“Look up,” said the Doctor, “and you’ll see the luminous waves flying through the firmament.”
Meanwhile, Arthur Brad had gone to stand in front of the telephonic transmitter in the right-hand section of the machine.
“Send the call signal, Doctor,” he said.
Ahmed Bey’s hand was on a porcelain lever. He pulled it downwards. There was a shrill hiss inside the machine. Crackling parks striped the obscurity of the immense round room, and suddenly, up above in the sky, a blinding luminous zigzag appeared, shone, paled and went out.
Beneath the light of a small electric lamp suspended in the middle of a semicircular screen, Ahmed Bey looked at the second hand of his watch and counted aloud: “Ten… twenty… thirty. One! Ten… twenty… thirty. Two! Ten… twenty… thirty. Three! Ten… twenty… thirty. Four! Messieurs, Jonathan Bild is alerted. Within five minutes, we shall be notified...”
In the silence that followed these words, the voice of Constant Brularion was heard, saying: “But what if Jonathan Bild is dead?”
“He isn’t,” replied the Doctor, coldly.
“How do you know?”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Ahmed Bey replied, in the same cold voice: “I disincarnated yesterday and my soul has been to visit Jonathan Bild on the planet Venus.”
A kind of frisson passed through the shoulders of the spectators drowned in the shadows, No one dared say anything more.
As Ahmed Bey gestured toward the sky, everyone raised their heads—and suddenly, a luminous zigzag, still vague, appeared in the night. Immediately, it became more distinct, passed in a flash and disappeared. At the same instant, sparks crackled and an electric bell resounded in the left-hand section of the machine.
“Bild is ready,” said the Doctor. “Speak, Brad!”
And without a whisper coming from the row of armchairs, in the silence of the tower, before the machines that resembled, in the darkness, crouching apocalyptic monsters, Arthur Brad slowly pronounced words that were about to resound, ten million leagues away, through the void of interplanetary space, in the ears of Jonathan Bild and the Venusians.
The portion of the sky circumscribed up above by the circle of the tower was striped continuously by luminous zigzags of different breadth and intensity.
Suddenly, Brad stopped speaking.
There were five minutes of a silence more profound than the silence of death.
Then other zigzags appeared, coming from space. Sparks crackled in the tower and words emerged resoundingly from the phonograph funnel.
“Jonathan Bild and thirty Venusian scientists, to Señorita Lolla Mendès and all of you, greetings!”
Chapter Two
In which there is an anxious wait
There was an amazement throughout the entire world that far surpassed the panic caused by the Fiery Wheel and the astonishment produced by the projected message that had arrived a few days afterwards.
On the morning after the extraordinary night, the Universel was the first to publish, beneath the signature of the astronomer Constant Brularion, an account of the meeting at the Gravelle laboratory, as well as the full text of the conversation between the Terran Arthur Brad and the Venusian Jonathan Bild.
All the great newspapers of the world produced a second edition on the same day reproducing the Universel’s prodigious news, which had been cabled, telegraphed and telephoned from everywhere to everywhere else during the morning.
Observatories, Academies and scientific societies were excited. National conferences were organized, and then, with surprising rapidity, a worldwide scientific congress, which would be held in Paris in the great hall of the Trocadero.
Polemics were, however, launched in the newspapers. The majority of the world’s great periodicals, all the French newspapers, the New York Herald, the Daily News, the Times, the Novoye Vremya and the Neue Freie Presse, sided with the Universel in accepting without discussion the veracity of the interplanetary communication. Cosmos, the Daily Telegraph, the Revue des Deux Mondes,14 the Daily Mail, the Gazette de Francfort and almost all the German newspapers denied the facts and talked about American hoaxes, French frivolity and English credulity. In these peevish periodicals Ahmed Bey was treated as a “mad spiritist,” Brad, Paul and Francisco as charlatans and Lolla as a woman “of dubious character,” and so far as they were concerned, Bild had never existed. As for Brularion, he was called, with the well-known finesse of Teutonic wit, an “astronomer of the hairdressing salon” and Monsieur Torpène became a “policeman escaped from Charenton.”
