Scientific Romance

by Brian Stableford

  There was an epoch in the course of the general sentiment when the comet had attained, at length, a size surpassing that of any previous recorded visitation. The people now, dismissing any lingering hope that the astronomers were wrong, experienced all the certainty of evil. The chimerical aspect of their terror was gone. The hearts of the stoutest of our race beat violently within their bosoms. A very few days sufficed, however, to merge even such feelings in sentiments more endurable. We could no longer apply to the strange orb any accustomed thoughts. Its historical attributes had disappeared. It oppressed us with a hideous novelty of emotion. We saw it not as an astronomical phenomenon in the heavens, but as an incubus upon our hearts, and a shadow upon our brains. It had taken, with inconceivable rapidity, the character of a gigantic mantle of rare flame, extending from horizon to horizon.

  Yet a day, and men breathed with greater freedom. It was clear that we were already within the influence of the comet; yet we lived. We even felt an unusual elasticity of frame and vivacity of mind. The exceeding tenuity of the object of our dread was apparent; for all heavenly objects were plainly visible through it. Meantime, our vegetation had perceptibly altered; and we gained faith, from this predicted circumstance, in the foresight of the wise. A wild luxuriance of foliage, utterly unknown before, burst out upon every vegetable thing.

  Yet another day, and the evil was not altogether upon us. It was now evident that its nucleus would first reach us. A wild change had come over all men; and the first sense of pain was the wild signal for general lamentation and horror. The first sense of pain lay in a rigorous constriction of the breast and lungs, and an insufferable dryness of the skin. It could not be denied that our atmosphere was radically affected; the conformation of this atmosphere and the possible modifications to which it might be subjected, were now the topics of discussion. The result of investigation sent an electric thrill of the intensest terror through the universal heart of man.

  It had long been known that the air which encircled us was a compound of oxygen and nitrogen gases, in the proportion of twenty-one measures of oxygen and seventy-nine of nitrogen in every one hundred of the atmosphere.3 Oxygen, which was the principle of combustion and the vehicle of heat, was absolutely necessary to the support of animal life, and was the most powerful and energetic agent in nature. Nitrogen, on the contrary, was incapable of supporting either animal life or flame. An unnatural excess of oxygen would result, it had been ascertained, in just such an elevation of the animal spirits as we had latterly experienced. It was the pursuit, the extension of the idea, which had engendered awe. What would be the result of the total extraction of the nitrogen? A combustion irresistible, all-devouring, omni-prevalent, immediate; the entire fulfillment, in all their minute and terrible details, of the fiery and awe-inspiring denunciations of the prophecies of the Holy Book.

  Why need I paint, Charmion, the now disenchained frenzy of mankind? That tenuity in the comet which had previously inspired us with hope, was now the source of the bitterness of despair. In its impalpable gaseous character we clearly perceived the consummation of fate.

  Meantime a day again passed, bearing away with it the last shadow of hope. We gasped in the rapid modification of the air. The red blood bounded tumultuously through its strict channels. A furious delirium possessed all men; and, with arms rigidly outstretched toward the threatening heavens, they trembled and shrieked aloud.

  But the nucleus of the destroyer was now upon us; even here in Aidenn, I shudder while I speak. Let me be brief—brief as the ruin that overwhelmed. For a moment there was a wild and lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things. Then—let us bow down, Charmion, before the excessive majesty of the great God!—then, there came a shouting and pervading sound, as if from the mouth itself of HIM; while the whole incumbent mass of ether in which we existed burst at once into a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in high heaven of pure knowledge have no name.

  Thus ended all.

  * * *

  1 Poe also uses “Aidenn” to refer to the realm of the afterlife in his famous poem “The Raven” (1845): “Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn / It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenor.” The reference to the “ten earthly years” that Charmion has been dead may suggest that Poe had his adoptive mother, Frances Allan, in mind; she had died in 1829.

