Scientific Romance

by Brian Stableford

  “Still Felix?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Hello, Felix!”

  “Good day, Monsieur Sambreuil.”

  “My laboratory assistant,” Bouvancourt went on, “asked if he could finish early. He’s going away tomorrow, and I can’t put this experiment off.”

  “Is it very interesting, then?”

  “Extremely, my dear chap. It’s the final one of a series; it ought to be conclusive. I’ll doubtless make a nice discovery. . . .”

  “What?”

  “The free penetration, by invisible light, of substances that the Röntgen rays still have difficulty traversing: glass, bones and others. We’re working in the dark. I’m trying to take a photograph. Permit me to remain silent for a few minutes—it won’t take long. Come on Felix!”

  Then I heard the insectile hum that induction coils make. There were several of them going; the buzzers, according to their tightness, imitated the sonorous flight of bees or that of hornets, and their swarm sang in passable cacophonic harmony. That infernal pedal-note, humming amid the calm of a provincial town, encouraged drowsiness, and I would probably have dozed off if it were not for the trams, whose passage along the boulevard filled the first floor with a periodic racket. Their electrical wires ran close to the house at the level of the windows; there was even a bracket supporting the cables attached to the facade between the laboratory window and the study windows. Every time they made contact with this suture, the trolleys produced a spark. My idle waiting was enlivened thereby. The coils, meanwhile, continued their parody of a beehive.

  Several trolley-shafts rattled past in succession. Ever-inclined to calculation, I counted them.

  “Will you be finished soon, Bouvancourt?”

  “Have a little patience, Monsieur Sambreuil,” Felix replied, vaguely.

  “Is it going well?”

  “Marvelously. We’re almost there.”

  These words gave me a furious desire to get to the other side of the door, in order to see the new phenomenon occur for the first time and contemplate the inventor at the moment of his invention. By means of his discoveries, Bouvancourt had already inscribed several dates in the calendar of Renown.

  A clock chimed. I shivered. The moment was historic.

  “Can’t I come in now, Felix?” I lamented. “I’m getting bored. That’s the twentieth tram going past, my lad, and. . . .”

  I said no more. As it touched the suture, the twentieth tram emitted a spark as crackly and as dazzling as a bolt of lightning. Then behind the laboratory door, there was a sequence of explosions, simultaneous with a series of assorted anodyne blasphemies.

  Puff!

  “Oh thunder!”

  Piff!

  “Dash it!”

  Paff!

  “A thousand million curses!”

  Et cetera. Bouvancourt’s anger was banal, but not sacrilegious. When the fusillade had ceased, he cried: “We’ll have to do it all over again! What a disaster! What bad luck, my poor Felix!”

  “What’s happened, then?” I said.

  “My Crookes tubes2 have blown up, of course! That’s what’s happened! It’s not difficult to guess!”

  Prudently, I shut up. A few seconds later, I heard Felix opening the door to the hallway and going out.

  Finally, Bouvancourt appeared.

  “Hello!” I said to him. “What have you done? What a state you’re in!”

  At first, I was nonplussed by his appearance. The cause of my astonishment gradually became clearer. The physician gave the impression of being surrounded by a very thin fog—a sort of violet tint, visually analogous to mildew, enveloped his entire body with a vaporous and transparent film. There was a strong odor of ozone.

  Bouvancourt was quite unmoved. “Right!” he said, simply. “Most curious, indeed. It must be a residue of the accursed experiment. It’ll go away, gradually.”

  He offered me his hand. The colored aura that enveloped him in mauve was intangible, but I was astonished to find that the hand was extremely flaccid. Suddenly, the scientist snatched it away from mine and pressed it to his torso, under the evident influence of a palpitation.

  “You’re not well, my dear chap—you need to rest. Shall I examine you?”

  “Come, come—no childishness, doctor! It will pass. In an hour, it’ll no longer be visible, I swear. Then again, to the Devil with the disappointment, since here you are, back again! Let’s talk about something else, if you please. What do you think of this novelty? Isn’t it fine work, that lambrequin? And the mirror! A Saint-Gobain, old chap!”

