The Nyctalope and The Tower of Babel

by Jean de La Hire

  The aircraft was hovering over the mansion. The propellers were blowing a strong wind over the yard, stirring up the leaves around Louis and Julienne. A few passers-by on the road outside the gates stopped and watched the spectacle. Everyone made comments about the appearance of the strange machine.

  “Monstrous! I didn’t think such a thing existed,” the governess told Bertrand, who in turn whispered back:

  “Me neither. It’s incredible. Hey, it looks like a door is opening under the thing!”

  Indeed, a panel in the lower part of the helicopter had just slid open, sliding into the side. For a minute nothing happened, then a kind of huge soap bubble appeared in the doorway and despite the blasts from the propellers it started drifting slowly to the ground. A second one showed up, followed by others. It was raining bubbles, slightly iridescent, glistening in the morning sun, falling over the mansion.

  At this stupefying sight the onlookers started laughing, maybe to evade the fright that they were no doubt feeling. Louis even started clapping, as if they he were watching a circus show.

  At this moment one of the bubbles touched down and exploded with a booming “pop.” A clear liquid spread over the ground. At the place where it spilled the grass seemed to stand straight up, as if drawn by a mysterious force. Another bubble popped, then another and another… Every time, some liquid poured out over the plants and bushes, effecting some kind of powerful pull over them, uprooting them and forcing them upward. Louis was hit by the liquid and his feet left the ground. He started floating up. He turned to Julienne and saw that she, too, had been touched. She was already six feet off the ground.

  The mansion was not spared. The roof tiles, washed with the weird substance, were flying off as if carried away in a windstorm. The whole atmosphere was supernatural, surreal. Only the walls resisted the magnetic force. Mademoiselle Bron, whose arms had been splashed by the strange liquid, was floating out of the window. Bertrand had grabbed her leg and was trying to hold her back as she clutched desperately to the window frame.

  The helicopter had regained altitude. The yard was completely devastated. Julienne was waving her arms 30 feet in the air, just over Louis who had held onto a branch at the top of an oak tree, trying to stop “falling into the sky,” so to speak. The mansion was being torn apart. Its roof, attic and even the walls now were crumbling, stone by stone.

  Bertrand was trying to keep himself inside the window and had to let go of Mademoiselle Bron, who was swept away. But he struggled in vain. Like his son in the yard, who was soaring up along with the old oak tree, he too was inevitably dragged up.

  Five minutes later, the magnificent Saint-Clair residence was nothing but a pile of rubble. All the personnel had been sucked up into the sky by a mysterious, merciless enemy. The Nyctalope and his family owed their lives to the trip to Le Bourget airport whereby they were not home at the time of the terrible attack.

  CHAPTER V

  Inside the Tower

  Hubert de Pibriac and his companions had talked all night long about the attack on the Versailles residence of the Nyctalope. Hubert had learned about it during the conversation he had had with the radio service. Saint-Clair had told him the details in a calm voice, interrupted only by the static and breaks caused by the storm hitting Fort-Lamy and that disrupted radio communication. Pibriac found out that the mansion had been destroyed, his personnel decimated and a few passers-by, who happened to be in the vicinity of the mansion, had stated seeing the poor people literally “fall into the sky” and suffer a ghastly death in the higher atmosphere. Pierre was called in by Hubert and listened painfully to his father.

  Hubert then told the facts to his comrades and informed them about what Saint-Clair had found on returning from Le Bourget. The extraordinary and tragic event left them all speechless. Pierre, who had known the servants of the mansion since childhood, was deeply shocked. Everyone tried to comfort him the best they could. After telling Saint-Clair that his thoughts and support were with him, Hubert bid farewell to him and promised to contact him again when they got to the Tower of Babel.

  They started forming hypotheses about what might have happened, but they saw right away that Pierre was having a hard time getting over the awful news and they should not be talking about the event. They stopped, therefore, their speculations and did all they could to help the young man deal with his grief.

