The Mirror of Present Events

by Brian Stableford

  And Sauter turned round to lean over the press.

  Escander knew the boss; he knew that when the editor-in-chief said “That’s all,” the best thing to do was to go away without asking for further explanations. In any case, he had no observations to make. He turned on his heel and went back to the editorial offices to close the drawers in which the latest pages of the history of the Valois were sleeping.

  A colleague asked him a question: “On a mission?”

  “Yes.”

  “Far?”

  “Spain.”

  “Lucky devil!”

  Escander made it a principle never to say exactly where he was going or what he was going to do.

  Mathilde was on time at the rendezvous. Clad in a black traveling costume, enveloped in a fur wrap and wearing a cap, she would be able to confront the journey she was undertaking without suffering too much from the cold.

  The young woman had required a great deal of energy and will-power, not only to convince her mother of the utility of what she was doing but also to prevent the old lady from witnessing the departure. She had finally succeeded in those ends and, her mind tranquil, in that regard at least, she had hastened to the offices of Le Monde.

  She had herself taken to Sauter’s office, into which she was immediately introduced. On seeing her, the editor-in-chief came to meet her and extended his hands to her.

  “Excellent, Mademoiselle,” he said. “All my compliments; you’re resolved—that’s a trump card in our hand. Have confidence—we’ll win through. We’ve got them, and something tells me that we shall have them still.”

  He invited the young woman to sit down, and rang.

  “Has Monsieur Escander arrived?”

  “Monsieur Escander is waiting.”

  “Send him in.”

  Félix Escander was not one of those people lacking in foresight, whom events take by surprise. He was, on the contrary, always ready to depart on any mission, and when he presented himself, he was wearing a perfectly-fitting suit over a woolen undergarment and calf-length boots, and carrying in his hand a fur-lined helmet equipped with goggles to protect his eyes. In addition, he had a leather bag slung over his shoulder that seemed to be crammed with numerous items.

  The editor-in-chief made the introductions. Escander studied the young woman, who, for her part, cast a furtive but searching gaze over her companion. Was the double examination favorable or not? No one said a word,

  Sauter glanced at the electric wall-clock. “It’s time,” he said. “Let’s go up.”

  He led the two young people to the elevator, which deposited them on the reinforced concrete floor of the terrace in a single bound.

  Two aircraft, number twenty-one and fifteen, were there, the pilots standing next to their machines. While Sauter gave them his final instructions, Mathilde glanced down into the street.

  Dusk was falling rapidly, but the obscurity was not yet sufficiently dense for the young woman to be unable to see the usual feverish crowd awaiting the appearance of the paper that was going to commence publication of the manuscript that very evening. A rumor was rising from that crowd similar to the sound of the sea.

  Sauter came back to join the young woman. With a broad gesture he indicated the crowd.

  “That’s our strength,” he said. “Nothing can prevail against it, and it’s with us. No dyke can stop the flood on the day when the public powers don’t do their duty, their whole duty. On that day, Le Monde will cry: “Attack!” and the Ministry will be borne away like a wisp of straw. Remember that, Mademoiselle, and draw from this spectacle the courage and confidence you need.”

  “I have no need of that vision, which nevertheless frightens and delights me at the same time. Your confidence and devotion, Monsieur, have armed me.” After a brief pause, the young woman added: “Then again, the day when I gave my heart, I also gave my life. It belongs to Paul Ménestin; I can, you see, sacrifice it for him, if that is necessary.”

  “Nothing leads me to suppose that your life will be at stake in the adventure we’re launching; if I’d had the slightest fear in that regard, I would neither have solicited nor accepted your collaboration; but I’m very glad, nevertheless, to see you in this disposition—it is my guarantee that I can count on you.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  A voice rang out behind them: “All set!”

  Sauter drew the young woman toward airplane 21, where the pilot was already in his cockpit.

  Escander helped Mathilde aboard, and she soon found herself sitting in a narrow cabin in the midst of a heap of furs. The seats were arranged in such a manner that they could be elongated to firm a comfortable bed of sorts, garnished with a thin mattress and a pneumatic pillow. The cabin was constituted by a light aluminum framework mounted with narrow strips of silk rendered perfectly translucent with the aid of a varnish whose composition was no longer a secret for anyone.

  Escander was soon installed in his turn; the electric motor was started up and, running along a plane that surpassed the edge of the terrace slightly, the aircraft took off, without any shock or any sound other than that of its propeller sweeping through the atmosphere.

  A formidable clamor saluted its departure.

  Mathilde and Escander were on their way to Neustadt, and perhaps toward the light of truth.

  Le Monde, although it had raised its print run to one million two hundred thousand, was obliged to resume printing in the middle of the night, so far was that offering below the demand.

  The first fragment of the manuscript, which we shall make it a duty to reproduce in full, was preceded by the following note:

  Today we are publishing the first fragment of the manuscript of the French engineer Paul Ménestin, kept prisoner aboard the German aerobagne 32.

