The Blue Peril

by Maurice Renard

  The star had disappeared again. At the same instant, it seemed that the blue background darkened…

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Vega reappeared, and the field brightened.

  “It’s an eclipse!”

  In no time at all, the clockwork was switched off. The astronomer seized the chronometer whose button he had pressed at the moment of the star’s disappearance; the occultation had lasted four point nine seconds. He noted the time, and consulted the Connaissance des temps;22 the eclipse had occurred within a minute of the same time and at the same place as the previous day. The screen that had interposed itself between the Earth and Vega was therefore an object moving with our planet: a body associated with our world, remaining motionless above Bugey, situated seven degrees south of the zenith of Mirastel.

  But at what height?

  The astronomer set out to estimate it. In fact, since it had been stopped, the telescope had been subject to the rotation of the Earth, re-entering the general order; it sufficed to reverse it slightly to fix it upon the mysterious point permanently. A rotating knob brought it back by a millimeter, and within the telescopic field, traversed by other stars, the sky darkened again, and the stars went out one by one as they progressed.

  That dark vapor, Monsieur Le Tellier said to himself, isn’t in focus, that’s all.

  Two turns of the milled control-button caused the ocular tube to sink into the objective tube, and the diffuse cloud gathered together, condensed, solidified and became a strange square black patch.

  What’s that? With the naked eye, looking directly upwards, absolutely nothing could be seen; the object was much too distant—but in the telescope, it was as clear and definite as Vega had been a little while ago. And that fixity intrigued Monsieur Le Tellier. Without any doubt, he thought, this is the aerial island where my children are held captive by rogues. But how the Devil is that titanic balloon moored? It holds firm in the atmosphere, like a rock beaten by waves! Its nature, in any case, is not the question. It has to be an aerostat…or something similar. It’s an invention of human beings, whose interest is not in meteorology. But it must be devilishly high up to be invisible in broad daylight without a telescope! Ah, we were just saying: how high is it? A simple problem.

  Having ignited a small cigarette-lighter, he checked the extent to which he had shortened the telescope in order to bring it into focus. Then he made a calculation, and his face darkened in amazement.

  “Fifty thousand meters!” he murmured. “What! That machine is at an altitude of 50 kilometers! So there must still be breathable air at that altitude? One can live more than a dozen leagues above the ground, then? I’m delirious. That’s contrary to all accepted theory!”

  A bleak dejection succeeded the pride of his discovery and the almost-joyful thrill he had experienced. Already, he had been dreaming of a squadron of aeronefs blockading that accursed buoy—but 50 kilometers! No balloon could climb so high. The sarvants were out of range!

  But in that case, what was that patch?

  He put his eye to the ocular again. The patch had not changed in its form or its color.

  It’s not very large, thought Monsieur Le Tellier.

  He measured its dimensions, made more calculations, based on the coefficients of size and height, and deduced that in reality, the sides of the black square were 60 meters long.

  When he had stared and calculated all through the rest of the night, his knowledge had not increased by an iota. He realized that the sensible thing to do was to wait for daylight and study the patch once it was illuminated—a good resolution that proved impossible to keep. He finished the night at the end of his telescope, mulling over conjectures and talking to himself.

  “A buoy, damn it! I can always come back to it, in spite of everything. It can’t be anything but a buoy, of which I can only see the bottom…a sort of ultra-perfected balloon, which maintains itself in rarefied air. That it might be unconnected with the abductions is unacceptable. Everything’s in accordance…and yet, I don’t understand. What reason do these scoundrels have for lodging their victims at such a height? Half-that distance would be amply sufficient to protect them from any incursion. Why, too, that apparatus of terrorization—the stolen minerals and vegetables? Why make us wait so long for their letter of extortion? What new and furtive machine do they use to lift their victims up to that balloon-buoy? And where did they obtain that marvelous science? In sum, who are these people who work miracles of audacity, genius and wickedness?”

  Monsieur Le Tellier had not voiced one in four of the questions pressing upon his lips. A cock crowed. The rising Sun struck the patch from above. It was quite obvious that it was a vague entity, a solid sheet composed of brown rectangular pieces with very thin colorless lines between them.