  At the end of the evening, in order to distract him, they brought the conversation around to the last leg of their journey and what was awaiting them the next day. They went to bed pretty late since the departure was scheduled for 8 a.m. sharp, right after breakfast. In spite of his friends’ attention, Pierre could not forget the tragedy of Versailles and had slept badly, not dozing off until dawn.

  At the appointed hour the plane was ready to take off. The sky was clear, which was a good omen for the crucial day. When they were in their seats the plane took off without a problem, despite the muddy ground, and headed south. Nicolas Noque acted as copilot and the first part of the trip was made over the vast, little explored lands of French Equatorial Africa. After a few hundred miles they got to the point where traditional maps, which lack precision, become useless. Professor Noque, therefore, turned to a map that Hubert and he had drawn up during their last expedition. They had to fly over a real terra incognita where they had designated their own landmarks, being the first to venture into this region. They spotted the remarkable plain in the shape of an anvil near a long crevasse open to the sky, to the east a village whose only totem was a vulture and farther west an exceptionally tall tree that broke the monotony of the savanna.

  After two hours in the air they saw in the distance a short range of mountains in the middle of which they had discovered the valley hiding the Tower of Babel. The approach was made without any particular difficulties while they saw below them a thick layer of clouds that stretched out between two steep peaks. On the first circling over the valley the fog looked impenetrable.

  “Without the directions found in the pyramid,” Hubert said, “we would never have found this valley that’s constantly hidden by this fog. I’m going to put the plane on its theoretically axis… There we go… Now we’ll get through these clouds…”

  The others watched Hubert at the controls, trusting his skill as a pilot and explorer.

  The plane plunged through the clouds. Everything went dark. It only lasted one or two minutes. Then they saw a tropical valley under the leaden sky, but lit by a weird glow. At the bottom of the valley was a big lake with the summit of the tower sticking out of the middle. They had arrived.

  Hubert pulled in the landing gear so he could use the pontoons to land. He set down on the still lake and steered the Latécoère so that it stopped only ten yards from the tower.

  Then he said, “We’ll set up camp directly on the terrace at the top of the tower. The shore is unsafe because of the natives. Plus, we’ll have a good lookout point and can defend ourselves easily in case of attack. The time it takes any would-be attackers to cross the lake, climb the tower and reach us, will leave us free to organize our defense.”

  Everyone agreed with this wise decision.

  But first of all they had to put together the boat to load the material and bring it to the tower platform. It was done quickly and in less than an hour the essential equipment was waiting at their campsite. At the start of the afternoon they were ready to start their investigations.

  Hubert led the members of the expedition inside the tower in order to show them what he himself had discovered during the last voyage. Everyone followed him, with the exception of Professor Noque who was in a hurry to set up some of his equipment. Moreover, as he reminded them, he remembered the inside of the tower just fine and did not want to waste precious time. He looked a little feverish and was sweating big drops. Unusually, his movements, which were normally very precise, were becoming hesitant and clumsy. When they saw him struggle to open the smallest of his two mysterious crates, his companions, although a little s
urprised, did not press him and just exchanged understanding glances.

  Half an hour later they came out of the tower, definitely convinced that only an underwater passage was possible to enter the building. They found the professor in front of a complex machine: a metal box with multi-colored lights and a big, parabolic antenna that was spinning slowly.

  Nicolas Noque looked like he was back to his old self. He told them:

  “It’s an experimental machine that one of my colleagues at the Academy of Sciences asked me to test out on our expedition. It detects all the rays emitted within a three-mile radius. The lights flash different colors depending on the type of radiation. You can also detect radium, X-rays, even heat waves… For us here I saw that the first results are troubling. You see this blinking red light? It tells us that there’s radiation, some kind of energy, but it’s impossible to determine its nature. The machine was designed to spot all kinds of radiation, so this one is totally unknown and I’m wondering what it could be…”

  “That is curious,” Hubert said, “but I have to admit that I’m no expert on the matter. Maybe we’ll discover it by exploring the lower levels of the tower. Anyway, we’ll make good use of it. Pir and Bob, it’s your turn now. Set up the veloscaphe so we can explore the lake.”

