The Mysterious Force

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  “What should I do?” asked the old man, turning to Meyral.

  “Forgive!” replied the young man.

  “Forgive—never!” Langre protested. “But I’ll endure his presence.”

  “Thank you!” Pierre sighed, faintly. He was shivering more than anyone else; one might have thought that his face was growing thinner by the minute. “Where shall I go?” he asked, after a further silence.

  “Stay with us!” said Sabine.

  He grasped his wife’s hand, sobbing, and kissed it like a slave.

  Another hour went by; dusk was approaching. Through the western window they could see an immense crimson Sun; the clouds seemed to be steeped in coagulated blood.

  Vérannes seemed to have been drowsy for some time. His head was slumped on his right shoulder, one of his eyes was closed, the other half-open. He was breathing harshly, like a hunted animal. Suddenly, he raised his head, examined the laboratory and his companions with a distant gaze, and whispered; “Hideous things…are happening.”

  Then he got up. Shaken by long tremors, he began to move toward the crepuscular window. One might have thought that he was about to hurl himself through the window—but he turned back, retraced his steps, and knelt down beside Sabine.

  “Oh,” he groaned, “Forgive me...have mercy on me. I loved you so much. You cannot know what you were to me…all life, all springtime, all the beauty of the Earth! Every beat of my heart wanted you to be happy! For your love, I was ready for any crucifixion! But I was so afraid of losing you! And that fear tortured me like an implacable beast; it made an executioner of the man who cherished you more than himself.” He had grasped Sabine’s little hands, and was lavishing kisses upon them. “Can’t you…forgive me?”

  “My heart holds no rancor,” she murmured.

  “Thank you!” he said, in a raucous sob. He stayed there, as if in prayer; then, as the tremor in his limbs increased, he turned his convulsive face to the sunset and began prowling along the wall. “Death!” he gasped. “Death!”

  Meyral caught him just as he was about to collapse and sat him in an armchair. His teeth were chattering; his gaze was glassy; his hands were groping feebly. He shook his head two or three times, in a lugubrious manner, and after an abrupt exhalation of breath, disappeared into eternal darkness.

  Then Sabine, with a loud scream, threw herself on his body and gave him a kiss. They all stood around the pale statue. The profundity of death dissolved their rancor. In the distance, beyond the branches, the immense Sun was vanishing. It was possible that no human eye would ever see it again.

  “We exchange a unique spark,” Meyral quoted, “like a long sigh charged with farewells.”11

  Humbly, he studied Sabine. In the declining light, he went back in time to his youth, when all his dreams hovered around the maiden, like a flock of wild doves: luminous Sabine, perfumed Sabine…her long hair with the magic of Eden! She was free now; boundless hopes might have flourished around her…but it was the end of the world!

  The sunlight had abandoned the window; a dusk of bloody ash wandered amid the clouds. Night came, thick and murderous. In a few minutes, the temperature dropped several degrees.

  “It’s going to get very cold,” said Langre, “and very dark. The Moon won’t rise until after midnight. We must wrap up!”

  “Should the children be put to bed?” asked Catherine.

  “Not in their room,” the old man replied. “We shouldn’t be separated. Let’s go fetch cloaks, blankets and mattresses before it gets dark.”

  A crude bed was made up in the laboratory. Everyone had put on warm clothing. They made a hasty meal, while the last light lingered in the distance. A few red stars appeared in the desert of the sky: the Evening Star, Altair, Vega, the Diamond of Cygnus,12 Aldebaran, Jupiter, Capella. The smaller stars would remain invisible.

  The crisis of torpor began. Somnolence evaporated the sadness. With a large surge of effort, Langre, Meyral and Sabine took measures against the increasing cold.

  “It’s winter…eternal winter!” the old man sniggered, dully.

  Forms faded away, becoming no more than patches of darkness.

  “Ah! Ah!” Gérard’s raucous voice resumed. “We shan’t see the green rays disappear!”

  In the semi-sleep that was numbing her, Catherine moved as stiffly as a somnambulist. She was holding a box of matches, and sought instinctively to strike a light. As if in a dream, she said: “Will there never again be fire?”

