He indicated the crowd, and the shouts and acclamations heard a little while ago responded to his imperious gesture, even more enthusiastic, and mingled with gibes and cries of fury directed at the official envoys, whom it was necessary to escort back into the elevator-lobby by an indirect route. That explosion of howls was combined with the rage of the unleashed tempest, in the midst of which Goldfeller, raising his powerful voice again, shouted in a somewhat ironic tone as he took his leave of his visitors: “Farewell, gentlemen.”
Turning toward me, he added: “Go with them, Bayoud. When you return, you can join me in my study in the governmental palace.”
I rejoined the prefect, his secretary and the senator in the elevator. When the elevator began its descent they were pale and mute, seemingly overwhelmed by amazement and alarm.
For myself, I was as surprised as they were. Was Goldfeller setting me free? Alone, without any surveillance, he was depending on me to accompany the three frightened companions to the ground. Through the metallic cage, the apparatus of which effectuated the descent with a calculated slowness, they were considering the spectacle of a veritable typhoon, without saying a word.
Beneath the clamor of the storm-clouds and fulgurant lightning-flashes, the wind howled, sweeping everything in its passage, twisting and uprooting trees—which flew away like leaves—stripping the roofs off houses, sweeping away like flies the curiosity-seekers and people waiting assembled at the bottom of the tower. We saw a squadron of armored cavalrymen on maneuvers in the countryside lifted from the earth and the riders flying through the torment; with their red trousers one might have taken them for bloody leaves torn from virgin vines by the autumn wind.
When the elevator stopped the ground was strewn with debris of every sort, whirling and falling back furiously. The anguished cries of the victims of the mighty tempest were lost in the clamor of the unleashed elements.
Torn between horror and the astonishment of finding myself free, I did not know what to say, or to decide. Should I flee? Go back up? All that I had seen in the last 24 hours surpassed in intensity what I had been able to see during my forced sojourn in the tower, and was further surpassed by what I now suspected.
Curiosity proved the stronger. I said goodbye to the astounded prefect and his companions, and went back up to the city.
VI. The Unknown
There I found streets buzzing with a population ignobly amused by the surprise of events. Leaning over the balustrades of the boulevards, they were all following with amused eyes the various incidents of the catastrophe unleashed by Goldfeller’s omnipotence.
“Depressed, the prefect.”
“All right!”
I hastened to the governmental palace. The bestial Moldo was on guard at the elevator. He laughed at the sight of me, stood aside to let me pass, and steered the apparatus, which deposited me in the immense hall that the Gem King called his study. It was empty.
Alone in that singular place, I made a tour of it, initially inspecting things with a suspicious eye. I thought it might perhaps be sufficient to press one of those buttons, turn one of those wheels or pull one of those levers to unleash one of the catastrophes whose organization had been planned by the demons gathered in this place.
The childish curiosity that doomed Bluebeard’s wife took hold of me. At ransom, I pressed a large ivory button set beside a large screen, and immediately saw, to my surprise, an image blacken, grow and come into focus on the square of white canvas extended before my eyes.
The image depicted a garden, an admirable pathway in a park bathed in sunlight, where the shadows of leaves stirred gently on the ground—for the screen was not limited to the photography of the invisible; it was cinematographic. After a few seconds, I saw appear before me at the corner of the path the white and marvelous form of a woman: the most admirable female form that I had ever contemplated in my life. I scarcely had time to recognize the young woman glimpsed on the pond, the musician of a short while before…the sound of footsteps made me turn my head: Goldfeller was behind me. To my great surprise, far from seeming irritated, I saw that he was smiling.
He began by pressing the button of the apparatus to make the image that had interested me disappear from the screen.
“Ah!” he said, thereafter, almost cheerfully. “You came back. You aren’t afraid?”
I shook my head and replied: “No, I’m curious—that’s all.”
“Curious and even…indiscreet, still.”
“Forgive me. It was by chance…a button touched by mistake.”
