The Revolt of the Machines

by Brian Stableford

  I wasn’t boasting; although I didn’t dare jump to the conclusions that a further experimentation would constrain science to formulate, I can recall with pride that my inductions were already on the right track. Sourbelle, who couldn’t see so far, thought it was a matter of some Machiavellian or diabolical intervention; his brandished fist was threatening the invisible. The gesture in question was definitely familiar to him.

  Gravely, I stopped him. “Be careful,” I said, severely.

  Downcast, the poor fellow lowered his arm and recommenced twisting the green cap, which he had picked up from the floor, between his hands.

  Personally, I was reflecting that there was a session of the Académie des Science the day after tomorrow, and not a moment to lose. I turned toward Sourbelle. “My friend, you’re going to begin by swearing to me that you won’t say a word about all this to a living soul. You’ll understand that it’s a matter, as far as we’re concerned, of a phenomenon whose value ought to be brought to light by a voice more authoritative than mine. I have the good fortune to be the friend and pupil of a great scientist who, in this regard, can do anything. I’ll take you to see him; you can tell him your story, which I’ll be able to corroborate with a few personal observations, and…be brave.”

  “Oh,” said that pitiful individual, enthusiastically, “I’ll entrust myself to you, Monsieur. You’re my only hope!”

  Full of a courage that was perhaps exaggerated now, Sourbelle had flattened his green cap between his hands, and his eyes were rediscovering the smile in his cheese-grater face. He went through my door obliquely and took his leave of me with declarations full of cordiality. Alone in the antechamber, I started rubbing my hands together vigorously as a sign of delight.

  Come on, come on, I said to myself, it’s making progress. In the presence of facts as precise and verified, my old master, Saint-Denis, can’t refuse me the collaboration of his authority. Thanks to his universal reputation, all this will make the devil of a noise; thanks to his great name and this resounding experiment, my modest reputation will grow….”

  I saw myself launched, known, the newspapers talking about me….

  “Is my luck turning? I’ll make a specialty of nervous diseases….”

  From the depths of the apartment, the sound of doors opening and closing, and eruptions of voices distracted me from those ambitious dreams.

  On the threshold of the dining room, Madame Forbe’s mother appeared, wearing violet stripes and crowned with tulle and yellow buttercups, red-faced and very excited, followed by her daughter, emotional and seemingly anxious.

  “Quickly, quickly!” cried my mother-in-law. “Let me pass—I don’t have time.”

  “My God,” I said, jovially “What’s the matter.”

  Tearfully, my wife put her hands together. “The fire,” she murmured.

  “What fire?”

  Frantically shaking the buttercups that were oscillating on her hat, the old lady fixed me with a desolate gaze. “Oh, Auguste, pity me—my house is burning down. And what affects me most is that the only thing that has let me know is a vision of the kind that revealed the accident that Henriette had suffered to me. My God, my God! Am I becoming a hysteric? At my age!”

  “Come, on,” I said, “don’t distress yourself—perhaps it isn’t true.”

  She turned round on the staircase, where we were following her.

  “Not true!” she cried. “Oh, I saw it all too clearly: the flames coming through the roof. The fire has taken hold in the eaves. That old fool Félicie had the idea of taking a lamp up there to hang up her linen in the grain-loft. I’ve told her a hundred times…anyway, I’m certain. Au revoir, my children.”

  She disappeared. I leaned over the banisters to shout: “Send us a telegram when you arrive.”

  She was heard to mutter a few words and the door of the vestibule closed beneath the entrance arch.

  Madame Forbe was weeping.

  “Come on,” I said in order to make her feel better, “cheer up. This is becoming truly extraordinary, but every cloud has a silver lining. I have material here for sensational revelations, and if this fire is real, well…my word, it will be one proof more….”

  I hesitated momentarily before giving in to the scientific delirium that was possessing me. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself, and I murmured, fervently: “My God! As long as it’s true!”

  IV

  Everyone has heard of Professor Saint-Denis.