  We have studied the whole very carefully, sorted out the sheets, and there is no significant gap between them. It really is the same pen that has written all the pages, the same mind that has dictated them; everywhere, in these dolorous lines, one senses the same soul palpitating with anguish and despair. It is that of a tracked, martyrized individual.

  It is a frightful, incredible thing, but it is so. A human being, innocent of any crime, is in the hands of torturers who have resolved the defeat of his will or his death.

  As is known, the entire manuscript is written on detached pages, the slightest white space of which is covered with a fine and compact handwriting; the last bears a scarcely-formed name.

  The ensemble of the sheets was rolled up in a piece of cloth that might have been a handkerchief; on that fabric, in large letters, the following heart-rending appeal can be read:

  “I implore, in the name of almighty God, in the same of everything sacred that a human being has in his soul, the man or woman who finds this to make a copy of it and then send the original to the President of the Council of Ministers in Paris.

  “If that person does not have news of their dispatch at the end of a month, the certified copy should be sent to one of the major Paris newspapers.

  “It is a prisoner sequestered on behalf of the most and most odious despotism, a Frenchman abducted from his abode and martyrized for having wanted, in spite of everything, to remain French and not to betray his country, who, aboard the German aerobagne 32, is uttering a desperate cry and appealing to the justice of the world. Death and madness are perpetually at his sides; he is living in their shadow; have pity on him.”

  Le Monde added:

  It is from the captain of the transatlantic liner Foch, who has complied in every respect with the instructions of the prisoner, that we have obtained the photographic copies of which we are publishing the first extract today, and it is in the name of the immortal justice to which the prisoner makes such a moving appeal that we are doing so.

  This, then, is the first fragment of the manuscript found in the leather bottle:

  IV. The First Chapter of the Manuscript:

  What there was in the Depths of the Ravine

  It is necessary
, in order that anyone should be able to add credence to this story, for me to go back for a short distance in the course of the recent events in which I have been involved. That way, it will be easier to understand the motives of those who have imprisoned me, perhaps for the remainder of my poor existence. I have only one hope, which is that this manuscript—which is, I swear, the expression of the truth—will fall into friendly hands.

  But what power can break my prison of steel, wandering at an altitude of four thousand meters in infinite space?

  At any rate, I still have hope, crazy as that appears. I shall hope until the last sigh...

  I am twenty-eight years old. I had graduated from the École des Mines when I was solicited to come to the Neustadt Steelworks in the quality of an engineer able to speak fluent German. The contract I signed only bound me for a year—a trial period—and was worth on my return a considerable sum, which would enable me to realize a secret project very dear to me. I wanted to get married and my engagement had taken place a few days before my departure. That absence has, alas, lasted twenty-six months.

  As soon as I arrived in Neustadt I sensed that I was surrounded by hostile sentiments, albeit hidden beneath a cold and stiff politeness. Then I became vaguely conscious that the work with which I was charged was not really that for which I was destined. Spies were attached to my heels, keeping watch on my actions and my words; I had evidence of that several times, and soon acquired the conviction that I was not mistaken.

  The first month passed uneventfully; I received letters from France that made my life less bleak and less unhappy. Although I was engaged in the capacity of a metallurgical engineer, I was not allowed to penetrate into the interior of the factories. There were, in addition, various doors of the latter that bore notices forbidding entry, under the threat of penalties whose rigor appeared to me to be excessively severe, and out of proportion to a transgression of discipline on the part of a worker.

  On the first day I was taken to a studio that had been specially allocated to me, and I was asked to depict on paper various items of agricultural machines whose broad outlines were indicated to me, as well as the purposes for which they were to be used. Their construction did not concern me; I had merely to draw up the blueprints; once those were finished, their fate became unknown to me.

  The ensemble of factories affected the form of a rectangle some five kilometers long, composed of three groups separated by yards closed by iron doors in which there were not windows; all the buildings were illuminated from above and offered to nothing to the eye externally but entirely solid blank walls. The first of the groups was situated about four kilometers from the city and the last backed up to a very deep ravine whose steeply sloping sides were planted with pines and ash trees so dense and bushy that they formed a thick vault of foliage, hiding the long and narrow bottom of the gorge completely. The straightness of the lines and the orderliness of the plantations suggested an idea of artifice rather than something natural.

  Access to that ravine was forbidden, not only by a series of notices repeating the imperative formula Eintritt in diese Werkstaette streng verboten. Gefahr vorhanden. Jeder Bruch schwer gestraft—Entry to these works is strictly forbidden. Danger. Any infraction will be rigorously punished—but also by a barbed wire fence that was probably electrified.

