The Germans on Venus Page 7

  “ ‘That is a laudable and worthy occupation, to which I have an infinite inclination myself,’ replied Leviathan the Long, ‘but what can I do for you, then, and by what benefits can I display my gratitude and your merits. Speak! Would you like to be Quasikan?’

  “ ‘The title of that office is beautiful,’ I replied, ‘but I do not know what it entails.’

  “ ‘It is almost self-explanatory,’ he continued. ‘The Quasikan is the second person in my empire, and in that capacity he has the right to adore me perpetually, to amuse me when I am bored, and to do everything I wish.’

  “ ‘I understand perfectly, light of the world—in return for which he is lodged, fed and clothed…’

  “ ‘Shaved, sheared and buried—with all the benefits of life, of course—and enjoying in addition the disposition of all my treasures.’

  “I bit my tongue just in time. ‘What astonishes me,’ I said, cleverly, ‘is that such a beautiful situation is vacant.’

  “ ‘By accident,’ he said, shrugging a shoulder—I would have challenged him to budge the other. ‘Can you imagine that that there have been 14 on the trot that I have had impaled, in vain, to correct their distractions? Not one of them was able to remember that my left slipper must be presented to me in the right hand, and my right slipper in the left hand. It’s the most express condition of the ceremony, and it is recorded as such in the fundamental laws of the Savant Isle. I too am rather distracted, and I admit that the fundamental law scares me.’

  “ ‘Mighty Sun of the Patagons,’ I murmured, in a tremulous voice, ‘the sublime rank of Quasikan is far above my unworthiness. You would reward my feeble offices too nobly by sending me home as soon as possible, by the shortest route, provided that it is not in a boat with a triple compressor, nor a balloon armed for war, because I hold hose two vehicles in execration, for reasons that are particularly personal.’

  “ ‘What!’ retorted the Archikan. ‘I gladly give you permission to return there on foot, if you know the secret. It’s a means that my islanders have very rarely used, so far as I know, for transporting themselves to the continents. Since you are proposing to return whence you came, though, do me the favor of letting me know where that is. You will find that I have an astounding erudition in that regard. After hunting and heraldry, the subject in which we Patagon kings are especially well-informed is geography, because it opens the minds of young people wonderfully, and stimulates the appetites of sovereigns for conquest. It is no less necessary for government, at least as we govern.’

  “ ‘My intention,’ I replied, ‘is to go to that capital of science, that metropolis of art, that headquarters of civilization, that inexhaustible arsenal of perfectibility, Paris. It’s near Villeneuve-la-Guyard, only half a day away by diligence.’

  “ ‘To Paris!’ he cried, with a deafening laugh. ‘It’s 10,000 years and more since Paris was destroyed by a rain of aeroliths.’

  “ ‘I always suspected as much,’ I riposted, striking my forehead with my hand. ‘I was there.’

  “ ‘That astonishes me greatly, doctor. If you had been in Paris on that day, you would not have been sleeping for 10,000 years on the Isle of the Patagons.’

  “ ‘What! Sire, I was not in Paris; I was in the rain of aeroliths, which I did not deem it appropriate to follow as far as the ground.’

  “ ‘That was wise on your part, for at the contingent point, I would not have given straw for the difference. You should know, then, that the place where Paris was is occupied today by the superb city of Hurlu, which was founded by Hurluberlu, and which has the inestimable good fortune of now living under the most gracious, the wittiest and the most illustrious of all his descendants, the magnanimous Hurlubleu, grand Manifafa of Hurlubière. You can verify that immediately in the Royal Almanack.’ ”

  “Stop there, Berniquet,” the Manifafa interrupted. “Is it really true that Leviathan made that speech?”

  “May I never go back to the land of the Patagons,” replied Berniquet, “if I have altered a single word of it.”

  “I have difficulty understanding, then, why you give so little credit to the mind of the Archikan, for those phrases seem to me to be exceptionally well-turned.”

  “Everything is relative, divine Manifafa; a fool may utter such phrases as would do honor to a man of genius, and the expression of so natural and so facile a sentiment is only feeble and vulgar in proportion to an eloquence and style of 40 cubits.”

