Monsieur thinks so? In my situation, Monsieur undoubtedly wouldn’t say that. While I’m alive my fiancé will never marry another woman, and I’m counting on arriving in time to prevent the marriage.”

  Madame Forbe had closed her eyes. From her bed she murmured in a funereal voice, while making a hand gesture bidding everyone to listen religiously: “But my girl, you could have telegraphed your parents to find out whether this…marriage really is on the point of conclusion.”

  The wisdom of the argument nonplussed Augustine, who could not find any reply at first. She ended up resuming her speech and declaring that it was too late, and that she would not consent to miss the evening train.”

  “All right, go,” said Madame Forbe, with more dryness than one might have expected in her languid love, “and come back as soon as it’s settled.” With a gesture, she dismissed Augustine, who left.

  “In truth,” I said to my wife, then, “I don’t understand. You dealt with the girl very weakly! For a dream, you’re letting her leave just at the moment when we have most need of her—you suffering, your mother in Paris….”

  Completely forgetting her prostration, my wife sat up in bed. She raised her arms to the heavens, and exclaimed: “For a dream! In what way, then, is Augustine’s dream more incredible than what happened to Maman? And that child who’s becoming a somnambulist, or whatever you call it…in truth, you’re all the same, you men—even doctors, who only believe in nerves.”

  I protested, smiling in order to recover harmony. “Yes, yes…except that it’s necessary not to give in to them too much.”

  Dinner was announced, and from then on the conversation revolved exclusively around the abnormal phenomena to which Madame Forbe’s mother made exaggerated claims to be the victim, taking it as a pretext for criticizing modern civilization.

  “Oh, you mark my words,” she concluded, “with your telephones, your automobiles and all your new inventions, the world will end up going mad.”

  I tried, affectionately, to calm her down. “It’s obvious that those are developments whose slightly brutal novelty is likely to be accompanied by a certain cerebral overexcitement, but such troubles will be temporary. What do you expect? It takes time, and over time everything piles up, as ditch-diggers say. The malady of one century eventually becomes the temperament of the following century.”

  Dinner finished with placid verbiage, in which I was pleased to play my part while thinking about other things.

  I took my leave of my family thereafter in order to take a turn around the street while smoking my cigar. I took advantage of it to go to the police commissariat, where I confirmed my declarations to the Commissaire. The Sourbelle woman had been transferred to the cells without having made any new revelations on the subject of her quasi-demented action.

  Ten o’clock was chiming on the Norman clock in the dining room when I got home. Everything there was tranquil; my wife, wearied by staying in bed all day, and her mother, shaken up by six hours in a railways carriage, had gone to bed after my departure.

  I spent an hour making a few notes, consulting my schedule of visits, and arranging in my notebook the order of my journeys for the next day. When I slipped cautiously into my bedroom, Madame Forbe was snoring softly in the little brass bed next to mine, under a canopy draped with blue cashmere.

  II

  I was woken up by an impression of terror, in the midst of a nightmare in which I seemed to see four men standing at a street corner, in the process of planning a dastardly crime under cover of darkness.

  Everyone is familiar with that sort of impression; it subsists for a variable length of time when one has woken up, but the consciousness of being the victim of a dream is reassuring, in spite of everything, and gradually calms down the person who is its object.

  Then to my great surprise—let’s say the word: to my justified terror—I seemed to perceive, close by in the direction of the windows facing my bed, the sound of whispering. My ears straining and my flesh quivering, I listened.

  This is what I heard:

  “It’s understood? You, Radis, watch the Rue d’Anjou—and be on your guard, the police station’s on the corner of the Rue Lavoisier.”

  “You could have chosen another night; one can see as clearly as by day.”

  “Yes, yes, you want to write to the old lady to absent herself one evening when it’s pissing it down, or to come back when she’s at home, when we’d have to wring her neck.”

  “Well, no, not that, you know; for a start, I don’t like blood.”

  “Get on with it then.”

  “I’m going.”

  “Good. You stay here, Charlot. One blast if you see anything in the Rue Pasquier.”

  “Understood. What’s that grille over there?”

  “The Passage Puteaux. No danger there—it’s locked.”

  “But at t’other end, someone going past in the Rue de l’Arcade....”

  “Zut! You have a voice, don’t you? If you warn us in time, we’ll scatter, and meet up in the Rue Michel.”

  “Good. Not so much chat, and hurry up, the two of you.”

  “Let’s go. Ready, Pépette?”

  “You have the crowbar?”

  “Down my trouser-leg.”

  The voices died away into an incomprehensible murmur. Apart from that, there was no other sound.

  I certainly had the sensation of being awake; there was no means of believing that it was the prolongation of a dream. And yet, an instinctive logic caused me to set aside any dread of immediate danger. But what did it mean?

  Am I, in my turn, I thought, the victim of one of these phenomena that have been produced around us in the last few hours? It would be interesting, after all, and it would be easy to verify….