  The two young men went over to a big crate in which the pieces of their invention had been packed. Pierre Saint-Clair was interested, so he went to help them out. He grabbed a jimmy and pried open the top. The three of them together quickly had the pieces laid out on the ground.

  The veloscaphe, or more precisely the diving velocipede, was basically an underwater bicycle for two people. It was shaped like a cigar, around twenty feet long by five feet wide at the fattest part of its diameter. It was built of steel sheets placed over an inner frame made of duralumin rods. The diver-cyclists sitting on bicycle seats were protected inside a cylindrical compartment and controlled the up and down movement with lateral fins. When they were pointed down the machine started diving and when they were turned up it rose. The front of the vehicle was equipped with an electric spotlight and a steel spur that could send out a strong electrical discharge, which made for a powerful weapon.

  It was called the Motor II. The first Motor had been used two years earlier by the O’Connell brothers in the exploration of an underground lake in Switzerland. It had taken them all the way to a network of grottoes that were the home of prehistoric animals which, unfortunately, had destroyed the prototype.

  While the two young inventors got to work on their machine, Hubert, Professor Noque and Pierre, who had joined them now, took the boat to the shore in order to cut some wood. They had to build a hoist to get the Motor into the water from the top of the tower and to bring it back up again when needed. They took turns keeping watch while cutting down a tall, tropical tree and slicing up the trunk.

  This work took up the rest of the afternoon. They attached the logs to the back of the boat and towed them back to the tower. Using some rope they hauled the logs up the walls and put them on the terrace.

  During dinner it was decided that they would build the hoist the next morning and start exploring the lake early in the afternoon. If everything went as planned they could hope to have a picture of the submerged tower by evening.

  Bob took the first watch. He would be relieved two hours later. The deep, dark night passed with nothing to report. Jungle sounds echoed under the cloudy vault. All kinds of noises filled the darkness: birds squawking, wild beasts roaring, branches rustling when prey fled predators, grunts and howls and whining and wailing… Sometimes a crocodile splashed into the water and the man on watch had to keep a close eye on the walls of the tower to make sure that there were not natives coming to attack them. But after a few minutes of relative silence, interrupted by the eerie snap of the lizard’s jaws as it devoured its prey, the tension relaxed; it was a false alarm.

  Early the next morning, as the first days of dawn were crawling over the valley, Pierre, who was on watch, thought he saw a light in the sky. It was like a metal object had passed through the clouds at breakneck speed before disappearing in the tall trees of the jungle. It happened so fast that he could not tell exactly what he had seen. Without waking up his companions he stared at the spot where he thought the thing had vanished. For more than half an hour nothing happened. His watch, the last of the night, was just about over and Pierre was ready to let it go and wake up his companions when he saw the same object, more clearly this time, rise out of the jungle and shoot up into the clouds. The first time he had no idea what it was but now he saw it clearly. It was a machine of unknown design. A huge metal tower, six-sided, with propellers on top. He had never seen anything like it but it looked exactly like his father’s description of the helicopter that had attacked the mansion. What was this weird aircraft doing in the middle of an African forest right next to their camp? Why had it come only to leave right away? It was a complete mystery. But Pierre had to tell the others without delay because its presence here was a bad sign.

  CHAPTER VI

  Under Siege

  When they got back from the airport, the Nyctalope and his wife had found what remained of their demolished residence. They were first struck with horror by the incomprehensible sight. Saint-Clair got out of the car and started inspecting the ruins. He could not understand what had happened. Everything was destroyed but it did not look like an explosion.