The Universel, however, was not put off by such trivia. Until the eleventh of July, the date when Venus would pass directly between the Earth and the sun and when, for astronomical reasons, the communications would have to be interrupted, the Universel published a daily account, in full, of the interplanetary communications.
Bild had no adventures to recount. The planet Venus was populated by a single race of beings forming a unique nation divided into two classes: the class of intellectual workers and the class of manual workers. There were no artists. On Venus, art had been replaced by science. Any worker of the inferior class could pass into the superior class by inventing a machine or apparatus capable either of facilitating Venusian life or hastening the solution of the principal problem of science that would enable communication with the inhabitants of other planets. In such a society, whose government was composed of a council of ten members made up of equal number of the two classes, elected by regional assemblies, Jonathan Bild was receiving generous hospitality.
The Venusians bore little resemblance to human beings. Their body was a bony frame solely designed to support an assemblage of muscles and nerves; they had no legs, but immense wings, which could be lowered and held rigid in parallel to rest on the ground. Their form and stature were those of an immense bird, but they had two arms, or, rather, two tentacles, garnished with thousands of long and powerful suckers; they made use of these as multiple hands, with a prodigious dexterity and rapidity.
Their head was, properly speaking, merely a lantern: a bony spherical case, half of which opened as an immense eye and the other half containing, speaking in human terms, a brain, a seat of intelligence. They had neither speech nor hearing as we understand them. They “spoke” by means of the eye, whose enormous pupil varied in form, color and luminous intensity in accordance with the modulations of thought. In addition to that visual language, however, they had a written language composed of signs analogous to those of terrestrial Morse telegraphy, which they traced on golden tablets with a colorant punch made of unbreakable matter. The fundamental symbols numbered fourteen, but they had thousands of variations scarcely evident to the human eye, and a single sign often expressed a thought that a human could only have rendered in several sentences.
Bild had learned fairly rapidly to understand the visual language and assimilate the graphic alphabet. The Venusians talked to him with their eyes and he replied by means of a punch and gold tablets.
With Jonathan Bild’s radiotelegrams, therefore, the Universel compounded the most extraordinary and exciting serial that the paper had ever published.
On the evening of the tenth of July, that serial came to an end—but at the World Scientific Conference that opened the same day at the Trocadero Dr. Ahmed Bey read his paper, entirely devoted to the machine for suppressing distance. He only mentioned the disincarnation of souls briefly, limiting himself on that subject to calling upon the testimony of Monsieur Torpène, Monsieur Brularion, Abbé Normat, Dr. Payen and Professor Martial. In the scientific world, those gentlemen enjoyed such a reputation for intelligence, probity, wisdom and common sense that no doubt was raised, even among the scientific delegates from Germany.
From the day after the opening of the Conference onwards, the opposing newspapers ceased their polemics and finally conceded the truth. A book was published, under the auspices of a financial and scientific committee. It contained Ahmed Bey’s paper in full, countersigned by
Arthur Brad and Paul de Civrac, the record of the first session of the Conference, a description of the plans of the rediotelephonograph and the complete text of Bild and Brad’s interplanetary conversations. The work had a print run in the millions, was translated into twenty-three languages, and was distributed throughout the world.
Its conclusion was this:
In his last telephonogram, Jonathan Bild announced that, at the exact moment of the inferior conjunction of the Earth and Venus, he will embark with six Venusians in a traveling apparatus that the Venusian scientists have just completed. In terrestrial terms, that will be at nine p.m. on the eleventh of July. The distance from Earth to Venus being then about eleven million leagues, and the Venusian apparatus traveling at ten thousand leagues an hour on average, Bild expects to arrive on Earth forty-five days and twenty hours after his departure from Venus. It will, therefore, be on the twenty-sixth of August at approximately five p.m. that the Venusian apparatus will touch down on terrestrial soil. The people who have read these lines are requested to notify the nearest telegraph office of anything in the sky or on the ground that seems out of the ordinary on or around the date of August twenty-sixth.