  From that moment on, the spirit of scientific curiosity awoke in me and was stronger than any reasoning. Without yet having any goal, and with a mechanical haste, having opening the bathroom door, I began to get dressed.

  While hurriedly putting on the indispensable garments, I reflected. Reconstituting the conversation, real or imaginary, that I had just heard, it was easy to extract the most essential indications regarding the action it represented and the location where the crime whose planning I had overheard had to be taking place. By their thick and mocking accents, the interlocutors lent themselves easily to being taken for four of the frightful all-round villains who have proudly ornamented themselves with the name of one of the most heroic tribes of American Indians. The apartment that they were getting ready to rob must ordinarily be inhabited by an old woman whose temporary absence was facilitating their work.

  When I had buttoned my boots as best I could and knotted a
scarf under my overcoat to hide the soft collar of my night-shirt, I left the house, without any difficulty other than closing the door to the street quietly, in order not to disturb the sleep of the residents, especially that of Madame Forbe.

  I reflected momentarily before deciding on the direction I ought to take.

  Let’s see, I said to myself. If I can still make the supposition that I’m the victim of a telepathic hallucination, the men I heard just now must be in the process of exercising their regrettable profession in a street whose two extremities are being watched by two accomplices; those two extremities must be the Rue d’Anjou on the one hand, and the Rue Pasquier on the other; and moreover the one who is watching the Rue Pasquier has signaled that he’s in the vicinity of the Passage Puteaux. Given those circumstances, it can only be either the Rue des Mathurins or the Rue Tronson-Ducoudray.

  The realization that I was only a short distance away also awoke the legitimate anxieties that can accompany an enterprise of that sort. The critical spirit of the observant man, however, reassured me and pushed me forward.

  Come on—I’m the victim of some dream prolonged into a spontaneous hallucination, of no consequence.

  I shrugged my shoulders and hastened my steps. The need to know excites courage, and I was passionately keen to know.

  I crossed the Rue Tronchet, went along the Rue des Mathurins, and saw the corner of the small square where the lugubrious memory of Louis XVI persists. With an avid gaze I scrutinized the darkness ahead: nothing and no one troubled the silence of the spring night, which I would have found charming at another time.

  Mechanically, I murmured in a slightly tremulous voice: “There’s nothing at all.”

  The experiment was not concluded, however. The Rue des Mathurins was empty and tranquil; there remained the Rue Tronson-Ducoudray. The bizarre name seemed sinister in itself, having once been made famous by a crime that was notorious.24 I approached it mistrustfully, and was already hesitating over turning the corner when a strident whistle-blast stopped me dead. I must confess that I turned round, ready to flee, but I didn’t have time for reflection. Footsteps sounded rapidly around me, a mass fell upon my back, and I fell to the ground, entangled with a thin and agile body, and I felt fists belaboring me.

  I am rather placid by nature, incapable of the slightest desire to fight, and it had been a long time since I had passed forty, the age when the ardors of combative youth begin to calm down. However, on feeling myself assaulted, my anger was roused, along with my vigor, which is appreciable. I returned the punches with interest, and, however involuntary the aggression had been, in principle, there was a real wrestling match, my adversary attempting by any means possible to escape my grip, which closed progressively around him.

  I was dealing with a youthful individual with the flexibility of a reptile and the defensive ferocity of a jackal, who went so far as to try to bite my nose while we were breathing in one another’s faces. I sensed a pale face close to mine, illuminated by two eyes diluted even more by fear than anger. I made an effort to repel the little carnivore, who was defending his liberty with all his strength. When, after a few tumultuous movements, I had finally mastered him, I planted my knee on his narrow chest, whose bone-structure, still soft, buckled under my weight.

  In a halting voice, he protested and begged: “Let me go. I won’t complain, since I’m beaten. You’d do better to go after the others, who are running off toward the Boulevard Malesherbes.”

  He was a coward, ready to sell his friends to save himself. I didn’t reply, though, as I was getting my breath back, which was a trifle oppressed by exercise to which I was unused.

  “For one thing,” the young hooligan went on, “I’m only the lookout you know.”

  “Where were you?” I demanded, in a voice that as still breathless.

  “In the Rue Pasquier.”

  “You’re Charlot, aren’t you? Radis was at the corner of the Rue d’Anjou?”

  His astonishment was sincere, and to begin with he made no reply. He only muttered between his teeth: “How do you know that?”

  Nervous and excited by the satisfaction of seeing my experiment succeed, I tightened my grip. Pressing his arms against his neck again and increasing the pressure of my knee on the thorax that I could feel yielding beneath it.

  He had gone even paler; he grimaced in pain; his mouth rounded and his eyes begged.

