The Xenobiotic Invasion

by Theo Varlet

  “No, no, Gaston—you can’t take the poor girl to a hotel. We’ll put her in the guest-room.”

  Aurore accepted gratefully. She allowed herself to be enveloped by an affectionate compassion that softened her grief. My aunt, having obtained information as to her tastes, busied herself between the kitchen and the dining-room, in order to prepare us “a little light dinner.” My uncle was perfect; making no pretence of eloquent consolation, he muted his thunderous voice, talked about the imminent frost, and communicated his observations of the thermometer in the yard, which had gone down from three-and-a-half degrees to one degree above zero in an hour. Even young Oscar attempted to distract “the demoiselle” by showing her a box of Meccano and building a superb monoplane “for her.” And I, while she was wiping her eyes, was thinking about the most serene future and dreaming of another child, who would have her eyes and mouth...

  As we were sitting down at the table, an immense rumor rose up over the city; bellowing sirens, church bells ringing at full volume. The Meteorological Office forecast was coming true...

  At 9 p.m., the thermometer outside indicated minus two degrees. In the course of the night, it fell to minus five. The frost lasted for 36 hours and extended over the entirety of France, without sparing the Côte d’Azur.

  On the morning of October 31, in a Paris clear of lichen, the electric current was restored. The Metro, trams, taxis and motor-buses were running. Life resumed its normal course.

  Our marriage, celebrated at the Mairie of the 18th arrondissement in the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur, took place on November 15, one month to the day after the landing of the MG-17 Rocket at the Belle-Fille pass.

  The witnesses were, for the bride, Monsieur Marcel Frémiet, art photographer, and Professor Nathan, member of the Institute, and for the groom, Monsieur Géo de Ricourt, engineer, and Dr. Tancrède Alburtin.

  Luce and her husband—Mr. and Mrs. Cheyne-de Ricourt since the day before last—and Madame de Ricourt were in the front row of the audience, with other notable persons who were listed in the newspapers but are unimportant to us.

  The fusillade of photographers having been endured at the church door, Géo, shaking off the reporters, took us in his brand new Reinastella—which had replaced the Renault burned by the Chimeras at the Porte de Saint-Ouen—to the Pacific, where there was a private dinner.

  At 6 p.m., the express to Marseilles left the Gare de Lyon, with a young couple aboard who were going to spend their honeymoon in Tunisia.

  It was that evening, between Dijon and Lyon, that Aurore, tenderly nestled against me in our solitary sleeping-compartment, talked to me again about her father and the intuition she had had of his death, on seeing me with Nathan on the platform of the Gare d’Austerlitz.

  “I suspected it, I had a presentiment of it,” she had limited herself to replying, when I had asked her about it in the preceding days.

  This time, she finally explained.

  “When he came close to success in his discovery, my father seemed worried. He did something he had never done before, becoming preoccupied with the fate of his invention: ‘Am I really working for the good of humanity?’ And he explained his doubts. I reminded him of the principle that he had inculcated in me: ‘Discovery alone is important; the scientist does not have to worry about the applications that will be made of his science.’ He shook his head without replying. An article in the Orléans Républicain, which I read to him, affected him profoundly. It was signed by a certain Lieutenant-Colonel Verdier, who extolled the military utilization of intra-atomic energy for the construction of destructive engines capable of annihilating entire armies, 10,000 men in ten seconds.31 ‘There’s no doubt about it—that’s what will become of my discovery!’ said my father, sadly. And he spoke to me in an entirely new fashion. ‘Oh, if it could only be limited to the hands of sages—initiates—as in antiquity. Scientists ought to be able to use a special language, more hermetic than Sanskrit, to transmit their knowledge...’ And he deplored the inevitable diffusion, in our democratic times, of applied science.