  He’s a septuagenarian, a trifle sanguine, full of good humor, perfectly even-tempered and tranquil. To anyone who congratulates him, the professor replies without false modesty: “I consider the world as a garden, and I have the gaiety of a plant in the sun. I ask no more of human nature than it can give, so I’m unacquainted with dreams and disillusionment; I’m as unconscious and happy as a primrose, a cauliflower or an apricot.”

  The professor preaches by example. A successor of the likes of Darwin, Littré, and Herbert Spencer, he is the author of a theory of mental dynamics based uniquely on human observation and experimentation, and in order to establish that basis, he began by attacking the defective phraseology of the ancient method.

  “Before anything else,” he proclaims, “it’s necessary to get rid of what is conventionally known as the soul. Whoever says ‘soul’ says nothing more today than that we now situate within the neural centers the faculties once accumulated in a sheaf under that obsolete vocable.”

  That is why a chair has been created for Saint-Denis at the Collège de France, where he develops before enthusiastic audiences his lecture course in mental dynamics under the combative and limpid name of Psychotrity.25

  His entire life, devoted to study, has gone by in a little apartment in the Rue La Bruyère, which he leaves in spring to take up residence in Ville d’Avray in a small house near that of the painter Corot. From the windows of his study he has a view of the lake.

  Physically, try to remember Sainte-Beuve, whose mischievous gaze he has. Unfortunately, his nose is a trifle turgid, but he gains therein a kind of violence that is not without heroism. His admirers say that it composes a Panic face for him; his detractors express the same idea by saying that he resembles an old faun.

  Before broadening out his education as far as philosophy, Saint-Denis taught medicine, and I had the honor and joy of being his pupil. An affectionate relationship has subsisted between us, and he seemed to me to be better qualified than anyone else to present to the scientific world in the form that he judged to be convenient the little work that I had resolved to bring to him.

  At the agreed hour Sourbelle came to collect me, and it was not yet half past eight when I pulled with a tremulous hand the chain that made an old bell vibrate at the door of the Villa Ned—that being the name of the modest abode where my excellent master savored the mildness of summer days.

  The canonical visage of the old man suddenly appeared at the open window of the study.

  “Forbe!” he cried, joyfully “Come in, come in, my dear boy. I’m glad to see you—and by a singular hazard, I was just thinking about you.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me, my dear master.”

  “I launched forward, followed by my pitiful companion; in two bounds the garden was crossed and the front steps scaled. I went through the little dining room, modestly furnished with old mahogany.

  “Stay here, my friend,” I said to Sourbelle. “Wait until I give you the signal to come in.”

  “Well,” said the venerable scientist, amicably, in offering me an armchair beside his worktable, “To what do I owe the pleasure of your early morning visit, and who is the man with the face ravaged by hail or smallpox?”

  By way of reply I took out of my pocket the pages of the manuscript that I had prepared.

  “Please read this,” I said, placing my work on the table.

  Holding out the papers to his nose, he darted a rapid glance at them, scanning the first few lines, drafted in the form of a prologue. Then he looked at me misch
ievously.

  “That,” he murmured, “is quite a mystery.”

  With a simple gesture, I exhorted him to continue. “As for the conclusions, you’ll draw them yourself.”

  With his beautiful horn-rimmed spectacles with round lenses perched on his nose, Saint-Denis began reading, slowly and carefully, with a dubious expression, his nostrils a trifle pinched, and an ironic grimace on his upper lip, where his moustache, not yet shaven, formed a slight gray down, like the lichen on the old apple trees of Brittany.

  Finally, he finished reading, put his spectacles down on the table, took a deep breath of the perfumed air, contemplating the spring décor of the lake, and then interrogated me with his gaze.

  “Well?”

  I smiled, my heart a trifle emotional, troubled in its calm, because I had expected to surprise him.

  “Well, my dear Master?” I asked in my turn “What do you think it’s necessary to conclude from all this?”

