“It’s completely unbelievable. Such technology at a time when Europe was still prehistoric! If anyone told me this, I’d never believe him. Anyway, we still don’t know what’s happened to Professor Noque. This room is covered with debris from when the building was destroyed. Stones and pieces of the ceiling and layers of dust. If anyone else walked in here, we’d have seen traces of their footsteps.”
They started examining the floor, searching for some clue or indication. At first they saw only their own but Pierre suddenly called our when he noticed prints that did not belong to their shoes. The O’Connell brothers came over to him.
“Pir, Bob, I’ve found some footprints. Look, they go from the stone door we came through and head to the left, toward the staircase that goes down. And they clearly belong to only one person. Either the professor or our mysterious savoir… But there’s no way to know right now.”
“It could be this person in question who took the professor if he was wounded.”
“That’s possible because the professor would have waited for us. The best thing would be to follow the prints. What do you think?”
“Well, since we intend to explore the tower, we might as well start with this. What do you say, Pierre?”
Pierre looked at the stone stairs and nodded.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The young men got to the top of the stairs. The footprints continued down and they followed. 30 feet down they came out in a vast room full of damaged furniture and a multitude of corridors leading off from it. Apparently it was some kind of entrance hall. The footprints crossed the room, avoiding the remains of what might have been a control room or guardroom or even an information booth.
A sliding metal door had once closed off the corridor that now opened before them. The door was broken, the metal twisted as if under enormous pressure. The three of them were about to step through when Pierre noticed something.
“Look! Here… and there! The metal is bare and the coating’s been entirely removed. But there’s no sign of corrosion. That’s weird. I wonder what kind of metal could do this. It has to be completely rustproof. Let’s see if we can find the other doors lying around the room and see if they’re made of the same stuff. If their coating’s been damaged they should all be rusted.”
“But this door must have been broken down a long time ago. I don’t get it. Look, there’s no dust at all on the floor of the corridor after the door. It’s like that zone was totally cut off from this part. Which would fit with the idea that the door was destroyed recently and the traces we found are not the professor’s but the mysterious savior. He would have to be incredibly strong. And that explains how he could destroy the underwater attacker and kill the turbaned man inside it.”
The young men decided to go down the corridor, which passed by a series of futuristic laboratories. In this part of the tower there was less damage caused by the tower’s submersion. The laboratories were intact, as if they had been abandoned only a few hours before. The visitors, in awe and wonder, wandered through the rooms without saying a word, each of them trying to find logical explanations for these strange phenomena. It took them thirty minutes to explore the place, without discovering anything to help them understand what had happened in this lower part of the tower. At the end of the corridor they stood before another massive door, built to resist time and battering.
Like the other door, this one was open and seemed to have been broken recently and easily. The few inches of unknown alloy, no doubt the strongest material at the time, was not enough to protect it from being torn off its hinges.
Pierre, Pir and Bob climbed carefully over the obstacle. The door opened onto a big room full of gigantic machines.
Before them lay the body of a tall man dressed in armor. He must have been hit very violently because his helmet was bent out of shape, clearly the cause of death. The three men leaned over the corpse to get a closer look.
“But it’s not a man!” exclaimed Pierre. “It’s a machine. A machine in the shape of a man!”
Under the armor there were no signs of flesh and blood but they saw the damaged metal components, bathed in a viscous fluid, a thick, dark brown oil. Near him lay a weapon, a kind of pistol attached to the humanoid by a cable. It looked badly damaged and the power cable had been yanked out.
Pierre stood up straight.
“It’s a mechanical, artificial guardian. Whatever science created it is far beyond us. I can’t even understand the basic principles of how it works. In any case, the metal it’s made of is strong and it must have taken a colossal force to smash it like that and put it out of commission.”
Bob pointed to some residue of synthetic matter dripped on the floor near the door and said:
“Look. It might be that the attacker who broke in here was injured by the guard before getting the better of it.”
“You’re probably right. I propose we explore this room. I hope that we can find the professor and that the creature endowed with amazing strength who came in here before us doesn’t get a bad impression of us. I’ll bet we’re getting close to winding up this mystery…”
They went to the back of the room where they saw various control panels to unknown machines whose use was incomprehensible. The devices were in working order, to tell by the constantly blinking lights. They got closer and saw a dozen glass sarcophagi inside of which lay a dozen sleeping men.
One man was sitting in the middle of the control panels. They saw only the top of his head over the back of his chair. When they were within a few feet of him, he spoke:
“Welcome, my friends. I’ve been waiting for you.”
They recognized the voice of Professor Noque, who turned around to face them. The professor was smiling. The three young men stepped back. The professor’s left cheek had been badly burned and the skin torn off. His left eye had disappeared. But instead of the living flesh and bone that should have been in the hole, they saw the synthetic structure of a plastic skull. The smooth, light blue material must have been able to resist intense heat because the burn had completely melted Noque’s flesh.
