The Xenobiotic Invasion

by Theo Varlet

  The greatest number of the unemployed, however, estimated at 200,000 or 300,000, remained on the street, with neither work nor pay, without knowing where they might find one or the other. Their discontentment was all the keener because the favor of half-salary granted by the tramway authority to the first employees put on leave had generated the hope that the measure might be extended to everyone. I know very little about politics, but it seems evident to me that the latter factor played a considerable role in the demonstrations of the unemployed, organized by the advanced parties. Their monstrous procession went along the great boulevards and filed passed the Chambre des Députés for two hours, which had just gone into session in order to approve of the decree. They demanded, to the tune of Lampions—“Give us pay! Give us pay!”—their full salary, or its equivalent in the form of a State indemnity, for as long as their unemployment might last.

  Save for few minor scuffles with the police, everything passed off peacefully—but that demonstration, by its example, crystallized the discontentment and played the same role with respect to the public as a virulent newspaper article.

  After having rejoiced for two days because the suppression of electricity had stopped the growth of the Xenobiota and permitted the ragged remains of the lichen to be swept into the sewers, the reaction set in. The capital was beginning to find the “electric law,” previously demanded by the clamor of horns and cries, too harsh. The quarters that were still clear claimed that they were suffering injury without sufficient reason; why not do in Paris as in the provinces, where healthy regions retained the use of the current? In buildings already disinfected, people wanted to be able to switch the lights on again immediately. The passage of the disinfectants was dreaded because some—chlorine, in particular-damaged the furniture. At the same time, people railed against the slowness of the operations, carried out indolently. What was the point, anyway, in continuing them? To all appearances, all the arrondissements seemed sanitized. No one was scratching any longer, anywhere. What was the matter, then? The “Zenobia” was finished. How long did they have to wait to get the electricity back, to reestablish normal circulation, and everything else?

  That evening, under the makeshift lighting, gas jets in the main roads and acetylene in the cafes, there was no longer the calm relaxation of a Sunday but an effervescence of disgust and discouragement. No cinemas, no theaters, no music halls. Everyone was fed up with the low-key life imposed on the capital; tempers were flaring, in the sentiment of the futility of such a life...

  On October 26, that state of mind intensified, and there was a revolt against the decree. Ten times over, while cycling to the Ricourts at about 11 a.m., on the short journey from my apartment to the Rue Legendre, I saw agents of the anti-electric brigade dressing down motorists who had simply set out in their unprotected cars—and in almost every case, the denunciatory growth of lichen at the rear of the chassis proved that the spores were still adrift in the air of the capital. The latent nuclei were merely waiting to reveal themselves.

  In the Rue Legendre, in response to my ring, Géo came in person to open the door. He held out the tip of the little finger of a hand black with grimy grease.

  “Excuse me, old chap, we’ve been without servants since yesterday. Put your bike here. As you can see, I’m in the process of getting mine in shape too—but there’s a broken gear-plate; I need to repair it. This afternoon, to go to the factory, I’ll risk taking my old banger...giving a bribe to the X who’s watching the garage. Once outside, the worst I’ll end up with is a 100 franc fine for the contravention.”

  “Do you think the danger’s over, then?”

  “Me? Not at all! But whether there are a few spores more or less in Paris, it won’t change anything. Sterilization seems to me to be a utopia, as long as it’s not carried out at a stroke, by drowning Paris—evacuated in advance, of course—in a cloud of gas...and I’m not going to go eight kilometers on foot.”

  “Is your mother well? Your sister?”

  “My mother’s gone to the employment agency, to try to find a maid. My sister’s off on her provincial lecture tour with Cheyne. As he only speaks English, she’s speaking on his behalf and introducing herself—she has some nerve!—as the intended pilot of the next rocket. They’re in Brest and Rennes today. The enormity of it is that the ban on astronautical flights isn’t holding them back at all, and the issue of the European shares will be fully subscribed in a matter of days.

