Journey to the Isles of Atlantis and Other Fanciful Excursions

by Brian Stableford

  “How is it that at the present time you no longer posses a similar city?” Marcel objected.

  “What would be the point?” replied Blas. “The latest endeavors of our hygienists have had the effect of rendering the atmosphere of the lowest regions as healthy, as pure and as devoid of microbes as that of high altitudes. Then again, when it pleases us to study or travel though the upper layers of the atmosphere, are our aeroscaphs not to hand?”

  XV. Psychophotography

  Marcel’s visit to the Palace of Art and History had caused him a real cerebral fatigue. The extraordinary efforts of attention and imagination that he had been obliged to make had exhausted him.

  “That’s enough for the first time,” said Blas. You’ve just had an excellent history lesson. In a few days we’ll return to the Palace, and you can complete your documentation at your leisure. Today, you’ve only glimpsed the broad outlines, the principal events of that history of ten centuries. It will be necessary for us to study it in detail. The subject is interesting enough not to become tedious for you.”

  “This morning’s trip,” Marcel replied, “our rapid excursion through the ages, has been a veritable revelation for me. It’s only now that I can take account entirely of the vices, faults and imperfections of the men of my time, how ignorant and coarse they were, and how little they understood their veritable interests! They spent their lives tearing one another apart, instead of uniting against their enemies and combining the power of their intellect in order to render themselves masters of natural forces and trying to subjugate them.”

  “We’ve realized some progress,” relied Blas, modestly, “at least from the point of view of mutual understanding and concord, but with respect to the sciences we’ve accomplished hardly anything.”

  “You’re difficult to please,” Marcel protested. “I confess that, speaking for myself, I find your society admirably well-organized, and my mind takes fright at the thought of what humankind might become after another forward step of ten centuries, in the year 4000.”

  “That will certainly be a splendid epoch,” Blas replied. “We can already foresee that by the year 4000 humans will have discovered the means of prolonging their existence almost indefinitely, that they will have tamed the occult forces of nature definitively, and will doubtless have realized the dream of traveling through the celestial spaces and going from one planet to another at will.”

  “One question…in your opinion, will the outcasts still exist in that blissful epoch? For, after all, however perfect the future world might be, you’ll always need fitters, mechanics and handymen.”

  “I don’t think so. On the contrary, I’m convinced that in the year 4000 there will no longer be any outcasts. You can see that our society has already reduced, in considerable proportions, the number of manual workers. The inhabitants of the two polar cities only form a tiny part of the population. Machines construct other machines themselves. In ten centuries, that tendency will be further accentuated. By then, science will have simplified and improved everything. I’m sure that then, our aeroscaphs and submarines will be considered crude, cumbersome and primitive machines. They will have gone to museums to join the steamboats with paddles or propellers and balloons of varnished silk inflated by hydrogen or lighting gas that were employed in your time.”

  “Undoubtedly, but it seems to me that, having arrived at that degree of perfection, having nothing more to desire, sated with comfort and happiness, art and science, humans, no longer having to struggle, will suffer ennui. Won’t spleen be the end result of this exaggerated progress?”

  “You have a strange and misanthropic way of seeing, Marcel. Your fashion of appreciating future things is utterly illogical. The more intelligent and robust a man is, the more reasons he has for interesting himself in what surrounds him. By increasing the duration of his life and the volume of his brain, the human being will only augment the number of bonds that attach him to existence. Science and art are infinite realms; the further one advances in their mysterious pathways, the greater the perspective becomes. Human curiosity will be eternal, like the universe and the human soul itself. Humans will never be perfect from the moral point of view, but the higher they rise, the more they will attempt to approach that perfection. You ought to understand that, in those conditions, spleen, discouragement and ennui will no longer have any place in future societies.

  Blas’ words opened for Marcel such dazzling horizons of wellbeing, beauty and fraternity, that it was as if he were overwhelmed by the weight of his thoughts. Blas too seemed lost in his dreams. It was silently that the two friends took their places again in the pneumatic carriage and returned to the school for the midday meal.