A hint of irony was in that gaze as he watched the three of them with his artificial eye that looked exactly like a human pupil. Professor Etienne Noque, distinguished linguist of the Sorbonne, was an artificial man.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Invisible Man
Two lights darted through the night sky. All of a sudden a bright ray shot out of one and struck the other, which caught fire right away. It was obviously an airplane that was flying at a high altitude and had just been hit by a mysterious weapon. The plane exploded and a ball of flames and sparks lit up the night. Burning pieces fell to the ground as the attacker, after making a few extra rounds, shot off into the distance. Nothing remained of the battle between these two flying objects. Nothing but silence.
A few miles from the spot where the confrontation had taken place, four men sitting in a car were watching the scene attentively. Three of them looked indifferent but the fourth was much more intense. He was surrounded by instruments that took up almost all the space in the back of the car. He sat in front of a screen, now completely black, but on which he had watched the scene as if he were in the cockpit of the plane that had been destroyed. Under this screen were a bunch of dials, levers and even a wheel. All this equipment was an exact reproduction of an airplane’s commands. The man was wearing a helmet with headphones and a microphone so that he could communicate by radio as if he were inside the plane itself.
In order to be totally incognito, the car was parked with all its lights off. But this did not bother the man controlling the screens because it was none other than Léo Saint-Clair, the Nyctalope, whose enemy, Maur Korridès, believed he was killed in the plane crash. The plane that the Engineer had had a little trouble destroying was, in fact, a decoy, a remote-controlled machine.
In the front of the car that contained the remote-controlled commands were two of Saint-Clair’s aides, Vitto and Soca, and sit
ting next to him was his old friend Jacques Roll. The four men looked at each in silence for a moment. Saint-Clair was the first to speak.
“He’s gone. Everything went as planned and I almost beat him. I gained some time while talking to him so I could connect the plane to my manual controls, which allowed me to maneuver with the necessary precision. It’s like I was on board the Zig. The battle went off normally thanks to this exact replica of the commands. He thinks I’ve been killed and he’s going to let his guard down. We’ll be able to strike back!”
“But even like this it won’t be easy,” Jacques Roll said. “His helicopter has unsurpassable firepower.”
“I’m sure it does. But I managed to damage it and I doubt he can use its full capacity any time soon. Besides, we’ve also got our strike force and he’ll find out about that soon enough. Vitto, take us to Villacoublay.”
“OK.”
After a moment of silence the Nyctalope turned to Jacques Roll and said:
“In everything Korridès told me, what surprises me the most is what I did on Mars when the French colony was destroyed. Some psychological mechanisms must have gone haywire because I don’t remember a thing...”
Saint-Clair was very upset by this breakdown that he did not understand. Never before had he had such memory gaps. He anxiously wondered whether he had forgotten other events in his life. For the first time his powerful brain was floundering. Jacques Roll, who was seeing the telltale signs of serious doubt on his friend’s face, tried to reassure him:
“Considering the painful nature of those events, it’s possible that your brain set up some defense mechanisms to spare you constant remorse for the actions that you were in no way responsible for. In fact, if I believe what the Engineer said, the colonists including yourself were driven mad by an unknown Martian force, which would relieve you of any responsibility for the actions you committed in that fit of madness.”
Saint-Clair frowned and responded:
“And yet, it seems that I killed a bunch of people, maybe even my children… The worst thing is that now these memories are slowly coming back to me. I think Korridès was telling the truth. Yes, I have a gnawing dread, like a criminal must feel while seeing his murderous acts committed over and over again in his mind… Yes, I’m catching glimpses of men, completely changed, and a woman, my wife, whom I thought was dead for so long… Yes, as if the virus took over the bodies of some of the colonists… I’ll have to investigate this after I’ve beaten Korridès…”
The Nyctalope shook his head to chase away these terrible, nagging questions. He turned to his friend again and spoke in a firm voice:
“But in the meantime, we have to concentrate on our present enemy.”
“That sounds like the only thing to do right now. He wiped out the CID and he’s holding your wife with every intention of killing her. So, we have to act quickly. Tell me, Léo, how did you know that Korridès was going to attack your plane? You said that you had some suspicions about the security of your communications system…”
“Indeed. He was not very effective in hiding the fact that he was spying on me through the radio. First of all I noticed that all my radio communications were being broken up by interference. At the start it didn’t seem too suspicious to me, but after I got to Madrid it looked really fishy. I wondered how the two men sent by Korridès could have known about me being there. In other words, how did my enemy locate me? Of course, he could have guessed that I would go there, knowing that I would automatically think of him after the very particular kind of attack on the Blingy mansion. But the destruction of my plane and the precise instructions he had given to his men got me thinking that he was too well informed about my movements, which allowed me to react more favorably. And when he finally told me just now that he was spying on me with a special radio, it only confirmed what I already suspected.
“I had worked in this kind of thing in the past, with my father who was an expert. We studied the possibility of creating an ultra-powerful two-way radio that could spy on whatever conversations we chose of all those crossing the air. If we could do it, there’s no reason why one of the greatest scientists of our time couldn’t also build such a device. For some mysterious reason his pirating, which should have gone completely undetected, scrambled the signals he intercepted and caused static. Korridès was probably in such a hurry to get his revenge that he used it before it was perfected. Anyway, that’s what put the bug in my ear.”