  They could no longer see; they were drowned in darkness; the faint light of the red stars could not even impart a glow to the windows, magnifying-glasses, mirrors and prisms.

  When the children had been put to bed, Catherine and Césarine went unsteadily to lie down in their turn.

  “My poor little Sabine! My dear Georges!” stammered the old man. He drew them toward him; already in the grip of torpor, he whispered; “This is the last night of the human race! Oh, we would have been able…I’ve loved you so dearly! Nevermore…”

  They listened, chilled to the bone. The cold was becoming intolerable.

  “Goodbye!” sobbed the old man. “The Ocean of the Ages…” The words died away in a surge of pain and tenderness.

  Langre still had the strength to help Sabine lie down beside her children; then he let himself fall on to a mattress.

  Meyral remained standing, alone.

  A dream filled him: the immense dream of humankind, a dream of centuries and millennia. In the infinite darkness, on the surface of a black star, he saw once again the dawns of his childhood, as young as the first dawns of the upright animal as he lit a fire on the bank of a river or on a hill.

  In spite of the cloak in which he was swathed, he felt the cold sinking into his limbs.

  Millions of my peers are living their final hour! he thought.

  Then he heard the jerky breath of his companions. His shivering intensified; a great weakness made his muscles contract. Instinct carried him to his mattress. He wrapped himself up in the blankets, and collapsed like a dead weight.

  VI. Dawn

  When he woke up, faint copper-colored light was filtering through the eastern window. He remained utterly tremulous for a minute, still filled by the weight of his dream. Gradually, his mind cleared and organized itself. The horror of the dream appeared. The cold had become unbearable; it had frozen Meyral’s face…

  He looked around, blurrily perceiving the mattresses on which his companions were lying. No breathing was audible in the great silence.

  “They’re dead!” Meyral stammered, terror-stricken.

  He stood up, his head reeling; he moved to the nearest mattress and confusedly made out a shock of white hair. Mortal anguish immobilized him; he almost went back to his own bed to await the decree of the invisible. The strength that was within him, and did not want him to despair before the last sigh, reanimated him. He felt Langre’s face.

  The face was cold. No breath seemed to be exhaled from the lips.

  Georges dragged himself to the other beds, one by one. All the faces were as cold as the old man’s, and no respiration raised their breasts.

  “Nothing!” sighed the young man.

  He leaned over Sabine for a longer time; a whimper escaped him. His pain had something too vast and too religious within it, however, to burst out in tears. Kneeling in the dark, ready to die, since all those he loved had now disappeared, and since all his human kin were condemned to death, but filled with wild rebellion, he could not yet admit that the long effort of ages was sinking into that abominable oblivion.

  For some minutes, that rebellion shook him to the very core of his being; then he discovered a grim grandeur in the catastrophe. It appeared to him to be almost beautiful. Why should it not symbolize the infinite resources of the world?

  The sacrifice of one humankind counted for little more, in the inexhaustible cycle of forces, than the sacrifice of a beehive or and anthill. The millennia during which the generations emerged from the sea had followed o
ne another were as fleeting in the life of the Milky Way as a second in the life of a man. Perhaps it was admirable that the long tragedy of Beasts and Plants should end in a disdainful destruction…

  What had terrestrial life been but a war without mercy, and what had humankind been, if not the species that had massacred, enslaved or degraded its inferior kin? Why should its end have been harmonious?

  “No! No!” Meyral protested. “It’s not admirable—it’s hideous!”

  His thoughts were beginning to slacken and slow down. The numbness was gripping both his limbs and his intelligence again. He was no longer anything but a tiny shivering and dolorous entity. He folded up beneath enormous forces like an insect in the autumn cold.

  Soon, his thoughts became disconnected; even images became rare; instinct dominated him. Painfully, he went back to his bed and buried himself in its blankets.

  The dawn had come, then the daylight: a daylight that resembled polar nights when the aurora borealis rises amid the clouds. In the large laboratory, nothing moved.