  “It’s true that Rosenkrantz has joined forces with them. Cheyne has ceded him the proceeds of the fabrication of synthetic oil in exchange for Standard supporting the Moon Gold share issue. Cheyne’s jubilant. He’s found a suitable match. Goodbye misogyny—I’m beginning to believe that it will end well, in a marriage. Personally, I’d like nothing better, but it’s our noble mother who’ll find the insult hard to swallow. Think of it: an arch-plebeian Yank, the son of a road-sweeper! She’s already down in the dumps knowing that her daughter’s ‘showing herself off like a mountebank and dragging the good name of the Ricourts in the mud of speculation!’”

  I was buoyed up by joy at this favorable news. I experienced so much affection for my old friend Géo that, when he invited me to dinner that evening, I accepted enthusiastically. Before leaving him, though, a thought occurred to me.

  “What if your mother hasn’t found a maid?”

  “Don’t worry about that, old man. We’ll go to Wepler’s in the Place Clichy. Agreed? Come and pick me up at 7:30.”

  XV. The Ardent Lichen

  The materiality of the facts has not, of course, been contested by anyone, and could not be, except in systematic bad faith. The official figures are there: 450 dead, 882 wounded; 1332 victims in all. Such is the frightful tally, in Paris alone, of the incursion effected on that evening of October 26 into the center of the capital by the creatures that were called the Monsters of Saint-Denis, the Cosmic Chimeras or the Ardent Lichen. Only one or two chroniclers of varying degrees of intelligence, such as Monsieur Clémentel-Vault, dared to cast doubt on their reality when the dailies reappeared three days after the event, and attribute the victims to a communist riot. One serious historian, Monsieur Raymond Valescure, in his exceedingly well-documented work In the Time of the Xenobiota, even invokes by way of explanation a crisis of collective hallucination and “gregarious insanity,” born of the mental tension of those days of terror. He appears to forget the fact that that minds were not tense on the 26th, that the menace had almost been forgotten, that people were beginning to sneer at the decree in an illusory sentiment of security, and that the communist riot and the Electric Terror were only manifest after the incursion of the Chimeras into Paris. It is with reasoning analogous to Monsieur Valescure’s that it has already been “demonstrated” that Alexander the Great and Napoléon I never existed.

  Without taking into account the unanimous belief of the time, however, or the opinion of Professor Nathan, who formally admits the authenticity of these monsters, there is the official inquiry, which came to the same conclusion, based on the depositions of more than 700 witnesses. There is the destruction of the power-station at Saint-Denis by military aircraft. Would the latter have received orders to destroy plant and equipment worth several hundred millions if there had not been certainty that it was a matter of something other than a collective hallucination?

  As for me, I did not see the Ardent Lichen, but less than an hour after the event, I heard the testimony my friend Géo, who had narrowly escaped them.

  He had told me once about an aviation accident in which he had first almost been burned and then nearly crashed into the ground, his parachute only having opened at the last moment—and that episode, he evoked with a smile. When talking about the Chimeras of Saint-Denis, however, his face was a mask of tragic horror; he had endured the most anguishing moments of his life...

  On the morning of October 26, the communist municipality of Saint-Denis, obedient to directives from Moscow, had judged that the moment had come to inflict a defea
t on the government by flouting the law and forcing the engineers at the electricity generating station on the Quai de Saint-Ouen to resume production.

  At 2 p.m., from a distance, Géo, having evaded the slack surveillance of the Xs, saw thick smoke coming from the blast-chimneys of the power-station and a red flag with the hammer and sickle flying high. Like the others, however, the Hénaul-Feltrie factory was profiting from the restored current and work there, languishing the day before, had resumed its normal regime.

  Nothing abnormal happened until 6 p.m. The workers having left ten minutes before, and the big boss having departed too, Géo was getting ready to return to Paris when sirens began blaring and a great clamor rose up in the distance...

  But I shall hand over the floor of Géo.

  “And then, here comes a young boy of 15—the son of the factory’s night-watchman—pedaling his bike like crazy, and he leaps to the ground in the yard, shouting: ‘Close the doors! They’re coming! I’ve seen them. They’re running after me! They’ve scoffed everyone at the power-station...’

