The Revolt of the Machines Page 10

  Could one at least plan a series of laws sufficiently efficacious to ward off the redoubtable consequences that the whole world had identified? It would not be easy. The laws would not easily constrain men possessed of such a means of flight.

  And how could France be protected against foreign invasions able to arrive unexpectedly from the most distant nations, either for the purpose of conquest, or to ravage and then disappear? Would they be reduced to creating innumerable aerial armies for self-defense, and rendering to foreign lands the evils received therefrom?

  There was nothing but impossibility perceptible in all directions.

  He ended up where perhaps he ought to have begun. He resolved to enter into communication with the aerial navigator and seek information as to the measures that he would probably have to propose to ensure that his discovery did not become a public calamity, but, on the contrary, a benefit for the world, and in particular for France.

  He was only stopped by a question of etiquette and governmental dignity. He was reluctant to take the first step, and especially to correspond with an unknown individual. The Head of State wrote to the man in question, by way of the offices of the Universel, that as soon as he cared to make himself known to the government, which promised him secrecy, the government would be ready to receive the communications that he might want to make to it.

  The aerial navigator responded immediately by means of a letter whose form was exceedingly polite, but which, in spite of the most refined epistolary mannerisms, was fundamentally arrogant and almost impertinent. The time to make himself known had not yet come, but he was ready, since the government seemed to desire it, to put himself in communication with it while conserving his anonymity. He offered to lend himself to an exchange of correspondence either by way of the Universel or some analogous channel, adapted to any chimney that the government wished to adapt to that effect in any of its edifices. He believed that the authority was seriously interested in planning and proposing to him the measures that it might have in mind. He promised to examine them with all the care they merited, desirous of turning to the profit of the public good the incalculable power that he found in his hands, and to show the government every deference and respect.

  The roles were reversed. The unknown was posing as the protector, leaving the government the role of protégé. There was no mistaking his pretention of treating power as power, and governmental power as secondary. Fortunately, he put sufficient diplomacy into it for the government to be able, without sacrificing the appearance of dignity, to submit to his law while having the appearance of making it.

  The Head of State resigned himself to a situation imposed on him by the force of circumstance, overcoming all the resentments of self-esteem, and wrote to tell his correspondent that the government would agree to grant him the mode of correspondence that he solicited, and was ready to examine the demands for indemnity that he might formulate for the communication of his method.

  X. Nagrien hastened to reply that the question of indemnity was not the most urgent. He asked that its examination be postponed until later, and to limit himself to giving a few indications on that point to which they could return when the time came. His invention, if he cared to exploit it, might procure almost infinite benefits.

  He could establish, with the unexplored regions of Africa, with the Orient, with gold-bearing locations and other distant places, an immense and fruitful commerce. He could run contraband. He could transport passengers and merchandise. The sixty-five millions paid out in a matter of days by the applicants for the voyage around France demonstrated well enough what voyages abroad might bring in. He could, by putting another aspect of his invention to work, rent out motive force to industrialists. It would be easy for him to earn hundreds of millions.

  Considerable offers had already reached him via the Universel letter-box. A prominent financier, asking him to name a figure, had gone so far as to declare that, without promising in advance to accept it, he would consider it and discuss it with him whatever it was, even if it surpassed a hundred million or a hundred and fifty million. His invention represented, if he were to exploit it himself, eight or nine hundred million, and perhaps billions. England or the United States would surely give him, whenever he wished, five or six hundred million. He was in no hurry to withdraw the benefits that he was assured as soon as it suited him to realize them.

  His desire was, before anything else, to enrich France with his discovery, and he would consider himself gloriously and amply indemnified by a national recompense reduced to much more modest proportions—a hundred and fifty million or two hundred million, if the government wished—so that was not what preoccupied him. The first question to be examined was that of the measures to be taken in order to put his discovery to work, and he asked the government to communicate to him its plans in that regard.

  The figures indicated in this letter were surprising at first glance, but reflection quickly demonstrated that the aerial navigator was not wrong to declare them modest. As for the rest, the government was unable to enunciate ideas that it did not have regarding the solution to that insoluble problem, but it was difficult to admit that and also press the inventor in order to obtain intentions that he might well be lacking and had not, at any rate, taken the initiative in offering, as had been hoped.

  The government wrote to say that the question was being studied, and the resolutions adopted would be communicated to him. The decision was, indeed, made to conduct that study very seriously in the hope of finally arriving at some practicable plan.

  X. Nagrien replied that, since that was the case, he would depart for his great voyage, the duration of which would not be very long, and that communication could be resumed when he returned. He indicated one useful element for the studies that they were about to make. It was possible to train captains to maneuver aerial ships without having to surrender the secret of the method of locomotion to them. That was the kind of measure he counted on taking if, in the case the government did not succeed in proposing suitable measures for putting his discovery to work, he decided to exploit it himself.

  The end of May arrived. The departure for the voyage around the world had been fixed for the first of June, the first anniversary of the manifestation by which the inventor had made his debut. The passengers, this time notified far in advance, had come from all over the world.