  Again, it was Meyral who woke up. At first, he stayed in the limbo of dreams, his eyes half-closed and his thoughts captive. Then reality took him by the throat, fear increasing like a horde of wild beasts. Sitting up on his elbow, he looked for a long time at the vague and motionless forms of his friends.

  “I’m alone! All alone!”

  Horror filled him. Then he experienced a kind of delirium. No idea or impression seemed graspable; they swirled around like blades of grass in a stream. That vertigo gave him a sort of strength; he succeeded in standing up, and there was no longer any but a single sensation, ardent and intolerable: hunger.

  It drew him out of the laboratory and took him to the kitchen, where he ate greedily and haphazardly: a few biscuits, some sugar, a little chocolate. The meal was efficacious; his thoughts became lucid again, and a vague optimism inflated the young man’s chest.

  “Until the end! It’s necessary to keep going until the end!”

  The pain came back, however, as soon as he was back in the laboratory He dared not lean over his companions; he wanted to conserve a glimmer of hope—and to grant himself a delay, he headed for one of the large tables.

  The thermometer registered seven degrees below zero.

  “Twenty-three degrees below average!” the scientist murmured, mechanically.

  Then he analyzed the solar spectrum. All of a sudden he quivered. The green zone was stable! Or, at least—which came to the same thing—it had hardly decreased at all.

  “Given the rhythm of the phenomenon,” he soliloquized, “the green should have disappeared. It’s probable…” He interrupted himself, examined the zone again, and continued—for it soothed him to formulate his thoughts: “It’s probable that the green was eaten away more profoundly. Therefore, the reaction must have begun.” He repeated, in a mystical tone: “The reaction must have begun!”

  That gave him the courage to go back to his friends. First, he leaned over little Robert. The child’s face was still cold; no breath was perceptible. Meyral felt his chest, and tried in vain to find a heartbeat; his limbs were stiff, but their rigidity seemed incomplete.

  Successively, the young man examined Langre, little Marthe and the servants. He scarcely dared to touch Sabine’s cheek. Their state appeared identical to Robert’s.

  It’s not rigor mortis! Georges thought.

  Besides, their temperature, taken in Langre’s and Robert’s armpits, was nearly 20 degrees. Meyral assured himself that that temperature was not getting any lower.

  “They’re alive! A precarious life, to be sure…a minimal life…but they’re alive! Oh, if the reaction were to continue…”

  His emotion, ardent at first, decreased. He thought that the torpid phase was about to overtake him again; if he went back to sleep, they would be alone in confrontation with the deadly forces!

  After an expectant quarter of an hour, he determined that his present state was different from the previous day’s states. His sensitivity was deadened, his movements a trifle slow, but he was not experiencing either torpor or stupor. On the contrary, he was quite lucid.

  While continuing to observe his friends, he resumed measuring the zones of the spectrum. Soon, he was certain that the green rays were not decreasing. He took extraordinary precautions for the next experiment, which he postponed until later in order to reduce “the contingency of the personal equation,” and made a few observations with the polariscope.

  At 10 a.m., the thermometer indicated nine degrees below zero; in that respect, the situation was getting worse. Nevertheless, a change was observable in the condition of the invalids, Meyral was no longer in doubt; neither Langre nor Sabine, nor either of the servants or the children, was dead. Their state seemed to be intermediate between that of creatures in hibernation and pathological lethargy. The peril was profound, though. They would probably be unable to resist the cold, even though the young man had heaped more blankets upon them and wrapped up their heads carefully.

  At 10:30 a.m., Meyral decided to resume checking the solar spectrum. He released a loud yelp; in spite of his apathy, his face was convulsed by an overpowering hope. The green zone had increased—the reaction had begun!

  “Ah!” he stammered, his eyes full of tears. “This hideous drama won’t go all the way to the end, after all!”

  In that first minute he forgot himself; his frail form disappeared into the ocean of creatures; he thought only of the salvation of Life. Then his apathy reappeared. He scarcely shivered as he wondered: What if it’s just a simple stutter in the phenomenon?

