Scientific Romance

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by Brian Stableford


  “Well?” I said. “What does that have to do with . . .?”

  “Imagine,” the scientist cut in, “that the first view projected were my portrait, and that the second represented a Louis XV bracket-table. It seems to me that it gives a good enough idea of what happened to me at the moment when you broke the mirror . . . especially if the table had been photographed in my drawing-room and your humble servant in his study. . . .”

  “It doesn’t explain anything.”

  “Indeed. On the other hand, however, everything that happened to us tends, in spite of reason, to justify a way of seeing that encourages belief in a space hidden behind mirrors. . . .”

  “But where do you imagine your—how can I put it—temporary5 space to be located?” I retorted. “In the present case, the reflected study would have occupied the same space as the drawing-room.”

  “That’s it—that’s exactly it,” said the professor.

  “But at the end of the day, Bouvancourt, the drawing-room is the drawing-room! Two things can’t be in the same place at the same time—that’s crazy!”

  “Ahem!” he said, pulling a face. “Crazy! First, there are melting views. Then again, we merely live in space and time, and do not know them. Immensity and eternity are inconceivable. Can you claim to know in detail the part of a whole that you do not know? Are you certain that two things can’t exist in the same time? Are you sure that they can’t exist in the same place, simultaneously?” In a mocking voice, he added: “After all, the space of my body is, at the same time, that of an invalid and that of an elector of equal volume, not to mention other individuals. . . .”

  I was relieved to see that he was clearly joking, and the subject of the conversation changed. Besides, only experiments could satisfy us with regard to so extraordinary an event—which, I sometimes suspect, might not have happened as I thought I observed.

  Scarcely convalescent, pale and limping, Bouvancourt began his research. Fearing indiscretions, he sent Felix away—whom I replaced, as best I could—and set to work.

  Let us state right away that temporary space—as we shall call it henceforth, by contrast with permanent space—never re-opened. The guinea-pigs that our prudence led us to utilize died of various afflictions, some of them hairless, others corroded by ulcers, some without claws, several of some unknown sort of fit. Three were struck down when, after many deceptions, Bouvancourt attempted to reproduce the trolley-spark artificially; one was killed by the scientist, who, in a rage, persisted in introducing it by force into a mirror. None, however, ever went to prance around in the world of reflections. Nothing could engender the famous violet transparency within them.

  I gave up on the project. Bouvancourt continued it. “You’re wrong,” he told me. “I have a theory. There aren’t just mirrors of glass . . . there are other substances endowed with reflective power, but more permeable. . . .”

  Poor old Bouvancourt! How stubbornly he pursued his chimera! What endurance and temerity! I had prescribed a strict program of treatment for him, under pain of death. Far from following it, he exposed himself continually to the terrible influences that had already nearly killed him. Every day, I saw his complexion become more jaundiced and his bald head slump further. The pathological symptoms reappeared. He became hideous, and he knew it.

  After a little while, he told me that on the day of his discovery, he would probably be less delighted with the triumph than with not having to pore over mirrors any more.

  “Patience, though!” he added. “Another week or two, and the Academy of Sciences shall learn something new!”

  *

  Yesterday, at dawn, a canal boatman noticed some unusual items of apparatus on the towpath. Taken to the police station, they were recognized by a sagacious inspector as “chemistry equipment.” He went to Bouvancourt’s house, in order to obtain fuller information. There, he learned that the scientist had disappeared the previous evening.

  He was fished out of the canal.

  “There are other substances more permeable than glass endowed with reflective power. . . .”

  Some people say that he drowned after having been electrocuted, in an excess of precaution. Others add, delicately, that “perhaps his housekeeper knows something about it.”

  “He committed suicide,” affirmed the Echo de Pontargis, “suffering from an incurable malady occasioned by his perilous studies.”

  Someone once said to me, with a charming smile: “The cold light had burned his brain, eh!”

  Only I know the truth.

  I can see Bouvancourt on the edge of the nocturnal canal. He dips the zinc electrodes of his battery into the bichromate. Immediately, the Ruhmkorff coil emits its bee-like or hornet-like buzz; the bulb becomes phosphorescent. The scientist believes himself to be impregnated with mysterious clarity.

  He looks into the liquid depths, at the inverted image of the restful landscape, snowy in the moonlight. He looks at that temporary space, into which the incorporated fluid ought to authorize him to descend into an even paler moonlight, an even brighter landscape. . . .

  And he descends, not knowing what laws of gravity govern that universe, at the risk of sinking into the gulf of the firmament open at his feet.

  And he descends . . . but he finds nothing but permanent space—which is to say, in actuality, water: the weighty water in which human beings cannot live; the water of epilogues, whose silence is that which follows so many stories; the water of finality.

  * * *

  1 The Musée Grévin at 10 Boulevard Montmartre, founded in 1882 and named after its first artistic director, Alfred Grévin, is a wax museum, the Parisian equivalent of London’s Madame Tussaud’s.

