The Nickel Man

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by Brian Stableford

Miss Adda was selling the last oranges, and the novice passenger was saying interminable adieux to his family; one might have thought that he was about to embark on a long voyage.

  In the meantime, Pilesèche and Bémolisant, in their eccentric costumes, were making furious music—but the artiste did not have the same verve as the previous evening. The immutable principles of absolute music were no longer speaking to his heart. He had many other preoccupations, and it seemed to him that he could still hear the mocking cry: “Look out! It’s the police!”

  And all of a sudden, his eyes, scanning the circle of spectators surrounding the aerostat, his eyes encountered the enigmatic visage of the so-called traveling salesman who had been denounced to him.

  The man’s words and gestures came back to his mind. He interpreted and explained them in the worst possible light, while, with inflated cheeks, he blew unconscious notes nevertheless into the mouthpiece of his trombone.

  That man had talked about Uncle Grillard!

  Was that not enough? Had he not given, himself, and without being solicited, all the reasons that condemned the laboratory assistant and the artist?

  Then, leaning toward his companion—his accomplice—between two brazen squawks that split the ears of an indulgent public, Bémolisant spoke in a low voice, confiding his anxieties to him. He showed him the danger that was surging forth like the head of Medusa.

  And the spectacle unfolds. The preparations are complete. Joël gives the order to remove the final sacks of ballast hanging from the net, which are keeping the balloon nailed to the ground. Several men put their weight on the nacelle to prevent the aerostat from flying away into the atmosphere, but their number is insufficient. Joël calls for a few volunteers. Oh, there’s no lack of them! They emerge from the ranks of the audience and launch themselves into the circle reserved for the maneuver.

  Several brush past the two musicians.

  At the same time, a voice whispers in their ears: “He’s the police!”

  And when their haggard eyes go once again to the commercial traveler, the subject of so much anguish, the voice continues, bringing their fear to a peak: “He’s going to arrest you at the end of the performance. Save yourselves.”

  Arrest them! They go pale and tremble in their tight and grotesque costumes. As if moved by a spring however, they have both stood up, dropping the trombone and the big drum. They are face to face, consulting one another with their gaze, in the midst of the crowd, whose members are also on their feet to watch the departure, all gazes fixed on the balloon—for the solemn moment has arrived. Impatiently, Joël calls out to his passenger, who is stretching out his adieux with kisses and compliments.

  Miss Adda, with one hand on the edge of the wicker cage, her head turned toward the unhurried traveler, is ready to climb into the nacelle.

  But suddenly, abruptly, in the midst of a confusion of aides jostling one another, two large bodies fray a passage through the men still retaining the balloon. Those two bizarre phantoms leap into the nacelle. As if they have agreed to act and speak in unison, they utter a cry in unison: a single, vibrant, resounding cry:

  “Let go!”

  At that powerful, unexpected cry, the surprised aides instinctively lift the hands that are retaining the aerostat, and the latter, suddenly free, bounds like a thoroughbred whose bridle has been released.

  An enthusiastic hurrah rises with it.

  The spectators have only seen in that unexpected turn of events a comic effect prepared in advance. They applaud.

  The passenger, abandoned on the ground, stares open-mouthed at his vehicle in flight, and Miss Adda, brushed by the nacelle as it escaped, remains motionless in stupor.

  In the audience, however, one man had straightened up, surprised and also anxious, while beside him, another man who has approached murmurs ironically in is ear: “You’re stumped, Monsieur Rosamour.”

  “Stumped!” the agent replied. “Not yet. There’s the telegraph for worthy men—but you’ll pay for this, Monsieur Boissonnald.”

  Balloons launched from fairgrounds do not, as a rule, come down far away. Rosamour had no doubt that by telegraphing the authorities in the region toward which the balloon was heading, he would have news of it that same evening.

  Now, the balloon had been carried away by a north-easterly wind. It was heading toward the sea, which might force the aeronauts to come down sooner than they would have wished.

