The Mysterious Fluid

by Paul Vibert

  He smiled bitterly, and slowly replied: “I never pay any heed to politics…but I’ll continue, if you’ll permit?”

  “Pray do.”

  “Thus, instead of opposing the laws of nature, after having discovered them, I have simply given myself the mission of supporting them, and if I can only live for another thirty or forty years—which is possible, for I’m only thirty-seven—I shall have found…but what good does it do to sell the bear’s skin before having killed it? I’ll stop there, for not only won’t you believe me, but you’ll mock me….”

  “Never. Go on.”

  “No, the Hummingbirds are leaving the stage now—and those Hummingbirds are giants compared with the race of true dwarfs that I’ve already obtained….” As if speaking to himself, he added: “Oh yes, if I live another thirty years, I’ll have found….”

  “What?”

  “The human microbe, Monsieur.”

  I started so violently that he exclaimed: “You see—you take me for a lunatic. Well, come to dinner tomorrow at the Café de la Paix, at seven o’clock, and I’ll explain to you how I was finally put on the right track, almost certain of success.”

  And because he noticed my amazement, as we were going down the circus stairway, he showed me a perforated gold locket on his watch-chain, as large as a two-franc coin, and said, gravely: “That’s to let them breathe.”

  This time, I thought him entirely mad—but he opened the locket, and said: “Look, here’s a husband and wife, very much alive, no more than a centimeter in height, the pair of them weighing seventeen grams. This is what I’ve already obtained by the methodical and scientific regressive selection, from which I’ve never deviated in the fourteen years that I’ve been pursuing this research and endeavor.”

  Defeated, afflicted by the vertigo of the very tiny, I parted company with him, without being able to say a word.

  He shook my hand, saying: “Tomorrow, we shall see how the human microbe might be attained…”

  And he disappeared.

  II. From Aztecs to dwarfs. Microbial dwarfs.

  The regressive or descending scale.

  The conquest of the Earth. Return to the primitive cell.

  The cycle of worlds.

  After installing myself comfortably in a good armchair, smoking a cigar, my eyes fell upon his desk. In the middle, in a Japanese porcelain ash-tray on his blotting-pad, which was as large as the palm of my hand, the young couple he had shown me the previous evening in his locket were sitting on a sofa whose surface area was a quarter the size of an ordinary postage stamp. As I leaned forward, to contemplate the human fly and his wife at closer range, I said to the American scientist;

  “Can they talk?”

  “English and French, like you and me.”

  “But we wouldn’t be able to hear them?”

  The doctor smiled, and held out a piece of wire about two meters long, terminating in a tiny receiver, just like those in telephones.

  “Put that in your ear—it’s an ordinary telephone, whose power is multiplied a hundredfold by an invisible little microphone of my own invention.”

  Indeed, I was put in communication with the human fly and his amiable companion, and the conversation might have continued indefinitely, so great was the charm and surprise for me, if the doctor had not torn me away from it.

  “Now look at them through this powerful microscope, and you will see that these individuals—whom it is necessary not to call midges, because it offends them—are as well-formed as you and me.”

  I uttered a cry of surprise and admiration on thinking that I recognized the man and his wife as well-known young deputé who had got married in America—the resemblance was striking.

  “And how old are they?”

  “He is 25 and she 21 months,” replied the doctor, “but set aside amusement Monsieur, for I must now give you a brief explanation of the method I have employed and the goal that I am pursuing. The method I’ve employed is quite simple. I began by making crosses between the last representatives of the Aztecs, whom I was able to find, although they were believed to be lost in the virgin forests of Mexico, and all the dwarfs that I was able to procure throughout the world. I proceeded by always mating the smallest individuals together…”

  “Pardon me, but that represents several human lifetimes, for it’s necessary to await the age of puberty.”

  “Of course—but as one descends the scale of living beings, formation is more rapid and life shorter; thus, this young couple of 25 and 21 months are already old—practically centenarians—and have been great-great-great grandparents for some time.”