  2 A Crookes tube was a primitive discharge tube developed by William Crookes in the 1870s, consisting of a partly-evacuated glass cylinder with an electrode at either end; it differed from subsequent cathode ray tubes in that the electrodes were not heated, so they did not emit electrons directly. Crookes tubes were usually operated, as Bouvancourt’s are, by Ruhmkorff induction coils; it was this kind of apparatus that permitted Röntgen’s accidental discovery of X-rays in 1895.

  3 The great French painter Ingres played the violin for pleasure relaxation, so the phrase “le violon d’Ingres” became a popular nineteenth-century nickname for any such secondary pastime. Renard could not know when he wrote the story that Man Ray would transform the significance of the phrase by producing a classic surrealist visual representation of it in 1924.

  4 A Ramsden machine employs a rotating disk to produce static electricity by means of friction; a Leyden jar—a bottle equipped with two electrodes, one internal and the other external—is a device for storing static electricity.

  5 The French temporaire can also be translated as “provisional,” which might make more apparent sense in this instance, but as the word is subsequently contrasted with “permanent” I have used the direct transcription. There is an inevitable temptation, given the customs of modern usage, to substitute “virtual” and “real,” but that would be stretching permissible translation too far.

  THE HORROR OF THE HEIGHTS

  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) trained and practiced as a physician before his sideline writing popular fiction brought him enormous success and fame, primarily as the creator of the archetypal detective Sherlock Holmes. Although he wrote a handful of early short stories in the scientific romance genre he devoted no particular effort to it until he produced the classic novel The Lost World (1912), featuring the charismatic scientist and explorer Professor Challenger. He followed it up rapidly with a sequel, the near-apocalyptic disaster story The Poison Belt (1913). The Great War interrupted his career, and the death of his son in action prompted him to develop a strong interest in spiritualism, which deflected the third and last novel featuring Professor Challenger in a very different direction.

  “The Horror of the Heights” was written between The Lost World and The Poison Belt, when Doyle�
�s interest in scientific romance was at its peak. It was written at a moment when the dream of flight featured in the earliest stories in the present anthology had been realized, but the conquest of the air had only just begun, leaving imaginative scope for the envisaging of exotic challenges. It has something in common with William Hope Hodgson’s tales of exotic life-forms lurking in the margins of the unknown, and marks the end of the era when such margins could still be located on earth. After the Great War of 1914–18, the world seemed smaller, and more familiar, and the fringe of the unknown, which could still be located above Wiltshire in “The Horror of the Heights,” was forced into a more distant exile, eventually finding a refuge in the greater wilderness of outer space, the literary colonization of which American science fiction soon began.

  The idea that the extraordinary narrative which has been called the Joyce-Armstrong fragment is an elaborate practical joke evolved by some unknown person, cursed by a perverted and sinister sense of humor, has now been abandoned by all who have examined the matter. The most macabre and imaginative of plotters would hesitate before linking his morbid fancies with the unquestioned and tragic facts which reinforce the statement. Though the assertions contained in it are amazing and even monstrous, it is none the less forcing itself upon the general intelligence that they are true, and that we must readjust our ideas to the new situation. This world of ours appears to be separated by a slight and precarious margin of safety from a most singular and unexpected danger. I will endeavor in this narrative, which reproduces the original document in its necessarily somewhat fragmentary form, to lay before the reader the whole of the facts up to date, prefacing my statement by saying that, if there be any who doubt the narrative of Joyce-Armstrong, there can be no question at all as to the facts concerning Lieutenant Myrtle, R.N., and Mr. Hay Connor, who undoubtedly met their end in the manner described.

  The Joyce-Armstrong fragment was found in the field which is called Lower Haycock, lying one mile to the westward of the village of Withyham, upon the Kent and Sussex border. It was on the fifteenth of September last that an agricultural laborer, James Flynn, in the employment of Matthew Dodd, farmer, of the Chauntry Farm, Withyham, perceived a briar pipe lying near the footpath which skirts the hedge in Lower Haycock. A few paces farther on he picked up a pair of broken binocular glasses. Finally, among some nettles in the ditch, he caught sight of a flat, canvas-backed book, which proved to be a note-book with detachable leaves, some of which had come loose and were fluttering along the base of the hedge. These he collected, but some, including the first, were never recovered, and leave a deplorable hiatus in this all-important statement. The notebook was taken by the laborer to his master, who in turn showed it to Dr. J. H. Atherton, of Hartfield. This gentleman at once recognized the need for an expert examination, and the manuscript was forwarded to the Aero Club in London, where it now lies.

  The first two pages of the manuscript are missing. There is also one torn away at the end of the narrative, though none of these affect the general coherence of the story. It is conjectured that the missing opening is concerned with the record of Mr. Joyce-Armstrong’s qualifications as an aeronaut, which can be gathered from other sources and are admitted to be unsurpassed among the air pilots of England. For many years he has been looked upon as among the most daring and the most intellectual of flying men, a combination which has enabled him to both invent and test several new devices, including the common gyroscopic attachment which is known by his name. The main body of the manuscript is written neatly in ink, but the last few pages are in pencil and are so ragged as to be hardly legible, exactly, in fact, as they might be expected to appear if they were scribbled off hurriedly from the seat of a moving aeroplane. There are, it may be added, several stains, both on the last page and on the outside cover which have been pronounced by the Home Office experts to be blood—probably human and certainly mammalian. The fact that something closely resembling the organism of malaria was discovered in this blood, and that Joyce-Armstrong is known to have suffered from intermittent fever, is a remarkable example of the new weapons which modern science has placed in the hands of our detectives.

