The Xenobiotic Invasion

by Theo Varlet

  After becoming infatuated with an Americanized Danae who twisted me round her little finger, to be romantically smitten with a world celebrity against her wishes, who considers me as a good comrade, and appreciates my devotion, but that’s all...and who is already engaged, besides—resolved to make a marriage of convenience…of cold, scientific, American convenience!

  If it’s true that a grand passion is one that is unrequited, here I am, on my way to being the most striking living illustration of that axiom!

  In addition to all that, my canvases are still in Cassis. In what condition will they reach me, if they’re packed by laymen? And I need them; I have to make some money, and it’s my “coves” that sell best.

  While ruminating these reflections and scratching my residual itches I went to bed and ended up going to sleep without putting out the beside lamp.

  When I woke up, from a heavy sleep, more tiring than a late night, at 10 a.m., the first thing that struck my consciousness was an odor of rotting roses. I was astonished to see the bulb of the lamp clad in a thick coral-colored lattice-work, the festoons of which hung down like stalactites, like an ornament from some baroque fantasy. It took me a few seconds to comprehend that this was a new growth of the impalpable powder brought from Cassis on my clothing and my person. The flexible wire was also laden with a mushroom-growth of lenticular patches and red nodes, like those in Alburtin’s house but larger, which had grown more rapidly, on which tiny blisters were already swelling, bursting one after another and each projecting a cloud of fine red dust. There was some of it on my bedclothes and on my face. My neck and shoulders were itching again, violently—and it was then that I began to establish a link between the so-called infestations of fleas and the dust of the “celestial fungus,” as I then dubbed it.

  That ridiculous incident, the dirt that squashed under a finger like brick-colored sweat, ended up putting me in a bad mood. Having switched off the lamp, I undertook a summary cleaning of the bulb and the wire, but I soon abandoned the task, leaving its completion to the concierge, who fulfilled the functions of a housekeeper for me.

  Not being a scientist, the possibilities implicit in that invasion did not occur to me as yet. I saw it merely as a disagreeable episode; I did not even think of the possibility that it would recur as soon as I switched on the electricity again.

  A bath and fresh clothes put an end to the itching, but not the bad mood. I was prickly and miserable. The rendezvous with Aurore only inspired a suspicion that I was being taken for a ride…and she would be fashionably late, the Angel!

  The North-South from Lamarck to Saint-Lazare; the station clock showing 11:25...

  I went into the Terminus, went on to the right-hand platform—the Le Havre side—then went back to the other...

  “Gaston!”

  Aurore, half standing behind her table, her hand extended! I was about to go past without recognizing her!

  The mere sound of her voice, raising up a tidal wave of tenderness and marvelous hopes, restored my good humor. While sliding between the marble tabletops to sit down beside her on the bench, I considered her with my painter’s eye, and I understood.

  “Ah! You’ve bought a new hat, Aurette. Congratulations. The change is so extraordinary...”

  “That you didn’t recognize me. I’ve succeeded, then. My Havana straw bonnet, which compressed me face, bore too close a resemblance to the flying-helmet I’m wearing in my photographs—whereas with this lacy capeline with a flared brim, people can see my hair. I’ve fluffed it up too.”

  “You can rest easy. No journalist will identify you.”

  “The precaution’s all the more useful because the newspapers have advertised my departure from Cassis. It won’t take long for them to start looking for me in Paris.” Observing my astonished expression, she added: “You haven’t read it? Look, here’s the Matin. In the latest news.”

  The items was headlined: FROM AMERICA TO CASSIS, VIA THE MOON.