  2 The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge (1833), from which Poe probably obtained his information about comets, popularized the information that a comet first observed by Laplace in 1770 had passed between the satellites of Jupiter in 1779 without causing any deviation of their orbits.

  3 The importance of the trace amounts of carbon dioxide in the air, and its role in fueling plant growth, were not known yet in 1839. The intoxicating effects of pure oxygen were, however, already familiar from the reports of the chemists who had isolated it.

  A HEAVENWARD VOYAGE

  S. HENRY BERTHOUD

  Samuel-Henri Berthoud (1804–1891) preferred to sign himself with the second of his forenames because his father, also a published writer, used the byline Samuel Berthoud, and he anglicized its spelling as an affectation. A great admirer of Lord Byron, the younger Berthoud inserted himself into the heart of the French Romantic movement in the early 1830s, when he published Contes Misanthropiques (1831; tr. as Misanthropic Tales), the first ever collection of what subsequently became known as contes cruels, and a large collection of folktales from his native Flanders. Hired by Émile Girardin as the editor of the pioneering family magazine Musée des familles in 1834, he became passionately involved with the cause of popular education, and, having encouraged Pierre Boitard to develop a new kind of scientific fiction in the pages of the magazine, he subsequently began to do work of that kind himself, eventually issuing a four-volume collection of Fantaisies scientifiques de Sam [Sam’s Scientific Fantasies] (1861–62), “Dr. Sam” being the byline he used for his regular science column in La Patrie during the 1850s.

  “Voyage au ciel,” here translated as “A Heavenward Voyage,” was Berthoud’s first attempt at a fantaisie scientifique, which appeared in Émile Girardin’s daily newspaper La Presse in 1841. It reflects the contemporary fascination with the idea of finding a means of powering and steering aerostats, in order to complete the human conquest of the air begun by the Montgolfier brothers. It also displays Berthoud’s very particular fascination with the distinctive psychology of scientists and scientific endeavor—something that was to dominate his journalistic work and his relevant fiction throughout his career. His work in the vein, including his pioneering exercise in prehistoric fiction, “The First Inhabitants of Paris” (1865), and his vision of future Paris in “The Year 2865” (1865), is sampled in the collection of translations Martyrs of Science (2013).

  In 1803, in the city of Altona, the capital of Holstein, there was a scientist named Ludwig Klopstock. When I say scientist, I am not expressing the general opinion of his fellow citizens in that regard, for they generally claimed that the poor fellow possessed no other merit and no other ability than bearing the great name of Klopstock. His sole entitlement to interest, according to them, consisted of being the nephew of the author of the Messias.1

  In appearance, at least, Ludwig justified the low esteem in which he was held. Always distracted and dreamy, he sought out solitary places, spent hours with his eyes raised toward the heavens, had no fixed meal-times, and had no idea how to earn an écu by means of his labor. He lived as best he could on the modest returns of a farm that he owned in the village of Oltenzen, and an annual income of about eight hundred livres, produced by capital invested with a merchant in Pallmailstrasse. At any rate, neither his meditations in the open air nor his uninterrupted twelve-hour sessions in the study in which he locked himself away had ever produced the slightest known result. Whenever he was asked what he was doing among his scientific instruments, or what he saw through the large telescope ins
talled on the roof of his house, he became disconcerted, blushing and stammering, and the questioner went away shrugging his shoulders, convinced that Ludwig was nothing but an imbecile.

  This conviction became even more unanimous in Altona when it was learned that Ludwig Klopstock was going to marry. His marriage must, indeed, have seemed very singular, for the young woman that the poor scientist was marrying was an orphan of sixteen; the death of her father had left her abandoned and destitute.

  In spite of the mockery of all those who knew about his plan, Ludwig led his bride to the altar. Ebba took over the management of the scientist’s household; order and propriety—which had been banished from the residence for some time, if they had ever entered it—flourished therein, and gave the desolate dwelling a cheerful and celebratory appearance.

