History is a perpetual recommencement. Humans can instruct themselves regarding faults and their deadly consequences, but they continue to commit them, as if their ancestors had never transmitted their experience to them.
The surprise of the invasion had caused the loss of many of the Europeans’ factories in the eastern marches. They were weakened in consequence.
Meanwhile, their enemies were obedient to the firm authority of Wang-Ti-Pou, the leader who deployed so much genius in his will to destruction. An antitechnologist, advocating for humankind a return to a primitive state, which he represented as the essential condition for happiness, only one thing was important in his eyes: the contemplation of the ideal, from which, he claimed, modern technology turned humans away by driving them to seek material wellbeing.
One could reply to him, like Paul Chartrain, that material progress, far from loading humans with chains, liberated them from the oppression of nature. But he riposted with other arguments. And in any case, it was a waste of time trying to convince him. There were two opposed conceptions of human destiny, two irreconcilable deals that were at odds.
So, antitechnologist as he was, Wang-Ti-Pou understood very well that he needed machines to vanquish the industrial Occident, and he was able to profit, in that regard from the conquest of Africa, which he had achieved without firing a shot. He drew on the resources that it furnished him in order to fall upon Europe from the vast continent that it had enabled to develop—and the concentration of the factories of North Africa permitted him, in spite of the absence of a first-rate managerial personnel, to obtain a better yield from them that his adversaries were obtaining from theirs.
Equilibrium was established between the two human masses in conflict.
The attrition that was gradually destroying, on both sides, the accumulated endeavors and the reserves created by civilization, was bringing the world back toward barbarism.
If it had remained reliant on its own strength, Europe would have been exhausted, and, even victorious, would have been reduced for a long time to the primitive state to which Wang-Ti-Pou had been determined to diminish it.
It was then that America, sensing the danger posed to it by the ruination of Europe and its subjugation to a barbarian leader, set aside the sentiment of rivalry that had initially prevented it from intervening. Its economists had succeeded in demonstrating that the loss of enormous riches is always a catastrophe, even if the riches belong to one’s neighbor.
From then on, the antitechnologists, overwhelmed by the formidable means that Europe and America combined could put to work, began to buckle. Their leader deployed all the resources of his malevolent genius in vain.
Africa was no longer sufficient to furnish the antitechnologists with enough mechanical power to stand up to two great civilized continents. Subject to the obligation to develop its own technological system in order to combat that of its adversaries, Africa wearied of having for allies people who were innumerable but disorganized. A day came when it decided to shrug off the yoke of the Asiatic dictator. The unity of command that had been the strength of the antitechnologists was compromised.
The technologists’ diplomacy did the rest. Africa agreed to reenter into concert with civilization, rejected the alliance with Asia, and joined forces with Europe and America.
That defection decided the outcome of the war.
Left to rely on its own strength, only possessing feeble industrial means by comparison with those of the rest of the world, Asia was soon reduced to helplessness. Its armies broke up or metamorphosed into undisciplined hordes, as dangerous to the antitechnologists themselves as to their adversaries.
In his obstinacy, Wang-Ti-Pou rendered the tyranny that he exercised over his partisans increasingly harsh and intolerable. A frightful poverty was rife among the populations he had drawn into the adventure; famine and epidemics decimated them even more cruelly than the war. Revolts broke out, and Wang-Ti-Pou suppressed them pitilessly in vain; he ended up succumbing, and was massacred along with his principal partisans and his faithful guards.
The technologists had no more to do than enter as conquerors into an Asiatic world delivered to complete anarchy, in which humankind had almost reverted to a savage state.
The victory had been obtained after three years of a titanic struggle.
It had been very costly. The devastations of the war had annihilated a considerable part of the work of the previous hundred years.
After having squandered capital to sustain the struggle and save civilization, it was necessary to engage what remained in order to recover and complete the organization of the planet.
XII
While the war was unfolding, life went on, and after a sojourn of three months in Scoresby hospital, Paul Chartrain and Claire Nolleau had been able to get out of bed and walk. Transported to Nice, they had completed their recovery in a splendid hospital for convalescents.
The entire world had been fully informed of their adventure: the heroic combat that they had sustained against the terrorists, their injuries, and the care they had been given. In all the civilized countries the progress of their recovery had been followed passionately by the spoken or printed news outlets. And when the news of their marriage was announced, everyone applauded what they regarded as the natural epilogue to a stirring romance.
Together, they resumed their functions in the staff of the Great Current. It was deemed that they had already paid sufficiently with their persons not to be mobilized in the armies that sustained the struggle against the antitechnologists.
A new plan had been established under the direction of Dr. Bormann for the reconstruction of the northern base of the Great Current.
