On the Brink of the World's End

by Brian Stableford

  The train stopped at a small station through which it should have passed at speed. Leaning out of the window, von Schünburg could see an agitated man making broad gestures speaking to the locomotive’s driver. He was about to send for news when the train moved off again at a much reduced speed, which it maintained.

  The general, his conscience tranquil, made himself comfortable in a corner, and fell asleep shortly thereafter.

  A sudden shock wakes him up. The train has stopped abruptly. This time, the general gets down; if the driver has not been warned that he has the honor of conducting the commandant of an army corps, he will go to inform him in energetic terms.

  Around the machine there is a circle formed by railway employees and a few passengers. The locomotive has derailed; the accident has been caused the rupture of the rails, which have split over a length of several meters.

  Thanks to its low speed, the machine had not traveled far; it has traced a furrow in the gravel and has stopped against a rail of the adjacent track—which, someone remarks, has been split by the impact over a distance of several meters. The machine is obstructing both tracks; circulation will certainly be interrupted for several hours.

  The train manager informs the passengers that there is a station only three kilometers further on, and that the simplest thing is to head for it on foot; from there they can telegraph for a train to be formed and come to pick up the passengers stranded by the breakdown.

  Von Schünburg sees wan faces peering at him, which might, in emitting the complaints of people who cannot swallow their anger, offend the dignity of the high rank he represents. He therefore contains himself and, responding to the salute addressed to him a moment before by a young officer of pretentious appearance striking the regimental pose, authorizes the latter to accompany him in attaining the advertised station.

  At the station there is an extraordinary hubbub; all the station personnel are afflicted by panic. There is good reason; no train has passed through for an hour; the last one to arrive derailed while stopping, the rails having twisted and broken beneath the locomotive at the moment the engineer applied the brake. It is necessary to believe that the shock was rude and had broken the wheels, for they had given way shortly afterwards and the machine is now maintained on the ground by a part of its mechanism and its axles.

  The general went directly to the station-master; authorizing himself by his rank, and even exhibiting his two telegrams. He ordered imperatively that a train be formed immediately. The station-master raised his arms to the heavens in a gesture of despair; all the dispatches he had received were incomprehensible; they talked of derailed rains and catastrophes, but nothing precise could be obtained therefrom except that railways circulation appeared to have stopped completely. Furthermore, telegraphic communication had been progressively cut off, without it being possible to determine the cause. At that very moment, information had just arrived that extraordinary phenomena were occurring at the large freight terminal created to serve the munitions factory with which the little town had been honored in 1915: the rails were disappearing and wagons were collapsing.

  Exasperated by that verbiage, which he attributed to a fit of madness provoked in a feeble mind by the announcement of a vulgar railway accident, von Schünburg sent the officer accompanying him to request on his behalf the elements necessary to form a train, and headed for the buffet.

  For nearly an hour, von Schünburg ate and drank copiously, isolated in a small separate room.

  As he lit a cigar he thought about the officer, who had not come back, but his well-garnished stomach inclined him temporarily to indulgence toward the subaltern who seemed to be taking a long time to carry out his orders. Suddenly, a man brought him a note scribbled by his companion, which told him that what the station-master had said was unfortunately correct; he had not been able to find and rolling-stock in s for state to travel. On the indication that he might perhaps find something at the munitions factory, he had gone there.

  After having taken cognizance of that message, the general noticed that the man who had brought it seemed to be on the brink of fainting.

  “What’s happening, then?”

  “Frightful things.”

  “Let’s go, then!”

  Getting up, with difficulty, von Schünburg decided to make a tour in order to restore order.

  At that moment, a cry of “Fire!” resounded. At the door of the buffet, the general stopped, dazedly. A short distance away the deformed locomotive had collapsed completely, and the coals, still incandescent, had set fire to the mass of fuel in the tender, of which nothing remained but vestiges.

  The wagons had crumbled; only the planks and drapes seemed intact; the gas reservoir of one was letting out gas through its walls, and a gust of wind had caused the cloud of gas to make contact with the sparks of the fire; in an instant, flames engulfed the train. In a matter of moments, the entire station would be on fire!

  The general followed the crowd that was fleeing through the only available exit, toward the freight terminal.

  There, he was obliged to admit that the rumors reaching him were accurate. Where the rails had been, nothing could now be seen but streaks of dark dust; nothing remained of wagons but plants and partitions; it was as if the framework had been volatilized.

  He stopped in front of a train loaded with munitions and contemplated the large shells that were heaped up pell-mell. He struck one of them with the tip of his cane and stopped, stupefied.

  Come on! He was dreaming. It wasn’t possible!

  He repeated the experiment; his cane had pierced the shell; under the slight impact, the magnificent steel of the German factories had shattered, laying bare the redoubtable explosive.

  Mechanically, he did it again, and every time, his stick disaggregated one of the shells of which he was so proud.

