The World Above The World

by Brian Stableford

  Where was I? We had not left the tower, and, on leaning to peer out of the small windows of our little carriage, I perceived nothing where the sky should have been but an inextricable metal trellis, within which air could doubtless circulate, but through which no external light penetrated. In spite of my bad humor, I could not help a start of surprise.

  So, I thought, the whole society of workers assembled here by the will of this man resides here, sleeps here, lives here, distracts itself here outside working hours; this shapeless colossus already hides an entire city within its flanks.

  On reflection, it was simple: in this marshy and desert land, far from any great center, it had been necessary to think about feeding, and even lodging, the laborers brought from afar, and the same thing had been done as in all sorts of works, where it was necessary to build canteens and dressing-rooms that were subsequently dismantled. Here, though, the proportions and the comfort were beyond all comparison.

  I looked with even greater astonishment at the enigmatic man who resided over this phantasmagoria. A kind of satisfied smile strayed over his lips while he started the little car moving slowly again. It crossed the plaza and resumed its course rather rapidly along a brightly-lit street full of busy people. I watched the shop-fronts speed by, trying to read their signs: restaurants, bakeries, cafes, groceries and fashion emporia. That went on for a few minutes, and then, by virtue of a ramp with a balustrade, which rose gradually alongside us, I ended up seeing nothing but the legs of all the pedestrians. Eventually, the car plunged…can I say underground?...at any rate, into a long tunnel in which it became impossible for me to distinguish anything. Sometimes, beneath abrupt lighted vaults, at inappreciable distances, the interior life of the tower reappeared in clear patches dotted with distant shadows. Through blue-tinted bays I saw crowds agitating in abruptly-interrupted comings and goings, and I gradually became conscious of the formidable power of the man who had been the determined organizer of this mysterious human ant-hive.

  He remained impassive, his grey eyes staring into the void; one might have thought that he was dreaming. He let the vehicle bowl along at to speed, which must have crossed the entire breadth of the tower, for the journey lasted almost an hour.

  At the end of it, letting go of his little handle, Goldfeller stood up.

  I did likewise, assuming that we had arrived and that the Gem King, satisfied with having put on a display of his power, was about to set me at liberty.

  Causing the car’s glazed door to slide sideways, he ushered me out ahead of him, into a waiting-room, in which several gentlemen of correct appearance got up on our arrival to come forward and meet the billionaire, to whom they handed papers that he examined with a scrupulous gaze. His brow furrowed discontentedly, and he addressed one of the individuals deferentially awaiting his orders.

  “Too many accidents,” he said, in a curt tone. “These eight men are in hospital?”

  An affirmative nod relied.

  “Which one?”

  “Hôpital Roux.”

  “Good. I’ll drop in. You can go, gentlemen.”

  As he spoke he crossed the large room at a rapid pace. I followed him, assuming that the course would reach a liberating terminus and that the next door opened by my guide would set me free. We walked through darkness for several seconds and, to my great surprise, the ground shook once more beneath my feet, and I felt that we were rising up, lifted by an elevator toward the top of the tower.

  Anger gripped me again. “Oh!” I exclaimed. “This joke is getting out of hand! Monsieur, if you’ve been trying to give me proof the extent of your power and your work, let me tell you that I’m convinced. Everything here, I agree, is enormous and surprising, and I shall certify that when the opportunity arises—but I want to go now.”

  A tranquil voice replied from the shadows. “But that’s not what I want, Monsieur Bayoud.”

  “You’re not intending of keeping me here against my will?”

  “Yes, that’s what I intend to do.”

  “As a prisoner?”

  “As a prisoner.”

  I burst into nervous laughter and tried to make a joke of it. In our era, a kidnapping…the newspapers…the law…I said everything you might suppose, and had not stopped talking when I was seized by the arms.