  By noon, it was impossible for him to repress the certainty: the green zone continued to increase. Unfortunately, the thermometer fell to ten degrees below zero. In spite of his cloak and blankets, Georges felt bitterly cold.

  A hunger similar to that of the morning having gripped him again, he devoured more chocolate, biscuits and sugar. The meal did him good, but made him sleepy. Curled up in an armchair, with his feet wrapped in an eiderdown and his head well-covered, he sank into unconsciousness.

  When he woke up again, he felt over-excited, and feverishly assured himself of his companions’ condition; their illness was stable. Then he launched himself toward the apparatus.

  The green had reached its limit again, and the blue rays were beginning to reappear!

  Meyral’s doubts dissipated then. His soul expanded like an April primrose. It was a great hope—the hope of resurrection, as vast as the dawn of a universe. All the poetry of Genesis swelled the young scientist’s heart. Fervently, he recited:

  “And afterwards an angel, opening the doors,

  “Faithful and joyful, will come to reanimate

  “The tarnished mirrors and the dead flames.”

  It was a festival of the infinite, a star’s springtime, a beatitude from which the gleams of the Milky Way oozed forth. And in that great minute, he did not doubt the salvation of his companions of the Ark.

  When the excitement had passed, he understood that the circumstances remained obscure and redoubtable. The cold was still punishing; the lethargy, although it was no longer imperious, had not shown any sign of amelioration. In truth, those immobile beings, whose breath was inaudible and whose pale faces remained strangely stiff, bore more resemblance to the dead than the living.

  “If I could only light a fire!” Meyral thought.

  Taking a chance, he made the attempt. Matches would not strike; no chemical combination could be started; the electrical apparatus remained inert. With extreme slowness, however, light continued to climb back toward the superior waves. The blue band became increasingly clear.

  At about 3 p.m., there was a second phenomenon of “return;” the compass needle, insensitive until then, began to point north-west, 15 degrees away from its normal position. That seemingly-trivial fact gave Georges considerable pleasure; terrestrial magnetism was the constant whose disappearance had made the deepest impression on him.

  “Electricity will reappea
r in its turn.”

  It did not reappear for another hour, in the Holtz apparatus—but no matter how vigorously the young man made the machine turn, he could not obtain a spark.13

  Returning depression crushed him. It was not the same sadness as before—the sadness of the planetary drama—it was a purely human distress. He continued making sure that his companions were alive, but it seemed more improbable with every passing minute that he could reanimate them. And as despair assumes a form appropriate to the circumstances, what distressed him now was wondering whether, even if life were reborn everywhere, the divine light would resume its creative work, and whether his former master or Sabine would witness the resurrection.

  Only warmth could save them, he thought—but the night would undoubtedly pass before he could obtain fire. Several times he tried, by means of changes in position and massage, to produce some effect on the children, whose vitality inspired him with more confidence than that of the adults.

  The time went by rapidly, in spite of all his anxieties. The Sun was already descending over the leafy crowns of the Luxembourg, and its orb was growing by the minute. Within half an hour it would disappear, and less than an hour later, there would be complete darkness. The Moon would not rise until 2 a.m.

  Meyral, simultaneously drawn by his emotion and his scientific curiosity—which even the near approach of death had formerly been unable to extinguish—multiplied his experiments. They were all in agreement in the evolutionary sense; the compass-needle gradually drew closer to its normal position; the Holtz machine, without yet yielding sparks, revealed stronger tensions; the blue region of the spectrum, in spite of the approaching sunset, never ceased to increase.

  “Fire! Fire!” moaned Meyral. “The cold will get worse during the night. Their weakness is excessive, their reactions are insignificant. Oh, for a fire!”

  Dusk arrived, less somber than the previous day’s; scarlet fires wandered over the summits of the Luxembourg…and all of a sudden, the Holtz machine began to produce sparks. They were brief and coppery sparks, but they filled the physicist’s heart with hope. He contemplated them drunkenly; he listened to their slight crepitation, which reminded him of the flight of certain insects—and an idea occurred to him.