Monsieur Dubourg drew himself up to his full height, superb in his scorn, with fire in his eyes, shaking his fists. “Are you talking already about vile publicity and filthy lucre?” he said, indignantly. “Is anyone thinking about the triumph of science? Does no one share the anguish that is oppressing me, at the moment of verifying the exactitude of my calculations with my first experiment?” The orator paused, then continued: “But I have confidence. That’s all I have to say. The two clocks, linked across the ocean, are marking the precise Franco-American moment fixed for the experiment. Come what may, let’s see…”
Standing to the left of the vast frame, Monsieur Dubourg activated a rotating disk—doubtless the communicator—inserted in the drapery.
All of a sudden, marvelously, it was as if the reflective surface tore like silver paper, revealing the décor of a office: a table heaped with papers, next to which was the exact silhouette, the indubitable outline, of a human being: yes, a perfectly ordinary, rather stout, gentleman in a frock coat, his coarsely-featured face emitting the smoke of an enormous cigar, his keen gaze sketching out superlative astonishment and indecision…
The prominent people present were no less alarmed. Phantom or chimera, science or magic, hallucination or mirage, the bewildered spectators’ hearts beat faster.
At first, Monsieur Dubourg only risked a single glance from the corner of the apparatus. An exclamation of joy erupted from his throat.
“Victory! Victory, my friends!” he proclaimed. “I have the honor of presenting to you my illustrious correspondent, the incomparable and generous Monsieur Edison. He is hesitant; he still does not see anything distinct in the luminous waves of the mirror placed in front of him. Like you, just now, he believed himself to be in the presence of a vulgar mirror. Let us hasten to enlighten him.”
He took a stride towards the middle of the glass. The two reflections confronted one another. Monsieur Edison, his arms upraised and his mouth wide open, such was his confusion before the prodigy, expressed all that with a pathetic gesture summarizing extreme delight.
Monsieur Dubourg bowed respectfully; their hands, reaching out to one another, simulated a friendly contact. That pantomime between the living man and the apparition was delightful.
“My dear Monsieur Edison,” said Jonathan, “My future French renown salutes your former Yankee glory.”
“But I can’t understand you at all, my dear Monsieur Dubourg!” was the reply they believed they could read on Edison’s moving lips. “But wait!” he mimed, extending his left hand and seizing a fountain pen with his right, which came down on a piece of blue paper.
“A congratulatory telegram, no doubt,” the delighted Dubourg inferred.
A magical product of improbably reality, a charming jest of the unknown, the huge spectral Edison simply continued writing while, as Jonathan had predicted, a thick mist covered the glass, eventually dissipating to reveal the metal plate, as bare and grey as before.
The guests, similarly emerging from their clouds of tobacco-smoke, walked incredulously towards the stage. Their analytical minds demanded the support of rigorous scientific certainty. It was necessary for them to examine in detail the incredible “transmitter;” they needed, above all, to verify a certain hypothesis, irreverently based on the extent of the space contained in the interior of the instrument.
These mistrustful investigations were, however, interrupted by the arrival of the chambermaid carrying the expected dispatch.
The radiant Monsieur Dubourg unsealed it and started reading. “Admirable! Perfect! Conclusive! Here, my friends, is what the memorable Monsieur Edison, my noble and loyal colleague, has sent me…but what’s this?”
Jonanthan’s features were suddenly overtaken by a frightful sadness.
“Alas, gentlemen, like you, just now, he too says to me: Quickly, quickly, shareholders, send the formula, the materials. Quickly! Quickly!”
Everyone held their breath, disconcerted.
“What! No!” Dubourg protested, proudly. “Begone, gold! Respect for genius! Glory, without vile partnership with the inventor whose sole name will be attached to the work—if that justice is refused to me, the experiment that you have just witnessed will not be repeated, and the impenetrable secret of my discovery will go with me to the grave. On that point, feel free, my dear fellow citizens, to continue to accuse me of madness, or to commiserate with me, a great man misunderstood…”
Alas, the dear fellow citizens inclined, as always, to the supposition that he was “a little touched in the head” and persisted in their annoying hypothesis regarding the possible maneuvers of an unknown person behind Monsieur Dubourg’s mirror.