  A new ship, augmented with shops, lounges, bedrooms and conveniences of every kind had been constructed on a plan similar to the first, in proportions sufficient to transport five hundred passengers, accommodated with the most ingenious comfort. Nothing was lacking in terms of provisions, weapons, instruments for scientific observation and protection against intemperate weather. It was to visit all the capitals of Europe, traverse the seas, penetrate unexplored regions, and show itself to savage populations far more stupefied by the apparition than the Amerindians had been at the sight of the first ships arriving from Europe.

  A national fête had been organized for the great day of the departure. The main courtyard of the Hôtel des Invalides had been put at the disposal of the aerial navigator for the embarkation.

  At noon, the ship rose up, decked in flags, to resounding fanfare, the acclamations of the passengers, to which those of the crowd replied, and detonations of its artillery, to which the cannon of Les Invalides responded. It traversed the Esplanade, went up the course of the Seine as far as the Pont d’Austerlitz, equidistant from both quais, rose higher and higher, drawing away eastward, and was visible long after as a black dot before vanishing in space.

  News of it is expected any day. The paradoxical journalist is alone in affirming, against all the evidence, that none will be received.

  Edouard Rod: Dr. Z***’s Autopsy

  (1884)

  For myself, knowing nothing and holding dreams in doubt,

  I believe that after death, when union is achieved,

  The soul then recovers clarity of sight,

  And that, judging its work with ser
enity,

  Understanding without obstacles and explaining without difficulty,

  Like its sisters in heaven it is powerful and regal,

  Measures its true weight, knowing manifestly

  That the breath, falsified by the false instrument,

  Was neither glorious nor vile, not being free,

  That the body alone prevented equilibrium;

  And calmly, it resumes, in ideal bliss,

  The holy equality of the Lord’s spirits.

  Alfred de Vigny, “The Flute.”6

  Perhaps you will still remember the noise made in the scientific world some thirty years ago by the discoveries of Doctor Z***, which suffered the fate of many discoveries and was universally denied. When he finally decided to publish the results of his patient research, Dr. Z*** was living in Bordeaux, where he enjoyed the renown of a good practitioner. The pamphlet for which he bore the expense, Observations on Some Phenomena of Cerebral Existence, provoked a general outcry, and he gradually lost his clientele.

  It should also be said that the pamphlet in question—an octavo of about a hundred and twenty pages—overturned all received notions, simultaneously threatening by its indirect consequences science, morality and religion.

  In effect, the physiologist claimed that the life of the brain is not extinguished at the same time as that of the body; that, on the contrary, it continues for a period that varies between seven and ten days after the last sigh—except, of course, in cases when the brain itself has been directly attacked by a disease, as in meningitis, encephalitis, general paralysis, softening, ataxia, etc.

  He went further than that; he affirmed that, while during life the cerebral cells consumed by thought are incessantly reformed, they are irrevocably destroyed after death, with the result that the brain, still intact and fully active when the heart ceases to beat, although already detached from sensation by the wastage or weakness of the interior nervous centers, gradually declines in that final labor.

  A good technologist as well as an excellent chemist, Dr. Z*** constructed an apparatus himself—which, so far as I can remember, bore some resemblance to the instrument invented more recently named the photophone7—with which he was able, for four or five days after death, to track the activity of brains in the process of decomposition.

  He destroyed that instrument, as he burned his records, when he saw that no one believed him, and that the most indulgent were treating him as a madman and the rest as a charlatan. Nothing, therefore, remains of his great work, and when science has finally deciphered the enigma of death, no one will be able to tell whether the obscure practitioner from Bordeaux was a pioneer or a trickster.

  For myself, who knew him, who saw him at work, who listened on many an occasion, in his laboratory, to his conversations full of luminous perceptions, his reasoning was irreproachable, departing from the most scrupulous observations to rise to the heights where thought can finally detach itself from the tyranny of facts, and were his deductions, all the links of which were connected by the most rigorous logic. I have always regarded him as one of the beacons that ignorance and human stupidity too frequently take it upon themselves to extinguish, for fear of seeing the darkness of their routines illuminated.

  I do not intend to explain Doctor Z***’s theories at length here, nor to recount his personal history. That might be instructive, but it is, I think, appropriate to leave it in the obscurity to which fate has relegated it, and to which he resigned himself without difficulty. But it was given to him once, to read with absolute clarity, an instance of that last period of life, which he alone has known, and I want to recall the circumstances of that strange case.

  A ship-owner of Bordeaux, Dutch by origin, Monsieur van Gelt, committed suicide in 1854. His family took a great many precautions to hide that catastrophic event, of which malevolent rumor did not take long to circulate in society, where Monsieur van Gelt had been highly esteemed. The secrets of his private life, which had transpired long before, gave that gossip a certain consistency.