That was signed by Arthur Brad, Ahmed Bey and Paul de Civrac, and countersigned by thirty of the most celebrated scientists in the world, including Monsieur Torpène.
The book in question, entitled The Earth and Venus, was published simultaneously in all the capitals of the world on the fifteenth of July. It was distributed profusely, gratuitously. The newspapers advertised it on a daily basis and also reprinted the conclusion.
And the entire Earth waited.
Meanwhile, in Paris, in the midst of an enormous affluence in which all aristocracies mingled with enthusiastic democracy, the marriage of Lolla Mendès and Paul de Civrac was celebrated. Arthur Brad and Ahmed Bey were Lolla’s witnesses, Monsieur Torpène and Francisco were Paul’s. The immense crowd was finally able to contemplate the young woman and the young man who had left their original bodies on the planet Mercury—for the full story of the successive disincarnations and reincarnations had been published the day before in the newspapers under the signature of Ahmed Bey, with the official authorization of Monsieur Torpène and the formal ratification of the French government.
Ahmed Bey, Arthur Brad and Francisco were no les admired and acclaimed—and in the mind of the multitude, confounded in the same unique thought, the certainly was implanted from then on that anything as possible; humankind was beginning to sense that it was godlike.
It was in a private apartment in Ahmed Bey’s house that the newlyweds lived while awaiting the construction of a villa in the grounds of the interplanetary laboratory at Gravelle. The day after his marriage, Paul de Civrac was appointed director of the laboratory by the French government, to which Ahmed Bey had made a gift of it. Arthur Brad accepted the position of chief of interplanetary communications; Captain José Mendès requested the liquidation of his retirement pension and Francisco became the new family’s steward. As for Bild, he was to be entrusted with the foundation and direction of a laboratory similar to the one in Paris, which the United States government intended to build, along with a radiotelephonograph, in the vicinity of New York.
During the night of the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth of August, few civilized people on Earth were asleep, and on the day of the twenty-sixth, normal work was abandoned. In the cities and rural areas, on the roofs and terraces of houses, in public squares and streets, in the midst of fields and on the summits of mountains, people watched, directing reflecting and refracting astronomical instruments, naval telescopes and simple binoculars at all points of the sky.
All the telegraphic and telephonic offices in the entire world were at the ready; senior functionaries of the postal, telephonic and telegraphic services of every nation were permanently stationed in their offices.
That feverish expectation was not entirely due to curiosity. In fact, before separating, the governmental delegates to the World Scientific Conference had voted a prize of ten million francs to be divided between the first person to indicate the Venusian vessel to a post office, the employees of that office and the people in charge of the line at the posts relaying the message. All telegrams were to be transmitted immediately by the most direct route to the central office in Paris, and sent from there to the telegraph station installed at the Gravelle laboratory.
In the laboratory itself, along with Ahmed Bey, Arthur Brad, Paul and Lolla de Civrac, José Mendès and Francisco, delegates of all the great scientific societies in the world were stationed, one from each society. There were also representatives of governments, newspaper editors, and a host of reporters. Everyone was eating and lodging in houses near the grounds of the laboratory; the present tenants were sub-letting apartments, outbuildings and individual rooms at crazy prices. A company selling collapsible houses erected a kind of vast caravanserai in a field, containing two thousand places—which were filled in three hours.
The first telegram arrived at two o’clock in the morning on the twenty-fifth of August. It read: Honolulu. Venusian machine visible in sky. David Glenko.
“We need to wait for confirmation of the news and a description of the machine,” said Ahmed Bey. “Optical illusions will be innumerable.”