  And while Ingres’ violin3 whined away in my memory, he led me to his masterpiece.

  Suddenly, however, stupefaction immobilized us. We looked at one another interrogatively, not daring to say anything. Finally, Bouvancourt asked me, in a tremulous voice: “There’s no doubt, is there? You can see it too—there’s nothing there!”

  “Perfectly,” I stammered. “Nothing . . . nothing at all. . . .”

  There, indeed, the miracle commenced. I don’t actually know which of us perceived it first. The certain fact is that, although we were both facing the mirror, my image alone was reflected therein. Bouvancourt had lost his. In the place which it should have occupied all that could be seen was the very distinct reflection of the desk and the more distant one of the blackboard.

  I was bewildered. Bouvancourt started uttering cries of joy. Gradually, he calmed down. “Well, old chap,” he said, “this is, I think, a discovery of the first magnitude . . . and one that I scarcely expected. Oh, how fine it is, my friend! There’s nothing there! How fine that is, my dear doctor! I confess that I don’t understand it, though. The cause escapes me. . . .”

  “Your mauve aureole. . . .” I suggested.

  “Shh!” said Bouvancourt. “Shut up.”

  He sat down in front of the glass, empty of his effigy, and began debating the issue, although that did not require him to stop laughing and gesticulating. “You see, doctor, I understand in part. For reasons that I won’t confide to you—for fear of being roundly scolded—I’ve impregnated myself with a certain fluid, the tenacity of which I was far from suspecting. I’m presumably saturated with it, for that nimbus seems to me to be an excess of fluid, superabundant to that within me, which is leaking out.

  “We recently discovered that this gas—that light, if you prefer—has an unexpected property. I only expected it to have the faculty of traversing substances already permeable to ultra-violet radiation—flesh, wood, etc.—plus bone and glass. A vague relationship is certainly discernible between the property that I supposed it to have and the unexpected quality that has just been manifest . . . all the same, I can’t explain it. X-rays, it’s true, are unreflectable, but. . . .”

  “Optical science has not yet unveiled the secret of reflection, has it?” I asked.

  “No. In reflection, optical science studies a set of results whose cause is not well-understood. It observes facts, without knowing the exact nature of their source, and pronounces the rules according to which they are routinely produced—then names these rules “laws” because, until today, there has been nothing to falsify them. Light, the agent of optical phenomena, is a mystery. Now, this mystery is all the more difficult to solve because half of its manifestations, ascertained and studied intently for some years, are not directly perceptible, being not only impalpable, silent, odorless and tasteless like the others, but also cold and dark.

  “Yes, only ten years ago, it was imagined that light was reflected by objects, more or less totally, but that it never penetrated into them.” Bouvancourt raised his voice. “What magic! All these bodies, transpierced!” He tapped the mahogany of his armchair with his curved index-finger. Then, seized by a sudden idea, he leaned toward the mirror and tapped it in the same fashion.

  That drew a fearful exclamation from me. His finger perforated the crystal as easily as the surface of a placid wave! Circles were born at the point of entry and radiated one by one, their co
ncentric ripples disturbing the limpidity of the vertical lake as they were propagated.

  Bouvancourt shuddered and looked at me. Then, getting up and stepping resolutely toward the mirror, he buried himself entirely within it, with a slight sound like rustling paper. An eddy made the deforming images dance. When everything calmed down, I saw the violet man on the other side of the glass. He looked me up and down and laughed soundlessly, comfortably installed in the reflection of the armchair.

  Beneath my own finger, the product of Saint-Gobain resounded solidly and impassively.

  In the environment of the reflected study, Bouvancourt’s lips moved, but no words reached me. Then he put his head through the bizarre partition that separated us, upsetting the vision again. “What a strange place!” he said to me. “I can’t hear my own voice there.”

  “I couldn’t distinguish it either—but couldn’t you select another means of communication? Your immersions and emersions prevent me from seeing for some time.”

