In disarray, they tried to flee, but their cleverly-trained hands no longer encountered anything along the walls but unfamiliar taste sensations; the howls of the spectators could only arrive in their brains in the form of violent odors, and the lights in the hall made a frightful buzzing din in their ears.
Almost all of them, broken down and demolished, piece by piece, like overcomplicated machines, succumbed to that terrible trial. When the hall was finally evacuated, nothing was found there on the following day but the janitor’s little cat licking itself, calmly looking around from time to time—with eyes adapted by the habit of centuries—at those phantom ideas which, as everyone knows, are always drifting slowly through the atmosphere.
XXVII. The Ferropucerons
I have had the great pleasure of spending a short time with Hydrogen, one of the 12 Immortal Old Men who preceded the formation of the Cellular State and who were the only ones to conserve the memory of time past.
The manner in which I introduced myself to him in the new world, across a distance of centuries, by means of the fourth dimension, was infinitely intriguing to Hydrogen—who, knowing that I could not communicate in any way with the citizens of the Cellular State, willingly allowed me to circulate freely, equipped with an identification number, and took some pleasure in telling my tales of olden times.
Between the primitive era of humankind, which came to an end around the year 2000, and the definitive reign of Absolute Science, many years of an infinitely curious intermediate era elapsed. Indeed, man was already in possession of all the mechanical discoveries that were the glory of the scientific world, but he was still submissive to all the traditions of prehistoric thought, and that formed a strange mélange of new and old ideas that often gave rise to the craziest conceptions.
All the renewed joys of Byzantine decadence were rampant then, formidably increased by the colossal support given to them by new scientific discoveries—and one can certainly imagine that humankind might have rolled into the abyss of madness if the prodigious interventions of the 12 Old Men had not put an end to those excesses, regulating and disciplining the new bronze-brained citizens of the Cellular State by means of the Magnetic Tempest.
Among the mad adventures that marked the decadence of the ancient scientific world, Hydrogen told me about one that troubled many a brain at the time.
It was on the occasion of one of the great airborne hunts that were held in the forests of the East by the mayor of Suippes; the latter, then 212 years old, had organized an aerial hunt conceived in imitation of the falcon-hunts that had been held in prehistory. Little unmanned monoplanes, shaped like birds, were released into the air, and racing airplanes had to seize that prey at an altitude of 1500 or 2000 meters, in the manner of falcons.
The hunt was saddened by the unfortunate fall of aviator 671-98, who, having fallen from a height of 3000 meters, spent at least 37 hours in hospital and came out of it quite disfigured and unrecognizable, the majority of his principal organs having been replaced by grafted organs taken from calves, dogs or monkeys.
Needless to say, there was much anxious discussion the following day of the unknown causes of such a fall. Unfortunately, the aviator could only give vague indications regarding the matter; he did not understand what had happened to him at all. His artificial bird was certainly the most prodigious that had been constructed to date; it bore no resemblance to the gross frameworks of canvas and wood that had been employed, a few hundred years before, in the early days of aviation. It was a veritable bird, faithfully reconstituted down to the slightest detail, which had been ingeniously endowed with sensibility.
Little mirrors, specially designed for hunts of the falconry genre, reflected the prey to be seized, affected the magnetic current and modified its direction without the aviator even having to preoccupy himself with it. Gusts of wind and the turbulence that one sometimes encounters in the atmosphere provoked the required reflex movements in the least of the creature’s organs in good time. It was a completely articulated artificial bird, anticipating all outside influences: an infinitely docile creature, in which any accident was rigorously impossible.
And yet, the facts spoke for themselves!
671-98 had only noticed one thing: that at the moment when he had lost equilibrium, one of the wheels mounted on the fork that served as the bird’s feet had appeared to be displaced in a lateral direction—and that slight imbalance had doubtless been followed by the machine’s fall.
That provided no precise indication, and it was decided to examine the machine more closely.
The artificial bird had remained very nearly intact; a few repairs sufficed to put it back in order and technician 15-20 wanted to try it out straight away. He took it up to 50 meters—then, suddenly, one of the wheels was clearly seen to rise up to the height of the right wing. The apparatus lost its position of equilibrium and fell heavily to the ground.
The same thing happened a dozen times over in different situations, and the bird had to be taken into a hangar, where experts examined it piece by piece.
The motor was started up again with the machine stationary. Suddenly, at the moment when it was least expected, the right foot elevated itself once again to the height of the right wing, brushed it slightly, moving slightly to the left, then fell back to the ground. There was no doubt; it was necessary to yield to the evidence: the artificial bird, endowed by its maker with reflex movements, appeared to be scratching itself.
The wings of the bird were rapidly examined with a microscope, and the amazement of the experts could not have been greater on discovering little iron lice within the weave of the silk, of a species absolutely unknown until then, which seemed to have been born on the aircraft and to be unable to live anywhere else.28
It was these imperceptible little parasites that provoked the corresponding reflexes on the part of the artificial bird. No doubt remained on this point: the mechanical bird was scratching itself.
