Scientific Romance
Page 10
In the meantime, in the southern hemisphere, a formidable revolution is about to take place. What am I saying? Scarcely fifty thousand years have gone by, and here it is, complete!
The polypers have joined all the continents together, and all the islands of the Pacific Ocean and the southern seas. America, Europe and Africa have disappeared beneath the waters of the ocean; nothing remains of them but a few islands formed by the last summits of the Alps, the Pyrenees, the buttes Montmartre, the Carpathians, the Atlas Mountains and the Cordilleras.
The human race, retreating gradually from the sea, has expanded over the incommensurable plains that the sea has abandoned, bringing its overwhelming civilization with it; already space is beginning to run out on the former continents. Here it is the final entrenchments: it is here that it will battle against the invasion of animal life. Here is where it will perish!
It is on a calcareous terrain; an enormous mass of animalized materials is incessantly converted into a chalky state; this mass, exposed to the rays of a torrid sun, incessantly stores up new concentrations of heat, while the functioning of machines, the combustion of hearths and the development of animal heat cause the ambient temperature to rise incessantly.
And in the meantime, animal production continues to increase; there comes a time when the equilibrium breaks down; it becomes manifest that production will outstrip consumption.
Then, in the Earth’s crust, a sort of rind begins to form at first, and subsequently, an appreciable layer of irreducible detritus; the Earth is saturated with life.
Fermentation begins.
The thermometer rises, the barometer falls, the hygrometer marches toward zero. Flowers wither, leaves turn yellow, parchments curl up; everything dries out and becomes brittle.
Animals shrink by virtue of the effects of heat and evaporation. Humans, in their turn, grow thin and desiccated; all temperaments melt into one—the bilious—and the last of the lymphatics1 offers his daughter and a hundred millions in dowry to the last of the scrofulous, who has not a sou to his name, and who refuses out of pride.
The heat increases and the wells dry up. Water-carriers are elevated to the rank of capitalists, then millionaires, to the extent that the prince’s Great Water-Carrier becomes one of the principal dignitaries of state. All the crimes and infamies that one sees committed today for a gold piece are committed for a glass of water, and Cupid himself, abandoning his quiver and arrows, replaces them with a carafe of ice-water.
In this torrid atmosphere, a lump of ice is worth twenty times its weight in diamonds. The Emperor of Australia, in a fit of mental aberration, orders a tutti frutti that costs an entire year’s civil list. A scientist makes a colossal fortune by obtaining a hectoliter of fresh water at 45 degrees.
Streams dry up; crayfish, jostling one another tumultuously to run after the trickles of warm water that are abandoning them, change color as they go along, turning scarlet. Fish, their hearts weakening and their swim-bladders distended, let themselves drift on the currents, bellies up and fins inert.
And the human species begins to go visibly mad. Strange passions, unexpected angers, overwhelming infatuations and insane pleasures make life into a series of furious detonations—or, rather, one continuous explosion, which begins at birth and concludes with death. In a world cooked by an implacable combustion, everything is scorched, crackled, grilled and roasted, and after the water, which has evaporated, one senses the air diminishing as it becomes more rarefied.
A terrible calamity! The rivers, great and small, have disappeared; the seas are beginning to warm up, then to heat up; now they are already simmering as if over a gentle fire.
First the little fish, asphyxiated, show their bellies at the surface; then come the algae, detached from the sea-bed by the heat; finally, cooked in red wine and rendering up their fat in large stains, the sharks, whales and giant squid rise up, along with the fabulous kraken and the much-contested sea serpent; and with all this fat, vegetation and fish cooked together, the steaming ocean becomes an incommensurable bouillabaisse.
A nauseating odor of cooking expands over the entire inhabited earth; it reigns there for barely a century; the ocean evaporates and leaves no other trace of its existence than fish-bones scattered over desert plains. . . .
It is the beginning of the end.