  Almost unthinkingly, “to see what would happen,” the astronomer interposed a lens between the objective and ocular lenses, in order to set the image—which astronomical telescopes invert—the right way up. That metamorphosis of the telescope into a long-distance terrestrial eyeglass had no noticeable effect.

  The astronomer was irritated. Occasionally, he tried without success to perceive the patch directly. The turquoise sky had a virginal purity, exempt from the faintest suspicion of brown, the most infinitesimal molecule of blond, or even of any darker blue. Too far away! Too far away! Thus, the patch could not be perceived, even if one neglected to take account of the thickness of the air, which is never totally lucid in spite of its appearance, and is tinted with ever-darkening blue.

  Monsieur Le Tellier, returning to the ocular lens of the telescope, discovered nothing new. Without becoming weary, he observed the underside of the enigmatic object. He examined the edges of the square more carefully, especially the northern one, which ought to have been the most convenient for observation, given the slightly southward displacement of the object relative to Mirastel. He wanted there to be some sort of balustrade, guard-rail, bulwark or more-or-less baroque banister around the patch, along the edges, and he anticipated the appearance of some infinitesimal and adored head leaning over the abyss, as tiny as a pin-head…

  In the end, he pulled himself out of that exhausting contemplation. Three hours of patience had taught him nothing new. The angle was awkward. It was necessary to observe the thing in profile, not from underneath; thus, it was necessary to observe it from a greater distance. Yes, but in that instance, an amateur telescope would no longer suffice. Larger telescopes would become indispensable…

  Suddenly, he had a flash of inspiration. The Hatkins equatorial!23 The dream! A magnification of 6000 diameters! Six thousand instead of 50! Much better. But would it be possible to see the thing from Paris, more than 500 kilometers from Mirastel? Wouldn’t the rotundity of the Earth prevent it from being seen? Wouldn’t the thing be below the Parisian horizon, with respect to the line of sight? Quickly, a pencil, paper, a table of logarithms…it was all right! It would be visible, 20 kilometers above the horizon…

  That same evening, Monsieur Le Tellier caught the Paris express at Culoz.

  II. Sequel to the Square Patch

  “Chauffeur! To the Observatory!”

  Monsieur Le Tellier is leaving the PLM station. He does not look well this morning. All night long, in the carriage—his second night without sleep—he has labored doggedly to understand; he has filled his notebook with geometric diagrams, algebraic equations and arithmetical operations…and he understands less and less. The mystery has never seemed so mysterious as it has since he has begun to clarify it. He has also begun to have doubts about the Hatkins equatorial. It is certainly powerful, but its situation is deplorable. The patch is visible in theory, but in practice? Will the telescope be able to pick it out, through an atmospheric mass of more than 50 kilometers, stuffed with clouds and mists, where variations in temperature produce innumerable refractions? The dust and smoke of Paris constitute a serious barrier in themselves. To obtain anything clear, it will surely be necessary to reduce the magnification…

&n
bsp; But here, at the end of its avenue, is the Observatory, with its cupolas. Here is the Saint-Sulpice of science, with its terrace, which seems to be seething. Here is the Sainte-Geneviève of astronomy, with that huge preponderant bubble, which is the dome of the great equatorial. Here is the Sacré-Coeur of Montparnasse!

  “Ah! Monsieur le Directeur!”

  The porter, surprised and respectful, hands over a bunch of keys. In the courtyard, the director evades a few astronomers who have just finished their night’s work and are going home. He goes up to the second floor on the beautiful stone staircase. He goes into the housing of the great equatorial and comes to a halt, involuntarily, in admiration.

  Leviathan! Goliath! Polyphemus!