  And now a word as to the personality of the author of this epoch-making statement. Joyce-Armstrong, according to the few friends who really knew something of the man, was a poet and a dreamer, as well as a mechanic and an inventor. He was a man of considerable wealth, much of which he had spent in the pursuit of his aeronautical hobby. He had four private aeroplanes in his hangars near Devizes, and is said to have made no fewer than one hundred and seventy ascents in the course of last year. He was a retiring man with dark moods, in which he would avoid the society of his fellows.

  Captain Dangerfield, who knew him better than anyone, says that there were times when his eccentricity threatened to develop into something more serious. His habit of carrying a shotgun with him in his aeroplane was one manifestation of it. Another was the morbid effect which the fall of Lieutenant Myrtle had upon his mind. Myrtle, who was attempting the height record, fell from an altitude of something over thirty thousand feet. Horrible to narrate, his head was entirely obliterated, though his body and limbs preserved their configuration. At every gathering of airmen, Joyce-Armstrong according to Dangerfield, would ask, with an enigmatic smile: “And where, pray, is Myrtle’s head?”

  On another occasion, after dinner, at the mess of the Flying School on Salisbury Plain, he started a debate as to what will be the most permanent danger which airmen will have to encounter. Having listened to successive opinions as to air-pockets, faulty construction, and over-banking, he ended up by shrugging his shoulders and refusing to put forward his own views, though he gave the impression that they differed from any advanced by his companions.

  It is worth remarking that after his own complete disappearance it was found that his private affairs were arranged with a precision which may show that he had a strong premonition of disaster. With these essential explanations I will now give the narrative exactly as it stands, beginning at page three of the blood-soaked notebook.

  *

  Nevertheless, when I dined at Rheims with Coselli and Gustav Raymond I found that neither of them was aware of any particular danger in the higher layers of the atmosphere. I did not actually say what was in my thoughts, but I got so near to it that if they had any corresponding idea they could not have failed to express it. But then they are two empty, vainglorious fellows with no thought beyond seeing their silly names in the newspaper. It is interesting to note that neither of them had ever been much beyond the twenty-thousand-foot level. Of course, men have been higher than this both in balloons and in the ascent of mountains. It must be well above that point that the aeroplane enters the danger zone—always presuming that my premonitions are correct.1

  Aeroplaning has been with us now for more than twenty years, and one might well ask: Why should this peril be only revealing itself in our day? The answer is obvious. In the old days of weak engines, when a hundred horse-power Gnome or Green was considered ample for every need, the flights were very restricted. Now that three hundred horse-power is the rule rather than the exception, visits to the upper layers have become easier and more common. Some of us can remember how, in our youth, Garros made a world-wide reputation by attaining nineteen thousand feet, and it was considered a remarkable achievement to fly over the Alps.

  Our standard now has been immeasurably raised, and there are twenty high flights for one in former years. Many of them have been undertaken with impunity. The thirty-thousand-foot level has been reached time after time with no discomfort beyond cold and asthma. What does that prove? A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced to come down in the jungle he might be devoured.

  There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers which inhabit them. I believe in time they will map these jungles accurately out. Even at the present moment I could name two of them. One of them lies over
the Pau-Biarritz district of France. Another is just over my head as I write here in my house in Wiltshire. I rather think there is a third in the Hamburg-Wiesbaden district.

  It was the disappearance of the airmen that first set me thinking. Of course, everyone said that they had fallen into the sea, but that did not satisfy me at all. First, there was Verrier in France; his machine was found near Bayonne, but they never got his body.

  There was the case of Baxter also, who vanished, though his engine and some of the iron fixings were found in a wood in Leicestershire. In that case, Dr. Middleton, of Amesbury, who was watching the flight with a telescope, declares that just before the clouds obscured the view he saw the machine, which was at an enormous height, suddenly rise perpendicularly upwards in a succession of jerks in a manner that he would have thought to be impossible. That was the last seen of Baxter. There was a correspondence in the papers, but it never led to anything.

  There were several other similar cases, and then there was the death of Hay Connor. What a cackle there was about an unsolved mystery of the air, and what columns in the halfpenny papers, and yet how little was ever done to get to the bottom of the business! He came down in a tremendous vol-plané from an unknown height. He never got off his machine and died in his pilot’s seat. Died of what? “Heart disease,” said the doctors. Rubbish! Hay Connor’s heart was as sound as mine is. What did Venables say? Venables was the only man who was at his side when he died. He said that he was shivering and looked like a man who had been badly scared. “Died of fright,” said Venables, but could not imagine what he was frightened about. Only said one word to Venables, which sounded like “Monstrous.” They could make nothing of that at the inquest. But I could make something of it. Monsters! That was the last word of poor Harry Hay Connor. And he did die of fright, just as Venables thought.

 

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