  “His intimate imperative to seek obliged him to carry his invention through to the end, but he visibly regretted that his success was imminent and inevitable. He said something terrible, which ought to have made it clear to me: ‘My child, if a catastrophe were to destroy me along with my discovery, that would be a stroke of luck!’ But he smiled as he said it, and I thought it was a joke. Only, in Paris, Gaston dear, when I saw in your expression, and Nathan’s, that something bad had happened, those words came back me, and I understood that he had sent us away—Alburtin, me, and the laboratory assistants—under various pretexts, that day, because he expected…what happened. That he had voluntarily provoked it, no! That would be too horrible, I don’t want to believe it…but he had undoubtedly neglected to take precautions...

  “You know, beloved, how grieved I am to have lost my father, and you won’t suspect my heart if I tell you this, but I can’t help agreeing with him. It’s a good thing for humanity that an almost-infinite source of energy has not been handed over to do the work of destruction. It’s already too much to have brought the Lichen.”

  Comforting her with a kiss, I replied, thoughtfully: “Who knows, my love, whether the gift will not be more profitable in the end than you think, and that it presently seems. The adventure of the Lichen has given humankind mistrust and modesty, with a salutary dread. People believed that they could juggle with the forces of the universe with impunity; their pride has been dented. The new state of mind, which Nathan calls neophobia, is perhaps the first step toward a future higher wisdom, which will include a consciousness of comic harmony and the duties it imposes...

  XVIII. The New Life

  Two years have passed, and facts have proved me right.

  People no longer believe in the infallibility of material progress. Machines have ceased to be considered as sovereign and invulnerable to contingencies. As the plague of the Middle Ages imposed on humans a sense of their fragility, the Xenobiota have come to attack and put them in check. And like the plague, the Xenobiota might reappear.

  Seemingly eliminated by the frost of October 29 and 30, the new creation remains present on the Earth, in a latent state. Even when no local epidemic breaks out, it is impossible to forget its existence, for a special brigade of Xs remains, and an Under-Secretary of Xenobiota.

  The lichen has gradually invaded almost all inhabited land, in spite of the closure of national frontiers, which was recognized to be futile and quickly abandoned. Not a month passes, and hardly a week, without an epidemic of lichen being announced in France or abroad, which has to be immediately combated by a severe famine of electricity, isolation and disinfection.

  In hot countries, in particular, the Xenobiota have become endemic.

  It is true that the vital drive to great expansion has almost entirely ceased, that the spores have lost much of their reproductive power and that the ideal sterilizing agent has been discovered in iodine vapor, but the danger has not disappeared, and will probably never disappear.

  Those of us who lived through the vicissitudes of the Great Shutdown retain a certain mistrust of electrical apparatus. Those who saw the Chimeras at close range scarcely dare to use a telephone or flick a light-switch. That phobia has attenuated and has not affected the younger generation, but they, like us, will have to “live dangerously.” The cosmic enemy, implanted on Earth, holds us under its perpetual menace.

  Another consequence: prohibition continues to weigh, in all countries, on astronautics. That is, as Nathan declares, a retreat of scientific curiosity, an entire realm condemned. In renouncing any attempt to leave their planet, human beings are setting limits upon themselves. They are saying to progress: no further!

  My wife, of course, joins in with the chorus of regret, and adds her own to it, at having to renounce piloting rockets and one day making the journey to our satellite.

  In spite of this embargo, the Moon Gold Company is highly prosperous. It liquidated it
s primitive goal to memory on the day when it obtained the lavish indemnity that Luce and Cheyne finally succeeded in obtaining from the government in Washington for the confiscation of the astronautical factory and laboratory. Lunar gold, a simple symbol of Credit—do the shareholders understand that? At any rate, they’re very satisfied with the dividends.

  Aurore has renounced her disapproval of that line of conduct, which has, she recognizes, become inevitable. She contents herself with not exercising her voting rights at meetings—for she has the largest shareholding. Luce kept her word, and Cheyne behaved properly; he gave my wife, in global indemnity for those of her father’s patents that he exploits, 1500 shares of the European issue—the synthetic oil alone is worth that. At an average dividend of 8%, less taxes, that leaves us with an income of more than 50,000 francs a year.