He made a disdainful gesture. “No harm done. A week ago, that simple gesture might have cost you your life. Today…”
“Today,” I challenged him, audaciously, “I’m satisfied: I know why you’ve constructed this tower. You’re hiding a woman. The means are enormous, but the object certifies the immensity of the enterprise…”
He burst out laughing. The echoes rolled around the metallic vaults—but he suddenly stopped.
“In fact,” he murmured, “there’s a little truth in what you say. But I don’t want you to retain that sentimentally clichéd image of me. Come.”
A narrow strip of moving carpet hoisted us up to the top of the room; there, Goldfeller placed me in a sort of cage fitted into the wall that suddenly opened behind us. It was as if we were projected into the open air by the extensible uprights of a ladder at the end of which our feeble cage was trembling; then the uprights, turning on pivots, brought us smooth back to the wall of the tower, against which we leaned after being suspended above nearly two kilometers of empty space.
We set foot on the soil of a garden, in a host of greenery. Goldfeller maneuvered the strange apparatus to send it back again—after which, with an amiable gesture, he beckoned to me to walk beside him along a pathway strewn with white sand, both sides of which were lined with russet marble sphinxes, polished by time, devoured by decay and corroded by the Sun for centuries.
At the end of the tunnel of verdure residential buildings appeared, made of roseate brick and stone, with a vast perron and a porphyry balustrade. Framed by a set of French windows, I saw coming toward us the woman of whom my imagination had made the innocent genius of this strange place, a thousand times more beautiful than I had been able to glimpse or dream.
“Yella,” said the Gem King, “here’s someone who has only stayed with us in order to see you.”
The delightful creature that I saw smiling before me appeared to me to be like the princess of an Arabian tale, whom the instruction of evil or protective genies has made prisoner in the depths of an enchanted palace, fortuitously discovered.
Pale and supple, with her precious golden hair, her eyes as blue and translucent as profound glaciers, she came to stand before us, greeted me with a regal smile and offered her forehead to Goldfeller, who kissed it.
I heard the young woman murmur: “Good evening, Father.”
That charming and ethereal being was the daughter of the man of implacable will whose prisoner I had been, and in whom I was not long in discovering the most tender of fathers, most anxious for a health that he deemed precarious. Stroking his child’s golden hair with his hardened fingers, that tamer of men stared at the frail Yella, and began to question her in an anxious voice.
“How do you feel, my child?”
She reassured him with a nod of the head and a distracted blink, directing all her curiosity at me, while I rediscovered on her father’s forehead the slightly irritated furrowing in which there was more anger than sadness. One might have thought that concern for the gentle creature susceptible to suffering was mingled there with the willful determination of the Gem King.
Apart from that impatient irritation, however, Goldfeller, under the gentle influence of Yella, seemed a different man. He was almost cheerful, leading the conversation tactfully, warning me by means of interruptions that were swift without being abrupt of what it was necessary to avoid saying in the young woman’s presence. I ended up understanding that Yella li
ved in Aeria with no suspicion of its history, without knowing anything of the imminent complications of the fabulous adventure above which she floated in a solitude that was perhaps necessary to her excessive sensitivity—but slightly burdensome, to judge by the eager welcome that she gave to a guest for an evening.
“Will Monsieur be dining with us?” She interrogated her father with a supplicant expression. Goldfeller left the reply to me, and, as might be imagined, I made haste to accept. For myself, the prospect of a few hours spent with that gracious young woman constituted a rare joy, after a year of exclusive contact with Rassmusses, Hartwigs and Kostiches. To substitute for the grating or ferocious voices of those demons the measure and musical voice of Yella, and to rise above that atmosphere of aggressive fever to respire the air of softness and peace that floated in the beautiful gardens—what a restful and refreshing dream!
Goldfeller seemed submissive to the influence himself and on hearing him thus, devoting himself at hazard to a slightly rambling conversation, seeing him walking under the trees beside a beautiful young woman who was his child, I was surprised to find the man that there is in the depths of every human beast made savage by pride, the spirit of wealth and domination.