  “I’m truly amazed.”

  “No, it’s logical. What am I doing, if not following the regressive or descendant scale—admittedly by artificial and hasty means—just as nature, in the beginning, followed the progressive and ascendant scale of beings as far as the vanished monsters we spoke about earlier? For you, who have so brilliantly discovered the secret of the geological life of worlds and have explained so perfectly, in your lectures, how worlds are born, live and die, ought to find it perfectly natural, since I am only doing the same for the zoological cycle of worlds.”

  “You fill me with admiration.”

  “You’re too kind. But let’s get on; the point I have now reached, with passionate attention, is the logical, fatal, ineluctable moment when, by continually obtaining smaller individuals, I shall pass from vertebrate humans to invertebrate humans, like insects.

  “What will the transition be like? I don’t know, but today, I shall be very close to the final triumph of my theories and their experimental demonstration. I shall rapidly reach the stage of the human microbe conquering the entire Earth, killing all the other harmful microbes and reproducing themselves instantaneously by the billion—as you know.

  “Then I shall be very close to attaining the primitive cell, the very one that swam with the spirit of God on the surface of the waters, according to all theogonies and Genesis itself, and I will have provided, in miniature, a living and palpable demonstration of the zoological cycle of worlds. That final conquest of the Earth by microbial humankind is not lacking in a certain grandeur, is it?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Except, I should tell you, that there is another, even more exciting problem in my experiments, which grips my utterly. The human soul, mind or intelligence, is an impalpable fluid that has no location—but how long, as Cicero said,29 could I contrive to enclose it in the bodies of my human flies, and then my human microbes? At the present moment the one-centimeter individuals you have before your eyes are still vertebrates; their bones are like taut spider-silk, but they still exist. But will intelligence be maintained when the transition to invertebrates occurs? That’s the big question, and I will admit frankly that I don’t believe so, that I shall soon be able to formulate this law: It is not location that intelligence lacks, but what it requires are sophisticated organs—which is to say, instruments enabling it to manifest itself and maintain contact with the external world.”

  “Bravo!” I said, involuntarily, seized by the luminous evidence of the demonstration.

  “Yes, of course. I’m convinced that microbes have a fraction of the great universal intelligence, just like us, but they do not have the organs, the instruments, to manifest it and make use of it.” Suddenly becoming thoughtful, he continued: “Who knows? Perhaps microbes suffer in consequence. For the time being, I shall set my problem aside—and if I arrive thus as an experimental demonstration of the zoological cycle of the universe, I shall deem myself very fortunate.”

  “Certainly—and you will be recognized as the greatest scientist of the twentieth century. But as one is insatiable, can you not invert your hypothesis—or, rather, your experiments—to depart once again from the gelatinous cell and return via the microbe, invertebrates, vertebrates, humans and large animals to the culminating point of the huge monsters of yesteryear?”

  “No, for the higher one remounts, the longer th
e generation-time becomes, after a puberty that only arrives as twelve, fifteen or even twenty years.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I would be dead before then—although the inversion of the proposition would obviously be interesting. That will be the work of my successors…if I thought it possible, for the geological conditions on the Earth are not the same. One can’t recommence the same cycle twice, and we’re heading for the death of the globe…slowly, oh, very slowly!”

  “Fortunately.”

  My cigar went out. The doctor was mute and pensive. In the quasi-religious silence, my eyes happened to fall on the couple of the human fly and his wife, and I uttered a cry. They had fallen off their sofa on to the cold porcelain of the ash-tray.

  Imperturbably, the doctor said: “They’ve just died of old age.”

  “At 21 and 25 months?”

  “Of course—arch-centenarians.”

  “Well, I prefer still having my natural human size.”

  The American scientist picked them up and threw them in the fire. “The ceremony of cremation.” And, as I was painfully distressed, he took me by the arm and said: “Let’s go out and have an aperitif.”