  Ludwig himself appeared in the city in clean linen, stockings without holes and garments that did not disappear in myriads of stains of all colors. His pallid complexion and livid thinness gradually gave way to a plumpness that gave his appearance a freshness and gaiety. He was still seen, every evening and well into the night, taking long walks in the country, but, instead of wandering at hazard, he was guided—or rather led—by Ebba. With her gaze directed at the ground, while her husband kept his raised toward the heavens, she sustained him, after a fashion, like the angels of which the psalm speaks, in order that his feet should not be injured by the pebbles of the path.

  Gradually, Ebba’s figure rounded out, and one morning, Ludwig, sitting by his wife’s bed with his eyes full of tears, heard a little child utter that first cry, which causes so much emotion in a paternal heart. From then on, the scientist devoted himself less exclusively to science; he even forgot his telescope in order to dandle the new-born on his knees; he looked out with greater patience and greater happiness for the little creature’s smile than he had ever done in discovering the mysterious conjunction of two stars.

  The child grew; he was as beautiful as his mother, and his broad forehead indicated to Ludwig the promise of a powerful intelligence. Simply to say that concern was manifest around the crib in which the pale angel slept would be an understatement. Ebba gazed at him incessantly and Ludwig’s calculations were confused by the slightest cry emitted by the infant’s rosy little mouth. Alas, one night, the child’s respiration became halting, his gaze lit up with a strange flame, and his cheeks became red. He had the croup! When day dawned, there was no longer anything but a cadaver on Ebba’s bosom.

  The poor mother thought of dying herself. It would surely have been better if God had reunited her body with that of her baby son in the same grave, as he had reunited their souls in Heaven. Ebba’s soul never came back down to Earth. Her body acted at hazard; her voice no longer proffered any but inconsequential words. She was an idiot.

  Ludwig’s friends advised him to send his wife to a lunatic asylum, by which means, in consideration of a modest boarding-fee, he would be rid of the annoyance and the sad spectacle that the presence of a madwoman in his house occasioned. Ludwig became indignant at this suggestion, and persisted in caring for the insane woman with the tenderness and devotion that she had shown him when she had enjoyed her reason. There was no more studying for the scientist; he lavished his intelligence, his time, his days and nights, in humoring the bizarre caprices of the maniac. People ended up believing that he was going mad himself.

  Nothing discouraged Ludwig for five years; nothing diminished his devotion to Ebba. At the end of that time, he fell victim to a further misfortune. The merchant in Pallmailstrasse, with whom he had invested the capital that yielded an income of eight hundred livres, went bankrupt and fled. That event left Klopstock with no other resource than the meager returns of his farm in Oltenzen. That would still have been sufficient for the scientist, who would not have minded being subject to privations, but the privations in question would affect poor Ebba. He decided to apply for a chair in astronomy that had just fallen vacant at the College of Altona.

  Imagine what anguish, annoyance and distaste a poor timid man who never went out, and who only maintained rare and distant relationships with two or three friends, must have experienced when he had to solicit employment, explain his request to the burgomeister and submit to the disdain of the councilors. No one took his request seriously, and a professor was summoned from Drontheim. When Ludwig learned that, he sold his little house in Altona and set out for his farm in Oltenzen, taking nothing with him but his scientific instruments and his telescope. Ebba followed him mechanically, without knowing what she was doing. Her soul, as you know, was in Heaven, with her child.

  Ludwig’s farm was near Oltenzen church. From the window, he could see his uncle’s tomb, shaded by a linden tree that the great poet had once planted. Ludwig sent his tenant farmer away and set about cultivating the land, with more intelligence, and even more strength, than anyone could have expected of him. The peasants began by laughing at his experiments and innovations, but they ended up copying him. The time that Klopstock did not spend harrowing and laboring, he devoted to study. The telescope took possession of the roof of Ludwig’s farm; he hardly slept—for sleep is like friendship; it only lavishes its favors on the fortunate—and spent his nights studying the stars. During these vigils, consecrated to the admiration of celestial marvels, Ebba lay her head on the scientist’s knees and descended into a dreamless torpor that resembled death.

