Scientific Romance

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Scientific Romance Page 34

by Brian Stableford


  Paul was startled when he investigated my find. It was his invisible dog, or, rather, what had been his invisible dog, for it was now plainly visible. It had been plying about but a few minutes before in all health and strength. Closer examination revealed that the skull had been crushed by some heavy blow. While it was strange that the animal should have been killed, the inexplicable thing was that it should so quickly decay.

  “The reagents I injected into its system were harmless,” Paul explained. “Yet they were powerful, and it appears that when death comes they force practically instantaneous disintegration. Remarkable! Most remarkable! Well, the only thing is not to die. They do no harm so long as one lives. But I do wonder who smashed in that dog’s head.”

  Light, however, was thrown upon this when a frightened housemaid brought the news that Gaffer Bedshaw had that very morning, not more than an hour back, gone violently insane, and was strapped down at home, in the huntsman’s lodge, where he raved of a battle with a ferocious and gigantic beast that he had encountered in the Tichlorne pasture. He claimed that the thing, whatever it was, was invisible, wherefore his tearful wife and daughters shook their heads, and wherefore he but waxed the more violent, and the gardener and the coachman tightened the straps by another hole.

  Nor, while Paul Tichlorne was thus successfully mastering the problem of invisibility, was Lloyd Inwood a whit behind. I went over in answer to a message of his to come and see how he was getting on. Now, his laboratory occupied an isolated situation in the midst of his vast grounds. It was built in a pleasant little glade, surrounded on all sides by a dense forest growth, and was to be gained by way of a winding and erratic path. But I have traveled that path so often as to know every foot of it, and conceive my surprise when I came upon the glade and found no laboratory. The quaint shed structure with its red sandstone chimney was not. Nor did it look as if it ever had been. There were no signs of ruin, no debris, nothing.

  I started to walk across what had once been its site. “This,” I said to myself, should be where the step went up to the door.” Barely were the words out of my mouth when I stubbed my toe on some obstacle, pitched forward, and butted my head into something that felt very much like a door. I reached out my hand. It was a door. I found the knob and turned it; and at once, as the door swung inward on its hinges, the whole interior of the laboratory impinged upon my vision. Greeting Lloyd, I closed the door and backed up the path a few paces. I could see nothing of the building. Returning and opening the door, at once all the furniture and every detail of the interior were visible. It was indeed startling, the sudden transition from void to light and form and color.

  “What do you think of it, eh?” Lloyd asked, wringing my hand. “I slapped a couple of coats of absolute black on the outside yesterday to see how it worked. How’s your head? You bumped it pretty solidly, I imagine.

  “Never mind that,” he interrupted my congratulations. “I’ve something better for you to do.”

  While he talked he began to strip, and when he stood naked before me he thrust a pot and brush into my hand and said, “Here, give me a coat of this.”

  It was an oily, shellac-like stuff, which spread quickly and easily over the skin and dried immediately.

  “Merely preliminary and precautionary,” he explained when I had finished; “but now for the real stuff.”

  I picked up another pot he indicated, and glanced inside, but could see nothing.

  “It’s empty,” I said.

  “Stick your finger in it.”

  I obeyed, and was aware of a sensation of cool moistness. On withdrawing my hand I glanced at the forefinger, the one I had immersed, but it had disappeared. I moved and knew from the alternate tension and relaxation of the muscles that I moved it, but it defied my sense of sight. To all appearances I had been shorn of a finger; nor could I get any visual impression of it till I extended it under the skylight and saw its shadow plainly blotted on the floor.

  Lloyd chuckled. “Now spread it on, and keep your eyes open.”

  I dipped the brush into the seemingly empty pot, and gave him a long stroke across his chest. With the passage of the brush the living flesh disappeared from beneath. I covered his right leg, and he was a one-legged man defying all laws of gravitation. And so, stroke by stroke, member by member, I painted Lloyd into nothingness. It was a creepy experience, and I was glad when naught remained in sight but his burning black eyes, poised apparently unsupported in mid-air.