  “Obviously,” said Saint-Denis, with his benevolent smile, “nothing at all.”

  I jumped out of my armchair, and my voice rose involuntarily to its highest register. “Nothing at all.”

  Saint-Denis was still smiling, and the smile ended up irritating me. I knew that he was circumspect and severe in his choice of affirmations, but I confess that I had hoped to encounter more confidence in my personal experience on his part.

  “In truth, my dear Master,” he said, in a piqued tone, “prudence of method has its limits…”

  He made me sit down again with a gesture, and, paternally placing his plump hand on my arm, he murmured in an affectionate one: “Let’s understand one another clearly,” he murmured. “If by a conclusion you mean a scientific definition of these phenomena, I agree with you that it’s a matter of the species of inexplicable facts of sensorial communication at an abnormal distance known by the name of telepathy.”

  Such was my ardor that I interrupted the old master that I respect as the equal of idols. “That’s right! You’ve got it!”

  “Undoubtedly,” said Saint-Denis, serenely, “I’ve got it. Let’s talk about telepathy. What exact observations have been submitted to us thus far under that label? I’ve read—it’s necessary to read everything—what’s been published on that subject in recent years and, I confess, always with a suspicion that my reading has not yet succeeded in dissipating. What makes me dubious about witness statements of this sort is their character of individual exception. Then again, have you noticed that they almost always relate to facts of a dolorous nature: deaths, accidents, maladies and malaises—in brief, all states eminently disruptive of our sensorial equilibrium? Can you think of any reason for that?”

  I reflected momentarily.

  “But isn’t dolor,” I suggested, slowly, with an embarrassment over which I triumphed as my argument proceeded, “for the majority of people, an abnormal state, and, in consequence, more remarkable than pleasure, which sentiment seems quite natural?”

  Saint-Denis nodded his head.

  “Perhaps,” he admitted.

  “And in any case, what does the cause of an insensible influence matter if the influence is manifest?”

  “So be it,” said the professor. “Let’s admit the exactitude of the facts. They remain no less accidental, and in the observations noted by scientists as estimable as Richet or Dariex,26 there are scarcely any but unique manifestations. Can you cite me a single example—even one—of powerful perception at a distance becoming a matter of habit in a subject?”

  “Certainly,” I said. “Hasn’t Madame Forbe’s mother had, twice in twenty-four hours….”

  “Pardon me,” Saint-Denis objected, “but the lady has seen two accidents at a distance, on which one—Madame Forbe’s fall—has been realized. As for the fire, we have no proof yet that the fact was exact.”

  “I’ll be certain in a few hours, but I confess that I already have no doubt about it myself.”

  With his arms folded over his chest, Saint-Denis darted a slightly saddened glance at me. “That’s exactly what I’m combating in you,” he said. “Experimentally, I suspect and detest the enthusiasm that, when riding an idea, does not stop until all the contingencies are in conformity with it.”

  I was on my feet. I began to pace furiously back and forth, while arguing: “But in the end, on thinking about it, why is the idea of telepathy, considered as a prolongation of the human personality, any more extraordinary than, say, wireless telegraphy? Given the fact that we exist, sense and think, it’s admissible that a more-or-less extensive molecular vibration results therefrom in the atmosphere that serves us as a suspension medium; that under some influence, that vibration can be prolonged, and that, naturally, the result is a sound, an image or an odor. All that, my dear master, is pure dynamics, logical and perfectly consonant with the scientific theories that are so dear to you.”

  My master watched me going back and forth benevolently; he forgave me for the impulse of impatience by which I had allowed myself to be carried away. He tried to calm it down by yielding slightly.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “In sum, where are you trying to arrive?”

  I moved closer, leaning ardently toward him over the worktable.

  “Before this current of sorts that seems to influence simultaneously a certain number of brains quite dissimilar in their organization, don’t you think that a species of law might be acting, which, for the moment, is inclining toward generalization?”

  Saint-Denis looked up dubiously. “You’re going rather quickly,” he said.