  “Neither the newspapers, nor the law, nor anyone else will be able to worry when you have, with the aid of a few letters, explained to those close to you that you have decided to go away for a indefinite period—a few months, perhaps a year…”

  “But I won’t write those letters, I said in a slightly tremulous voice.

  The imperative voice hissed in the gloom: “You will write them.”

  The elevator rose up at a vertiginous speed, and abruptly sprang forth into the open air. We stopped in the midst of a tangle of iron beams and scaffolding, through which the wind was blowing violently. Night had fallen, but vivid electric light allowed me to see Goldfeller, his eyes sparkling. Still gripping my arm, he drew me on to a narrow iron walkway, which rang beneath our feet.

  “Look,” he said.

  He pushed me, irresistibly. I perceived the blackness of the countryside, dotted with the pale and distant lights of a few villages scattered over the plain. No ramp or balcony had stopped out progress; we were leaning over nearly two thousand meters of empty space.

  Instinctively, I closed my eyes, my heart distressed by vertigo and anguish, and threw myself backward.

  “Let me go,” I stammered.

  He relaxed his grip. Turning my back on the abyss, I put my arms around a metal stanchion and looked behind me.

  What a spectacle! Extraordinary in broad daylight, that forest of iron in the process of germination, in the glare of the thousands of electric bulbs that illuminated the expanse, became a dreamlike vision that blinded the eyes and terrified the ears with its roar.

  In that white glare, one saw the little black shadows of men agitating as far as the eye could see and the wings and arms of machines turning in majestic gyrations, in a sort of apotheosis of that magical realm of human labor. The resounding groans of the metal, discharged without pause to be assembled and erected by machinery, rose up from the furnace-like glow toward the star-filled sky.

  I was simultaneously terrified and gripped by admiration.

  I turned unquiet eyes toward Goldfeller; his grey mask had taken on a lunar hue, and his eyes were animated by that fulgurant gleam which had impressed me from the outset.

  “Well,” he said, showing me the immense countryside sleeping at our feet, “What would happen if, this evening or tomorrow, someone were to discover your crushed body at the foot of the tower? Do you think that the plausible accident would hinder the progress of my work?”

  I struck a dignified pose in order to reply: “It’s your prerogative to commit a crime, Monsieur…”

  “Yes,” he interjected, sharply, “my prerogative…do you understand? I want my work to be above all criticism, justified or otherwise. Yours has annoyed me, made me impatient. I’ve decided to cut it short.”

  There was a brief silence. Then he went on: “I wanted to show you that I’m not a man like any other, Monsieur Bayoud. Unlimited wealth gives unlimited power, and I have many means to compel silence; the simplest is to keep you here—so I shall keep you, as a prisoner or at liberty, as you choose. Will you consent no sign the few letters that I mentioned a little while ago? They’ll be put into the post in Paris and will serve to explain your absence to those who might be anxious about you.”

  I hesitated briefly, but eventually replied in a firm tone: “I refuse to write those letters.”

  The Gem King smiled calmly. “So be it,” he said. “You choose prison. Reassure yourself; it will be at the top of our installation. You’ll have time to reflect. Would you like to follow me?”

  To remain in that sheer location, with the void in front of me and the uncertainty of interrupted construction-projects behind me, where it would be easy to break my neck at every st
ep…there was no need to think about it. I walked behind Goldfeller to the elevator, which took us back into the depths of the tower.

  IV. The Evil Geniuses

  From the height of an immense balcony, from which we could follow the flight of an avenue quivering with recently-planted bushes, we looked out over the city.

  We were smoking cigars; dinner had been delicious and we were talking uninhibitedly. Dr. Hartwig linked arms with me and murmured, as if in response to a professional thought: “1908 meters! The height of the Schwansee, in the Swiss mountains, where I was once installed in a sanitarium, where life was very sad…” He smiled at Goldfeller, who was smoking silently alongside us, and added: “And the table was inferior to yours, Master.”

