The Doctored Man

by Maurice Renard

  Florine, very pale, opened her mouth.

  “Ssh!” he said, cutting the air with a curt gesture. And he continued writing:

  I believe that they can’t read our thoughts because…because then, I have reason to believe that they would have interfered with my work. But…but if they exist and if they’re intelligent, do they overhear, and do they understand, our speech? Can they read our writing?

  He erased the last sentence very quickly, under the influence of a reflex, looked Florine deeply in the eyes and continued.

  In a few days, I expect to finish. Goal: fill the laboratory with certain emanations, modifying the air in such a way that the invisible ceases to be invisible. So that the hidden world appears. So that it can be studied, or at least observed, photographed. If it exists. As I believe it does.

  “It doesn’t exist!” protested Florine, outraged. “No! It’s not possible!”

  “Silence, now,” Philippe instructed. “Not a word. I promise to call you as soon as I obtain a result.”

  “But how do you imagine them? In what form?”

  “All hypotheses are permissible…”

  She was in the grip of an intolerable malaise. “No, no!” she repeated, agitated by anguish. “Such a thing!”

  “We shall see—we shall see!” he concluded, with a smile. “Now, we can go home.”

  They walked a little way back into the countryside to where the car was parked. The landscape was charming in the beautiful summer evening. A gentle, caressing breeze was blowing along the river.

  “The wind’s frightening me, now,” said Florine. “One might think that someone you can’t see is brushing past you.”

  Philippe cheered up. “Put like that,” he said, “it’s a joke.”

  “I don’t think so.” And she widened her eyes, staring tragically into space, like someone advancing into the darkness, gropingly.

  They reached the car. They filled it up with gasoline, and Philippe resumed his place at the steering-wheel. There was silence at first, but after 50 kilometers or so she thought aloud:

  “So far. Was that really necessary?”

  “I don’t know, I tell you. I don’t know anything. How quickly the darkness falls! What time is it, then?” He switched on the headlights.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He stopped immediately, surprised by the tone of the question. “What?” he asked, anxiously.

  “It’s still very bright, and you just switched the headlights on…”

  “Ah! Ah!” he said, strangely severe. “I thought that they were illuminating…that they were illuminating poorly…” He switched off the headlights and passed his hand over his eyes. “I don’t understand what happened…a shadow…it seems to me that it’s getting dark. It will pass…probably…”

  “You work too hard. You’re overtiring your nerves, your sight….”

  “Hmm! Yes, perhaps.”

  “What do you think it is?” she asked him, suddenly frightened by his attitude. An idea—a disturbing idea—was making her heart beat faster.

  “Drive,” he said, curtly. “Take the controls. I…I don’t have any confidence in myself this evening. I’m afraid that my eyesight might fail.”

  It was thus that they returned to Paris, very late that night. When they were back inside, she put her arms around him. “How do you feel? Are you ill?”

  “Not at all—except that there’s still a shadow over things.”

  She hesitated, then said: “Is it any worse?”

  “No...”

  She had no doubt that he was lying. With affected placidity, Philippe declared: “I’ll go to see the optician tomorrow.”

  “Understood,” she said. “As early as possible.”

  Neither of them slept. At dawn, Florine inquired: “Well?”

  He admitted that a thicker fog was extended before him. Then he delivered himself, at length, to considerations regarding atavism. His mother had had weak eyesight. One of his great-grandfathers had gone blind. Anyway, as Florine had said the previous evening, the fatigues…

  Thoughtfully, she listened to him searching for ordinary causes for his trouble, in order to reassure her, to put one over on her.

  Taking everything into account, she said to herself, there are incredible coincidences…

  He wanted to go to the optician, whom Florine had telephoned, by himself. She did not insist on accompanying him. He came back an hour later, joyful and exultant.

  “Cured! Cured, my love! It was nothing at all. A few drops of lotion, an application of electricity, and here I am, as before.”

  “But what was wrong with you, Philippe? What was the diagnosis?”

