The Mysterious Force

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  “Throw the grenades!” Langre commanded.

  The young men from Collimarre were standing up. One of them grunted, rotated his arm and threw the first grenade; several others followed, tracing luminous parabolas; all of them, exploding sharply, split chests, opened bellies, smashed bones, or carried away fragments of flesh and limbs.

  Frightful laments rose up; terror slowed down the carnivores’ charge—but the rear-guard, less surprised and not quite understanding what had happened, continued bounding forward. As soon as they were within range, grenades flew through the air; they carried away ranks of men; skulls were seen rolling on the ground like cannonballs; the strokes of the bell and the dazzling searchlight-beams rendered the scene more sinister still.

  “Attack! Attack!” repeated demented voices.

  The woods crackled; a fusillade emerged from the sylvan shadows, while the booming voice of Franières resounded like the roar of a bull.

  There was panic. There was a superhuman clamor of screams of terror and long laments uttered by the women, children and animals left in rear—and the carnivores scattered into the trees.

  “Should we pursue them?” Meyral asked.

  Langre only reflected momentarily. The collective soul was within him, which masked the danger.

  “We must!” he said.

  Soon, the groups from Collimarre and the inhabitants of the Lodge surged forth en masse. To render the pursuit more effective, men blew trumpets and horns they had taken down from the walls: a crazy and discordant music spread through the forest.

  Progress was slow, however, although they had hoisted the wounded and the children on to horses or oxen. Nevertheless, a few limping laggards were overhauled, whom the peasants shot down mercilessly. Then they discovered men, women, children and animals rolling on the ground, prey to the sickness that had killed the peasant woman from Rougues. Meyral and Langre forbade their companions to finish them off. In any case, a considerable event hypnotized them: the village was nearby. They perceived scattered fires and a swarming multitude, and heard rifle-fire.

  “Halt!” cried Meyral. “And silence.”

  He climbed up on to a sort of mound and, with the aid of his marine telescope, scrutinized the landscape. From the outset, he saw that the defense of the village was stubborn. Although the aggressors had been able to take possession of two solitary farms to the extreme south, the retrenchments were holding up well, and the assaults had been energetically repelled. The present attack lacked vigor and consistency; a propitious diversion would doubtless sow disorder and discouragement among the carnivores…

  They would be able to approach under cover, from the east, and attack the enemy from the height of a ridge, where the marksmen would be able to remain under cover.

  When he had examined the enemy positions in detail, Meyral came down from the mound and, drawing Langre aside, explained his plan to him.

  Gérard adopted it resolutely. He was living in a lucid dream, which was further enlarging the sense of personality. Fear had been abolished; peril became a kind of abstraction. That state of mind, which did not exclude prudence, was established in all the groups. Even the women and children were subject to a collective hypnosis, which suppressed their customary sensitivity.

  When Langre gave his orders, he encountered no hesitation; the men marched off with a fatalistic serenity. They reached the crest of the ridge without encountering any obstacles; the carnivores’ entire attention was focused on the village. Even their animals, weary of so many alerts and maddened by the incoherence of the battle, only manifested an uncertain anxiety. The forces defeated in the forest had veered northwards. Disorder was predominant. The savage hordes retained a kind of organization, however, carrying out certain tactics and tricks—but their experience was limited and they were guided by instinct rather than intelligence.

  VIII. The End of the Battle

  Langre and Meyral arranged the sharpshooters behind the crest. The position proved to be excellent and difficult to outflank: pools of water defended it to the right and a quarry to the left; it overlooked a terrace on which the majority of the besiegers were massed, and herds of animals were perceptible, hidden in an enclave inaccessible to the men of Roche, but easy to reach from above.

  “Don’t fire before the command!” Langre had said.

  Some of them had brought grenades; the women had picked up weapons before leaving the lodge. Meyral had brought a large reflecting lantern, whose light was almost as powerful as that of the electric searchlights; he was carrying it veiled.