  Since then, I’ve lost sight of him; he has returned to the United States. Has he recovered the primitive cell? I don’t know. But I thought it my duty to report here the extraordinary experiments that I witnessed in his home and the marvelous results that he has already attained in this order of research, so exciting for the future of humankind.

  The Submarine World

  I. In the Ocean depths. A strange population.

  The revealing missive.

  Most of the newspapers recently published the following small item of information:

  “It is well-known that the depth of the seas surpasses the height of the largest mountains. The most accentuated terrestrial relief is the summit of Gauri-Sankar in Asia. The greatest depression beneath the Ocean had been found in the South Pacific; it was measured at 9425 meters.

  “A captain in the United States navy has just discovered, in the North Pacific, a trench whose depth surpasses all those previously known. This depression is between the islands of Midway and Guam (one of the Marianas). It was found in the course of reconnaissance for the laying of a cable between the two archipelagos. The soundings carried out by the commander of the American ship have given a mean result of 9635.76 meters.30 Here, at approximately 400 meters, we are ten kilometers above the greatest known depth of the ocean.”

  For its part, the Bulletin de la Societé des Etudes coloniales et maritimes, in the issue dated June 30, 1900, published a very complete note on ocean depth and temperature:

  “In his presidential address to the geographical section of the British Association, Sir John Murray31 summarizes as follows the results furnished by the soundings carried out at various points in the Ocean:

  Percentage of the total surface

  Depths less than 180 meters………….7

  180-1800 meters……………………..10

  1800-3600 meters……………………21

  3600-5400 meters……………………55

  Above 5400 meters…………...………7

  “More than half of the surface of the sea therefore offers a depth in excess of 3600 meters. On the Challenger charts, all depths in excess of 5400 meters have been indicated and have been given distinct names. 43 depressions of this kind are currently known, 34 in the Pacific Ocean, 3 in the Indian Ocean, 15 in the Atlantic Ocean and one in Antarctic waters. The surface occupied by these 43 trenches is estimated at 7,152,000 square miles, which is about seven per cent of the total surface of the waters. Of 250 soundings taken in these regions, 24 have surpassed 7200 meters, including five in excess of 9000 meters.

  “Depths of more than 7200 meters have been found in eight of the aforementioned trenches; depths of more than 9000 meters have only been found, thus far, in the Aldrich Trench (South Pacific) east of the Kermadec islands and the Friendly Isles, where the greatest depth recorded was 9429 meters.

  “Sir John Murray then observed that all temperature measurements thus far made in the seas indicated that, at a depth of 180 meters, the water temperature remains almost invariable in all seasons. It is estimated that 92% of the mass of the oceans has a temperature less than 4.4oC, while the proportion in the superficial waters is only 16%.

  “Almost all of the deep waters of the Indian Ocean have a temperature below 1.7oC; the same is true of a large proportion of the South Atlantic and certain parts of the Pacific. In the North Atlantic, however, and a very large part of the Pacific, the temperature is higher. For depths in excess of 3600 meters, the mean temperature of Atlantic waters is about one degree above the mean temperature of the Atlantic sea-bed; the mean temperature in the Pacific has an intermediate value.

  “The depths of the seas are an obscure region, which solar radiation does not reach, so vegetable life is absent from 93% of the ocean bed. The abundant fauna of the great deeps thus lives on organic matter assimilated by plants growing close to the surface, in water or on the coast.”

  This reminds me of an extraordinary adventure that happened to one of my friends, a long-haul captain, on that very same celebrated Aldrich Trench in the South Pacific, which was once the deepest known, since—as we have just seen—it reaches 9429 meters.

  This perfectly true adventure is so extraordinary that I don’t know how to make a start in order to relate it simply and clearly, without omitting any element or essential detail.