  “That’s fair, jester; I’m not unduly flattered to be placed at that height in the estimation of that great personable. Continue.”

  “Leviathan continued speaking: ‘I cannot see the slightest inconvenience,’ he said, ‘in sending you back to Hurlu, but I’m afraid that you’ll find it a long journey if you obstinately refuse to use speedy means. It’s a terrible problem to untangle.’

  “ ‘It seems to me,’ I replied, ‘that on a globe whose circumference is calculated at 9000 leagues, it requires scarcely 3000 leagues by the axis and 4500 leagues by the semicircle to reach the antipodes. Now, we both understand by antipodes the two opposite points of the sphere through which the greatest possible perpendicular could be passed.’

  “ ‘I could not prove the contrary in a quarter of an hour,’ the Archikan replied, ‘but I have a suspicion that you are mistaken regarding the actual dimensions of the Earth—and that would be an entirely understandable illusion after 10,000 years of sleep. Observe first, savant, that you are not taking account of the gradual increase of the geological and mineral world by juxtaposition. A tree elevates a bird’s nest imperceptibly while it sleeps momentarily, with its head hidden beneath its wing, but you’re supposing, doctor, that you have spent 10,000 years under your bell-jar without changing your relative position in space!’

  “ ‘No, truly,’ I replied to the Archikan. ‘There must be something in it, or I don’t understand anything.’

  “ ‘Reflect a little further,’ Leviathan the Long went on. ‘You have seen satellites dissolve and rain aeroliths upon the Earth. You have seen them bury cities and cover vast regions without anything of indestructible matter being destroyed but a transient form. What do you say about the geoliths that volcanoes vomit forth as they deepen their craters, a common phenomenon that will perhaps be repeated until the empty globe is reduced to an immense shell, which must necessarily gain in surface what it loses in solidity?’

  “I thought privately that this accident would be very favorable to the exhumation of Zeretocthro-Shah and his man, and that it would be rather prudent to postpone to that epoch the definitive advent of perfectibility.

  “ ‘What do you say about all the organic creatures, living and sensitive, which accumulate in humus, which stand out from cliffs, which lie in ossuaries? About mountains that collapse, and which, in flattening out their abnormal unevenness, increasingly raise up the soil that serves as their base. What do you say?’ ”

  “What do you say, Berniquet?” cried the Manifafa. “I don’t understand the Patagon any better than the propagandist, or the propagandist than the Patagon, but it seems to me that there can’t be much in it. When you put your story into print, don’t make this huge Leviathan so stupid; he talks at least as well as the books of buffoons.”

  “Instinctively, milord; there is nothing as crushing as the simple reasoning of an ignoramus, but Your Majesty probably no longer remembers that these poor people have no intellectual sense?”

  “I remember quite clearly, jester, that the ideological section appeared not to have found it—but if it ever does find it, against all expectations, and you still have credit in those lands, I suggest that you ask them to keep it to themselves. That can’t do the ideological section any harm, and I think it would be as well for them if our Patagons did without it.”

  “ ‘Finally,’ said the Archikan, still talking, ‘you are not taking into account certain fortuitous aggregations like the one that resulted from the fall of the Moon while you were sleeping so soundly. There’s a protu
berance that extends your diameter a little!’

  “ ‘What!’ I riposted immediately. ‘The Moon, gone astray by virtue of one of those perturbations to which it was so liable, has become united with its metropolis? That meeting must, indeed, have produced a rather remarkable bulge on the sphere.’

  “ ‘Don’t speak any longer of a sphere, my dear doctor; the world that your century labeled thus now resembles one of those spinning-tops with irregular and unequal rhombs, which children cause to leap about on rope—or, if you prefer, it is exactly the same shape as one of those pumpkins from which pilgrims fashion gourds. The most unfortunate thing about that collision was that it struck in a horrible fashion that beautiful kingdom of diamonds in which the Regent would only have passed for a miserable paring, because they had succeeded in fabricating the richest of nature’s works in enormous dimensions. We have carefully retained the recipe for them, but we have searched in vain ever since for the proportions and the procedure.’