  Marseilles, October 18. It is in Cassis, a charming little port 20 kilometers from Marseilles, well-known to painters and visitors to the Côte d’Azur, that Miss Aurore Lescure, the first female astronaut, whose prodigious flight we reported yesterday, remade contact with the terrestrial globe on returning from her expedition to “blonde Phoebe.” Picked up unconscious in the territory of the commune by the radiotherapeutic physician Tancrède Alburtin, who was passing by in his automobile, she was transported to the doctor’s clinic. The latter “judged it his duty, in view of the young astronaut’s condition” to forbid any interview with her. This is the reason for the silence maintained by the dispatches published in yesterday’s editions regarding Miss Lescure’s exact landing-place. It must be assumed that it was for the same reason, in order to take a few days’ well-deserved rest, that she left Cassis this morning for an undisclosed retreat. This voluntary reclusion will be of short duration, however, and we shall soon have the privilege of offering a detailed account of her adventure in these pages, which she is in the process of writing for us.

  I folded up the paper, my only comment being a slight shrug of the shoulders.

  “I telephoned Professor Nathan,” she added. “He was informed of our arrival by Dr. Alburtin, and he’ll see us shortly, at 2 p.m. I’ve brought the box and the phial.”

  “Ah! In that regard, I’ll have news for him.” And I told her about the incident of my lamp and the flex invaded by the “celestial fungus.”

  The North-South 12 to Rennes…the Rue de Vaugirard, facing the autumnal Jardins du Luxembourg...

  Professor Albert Nathan received us in his severe study, whose walls were entirely lined with books. When we came in he nodded his head, without getting up from his armchair, and offered us two chairs with a gesture.

  “Mademoiselle Aurette Constanin; Monsieur Gaston Delvart…my former pupil and friend Tancrède Alburtin tells me that you have an interesting communication to make to me. I can give you five minutes. Be brief.”

  He was a tall, thin old man of indeterminate age, between 65 and 80, with leathery features and a forehead extended by baldness between two tufts of silvery white hair. He fixed the Olympian gaze of his dark blue eyes upon us, as if he doubted that people so young could have anything to teach a scientist of his species.

  I humbly admit, despite the good opinion that I had of myself as an artist, that I felt very small in front of this superior representative of humanity, a biologist doubled with a philosopher of universal repute. I let my companion speak.

  Holding her head high and her gaze steady, modest but confident, she said: “Monsieur le Professeur, before anything else, I’m obliged to ask for your word as a scientist and a gentleman that you will not mention to anyone whatsoever the object of my visit or my current address. It’s imperative that no one knows that I’m in Paris until circumstances permit me to authorize it. Aurette Constantin is only a pseudonym.”

  Albert Nathan’s white and bushy eyebrows frowned. “I don’t like secrecy, Mademoiselle. Out of consideration for Tancrède Alburtin, I’ll make you the promise you ask, but if your communication were to have scientific results, I must have authorization to publish them…if they’re worth the trouble.”

  “Provided that no one knows that I’m in Paris, I see no objection to your publishing the results. As to whether they’re worth the trouble, you shall be the judge.”

  Bending down slightly, she picked up the green box from the carpet, where she had deposited it on sitting down, rose to her feet, and went to open it before the scientist’s eyes.

  “This is meteoric dust that I collected outside the terrestrial atmosphere, at altitudes between 1000 and 4000 kilometers. I’m Aurore Lescure.”

  The grand old man sketched a pale smile, which accentuated the irony of his gaze.

  “Mademoiselle Lescure, I believe that you are a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, and that Cartesian methods of rational research are familiar to you. A scientist must always doubt a priori. What is the proof that this
dust—which might, parenthetically, have been more appropriately submitted to my colleague Quentin-Dufour, the mineralogist—is meteoritic in origin?”

  “When you have experimented with it, Monsieur le Professeur, you will observe that, at the very least, this dust behaves in a fashion very different from any terrestrial substance.”

  Briefly, she described the generation and the appearance of the spongy magma the color of coffee-grounds obtained under the X-ray tube, and then brought the wide-necked phial out of her handbag.

  “This other red dust has been projected by the blisters that form spontaneously on the magma, and it’s this, it seems, that propagates the red vegetation of which these are specimens.”