Under the triple influence of heat, asphyxia and desiccation, the human species is gradually annihilated; humans crumble and peel, falling into pieces at the slightest shock. Nothing any longer remains, to replace vegetables, but a few metallic plants that have been made to grow by irrigating them in vitriol. To slake devouring thirst, to reanimate calcined nervous systems, and to liquefy coagulating albumin, there are no liquids left but sulphuric and nitric acids.
Vain efforts.
With every breath of wind that agitates the anhydrous atmosphere, thousands of human creatures are instantaneously desiccated; the rider on his horse, the advocate at the bar, the judge on his bench, the acrobat on his rope, the seamstress at her window and the king on his throne all come to a stop, mummified.
Then comes the final day.
They are no more than thirty-seven, wandering like tinder specters in the midst of a frightful population of mummies, which gaze at them with eyes reminiscent of Corinthian grapes.
And they take one another by the hand, and commence a furious round-dance, and with each rotation one of the dancers stumbles and falls down dead, with a dry sound. And when the thirty-sixth cycle is over, the survivor remains alone in front of the miserable heap in which the last debris of the human race is assembled.
He darts one last glance at the Earth; he says goodbye to it on behalf of all of us, and a tear falls from his poor scorched eyes—humankind’s last tear. He catches it in his hand, drinks it, and dies, gazing at the heavens.
Pouff!
A little blue flame rises up tremulously, then two, then three, then a thousand. The entire globe catches fire, burns momentarily, and goes out.
It is all over; the Earth is dead.
Bleak and icy, it rolls sadly through the silent deserts of space; and of so much beauty, so much glory, so much joy, so much love, nothing any longer remains but a little charred stone, wandering miserably through the luminous spheres of new worlds.
Goodbye, Earth! Goodbye, touching memories of our history, of our genius, of our dolors and our loves! Goodbye, Nature, whose gentle and serene majesty consoled us so effectively in our suffering! Goodbye, cool and somber woods, where, during the beautiful nights of summer, by the silvery light of the moon, the song of the nightingale was heard. Goodbye, terrible and charming creatures that guided the world with a tear or a smile, whom we called by such sweet names! Ah, since nothing more remains of you, all is truly finished: THE EARTH IS DEAD.
* * *
1 The lymphatic temperament, associated with one of the four humors of ancient medicine, is better known as the sanguine; it is associated with sociability and compassion, among other traits.
A PARADOXICAL ODE (AFTER SHELLEY)
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL
James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) was one of the leading theoretical physicists of the nineteenth century, whose work gathered the phenomena of electricity and magnetism in a single theoretical framework—a unification comparable to the one wrought by Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. He was not the first great British physicist to have a strong interest in Romantic poetry; Humphry Davy published “The Sons of Genius” (1799) while in his teens, and his final work, Consolations in Travel: The Last Days of a Philosopher (1830) includes a rhapsodic vision of the cosmos analogous to Poe’s Eureka. In fact, it is arguable that the origins of both the British Romantic Movement and British scientific romance can be found in the epic poetry of Erasmus Darwin—which had a powerful influence on Percy Shelley, whose Prometheus Unbound (1820) provided the model for Maxwell’s satirical ode—and it seems appropriate to include at last a small sample of poetic scientific romance in the present showcase.
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“A Paradoxical Ode” was written in skeptical response to the popularizing efforts of Maxwell’s friend Peter Guthrie Tait, the co-author with Lord Kelvin of A Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867) and co-author with Balfour Stewart of The Unseen Universe; or, Physical Speculations on a Future State (1875). The latter work was written in opposition to the materialist views of the Darwinian evolutionist John Tyndall, and was intended to demonstrate that modern science could be reconciled with Christian doctrine; Tait and Stewart followed it up with a fictionalized sequel, Paradoxical Philosophy (1879), which Maxwell must have seen before publication, because it involves imaginary conversations between Scottish Christians and a fictitious German philosopher, Hermann Stoffkrafft, to whom Maxwell’s poem is notionally addressed. Tait’s geometrical work on closed curves (or “knots”) and Félix Klein’s suggestion that such knots could be undone if a fourth spatial dimension were added to the conventional three—making what William Clifford and others called a “homaloid”—is referenced in the first verse. Poetry, of course, always feels entitled to an unexplained esotericism that is denied to pedestrian prose.