  “They stop me too; I perceive you in the study as you see me in its reflection, with the difference that I’m keeping company with your image.”

  His head plunged back into the extraordinary world. He moved about there without any apparent difficulty, touching objects and feeling them. As he displaced a flask on a shelf, a ringing sound made me turn my eyes toward the actual room, and I saw the actual flask rise up into the air momentarily and replace itself on the shelf. By this means, Bouvancourt provoked several movements in the actual study symmetrical with those he initiated in the apparent study. When he passed close to my double, he took care to go around him. Once, deliberately, he pushed him lightly, and I felt myself moved sideways by an invisible individual.

  After a few experiments of this sort, Bouvancourt stopped next to the reflected blackboard. He seemed to look for something to his right, then slapped his forehead, and discovered the sponge to his left. Having rubbed out the equations and formulas, he made his own impressions with a nimble piece of chalk. He wrote in large characters, in order that I could read them easily from the threshold of the mirrored room that was forbidden to me. He often left the slate, hazarded an exploration, verified a suspicion or tested some conjecture, then returned to write the result of the experiment. Behind me, the actual piece of chalk tapped away at the real slate with a noise like that of a telegraph, extending indecipherable gibberish from right to left, in inverted letters.

  Bouvancourt wrote the following account. I copied it out in my notebook, for the dimension of the characters quickly covered the board and necessitated frequent erasures.

  I’m in a strange region. One can breathe here without difficulty. Where can it be situated? We’ll think about that later. For now, it’s appropriate to observe.

  All these doubles of reality are flaccid to a supreme extent—almost inconsistent. The room in which I’m located ends suddenly where the visual field of the mirror finishes. On my side, the wall against which the mirror is set is a dark field pierced with a rectangle of light . . . a dark and impenetrable plane. It’s distressing to look at, even more so to touch. It’s neither rough, nor hard, nor warm, but simply impenetrable; I don’t know how to express it.

  If I open the window, the same opaque night extends to either side of the reflected landscape. It’s that too, which constitutes the unreflected sides of images, including the back of your own copy, doctor. Your phantom is divided into two zones—the one facing the glass is similar to one of your halves; the other is a silhouette composed of that frightful obscurity. The line that divides them is very precise and when you turn round, the line remains immobile, as if you were turning in front of a luminous hearth at night, always half-illuminated and half in shadow.

  The ammonia has no odor. Liquids have no taste. The Ramsden machine is letting off apparent sparks, devoid of energy, in the direction of the Leyden jar.4

  We were in the course of our correspondence when I wanted to transmit to Bouvancourt my uncertainties regarding what would happen in inclined mirrors, or those in the ceiling—or, even better, on the floor, and my opinion regarding investigations of the weight imposed in these various hypotheses and even in the present case. With that end in view, I sponged the slate myself. It took a few seconds.

  I had just begun to write my proposal when the chalk leapt violently from my hand. In awkward, tremulous characters, going from left to right, as normal—an indication that the scientist was writing backwards himself, and wanted to make me understand without delay, at whatever cost—it traced: HELP! At the same time, a misty human form appeared next to me, holding the white chalk.

  I ran to the mirror. Bouvancourt ran within it to meet me. His forehead was bloody. He crashed into the glass with all his force, as if to break it—but a block of granite could not have put up more resistance. It had become impenetrable, with an incomprehensible solidity, with respect to powers retained from the world beyond it. The scientist’s head reddened from another wound, and I understood that, during my brief absence, he had attempted to escape. The mauve aura had dissipated, and the unfortunate man, abandoned by the fluid—doubtless vital in that unknown atmosphere—was giving increasing signs of asphyxia.

  Several more times he charged, crashed into and bruised himself on the inflexible separation. The most frightful thing of all was seeing his image gradually reappear on my side, becoming a second bloody Bouvancourt, maddened and monstrous, with his dark half—and to see those two prisoners face to face, their lips silently twisting in howls and cries for help, continually throwing themselves at one another—hand to hand, forehead to forehead, blood to blood—and continually crashing into one another with the same savage gestures and the same impotent blows.