Needless to say, the scientists lost themselves in conjectures on the nature of these lice. In that era, people were still entirely imbued with absurd evolutionist doctrines and spontaneous generation seemed simply nonsensical. They devoted their ingenuity, therefore, as best they could, to explaining how ancient lice, feeding on iron filings and living on the wings of airplanes, had been able to transform themselves by adapting to a new environment. It was even suggested, by virtue of their color being identical to that of the wings of the artificial bird, that they represented a curious case of mimicry.
They had not the slightest suspicion of the disconcerting prodigies that were to turn that transitional humankind upside down a few years later, with the appearance and the decadence of living machines.
XXVIII. Industrial Love
It was only in the mid-20th century that an inkling was finally obtained of what Love might be. Since the origin of the world, that question had legitimately preoccupied all thinkers and all psychologists, but no one had so far been able to come up with a satisfactory answer.
People sensed, deep down, all the absurdity and all the pettiness of the sexual passions between men and women, but the force of those passions could not be denied. In response to the slightest inclination, the greatest men did not hesitate to throw away their entire lives, renouncing the noblest ambitions, and one thus caught a glimpse of a colossal underutilized or ill-directed energy. It was a relief when it was understood, with the progress of civilization, that all this was merely a matter of an obscure primitive instinct that had awaited, in order to develop normally, the appearance of the scientific world, colossal factories and gigantic business affairs.
The love of women, which was merely a base physical penchant, was bound to be succeeded by the love of civilized man for his industrial creations: for the work that he had conceived and to which he devoted all his life. Certain follies of the past immediately became clearer. What did the absurd age-old jealousy, the immoderate love of sacrifice and the inadmissible personal pride of men with regard to wome
n signify, without that industrial explanation? How, similarly, could the seduction be explained that the complications, cunning and trickery currently employed by women were able to exercise on well-organized masculine brains?
Everything in primitive love was veritably absurd and disproportionate. It could often happen, for instance, that a man loved two women, sincerely and profoundly, at the same time and, when that was discovered, showed a distinctly ill grace about it. Why, equally, did a man, when he was a lover, accept the existence of a husband, when a husband did not accept that of a lover?
Great military feats had, it must be admitted, furnished a useful nourishment to these unused forces of the human mind. Generals had been known who loved glory more than anything else, devoting all their efforts to bringing off a victory, gladly resorting to any subterfuge to succeed and not hesitating to sacrifice their own lives if required—but it has to be recognized that these were barbaric games, unworthy of a more advanced civilization, which involved the needless sacrifice of a large number of human lives. Industrial love, it is true, sometimes also involved many human sacrifices, but the results that it pursued were much more worthy of tempting a civilized man.
Progressively, towards the middle of the 20th century, the old love disappeared almost entirely from the upper classes of the nation; it was now only found among the lowest class, where it replaced—quite advantageously—the sad alcoholism and stupefying agents of old.
The great industrial magnates devoted themselves entirely to their works, and were not long delayed in recovering, massively magnified, all the despairs, all the amorous joys, all the triumphs and all the deceptions of primitive love. It was no longer a matter, in the ferocious struggles of industries, of making money, if one could not render a factory more beautiful and more prosperous, and amorous passion soon far surpassed the simple love of money.
The most celebrated adversaries of that era bore the two greatest names in France: they were the Chevalier Bloch de Lille and Prince Weill de Jeanne d’Arc. The former had been for many years the director of the colossal factory making Greasy Filaments, a new product which, by reason of recent discoveries, was used more than any other in the land. The latter was the skillful proprietor of the English Filament Company, whose concurrence was a serious threat to Greasy Filaments.
The story of these two great industrialists dominated the news for a long time.
Chavalier Bloch had a great affection for his factory. He had known it when it was very small, had dedicated himself to its development, and had formed it piece by piece—but it was beginning to show its age a little when the Fatty Filament arrived on the scene.
Prince Weill, for his part, had got involved with the Fatty Filament when it was in full bloom. He had acquired it from an Englishman who had gone to Japan with a young newly-formed overseas company. Prince Weill scarcely saw anything in his enterprise but the façade. It flattered him to have in his possession the Fatty, which was as famous and as universally admired—justly—as a beautiful racehorse, but he did not have the kind of affection for it that leads to a long communal life and the memory of difficult years spent together.