  “I have a refined and harmless solution for them,” he said. “A fine spray with an air-brush, and presto! I am not.”

  This deftly accomplished, he said, “Now I shall move about, and do tell me what sensations you experience.”

  “In the first place, I cannot see you,” I said, and I could hear his gleeful laugh from the midst of the emptiness. “Of course,” I continued, “you cannot escape your shadow, but that was to be expected. When you pass between my eye and an object, the object disappears, but so unusual and incomprehensible is its disappearance that it seems to me as though my eyes had blurred. When you move rapidly, I experience a bewildering succession of blurs. The blurring sensation makes my eyes ache and my brain tired.”

  “Have you any other warnings of my presence?” he asked.

  “No, and yes,” I answered. “When you are near me I have feelings similar to those produced by dank warehouses, gloomy crypts, and deep mines. And as sailors feel the loom of the land on dark nights, so I think I feel the loom of your body. But it is all very vague and intangible.”

  Long we talked that last morning in his laboratory and when I turned to go, he put his unseen hand in mine with nervous grip, and said, “Now I shall conquer the world!” And I could not dare to tell him of Paul Tichlorne’s equal success.

  At home I found a note from Paul, asking me to come up immediately, and it was high noon when I came spinning up the driveway on my wheel. Paul called me from the tennis court, and I dismounted and went over. But the court was empty. As I stood there, gaping open-mouthed, a tennis ball struck me on the arm, and as I turned about, another whizzed past my ear. For aught I could see of my assailant, they came whirling at me from out of space, and right well was I peppered with them. But when the balls already flung at me began to come back for a second whack, I realized the situation. Seizing a racket and keeping my eyes open, I quickly saw a rainbow flash appearing and disappearing and darting over the ground. I took out after it, and when I laid the racquet upon it for a half-dozen stout blows, Paul’s voice rang out:

  “Enough! Enough! Oh! Ouch! You’re landing on my naked skin, you know! Ow! O-w-w! I’ll be good! I’ll be good! I only wanted you to see my metamorphosis,” he said, ruefully, and I imagined he was rubbing his hurts.

  A few minutes later we were playing tennis—a handicap on my part, for I could have no knowledge of his position save when all the angles between himself, the sun, and me, were in proper conjunction. Then he flashed, and only then. But the flashes were more brilliant than the rainbow—purest blue, most delicate violet, brightest yellow, and all the intermediary shades, with the scintillating brilliancy of the diamond, dazzling, blinding, iridescent.

  But in the midst of our play I felt a sudden cold chill, reminding me of deep mines and gloomy crypts, such a chill as I had experienced that very morning. The next moment, close to the net, I saw a ball rebound in mid-air and empty space, and at the same instant, a score of feet away, Paul Tichlorne emitted a rainbow flash. It could not be he from whom the ball had rebounded, and with sickening dread I realized that Lloyd Inwood had come upon the scene. To make sure, I looked for his shadow, and there it was, a shapeless blotch the girth of his body—the sun was overhead—moving along the ground. I remembered his threat, and felt sure that all the long years of rivalry were about to culminate in uncanny battle.

  I cried a warning to Paul, and heard a snarl as of a wild beast, and an answering snarl. I saw the dark blotch move swiftly across the court, and a brilliant burst of varicolored light m
oving with equal swiftness to meet it; and then shadow and flash came together and there was the sound of unseen blows. The net went down before my frightened eyes. I sprang toward the fighters, crying:

  “For God’s sake!”

  But their locked bodies smote against my knees, and I was overthrown.

  “You keep out of this, old man!” I heard the voice of Lloyd Inwood from out of the emptiness; and then Paul’s voice crying, “Yes, we’ve had enough of peacemaking!”

  From the sound of their voices I knew they had separated. I could not locate Paul, and so approached the shadow that represented Lloyd. But from the other side came a stunning blow on the point of my jaw, and I heard Paul scream angrily, “Now will you keep away?”

  Then they came together, the impact of their blows, their groans and gasps, and the swift flashings and shadow-movings telling plainly of the deadliness of the struggle.