  I tried—with what objective and by what intuition?—to drag the reflection into the laboratory. Having reached the limit of the mirror’s visual field, though, the inconsistent being was arrested there, as if by the most immovable object. That frontier cut obliquely through the wide-open door, blocking it more solidly than a rampart of rubble with respect to the scientist’s specter. With all my strength, I pulled him and pushed him against that immaterial barrier—which evaded my perception—without succeeding in getting him through it. He depended intimately on Bouvancourt’s actual body, and that, as I had forgotten, was a prisoner in the fabulous region.

  It was necessary to do something, though. The reflection was gasping for breath in my arms. What could I do? I lay him down on the floor—and there, in the depths of the mirror, Bouvancourt lay down spontaneously, red in the face, with his eyes closed.

  I took a decision. In the drawing-room hearth there were those heavy eighteenth-century fire-irons: I went to fetch one of them.

  At the first blow, the mirror cracked from side to side. It was soon reduced to smithereens. The wall appeared, and the fire-iron scraped the thick wall.

  I turned round. Bouvancourt’s reflection was no longer there. Then a woman’s scream resounded in the drawing-room. I found the housekeeper there, attracted by the din.

  “Well? What?” I said to her, going back in. To my profound amazement, she pointed to her inanimate master lying on the parquet floor. The leg of a bracket-table, still in place, transfixed his thigh.

  I declare here and now that a minute before, when I had gone into it to grab the fire-iron, that room had been absolutely deserted.

  The physicist was alive, and he recovered consciousness after a few rhythmic tractions of the tongue and a few maneuvers of artificial respiration—but it was necessary for me to loosen the bracket-table and haul with all my muscular strength on the piece of wood before I succeeded in drawing it out. Its extraction left a singularly neat wound, piercing the flesh clean through and grazing the femur—a wound that, to tell the truth, did not really merit that name; it was more like a hole, whose edges manifested no sign of contusion. The weight of the table had not, therefore, been driven into the thigh. Besides, the fastening immobilized it. One might have thought—and perhaps it’s the truth—that th
e limb had re-formed around the table-leg, sealing it in like a mold.

  I did not have time, though, to dwell on that subject; Bouvancourt’s condition demanded all my attention. It was not his leg-wound that threatened his life, however, but the ulcers that covered him, and strange internal burns, from which he might never recover. It was the worst dermatitis that I have ever treated, accompanied by hair-loss and a malady of the finger-and toe-nails. In brief, he showed all the notorious symptoms of prolonged exposure to invisible light, which I had observed many a time in X-rayed patients before the introduction of instantaneous photographs.

  In addition, Bouvancourt admitted to me that he had attempted to photograph an iron candelabrum through his own body and a sheet of glass—an experiment aborted in the manner I have related, which was the origin of this adventure. “I’ve composed the metal of my electrodes from a mixture of radium and platinum,” he told me. He talked to me continually from his bed, directing innocent curses against the misfortune that had taken him away from his experiments, and hence from the solution of the enigma.

  To calm him down, I informed him of the observations I had made, showing him the necessity of combining all our certainties in order to build logical suppositions thereon that would permit us to work more adequately. I devoted myself to an investigation of the relevant locations, in the hope that their examination might reinforce our documentation with further observations. I only discovered one thing: the bracket-table in the drawing-room was fixed, relative to the plane of the shattered mirror, at a point symmetrical with the one where I had set down Bouvancourt’s image in the study.

  I imparted this information to the scientist.

  “Are you familiar,” he asked me, “with the trick employed by makers of magic lanterns known as melting views?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “It consists of replacing one image projected on a screen by another. It’s worked by means of two projectors; the first is slowly darkened while the second is gradually unmasked.”

  “There is, therefore, if I’m not mistaken,” the physicist went on, “a moment when both images are visible together on the canvas, mingling their different subjects—the masts of a ship emerge, for instance, in the midst of a group of friends. . . .”