The system of ice-dividers that had been adopted initially appeared to be decidedly too fragile. An event such as the aggression of the antitechnologists, which had put the thousand cables of the line out of use at a stroke, along with the power plant at Scoresby, was doubtless extremely exceptional and one could hope that it would never be repeated, but it was imprudent nevertheless to leave an immense enterprise like that of the Great Current at the mercy of an accident of happenstance.
When, spring having returned, work was begun again in order to repair the disaster, a different conception had therefore been adopted.
The North African insurgents not having yet abandoned their Asian allies, they were naturally unable to think of reestablishing the Great Current immediately, but they could already begin the preparations for its reorganization, in order to limit the damage that winters would cause the installations if they were abandoned.
The plan consisted, firstly, of rectifying the frontal gallery, blowing up the promontories and filing in the fissures that their suppression left behind with masonry. That would obtain a kind of quay sixty kilometers long, over which the ice could slide without obstacles. The excessive pressure produced in the depths of sinuosities without issue would thus be avoided.
Secondly, the system of ice-dividers, which had the defect of making too close a contact with the ice-sheet, was abandoned completely. The new system selected by Dr. Bormann consisted of hollowing out a kind of channel in the rectilinear quay, in which the ice, driven by pressure, would travel freely throughout its extent, and in which it could also penetrate not only at its upper extremity but also along its entire external edge, limited by the rectilinear quay below sea level.
The walls of that channel would be hollow, composed of reinforced concrete vaults supporting an impermeable external cladding lined with a thick armor plating of chrome steel. In addition to their great resistance, they would possess the indispensable property of being excellent conductors of heat—and, in consequence, of cold.
The surface of the armor plating would be augmented by a series of grooves two or three meters deep, giving the whole the appearance of a gigantic sheet of corrugated iron, orientated longitudinally in order not to offer any obstacle to the advancement of the ice.
Underneath and on the sides of the a
rmored cladding, in the empty pace maintained by the vaults, which would be carefully protected from any infiltration, galleries accessible at all times would receive the cables of the Great Current at the extremities, the elements of which would be insulated electrically by a simple mica envelope put in contact with the chrome steel wall.
The lateral and inferior passages, thus adapted between the rock and the steel channel, would be illuminated by electricity. Surveillance would be easy, and it would be possible to effect all the repairs therein eventually required by the wear and tear of the cables—which would have been very complicated with the old system.
The new plan had one inconvenience, however: its execution would be even more difficult and more costly than the original one.
In addition, as they could not work under the constant threat of the water and the ice, it was necessary not to think about using what remained of the original gallery after the work of rectification. Except for a few points where the general demands of the track obliged encroaching on the fjord, and where extraordinary means were put to work, it would be necessary to pierce a new gallery behind the first and to maintain it in shelter from the water and the ice until the conclusion of the work, by allowing a rocky wall to subsist externally, in accordance with the procedure employed during the first attempt, which would be demolished at the last moment, when everything was ready.
They would thus obtain a gallery about twice as deep as the first, containing the channel, doubled externally by a broad glacis.
So long as hostilities lasted, they could not work very actively on the execution of that grandiose plan. In spring and in summer, they brought into play the hundreds of machines that had not been requisitioned for the services of the army, and attacked the rock in order to rectify the littoral.
When the peace was signed, things took a different turn.
While they proceeded in Africa with the repair of the cables that the insurgents had severed, the piercing of the new gallery was begun at the Franz-Josef fjord.
Thanks to the considerable number of machines that then became available, the work was concluded in a single summer.
In the following season, they proceeded setting up the chrome steel sheets that were to form the walls of the channel, which were sent from Liverpool, Le Havre, Rotterdam and Hamburg. As soon as the sheets were in place, they hastened to install the cable elements underneath, which were to be put in contact with them in order to draw from the source of cold.
The second inauguration took place at the beginning of winter, when the sun had already ceased rising at the latitude of the Franz-Josef fjord some weeks before.
It was a triumph. However, the season did not permit the influx of tourists and official manifestations that had saluted the first. Nor could the engineers of the Great Current and the people who had collaborated with the great work, the delegates of the public powers and the representatives of the news outlets help mingling the joy of the success with the memory of the disaster that had so tragically reduced the efforts of the new pioneers of civilization to nothing.
Life recommenced.
The scourge of war, which had shaken the round machine once again, had at least procured humankind one benefit. The world was entirely conquered by civilization. Anarchy was vanquished everywhere. The rational utilization of all the forces of nature, subjugated by human intelligence, became possible in Asia as in the other continents.
New thermoelectric sectors between the poles and the equator were planned in Europe, Africa and America. The Great Current was already beginning to render the immense services expected of it to peoples who were henceforth narrowly bound together. Frontiers were definitively abolished, the ancient nations were no longer anything but the provinces of a great nation that covered the entire world.