  “You’re hurting me,” he sighed. “If you know…yes, yes, it’s true: Radis and me were keeping watch at the ends of the street while Pépette and the big Polard tried to pry the shutter open with the crowbar. When the cops arrived, Radis whistled and I ran. If you hadn’t been there at the street corner, I’d be long gone by now.”

  Thus, everything was verified in the mysterious communication that had just been established, through two enormous blocks of houses and a tangle of streets, between me and one of those scenes of brigandage of which a big city like Paris is the ordinary theater every night. I found myself, along with those nearest to me, prey to a mysterious telepathic current that was facilitating the most various distant perceptions. How was that collectively possible? I had no idea, but I was ready and willing to study the manifestations, and, I hoped, to discover their cause. In truth, my role was finished, but I didn’t know what to do to get rid of the prisoner with whom hazard had gratified me.

  It was also hazard that came to my aid.

  The sound of heavy footsteps resonated on the sidewalk, and in response to my call, two sergents de ville emerged from the Rue Pasquier, taking one of young Charlot’s accomplices, whom they had just apprehended, to the station. I helped them to take the unruly youth to the commissariat in the Rue Lavoisier; he strove in vain to escape, thrashing about and wriggling like a snake.

  Once again I had to give my name to the police, whose auxiliary I had become twice in less than twelve hours, but I claimed that I had emerged from the house of a patient, jealously keeping, for the time being, the secret of the strange reasons for my presence at such an hour in a deserted street.

  I went back home, reflecting profoundly on the various contingencies.

  Fundamentally, without daring to admit it, I was dejected. The initial curiosity, and the entirely scientific satisfaction of having fortunately resolved the observation of a fact whose as-yet-unknown nature was beginning nevertheless to be incontestable, was succeeded by a depression, egotistical in origin, that I could not succeed in overcoming.

  It was necessary to yield to the evidence.

  Thus, with the exception of Madame Forbe, all of those close to me, and myself, had been victims, for at least one day, of a series of nervous shocks of a kind that science, thus far, admits as exclusively possible in individualities of an exaggerated nervousness.

  In those facts, such as I had observed them in others, I had interested myself, doubtless in a concerned manner, but with those sentiments of scientific curiosity with which we physicians sometimes defend ourselves. Now it was my turn, and, as well as the observer, I had become a subject of observation; I confess, to my shame, that I was affected by that.

  And yet, exclusively personal as that fact might appear, I now owed to it a glimpse of a possible generalization of a series of accidents that I could only resign myself to considering as explicable under the title of being exceptional.

  Is it possible, I asked myself, that a well-balanced, averagely equilibrated nature, like mine—as I am entitled to say—can become, without some superior cause, without an influence magnified to the extent of claiming the name of a law, the instrument of manifestations previously isolated and obscure in essence?

  One thing, above all, surprised me: how was it that my wife, whose temperament, although assuredly less nervous than she thinks, must nevertheless be very impressionable to a current of events of the sort in question, had not yet sensed anything?

  I thought that with a certain bitterness as I went upstairs and into my room.

  The state in which I found Madame Forbe
was to modify the course of my thoughts and definitively fortify my inclination to envisage as capable of generalization a state common to many people at a single location on the globe.

  With a candle lit on the bedside table, the poor woman, her face distraught beneath the halo of curlers that replaces during sleep the artifice of her fluffed-up coiffure, was sighing profoundly under the influence of some malaise or nightmare.

  She watched me enter the room as if she were staring at a phantom, and when she finally understood that it really was me, her head inclined languidly onto her shoulder, and she let herself fall weakly back on to her pillow.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, in anguish. “Can’t you see that I nearly died?”

  As a matter of habit, that is the fashion in which Madame Forbe manifests the preliminary symptoms of the slightest stomachache or headache. I thought that she had woken up, had called out to me and had been alarmed not to find me beside her. I attempted to reassure her. With the most extreme reserve, I attempted to explain to her the reasons for and the purpose of my unusual absence, but she interrupted me when I had hardly started.

  “Oh, what a frightful dream! But, great gods, what’s happening around us? Can you imagine that Augustine has just broken both her legs?”

  “But isn’t she on the train at this moment, on her way to La Rochelle?” I asked, in surprise.

  “Obviously—but her train has just been derailed. The locomotive has overturned across the track. Four carriages are broken….”

  “That’s what you dreamed?”

  Exhausted, she nodded her head—but then went on, groaning: “Never—never, you hear—have I had a dream like it: such clarity, such precision of detail. I was sitting on the banquette beside Augustine…she was asleep…look, we’d just passed through a station at which the train didn’t stop, but it had slowed down, and in the station, above the lantern, I’d been able to read the name of the place: it was Reuil. Afterwards, the train picked up speed again and was traveling as before when, all of a sudden, a violent shock threw us forwards. There was a sound of breaking glass and splintering wood; the lights went out, screams began to ring out on all sides, then moans, howls of pain…it was horrible, horrible….”