  In spite of the favorable circumstances, the night did not bring any news.

  The following day also passed without anything being heard of the aerial voyagers. They had flown away into the sky, and they had not come down again.

  Boissonnald was right. Rosamour was stumped.

  He did not want to admit defeat, however, and he went back to the tent, where Miss Adda was awaiting, silently and fatalistically, the denouement of the singular affair.

  She did not understand as yet exactly what had happened, and had no doubt that the aerial voyagers might return at any moment. Time was passing, however, and her confidence was ebbing away. A dull anxiety had been born within her, and a kind of obsession. It was not the image of Joël that passed through her mind—Joël was always harsh, with never a kind word—but that of the unfortunate Pilesèche, so sympathetic to the young woman’s miseries, even though he scarcely talked to her. It seemed that his magnetic power had not only exerted a temporary influence over her, but had installed itself as sovereign throughout her being. When he spoke, she listened, lost in a dream, as if his voice were singing. When he approached, she felt his proximity instinctively, and turned her head. And now that he was no longer there, it was like a great void in the middle of which she was completely disorientated. A part of her had departed with her magnetizer, without her being able to render account of what had disequilibrated her, and that exteriorization, as it were, of her faculties.

  When Rosamour came to question her, he found her anxious and agitated. She looked at him suspiciously, without replying. Instead of threatening her, the agent was gentle and insinuating; he was only looking for the truth, the proof of innocence.

  At Pilesèche’s name she had shuddered, and Rosamour pulled that string, saying that it was in the interests of the young man that he gather all the information that might facilitate his recover.

  Then Adda, quite simply and without any evasion, told him the story of the association from the day that Joël had met the two supposed criminals.

  Criminals! Who could possibly believe that they were? She had seen them at close range, had lived with them, and she swore that they were not.

  She became excited as she said that, and then her speech fell back into calm monotony, as if wearied by the effort.

  Certainly, she had told him all that she knew—he had no doubt about that—but what she knew scarcely cast any light on the problem. Rosamour left, discouraged by the conversation; he made a minute inventory, without finding anything in the midst of the gaudy trash cluttering the tent and the vehicle that might aid him in his task. He kept a few papers for examination at leisure, although even they appeared at first glance to be insignificant.

  As he did not want to return to Paris empty-handed, however, he invited Miss Adda to accompany him—she was still a witness—and registered as baggage the famous nickel statue, stripped of the layer of paint with which it had been daubed, shining beneath its white patina.

  XIV. The Wreck of a Balloon

  The idea of attempting the aerial route to escape the pursuit of the gendarmes does not involve any more danger than that implicit in tranquilly buying a railway ticket for a distant location, but it is less practical.

  Murderers and other large-scale malefactors do not always have a ready-inflated aerostat to hand, fiacres generally being more common in our streets. The balloon, moreover, is a costly means of locomotion that does not lend itself easily to mystery.

  Joël had been utterly astounded on seeing those two fantastic beings leap into the nacelle: a clown and a village bridegr
oom, two estimable murderers—for it must be said that he if had once listened, with a benevolent smile, to their fantastic explanations regarding their imaginary crime, he had not been duped for a single instant. It was not him, Joël, who could be taken in by such tales; he had seen far too much of the world to be credulous.

  “What’s got into you?” he shouted, with a formidable oath, when, after that abrupt irruption, the balloon, escaping from the grip of its guardians, flew away into the air.

  The wicker nacelle, poorly attached to the encircling net and violently jolted, oscillated like a salad-shaker, and the aeronauts were forced, in order not to be slammed into one another, to cling on to the rigging.

  They had made a sudden bound five hundred meters into the air before the acrobat had recovered from his surprise. It was truly a little late to give the crowd, amazed by that unexpected departure, the spectacle of pirouettes executed on the bar of the trapeze that the balloon had lifted up with it and which was swinging furiously. In any case, the incident had been so unexpected and comical that the members of the public, believing it to be a farce cleverly planned to tease their appetite for novel fare, were clapping their hands fervently and crying “Bravo!” with all the force of their combined lungs.