  An electric massage followed by a walk in the magnificent arbors of the central garden dissipated, as if by enchantment, the headache from which Marcel was suffering. He found himself as keen and well-disposed in imagination and intelligence as he had been that morning.

  For some time, Blas and Marcel strolled beneath the shady vaults of the circular gallery, inhaling with delight the warm breeze charged with the embalmed odor of the gardens.

  “You talked this morning,” Marcel said, “about the considerable progress that humankind still has to realize from the moral viewpoint. It seems to me that in that regard, you’re not backward.”

  “Evidently, what we’ve done is enormous. A long time ago we recognized that in protecting the weak, humankind was not only augmenting its moral potency but its material strength. But what we’ve realized in very little by comparison with what remains for us to do.”

  “I find your morality sufficiently perfected already, my dear Blas, and I’d be curious to know by what means you’ve been able to obtain such fine results.”

  “Firstly, by the diffusion of ideas, the progress of education and, above all, the facility of communications. When people knew one another better, they lost the prejudices and hatreds that separated them from one another. The nations of times past only detested one another because they didn’t know one another. It’s also necessary to add that we’ve been powerfully aided by certain discoveries, among which I’ll cite, in first place, psychophotography.”

  “I don’t even know the name of that science. If it wouldn’t be tedious for you, I’d be grateful if you could give me a few explanations.”

  “Of course, my dear Marcel. Psychophotography, born of the radiographic photography of the brain, is the science that treats the means of photographing thoughts, sensations, and, in sum, all cerebral impressions.”

  “Ah!” exclaimed Marcel. “I’d be glad to observe experiments in psychophotography. That would interest me, if possible, even more than the views of historic cinematography that you enabled me to admire this morning.”

  “I’ll take you there. I had, in any case, planned to show you those experiments one day. That’s the employment of our afternoon determined.”

  Following Blas, Marcel went into a dimly lit corridor. They went into a room completely plunged in darkness.

  When Marcel’s eyes had habituated to the darkness somewhat, he distinguished half a dozen students, silent and attentive in the gloom, who did not even turn their heads at the approach of the newcomers.

  Soon, in the depths of the darkness, ampoules were illuminated by a pale green light, similar to that of glow-worms or burning phosphorus.

  On a platform at the black of the room Marcel perceived screens, flasks and mirrors, the employment of which was not evident to him.

  “Now pay attention,” murmured Blas. “As usual, we’ll begin with the simplest experiments. Watch the luminous traces that appear on the screen.”

  On a large plate of sensitized glass, Marcel saw stripes and patches appear against a dark background.

  Blas explained: “We’ve succeeded in preparing plates of such sensitivity that they’re even impressed by the fluid emitted by the active brain. Those large white patches have been produced by the fluid emanated by an angry man; the small ones are due to th
e fluid of a brain attained by a fever. We’ve succeeded by this means in photographing, as you can see, hatred, pride, idleness, and even ambition. But these are only elementary experiments. By photographing certain nervous centers, we succeed in obtaining images that represent, cerebrally, the person placed before the apparatus, even including his thoughts. We witness the formation of a reasoned argument in the bosom of the cerebral circumvolutions. Thanks to psychophotography, the human brain is like an open book, which we can decipher fluently.”

  “I’m no longer astonished by the progress you’ve accomplished in morality. No vice or fault would be able to resist the marvelous clairvoyance of that apparatus, which allows you to fathom the utmost depths of consciences.”

  “It’s certain,” Blas replied, smiling, “that with the progress of psychophotography, lying and hypocrisy are no longer secure. A man with evil designs against his fellows would soon be unmasked. He could no longer harm anyone; he would simply be covered in ridicule. What point in there in lying, then? What is the point of trying to hide one’s faults? On the contrary, anyone among us who has evil penchants informs everyone of it, in order that the means of correcting him can be procured. Personally, I don’t let a week go by without coming to examine my brain in confrontation with the psychophotographic apparatus, in order to see whether, unknown to myself, some unfortunate tendency might be developing within me...”