  “Who was he talking about? A band of communist harpies? No: ‘balls of green fire!’ Impossible to get anything coherent from him. The little chap was out of his mind, mad with terror. And to get further information, not so much as a cat outside, in the streets lit by electricity again. Except, toward the Quai de Saint-Ouen, the blasters were still smoking. For the people who’d been ‘scoffed,’ the personnel weren’t doing a bad job. I gave up trying to understand and set off for Paris with my headlights on, at low speed to avoid a breakdown—for my car was ‘making’ lichen again.

  “As you know, the Hénault-Feltrie factory is situated on the edge of Saint-Denis, 500 meters east of the national highway. As I turned on to it, heading south, I heard someone hailing me from the north. Under a street-light, I made out a barricade of carts and barrels across the causeway, and behind it, men with rifles. Communists or gendarmes, I thought they were after my rattletrap, and I accelerated, heading for Paris.

  “Something significant had obviously happened…a drama. The road, ordinarily so busy, was absolutely deserted…deserted by the living, that is, for almost immediately, I had to serve round a corpse lying on the ground: a frightfully burned cadaver...then another, and others still: police cyclists, lying beside their machines…then a half-consumed cabriolet, still smoking, lying on top of its stricken horse.

  “Explanation: a communist mob? But a mob, the passage of a revolutionary column marching on Paris, wouldn’t have left that absolute void of living creatures behind it!

  “It’s true that beyond the junctions, on the side-roads, there were groups of people, who hailed me, waving their arms, as if I were running some danger—but they were too far away and I couldn’t understand what they were saying to me. And still the deserted road, still strewn with cadavers, for kilometers...

  “I went on slowly, rather nervous, I confess. The young lad’s incoherent words came back to me involuntarily. I thought vaguely about some infernal machine, a terrestrial motor-torpedo. But the approach to Paris, encased between the houses of the Avenue des Batignolles, was full of people at the windows on the upper floors, and I was finally able to make out a few distinct shouts: ‘Not that way! Save yourself! Be careful—they’ll kill you!’

  “Finally, at the crossroads of the Porte de Saint-Ouen, I saw 20 men and an officer on the Boulevard Ney, with an armored car. Just then, my engine started misfiring and dying. And there I was, broken down in the middle of the opening of the Avenue des Batignolles, facing the Avenue de Saint-Ouen.

  “The officer, revolver in hand, seemed to hesitate. Positioned in the middle of the crossroads, he inspected both avenues one after the other. He called to me: ‘Hey, you, motorist! Are more of them coming?’

  “‘I’ve only seen cadavers on the road. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Was it a mob?’

  “In the distance, toward La Fourche, explosions crackled, then the rattle of a machine-gun. That lasted 20 seconds and suddenly fell silent. A clamor went up, and cries propagated: ‘They’re coming back! Every man for himself!’

  “The officer left me to return to his men. They were disposed as sharpshooters to the right and left of the armored car, which had been set in the middle of the road, the muzzles of its machine-guns aimed at the Avenue de Saint-Ouen.

  “Standing on the footplate of my car, ignorant of that danger, I was only thinking about seeing what would happen.

  “A luminous dot at the far end of the ill-lit avenue was advancing with nimble little bounds…like a football that was rolling along on its own without anyone to push it. It grew in size and came closer, following the axis of the train-lines—and behind that first ball, there were others: one, two, three…ten...a whole string in single file…large balls of green light...like pharmacist’s globes…but these balls were a meter or two in diameter.

  “Have you read that story by Rosny Aîné called Les Xipéhuz? It made me shiver in my youth—when I still had time to read. These Xipéhuz, an aberrant creation born on Earth in prehistoric times, were beings endowed with intelligence, in the form of cones, gliding at ground level, provided with a single flamboyant eye....

