Then, to the great satisfaction of Gargantua, they attacked the hatches. It was hot; the workers bared their chests.
“Not too soon!” Virachol muttered. “He says it’s just like the Lutin—at that time, I was a skinny quarter-master myself.” He could not conceive that, if the aeroscaph really had contained “skinnies,” he would have been able to see them through that ultra-diaphanous envelope as clearly as he saw his fat Pantagruelesque belly expanding before him, already streaming with a sweat of anticipation.
The hatchways resisted crowbars. Pick-axes rang out, buckling on the substance that had flattened Robert Collin’s bullet and withstood two opposite torrents of automobiles without flinching. A bizarre emotion gripped the spectators. In a few minutes, they would know what the sarvants were! The last enigma would be solved; the last veil of the monstrous Isis47 was on the point of falling.
But the hatches refused to open, and the inconvenience of unstopping them was further increased because Monsieur Le Tellier had forbidden anyone to get closer to them than a meter, for fear of the void, in case of an abrupt perforation.
The works being carried out behind the Grand Palais necessitated the employment of a steam-powered winch; it was fetched. Hooked on to the aft hatchway, however, it lifted the entire aeroscaph, in spite of the counterweight of a hundred men hanging from the ropes. The void beneath the panels kept them sealed by the enormous weight of the atmosphere. Essentially, it was a variant of the two famous hemispheres of Magdeburg,48 of which every schoolboy retains an affectionate memory.
The winch was withdrawn. Monsieur Le Tellier mounted the aeroscaph to feel the invincible lids again. A numerous following joined him there—and now it is necessary to know what had become of Virachol.
Beside himself, his humanitarian instincts in revolt because of the slowness of the “rescue,” he had recruited his comrades for the execution of a deadly project. He had noticed that the scraping sounds were coming from a part of the subaerian situated low down in the bow. He decided to attack there, directly, and to scuttle the ship in order to “get air to the victims.” While the hatchways were distracting attention, Virachol pin-pointed the scraping sounds: directly behind the last “porthole,” beside the prow. Then he tried to draw a chalk circle on the invisible aeroscaph, in order that the perforating blows could always be aimed at the same spot—but the chalk made no mark, either on the “porthole” or the hull. Then he folded his meter rule into the shape of a pentagon and had a journeyman hold it up in the right place, between two ropes.
There were eight men supporting Virachol-Gargantua’s huge pointed crowbar. For a moment, they swung it rhythmically back and forth; then aiming straight into the pentagon, they struck. The ram rebounded…the impacts sounded with the regularity of a pendulum and the timbre of a bell.
At the first blow, the astronomer guessed what was happening. “Stop them!” he ordered, from the top of the platform. “Quickly! It’s madness! Stop them! The void! The void!”
Gargantua breathed out, grunted and spat out phlegm. “Courage, by God! Get a move on, lads!” He was in front of the others, and shoved the crowbar with all his phenomenal weight, sweating, reddening and exhaling savage noises.
“Stop it!” implored Monsieur Le Tellier, hastening to get down. “You’re going to…”
But he was too late.
A prodigious hiss was heard, brief, sharp and deafening. It was followed by a dull, flaccid sound and a piercing scream. Virachol had let go of his crowbar, and was waving his arms; it was easy to see that he was stuck to the subaerian. He braced himself, in vain; his alarmed friends tried to pull him backwards, in vain. The desperate man could not detach himself, and he look down fearfully at his immoderate belly, from which a swollen excrescence had suddenly begun to extend.
A crowd pressed around him. Monsieur Le Tellier calmed them down: “Don’t pull; it’s futile.”
“The sarvants have got him!” someone said.
“No,” the astronomer replied, hotly. “It’s the vacuum, and nothing else.”
The workmen explained what had happened. “The crowbar suddenly got away from us. One might have thought that it had decamped voluntarily. There was a whistling sound, and Gargantua’s stuck there in mid-air, as if he were trying to follow the crowbar!”