  The clamors rose up in discordant gusts all the way to the narrow receptacle in which were crouched the three most singular passengers imaginable: an acrobat, an improbable clown and the most horribly grease-painted of village bridegrooms, with his flowery waistcoat, his gigantic collar shapelessly turned down, his Bluebeard suit with large brass buttons and his beribboned bouquet.

  Joël was furious, and he had no lack of reasons to be. Was he not about to lose his reputation, by virtue of not having completed his program?

  “But since they’re applauding...!” the former laboratory assistant objected, timidly.

  “You’re nothing but an idiot!” the other interrupted, violently. “What about the passenger I was supposed to bring—is he applauding too? He’s been left on the ground…and carrying away his money. Is that the way to do things, eh? I wouldn’t care about that, if it weren’t necessary to go back to Nantes for the rest of the kit, but we’re going to have to do that…and we’ll be lucky if the police don’t get mixed up in it...”

  Bémolisant and Pilesèche lowered their heads and received the downpour without saying anything. From time to time, the artiste tried to get a word in. “Listen…,” he said, timidly—but immediately, the insults rained down even harder, and the orator had considerable reinforcements of oaths in his throat.

  Everything comes to an end, however, even the great fits of anger of acrobats and professors of magnetism. Joël finally fell silent, breathless, and Bémolisant was able to make his speech.

  He explained the cause of their panic. He related the mysterious advice uttered twice over, and the head of Medusa suddenly appearing in the form of an agent of the Sûreté with a mocking expression.

  It makes no difference whether one is innocent, there are things one cannot help and, in truth, without reflection, they had both had the same idea, of taking off for the clouds. Perhaps it was stupid, but after all, one could hardly blame them.

  “Well, it’s very clever, what you’ve just done,” Joël muttered. “As if the telegraph has been created for nothing! You’ll be picked up when you disembark from the balloon, and thanks to you, I’ll be caught in the net. But if that happens, damn it, you’d better get ready to pay me back!”

  During this altercation, rapid as it was, as the insults had followed one another like javelins in some Homeric combat, no one was keeping watch on the progress of the balloon, which had continued rising until it reached an altitude of a thousand meters and then had started flying rapidly south-westwards.

  An immense plain of hilly cloud extended beneath the nacelle, pierced here and there by somber holes, shafts of a sort, at the bottom of which patches of brown earth could be perceived.

  Above them gilding the yellow cambric dome of the balloon, the sun was shining in the transparent and rarefied atmosphere. In spite of the clouds floating higher in the sky, which obscured it at intervals, its rays warmed the aerial globe somewhat, and it resumed its ascendant trajectory as it dilated in that heat.

  Gradually, however, as it continued its course, the aerostat penetrated into a glacial mist in which the iridescent light was scattered by the turbulence of microscopic crystals of nascent snow.

  For the aeronauts, all indication of movement had disappeared. The aerostat seemed to be motionless in space, in the middle of a block of unpolished glass, drowned in a diffuse light.

  No more earth, no more sky! No noise was rising up from the ground to the nacelle. It was a grim solitude; oblivion in the midst of the golden darts of radiant light.

  Bémolisant was shivering with fever and cold, while Pilesèche, his head in his hands, forgot his observer’s temperament, unconscious of the marvelous spectacle that was offered to him without his having to seek it out.

  The acrobat Joël was certainly not sacrificing himself to the ideal, and his poetic tastes did not solicit him to prolong the voyage for the vain pleasure of contemplating the aerial scenery. A fairground ascension is not exactly an amusement for the man who carries it out; he considers that he has done enough for is audience when he has made a prestigious departure, and as soon as he has disappeared into the clouds he has nothing more pressing to do that return to earth as rapidly as possible, in order to avoid excessively considerable expense in returning by railway. It had required the surprise and the heat of the dispute to cause him to forget those principles of sage economy, in order for him not to have yet determined the descent by a vigorous tug on the valve.