  “Vegetation that is generated in particular on illuminated electrical lamps and long conductive wires,” I added, emboldened. “And it grows very rapidly…more rapidly at present, it appears, than at the beginning in Cassis.”

  I told him what had happened that very morning in my room.

  Was the scientist listening to me? I don’t know. While I was speaking, he leaned over the table and, with the aid of nickel-plated tweezers, took from the green box and the phial, successively, a few meteoric grains, a little impalpable red powder and a sample of coral fungus, which he deposited one by one on a piece of paper. Then, equipped with a powerful magnifying-glass, he pored over the specimens.

  When I fell silent, he looked up. The skeptical smile had vanished from his face, and without even looking at me, he addressed himself to Aurore, in a deliberately cold and impassive tone in which contained emotion was detectable.

  “Mademoiselle, these are indeed spores and tissue with no relationship to terrestrial plants. If the facts that you have reported are accurate—and I shall verify them soon enough—we have in these organisms the first evidence of a new creation in the process of developing on Earth and hastening to take possession of its new domain. In that event, Mademoiselle, science will owe you the solution to one of its most intriguing enigmas: the origin of life. Your meteorites are specimens of the mysterious cosmozoans,13 or seeds of extraterrestrial life, that were purely hypothetical until now...

  “I have every reason to believe that your discovery is bound to have considerable resonance, not merely within the scientific world, for the experiment will not be limited to Dr. Alburtin’s laboratory and mine. It will develop outside, thanks to the extreme smallness of these reproductive spores, which renders them as mobile and diffusible as flower-pollen. You are carrying it on your persons, and have left it in the atmosphere throughout your journey. No matter how few of these seed-germs settle on electric wires through which current is passing, the insemination of Paris is assured. That will be very interesting to observe.”

  He fell silent, and ostentatiously consulted his watch, which he had placed on the table in front of him.

  “It’s agreed, then: I shall undertake a study of his knew living realm. Do you need this box and phial, Mademoiselle?”

  “No, Monsieur le Professeur; they’re yours. I only collected these meteorites in order to donate them to science.”

  “Thank you. Would you care to give me your telephone number, so that I can inform you when I have something new? Hôtel Métropole, Room 127…perfect. Now, excuse me, I have work to do. Mademoiselle, Monsieur...”

  He did not get up from his armchair, any more than he had when we arrived; nor did he offer us his hand.

  We withdrew. I was furious. To think that this was a scientist of the Institut, a man of the last century, in which it is claimed that courtesy and politeness were cultivated. Not once had he addressed himself to me, and he had not invited me to return. Oh, to be sure, I had no desire to return! Evidently he considered me, in my capacity as an artist, to be a good-for-nothing. Only Aurore, the donor of his cosmozoans, had some right to his interest.”

  “What a boor! He wasn’t even polite to you, Aurette!”

  “Yes, Gaston, he was polite. If you knew what American scientists are like, you might even think that he was very polite. The essential thing, in any case, is that he has consented to study the meteorites. I feel somewhat liberated of a responsibility.”

  “Do you think his prognostication has any chance of being realized? The insemination of Paris, as he put it? He’s exaggerating, isn’t he?”

  “He sees a theoretical possibility, at the very least. He’s extrapolating from the laboratory to real life.”

  We were I agreement in concluding that the professor’s observation was merely a mental vision, incapable of assuming any real importance in the domain of everyday facts. The agile and confident vertigo of Paris, the turbulent movement of the Metropolis, took hold of us as soon as we had regained the great arteries.

  The spectacle of the marvelous organism that is a capital city functioning with such a complex harmony, inspires such confidence in the solidity of civilization! How could one suppose that its order might be put in peril by that pinch of dust brought back from space by my companion?

  Aurore wanted to regulate our relationship immediately, in such a way as to “respect my liberty.” I had made the mistake of talking to her about my art-dealers, and she wanted me to visit them that afternoon.

