Scientific Romance

by Brian Stableford

  “What? Do you think, then, that this thing is . . .?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” was the solemn reply, “but please the gods I will, with your assistance, thoroughly investigate it.”

  We watched together, smoking many pipes, all night long, by the bedside of the unearthly being that tossed and panted until it was apparently wearied out. Then we learned by the low, regular breathing that it slept.

  The next morning the house was all astir. The boarders congregated on the landing outside my room, and Hammond and myself were lions. We had to answer a thousand questions as to the state of our extraordinary prisoner, for as yet not one person in the house except ourselves could be induced to set foot in the apartment.

  The creature was awake. This was evidenced by the convulsive manner in which the bedclothes were moved in its efforts to escape. There was something truly terrible in beholding, as it were, those second-hand indications of the terrible writhings and agonized struggles for liberty which themselves were invisible.

  Hammond and myself had racked our brains during the long night to discover some means by which we might realize the shape and general appearance of the Enigma. As well as we could make out by passing our hands over the creature’s form, its outlines and lineaments were human. There was a mouth; a round, smooth head without hair; a nose, which, however, was elevated above the cheeks, and its hands and feet were like those of a boy. At first we thought of placing the being on a smooth surface and tracing its outline with chalk, as shoemakers trace the outline of the foot. This plan was given up as being of no value. Such an outline would not give the slightest idea of its conformation.

  A happy thought struck me. We would take a cast of it in plaster of Paris. This would give us the solid figure, and satisfy all our wishes. But how to do it? The movements of the creature would disturb the setting of the plastic covering, and distort the mold. Another thought: why not give it chloroform? It had respiratory organs—that was evident by its breathing. Once reduced to a state of insensibility, we could do with it what we would.

  Doctor X—— was sent for; and after the worthy physician had recovered from the first shock of amazement, he proceeded to administer the chloroform. In three minutes afterward we were enabled to remove the fetters from the creature’s body, and a well-known modeler of this city was busily engaged in covering the invisible form with the moist clay. In five minutes more we had a mold, and before evening a rough facsimile of the Mystery.

  It was shaped like a man—distorted, uncouth, and horrible, but still a man. It was small, not over four feet and some inches in height, and its limbs revealed a muscular development that was unparalleled. Its face surpassed in hideousness anything I had ever seen. Gustave Doré, or Callot, or Tony Johannot, never conceived anything so horrible. There is a face in one of the latter’s illustrations to “Un Voyage où il vous plaira,”5 which somewhat approaches the countenance of this creature, but does not equal it. It was the physiognomy of what I should have fancied a ghoul to be. It looked as if it was capable of feeding on human flesh.

  Having satisfied our curiosity, and bound everyone in the house to secrecy, it became a question of what was to be done with our Enigma. It was impossible that we should keep such a horror in our house; it was equally impossible that such an awful being should be let loose upon the world. I confess that I would gladly have voted for the creature’s destruction. But who would shoulder the responsibility? Who would undertake the execution of this horrible semblance of a human being? Day after day this question was deliberated gravely.

  The boarders all left the house. Mrs. Moffat was in despair, and threatened Hammond and myself with all sorts of legal penalties if we did not remove the Horror. Our answer was: “We will go if you like, but we decline taking this creature with us. Remove it yourself if you please. It appeared in your house. On you the responsibility rests.” To this there was, of course, no answer. Mrs. Moffat could not obtain for love or money a person who would even approach the Mystery.

  The most singular part of the affair was that we were entirely ignorant of what the creature habitually fed on. Everything in the way of nutriment that we could think of was placed before it, but was never touched. It was awful to stand by, day after day, and see the clothes toss, and hear the hard breathing, and know that it was starving.

  Ten, twelve days, a fortnight passed, and it still lived. The pulsations of the heart, however, were daily growing fainter, and had now nearly ceased altogether. It was evident that the creature was dying for want of sustenance. While this terrible life struggle was going on, I felt miserable. I could not sleep of nights. Horrible as the creature was, it was pitiful to think of the pangs it was suffering.

  At last it died. Hammond and I found it cold and stiff one morning on the bed. The heart had ceased to beat, the lungs to inspire. We hastened to bury it in the garden. It was a strange funeral, the dropping of that viewless corpse into the damp hole. The cast of its form I gave to Dr. X——, who keeps it in his museum in Tenth Street.

  As I am on the eve of a long journey from which I may not return, I have drawn up this narrative of an event the most singular that has ever come to my knowledge.6

  * * *

  1 Catherine Crowe (1803–1876) published The Night-Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost-seers, a collection of “true” ghost stories, in 1848; it was by far the most successful of her literary works; she published two further collections of a similar kind.

  2 O’Brien’s story “The Pot of Tulips,” in which Harry Escott also features as the narrator, had been published in 1855.

  3 Charles Brockden Brown’s Gothic novel Wieland; or, The Transformation, was first published in 1798; Edward Bulwer-Lytton classic Rosicrucian fantasy Zanoni first appeared in 1842.