  The place was, however, less ingrate than the arid plains that immediately surrounded the city. I chose it as the goal of the rare walks that I was able to take on Sundays when the weather permitted, to stretch my legs and saturate my lungs with fresh air. I took a book with me then and, lying in the grass, not far from the ravine, or sitting on a stone, I read or daydreamed until dusk.

  I was absolutely alone, but I did not take long to discover that I was watched from a distance by a man who, hidden in a small peasant cottage, spied on me with the aid of a telescope.

  Meanwhile, what happened in the steelworks continued to surprise me a great deal. After two months of discreet observation, I was convinced that the factories were laboring in the shadows on a project far more mysterious that the manufacture of any kind of pacific equipment.

  Furthermore, it seemed evident to me that the quantities of raw materials that we received did not correspond to the finished products that emerged from the factories. Ostensibly, new tractors with shiny paintwork, plows, and combine harvesters were being sent forth in large numbers, but that might have masked other manufactures.

  All these observations gradually led me to seek the solution of the enigma. One can easily understand how reluctant I was to lend a hand, even involuntarily, to work that I sensed to be perfidious and the deliberate violation of treaties intended to guarantee the security of my homeland.

  While roaming the surroundings I had, moreover, made further discoveries. Enormous ventilation shafts, cleverly dissimulated in clumps of trees, surrounded the ravine I mentioned, and did not seem to belong directly to the factory in which I was employed. That drew me to take my investigations further; I then remarked that, although the number of workers was not excessive, the trains that brought them to the city were packed. Where, then, was that multitude going? It is true that the trains went further and passed over the ravine on the bridge forbidden to pedestrians.

  To know: that was now my perpetual desire. In order to satisfy it, I took one of the trains and pretended to be engrossed in a technical brochure that I held in front of my face. The line, belonging to the steelworks, was reserved for its personnel. And I remained on it until the other side of the bridge, when I played the part of someone perceiving his mistake. I then took another train heading in the other direction—but I had been able to make a few interesting observations.

  The trains that succeeded one another every few minutes were composed of a locomotive and three carriages. On departure they were filled, and a large number of workers massed on the station platforms waited for the following trains. At the factories, about a third got off; the other two-thirds only left the train on the far side of the bridge, and were swallowed up by a squat building whose doors closed behind them.

  Those facts confirmed my suspicions. There were other factories, and one of them must be at the bottom of the ravine. That idea, suddenly engendered within me, was imposed more by a kind of instinct than by reasoning.

  I resolved to clarity the matter.

  At the restaurant where I took my meals, a man—a Polish foreman who thought he had slid far enough into my intimacy to render me a few small services—came to exchange a few words with me every evening, and soon began sitting with me at the table. I saw no harm in that; to begin with our conversations only dealt with generalities. The evening when I had decided to go over the bridge with the aid of the subterfuge I have described, however, he asked me an unexpected question:

  “Do you know,” he said, “that a new toxic gas has just been discovered in France, whose effects appear to be terrible?”

  “I heard mention of it before my departure, but be sure that France is a pacifist country, which only ever takes up arms when attacked.”

  “What does it intend to do with it, then?”

  “So far as I know, purify some of our colonies that are infested with mosquitoes, and combat invasions of locusts in Algeria. In any case, all the elements of the gas are known; no mystery has been made of them.”

  “No, all the elements aren’t known; their composition and manufacture remain secret.”

  “I would be easy to find out,” I said, imprudently.

  The man looked at me strangely.

  “There would be an enormous fortune to be gained,” he said, playing with the crumbs scattered on the table with the tip of his knife.

  And I replied, no less stupidly: “I wouldn’t want to enrich myself at that price.”

  Scarcely had I pronounced those clumsy words than I regretted them, because, for the first time, I discovered, merely by the way that my interlocutor looked at me askance, how false and suspicious his gaze was.

  I certainly have no
excuse for my conduct, but it is appropriate to recall that I was there all alone, in a hostile environment, and that the man had appeared to take pity on my solitude, giving evidence of some sympathy for me.

  I was not, however, the master of the sentiment I had just expressed; he perceived that and immediately changed his attitude. He looked at me frankly and said: “I approve entirely; in any case, there are chemists here sufficiently distinguished to carry that work through if they wish. I only said that to point out that a fortune is sometimes easy to come by.”

  The conversation was diverted, and we separated after the meal.

  That man, who is certainly not Polish, was named Karl Koskutio, or at least said he was; people simply addressed him as Karl.

  When he had gone, I sensed the full gravity of my imprudence, but how could I diminish its effects? If I began to avoid him, I would show him that I now held him in suspicion and that I attached too much importance to the words we had exchanged. It was better—and I hold to that decision—not to allow my anxieties to show, and to continue my relations with him as in the past, while nevertheless exercising greater prudence.

  In spite of what had just happened, however, I did not abandon the idea of unveiling the secret of the factories, and, in order better to conserve the memory of what I was able to discover, I resolved to keep a journal of all the incidents that I witnessed or in which I participated.