  Marcel listened, amazed and alarmed.

  “Psychophotography is also a great help to us in the examinations that serve as a sanction for studies,” Blas added. “That way, no cheating is possible, and the timid but laborious pupil no longer has to fear seeing himself put off until the next session because emotion has paralyzed his means of expression. Evidently, psychophotography only constitutes a part of the evidence; it simply serves as a check on the opinions of the examiners, who have already interrogated the candidate at length.”

  Blas fell silent abruptly. A sensitized plate, much larger than its predecessors, had suddenly brightened.

  Against a pale background of a phosphorescent glow, landscapes, faces, numbers and even musical notes were designed, fading out to give way to others, and then reappearing, only to fade again.

  “The images you can see,” Blas murmured in Marcel’s ear, “are those that are forming in the brain of the student placed in front of the apparatus at the moment. Just now he was thinking about a landscape; it was at the very moment that his attention was concentrated on the object in question that the landscape appeared clearly on the plate. He thought about one of his friends, and that memory evoked the image of the absent friend.”

  “Permit me an objection,” said Marcel. “It seems to me that what you’re photographing are images produced on the retina, not the brain itself.”

  “That’s a great error, but quite understandable. A few words will dissipate it. It’s the cerebral centers, not the nervous extremities, that are the seat of sensations. A man whose eyes have been put out can evoke in the imagination the landscapes he once saw. Wasn’t Beethoven entirely deaf when he composed his best symphonies? I could multiply examples, but I think you’ve understood.”

  “Perfectly,” Marcel replied, “except that, I confess that I too would be glad to make a trial of the psychophotographic apparatus and take account of its magical effects by means of personal experience...”

  “Nothing is simpler. Place yourself before the apparatus; concentrate your will forcefully; focus your thought on an object or a person that is well engraved in your memory, and you’ll see their image appear on the sensitized plate.”

  Slightly emotional, Marcel got up and went to sit facing the psychophotographic apparatus.

  He closed his eyes.

  And with all his might he concentrated his will-power on the person of Doctor Belzevor.

  When he looked a few seconds later, the doctor was before him, coiffed in a brightly colored felt hat, impeccably dressed as an elegant man of the twentieth century.

  His face was illuminated by a sarcastic smile...

  Fearfully, Marcel thought that everything was sinking around him.

  His ideas became blurred; his brain exploded

  He extended his arms abruptly, in a convulsive start, and uttered a terrible scream.

  XVI. The Return

  When Marcel Vernoy opened his eyes and looked around, he perceived his parents, anxiously watching out for the moment of his awakening.

  With an instinctive movement, Marcel leapt out of bed.

  His legs buckled.

  His father and mother leapt forward in order to sustain him, and he threw himself into their arms, weeping.

  He was incapable of pronouncing a word, he was so emotional.

  After those expansions, which Monsieur and Madame Vernoy did not trouble with any question, Marcel sat down, exhausted, on one of the blue velvet armchairs and passed his hand over his forehead with a gesture of profound lassitude.

  “Excuse me,” he stammered. “It seems to me that I’m emerging from a hallucination. I don’t know yet whether I’m really awake. I don’t even know what world I’m in, or what the date is. I fear that dementia might be taking possession of me.”

  “My dear child,” replied Monsieur Vernoy, emotionally, “calm down, I implore you. Rest, reflect... You went to sleep yesterday evening under the influence of an elixir that Doctor Belzevor made you drink, and which, according to him, ought to have transported you in thought into the bosom of the human society of the future...”