  An expectant pause. The clouds were thickening further. A grayish darkness hung over the location, pierced by a milky gleam in the east. There was a sort of truce between the combatants, but from the height of the crest several files of carnivores could be seen heading for the terrace. Pale fires, splashes of light, accompanied intermittent fusillades.

  “The rogues are preparing an assault,” Langre muttered. “Are we ready?”

  Meyral distributed trumpets and horns to a few women and young boys; they would only make use of them at the moment when the men of Collimarre opened fire.

  Suddenly, shouts went up; a thunderous fusillade was launched from the terrace; a command resounded and a savage horde precipitated itself toward the retrenchments of the village.

  “Fire!” yelled Langre.

  Georges unveiled his lantern and projected its dazzling radiance upon the carnivores. Castelin, Franières, Bouveroy, and even the poorer marksmen, ravaged the swarming masses. The trumpets and horns sounded. An immense cheer went up from the village, followed by desperate rifle-fire. Bewildered, the assailants collided with one another in disarray, carried by their momentum, gripped by eddies and refluxes, or stopped by the fall of their companions.

  The attack was not broken, however. An energetic advance guard ran toward the village retrenchments, followed by hypnotized files. The center whirled around bizarrely. In the rear-guard, a tall man shouted out as he climbed the slope. A bullet had almost torn away one of his ears, and he howled, exasperatedly: “Take the hill!”

  Gradually, his fever infected the others; raucous voices roared; the hypnosis increased and became invincible; enslaved bands climbed up toward the men of Collimarre…

  The fusillade redoubled. Every shot fired by Meyral or Castelin hit the target; Franières and Bouveroy worked tirelessly and effectively; the cacophony of trumpets and horns seemed to be the discordant voice of the Earth…but the assailants were still climbing. If they succeeded in precipitating themselves on their adversaries before the depressive phase kicked in, the latter would inevitably be crushed.

  The steep slope, bristling with obstacles, slowed down their march; sometimes, the carnivores seemed harassed, but then the ascent resumed and the huge lantern illuminated haggard faces, wolfish eyes and gaping mouths…

  Soon, the leading group drew close. It advanced with hoarse cries, tightening up in a kind of gully, between two ribbons of stone.

  The movement had been anticipated. Langre waited attentively until the defile was filled with men, and then he commanded: “To you, Gannal, Barraux and Samart!”

  Those three men were holding grenades at the ready. They stood up slowly and took aim. The projectiles were seen to describe parabolas, to fall upon the crowd accumulated in the gully, and rebound in flamboyant shreds. There was a grim clamor, howls of terror, panting bodies, scattered limbs and floods of red liquid: the advance-guard’s attack was broken…

  At the rear, though, other men were running, going around the blocks of stone and appearing in two hordes on the flanks of the men from Collimarre. A brutal fusillade greeted them; then, in response to an order, Barraux, Gannal and Samart threw more grenades. The effect was horrible; it broke the charge on the left. To the right, 30 stubborn individuals continued the climb. The last grenades sprang forth from the ridge…but six or seven assailants reached the crest. One of them spun round and collapsed; the others launched themselves forward, croaking. The colossal
Franières slashed at them with an axe; Barraux, Gannal, Samart and ten others stabbed them with pitchforks, beat them with heavy cudgels or whirled swords. Meyral laid about him with his rifle-butt…

  That secured the victory. All along the slopes, the survivors were fleeing vertiginously, while the last aggressors died on the crest.

  Although several were wounded, the men of Collimarre gave voice to a long howl of triumph, to which a clamor from the village responded. Meyral, Franières, Bouveroy and Castelin were already firing on the carnivorous masses, and their intervention was salutary. The attack against the retrenchments of Roche, violent until then, weakened. The right wing retreated under an ardent fusillade; the left wing ceased advancing. Langre directed the piercing rays of a searchlight at the latter wing and ordered the fire to be concentrated there, while he grabbed hold of a horn himself and blew it lustily.