“So, you thought he was going to attack you on your way home?”
“Yes, that was the most likely. And I thought right away of using the remote-controlled plane to foil his plan. But I had to change planes without him noticing. Otherwise there was a good chance that he wouldn’t try to fight to the death! Therefore, I used a code name for the CID to make the exchange: ‘Protocol’ meant the remote-controlled plane and ‘Joan of Arc’ meant Orléans, the place where the exchange would be made. I did indeed figure that he would attack my plane on the way home, close to Paris…”
“Why’s that?”
“In fact, thanks to his monitoring system, he knew that I’d be going back to Paris to join my wife. For him, in theory, any place on my route between Madrid and Paris would do. But it was easier for him to spot the plane closer to the point of departure or arrival. Of these two, Paris seemed to me the most plausible since Korridès was hiding out near Paris.”
“Great! You’ve found his lair!”
“In fact, from the start of this affair I gathered the clues that led me, one by one, to know where he’s hiding.”
“How’s that?”
“First of all, one fine morning while reading the newspaper my attention was drawn to an article that reported a severed hand found in Paris near the Jardin des Plantes. I asked Michel Dorlange to investigate it in the guise of national defense. Before being killed in the attack on my house he had time to inform me that the macabre relic belonged to one of the CID agents who was tailing a spy who was spotted in one of our Lyon buildings. This must have been to place the mines that Korridès set off not long ago. But in the end, our agent and his colleague followed him to the Jardin des Plantes, more precisely to the Museum of Natural History, which was having work done on it. At first the agent’s disappearance went unnoticed because of all of Korridès’ attacks. There were fingerprints lifted by the police that identified him.”
“But none of this was enough to locate his lair.”
“That’s right. In fact, it only confirmed the information that I’d already gathered.”
“But what did you do then?”
“When I was sure that Korridès was spying on my conversations, I snuck into the control tower at the Madrid airport and used the radio there. I contacted the main French offices of the CID and changed the transmitter to throw off the enemy. Moreover, I sent my messages using a secret code known only to CID agents. Obviously, as the outcome has shown, Korridès couldn’t pirate these communications. I asked our offices to use new equipment and call this counter-espionage mission ‘Gorillard.’ Now they could detect the origin of a radio message as well as its destination. The different offices located pretty much everywhere in France got to work and thus we had a good chance of finding exactly where Korridès’ equipment was located. If he had only used his technology to spy on our conversations, he would have been safe. But in our case he also used his equipment to get in contact with his organization in Spain. He gave them instructions, notably and unfortunately to organize the attack in which our friend Pedro d’Arendar lost his life. These transmissions were coded and therefore not deciphered in time to save him. But his transmitter was so powerful that it could be identified and located easily. That same evening I found out where his hideout was. He was broadcasting from Paris and he was hiding in the Natural History Museum in the Jardin des Plantes where my two agents were murdered a few days ago.”
“Impressive discovery! So, we’ll be able to organize an attack and arrest the Engineer and his accomplice…”
“Sadly no and for several reasons. First of all, Sylvie, my wife, is their prisoner and we have to act discreetly to keep her from being killed during the attack. Then, Korridès must have a spectacular defense system. There was nothing found of two CID agents who approached his headquarters except a hand. When Korridès attacked my plane he used a terribly formidable disintegrating ray. He probably has one set up inside his lair as well. Furthermore, he told me that he had a powerful ally. So, he might have other means that we can’t imagine and he would certainly be able to fend off a frontal attack. No, no, we have to have a surprise attack, breach the defenses using a method that he can’t suspect. For this I have a plan and you’re part of it.”
“What are you waiting for, my friend? Tell me what Jacques Roll can do for you.”
“In fact, it’s not Jacques Roll I need but the Invisible Man!”
Jacques Roll answered with a smile. Saint-Clair and him had met a few years ago when Roll had become Prime Minister. Before the War, since the Ciserat Affair and the conquest of Argyre on Mars, the Nyctalope had had special relations with the Prime Minister. He even had a special telephone line that connected directly with him to coordinate actions with the government. When Jacques Roll had become Prime Minister in 1924 the two men got along great and had since remained good friends. During a confidential affair that involved certain parties well-known to the public, Saint-Clair had found out that the Prime Minister also had a superpower. Thanks to a mysterious chemical he could become invisible, both his body and his clothes. Several times, in the interest of the state, he had used this power and shared some of Saint-Clair’s adventures. After his marriage in 1925, the Invisible Man had retired and Jacques Roll had become a doctor again in the south of France. Since then the Nyctalope had not called on him, leaving him to enjoy his family life in peace. Only the extreme gravity of this present situation had forced him to ask for his old friend’s help.
When the Nyctalope had contacted him, Jacques Roll accepted without hesitation. Vitto and Soca went to pick him up in the car and all three of them prepared the Orléans Protocol, which had saved the Nyctalope’s life.
The Nyctalope and The Tower of Babel Page 30