  The dimensions of the telescope are so colossal that Monsieur Le Tellier cannot remember them. One might think that one were inside the turret of a fortress or some monstrous suit of armor. The enormous concavity of the zinc vault takes on the appearance of an armored skull-cap, and the equatorial is a prodigious cannon, inclined toward the world’s axis, menacing the sky. Its gun-carriage, a tower of masonry in the center of the rotunda, is enveloped by light metallic structures—stair-heads, ladders, spiral stairways—and an infinity of precision mechanisms is visible there, some slender and others Herculean, as one might expect to find around an instrument that is simultaneously a lady’s watch and a crane for heavy lifting. The equatorial rests on the pivots of the howitzer. It stretches forth: a Colonne Vendôme that is a bombard, a bombard that is a telescope; a mastodon of a cylinder, an elephantine leaning tower of chrome-steel, grey and mat. Perspective tapers its extremity; it hardly shines at all. Its ocular lens, complicated by a mass of tiny machinery, genuinely looks like the breech of a gun. And is it loaded, this artillery piece? A layman would fear so, and dread its deafening detonation, and wonder what phantasmagorical projectile it might launch at the Moon…

  It is warm under that bell. The meditative silence is almost that of a basilica. The rumor of Paris, distant and oceanic, murmurs incessantly. From second to second, the tick-tock of the sidereal clock echoes from the arches of the cupola, redoubling the accumulated gravity of passing time.

  To work!

  Monsieur Le Tellier maneuvers a capstan. The dome pivots, rolling on its castors with a rumble of thunder and brass. Cords are drawn out. A large opening is uncovered to the south-east: the direction of Mirastel. The optical artillerist aims his “Long Tom,” which slowly declines toward the horizon. By means of the little secondary telescope stuck to the large one, known as a seeker, he tries to pick out the square patch.

  God, how small he is beneath the equatorial! One might take him for Gulliver beneath a giant’s microscope.

  But the patch? Where’s the patch?

  Wait! He gropes about, turns wheels, aims lower, then to the left. He remakes his calculations…changes lenses to reduce the magnification and increase the clarity…

  Ah! There it is at last, that accursed patch. Here it is in elevation, instead of being seen from underneath—but it can only be discerned at a magnification of twelve hundred, no more, and is unsteady, disturbed by the atmosphere, vibrating because of the great city that makes the Observatory tremble. It has not moved; that is the only conclusion of the entire session. As for saying exactly what it is, that is equally impossible for various reasons.

  It’s stifling in here!

  Exasperated, Jean Le Tellier goes out on to the terrace. He strides back and forth furiously, going around the domes whose hemispherical domes protrude there, like half-inflated balloons in an aerostat park. He bumps into items of recording apparatus, staving in a pluviometer that gets in his way with a blow of his fist.

  It’s idiotic—all these machines which only serve up stupidities! Science, science, science! Oh, it’s in its infancy, is science!

  Paris extends beneath the feet of the irritated astronomer. The human ant-hill extends before him the convexity of its vale of tears between all the vales of misery constructed as far as the eye can see. It descends from Montparnasse to rise again at Montmartre, and in the distance, facing the Observatory to the north, as if it were its own distorted reflection, stands another crumple of cupolas. By a strange symmetry, Sacré-Coeur and the Sacred Brain dominate Paris, each to one side. They are two parallel but dissimilar temples, both built to extend toward the heavens and which, jealous of one another, seem to be challenging one another above the heads of an entire people. Which will prevail? Which of these two temples on the two hills ought to prevail? The astronomer sways momentarily. Rather than being here, should he not rather be there, in the ecstatic observatory of Heaven? A Heaven so constellated that it no longer contains any darkness?

  Ah! Courage, you crazy fool! It’s not yet time to give up. Nothing is lost! About turn! Confront the enemy: the sarvant!

  With a determined tread, Monsieur Le Tellier crosses the platform and recklessly stands on tiptoe, leaning on the balustrade. Down below, in the garden, the housings of the photographic meridional telescopes round out their mosque-like roofs. Further away to the south, toward Mirastel and the patch, is the Montsouris Observatory, and further away still, better placed than Paris in certain respects…Saint-Genis-Laval, near Lyon. That’s it! That’s it!

  It’s to Saint-Genis-Laval that it’s necessary to go now. Patience and perseverance! I’ll be there before nightfall. Let’s go!