To Hermann Stoffkrafft, Ph.D.
I
My soul’s an amphicheiral knot
Upon a liquid vortex wrought
By intellect in the Unseen residing,
While thou dost like a convict sit
Wit marlinspike untwisting it
Only to find my knottiness abiding,
Since all the tools for my untying
In four-dimensional space are lying,
Where playful fancy intersperses,
Whole avenues of universes;
Where Klein and Clifford fill the void
With one unbounded, finite homaloid,
Whereby the infinite is hopelessly destroyed.
II
But when thy Science lifts her pinions
In Speculation’s wild dominions,
I treasure every dictum thou emittest;
While down the stream of Evolution
We drift, and look for no solution
But that of survival of the fittest,
Till in that twilight of the gods
When earth and sun are frozen clods,
When all its matter degraded,
Matter in aether shall have faded,
We, that is, all the work we’ve done,
As waves in aether, shall for ever run
In swift expanding spheres, through heavens beyond the sun.
III
Great Principle of all we see.
Thou endless continuity!
By thee are all our angles gently rounded.
Our misfits are by thee adjusted,
And as I still in thee have trusted,
So let my methods never be confounded!
O never may direct Creation
Breach in upon my contemplation,
Still may the causal chain ascending,
Appear unbroken and unending,
And where the chain is best to sight
Let viewless fancies guide my darkling flight
Through aeon-haunted worlds, in order infinite.
THE ABLEST MAN IN THE WORLD
EDWARD PAGE MITCHELL
Edward Page Mitchell (1852–1927) was a successful American journalist, primarily associated with the New York Sun, whose fiction for that paper included several significant exemplars of popular American scientific romance. They remained uncollected and obscure until long after his death, when Sam Moskowitz put together a collection entitled The Crystal Man: Landmark Science Fiction (1973) and established his historical importance in the development of American imaginative fiction. The collection gathers together a dozen stories in the enterprising tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, developing innovative ideas, usually in a humorous manner, with some ingenuity.
“The Ablest Man in the World,” which appeared in the Sun on 4 May 1879, is the best of Mitchell’s scientific romances, and one of the earliest stories to take inspiration from the attempts made in England by Charles Babbage (1791–1871) to build a mechanical calculating machine, based on principles that subsequently provided the foundation for modern computers. Unappreciated at the time, Babbage’s attempts and Mitchell’s speculative extrapolation thereof came to seem possessed of great foresight a hundred years later, entitling the latter to a belated classic status. The story is also a significantly unusual inclusion in the subgenre of stories about automata in human form, to which Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Dancing Partner,” featured subsequently in the present anthology, also made a notable addition.
It may or may not be remembered that in 1878 General Ignatieff1 spent several weeks of July at the Badischer Hof in Baden. The public journals gave out that he visited the watering-place for the benefit of his health, said to be much broken by protracted anxiety and responsibility in the service of the Czar. But everybody knew that Ignatieff was just then out of favor in St. Petersburg, and that his absence from the centers of active statecraft at a time when the peace of Europe fluttered like a shuttlecock in the air, between Salisbury and Shouvaloff,2 was nothing more or less than a politely disguised exile.
I am indebted for the following facts to my friend Fisher, of New York, who arrived at Baden on the day after Ignatieff, and was duly announced on the official list of strangers as “Herr Doctor Professor Fischer, mit Frau Gattin and Bed. Nordamerika.”
The scarcity of titles among the traveling aristocracy of North America is a standing grievance with the ingenious person who compiles the official list. Professional pride and the instincts of hospitality alike impel himto supply the lack whenever he can. He distributes governor, major-general, and doctor professor with tolerable impartiality, according as the arriving Americans wear a distinguished, a martial, or a studious air. Fisher owed his title to his spectacles.