  “The frisson I experienced on reading that in the past gripped me again, but real, multiplied tenfold, in confrontation with those monstrous phosphorescent balls. I was still broken down at the crossroads, watching them come, lost in an immeasurable and perverse curiosity…in a fascination, like a bird in the presence of a serpent’s maw…the Monsters born in the Saint-Denis power-station, progeny of the alternators and the comozoans…which, after a brief excursion to Paris to test their strength and reconnoiter their domain, were returning to their birthplace, perhaps to take a rest, and to graze on the current...

  “Hypnotized, perceiving in two seconds and by means of a sort of panoramic intuition the thoughts that I’ve just put into words, awkwardly, I watched them come straight toward me, in single file: luminous emerald green globes, large and small…exactly like a joyful family coming back after a trip to the country...

  “‘Fire at will!’

  “The Lebels crashed and the machine-guns sputtered. Flames were ripped from the first green ball by the bullets; it seemed to be agitated by violent palpitations, as if someone hidden inside were struggling, launching blows with his fists and feet, which were making the envelope of the balloon bulge. But it kept coming, straight toward the armored car, which ended up hiding it from me. I didn’t see the impact, but a great flame suddenly emerged from the car, which was enveloped in smoke.

  “The other balls of green light, large and small, had accelerated, as if enraged by the gunfire, charging the soldiers, who were still firing. They fell: one, two, three…the others, their weapons empty, took flight.

  “Leaping and bouncing, the balls had gone past. Paralyzed by stupor and horror, I watched them come toward me, the machine-gunned ball in the lead, reduced to half its size and leaving a trail of fluorescent substance behind it...

  “With a desperate surge, I tore myself from that catalepsy, leapt to the ground and fled along the Boulevard Ney...

  “When I turned round, I saw that my car was in flames, like the machine-gun carrier...”

  The incursion of the Chimeras had been stopped in the Place Clichy, thanks to the presence of mind of a motor-cycle policeman, who had stopped the firemen from the Carpeaux station, returning from a call to some chimney-fire. Two large hoses, set up in parallel at the entrance to the Avenue de Saint-Ouen, had succeeded, with their powerful water-jets, in making the fulminating globes retrace their steps…but not all of them. Two of the troop, forcing the hydraulic blockade, crossed the square, where they killed 100 idlers, and, emerging from the Rue d’Amsterdam, continued their hecatomb as far as the Boulevard Haussmann. They were annihilated at the Carrefour Drouot by the flame-throwers of a detachment of engineers sent in a truck from the barracks at La Pépinière...

  At 8 p.m., when Géo took me to dinner at Wepler’s, no
thing remained in the Place Clichy as evidence of the event but a few pools of water at the entrance to the Avenue de Saint-Ouen. No trace of blood—the victims, taken away by ambulances, had succumbed to horrible burns.

  But we saw the rise of that kind of siege-fever that was in the process of gripping all of Paris.

  The illusory security that had reigned for three days gave way to an anguished consciousness of enormous and imminent peril. A rage, too, a despair that the work of the Great Shutdown had been compromised, and that everything would have to begin again, thanks to the sin of the Communists of Saint-Denis—and it was the general anger against them, as much as the military and police precautions, that stifled the riot that had scarcely begun.

  The starting up of the electric power-station was a provocation, a ruse to attract repressive forces to the suburb. It was in Paris itself that the insurrection was in preparation. The leaders charged with giving the signal saw the arrival of the Chimeras as an unexpected, providential assistance, and the movement commenced at about 9:30 p.m. in the Place de la République, under cover of the confusion. But the Republican Guard was alert; within five minutes, reinforcements were arriving from every direction, and the skirmish, limited to the edge of the square at the entrance to the Boulevard Magenta, was over before 11 p.m.

  I was then in the Place de l’Opéra, on the terrace of the Café de la Paix, with Géo, and we saw nothing except for the passing of a few troop-carriers sent from the École Militaire. No one knew as yet that it was a matter of a riot; the rumor ran around that it was a new Chimera offensive—and that quasi-simultaneity made no small contribution to establishing the confusion between the two sets of facts.

  A few minutes later, the Echo de Paris’ loudspeakers announced the government’s decision to destroy the Monsters of Saint-Denis.