  As if under the influence of a hallucination, he struck with harder blows, hoping finally to hear the metallic sound usually rendered by those large jewels of death, which only Germany had been able to prepare in advance—but he encountered nothing but soft sounds, which the friable envelopes made as they crumbled, laying bare their hideous yellow souls.

  Then, griped by vertigo, he fled. But he did not get far.

  A few hundred meters away, and immense whirlwind of flames burst forth. He only just had time to think: The munitions factory! before he was swept away and crushed by the torrent of gas, materials and debris of all kinds projected in all directions by the explosion of a considerable mass of munitions and thousands of tons of explosives.

  Lieutenant Jacques’ method was triumphant.

  It really was an idea of genius that he had had, of provoking, by means of a new phenomenon of the electric order, what he called a “molecular disease of iron.” Under the impact of that special wave, iron and steel took on an intimate vibratory movement—for nothing was revealed at the outset—that provoked an extreme fragility in the metal. Under the effect of the stresses to which it was subjected, the metal broke; the disintegration continued by virtue of the annihilation of molecular attraction, and the iron was reduced to dust. And the most extraordinary thing was that the malady was eminently contagious; the vibration was transmitted with a speed so reduced that it was difficulty to explain scientifically, but it was transmitted from one piece to another, even when there was only an insignificant contact between them.

  What had happened at the station where General Schünburg had had such a tragic end to his dinner was only one small scene in the terrible drama that shook Germany and extended to Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey. The disease progressed, following the facile route of the railway, and multiplied, without any break in continuity, at the inexorable velocity of fifty kilometers and hour, sowing terror everywhere.

  The first effects were those already known: the rails broke and disintegrated, leading to frightful derailments; the locomotives and the metal parts of the wagons soon followed, and by means of the fires in the engines, the gas in the wagons and elect
rical short-circuits, the trains fell prey to flames. In the big stations, above all, the accumulation of materials subject to that extraordinary decomposition led almost immediately to devastating conflagrations.

  Metal bridges attained by the epidemic collapsed noisily.

  At army railways depots, the accumulation of munitions and cannons offered a magnificent field for the extension of the molecular disease, whose ravages spread, reducing the results of the efforts of Boche industry to nothing.

  Near the front, the stations of the various engineering and artillery stores are naturally afflicted; in the munitions depots, the casings of shells disintegrate before the fearful eyes of the personnel, who flee madly in all directions, often with reason, for the fires produced there, as everywhere, lead in places to mighty explosions; the latter spread from one accumulation to another. Projectiles and cartridges of every caliber, grenades, rockets, canisters of incendiary liquids and gas cylinders form gigantic firework displays, of which only those who are able to contemplate the most massive destructions accomplished in the course of the war can have any idea.

  Ill. Lelong

  The contagion continues; a simple momentary contact between an item attained by the mysterious disease and a healthy piece contaminates the latter, which becomes susceptible in its turn of transmitting the plague. Many bizarre incidents result therefrom.

  Projectiles unloaded from a cart at the moment when the fatal wave reaches them carry the germ inexorably into the munitions depots of batteries where they are stored; if those projectiles are immediately employed, it is to the cannons that they communicate the decomposition still latent within them; in that case, it is a rare gun that resists the first shot; at the second, the breech, under the pressure of the gases, explodes with a bang.

  In the interior, the railway stations are not the only places attained; industrial communications are a facile route of penetration which the molecular disease comes implant itself in the enemy’s factories. By way of wagons, and the conveyor belts that load and unload them, the vibratory shock imperceptible invests the frameworks of the vast proud halls; as time goes by, they collapse noisily, contaminating the machine-tools and the components under construction, reducing the martial and economical equipment so laboriously constructed to nothing.

  But that is not all; many tramway rails are connected to those of the railways. By way of them, the funeral frisson reaches the hearts of cities.

  Tramway rails, in order to reduce the effects of electrolysis provoked by the currents, are linked to the great cast iron conduits that distribute water and gas; those electrical links, in copper cables prior to the war, have been replaced by pieces of soft iron, because Germany needs to make use of its entire stocks of copper in munitions; those cables are, therefore, further vehicles that tranquilly absorb the electrical wave broadcast from the French front; and those routes offer a magnificent means of fulfilling the mission for which it has been created.

  It reaches the electricity stations and water distribution stations and destroys them. It reaches the gas factories, and its destructive power is amply displayed; the apparatus of the manufacture and purification of the gas, and the gasometers, disintegrate under its action. The gas and incandescent hearths are liberated; their encounter produces cataclysms; gigantic flames rise up to enormous heights, as if to underline the amplitude of the punishment for the terrified populations.

  The devastating scourge follows its inflexible law; the major conduits that have brought it to the places where gas is produced have not caused it to disdain the secondary iron conduits that aliment certain districts; it arrives to prove its power by provoking conflagrations that the disappearance of the water mains does not allow to be combated.

  The fluvial routes do not remain immune; bridges and locks are infected, and break; cisterns empty; their contents produce floods.