  On the other hand, the perspective of the tricorn hats and sashes that he was expecting to appear on landing rendered him rather perplexed and irresolute. Was it necessary to stop, or to gain ground, in order to return to earth in some remote spot where it would be easier to get away?

  The atmospheric circumstances took responsibility themselves for answering the question.

  The balloon was weighed down by a multitude of spangles and needles of ice. Under that burden, and as the gas contracted by virtue of cooling, the aerostat began to descend. There were no reference points, but in order to be certain of the fall it was sufficient to look at the flaccid fabric, which was hollowing out beneath the huge sphere maintained in the broad mesh of the net.

  Joël threw a few pieces of cigarette paper out of the nacelle, which seemed to rise up rapidly toward the sky, simply because the aerostat was descending much more rapidly than they were.

  The aeronauts felt a vertical wind strike their faces. Finally—the last indication—the flag suspended from the rigging was lifted up, fluttering under the resistant action of the air.

  It seemed that they were heading for the ground at a speed that was already vertiginous. The acrobat judged it prudent to slow that hectic progress by emptying a sack of ballast.

  The fog did not permit the ground beneath the nacelle to be distinguished, but a dull murmur could be heard, like the distant rumble of trains in the vicinity of a large train. The noise was rather bizarre in its continuity, and grew in volume as the altitude diminished.

  In order better to perceive and analyze it, Joël leaned over the fragile wicker of the nacelle.

  The fog seemed to become less dense. The iridescent crystals, charged with electricity, were attracting one another, hastening together and aggregating into snowflakes. That snow was falling on to the balloon, already bristling with needles of frost—a white coat whose layer was thickening and making the aerial vehicle heavier. The danger was imminent, for its speed was accelerating rapidly.

  “Damn!” cried Joël. “Ballast, quickly! We’re falling!”

  It was, indeed, a rapid fall that was now precipitating the balloon toward the earth, and already, through the snow, daylight was visible.

  Obstinately leaning half way out of the nacelle, the acrobat tried to catch a gl
impse of the murmurous ground, and suddenly shouted: “Damnation! It’s the sea!”

  The sea! It was the sea that was producing that strange murmur. It was the sea, rolling wave after wave, breaking on rocks.

  The shore was close by, but the balloon had already passed over it, and, while falling, it was continuing its course out to sea!

  “We’re doomed!” howled Joël, his hands clenched in his hair.

  “We need to find a contrary current,” hazard Pilesèche.

  “Imbecile! A contrary current! Empty ballast, animal! That’s all that you can do...”

  And, setting an example, the two men nervously threw sacks of ballast into the sea, without even untying them, abruptly and hastily, each time delivering a shock to the aerostat.

  And when the ballast ran out, it was all the instruments there were in the nacelle, and anything that was loose, heavy or light, including the anchor, whose rope was rapidly cut by a stroke of a knife.

  As if it had understood the danger, the aerostat, thus unburdened, slowed its velocity, and finally paused two or three hundred meters above the swell that was oaring beneath it. But it did not rise up again, and there was nothing left to lighten it any further.

  It was still heading westwards, and toward the west there was nothing but water, as far as the eye could see, and on the water, only a few distant sails that were disappearing over the horizon, without having seen the airship in distress.

  His anger passed, Joël, in the face of danger, had recovered all his composure. It was not the first time that he had confronted peril in his adventurous life, and he thought about the best means of prolonging their suspension at a moderate height until a ship, passing close by, perceived the balloon and came to its aid.

  But time was passing and the balloon, after a brief respite, resumed its downward movement. he guide-rope hanging from the nacelle suddenly touched the surface, and, gradually plunging into it, lightened the aerostat slightly…but not enough, alas, to interrupt the descent, which continued irremediably.

 

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