  With that and the sales of my paintings, whose prices are rising, we already have enough for our needs. We both have simple tastes, and Aurore didn’t even want us to look for a better apartment than the one I had in the old building in the Rue Cortot; as it is vast, it makes a very agreeable abode. But she can’t bear idleness, and would judge me criminal for confiscating an intelligence like hers. Nathan who testifies a paternal affection for her in his surly manner, has appointed her as his assistant in his laboratory at the Institut, where she works with him. The service is not over-demanding, and we are never separated for more than half a day. She benefits from four months’ vacation.

  Last summer, Nathan came to spend a fortnight at our villa in Brittany, when I got to know him better, and almost to like him; beneath his Olympian exterior, the scientist is a man like any other. I’ve seen him laugh several times, when I beat him at chess, which he plays with a lack of skill that amuses him—and those petty victories have contributed a great deal to making me less timid in his presence. It wouldn’t take much to make me think myself his superior what I checkmate him more rapidly than usual—but I still admire the perfect ease with which Aurore converses with him as one equal to another.

  And the meteorites? They’re in the Museum, in a glass case in the bolide hall: a little pile of black dust in a glass saucer, beside the other saucer that contains the similarly black but slightly larger granules collected by Nordenskjold on the glaciers of Greenland. Nothing attracts them to the attention of the public but a label with a simple catalogue-number.

  Sometimes, Aurore and I go to spend five minutes looking at them dreamily, and I recall that, although it’s through them that the world has lost its former sense of security, I owe them the happiness of my new life...

  Notes

  1 Translated as The Martian Epic, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-934543-06-1.

  2 Translated as the title-story of the collection The Mysterious Force and Other Anomalous Phenomena, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-935558-37-8.

  3 Translated as The Great Cataclysm, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-026-5.

  4 Rosny added a preface to the book version of the novel in order to emphasize that its serialization in Je Sais Tout had begun before the serialization in The Strand Magazine of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, whose opening sequence has strong (but presumably coincidental) similarities to it.

  5 From 1924 to 1929, Régis Messac was a professor at McGill University in Canada, where he must have made the acquaintance of US pulp magazines, notably those in the genres in which he was interested as a historian and critic—crime fiction and what the pulps in question soon dubbed “science fiction.” He maintained his interest after returning to France, after which he published several translations of works by the pulp sf writer David H. Keller. It is not impossible that David Lasser, the managing editor of Wonder Stories, was aware of the existence of La Grande Panne in 1930, given that he serialized several translations of French and German sf novels and that he had a strong interest in what Varlet calls “astronautics,” but the basic idea is by no means so exotic that two writers could not have come up with it independently. Varlet is, however, correct about the crudity of the two pulp stories, which were actually signed A. Rowley Hilliard, and contrast strongly with his far more sophisticated development of the premise.

  6 Varlet was unable to find a publisher for the sequel before he died in 1938; it is obviously the novel published posthumously in 1943 as Aurore Lescure, Pilote d’astronef.

  7 Gottlob Espenlaub (1900-1972) had been experimenting with rocket-propelled gliders since 1928.

  8 Herman Oberth (1894-1989) never got his proposed rocket into space, although he did get it on to the cinema screen in Fritz Lang’s Die Frau im Mond (1929), for which he was hired as a technical consultant. The film appears to have been one of the primary influences on the present novel, but the actress Gerda Maurus, who played the role of the female member of the ill-fated lunar gold-mining expedition, was probably not the sole inspiration for Aurore Lescure. The American aviatrix Amelia Earhart became world-famous in 1928 after flying the Atlantic and became a familiar sight in the cinema, associated in the next two years with massive advertizing campaigns for clothing and cigarettes.

  9 Polypier [polypary] is a term, now rarely used, designating the matrix in which the polyps of corals and similar organisms are embedded.

  10 The French language grades degrees of intimacy in friendship in a more careful fashion than English, so I have been forced to make frequent use of a distinction between “friend” and “comrade” that sounds slightly odd in English.