Indeed, everyone could see the stout iron bar inside the vessel. It seemed to be perpetually on the point of falling, sustained as it was by an invisible opposing force. As soon as it had pierced the flank of the aeroscaph, the vacuum had absorbed it avidly—or, if you prefer, the entering air had drawn it in—and then it had aspired Gargantua who was now blocking the airway that he had opened with his own abdomen. His elastic flesh was being sucked in by the formidable cupping-glass; the apoplectic appendage was elongating, swelling and bleeding. There was a dreadful possibility, it seemed, that the entire man would end up being sucked into that little hole.
The panic-stricken Virachol took out his knife; he preferred to cut off a part of his paunch rather than adhere for one minute more to the sucker of that gigantic artificial octopus…
Monsieur Le Tellier stopped him. “It’s simply a matter of letting air into the vacuum-chamber.”
Another battering ram was already attacking the sonorous hull. The hearty fellows maneuvering it had passed cables around their waists, and fifty firemen were holding them back.
The second ram departed like the first, but no man was cupped, in spite of the air that was whistling louder than a steam-engine in distress.
Virachol was able to disengage himself. He was carried away unconscious.
The scraping sounds had ceased.
“Dead!” whispered Monsieur Le Tellier, in the Duc d’Agnès’s ear. “The invisible matelots are dead, drowned in air!”
“Then there’s no more void in the subaerian?”
“Oh, yes. We’ve only forced an entry into a single compartment—the blast of the whistle didn’t last long for us to suppose anything else. My God! I’ll simply have the hatchways staved in, after all. The void will assist us. Too bad about the damage—I’d have preferred to open them.”
Gathered around the aft hatchway, six athletic metalworkers working as a team plied six long-shafted twenty-kilo sledgehammers, and began to strike it resonantly, as if chiming an invisible bell.
While they were hammering, the Duc d’Agnès took Monsieur Le Tellier aside. “I might seem stupid to you, but—invisibility? I still don’t understand. And many others are in the same boat, who dare not admit it. Robert Collin seemed to find it perfectly natural that invisible worlds and invisible beings might exist…”
“Since ancient times,” Monsieur Le Tellier replied, “people have admitted that there might be invisible entities. The gods of paganism hid themselves from mortal eyes; they were granted the Olympian faculty of aorasie,49 which is nothing but invisibility. An ancient legend, retold by La Fontaine in ‘King Candaules,’ relates the story of Gyges, the shepherd who became a king thanks to a ring that rendered him invisible. I also remember a certain turban in the Thousand-and-One Nights, which one only had to put on in order to disappear…”
“Mythology! Fable! Literature!”
“Certainly. But are we not surrounded by invisible entities? Real, but invisible? Energy, sound, odor and the air that bathes us—and the wind, the invisibility of which you are so well aware that you have equipped your airplane with an instrument to render it visible? You recognize that these are invisible entities. Well, that’s sufficient to strip all implausibility from the conjecture of invisible worlds that are formed entirely of similar entities…”
“All right, then—things. But living beings?”
“Oh, living beings. Let’s see—what is a living being? Let’s go as far as possible: what is a man? A soul and a body. Perfect. But the soul itself is always invisible; you’ve never seen a soul wandering about by itself, have you? Good. As for the body, an abstraction made by the soul—my God, the body is nothing but a certain quantity of
matter, neither more nor less estimable that a certain quantity of atmosphere. In consequence of that, I can’t see why one would refuse to one any property that one grants to the other, including the property of being optically imperceptible, for…
“For, don’t forget that invisibility is only that; it’s the quality of that which makes no impression on our retina. For an object, therefore, it’s no more extraordinary to be invisible than to be odorless or tasteless, given that we admit without difficulty that it doesn’t smell of anything or leaves the taste-buds indifferent. Do you think it prodigious that we don’t hear the clouds gliding past? Then why are you surprised not to see the sarvants passing by? Why are you, who admit impalpable objects, so reluctant and astonished to recognize the existence of invisible objects?