  Monsieur Le Tellier never found out how the journalists got wind of his presence in Paris. Still, there was a group of gentlemen with pens on the alert, waiting for him at the Observatory’s main gate. He did not think he ought to conceal his discovery of the patch from them, nor his recent disillusionment. Sensational news! The reporters, no longer feeling joyful, immediately dispersed with an inconceivable rapidity and, while each one ran to his editorial offices at top speed, Monsieur Le Tellier—who had a couple of hours to kill before the departure of his train—took a cab to the Duc d’Agnès’s house in the Avenue Montaigne.

  The young sportsman had just come back from Bois-Colombes. He was radiant. He had the highest hopes of the airplane under construction; the apparatus capturing atmospheric electricity was a marvel. No, he had no further news of Tiburce. But how did it come about that Monsieur Le Tellier was in Paris? A patch? At an altitude of 50 kilometers? Inaccessible to any airplane? Too high? Ah, damn it! That was upsetting…but this patch must be the sarvants’ lair, mustn’t it? There was still, in consequence, the phantom dirigible, which could be pursued, captured…the Epervier—as he had named his hunting aircraft—would therefore be useful for something. Ah, damn it! He had been afraid for a moment! But all would go well, very well! Mademoiselle Marie-Thérèse, oh, my God, he swore that he would save her…and to marry her, damn it! Oh yes, yes, that Robert Collin—smart, very smart, damn it!

  The Duc d’Agnès needed to talk a great deal and blaspheme a little when he was very content. He was still jabbering away and cursing when he arrived on the station platform with his future father-in-law. There were special editions of the newspapers that the astronomer had informed on sale there. The latter bought a few gazettes. Alone in the carriage that bore him away, he had the leisure to study the various interpretations that had been put on his words. But what did these ornamental flourishes matter? If the language varied, the core of the information remained faithful and accurate. At that moment, millions of intelligences were being updated. Tomorrow, the universe would know about the existence of the enigmatic patch. And then…oh, the stimulation of thought! It would produce such an effort on the part of humankind that the patch would be brought down, no matter what the cost, my friends! Ah! It would be brought down! It would be unhooked, flung on to the ground!

  As Saint-Genis-Laval, though, the view of the sarvant patch he had was from below. It seemed to be constituted by an aggregation of indistinct elements. It formed a sort of brown pavement without overmuch regularity, with rays of light shining through between the rectangles.

  As large telescopes could not be mutated
into terrestrial telescopes, all manner of expedients were employed to straighten the image of that square logogriph. It was projected on screens. Variations of shade and clarity were observed in the intermediary rays, in places…new points of interrogation.

  Fifteen astronomers surrounded Monsieur Le Tellier, succeeding him at the ocular of the telescope or in front of the projection. They aimed every telescope in Saint-Genis at the same visual target, fruitlessly. And could one ever count the number of people who were imitating them? Hundreds and thousands, making use of everything from hand-held binoculars to equatorial reflectors. There were people gazing in places from which it was impossible to see the patch, through kilometers of terrestrial arc. There were many, relying on the indications of the newspapers, who could not identify the point at which to aim. The majority saw nothing—and yet, a simple pair of opera-glasses was sufficient to make that little russet patch emerge from the sky-blue.

  Eyes, and yet more eyes, were searching out the dark star in the azure firmament—but all those gazes laying siege to the sky were no more than a prelude to the superb movement that was about to hurl humankind to assault the clouds.

  III. The Assault on the Sky

  The announcement of the Le Tellier discovery ran along the telegraphic wires and crossed the oceans on Hertzian waves or in submarine cables. Immediately, the mass of explorers disseminated everywhere in quest of the sarvant stopped searching. Caravans in the desert, missions in the pernicious forests, regiments among the Barbarians, chains of climbers on the flanks for needles of ice, all set out on return journeys. Horses turned their noses toward the stables, boats headed for port. The word was for aeronauts alone.

  For a long time—since the possibility of an aerial pursuit had been recognized—aircraft construction-yards had been working zealously, but when it was averred that the bandits had elected to base themselves in excelsis, their activity redoubled and the workshops were swarming.