  “Vague. Very vague. I have a suspicion that I was being treated at hazard. What does it matter? I’m better now, that’s the main thing.”

  “The doctor didn’t advise you to avoid overwork?”

  “Yes,” Philippe confessed, “but that won’t prevent me from continuing with you know what. Weren’t we silly, last night? Admit it—we both thought that…”

  “I still think it, you know.”

  “Get away!” he mocked. “The best proof of our error is that human medicine put a stop to the darkening effect, quite abruptly.”

  Slowly, she said: “Are you sure of that? Are you quite sure that it was human medicine?”

  This disorientated him. “But…” he said, half-indecisive and half-mocking, “it seems so to me!”

  “We never know,” Florine continued, in the same slow and deliberate voice.

  “What, for example? Let’s see! Have I renounced my enterprise? Have I made an oath to abandon my work? Thus, the invisibles have no reason to reward me!”

  “You’ve done none of that. But I…you must forgive me, Philippe, because I love you dearly…because, you see, for me, all the discoveries and all the glory in the world count for nothing, by comparison with your health, your sanity…”

  “My life’s not in danger,” he said, precipitately. “But explain…”

  “Your life’s not in danger? That’s the question. Suppose…do me the kindness of supposing, for a moment, that what happened is imputable to their will, that they determined it…Them…”

  “But Florine….”

  “Let me finish. Mightn’t it be a warning? A first warning?”

  “Let’s be illogical. In the case that you’re supposing, it would be necessary to admit—I insist—that they consider my offensive concluded.”

  “It is, Philippe.”

  “Why is that?”

  “During your absence, I smashed everything in the laboratory.”

  Silence fell. Philippe bit his lip. “Ah!” he said, eventually. “Oh! Ah!”

  “Do you forgive me?”

  “Great gods, my love!” he said, distraughtly. “What wouldn’t I forgive you?”

  He embraced her wholeheartedly—but she found his face pained and pale, the skin seemingly taught.

  “I…I’ll go take a look,” he said.

  “Shall I come?” He was still embracing her.

  “Not worth the trouble, Besides, it’s nearly lunch-time. Time to take stock, and I’ll come back down.”

  He turned round in the doorway and blew her a kiss, a sign of perfect harmony, accompanied by the most affectionate of smiles.

  “Thank you,” said Florine.

  At the top of the stairs he opened the new door with the hermetic seals.

  The two distressed assistants were gathering up the debris, in the midst of a chaos that recalled visions of war. He helped them, without saying a word—and when mid-day chimed and they had gone he continued sweeping mechanically, alone.

  As he worked, he dreamed. The air became populated, in his imagination, by prodigious creatures that slithered and glided like creatures at the bottom of the sea. Their forms were translucent. There were of all possible sizes: minuscule ones; immense ones; ones much too enormous for the laboratory to contain them in their entirety. They passed through it, h
owever, cloudy and buoyant, for neither the walls nor any material object of any kind was an obstacle to them. They passed through everything, as electrical waves do, as if their substance were composed of waves. They were only visible, though, in the cube of air contained in the laboratory, scientifically prepared for that effect.

  It was a magical dream—and the scientist’s eyes shone.

  “Bah!” he said. “Who takes no risks…”

  He looked at what he was holding: a commutator, which Florine’s hammer had torn away from a dynamo. Philippe found the dynamo in the heap, but the damaged piece could no longer be reconnected to it. “Six months and 100,000 francs,” he calculated, in a low voice. “This time, of course, not a word! Florine mustn’t know anything.”

  Florine climbed up the stairs, anxious to know what could have delayed him much longer than he had said.

  She found him lying on the floor, not moving.

  The doctor could not revive him. He attributed the death to a stroke, brought on by overwork, and said that the previous day’s visual disturbances had been a symptom, the seriousness of which the optician had, unfortunately, failed to understand.

  Which proved absolutely nothing.

  THE SHARK

  “Eight months in the China Seas…”

  “That’s a fine voyage,” I said to him. “You were lucky, Fabrice.”