  The billionaire shrugged his shoulders and turned to look back into the dining-room that we had just quit. “Speaking of that,” he said, in his imperious voice, “where are you, Rassmuss, with your pills?”

  There was a sound of hurried footsteps, and a slightly confused murmur; the bald head of the old chemist appeared in the still-bright June twilight, which caused his eyes, habituated to the artificial light of his laboratory, to blink.

  “Excellency,” he replied, in a hoarse voice, “the trials are finished and the formula is ready: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus calcium…a little gelatin to agglutinate the mixture.”

  I nodded my head, trying to make a joke. “My word, “I proclaimed, “I’m re-living that creole-style turbot and those delicious slices of duck, with their slight taste of lemon and paprika…”

  “It’s necessary, in any case, to proceed with prudent trials,” Hartwig objected. “Imagine…”

  He launched into a story to which Goldfeller listened placidly, surrounded by the general staff of scientists and energetic men among whom I had been living for months—for the Gem King was right; I had ended up yielding to the tedium of continued reclusion.

  The first days of my captivity in the tower had passed under the close surveillance of one of the two giants who had brutally separated me from the procession of visitors to bring me into the depths of that strange prison. The man with the yellow skin, whose teeth shone cruelly behind his mauve lips, had ended up exasperating me and also frightening me, by his silence and the tiger-like gaze with which he watched my gestures while serving my meals. The little iron room where I had endured those hours of anguish, in intimate association with the colossus, whose severed tongue guaranteed his discretion, had eventually stifled within me any other idea but getting out of it, escaping those staring eyes, in which I divined the order to strangle me at the first sign of revolt.

  I had, therefore, given in, signed several letters in which I had informed my friends of my departure for a rather long voyage, whose purpose I concealed. In exchange for my submission, I became free to come and go within the entire extent of the interior city. From that day on, I had shared the existence of those who were seconding, in his mysterious work, the bizarre individual whose prisoner I was.

  Those men I had learned to know, to the extent that could be deduced from the external appearances they cared to manifest; as to their real personalities, perhaps their real names, who could tell? Goldfeller, doubtless—who, I rapidly came to suspect, had snatched them one by one, in the course of his global peregrinations, from one or other of those disgraces or catastrophes in which human determination and dignity founder once and for all. In return, they gave him the faithful attachment of bought slaves, or animals saved from drowning, and my miseries, my resentment toward their master, immediately crumbled before their silent respect for him.

  They were, in consequence, as many spies dogging my footsteps. Nevertheless, in their company, I visited their laboratories, their libraries, their studies and their experiments, and assisted them in the installation of marvelous apparatus, whose purpose only ceased to seem inexplicable to me on the day when, liberated from that semi-captivity, I had been authorized to leave the interior of the tower to enjoy the open air once again, at the summit of the finally-completed edifice.

  Imagine my surprise on then discovering that, in a matter of a few months, an entire city had been installed in the immense space that I had left in the state of a metallic construction-yard. In the streets and plazas there were the same crowds of workers, less active now at the culmination of their labor, circulating in rather leisurely groups, contemplating their work and living at ease in comfortable houses, furnished with all that an improved science had been able to anticipate to satisfy the demanding needs of modern humankind. The steel-workers had been succeeded by masons, plumbers, carpenters, locksmiths, painters, gardeners and the various tradesmen whose successive efforts had ended up making that city the marvel of comfort and delight that the man who was the soul of the enterprise had wanted to create.

  From the depths of darkness, the dwellings, shops, the houses of business and pleasure were transported, definitive and splendid, into the full light of the Sun, refreshed by the pure wind, shaded by the gardens and parks sprung forth, as if by a miracle, under the restless effort of the millions of arms of that population of workmen. It seemed that all those men, whose work was almost concluded, happy with the result, could not resign themselves to let go of it, and were dallying there lethargically, with a vague desire to spend the rest of their transformed lives there, with the tacit consent of the man who had brought them here.