  11 Paris, Lyon, Marseille—a fast rail link then independent of the principal network,

  12 The old metro line A which became line 12 in 1930.

  13 The original version of the term translated as cosmozoaires in French and cosmozoans in English appears to have been coined by Hermann Richter in 1865, in an obscure essay subsequently credited by Svante Arrhenius as the origin of the theory of “panspermia,” which he popularized: the notion that life is communicated to planets by spores drifting in space. Although Varlet never uses the latter term in the text, he includes a history of the notion in a later chapter.

  14 The quotation that Gaston has in mind is from Le Bourgeois (1906) by Abel Hermant, although Hermant used conscience [conscience] rather than âme [soul] and canaille [rogue] rather than criminel [criminal].

  15 It is more grotesque in French, by virtue of the substitution of atterrissage [landing, or, more literally, coming to earth] by the humorously improvised “allunissage.”

  16 In the early days of radio broadcasting, the Eiffel Tower was the site of the Paris transmitter.

  17 Freak of nature

  18 The reference is to Comte Éleonore de Montlivault’s Conjectures sur la réuinion de la Lune et de la Terre, et des satellites en general à leur planète principale; Montlivault subsequently published two other works of cosmology, including his letters on that subject to Baron Fourier. In fact, earlier versions of theses regarding the interplanetary transmission of “seeds” can be found in Christiaan Huygens’ Kosmotheoros (1698), and in Charles Tiphaigne de la Roche’s eccentric scientific romance Amilec, ou la graine d’homme (1753; tr. in Amilec, Black Coat Press, ISBN 9781612270333). The well-known popularizer of science Henri de Parville also envisaged the possibility of the interplanetary transmission of living matter in his semi-documentary scientific romance Un Habitant de la planète Mars (1865; tr. as An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars, Black Coat Press, ISBN 9781934543450).

  19 Lord Kelvin talked about Richter’s theory in his presidential address to the British Association of the Advancement of Science in 1871, which was entitled “On the Origin of Life”; that raised its profile sufficiently to interest Hermann van Helmholtz and William Thierry Preyer; the latter featured it in his Naturwissenschaftliche Thatsachen und Probleme (1880)

  20 The arguments employed to back up Maurice Edmond Gheury de Bray’s assertion that the velocity of light is not constant, originally published in French in 1927 and reprinted in Nature in 1931, are now largely discredited, although the thesis still appeals to dissenters from Ei
nsteinian theory.

  21 The reference is to Émile Belot’s L’Origine dualiste des mondes et de la structure de notre univers (1924, with an introduction by Camille Flammarion), also known as Essai de cosmologie tourbillonaire.

  22 The term élan vital [vital impetus] was coined by Henri Bergson in 1902 in association with his theory of creative evolution, but the notion that some such impetus must have declined in the course of Earth’s evolutionary history is considerably older, employed by several early evolutionists to excuse the fact that evolution did not appear to be observably ongoing at present.

  23 Varlet has “G. Carruthers;” I have corrected several other slightly-mistaken references in this chapter without comment, but it is possible that I might be wrong in assuming that this one is to William Carruthers, the then-president of the Linnean Society.

  24 The original version of this quote, in Jules Verne’s Robur le conquérant (1885; tr. as The Clipper of the Clouds), is to one horse power “dans un boitier de montre” [in a watch-case]; as Professor Nathan has already modified it, it did not seem inappropriate for me to update it slightly, for the convenience of modern readers.

  25 A name borrowed from a classic short story by Anatole France, which became generic.

  26 Camille Flammarion died in 1925, but it is entirely appropriate that his widow should be present on this hypothetical occasion to represent him. Whether or not Varlet was a member of the French “rocket society,” he would undoubtedly have met Flammarion and had probably visited his telescope at Juvisy.

  27 A non-explosive gasoline-lamp invented in the late 19th century by Charles Pigeon.

  28 Aristide Briand, the French prime minister, and Gustave Stresemann of the Weimar Republic received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926 for the Locarno Treaties, which reconciled France with Germany. They were both strenuous campaigners for universal disarmament, but Stresemann’s death from a stroke in 1929 and Briand’s in 1932 took a lot of the wind out of the movement’s political sails…and the Nazis subsequently took Germany in a very different direction.