It was then that Chevalier Bloch, seduced by the new production-methods and the young and vibrant appearance of the Fatty Filament, began to commit inexplicable sins. Furtively, he favored the concurrent factory, secretly becoming one of its principal clients, and committed the worst follies on its behalf. Is it necessary to relate that the Fatty, in spite of all his advances, never belonged to him, and that Chevalier Bloch, humiliated and ruined, was content to rediscover his old Greasy Filaments, damaged and impoverished by his error, but still capable of devotedly assuring his upkeep again? Is it necessary to evoke the tragic drama that put a final end to the affair: the moral suicide of Chevalier Bloch, who mechanically destroyed the old factory that he did not love and whose benefits were sold in order that he might become a simple workman in the Fatty that he loved; and finally, the industrial murder of Prince Weill, whose entire factory was destroyed one day by an unspeakable sabotage due to jealousy?
These were events whose multiple amorous contradictions tempted the feuilletonist novelists of the era, but which I shall limit myself to recording.
XXIX. A Machine Revolt
On the third intercalary of the first scientific period, overseer HG28 flew into his factory manager’s office like a gust of wind, crying: “Boss! Boss! Come quick! The electricity’s fizzling out!”
Given the mores of the time, this obsequious mode of addressing the factory manager is sufficient demonstration of HG28’s state of agitation. The factory manager followed him immediately to the workshops and there, in the automatic lathe section, he saw that strange things were indeed happening.
Undoubtedly, the reality was not at all in accordance with HG28’s affirmations, and the electricity was not fizzling out; there were, however, inexplicable losses in the transmission of power and a sort of oily sweat was escaping from the arrested dynamos, which streamed away without it being possible to determine its precise origin.
Salts had escaped, climbing up the walls of their vats, and were now heaped up against the factory’s main door. Some automatic lathes had stopped abruptly while working at top speed, their principal mechanical parts breaking clean off and their controls twisted in every direction, without the intervention of any external force that might explain such deformations of the metal.
The engineers were contemplating these strange phenomena in silence. They had already known for some years, in fact, that a strange and unknown life had animated the metal; how it might be poisoned, subject to overwhelming fatigue, stimulated—like tin or platinum, for example—with sodium carbonate or calmed with bromide or chloroform. They were no longer unfamiliar with the way that an iron bar, after receiving a shock or being subjected to a rapid expansion at a particular place, repaired its substance and became much stronger at exactly that place, just as a broken bone in the human body becomes more resistant at the point where it has knitted.
Nevertheless, they had not thus far attributed to matter a veritable life analogous to the life of plants and animals, and they asked one another anxiously whether new and disturbing discoveries were not being made on this subject.
It was necessary, in fact, to recognize that, since the formation of the globe, nothing of that which constituted life could have come to us from the sky. In the beginning, the Earth was nothing but a gaseous mass, then matter in fusion; it was from that primitive matter that plants and animals had later emerged, by cooling, and that is sufficient reason to think that life as we know it was pre-existent in minerals.
The most primitive cell is already a complex edifice. Below that, it is thought that bacteriophages29 exist: veritable parasites of microbes, entities more primitive still, but living, since their influence suffices to modify the hereditary characteristics of microbes. But if one considers life as emanating uniquely from the physico-chemical properties of certain bodies: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, phosphorus and metallic catalysts, ought one not to seek even more distant origins within the very constitution of the elementary atom, that veritable but infinitesimally small universe whose modifications and planetary movements suffice to create or absorb energy, and which, by a marvelous alchemy, know no other differences between bodies than those of the number of electrons gravitating around a central nucleus?
Is not life already in play in the movements—the actions, one might say—of inert matter drawn into eddies in water or the wind? And when one considers that the entire solar system is nothing but a grandiose imitation of the atomic world, is it not evident that what creates, for our minds, the penetrating charm of descriptions that poets have given us of nature is the obscure kinship that unites, over centuries, the movements of clouds, seas and forests with those of our various and ever-changing thought?
These facile observations had been reinforced, in recent times, by curious observations made of advanced machines. The metals, intensively worked
that had been employed in their construction, reinforced and coated in numerous chemical materials, had become organisms of a sort, of a genuinely new kind, capable of engendering unprecedented phenomena. The perpetual transmission of electric currents and the impact of Hertzian waves had provided these ultra-modern metals with properties more curious still. In certain cases, veritable recurrent maladies had been observed to occur in machines, rather like vices, identical to those that had once decimated the working class. Obviously there was no question, strictly speaking, of alcoholism or tuberculosis, but the defects were analogous.
By virtue of curious affinities, it had been noticed that certain steels, when they were in the presence of certain chemical compounds that pleased them, appropriated particles of them over time, forming a shell that soon influenced their own organism. It was by this means that certain machines had their health entirely ruined by the abuse of the soap-suds used to reduce friction during their operation. Other machines seemed to be endowed with mobility; disturbing displacements of matter were observed: bosses produced at certain points on the surface, grooves in others. Undeniably, molecular labor was tending in a particular direction, and it was observed that this direction was no longer that of the canteen, but always that of reservoirs containing chemical products. These displacements were evidently due to an internal effort of the metal, progressing like molten metal but without losing its qualities of resistance.
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