  “Then everything I’ve seen was only a beautiful dream!” exclaimed Marcel, with a bitter disenchantment. “Humankind perfected, fraternal, rid of its paltriness, its ignorance and its brutality, only exists in Doctor Belzevor’s flasks! Like the gold and crimson clouds of the sunset, which the darkness swallows, the progress and the ideal by which I found myself summoned for a few hours have vanished like a nocturnal phantasm in the first rays of sunlight.

  “Oh, certainly,” he added, in a voice vibrant with sincerity, “I swear to you that the admirable spectacles I’ve witnessed, and the moral lessons in which I’ve participated, have already borne their fruit. You’re going to find me regenerated and transformed, very different from the ambitious, egotistical and idle schoolboy who made you despair. Now, I shall love work, struggle and abnegation, for the sensual pleasure they contain.

  “Henceforth, in my own eyes, I want to be proud of myself. I shall no longer have the cowardice of choosing as the aim of my life the conquest of a sinecure, in which I can stagnate in idleness and mediocrity. I’m ready to endure poverty, privation and the scorn of the crowd in order to follow through the ideas of beauty and truth that are germinating within me. I want to be one of the anonymous workers of that progress, that good will and that future fraternity, the splendors of which I alone, of the men of my time, have been able to contemplate.

  “Oh, that dear Doctor Belzevor, how much gratitude I owe him! In revealing to me, by the sovereign mastery of his science, the magnificent humankind of the future, he has regenerated me. Henceforth, I shall advance, in the social struggle, protected by my convictions as if by a diamond suit of armor. But I’d like, this very minute, to go and see Doctor Belzevor, to throw myself at his knees and assure him of my infinite gratitude!”

  Monsieur and Madame Vernoy looked at one another sadly.

  With a gesture of tenderness and melancholy, they invited Marcel to sit down again.

  “My dear child,” said Monsieur Vernoy, gravely, “I have some very sad news to give you. While you were asleep, watched over by your mother and me, under the azure wallpaper of this room, while your mind, temporarily freed from the tyranny of time and space, was flying toward future worlds, Doctor Belzevor, your benefactor and ours, has been the victim of a terrible accident.”

  “What’s happened to him” asked Marcel, with an indescribable emotion.

  “His laboratory caught fire, alas.”

  “The doctor isn’t dead, though?”

  “H
e’s very seriously injured. His life is in danger, and his condition is aggravated terribly by the despair caused by the irreparable loss of his notes, his formulae and his elixirs. His laboratory is no longer anything but a heap of rubble.”

  “I want to see Doctor Belzevor!” Marcel exclaimed. “I won’t have any tranquility until I’m sure that his life isn’t in danger.”

  “My child,” replied Monsieur Vernoy, sadly. “You’ll only see a wounded man, shrouded in dressings and bandages and plunged in a profound slumber. In consequence of a servant’s error, the doctor has taken a large dose of the contents of the last bottle of the same elixir that permitted you to visit the realms of the future. He’s drunk all the belzevorine that remained after the catastrophe that destroyed the laboratory.”

  “With what result?” asked Marcel, fearfully.

  “With the result that Doctor Belzevor must be traveling at this moment, in thought, in the regions that you’ve just quit.”

  After that conversation, Marcel remained plunged in a bleak silence, which his parents dared not disturb.

  His overtaxed brain could not succeed in recovering its equilibrium.

  Chagrin, amazement and wonder nailed him to the spot, and he was making vain efforts to coordinate logically the ideas that were pressing upon him.

  After having ascertained that Monsieur Belzevor’s condition was stable, Marcel and his parents returned to the village of Montbarzy in one of the château’s carriages.

  That short journey, under the profound shadow of the oaks, was silent.

  “Permit me, Father,” Marcel had said, “to collect myself, to rest and put my impressions in order. I’m succumbing under the weight of too many ideas and too many sensations...”

  Marcel recovered, slowly. Little by little, he regained the complete equilibrium of his faculties. He was, however, completely transformed. Judging by his seriousness, his patience and his mildness, one might have thought that he had acquired the experience and the wisdom of an old man.