  I shouted for help, and Gaffer Bedshaw came running into the court. I could see, as he approached, that he was looking at me strangely, but he collided with the combatants and was hurled headlong to the ground. With a despairing shriek and a cry of “O Lord, I’ve got ’em!” he sprang to his feet and tore madly out of the court.

  I could do nothing, so I sat up, fascinated and powerless, and watched the struggle. The noonday sun beat down with dazzling brightness on the naked tennis court. And it was naked. All I could see was the blotch of shadow and the rainbow flashes, the dust rising from the invisible feet, the earth tearing up from beneath the straining foot-grips, and the wire screen bulge once or twice as their bodies hurled against it. That was all, and after a time, even that ceased. There were no more flashes, and the shadow had become long and stationary; and I remembered their set boyish faces when they clung to the roots in the deep coolness of the pool.

  They found me an hour afterward. Some inkling of what had happened got to the servants and they quitted the Tichlorne service in a body. Gaffer Bedshaw never recovered from the second shock he received, and is confined in a madhouse, hopelessly incurable. The secrets of their marvelous discoveries died with Paul and Lloyd, both laboratories being destroyed by grief-stricken relatives. As for myself, I no longer care for chemical research, and science is a tabooed topic in my household. I have returned to my roses. Nature’s colors are good enough for me.

  THE GORILLOID

  EDMOND HARAUCOURT

  Edmond Haraucourt (1856–1941) was an avant garde poet, songwriter and playwright at the center of the Parisian literary community of the 1880s, who found a vocation that would allow him to make a steady living when he became a museum curator. After making a spectacular debut as a writer of prose fiction with Immortalité (1888; tr. as “Immortality”), the ultimate skeptical extrapolation of the notion of a paradisal afterlife, his short fiction became remarkable for seeking unexplored extremes; he wrote several other far-futuristic fantasies in addition to the one below, all of which are available in English in the Black Coat Press collection Illusions of Immortality (2012). Most of his scientific romances were published as short serials in the feuilleton slot of Le Journal, which also accommodated a long story sequence detailing the origins of conscious thought and technological adaptation in a Neanderthal horde, collected as Daâh, le premier homme (1914; tr. as Daâh, The First Human).

  “Le Gorilloïde,” which was published in Le Journal in January 1904 before appearing as a booklet in 1906, is typical of Haraucourt’s tendency to venture into previously unexplored regions of the imagination, usually endeavoring to find novel narrative strategies that would allow him to do so. It is a masterpiece of the French genre.

  I

  Of Others

  The first day of the new year incites

  our minds to look into the future.

  Guy de l’Estang (1413)

  Four thousand centuries have passed. The face of the world has changed. Our continent has been swallowed up by new seas; the glacial waters of the Pole descend as far as the shores of Africa. The only inhabitable regions girdle the globe between the two tropics. All our animal and vegetable species have been transformed during the Quinary period and the majority have ceased to exist. Humankind no longer exists.

  On the other hand, several races of apes have been perfected, and among them, the Gorillas, having reached the highest degree of development, constitute the superior being. They live in societies, and their civilization, like their science, is highly advanced.

  Now, on the 26.3 of the year 71.9.37, an extraordinary item of news spread, and for two lunes—the day then being thirty-six hours long—the newspapers everywhere were discussing Professor Sffaty’s discovery.

  On an exploratory voyage to the North Pole, the illustrious scientist ventured into previously unknown regions. Having reached a latitude of 46°1 he encountered a rocky archipelago of Secondary origin, where he wintered. On those islets he collected the fossil bones of vanished species, notably several skeletons of a previously unknown antediluvian ape, which presented strange resemblances to the Gorillas.

  The professor even succeeded in capturing a live specimen of one of these “humans”—as he called the prehistoric animal in question.

  The news of this event, initially treated with great suspicion, did not take long to spread, and immediately impassioned public opinion in spite of its scientific character. Violent polemics appeared in the newspapers, the question at stake being: Are Apes descended from Humans?

  Politics and religion envenomed the debate, which promptly ceased to remain zoological.