  Saint-Clair was a veteran of the Great War. He had seen battlefields but nothing like what he had before his eyes, even from afar: a huge pit at the bottom of which were the foundations and the remains of the walls of his mansion. And no trace of burns indicating that the disaster was the result of a fire! He was contemplating this when some passers-by who had witnessed the scene arrived. Listening to their statements he got a better idea of what occurred. His mansion was the victim of an extraordinarily violent attack that had targeted it directly; he had only escaped by the slim chance that had called him to Le Bourget to see off his son! An attack by an unreal helicopter with a formidable weapon!

  The unknown threat could strike again at any moment. He had to get Sylvie to safety before he could think of his next step.

  Therefore, to get his wife under protection he made a complicated journey through country roads to arrive in Paris. Saint-Clair took her to a little house he had bought the year before on Rue Montbrun in the 14th arrondissement. Then he called the Paris office of the CID to send ten agents to guard the mansion and keep anyone from entering the ruins.

  Nevertheless, the offensive power of this unknown enemy was such that he wondered if these measures, despite a certain level of protection, were enough to counter an attack like the one carried out that morning, which had taken the lives of all his household staff.

  He consulted one of his old friends and agreed that Sylvie’s security should be strengthened. Immediately he called the Minister of War, André Maginot, to get the protection he deemed necessary for his wife’s safety. The two men had known each other for a long time and kept on friendly terms. The Nyctalope wasted no time getting to the point:

  “Hello André. This morning at Versailles my mansion was destroyed in an aerial attack by an unknown party. I got my family to safety in my house in Paris and I’ve already taken some measures, but I’m afraid it won’t be enough and I need reinforcements.”

  “My poor friend, what you’re telling me is absolutely incredible! Such an attack, just a few miles from Paris! In any case, you can count on the government’s support in this matter. As for a defense, you won’t find anything better. You know that I’ve earned a reputation for this and I’ll make sure that your house is as impregnable as France itself will soon be. Tell me, about these measures you’ve taken: what exactly have you organized and what extra help do you need to step it up?”

  “Ten CID agents are protecting the house, but as I said, it was an aerial attack and I don’t really have the means to do much against this kind of assault…”

  “I’ll place
a company of soldiers around the house. We’ll back them up with a few 75mm field guns that should be able to destroy the machine in case it comes back. Furthermore, I’ll ask my colleague Dumesnil, the Air Force Minister, to deploy a squadron of fighter jets to make regular rounds of the area and be ready to strike at the least incident.”

  “Thank you, André. I think that should do the trick. For my part, now that I feel better about my wife, I’ll start an investigation to find out where this attack came from. According to the description of the helicopter by the witnesses I’m thinking of one of my old enemies. But it seems highly unlikely to me because he’s dead and I saw him buried. Nevertheless, I’ll start there. It’s the only lead I have and it just might lead somewhere.”

  “Very well. My men will be in place in a few hours and I think the squad of fighters will start flying over your neighborhood by the end of the afternoon. At least this aircraft isn’t invisible, by God! We should be able to spot it in the air. The air force will be standing by to intercept it whenever and wherever we see it.”

  “Thanks again, André. Anyway, I’ll keep you up-to-date on any new developments.”

  “Goodbye, Léo, and good luck.”

  After finishing his conversation with André Maginot, Saint-Clair called the Secretary General of the CID, Michel Dorlange.

  “Michel, the Blingy mansion has been destroyed. We’re holed up at Rue Montbrun. Can you get over here to protect Sylvie while I start the investigation?”

  “No problem, Monsieur Saint-Clair. I’ll tell my wife and be right over. Hold on, please…”

  The conversation was interrupted for a couple of minutes during which Saint-Clair heard Dorlange talk with his wife. Then Michel was back on the line.

  “Erin’s worried about Sylvie and is offering to stay with her. She insists since she’s also a CID agent and in a position to help us… I’ll be over with her. She’ll keep your wife company. Moreover, I think we should inform all our services in case of another surprise attack…”