  4 Unlike the others cited, this text is fictitious.

  5 The volume in question was published by P.-J. Hetzel, later to be Jules Verne’s publisher, in 1843, credited to the artist Tony (i.e., Antoine) Johannot (1803–1852), the poet Alfred de Musset and “P.-J. Stahl”—the pseudonym Hetzel used on his own works. All three were at the heart of the French Romantic movement.

  6 This is where the version of the story in the 1881 collection ends. Some other reprints, however, add the concluding note that was appended to the story in the Harper’s Monthly version: “Note: It was rumored that the proprietors of a well-known museum in this city had made arrangements with Dr. X—— to exhibit to the public the singular cast which Mr. Escott deposited with him. So extraordinary a history cannot fail to attract universal attention.”

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  EUGÈNE MOUTON

  Eugène Mouton (1823–1902) was one of the several French humorists who appropriated ideas from science and technology for development in comedies and satires; the others include Pierre Véron, whose relevant work from the 1860s is translated in The Merchants of Health (2015) and Albert Robida, who was drawn by his fascination with the relevant ideas to become one of the most prolific French writers of scientific romance between the 1880s and the 1920s. Mouton’s other relevant work includes “L’Historioscope” (tr. as “The Historioscope”) about a means of collecting images from the past.

  “La Fin du monde,” here translated as “The End of the World,” appeared in a collection entitled Nouvelles et fantaisies humoristiques (1872) signed with the pseudonym Mérinos. It is remarkable in being one of the earliest satires to depict the end of the world as an accidental side effect of human activity; the fact that it imagines the disaster unfolding as a result of global warming occasioned by the burning of fossil fuels allowed it to reacquire an ironic topicality more than a hundred years after it was written, ensuring that its satire bites harder today than ever before.

  And the world will end by fire.

  Of all the questions that interest humankind, none is more worthy of research than that of the destiny of the planet we inhabit. Geology and history have taught us many things about the Earth’s past; we know the age
of our world, within a few hundred million years or so; we know the order of development in which life progressively manifested itself and propagated over its surface; we know in which epoch humans finally arrived to sit down at the banquet that life had prepared for them, and for which it had taken several thousand years to set the table.

  We know all that, or at least think we know it, which comes down to exactly the same thing—but if we are sure of our past, we are not of our future.

  Humankind scarcely knows any more about the probable duration of its existence than each one of us knows about the number of years that he has yet to live:

  The table is laid,

  The exquisite parade,

  That gives us cheer!

  A toast, my dear!

  All well and good—but are we on the soup, or the dessert? Who can tell us, alas, that the coffee will not be served very soon?

  We go on and on, heedless of the future of the world, without ever asking ourselves whether, by chance, this frail boat that is carrying us across the ocean of infinity is not at risk of capsizing suddenly, or whether its old hull, worn away by time and impaired by the agitations of the voyage, does not have some leak through which death is filtering into its carcass—which is, of course, the very carcass of humankind—one drop at a time.

  The world—which is to say, our terrestrial globe—has not always existed. It began, so it will end. The question is, when?

  First of all, let us ask ourselves whether the world might end by virtue of an accident, a perturbation of present laws.

  We cannot admit that. Such a hypothesis would, in fact, be in absolute contradiction with the opinion that we intend to sustain in this work. It is obvious, therefore, that we cannot adopt it. Any discussion is impossible if one admits the opinion that one is setting out to combat.

  Thus, one point is definitely established: the Earth will not be destroyed by accident; it will end as a consequence of the continued action of the laws of its present existence. It will die, as they say, its appropriate death.

  But will it die of old age? Will it die of a disease?

  I have no hesitation in replying: no, it will not die of old age; yes, it will die of a disease—in consequence of excess.

  I have said that the world will end as a consequence of the continued action of the laws of its present existence. It is now a matter of figuring out which, of all the agents functioning for the maintenance of the life of the terraqueous globe, is the one that will have the responsibility of destroying it some day.

  I say this without hesitation: that agent is the same one to which the Earth owed its existence in the first place: heat. Heat will drink the sea; heat will eat the Earth—and this is how it will happen.

  One day, with regard to the functioning of locomotives, the illustrious Stephenson asked a great English chemist what the force was that moved such machines. The chemist replied: “It’s the sun.”

  And, indeed, all the heat that we liberate when we burn combustible vegetable matter—wood or coal—has been stored there by the sun; a piece of wood or coal is therefore, fundamentally, nothing but a preserve of solar radiation. The more vegetable life develops, the greater the accumulation of these preserves becomes. If a great deal is burned and a great deal created—that is to say, if cultivation and industry evolve, the storage of solar radiation absorbed by the Earth on the one hand and its liberation on the other will increase incessantly, and the Earth will become warmer in a continuous manner.

  What would happen if the animal population, and the human population in its turn, followed the same progress? What would happen if considerable transformations, born of the very development of animal life on the surface of the globe, were to modify the structure of terrains, displace the basins of the seas, and reassemble humankind on continents that are both more fertile and more permeable to solar heat?

  Now, that is exactly what will happen.