  “Doctor Brandt has always been an excellent friend to me. I hope that he’ll take me again. I’ll retain a nostalgic memory of the Orion and life aboard…”

  “The Orion’s a three-masted schooner, isn’t she?”

  “Exactly. You’re much more knowledgeable that I was when I embarked!”

  “Oh,” I said, blushing, “It’s just that I’ve seen photographs in the magazines…tell me, Fabrice, what made the deepest impression on you in the course of your oceanographic cruise?”

  “On the return journey,” he said, after a moment’s reflection, “we crossed…”

  Then he hesitated, and darted a slightly anxious glance at me, as if he regretted having stupidly started a story that I might be unworthy to hear. He continued, however.

  “One night, after dinner, Brandt and I were strolling on the deck. It was somewhere the other side of Malacca. A warm and magnificently starry night…the boat was moving slowly. Some crewmen, with Captain Fall, were busy with some work or other at the side. I asked Brandt what they were doing, assuming that it was some kind of fishing enterprise. I’d seen them employ so many different kinds of apparatus while we were exploring the depths…

  “Brandt said: ‘We’re not fishing. I’m taking depth-soundings. It will take all night and much of tomorrow, until the afternoon…’

  “Naturally, I had nothing to say in reply. It was all quite banal. But Brandt went on: ‘Do you know where we are? Do you know what this sea is?’ And with a grand gesture of the hand that was holding his pipe he indicated the circular moving expanse of which the Orion was at the center. The waves were rising placidly, stirring the innumerable reflections of the firmament. The marine desert had no particular attributes.

  “ ‘Of all the mysteries that the ocean conceals,’ the doctor said, ‘perhaps the strangest is what it hides down there. Beneath these waters there must be unsuspected rocks, and it’s those rocks that I’d like to reveal. That’s why we’re taking soundings, patiently. The marine charts indicate great depths everywhere. They’re mistaken. They’re badly mistaken.’

  “ ‘Why?’ I asked, quite interested.

  “ ‘Look at these surroundings,’ Brandt said, repeating his gesture. ‘In the last 30 years, 22 ships have sunk hereabouts. 22 ships have been swallowed up in a relatively restricted area.’

  “ ‘Is that so extraordinary, then?’ I objected. ‘30 years is quite a long time—and typhoons, as you’ve told me, are frequent in these latitudes.’

  “I saw Brandt’s eyes gleaming in the shadow of his peaked cap; he was staring at me fixedly. ‘It’s not a matter of shipwrecks caused by bad weather,’ he told me. ‘The 22 vessels I’m talking about disappeared with no apparent reason, in calm seas, beneath a cloudless sky. The men who survived these disasters and lived to tell the tale couldn’t explain what had happened. All the ships had sunk abruptly, with frightful rapidity. I tell you, Fabrice, that this can only be explained by the presence of reefs treacherously concealed beneath the surface. The 22 vessels must have been spiked by a rocky point, the summit of some submarine mountain.’

  “ ‘Couldn’t your divers go down to the wrecks to investigate?’ I asked, timidly.

  “Brandt smiled. ‘The wrecks haven’t been located,’ he replied benevolently. ‘Besides, it’s a safe bet that they’ve slid down the rocks all the way to the sea bed—which is to say, to the bottom of an abyss so deep that no man can dream of reaching them, given the present state of science. No diving-bell exists capable of descending several kilometers below sea level.’

  “ ‘Damnation!’ I said. ‘Really? Several kilometers!’

  “ ‘In any case,’ Doctor Brandt continued, ‘even if we find the presumed rocks, that won’t explain everything.’

  “ ‘Evidently,’ I agreed.

  “ ‘They were frightful disasters,’ the doctor continued, after a pause, ‘and so prompt that there was never time to get the lifeboats into the water. Even worse, perhaps, was…’

  “ ‘What?’ I asked, alarmed by my companion’s tone.