  A lecture by Professor Sffaty, advertised as being due to take place in the large lecture-hall of the Museum of Karysk, has brought together an enormous and select crowd. People have fought over tickets. Five hundred Gorillas of the noblest birth, the most illustrious apes in politics, finance and the various institutes have assembled in the hall, which has been crowded since the doors opened.

  The building’s surroundings are cluttered with a popular multitude, and one might believe that all Gorillakind is taking an interest, in its conscience and in its dignity, in the questions that are about to be treated in that solemn session.

  The auditorium is unsettled; the adverse opinions of materialism and idealism are already manifest with a latent acrimony that the severity of the location is only just retaining within the bounds of decency. The police, affecting to fear a riot, have taken exceptional measures to ensure order in the hall and its surroundings.

  While waiting for the lecture to begin, opera glasses are aimed at two twin tables that have been laden with bones.

  The moment is approaching; the room is warming up.

  Professor Sffaty finally appears.

  Prolonged applause and a hostile tumult greet his entrance simultaneously.

  He is rather pale but quite calm. His fine bearing and the dignity of his attitude end up holding sway. After only a quarter of an hour, silence is almost reestablished, and the doctor can finally make himself heard.

  He speaks.

  *

  Messieurs,

  Whatever humility imposes itself on the pioneers of Science, who habitually live in confrontation with the most sublime problems and incessantly observe the impotence of effort, I have the conviction today of seeing my tribulations and fatigues recompensed by a discovery of the most fundamental importance, and of presenting to you a document of the greatest possible interest to the history of our race, its origins and its future.

  Sensation.

  The newspapers of the entire world have already spoken to you about it, perhaps a little too hastily. Perhaps they have also been too hasty, and too categorical, in evaluating the character of this scientific revelation. Is it true as they claim, that I am bringing you our ancestor? In other words, is it true that Gorillas are descended from Humans? Messieurs, let us proceed less rapidly. Such a question is serious, and requires only to be resolved as calmly as possible, by means of a very careful examination, with a precise method. That is why, before presenting the strange anima
l that will be the object of our study to you, it is first appropriate to look back, in order better to explain the conditions of its existence and the environment in which it has been able to manifest itself.

  Various movements.

  Have no fear, Mesdames; I shall keep this necessary preamble as brief as possible, in order not to irritate you by abusing your patience.

  Smiles.

  Messieurs, everything leads us to believe that the boreal regions, presently covered by an immense Ocean, were not always sunk beneath the glacial waters. We know, and no one any longer disputes it, that the polar zone was once much less extensive, and that in the first ages of the world, when the terrestrial globe knew no seasons, the average temperature at the poles was equal to that of the tropics, and certainly far superior to that which we enjoy today in our equatorial climes. That certainty has been acquired by Science.

  However, the hypothesis, more contestable and more contested, of a vanished continent which occupied that portion of our planet, in the epoch when the zone of polar ice scarcely descended below the forty-second degree of north latitude, is another matter. Those problematic lands, which legend calls Europides or Europe, would have spread out in the place where the ice of the Europic Ocean now extends, and the rare islands that we see, scattered over that vast sea, would simply be the summits of its highest mountains, still emerging to attest the previous existence of a continent that is no more.

  Let us hasten to say that the existence of a continent is still no more than a hypothesis—a logical hypothesis, corroborated by all the notions of geology, but which has not, to date, been scientifically demonstrated by authentic vestiges, the only evidence that we can admit. For you can easily understand that it is permissible to say: “The sea once covered the continent on which we reside, and has built us this fatherland—here are its traces!”—but it is less easy to go to study, at enormously profound submarine depths, the vestiges of an ancient terrestrial life. And although we observe experimentally that everywhere the land is, the sea was, we cannot establish by the same method that land surged forth where the sea hollows out—but we can at least suppose it, by analogy. Continents have their vicissitudes. No one is unaware that, since the creation of the globe, all the land presently visible and known, was by turns abandoned and repossessed, left once again by the sea that subsequently came to reoccupy it, and the successive layers of the terrestrial crust are here to certify this perpetual alternation.

 

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