“Our amazement in the presence of the Blue Peril originates from the fact that these newly-revealed entities are solid, and that invisibility and solidity are two qualities of matter that are not found together in the habitual conditions in which we exercise our senses of sight and touch. However, even before our first contact with the invisible world, we had already witnessed instances of the combination of those two qualities in the same object. A solid body, animated by a rapid movement, can no longer be seen. Examples: a bullet in its trajectory; a propeller turning in the shade. Another, quite different example of an invisible solid is that of a colorless crystal vase plunged into pure water has the same refractive index. Colorless, I said—but a colorless entity is already invisible, and you’ve doubtless admired panes of glass so colorless, so aerian, with respect to visual perception that closed windows still seem wide open.
“Now, take note, please, that of all these substances we’re talking about, some are at least as important in the universe as the perishable clay of our bodies.”
“Even so,” retorted the Duc d’Agnès, instinctively, “one is tempted to deny the reality of that which is invisible.”
“Yes, because among our senses, sight is the one that has the vastest domain; it’s the sense that we deem principal—and that’s why you contest the existence of entities that it does not appreciate in any fashion. Imagine a creature, though, endowed with but a single sense—the sense of smell, for example. Such a creature is not absurd; there must be one among the multitude of living things. Think, then, of the infinity of things whose existence it would deny. Everything that has no odor! That blind creature would deny the reality of any visible thing that had no perfume!
“We resemble that creature. With respect to the aeroscaph, sarvants and the superaerian world, we are just as blind. Since the commencement of life, we have been playing a terrifying game of Blind-Man’s-Buff with the sarvants, and we’re the ones whose eyes have been bandaged! Moreover, they aren’t the only invisible enemies we’ve had for all that time. Think of treacherous carbon dioxide and its poisonous accomplice, carbon monoxide, and many others! We’re blind in confrontation with the sarvants, I tell you—that’s all; it’s a question of words. We can only perceive them by means of hearing or touch. For Madame Arquedouve, who cannot see at all, they’re exactly like other creatures, since they merely lack a quality that she is incapable of perceiving. Were she to touch that aeroscaph, the impression she would obtain would be the same as if it were a matter of a visible craft, unless her touch, perfected by experience, informed her that the object possesses some special characteristic that, for the sighted, translates into invisibility—a characteristic that would only exist for the blind. A man born blind would be unable understand that, from his point of view, there is any difference between the metal or the aeroscaph and our flesh. Are you still astonished, then, Monsieur, by an exception to what seems to certain people to be a general rule, which reason seems to impose as such with all its omnipotence?
“Would you like to break the spell of the invisible? It’s not difficult—close your eyes!”
“Rhetoric, Monsieur, rhetoric! Furthermore, admit that the objects you cite as being invisible are merely temporary and occasional. The bullet only becomes so once it is fired, the propeller when it turns and the vase when it is immersed in water. As for permanently invisible things, they’re gases, impalpable and very far from…”
“Who says that palpable gases cannot exist?”
“They would no longer be gases, by definition. Air only becomes palpable when liquefied under high pressure—when it metamorphoses from gas into liquid.”
“Bravo, young man! But tell me: this very liquid, this ‘honorary gas’ may be frozen. Why should that gas, having become a solid, necessarily lose its property of invisibility? It would only require one not-very-exceptional exception! It’s a simple question of the index of refraction. Does not opaque sand, Monsieur—sand, which is a kind of solid liquid—become transparent when it is transmuted into crystal? Why then, if you please, should an invisible gas not remain invisible on adopting another consistency? In the present case, is it not much less arduous to remain than to become?”
“All right. And what about the invisible worlds to which Robert Collin made allusion?”