  This maneuver coincided with the carnivores’ loss of heart; they saw a stampede propagate magnetically from the east to the north, and from the south to the west. To accelerate it, Gérard selected 20 men and told them go down as far as the gully. The effect was decisive. When those men appeared on the crest, the besiegers who were still hesitating thought they were seeing a crowd, and beat the retreat. Scattered at first, the mass of carnivores reassembled in the north; it faded away gradually into the pearl-tinted darkness. Here and there, a human or a quadruped spun round and collapsed, struck down by the mysterious malady that Meyral called “rupture sickness,” or a bird, after a jerky flight, fell to the ground.

  “We’re saved!” roared Franières.

  His cry rang out like a fanfare of hope. The unanimous joy spread from individual to individual, making the women and the children laugh, the quadrupeds quiver, and a flock of pigeons, sparrows and bats to whirl around the crest of the hill.

  Standing up on their retrenchments, the defenders of La Roche-sur-Yonne cheered Langre, Meyral and the men of Collimarre.

  Epilogue

  I. La Roche-sur-Yonne

  That night saved the inhabitants of La Roche-sur-Yonne, Collimarre and Vanesse. The defeated carnivores did not attempt any offensive return; they spread out toward the north, where they met Parisian hordes that annihilated and devoured them. Having returned to the village, Langre and Meyral organized its defenses to the point of rendering the retrenchments inaccessible to the bands roaming the region, none of which was very large. Two or three of these bands attempted nocturnal raids, but retreated before the glare of searchlights, the number and glare of which gave warning of a significant garrison and redoubtable means of defense.

  As their losses had been minimal, save for the hamlet of Rougues, the groups affected only experienced tolerable suffering, which did not cause any deaths. The harvests of the mushroom-farm sufficed to strangle carnivorism. The general state of health was better than in normal times. The supernatural links uniting the groups acquired a charm that seemed to increase with familiarity.

  The collaboration between Langre and Meyral attained an extraordinary unity. Although there was no telepathy, save for certain sensations, identical thoughts eventually arose from the nervous connection. It happened so often that the physicists had the same idea or the same intention that it became impossible for them to distinguish whether a discovery belonged to one or the other. They no longer tried to do so; they gladly abandoned themselves to a solidarity that multiplied their inventive faculties tenfold. Their discoveries increased in number and in depths. Those discoveries sometimes excited them, and sometimes plunged them into a sort of ecstasy.

  After numerous attempts, they created a colloidal solution whose active substance extracted spores from fly-agaric mushrooms. Prepared in particular conditions, the solution seemed perfectly isotropic, but when traversed by the lines that bound the members of the group together, it had a weak duplicatory effect on light-rays, especially the violet rays. If the test-tube or flask containing the solution was between Langre and Meyral, the duplication was hardly discernible; it became more apparent when several individuals were gathered in the laboratory, particularly when they were arranged in such a manner that the lines traversed the liquid in parallel.

  As soon as they had carried out the first experiments, the scientists became convinced that it was not, strictly speaking, a matter of double refraction, but of facts entirely comparable with those that had preceded the Planetary Catastrophe.

  For a week, no further discovery was made. Langre and Meyral sought to increase the intensity of the phenomenon. They succeeded by arranging two rows of humans and animals. It did not take them long to make a new observation concerning the violet rays: those rays weakened perceptibly when the lines of communication were more forceful, and the relevant rays tended to form a right angle with the relevant lines. By prolonging the experiment, the disappearance was determined of a limited zone of violet radiation.

  “We’re entering the gulf of unknown energies!” Langre exclaimed, trembling with joy.

  Meyral was as excited as the old master. They persisted, and, enlarging the scope of their experiments, had recourse to three other groups from the village, chosen from those which included the highest proportion of humans. The zone of transformation was enlarged; they contrived the disappearance of a considerable range of violet rays, a weakening of indigo radiation, and a slight discoloration of the blue rays. In sum, the physicists reproduced almost all the phases of the Planetary Catastrophe.