  The family requested an autopsy, and Dr. Z***, then still looked on favorably, was given the responsibility. He communicated his surgical observations to the law, but he kept to himself the psychology of the dead man, which he had read as if in a book in the scarcely-drowsy brain.

  The ship-owner, van Gelt, was evidently a man of high intelligence and great heart, so his posthumous ideas presented a character of superiority that Dr. Z*** had never encountered before. He collated his notes lovingly, conserving their personal form. On the day when he communicated them to me, reading his manuscript as an author might read a chapter of his novel, I was amazed: the dead man lived—so to speak—his strange cadaveric existence before me.

  I begged my friend to let me have a copy of his notes, and he agreed, on the express condition that I did not publish them before he had published the great work to which his observations were only the preface. I have described the fate of his writings. He is dead now, and I can therefore regard myself as released from my promise and free to deliver this curious document to the public. If I am not mistaken, it will one day cast new light on the presently unfathomed mysteries of eternity. The only element that I shall permit myself to introduce into it, which appears to me to be necessary to the understanding of the script, concerns the ordering of the facts; I have brought together in the early pages details relating to the circumstances of the suicide, which are dispersed in the notes as if at the hazard of memory.

  …I have exhausted what it is appropriate to call the calyx of suffering; for some time, catastrophes and misfortunes, superposed upon me like heavy stones on a man being walled up alive, have been pursuing me with a tenacity almost incredible in the force of its ferocity.

  First of all, it was my only son, twenty-six years old, who fled with some creature after having robbed me in the manner of a treacherous accountant. Then my daughter died of typhoid fever at the moment when I was about to marry her to a young man she loved.

  Soon afterwards, I discovered that my second wife—whom I had married without a dowry, for love, foolish old man that I was!—was deceiving me with one of my nephews, to whom I had given a position in my business, and whom I regarded, alas, as a second son. Rendered cowardly by that love, almost senile and almost ridiculous, whose roots stifled my courage, I accepted with interior tortures my role as a deceived husband, begging the wretch for the refuse of her tenderness, striving to conceal a wound that was getting larger every day.

  Worn out by so much emotion, I became ill. I consulted a physician; he recognized that my morbid state was caused by the first symptoms of a cancerous infection of the stomach. Finally, after a disaster that coincided fatally with a financial crisis in Lyon, I saw the moment arriving when I would no longer be able to meet my obligations. At sixty-two years of age, at the end of an honorable career, having worked hard and done good, I thus found myself surrounded by dishonest affections, cuckolded, ill and poor.

  Among the few idea that could still germinate within my brain, raked as if by the claws of birds of prey, a comparison was insinuated between my fate and that of Job. And I found myself even more unhappy than the patriarch: he had God, while I, throughout my overworked existence, had paid no heed to supernatural matters, which inspired an insurmountable mistrust in me, and even a little of the disgust that men of action have for the reveries of the contemplative.

  At that moment, removed from all activity, forced into bitter contemplation of myself, meditative for perhaps the first time in my life, I began to desire faith, which the unfortunate regard as the supreme panacea. To acquire it, however, would have required time; and even then, would I ever succeed in vanquishing my deep-rooted skepticism? Would not my innate need for truth always triumph over the suggestions of my sentimentality? Certainly, in spite of my efforts, doubts would subsist in me, poisoning the consolations of the priest.

  That refuge was thus refused to me. There remained one other, more reliable: death. I accepted it.

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nbsp; The fear of bankruptcy vanquished my last hesitations. At another time, I would have tightened my muscles, stiffened my will and struggled until the final defeat, but I felt paralyzed by a definitive lassitude, like a shipwreck victim whose limbs have become heavy, who loses consciousness and abandons himself. I did not even wait for the certainty of my disaster to be absolute; the probability was sufficient for me, and I bought an American revolver.

  …I went home; I locked myself in my study and there, while parading my eyes over the files filled with papers in which my entire activity was stagnating, over the curiously-wrought old furniture with which I liked to surround myself, and the few valuable paintings hanging on the walls, I slipped into a long reverie. My life passed before me in images whose colors sang with strange symphonies; I started going back over the course of time, stopping at unforgettable dates.

  I arrived at the distant years of youth when I had battled furiously to live, my heart swollen with immeasurable ambitions, tormented by insatiable appetites; and I lingered there with delight while certain charming details gradually emerged from the monotonous tint of the past, like holes of light in a fog.

  One memory, above all, pursued me for some time and made me smile. It was in the month of May; I had left the obscure mansard in the Rue de Jeûners to which I went home after my long days of work; I went for a walk in the woods of Meudon with my first mistress, a blonde milliner, slim and cheerful, who loved me as I loved her, without any hidden agenda, without any thought for the morrow, just for the pleasure that we gave one another. We had a little money and we drank warm milk at a farm. Suddenly, she started, the milk spilled over her beautiful Sunday dress. She was distressed. We were hidden by a bushy arbor; I kissed her for a long time, and she forgot her chagrin. Her name was Marguerite. There were flowers everywhere….