  “ ‘That’s what we lack too,’ I told Leviathan the Long, ‘but I ought to add that we don’t have the recipe.’

  “ ‘It comes down,’ he said, ‘to two rather common principles: charcoal dust passed through a sieve, which can be extracted from bladder-nut trees, and a vegetable element called fagotine, which the botanical physiology section has discovered in bundles of firewood.’ ”

  At this point, the impatient Manifafa once again abruptly broke into the jester’s interesting narrative. “I’d like to know, Berniquet, why the botanical physiology section got mixed up in it. Diamonds are losing all their value.”

  “Right, milord! The street urchins no longer want them for playing marbles—but bundles of firewood are priceless.”

  “I can’t see, then,” he continued, joining his hands together piteously, “what advantage one can derive, in terms of political economy, by debasing a stupid jewel whose rarity alone made all utility unnecessary, and making it impossible for good folk to acquire the joyful firewood that adds charm to winter evenings?”

  “It’s necessary to make a distinction, Divine Manifafa; I didn’t say that it was advantageous, merely that it was progress.”

  “My word, you’re right, Berniquet. That distinction had escaped me. Resume your story immediately, jester, for I’m finding it very instructive.”

  “The Archikan continued the discourse from the point at which we left him in this manner: ‘You see, doctor,’ he said, ‘that, the world has grown unexpectedly in your absence. It will be difficult to reach the fine city of Hurlu, by the most direct route, in less than ten years, to which you must add ten years more that you will inevitably spend at custom-barriers, hospitals and police stations, and another ten years spent in waiting for passports and visas. Factoring in fatigue, accidents and, most of all, the infirmities that increase every day at your age, and you’ll be doing well if you only have to give yourself another 30 years. With the virile maturity that you display, strong resolution, an intrepidity proof against anything, good feet, a good eye and a little luck, you might well make your entrance into the splendid capital of Hurlubière in 60 years or thereabouts, save for submitting to preliminary inspection of the gendarmerie, the sergents de ville and the officials at the toll-booth.’

  “ ‘You don’t say,’ I replied to Leviathan the Long, in a humorous tone. ‘That will make at least a century since my emergence from the baptismal font.’

  “ ‘You’ll be all the more respectable. On the other hand, if you decided to take the indirect route—which is infinitely more comfortable—we would be able to offer you, in truth, suspension bridges ending in 800 planets.’

  “ ‘Great God—800 planets! And planets with suspension-bridges! All those ruined entrepreneurs!’

  “ ‘That’s where you’re mistaken. All the men who grow bored on one planet spend their poor lives going in search of another. It’s a perpetual shuttle; but that mode of traveling presents quite a few inconveniences, according to the celestial mechanics section. The first, savant friend, is spending your valuable spare time in journeys that are instructive but fruitless, for 200,000 or 300,000 solar cycles—I’m giving you approximate figures, because I don’t remember them.’

  “ ‘Oh, milord,’ I cried, lamentably, ‘I gladly give you dispensation for the approximate figures and the other inconveniences. After a figure and an inconvenience like that, I’m quite certain of never seeing Hurlu again.’

  “ ‘You’ll be there in ten minutes, if that’s agreeable to you,’ the Archikan relied, laughing.

  “ ‘2000 or 3000 solar cycles, and the space that their revolutions embrace, in ten minutes! I must be dreaming.’

  “ ‘That wouldn’t make things worse,’ he went on. ‘All the time one isn’t dreaming is time lost.’

  “ ‘I can’t deny,’ I ruminated, understandably, ‘that fulminating gold promised to make a very pretty projective in my youth, but these thousands of solar cycles reduced to minutes must surpass the range of the propaganda.’

  “ ‘Gold! Truly a beautiful poverty. Get it into your head that we have discovered ten metals superior to gold on one planet alone, and 10,000 projectives for fulminating gold. The common people don’t make matches from it.’

  “ ‘That’s strange!’ I replied. ‘Gold was quite valuable in my time, if one can judge by hearsay.’