  I strove to convince him, expanding persuasive arguments. Thoughtful and distracted, with his amiable smile on his lips, Saint-Denis was not really listening. It seemed to me, however, that his attention gradually became focused, not on me but on the truth. His eyes round, his lips slightly parted, he looked out of the open window at the lake with an expression of astonishment that became, in a matter of seconds, amazement, and almost fear.

  As there was no way of attributing such a virtue of persuasion to my words, I stopped talking.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked him, a trifle sulkily.

  He turned toward me, his face entirely distraught, as if dazed, and then, looking back at the lake, he extended his arm in the direction of the window and stammered: “There…there…look!”

  As he said these words, Saint-Denis rose swiftly to his feet, took me by the arm, and turned me forcibly toward the window—where, this time, I saw something that surprised me as much as my old professor.

  Slowly and soundlessly, on that screen of verdure and sky, a pale thread of yellow flame slid from bottom to top, rising from the lake in order to expand in the air into a luminous spray, from which red and green sparks began to descend, shining like tears of light.

  “My word,” I said, tranquilly. “It’s a rocket.”

  “It’s not the first one I’ve seen,” said Saint-Denis. “Look—there’s another…and another…notice that they’re bursting silently. One might think that it’s a matter of fireworks fired over the water, in accordance with annual custom, on days of public fêtes. I don’t suppose, though, that the municipality is generous enough to offer us such a distraction at nine o’clock in the morning and without any known motive for official rejoicing.”

  He placed a little black silk hat on his head and moved toward the door, saying: “We have to go and see what it is.”

  Without paying any attention to Sourbelle, who had stood up when we came into the dining room, he hastened toward the vestibule, and I followed him, going through the garden behind him.

  In a few strides, we were on a roadway of sorts that overlooks the lake at that point.

  We were not alone. Leaning on the iron rail that borders the road, some twenty people were considering the unusual spectacle.

  Beside me, Sourbelle, who had followed us, uttered a muffled exclamation: “Oh!”

  With an ecstatic expression, he pressed his green cloth cap against his heart, raising his eyes to the hea
vens; forgetting his chagrin and his anguish, he was absorbed in the contemplation of a monstrous polychromatic bouquet, whose spray expanded in the breadth of the sky in a flowering of gemstones of every color.

  Saint-Denis turned his pale and obstinately serious face toward me, in the midst of which his truculent nose was bursting with life.

  “Do you understand?” he asked me, in a low voice.

  “What?”

  He took me by the arm, led me as far as the balustrade, and pointed his finger at the limpid, unaltered, sky blue lake.

  “Look,” he said to me, in a voice strangled by emotion. “In the water…in the water….”

  “Well?”

  He fixed me with his gaze, full of profundity, remained mute for a few seconds, and then proffered, slowly: “There’s no reflection.”

  What flash of enlightenment that was for me! Silently, I took the excited hand of my old master, and in a communion of thought, full of ardor, I squeezed it in mine. Very quietly, apart from the crowd that was amusing itself without intelligence, we murmured brief responses to one another.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, my friend, thanks to what you’ve just told me.”

  “Oh, Master…!”

  “It’s evidence, and I yield to it.”

  “So, the fireworks…?

  “A mirage, a projected image: you were right.”

  There was a brief moment of reflective delirium, if one can say that, far beyond the idlers who surrounded us. Saint-Denis was the first to go on.

  “Let’s reason,” he concluded. “Isn’t it beyond doubt that if this spectacle, instead of being a reverberated or prolonged image, were real in this location, the prodigious firework display that we’ve just seen could not have taken place without the air being shaken by detonations, and without all those pyrotechnics being reflected in the surface of that clear water?”

  “That’s evident.”

  “Where are those rockets, serpents and sunbursts exploding? Perhaps at Noumea, where it’s eight o’clock in the evening at present. Unless the transmission of the image hasn’t been instantaneous, and we’re watching at this moment some spectacle of yesterday evening.”