A few meters beneath us Aeria was blazing and buzzing; its confused rumor came to expire at the foot of the immense park with which Goldfeller had surrounded this retreat. A few old domestics, smiling women of mixed race, looked after Yella, while Siam-Si or Moldo would be on watch outside the wall, silent watchdogs attentive to the noises of the external world.
After dinner, we went to the summer-house in the garden to make music. Yella sang; she accompanied herself on the harp, realizing, with her hair slightly ruffled and the floating silk of her dress, a delightfully young form within her old-fashioned appearance. At random, we deciphered all sorts of old tunes and modern music; it was an art in which I had some skill, which won me a great success with my companion. She made me promise to come back to help her read a recent publication full of difficulties. I promised everything that she wished, of course, questing in my turn in Goldfeller’s eyes for the assent that would be indispensable to keeping that promise.
Seated on a divan, the Gem King smoked cigars without saying anything, gripped once again by his mysterious preoccupations. He nodded his head by way of polite acquiescence, letting the two of us pass through all the enthusiasms of the little improvised concert.
Abruptly, at about 10 p.m., he gave the signal for departure; hastening the separation and the farewells, he drew me into the depths of the garden along a round pathway, from the top of which the eye plunged into a deserted and silent street.
We were walking rapidly, when a heart-rending scream suddenly rang out; there was a noise of stamping feet and a concert of irritated voices, the soft and muffled sounds of blows silently exchanged by people fighting a short distance away from us. We were able to make out three men fighting one another furiously, trampling the body of a woman lying on the ground.
I wanted to shout, but Goldfeller grabbed me by the arm and squeezed, murmuring in an altered voice, in the imperious and brutal tone that I had not heard for several hours: “Silence!”
Meanwhile, two of the combatants seemed to be combining their efforts against the third, and the contest was cut short. We saw the wretches seize their adversary by the shoulders and legs and hoist him awkwardly on to the iron railings that bordered the wall encircling the city, from which they let him fall into the void. From that height, the noise of his fall was lost in the darkness. The two accomplices ran off and disappeared around the corner of the street, abandoning the woman lying in the roadway, unconscious or dead.
I looked at Goldfeller. He was pale but impassive, and ready to start walking again. In a low voice, I said to him: “Since you are the master here, will you let that crime go unpunished? By searching the woman’s body, it’s easy…”
He imposed silence on me with a gesture and said, simply: “I’ll see to it.”
He drew me away. I was obliged to follow him, so upset that I still do not know how I came to find myself alone in the middle of an avenue, from which I went home.
Such was the uncertainty and the incoherence of my sentiments with regard to that man that I suspected him momentarily of complicity in the murder I had just witnessed. His evasive tone, his preoccupied attitude and the pitiless rigor to which all his actions testified, all seemed at first to authorize me to mistake for an assassination ordered by him what I soon discovered to be a banal episode in the daily life of the new city.
If I note this stray fact, ultimately of no particular importance, here it is because it marked for me the point at which the situation we were in became complicated, and events began to hasten toward a terrible outcome, which Goldfeller’s pride had not foreseen but with which he had already been secretly preoccupied for some time.
For as long as the work of construction had lasted, the masses of men in the tower had expended the active ardor of their energy in the fatigue of daily labor; to the few brawls inevitable in the life of such a human aggregation, the authority of the selected overseers had served as a sufficient brake, and the city’s police had been scarcely more than construction-site security guards.
Since the work had been finished, however—since the cosmopolitan population of workmen had understood that, after having constructed a city, it would become permissible for them to live in it in idleness—things had no longer been the same. From that idleness a considerable peril had germinated, unforeseen by the Gem King. In a matter of days, brawls, attacks, scenes of murder, drunkenness and even greater scandals began to terrorize the inhabitants. A rather brutal police force, hastily organized and a trifle excessive in its measures, augmented the disorder instead of remedying it.