  I had spent rapid days thus, wonderstruck, whose story would scarcely be more than a repetition of those that will follow, in which the details will be found of an assembly of unprecedented facts, crowned by the craziest and most coldly intelligent of the catastrophes that have devastated the world.

  If I had ended up, little by little, by fathoming the mystery of the depths of my immense aerial prison, by contrast, I had not yet obtained from my companions the slightest revelation that might clarify for me the enigmatic personality of the man they addressed by turns, according to the habits of their private language and national servitude, as Excellency, Master, Your Honor, etc.

  Goldfeller continued to appear to me as a mysterious and terrible man, pursuing a secret goal with an energy that was master of secondary energies no less audacious. Who was he? What did he want? I was able to suspect, without certainty. Apparently sharing our life, it seemed to me that the man must live apart, in the house whose discovery had cost me my liberty. The pretty creature I had glimpsed momentarily from the height of the wall I had scaled haunted my memory and my imagination, but I had never dared risk going in search of the place where she lived, perhaps a prisoner like me, amid the host of buildings, houses and gardens that had made the tower into a suspended city. I had no specific clue that would permit me to rediscover the garden where the pretty blonde fairy draped in white fur had appeared to me.

  I could not help imagining that the young woman was the cause of the gigantic enterprise completed by Goldfeller; it pleased me playfully to associate that tiny image with the mass of an edifice whose shadow plunged the countryside into darkness for several leagues around. But beyond that, I was reduced to conjectures; thus, in his person as in his plans, the Gem King remained for me the mysterious, impassive and closed individual that he was at that very moment, when he was listening to Hartwig tell him his story about concentrated nourishment.

  The doctor fell silent. Passing his hand over his broad tanned forehead, Goldfeller murmured in a preoccupied maner: “Our provisions are undoubtedly enormous, but Rassmuss’s pills might become indispensable.”

  “Bah! Are you afraid of a siege?” The physician laughed.

  Goldfeller turned toward the dining-room. “What is it, Glubb?” he demanded of a kind of red-headed with a jockey’s build, who was coming toward us, cap in hand.

  “They’re not satisfied,” Glubb replied, in English, with a snigger that revealed his discolored teeth and creased his hideously bright eyes—those of a cockney street-urchin.

  “Who? Who?”

  A rapid discussion in English told us that after gru
mbling for a long time, the local peasants, whose hostility had increased incessantly, were about to pass from words to action. They intended to mount an armed attack on the workers engaged in the daily work of unscrewing the leather hoses of the pumps that brought our daily provisions of water.

  In spite of my apparent submission, I could not suppress a sort of snigger.

  “Ha ha!” I said. “It had to happen. Your work casts a shadow over the fields, hides the sun, devours the water from the wells and rivers. The other day, your trials of artificial rain drowned the peasants’ meager harvests, and your dynamite explosions excavating new wells killed children who were coming back from school in Montepreux. Now, here’s the revolt—you didn’t anticipate that. The voice of the people—there’s nothing like it to tame wealth, even science…”

  A thunderous glance from Goldfeller interrupted me. He seemed transfigured, from impassive, his attitude had turned aggressive; his thin and supple figure stiffened, as if it had snapped into shape.

  “Stupidity,” he cried, in a thunderous voice, “is devoid of strength against determined intelligence. Popular revolts are as old as the world; they’re not untamable. Do you think that the Pharaohs who built the Pyramids allowed themselves to be stopped by the squeals of an imbecile rabble? Come and see how these idiots are made to see reason.”

  He left the room swiftly. We followed him silently, all equally surprised by the sudden violence of his speech, usually more coldly imperious.

  By means of rapidly-rolling walkways we transported ourselves from one end of the city to the others, through vast avenues planted with trees, to the doors of a building formed like an ancient temple, on the fronton of which was inscribed, in letters of bronze, the word Government. The temple I had seen constructed a short while before, with a magical rapidity, but the word defining its purpose had only just been added, in accordance with a recent order.