  “What about you, Aurette? You don’t know anyone in Paris. What would you do? No, I shall devote this first day to you. This is my holiday, just as it’s yours.”

  All that I consented to do was to go into a café to write a letter to the proprietor of the Hôtel Cendrillon: I asked him to send me the bill that had been settled by Alburtin, and to send me my paintings, well wrapped-up, and the other effects I had left in Cassis.

  For my part, I obtained permission from her to let me paint her portrait—but the day was too far advanced, and artificial light is worthless. She promised to do a sitting for me the following day.

  After that, a stroll through Paris—still good comrades, although she yielded more of her memories to me and I recovered, momentarily, the illusion of a current of mutual sympathy.

  That evening, we went to the Paramount. A surprise was reserved for us there… a documentary film with sound, transmitted by telephotography: the departure of the Rocket from Columbus three days earlier. Aurore was amused to hear and see herself pronouncing her final words and entering the apparatus—and then the surge of the shell into the Heavens, thunderously, and the cheers of the American crowd…but she was glad of the obscurity of the auditorium, which protected her from any danger of any direct confrontation by her neighbors of her living image.

  VI. The Lichen Gains Ground

  I got home after midnight but didn’t go to bed immediately, thinking I was reading the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini, but actually dreaming about Aurore. The concierge had shaken my bed-sheets and cleaned the lamp and its wires, but it was evident that the spores had, to use Professor Nathan’s term, inseminated my apartment. I had been reading for half an hour, and was getting drowsy, with the illusion that rain was beginning to patter on the window-panes, when I noticed that the lamplight was getting weaker and redder...and there was an odor of rotting roses…and the itching!

  A new network of coral lace encrusted the bulb and the wires of the flex. The little crepitation that I had mistaken for rain was nothing less than the minuscule and reiterated explosions of the spore-producing pustules projecting their ochreous pollen on to the night-stand, the sheets and me.

  The joke was turning sour. For the first time I thought: Science is all very well, but it would have been better to leave that box of meteorites in the woods at Belle-Fille! Without the censorship of my subconscious, as Freud puts it, my exclamation might have been translated as: Why did you take it into your head, Aurore, to collect those satanic cosmozoans?

  Reluctant to clean the bulb, disgusted by the idea of getting my hands dirty, I switched off the light.

  My first thought on waking up is for Aurore, but it’s no longer a question of addressing reproaches to her. Another two days! Yes, in two days, her father and fiancé will disembark in
Paris, and then it will be over. Goodbye daily meetings with her; goodbye illusion of amorous companionship and tempting myself with the hope that eventually, by virtue of sensing my adoration nearby, she might end up seeing me as something more than a good comrade. From the way she talks about her father and her fiancé, especially her father, I understand that as soon as they’re here, I’ll cease to matter; she’ll work with her father, not leaving him an more. Will she even make an effort to escape that monopoly and devote one hour a day to me… for which I won’t ask? For I can’t think of introducing myself into their company. By what right? With what excuse? I’m nothing with regard to science or business—and as for the services I’ve rendered Aurore, what gratitude will these people think they owe me? That I picked her up? But that honor belongs to Alburtin. That I escorted her from Cassis to Paris? That I’m keeping her company? She could easily have done without me; her fiancé might even look upon it with a jaundiced eye, if I were tempted to make use of it. I’m painting her portrait? Well, they’ll pay me, and it will earn me a distracted “Thanks” with, at most, an invitation to diner...

  Another two days. While going to pick up the Excelsior and the Matin that the concierge, resuming her regular routine, has deposited on my doorstep with a carton of milk, I glimpse an insidious desire in the hidden depths of my conscience: that the Berengaria, having suffered damage—an encounter with an iceberg—will be delayed for a day or two. But there aren’t any icebergs in the North Atlantic in October.

  Who was it said: “I don’t know what the soul of a criminal is like, but that of an honest man is appalling!”14

  A shiver runs along my hands and arms to my back and clutches at my heart...