  One morning, on descending from his observatory, Ludwig, who was ordinarily sad and absent-minded, manifested an unusual and heedless joy. The scientist’s manifestations of happiness could not have been more energetic if Ebba had recovered her reason. He spent six nights writing a long letter, with which he was never satisfied; he began it over, annotated it, consulted his telescope again. . . .

  Finally, the important work complete, he placed his memoir carefully in an envelope and posted it in Altona, after taking the precaution of franking it and obtaining a receipt from the Post Office. The package was addressed to the director of Hamburg Observatory, and contained the discovery of the axial rotation of Saturn in ten hours thirty-two minutes.

  This is the reply he received:

  If your letter is not a hoax, Monsieur, you are a little too late to claim a discovery made and published a fortnight ago by Frederick William Herschel.2

  In response to this cruel disappointment, which stole all the glory of which he had dreamed for his name, Ludwig only manifested his chagrin by his habitual sad smile.

  Let us admit, however, that in the meantime, that obscure and timid man had been devoured by a thirst for celebrity. He dreamed night and day of making a name for himself. He sensed a mysterious force within himself that elevated him above vulgarity and only required to manifest itself to be resplendent forever. Poverty and misfortune, however, rendered that manifestation impossible.

  When, two years later, he announced that it was possible to solidify carbon dioxide, no one even wanted to read his memoir, nor examine the diagrams he had attached thereto for the construction of the machine necessary to carry out the experiment. The Hamburg Academy remembered the belated discovery of the rotation of Saturn, and treated as fantasy the great operation that was to be reinvented a few years later, by our illustrious scientist Monsieur Thilorier.3

  Several years went by without Ludwig leaving the village of Oltenzen or making any further attempts to publish the results of his studies.

  One day, when the aeronaut Bitorff,4 in the midst of an immense crowd of spectators, was getting ready to depart from Hamburg and make an aerial voyage, he saw a little man in a large threadbare black coat coming towards him. Without any preamble, the man proposed that he should accompany him on the excursion that he was about to make by balloon.

  At first, Bitorff thought that he was dealing with a madman, but as the unknown man insisted and even offered the aeronaut several handfuls of gold to obtain what he desired, he ended up giving his consent, all the more willingly because the strangeness of the proposition and the discussion keenly excit
ed the general curiosity. Like a good speculator wanting a double return, however, he told Ludwig that his ascent would only take place two weeks hence, because the balloon—he alleged—was not yet powerful enough to carry two travelers. Ludwig consented to this delay, and calmly went back to Oltenzen, from which he returned on the appointed day.

  During the two weeks, Ludwig Klopstock’s project had been the only topic of conversation in Hamburg. The old story of the axial rotation of Saturn, discovered a month after Herschel’s publication, was exhumed, and a thousand jokes were told. Bitorff had never attracted as many spectators as he did on the day when the ascension of his travelling companion was to take place.

  Ludwig, intimidated by the crowd, the eyes of which were fixed on him, approached the gondola awkwardly and almost tore the balloon by bumping into the scientific instruments with which it was laden, in order to carry out experiments during the voyage. To his great regret, the aeronaut obliged him to leave part of his luggage on the ground. They both took their places, the ropes were released and the balloon rose up rapidly like a bird.

  Ludwig’s first sensation, when he felt himself borne away by the frail machine, was terror. The immense abyss gaping beneath his feet furrowed the scientist’s brow and surrounded him with swirling dizziness. Each commotion was succeeded by a sort of perfidious satisfaction. He leaned over the earth, attracted by a mysterious force, and was about to launch himself forth when his companion seized his arm and held him back. Once extracted from this peril, Ludwig recovered all his composure, armed himself with resolution and set about looking down with a freedom of spirit by which the aeronaut could only be astonished.