“Who knows, though,” a few of them said to themselves, looking beyond the network of telegraphic wires, “how many voices will extend across space in the future…?”
Alphonse Allais: Erebium
(1904)
Alphonse Allais (1854-1905) was a prolific contributor to popular periodicals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, renowned for his humor. His enormous output included a small but fairly numerous minority of satirical speculative vignettes responding to contemporary scientific discoveries and technological developments. Although his entire works have now been assembled in a series of omnibuses, only a third of which consist of articles collected in book form during his lifetime, no one has taken the trouble to go through them and abstract the speculative items for separate publication, although a specialized volume of that sort would make an interesting illustration of the concerns of fin-de-siècle scientific reportage, and thus help to illuminate the more selective concerns of the period’s scientific romance.
The following item first appeared in two parts in the June 5 and 9 1904 issues of Le Journal, the second part under the separate title “Où la science s’arrêtera-t-elle” [Where will science stop], Allais had already addressed the notion of “lumière noire” [black light]”—as invisible radiations were initially christened by such pioneering French experimenters as Gustave Le Bon—in two previous pieces in the same periodical, “Un peu de science” [A Little Science] (February 28 1896) and “Révolution dans la pyrotechnie” [A Revolution in Pyrotechnics] (July 16 1897).
Allais’ satirical pieces poking fun at science and technological progress undoubtedly helped to inspire Gaston de Pawlowski’s comic vignettes describing imaginary inventions and the parodic accounts of the Scientific Era included in Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension (1912; tr. in a Black Coat Press edition as Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension).66
This double item was reprinted in the fourth issue of Philippe Gontier’s Le Boudoir des Gorgones (October 2002).
1.
Like everyone else, I had heard mention of Erebium67 and the amazing property possessed by the new element: that of projecting a globe of darkness around it. I admit, however, that like everyone else—the inventor being a chemist in San Francisco—I considered it as an item of American bluff, hoax or humbug pending further information. This W. K. Goldcock was obviously a shameless self-publicist, or a skillful practical joker. Just as the discovery of radium was slightly surprising,68 so the advertisement of this paradoxical substance took all of us—my friends in the great laboratories and your humble servant—aback.
Erebium! A material body as large as the head of a pin able to produce darkness over a radius of three or four meters. What a joke!
Henry Becquerel, d’Arsonval and Lippmann, not to mention the likeable new director of the Pseudotechnical Institute, Max de Nansouty, and a few other well-respected scientists, were unanimous in shrugging their shoulders in response to the news.69
The young Pierre Trébucheau, already reputed as a genius, was an exception. “Why not?” he said. “We have the means of producing heat and cold at will; why should we not produce darkness with the same ease with which we already produce light?”
As we all protested against such perfectly antiscientific simple-mindedness, however, there was an even more unanimous shru
gging of shoulders around Trébucheau, with which all of ours, for once, joined in.
“But, unfortunate collection of idiots that you are,” he persisted, “light and darkness are just words, like heat and cold—words vaguely expressing phenomena intermediate between the states that set limits upon our vestigial perceptions.”
We had just respectfully made the observation to Trébucheau that we knew that when a laboratory assistant came to tell us that the gentleman whose card he held out to us was asking to be admitted.
The card bore the name W. K. Goldcock.
Professor d’Arsonval was the first to recover from his stupor.
“Bring him in!” he said, wanly.
The laboratory door, which faces south, opens on to a vast and admirable well-lit courtyard. As soon as it is opened, a flood of light overwhelms you, especially when—as was the case in this instance—it is about midday and the weather is fine.
The laboratory door opened.