  “Brant took me by the arm and let me toward the Orion’s stern, to the very edge.

  “ ‘Can you see them?’ he said to me, in a low voice.

  “ ‘What do you mean?’

  “He made no reply, but his gaze never quit the waves. I looked harder. Then I saw, amid the undulations of the sea, other curves appearing and disappearing, glistening momentarily, leaving an impression of long, swift tapering bodies.

  “ ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘The sharks!’

  “ ‘Yes—the sharks. This region is infested with them. They surround ships in distress…’

  “ ‘As they’re surrounding us at this moment,’ I remarked.

  “ ‘Don’t worry. We’re making headway too slowly for any harm to come to us, and the sounding-line will reveal any danger to us before it’s too late.’

  “ ‘May God hear you, Doctor! That must be a frightful death…’

  “I had become accustomed to the darkness. I could see the sharks more clearly. They were very numerous. Sometimes, a fin or a forked tail emerged from the water, only to plunge back into it immediately. I thought, fearfully, of the windfall that those voracious carnivores must have enjoyed as large ships, loaded with human beings, poured out their crews and passengers into these very waters. The emotion that I experienced was so strong that I covered my eyes with both hands.

  “ ‘I share your sentiments,’ Brandt told me. ‘How happy I would be if I were able to discover those rocks and, in consequence, avoid the recurrence of similar abominations!’

  “We chatted in that fashion for another hour. I delayed going to bed stubbornly. For the first time since our departure, my sojourn on the Orion didn’t appear to me to be absolutely safe, and I was conscious of all the redoubtable mystery that threatens a ship in the immense solitudes of the sea. Eventually, it was necessary to go back to my cabin—but I slept very badly, unable to deflect my thoughts away from the twenty-two wrecks lying at the bottom of the gulf, or the multitude of sharks that were encircling us.

  “I woke up anxious the next morning, and I had to make an effort to conceal my malaise. The Orion, still escorted by sharks in large numbers, was continuing to take soundings. The day went by without any result. The apparatus indicated no shallows…

  “That went on for a week, a pure waste of time—a week of which I retain one strange memory. I’ve told you why Brandt did me the favor of taking me with him that year. It was a matter, you’ll recall, of giving me a change of air, of helping me to forget a bitter sentimental deception. The excellent fellow noticed that I had become nervous ag
ain, and besides, he too seemed as annoyed as he was surprised by the futility of the soundings—to the extent that, while having them continue, he wanted to break the monotony of the scorching days during which the population of sharks never ceased to surround us, as if they were waiting for the sudden sinking of the Orion.

  “Brandt decided to catch one or two of them. He thought, rightly, that a fishing party would distract me. No other motive led him to do it. I must admit that, if any spectacle is designed for excitement, it was that of the dogged struggle offered to us by the two monsters that our crew caught. In the meantime, the vain sounding operations were uninterrupted.

  “Brought on to the deck one after the other, the two enormous and truly hideous creatures were of quite different species. One of them, a brownish grey in color, intrigued the doctor by virtue of the dimensions of its head. He decided to dissect the animal.

  “Doctor Brandt had not been at that task for more than half an hour when we saw him come out of his laboratory, with his face set hard, not finding it easy to conceal his amazement.

  “ ‘Stop the soundings,’ he said to the captain, ‘and let’s get moving. Let’s get moving right away!’

  “At table, that evening, he never opened his mouth. The Orion sailed on at top speed. The sharks around us became rarer. The next day, Brandt called me into his cabin. I found him very excited. He was contemplating a bowl in which an anatomical preparation, which appeared to me to be a section of brain, was submerged in alcohol.

  “ ‘Can you tell that this is a mutation?’ he asked me. ‘No? Well, it is. Understand me, Fabrice: there aren’t any rocks down below. There are no rocks, but a species of shark—which, due to the effect of a mutation, has undergone an abrupt and formidable transformation, and has suddenly become a superior species, certainly capable of reasoning, understanding, carrying out plans…’