As for Paul Chartrain, supported by the faithful collaboration of his wife Claire, he gradually climbed all the rungs of the hierarchy in the course of his long endeavors, until the day when he was appointed Chief Engineer of the European Thermoelectric Network of the Great Current.
Before reaching that elevated position, he had the honor of being selected to direct the study mission of the thermoelectric network of India, established between the glaciers of the Himalayas and the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.
In the course of that mission, which he accomplished with Claire, proud as he was of his long endeavors and convinced of the benefits that mechanical civilization was lavishing on the entirety of humankind, he was seduced by the charm of nature in the raw, and understood why certain mystics, like Wang-Ti-Pou and his partisans, had tried to stop the upward flight of humankind.
He felt a veritable intoxication in traveling in an auto-caterpillar, sometimes even on a horse or mule, as his ancestors had done three centuries before, through a jungle populated by animals that humans had not yet domesticated or tamed. He experienced a poetic regret in imagining that it was the world of several thousand years before.
Then, nature had been stronger than humans, incessantly threatening to crush them—but how unexpected and picturesque the existence of primitive humankind had been! What heroism and ingenuity they had had to employ in order to defend their uncertain lives against so many hostile forces!
“Undoubtedly,” Paul said, discussing with Claire the subject that impassioned her no less than him, “it would be puerile to claim that in our civilized country, where nature in its entirety is disciplined, where everything is adapted for comfort, hygiene and the wellbeing of the inhabitants and in order to extract the maximum yield from all forces, existence is devoid of the unexpected and does not involve either heroism or poetry. We can extend our knowledge and increase our power, but we shall always discover, whatever we do, a further domain that escapes our empire. The dangers that threaten civilized humans are no longer those that primitive humankind feared, but they’re no less terrible.
“I believe, however,” he went on, “that it would not be a bad idea to reserve, here and there, a few vast tracts of wilderness, that would be maintained in their present condition and would be, on a larger scale, like those national parks that it was fashionable to establish, three centuries ago, in America. Our young people, on leaving school, would be taken in groups to those parks, where they would stay for six months or a year, without any other means than those that our ancestors in past centuries possessed. That proof would not only have the advantage of completing their education and developing their strength, but also that of making them appreciate, by comparison, the benefits of modern civilization, which habit prevents them from sensing.
“Such an institution would respond to the criticisms of contemplators of progress, according to whom existence will end up becoming utterly tedious in a world too well organized.”
“I’m not anxious in that regard,” Claire replied. “Energetic humans endowed with the spirit of enterprise will always find exercise for their intelligence and activity, and undergoing adventures if they have a taste for it. There are still free spaces on the globe. We still have to explore the bed of the sea and the depths of the earth. Energies whose existence we scarcely suspect remain to be discovered and captured. And in the end, if there really were nothing more on earth to explore and conquer, we’d have the infinite heavens offered to our thirst for knowledge and our desire for dominion.
“Astronautics is still in its infancy, but soon it will be capable of taking us to the regions of the Moon, Mars and Venus, and we shall have to find means of descending on to those strange worlds, subsisting there and maintaining ourselves there in spite of their nature, so different from that of our globe and so contrary to our physical constitution.
“What interest we do have, some say, in doing that? That interest will be discovered as we go along. Perhaps an example can already be cited for the Moon. If an observatory were installed on its surface, astronomers would have an instrument of study of the highest order. Thanks to the absence of an atmosphere on the Moon, they would, in fact, be able to observe the stars
with a clarity unknown on earth, and would discover a host of phenomena that are as yet hidden from us. As for meteorologists, they would be able to study with a perfect precision the formation and movement of clouds on the earth and would be able to predict the weather with certainty.
“That’s only one example, among a hundred that one could imagine.
“The universe is infinite, and that’s why the progress of humankind ought to be too.”
THE SECRET OF THE INCAS
I
Jacques Lasserre sat up on his bunk. He had just opened his eyes and was astonished that it was so bright inside his tent, when he had given orders that he was to be woken up at first light.
He got up and shivered slightly, for the cold made itself felt at that early hour even under the alpaca-lined tent. He moved aside the curtain that served as a door and darted a glance around the camp.
Two small squat tents similar to his own were situated to the right. His two traveling companions, Paul Vauguyon and Pierre Estray, were sleeping in them.
On the natural platform that overlooked a precipice, however, which he expected to see occupied, as on the previous evening, by the mission’s Indian servants and llamas, he saw nothing but a little detritus, the remains of the Redskins’ meal and the ashes of a fire that had only just gone out, still smoking.
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