For myself, since my encounter with Yella, I scarcely paid any heed to the alarming rumors reported every morning by the few newspapers that had been founded, and it required a seemingly-trivial incident to attract my attention in that direction.
VII. The Festival of Gems
One morning, when I went out, as I did every day, like a good idler, to buy the newspaper in which I was accustomed to read the news, I found the kiosks closed and surrounded by crowds that were commenting malevolently on the first act of authority by the master of the city. Goldfeller had forbidden the sale of newspapers until further notice.
Without lending my ears any longer to the popular discontent, which seemed to me to be rumbling seriously, I hastened to join the billionaire, whom I found in his immense study in the governmental palace, surrounded by his general staff and in an attitude of deliberation.
Immediately, he barked at me: “Well, what are they saying?”
“They’re saying,” I said, “They’re saying…that they’re not content.”
“We can see that perfectly well,” said the Gem King. “Hernu, open the screens.”
In response to a signal, Hernu, the technician, climbed a ladder and started running along an iron balcony mounted under the ceiling of the room, pushing buttons a intervals. In response to each gesture, a little luminous disk appeared in the immense roof, like a distant eye, whose gaze was reflected in images on an entire sequence of automatically-uncovered screens on the metallic wall in front of us. Imagine a sequence of plaques on which we saw appear in succession, by means of instant cinematography, the simultaneous life of the entire city.
Goldfeller, Hartwig, old Rassmuss and his assistant Kandy, Kositch and myself went from one screen to the next, marveling with surprise, considering the movement of the crowds evoked before our eyes. We saw the passionate discussions of the crowds succeeded, within a few minutes, by frenzy: a fit of sudden anger, in which the disappointed idlers rushed the empty kiosks, overturned them, set them on fire, and then, tearing up everything they could disturb or break, began to drag through the streets the debris of lighting apparatus, chairs and benches, their open mouths signifying that revolutionary songs were accompanying these scenes of pillage.
“They’ll destroy the city,” Kositch murmured.
“But we must stop them,” I said, running to Goldfeller. “You, Monsieur, stop them, speak to them.”
Scornfully, he shrugged his shoulders, making no reply.
“Will you give me a free hand?” Kositch asked, coldly. “With a few of my little sulfurous bombs…”
Goldfeller uttered a cruel laugh. He looked at Kositch, thoughtfully.
The ancient voice of old Rassmuss suddenly piped up: “No unnecessary violence, Master. What’s needed? To deflect the attention of these irritated children momentarily. Give me one hour—two at the most.” He trotted over, murmured a few words in Goldfeller’s ear.
He latter’s face cleared. “Do it,” he said.
Rassmuss had already disappeared through a door abruptly opened in the wall, followed by Goldfeller. We remained alone still following the progress on the screens of the spectacle of a mob that was growing by the minute. It was easy to see that nothing would stop those madmen in the fury of destruction, and that 1900 meters above the Earth, human folly remained the same.
An hour and a quarter after the Gem King and the old chemist had left, however, the symptoms of popular frenzy appeared to be calming down. On the screens, we saw the moving masses slow their incoherent surge, pausing momentarily. A strange stupor seemed to paralyze the participants and the rare spectators who were watching them placidly from the doorways and windows of houses. Some yawned; others stretched themselves lazily; some sat down on the ground, others lay down, a few suddenly fell down as if stunned. Within a few minutes the streets were strewn with bodies succumbing to some kind of sudden fatigue.
“Well,” said Goldfeller’s voice behind us, “now that they’re asleep, let’s go home and discuss the means of procuring them a pleasant awakening.”
Without giving us time to reflect, he led us away. Inside the elevator, before we left the palace, Rassmuss—who had followed us—gave each of us a partial mask designed to cover the mouth, nose and ears without impeding breathing. Equipped with that apparatus, we advanced into the streets.
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