“You’ll recall that the planets, including the Earth, don’t describe circular orbits around the Sun of which the Sun is the center, but ellipses, of which the Sun only occupies one of the focal points. What is at the other focal point—the second center, if I might put it thus—where there must be something powerful enough to counterbalance the action of the Sun and to contrive that the orbits of the planets are elliptical instead of circular? Some worthy intelligences maintain that there must be other Suns, invisible to human eyes, at the second focal points of the planetary ellipses. Have you read what the pamphlet on this subject by Jean Saryer has to say?50
“The Sun and the other invisible Sun, actual focal points of the ellipse, seats of two equal forces coupled in the immensity…draw the Earth along with an influence constant in direction…. Perhaps the other star radiates cold light and illuminates creatures invisible to humans.
“A world of the same contexture as the one that envelops us on high! Creatures similar to the sarvants! Sight has no purchase on them; they are endowed with absolute transparency; light goes right through them.”
“We are stupidly trusting of the evidence of our sight,” said the Duc d’Agnès. “First, we mistook the victims for the kidnappers—remember the flying men—and then the prisoners for the prison—recall the square patch!”
“And the inexplicable flying fish—which was, in reality, writhing on the floor of the invisible cylinder!”
“Ah, they’re…” Monsieur d’Agnès broke off to plug his ears. A skull-splitting whistle, accompanied by a sudden blast of wind, had just replaced the beat of the hammers. Under their repeated impact, and under the pressure of the air, the invisible hatch-cover had finally given way. It had caved in with surprising brutality. They heard things breaking, which it demolished as it went through the subaerian from top to bottom, and, as a hole was suddenly formed in the ground, they knew that it had gone clean through the bottom of the hull, in the manner of a bullet from an air-gun.
To avoid the suction, the six hammer-wielders had dropped into prone positions, forming a human star radiating around the orifice. One of them, whose head was on the very edge and who was hanging on to it, quickly got up and shouted: “Something brushed against me as it came out violently, immediately after the whistling! It went past me…”
Scarcely had he expressed his surprise when they heard a sound of breaking glass high above. In the expectation of an invisible collapse, everyone ducked. After a second or so, a rain of broken glass fell on the audience. That was all. The roof of the Grand Palais had just been split open; no one knew how or why.
“It’s the body of one of the matelots!” Monsieur Le Tellier explained. They must be very light! As soon as the air had flowed in, equilibrium having been re-established, the body rose up again toward the surface of the Air, like a cork, just as one of our bodies would rise up from the bottom of the sea, with incalculable force. That’s one
of them lost. Let’s try to safeguard the others—those that were scraping in the bow.”
And he thought: They’re not human—that’s impossible. So light! No hearts! No lungs! They can’t be human, damn it, even adapted. Transformation has its limits. What are they, then? His imagination forged frightful and fabulous creatures. The idea of Marie-Thérèse was inevitably mingled with these infernal evocations, and the astronomer felt himself becoming increasingly tremulous the closer they came to full knowledge.
A naval cadet, Monsieur Rigaud, slid into the invisible breach. He went down into the aeroscaph, taking every possible precaution. He reported out loud on the shapes he encountered. He went back and forth in mid-air, in a miraculous fashion, His circumspect footsteps were audible, along with the tick-tock of his fingers tapping the walls. His voice became gradually fainter. He moved upwards and downwards, and turned corners, seemingly opening doors and hatches, crawling through invisible tubes and turning sideways to follow narrow corridors. His voice could no longer be heard, nor his footsteps, nor his stumbles. He continued the exploration of the fantastic labyrinth, but suddenly went pale and made frightened gestures. He was lost! He was visible a few meters above ground; it seemed that they could reach him with a single bound, and yet he was a captive in an inextricable jail. Foremen holding hands formed a chain through the labyrinth as far as Monsieur Rigaud. He came out, saying that he would only go back in with a coiled thread that he might unroll like Ariadne.
It was, in fact, by means of that ancient method that they were able to explore the whole of the airtight part of the aeroscaph to which the first hatchway gave access. Then they stayed in the others, except for the fifth.
The Blue Peril Page 27