As I have just said, it was about midday and the weather was fine—but the laboratory door opened into the most intense darkness.
Some old Arab or other claims that the perception of God is able to distinguish the blackest of ants wandering around on the blackest of marble surfaces on the blackest of nights. Perhaps that’s true—but what can mere men do when they suddenly find themselves confronted by an unaccustomed Limbo?
Speaking in strongly-accented French, a voice emerged from that darkness: “I’m not disturbing you, then, gentlemen?”
But how can one relate something as sensational in so few lines? Make your way, therefore, ladies and gentlemen, to one of the impending performances.
2.
Have you ever found yourself in the bizarre situation, when opening your door to some visitor, of seeing something coming into your house like an immense sack of coal that is not content merely to be intensely black, but takes pleasure in radiating around itself a dense twilight.
Such was the spectacle to which we—Messieurs Henry Becquerel, d’Arsonval, Lippmann, Max de Nansouty and yours truly—were witness: a spectacle hardly banal, of which the last-named has recently traced a brief preliminary sketch in these very pages.
A voice was heard, seeming to emerge from the upper part of the coal-sack: “I’m not disturbing you, then gentlemen?”
There was no longer any doubt about it; we had before us W. K. Goldcock, the inventor of Erebium—and Erebium was not a mystery, nor a confidence-trick, nor a hoax, nor a bit of fun, nor an item of humbug. Erebium really did have that amazing property of emitting darkness, or at least of obliterating daylight, within a certain radius.
The block of shadow moved, seemingly gliding around us—and every time the block reached one of us, one of us disappeared, as if absorbed by a mobile night.
The voice resumed, mockingly this time: “Well, gentlemen of science, don’t you recognize me? Is it because you’re seeing me for the first time?”
“If one can call this seeing a man,” Monsieur de Nansouty observed.
“Or is it because I’ve covered myself with a simple dust-sheet impregnated with erebium permanganate? Ah! Erebium, which surprises you as much as radium!”
Suddenly, there was a violent shaking inside the coal-sack; then we saw it collapse on to the ground, occupying a much more restricted volume than it had a moment before. Emerging from the patch of obscurity, after greeting us with a smile, a middle-aged man bent down and performed the gestures folding an item of clothing. As these movements progressed, the patch of darkness diminished to negligibility, finally disappearing into a satchel that the man had slung over his shoulder.
“W. K. Goldcock,” the gentlemen said, introducing himself.
Professor d’Arsonval hastened to introduce all the individuals present at that unforgettable scene to our visitor.
“W. K. Goldcock,” continued the latter, “or, more accurately, Guillaume Charles Vidor, former first-class pharmacist in France, forced by an ungrateful magistrate to expatriate himself, in consequence of some petty matter of selling abortifacient materials during a time of prohibition.”
“We are happy,” Monsieur Becquerel declared, “to see, yet again, such a beautiful discovery made by a Frenchman.”
“Would it be indiscreet…?” the good Monsieur Lippmann murmured, timidly.
“Not at all, not at all, my dear professor. Here: just as fish exist that are endowed with what Doctor Raphael Dubois calls biophotogenesis—which is to say, the faculty of emitting light originated by their own physiology—so the opposite also exists—which is to say, fish that are capable, in certain circumstances, of producing darkness and surrounding themselves with it.”
“Like a squid…”
“You said it. Nansouty…”
Everyone burst out laughing.
“With a very small quantity of substance,” our friend continued, “a squid can darken a considerable volume of water, virtually instantaneously. Was that operation anything other than a vulgar and material muddying of the waters by the addition of foreign substances? That is what I suspected. After a month’s work, I succeeded in isolating Erebine, which I thought at first to be an organic substance, but soon perceived, to my amazement, to be erebium oxide.”
What will the consequences of this discovery be? Immense, undoubtedly, but of an order difficult to specify, for the moment.