It was still early in the season. The theater had not yet opened. The hotels were hardly half full, the concerts in the kiosk at the Conversationhaus were heard by scattering audiences, and the shopkeepers of the bazaar had no better business than to spend their time in bewailing the degeneracy of Baden Baden since an end was put to the play. Few excursionists disturbed the meditations of the shriveled old custodian of the tower on the Mercuriusberg. Fisher found the place very stupid—as stupid as Saratoga in June or Long Beach in September. He was impatient to get to Switzerland, but his wife had contracted a table d’hôte intimacy with a Polish countess, and she positively refused to take any step that would sever so advantageous a connection.
One afternoon, Fisher was standing on one of the little bridges that span the gutter-wide Oosbach, idly gazing into the water and wondering whether a good sized Rangely trout could swim the stream without personal inconvenience, when the porter of the Badischer Hof came to him on the run.
“Herr Doctor Professor!” cried the porter, touching his cap. “I pray you pardon, but the highborn the Baron Savitch out of Moscow, of the General Ignatieff’s suite, suffers himself in a terrible fit, and appears to die.”
In vain Fisher assured the porter that it was a mistake to consider him a medical expert, that he professed no science save that of draw poker, that if a false impression prevailed in the hotel it was through a blunder for which he was in no way responsible, and that, much as he regretted the unfortunate condition of the highborn the baron out of Moscow, he did not feel that his presence in the chamber of sickness would be of the slightest benefit. It was impossible to eradicate the idea that possessed the porter’s mind. Finding himself fairly dragged toward the hotel, Fisher at length concluded to make a virtue of necessity and to render his explanations to the baron’s friends.
The Russian’s apartments were upon the second floor, not far from those occupied by Fisher. A French valet, almost beside himself with terror, came hurrying out of the room to meet the porter and the doctor professor. Fisher again attempted to explain, but to no purpose. The valet also had explanations to make, and the superior fluency of his French enabled him to mon
opolize the conversation. No, there was nobody there—nobody but himself, the faithful Auguste of the baron. His Excellency, the General Ignatieff, His Highness the Prince Koloff, Dr. Rapperschwyll, all the suite, all the world, had driven out that morning to Gernsbach. The baron, meanwhile, had been seized by an effraying malady, and he, Auguste, was desolate with apprehension. He entreated Monsieur to lose no time in parley, but to hasten to the bedside of the baron, who was already in the agonies of dissolution.
Fisher followed Auguste into the inner room. The Baron, in his boots, lay upon the bed, his body bent almost double by the unrelenting gripe of a distressful pain. His teeth were tightly clenched, and the rigid muscles around the mouth distorted the natural expression of his face. Every few seconds a prolonged groan escaped him. His fine eyes rolled piteously. Anon, he would press both hands upon his abdomen and shiver in every limb in the intensity of his suffering.
Fisher forgot his explanations. Had he been a doctor professor in fact, he could not have watched the symptoms of the baron’s malady with greater interest.
“Can Monsieur preserve him?” whispered the terrified Auguste.
“Perhaps,” said Monsieur, dryly.
Fisher scribbled a note to his wife on the back of a card and dispatched it in the care of the hotel porter. That functionary returned with great promptness, bringing a black bottle and a glass. The bottle had come in Fisher’s trunk to Baden all the way from Liverpool, had crossed the sea to Liverpool from New York, and had journeyed to New York direct from Bourbon County, Kentucky. Fisher seized it eagerly but reverently, and held it up against the light. There were still three inches or three inches and a half in the bottom. He uttered a grunt of pleasure.
“There is some hope of saving the Baron,” he remarked to Auguste.
Fully one half of the precious liquid was poured into the glass and administered without delay to the groaning, writhing patient. In a few minutes, Fisher had the satisfaction of seeing the baron sit up in bed. The muscles around his mouth relaxed, and the agonized expression was superseded by a look of placid contentment.