  In spite of stubborn efforts and the most ingenious equipment, they were unable to make the blue rays or the green rays disappear altogether, but they made other discoveries. The first showed that, if subjected to the directed action of groups for a long time, the colloidal solution retained durable traces of the experiment. By prolonging the poses, it was observed, with the aid of red light, that lines parallel to the filaments persisted in the liquid. These lines were a weak reproduction of the lines that linked individuals in the same group together. By means of patience and ingenuity, they succeeded in increasing their visibility—and, undoubtedly, their diameter. They could then render them perceptible with the aid of orange, and even the less refrangible yellow radiation—but the other rays did not seem to have any effect on them.

  “There’s no doubt, however, that the effect exists,” said Georges.

  It did, indeed, exist. A series of particularly subtle experiments showed that the filaments weakened violet radiation.

  “Weakening them and making them disappear is the same thing,” Meyral remarked. “We have, therefore obtained fixed lines of force that have the properties of the mysterious phenomenon.”

  An ultimate experiment, made with the aid of an exceedingly narrow beam of violet light, taken from the edge of the ultra-violet zone, ended in the vanishing of the beam.

  “One more step,” Langre sighed, always more excited than his companion.

  The step was taken. After being isolated for a fortnight, one of the solutions, which had caused a relatively considerable range of violet rays to disappear, began to emit an unusual quantity of electrical and calorific energy.

  “Indirect reversibility,” murmured Langre, in an awed tone.

  “Which explains the period of exaltation,” Georges added. “We’re probably reaching the limits, old friend. We’ve far exceeded our fondest hopes! Not only have we reproduced the phenomenon in its broad features, but we’ve succeeded in retaining a form of it as stable as our material forms. Perhaps we’ll be able to reach a conclusion.”

  “We shall—and boldly!” cried Gérard, spiritedly. He interrupted himself; a rumor was growing in the street.

  “The postman!” said Georges, who had gone to the window. “One might think that he were bringing correspondence.”

  “Is social life resuming?” said Langre, incredulously.

  “A newspaper!”

  Césarine brought in Le Temps, printed on four small pages. The two men considered this social message with a strange affection. Was this the end of the accursed era, the return o
f human harmony, or merely a lull in the storm? For a fortnight, the region had been tranquil; roaming bands were no longer seen, but no group dared to chance itself in the fields and villages, which the carnivore war had made into wilderness or places to be feared.

  Le Temps announced that the scourge was losing all its impetus. Carnivorism was dying out; in France, it was thought that it only subsisted in a few remote districts. Its decline had been rapid, even abrupt, and coincided with a perceptible relaxation of bonds of solidarity. A few groups in Auvergne and Touraine were showing symptoms of dissolution. Normal existence was beginning to resume in the big cities. Trains were running intermittently. The principal telegraph lines were functioning for several hours a day. Newspapers were being printed in Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, Bordeaux and Lille. The losses due to carnivorism, however, were seemingly immense. In Paris, a fifth of the population had been immolated or had perished in the wake of the massacres. Equally grave losses had been sustained in the Lyonnais region, and even graver ones in a few large cities and some foreign territories. Le Temps estimated the average losses to be a tenth of the European population.

  “We’ve been extremely fortunate!” said Meyral.

  “Thanks to our dietary regime and our victory over the carnivores! On the other hand, we haven’t yet observed any decrease in the cohesion of our group, nor the other groups in the village.”

  “I fear that that might also be a consequence of the diet. Our return to normal will undoubtedly be slower than everywhere else.”

  “Damn it!” said Langre, who seemed worried.

  Every day, the news got better. The supernatural link that had shackled societies was fading away rapidly. Individual action was resuming. Automobiles were reappearing on the roads; numerous trains were circulating on the railways; the postal service, the telegraph and the telephone were functioning with a degree of regularity; a few aircraft were flying over the devastated region. Newspapers increased in number. The cultivation of the land was resumed. Factories and workshops reopened, one by one.