  I don’t believe in the fatalism of the Muslims, the Destiny of the ancients or the Providence of believers, but I’m forced to recognize there really is an extraordinary coincidence in the chain of events that I am about to report here, for if my friend had not been a very erudite Israelite who had studied to be a rabbi in his youth, before becoming a long-haul captain, having been disappointed in love. I wonder fearfully whether he could have made a discovery so interesting for human science, especially for ethnography and anthropology.

  So, one day, when my friend Jacob Laquedem32 paused over the trench with a heavy cargo of cinnamon that he had picked up in the Moluccas, he began very conscientiously to take soundings of the great depths, at the request of a great scientist, a famous sounding-father whose name I shall not disclose here, because he has since gone to the bad.

  As the cable ceased sliding, stopping exactly at the depth, since verified, of 9429.11 meters, according to the custom of a cable that “skids” on contact, he thought that he felt—after an appeal by his men and after careful examination—a sort of rhythmic movement, very gentle and almost imperceptible, but regular and determined.

  “Damn it,” he said to himself. “The claws of my probe have closed on some unknown fish or crab, which is struggling—but it seems to be struggling in step, which is odd. Well, let’s see.” And he gave orders to his men to bring the 9429.11 meters of cable in question back up on to the winch, very slowly and carefully.

  The operation took a long time, and when it was finally terminated, it was with a veritable anxiety that Jacob Laquedem fell upon the probe to see what monstrous fish or strange crustacean had made the cable oscillate thus. But the steel teeth had closed, and nothing projected from them or betrayed the presence of a living creature inside.

  Increasingly intrigued, the captain raced to the automatic trigger, and when he had activated it, he was greatly surprised to see, not a fish of an unknown species, but a pretty little wooden box fall at his feet.

  “Look,” he said to his sailors. “Here’s a box that must go back at least to the Queen of Sheba’s time, and has been on the sea-bed since some prehistoric shipwreck.”

  “I beg your pardon, captain,” said his first mate, who was an equally fine Parisian, educated and intelligent, “but how can a box made of wood, and light in consequence, have rested thus on the ocean bed without drifting to the surface?”

  “My word, that’s true—but in the meantime, let my open it to see whether it c
ontains the treasures of the aforementioned Queen of Sheba.”

  The casket was closed by a hermetically-sealed lid, which was secured by a buckle, and it contained nothing but a piece of paper folded in four, which looked like a piece of strong parchment, or rather tanned fish-skin.

  Once unfolded, the sheet was covered with characters that seemed strange at first sight—but after examining them at length, Jacob Laquedem suddenly declared, as if choked by astonishment and stupefaction:

  “Two things amaze me in the attentive and summary examination of this mysterious parchment, which appears to have been fabricated from shark-skin: firstly, that its characters bear a strange resemblance to Hebrew and Sanskrit characters—more so to Hebrew—and secondly, that they do not seem to date from the remotest antiquity, but to have been written only a few hours ago…”

  And as the captain scratched his head furiously, staring at those strange characters, suddenly, as if emerging from a dream, he said abruptly to his first mate: “In my time you know, I had some skill in the art of cryptography; I could solve the most conventional secret scripts and the most mysterious ciphers in less than an hour.. This language seems to me to be a germane cousin of Hebrew. If I find the key, we’re saved, and I’ll bring you the translation within an hour—for I still know my Hebrew, thank God, and it isn’t very long. We’re at rest, the weather is calm; I leave you in command of the ship. Look after her, old chap, and I’ll see you soon….”

  And the captain, feverish with impatience, went to shut himself up in his cabin.

  II. In the Ocean depths. A strange population.

  The revealing missive.

  After an hour and forty-five minutes, his features utterly convulsed by emotion, Captain Jacob Laquedem emerged, with the piece of paper in his hand. When he had joined his first mate, however, and had beckoned to a few sailors, he spent some time feverishly shaking the piece of paper without being able to pronounce a single word.