  “ ‘With rhinoceros-loads, hippopotamus-loads and camel-loads, dear doctor—so many years have you slept—with mammoth-loads, you would not be rich enough to but a handful of rice, barley or sesame.’ ”

  “Oh, how I would like,” said the Manifafa, “to see that double-dyed fool Croesus resuscitated in the midst of his treasures in the Isle of the Patagons, to laugh at his idiocy! That bewilderment would do great honor to the gaiety of Providence.”

  “ ‘Come on,’ Leviathan continued, in an imperious voice, ‘decorate this famous doctor with a ceremonial gown that will not be useless to him in the cold regions through which he will pass, and send a forced projection to Hurlu, even if it bursts the mortars. You’ll answer to me with your head!’ As I was carried away, he added: ‘By the way, European philosopher, don’t forget to present assurances of my esteem and fraternal amity to your master.’ ”

  “I kiss his hands,” said the Manifafa, “and I approve of the way he treated you, because it was quite gallant. There you are in a carriage, then.”

  “It was a comfortable chair, elegant, light and well suspended, but devoid of wheels or shafts—those vulgar means of vehiculation being quite useless to it. It was simply fixed in front of a horizontal metal bar—have the generosity to imagine it, for I did not have time on the way to make a drawing—the extremities of which ended in two large-caliber cannonballs at the orifices of two artillery pieces, which were placed at exactly equal distances, similar to my tilbury, with the result that I was enclosed in a sort of iron horse.”

  “That’s rather ingenious,” Hurlubleu interrupted. “I’m waiting for you at the projective.”

  “Behind me the openings of the two cannons were furnished with two convergent conductors, which inevitable slanted towards a common summit, geometry not having changed between here and that disposition. I was not made to wait. Scarcely was I arranged on my cushions to sleep when a lanky postillion arrived…”

  “Match alight!”

  “No, Divine Manifafa, Leyden jar in hand. The electric spark was preferable because of its synchronicity. He presented the switch to the conductors’ point of contact, and I departed with a rapidity that is difficult to imagine, especially if one has only ever come from Villeneuve-la-Guyard by way of a mail-coach.”

  “Did the mortars explode?”

  “I have never been able to find out, milord. Sound travels at little more than 200 fathoms a minute; I would have been hard pressed to catch it.”

  “This means of travel, Berniquet, must be rather inconvenient for people who are short of breath.”

  “Not as much as you might think, Divine Highness, because the rarefaction
of the air, which is incalculable at those heights, makes more than adequate compensation, and because the rapidity of the flight almost makes up for the lack of atmospheric density. The greatest danger that a traveler might run is that of encountering a body more solid than the medium it is penetrating.”

  “An aerolith, for example, worthy jester—that would be a dire occurrence.”

  “Very dire, Divine Manifafa. I almost cracked my skull on a thin grey mist of flax which was no larger than a fist, and which arrived, bobbing around insouciantly, exactly in the middle of my two cannonballs. God, what a crash!”

  “You blew it away.”

  “I couldn’t—but it was obliging enough to take its right of way, like a taxi-cab.”

  “What I find most irritating about this method, jester, is the monotony of the eye-blink, for nothing can be as disagreeably uniform as a route where little grey mists of flax count as events, when one is accustomed to observing as one travels, ending up reading the signs.”

  “The monotony! Don’t believe it, milord. I took an inexpressible pleasure in contemplating the 800 planet-to-planet suspension-bridges that were hurtling from horizon to horizon in marvelous arcs, all charged with trophies, obelisks and statues in rather good taste, and exactly the right proportions, at least by comparison with those on the Pont de la Concorde. I can’t describe it.”

  “No one else would be able to describe it any better than you, Berniquet. You’re talking about an admirable view.”

  “I was enjoying it with all my heart when the shaft of my cannonballs, probably overheated by friction, and heat-sensitive by nature, suddenly dilated with a screech—and broke into two exactly equal parts, because of the homogeneity of the material and the perfect equipollence of the two projective impulses.”

  “By virtue of the homogeneity and the equipollence,” said the Manifafa, yawning and climbing his jaw, “it could not have happened otherwise. You’re now well on track to describe the world upside-down again, for I can’t believe that you’re the kind of man to give up the habit of falling head-first, as the variety of your tale would require.”