In the wrong hands, erebium might, alas, become a weapon injurious to the orderly functioning of society in general, particularly where brave process-severs and poor creditors are concerned!
André Mas: The Germans on Venus
(1913)
Very little is known about André Mas, whose dates of birth and death are unrecorded; the by-line may well be a pseudonym. Les Allemands sur Vénus, here translated as “The Germans on Venus,” was initially published as a booklet by the Revue des Independants in 1913. The timing was unfortunate; the Kaiser’s forces invaded France within a year because his Empire’s sense that “its share of this world [was] not large enough”—as Mas’ preface puts it—had given rise to actions quite different from those described in the story. After the war, the by-line appeared on two further works of speculative fiction in booklet form, the first formulated as a long poem, “Sous leur double soleil des Dryméennes chantent” [Beneath their double Sun, Drymeans sing] (1921), and the second as a prose romance set in the same locale, “Drymea, monde des vierges” [Drymea, world of virgins] (1923). Both of the prose works were reprinted in 2004 by Apex.
The Apex edition of Les Allemands sur Vénus, from which this translation is taken, is photographically reproduced from the original booklet; it includes a reproduction of the cover, which bears two quotations from German writers; one of them, attributed to “Léo Stahl,” translates as “The future of Germany is in the stars;” the other, from Heinrich Heine translates as “To the English, the sea; to the French, the land, to the Germans, the kingdom of the Heavens.” The Apex edition also reproduces a dedication to “My master and friend, Henry Beuchat of the Canadian Arctic Expedition.” (Beuchat was a noted anthropologist based in Paris.)
In addition to these embellishments, the text has two further supplements of interest. The first is a bibliography, divided between previous works of fiction dealing with interplanetary travel and scientific works consulted with respect to the technology of space travel and the design of a hypothetical Venusian ecology; this is particularly interesting for the clear indication it gives of the consciousness that an international genre of “space fiction” was firmly established in 1913, comprising both classic and popular works. The bibliography is followed by a parody of a “bill of lading” applicable to future interplanetary transport, which neatly rounds off the satirical component of the text, emphasizing the manner in which seriousness and comedy were routinely combined in texts of this sort.
Although modern references to Les Allemands sur Vénus sometimes dismiss it as a slightly distasteful item of nationalistic propaganda, the narrative is sufficiently iron
ic to defy that charge, and is historically interesting in two other ways. Firstly, it takes more care in its description of a hypothetical means of space travel than any previous work, with the arguable exception of Jules Verne’s two-part account of a lunar voyage; it features one of the earliest fictional “space walks”—undertaken to clear a blockage in the spaceship’s waste-disposal system!—and includes some original speculations about the possible effects of weightlessness. Secondly, it takes more care in its attempt to design a hypothetical biosphere for another planetary surface than any previous work, especially in terms of that biosphere’s evolutionary dynamics. By modern standards, both these attempts are inevitably primitive and grossly mistaken, but they were remarkable for their time.
Although Mas’ propagandistic endeavor had been anticipated in Russia by Nikolai Fyodorov and his protégé Konstatin Tsiolkovsky, Mas cannot have been aware of their work, or he would certainly have acknowledged it. Tsiolkovsky did not manage to complete his science fiction novel Vne zemli (tr. as Beyond the Planet Earth and Outside the Earth) until 1916, although he had begun it in 1896, and it did not appear in book form until 1920; this means that “The Germans on Venus” was the first-published item in a remarkable series of propagandistic works of fiction by rocket enthusiasts, which was to be continued in Germany by Otto Willi Gail’s Der Schuss ins All (1925; tr. as The Shot into Infinity) and in America by Laurence Manning’s “The Voyage of the Asteroid” (1932).
Preface
“For the progress of Man will always be limited if he has no other horizon than his narrow terrestrial horizon, and one may suppose that a moment will come when the only progress that remains to him will be an astronomical progress.”
Charles Richet 70
The Germans on Venus Page 20