  Any yet more: the ravages are not only exercised on land, the ports are subject to it as well. Maritime railway stations docks and warehouses are gripped and disappear in the torment. Naval shipyards are not sheltered from the blows of the invisible enemy, which shows no mercy to any of the atoms of iron that it encounters in its path. The gigantic or modest hulls of cruisers under repair and submarines under construction disappear rapidly from the places where they are being prepared for further depredations.

  The ships in dock receive the unforgiving flux via the apparatus for loading coal and the embarkation gangways; in a matter of hours they are on the sea-bed. Several large battleships, confronted by the inexplicable disease, decide to leave, but many of them carry away the fatal germ that a fortuitous contact has transmitted to them. At sea, their hulls dissolve and they plunge abruptly beneath the waves.

  The initial shock provoked at three points of the enemy railway network by the intermediary connections established with great difficulty had succeeded in reaching the adversary in all its vital and sensitive spots, thanks to the prodigious continuity of the metal components that cover all the civilized or supposedly civilized nations with a slender but tangled network that binds together all toil and production.

  Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey were reduced to helplessness. The destruction extended, alas, to the territories occupied by the ferocious aggressors, but that was the ransom of the triumph.

  As for neutrals, to the great satisfaction of the three protagonists of the momentous affair, they had not suffered. The molecular disease had been transmitted from the front; the anticipated protective measures had been taken in time; the railway lines linking them to the central empires had been cut.

  The task of Lieutenant Jacques was accomplished; he had refused in advance all the flattering proposals made to him. He would return to his cherished laboratory; he had a great problem to solve—to the molecular disease of iron that his genius had created, he needed to find a remedy. That would be his work during the peace, the glorious and just peace that the beaten enemy was now demanding on its knees, and which would be signed the next day.

  “Lieutenant! Lieutenant! The colonel has arrived to congratulate the battery!”

  It is only at the third announcement of that news, shouted by his orderly, that Lieutenant Jacques, after twelve hours of deep sleep, wakes up.

  * * *

  26 “Maximalist” is an approximate translation of “Bolshevik,” “Bocho” is an improvised derivative of Boche, signifying the German origin of Marxist-Leninist theory.

  27 The President of the Council, or Prime Minister, of France in 1918 was Georges Clemenceau.

  28 Ferdinand Foch was appointed commander-in-chief of the Allied armies in the Spring of 1918.

  Raoul Bigot: Nounlegos

  (1919)

  I

  Nounlegos. That was the name, written in pencil on a piece of paper in the waiting room, that Monsieur de Landré, examining magistrate of the Court of the Seine, read when he cast a glance at his desk as he handed his hat and coat to the office boy.

  Anticipating the question, the boy replied: “He’s an old gentleman who’s asking to speak to Monsieur the examining magistrate about the Charfland affair; he refuses to give any further explanation. Asked to request an audience in writing, explaining the reason, he replied: ‘I’ve come to offer help in discovering the truth; I’m not asking for anything; I’m making an offer; I won’t make it again.’ What should I do, Monsieur?”

  “Leave me alone for a moment; I’ll summon you again.”

  And Monsieur de Landré, holding in his hand the piece of paper on which the name Nounlegos stood out in large letters, irregular but clearly traced, sat down to contemplate it, pensively.

  How many times had he been disturbed by importunate individuals affirming that they had information of great importance relative to some affair or other, who ended up wasting his time without adding anything of interest to the cases? That was what had led him only to grant audiences, save for exceptional cases, in response to written requests.

  This time, however, although sc
antly initiated by his profession into the so-called mysteries of graphology, he examined those characters attentively, revealing, he had no doubt, an uncommon will. The verbal response made by the unknown person augmented the magistrate’s curiosity to make the acquaintance of an individual that he anticipated to be interesting.

  Faithful to his method, which was to leave as little scope as possible to chance and surprise, he telephoned his secretary to carry out immediate research regarding a certain Nounlegos and to inform him immediately.

  He knew that all the Bottins and directories, and all the files accumulated by the Court and the Prefecture of Police, would be consulted, and that he would have some indications regarding his visitor in a matter of minutes.

  Then, his thoughts going to the object of his visit, he absorbed himself in recalling the details of the famous Charfland affair.

  Yes, famous—and threatening to be disastrous for him!

  In the heart of Paris, in a first-rate family boarding-house, an American billionaire, A. H. Terrick, his wife, his two children and their governess had been murdered by the injection of a violent poison that the experts had not been able to define exactly.

  On the eve of the discovery of the crime, a great financial institution, the Universel Crédit, had paid in cash to someone named Joe Helly a check for ten million francs signed A. H. Terrick, who had informed the bank of that circumstance. It had been impossible to find any trace of that Joe Helly, whose description had been easily reconstituted, in view of the curiosity inspired by the beneficiary of such a large sum withdrawn at a stroke.

  On the crime scene there had been no trace of a struggle, no sign of forced entry had been found, and no theft had been committed.