Indeed, from one minute to the next, further telegrams arrived. Soon, the hundred receivers that had been installed did not pause for a second. The operators worked in one hour shifts and the telegrams were brought to the work-room where Ahmed Bey, Brad and Civrac were stationed, with fifty interpreters. The Venusian apparatus was appearing at all points of the globe. It was seen everywhere. It was about to land everywhere.
The hours passed in feverish activity.
“It’s necessary to wait for one of these thousand of correspondents to confirm the preceding one, to specify the point at which the apparatus will land and to give a succinct description of the apparatus itself. Until then, illusions, optical illusions…”
The night and day of the twenty-fifth and the night of the twenty-sixth brought nothing conclusive. By nine a.m. on the twenty-sixth, 16,895 telegrams had been received, but no correspondent, having sent one, had sent a second…
During the day on the twenty-sixth, the flood of telegrams abated.
“Daylight isn’t as propitious as daylight for imaginative illusions,” said the smiling Ahmed Bey. “Besides which, it’s not until after five o’clock in the afternoon according to Bild’s notification and out calculations, that the thing ought to arrive.”
The day went by without any confirmation of a prior telegram.
From seven p.m. onwards, the number of dispatches increased by the minute.
“Is the projector ready?” Ahmed Bey asked Brad.
“Yes.”
“The phonographs?”
“Them too.”
At the summit of the tower an electric beacon had been set up which would light up as soon as the arrival of the Venusian apparatus was indubitable, and four phonographs, one of enormous power, would hurl to the four points of the compass the words announcing the time and place of the marvelous landing.
The entire evening and night of the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh went by without the coppery voice of the phonographs ringing out.
On the twenty-seventh, at eight a.m., Ahmed Bey, Brad and Paul de Civrac lay down on mattresses in the workroom and feel profoundly asleep. They had not slept for forty-eight hours. Francisco, stationed nearby, had orders to wake them as soon as the checkers who were numbering and classifying the telegrams received one duplicating a signature already seen.
At nine a.m., Lolla and her father arrived. They sat down in the workroom and chatted to Francisco near the three sleepers, waiting...
But the entire day went by: nothing.
By six p.m., the number of telegrams received had reached 359,000, but they all bore different signatures. There was not a single confirmation.
Having slept, eaten and taken a few minutes’ physical exerci
se in the courtyard surrounded by the laboratory buildings, at nine p.m. on the twenty-seventh, Ahmed Bey, Brad and Paul de Civrac sat down in the workroom again.
Ten o’clock chimed, then eleven, and then midnight...
“As long as Bild and the Venusians haven’t made a mistake in their calculations, said Paul. “The slightest error might have sent them into the infinity of interplanetary space.”
“Yes,” said Brad, “if their apparatus isn’t steerable once launched. But if it is steerable, they could repair any error of direction while en route...”
“Unless unknown laws of attraction have sent them off course,” murmured the Doctor, scanning the four hundred and twenty-second-thousandth telegram with his eyes. Almost immediately, however, he uttered a stifled exclamation and said: “Listen!” And with the sudden emotion that his exclamation had provoked, he read: “Astronomical Observatory Gaurisankar, Himalaya, 27 August, 3 a.m. Incandescent bolide arrived over Earth, from direction of Venus. Telegrams will follow at fifteen minute intervals. Archibald Simpson.”
“This time,” said Arthur Brad, “I think it really is Jonathan Bild. I knew Archibald Simpson in Boston. He’s the coolest and most circumspect astronomer in the entire world.”
“I know,” said Ahmed Bey. “That’s why the telegram caught my attention.”
“Let’s wait,” Paul concluded.
And fifteen minutes later, another telegram from Arthur Simpson arrived.
27 August. 3-15. Bolide increasing in size.
At quarter past three, astronomically, counting from the conventional midnight, it must be night-time at Gaurisankar,” said Paul.
“And daylight here,” said Brad.
Immediately, however, further telegrams from the far side of the world confirmed Archibald Simpson’s information. The later concluded with a final telegram:
The Fiery Wheel Page 23