  When one compares the world with what it once was, one is immediately struck by one fact that leaps to the eyes: the worldwide evolution of organic life. From the most elevated summits of mountains to the most profound gulfs of the sea, millions of billions of animalcules, animals, cryptogams and superior plants, have been working day and night for centuries, as have the foraminifera on which half our continents are built.

  That work was going rapidly enough before the epoch when humans appeared on the Earth, but since the appearance of man it has developed with a rapidity that is accelerating every day. As long as humankind remained restricted to two or three parts of Asia, Europe and Africa, it was not noticeable, because, save for a few focal points of concentration, life in general still found it easy to pour into empty space the surplus accumulated at certain points of the civilized world; it was thus that colonization increasingly populated previously uninhabited countries innocent of all cultivation. Then commenced the first phase of the progress of life by human action: the agricultural phase.

  Things moved in this direction for about six centuries, but large deposits of oil were developed, and, almost at the same time, chemistry and steam-power. The Earth then entered its industrial phase—which is only just beginning, since that was not much more than sixty years ago. But where this movement will lead us, and with what velocity we shall arrive, it is easy to presume, given that which has already happened before our eyes.

  It is evident, for anyone with eyes to see, that for half a century, animals and people alike have tended to multiply, to proliferate, to pullulate in a truly disquieting proportion. More is eaten, more is drunk, silkworms are cultivated, poultry fed and cattle fattened. At the same time, planning is going on everywhere; ground has been cleared; fecund crop rotations and intensive cultures have been invented, which double the soil’s yields; not content with what the earth produces, salmon at five francs a side have been sown in our rivers, and oysters at twenty-four sous a dozen in our gulfs.

  In the meantime, enormous quantities of wine, beer and cider have been fermented; veritable rivers of eau-de-vie have been distilled, and millions of tonnes of oil burned—not to mention that heating equipment is improving incessantly, that more and more houses are being rendered draught-proof, and that the linen and cotton fabrics that humans employ to keep themselves warm are being fabricated more cheaply with every passing day.

  To this already-sufficiently-somber picture it is necessary to add the insane developments of public education, which one can consider as a source of light and heat, for, if it does not emit them itself, it multiplies their production by giving humans the means of improving and extending their impact on nature.

  This is where we are now; this is where a mere half-century of industrialism has brought us; obviously, there are, in all of this, manifest symptoms of an imminent exuberance, and one can conclude that within a hundred years from now, the Earth will have developed a paunch.

  Then will commence the redoubtable period in which the excess of production will lead to an excess of consumption, the excess of consumption to an excess of heat, and the excess of heat to the spontaneous combustion of the Earth and all its inhabitants.

  It is not difficult to anticipate the series of phenomena that will lead the globe, by degrees, to that final catastrophe. Distressing as the depiction of these phenomena might be, I shall not hesitate to map them out, because the prevision of these facts, by enlightening future generations as to the dangers of the excesses of civilization, might perhaps serve to moderate the abuse of life and postpone the fatal final accounting by a few thousand years, or at least a few months.

  This, therefore, is what will happen.

  For ten centuries, everything will go progressively faster. Industry, above all, will make giant strides. To begin with, all the oil deposits will be exhausted, then all the sources of kerosene; then all the forests will be cut down; then the oxygen in the air and the hydrogen in the water will be burned directly. By that time, there will be something like a million steam-engines on the surface of the globe, averaging a thous
and horse-power—the equivalent of a billion horse-power—functioning night and day.

  All physical work is done by machines or animals; humans no longer do any, except for skillful gymnastics practised solely for hygienic reasons. But while their machines incessantly vomit out torrents of manufactured products, an ever-denser host of sheep, chickens, turkeys, pigs, ducks, cows and geese emerges from their agricultural factories, all oozing fat, bleating, lowing, gobbling, quacking, bellowing, whistling and demanding consumers with loud cries!

  Now, under the influence of ever more abundant and ever more succulent nutrition, the fecundity of the human and animal species is increasing from day to day. Houses rise up one floor at a time; first gardens are done away with, then courtyards. Cities, then villages, gradually begin to project lines of suburbs in every direction; soon, transversal lines connect these radii.

  Movement progresses; neighboring cities begin to connect with one another. Paris annexes Saint-Germain, Versailles and then Bauvais, then Châlons, then Orléans, then Tours; Marseilles annexes Toulon, Draguignan, Nice, Carpentras, Nîmes and Montpellier; Bordeaux, Lyon and Lille share out the rest, and Paris ends up annexing Marseilles, Lyon, Lille and Bordeaux. And the same thing is happening throughout Europe, and the other four continents of the world.

  But at the same time, the animal population is increasing. All useless species have disappeared; all that now remain are cattle, sheep, horses and poultry. Now, to nourish all that, empty space is required for cultivation, and room is getting short.

  A few terrains are then reserved for cultivation, fertilizer is piled herein, and there, lying amid grass six feet high, unprecedented species of sheep and cattle, devoid of hair, tails, feet and bones are seen rolling around, reduced by the art of husbandry to be nothing more than monstrous steaks alimented by four insatiable stomachs.