“It had to happen, you know,” he explained. “If the order wasn’t given sooner, it’s because the Manitous hadn’t realized the danger immediately. They were taken by surprise. You benefited from that. People were able to talk about your invention. But they understood, in the end. Now you’ve been erased. It’s as if you no longer existed.”
When François argued that the exclusion was not general, Laronce had demonstrated to him harshly that all the papers would enter the conspiracy.
The Bonjour hadn’t done so yet, but it would. Evidently, there were different kinds of papers in the major press. Some, like the Bonjour, were family concerns that had been handed down from father to son. Some, in the hands of one man, were instruments of defense or ambition. Other opinion-factories were run by companies. Some affirmed their publicity, some managed it discreetly—but those were just shades; fundamentally, they all obeyed the same interests, the same power of money and, when the need arose, the same command.
He was right. Gradually, all the newspapers were closed to Sidereal Energy—but the truth got out and sprang forth even so. The lucid and prestigious Chérance did not appear to be greatly alarmed by this trickery. Every time he was notified of another setback, she swept dread aside with a brief gesture as if her were chasing away an importunate fly.
“Bah! It’s temporary...”
And, as if to demonstrate his calmness with regard to the business that was dearest to his heart and crowned his life, he set off for India in an airplane.
Dutrait, who had become a bibliophile in imitation of his boss, told François that Chérance hoped to discover the oldest manuscripts in the world in Tibetan monasteries. He added, half seriously and half in jest, that the financier wanted to bury himself in the search in order to forget his great failure as a collector, his chagrin at not being the possessor of the much more desirable rare pearl that Pierre Contal obstinately refused him: the manuscript of Génie antique.
The time set for the meeting was long past, however, and Dutrait had not appeared. Francois was irritated by that. There is no time more stupidly lost than that spent waiting. In addition, a Swedish mission was due to inspect the Starter that afternoon at the Center for Studies in Physics. Thuilier would certainly do the honors, but now that attempts were being made to stifle his discovery, it would have pleased the young inventor to explain it himself to the foreigners, to convince them and win them over.
He consulted his watch. Dutrait had never been able to cure himself of his infirmity and become punctual. Like the convicts of old, he dragged around a cannonball attached to his ankle, which slowed him down, diminished him and whose chain he could not saw through.
With his eyes on the dial, François thought: One can put right a watch that loses time, but a man who is slow can’t correct himself. Oh, we’re still in the infancy of humankind.
In front of him stretched the workers’ village. The houses, cheerfully graceful in the Dutch style, were varied in design and painted in bright colors. Although spring had scarcely begun, they were already tufted with verdure. That was because François, free to dispense energy without counting the cost, had applied electricity to cultivation, just as he had applied it to all kinds of domestic labor. He had thus been able to realize, under every roof, the material wellbeing that appeared to him to be the necessary base, the trampoline, of moral wellbeing. In another domain, too, he had been able to bring his actions and doctrines into accord, by applying the regime of profit-sharing, which ought to succeed wage-earning as the latter had succeeded serfdom.
He had been able to remain faithful to his principles in this respect thanks to Chérance, who had deliberately covered him in these attempts and had allocated him generous credit. Was the financier acting out of a kind of natural elegance? Did he want to demonstrate his faith in the discovery of the Starter? Or was he, as an impenitent bibliophile, attempting indirectly to please the author of Génie antique? He was doubtless obedient to all these various motives; all our actions have complex causes.
Dutrait did not arrive. François despaired of meeting the Swedish mission at Bellevue. He decided to telephone the Company offices, where the commercial director was based, in order to find out whether he was at least on his way, and went back into his office. At that precise moment, the phone rang—doubtless Dutrait, about to offer ingenious reasons for his delay, politely request forgiveness and “do the repentance dance.”
Smiling, François picked up the receiver.
Suddenly, a sledgehammer blow descended upon his head. An awkward and troubled voice was telephoning from Bellevue. He seized scraps of sentence: “Explosion of a Starter…at the Center for Studies…during a demonstration…façade collapsed...”
Two thoughts went through him, with a double impact. One was for Marianne, Lise and Claude; their house was next door to the Center. The other was paltry and absurd: but for Dutrait’s lateness, he would have been demonstrating the Starter to the Swedes himself, and the explosion would not have occurred. He dared not confess his mortal dread openly. He said, obliquely: “Was anyone hurt?”
No. When the explosion occurred, the foreign mission had been visiting the Museum Hall. Resuscitated, Francois breathed more easily. Already, he had recovered his valor. One of his favorite maxims came to mind: Everything is reparable except death.
His faith in the destiny of his apparatus was so robust that he had not reflected, at first, on the potential repercussions of the accident. It was a severe blow, however. It was capable of seriously hurting the business, already weak and anemic because of the conspiracy of silence. The dangers of the Starter! François could imagine the value that his adversaries would be able to extract from some such formula. Oh, why did Chérance, that decisive and reliable leader, have to be absent at such a moment?
Firstly, however, it was necessary to take stock of the damage, and its cause. François raced to the service aircraft, whose pilot was always ready to take off. On the way, the explosion haunted him. What could have caused it? What imbecile, what clumsy oaf…or what criminal? With a shrug of his shoulders he rejected the suspicion of sabotage. “Come on, let’s not be dramatic.”
When he landed at Bellevue, his first glance was at the Center for Studies. He dreaded finding it in ruins—but only the laboratory windows had been broken. A small group of people was standing in front of the façade. François recognized one of his laboratory assistants, and interrogated him rapidly while they made their way to the laboratory. The shock had broken the glass in the display-cases, smashed apparatus. The Starter no longer existed. They walked over shards of glass and lumps of plaster detached from the ceiling.
“How did it happen?”
Monsieur Thuilier, the director, had been delayed at a conference in Paris. In his absence, the deputy director, Monsieur Lavolige, had carried out the customary demonstration for the Swedish mission—but he had left the motor running when he had taken the visitors to the museum. It was then that the explosion had occurred, abrupt and brutal, “like a thunderbolt.”
“Where is Monsieur Lavolige?”
“He’s gone to Paris with the Swedes.”
Lavolige! Of course. The fool had neglected the regulator—perfectly simple—that rendered the dissociation progressive. Or, rather, he had allowed the Starter to deregulate of its own accord. Had he done so out of pure inadvertence? Had he pretended to be distracted? Had he, at the last moment, given a flick of the thumb, yielded to some diabolical temptation surging from the unconscious? How could one know? No man ever descends to the bottom of the sewers of his own mind. All the more reason why no one can fathom the heart of another.
He put Lavolige out of his mind, as one expels a rogue with a kick up the backside in order to send him to be hanged somewhere else. He murmured to himself: “Let there be no more question of that imbecile.”
He left the laboratory. When he went past the big globe in the vestibule he was tempted to murmur: “Don’t worry—we’re going to continue busying ourselve
s with you.”
He was in haste to see his family. How precious their existence had seemed to him during that brief ordeal...
He hugged them wordlessly, however, for we keep our greatest tenderness to ourselves. Everyone in the house had recovered from the alarm. Lise had found her lovely smile again, as clear and pure as the tinkle of a bell. Claude repeated his story to every new arrival; he had already fixed the words and inflections with sure theatrical instinct that operates at all ages but which childhood displays ingenuously. There had been a bang! Maman was all pale. She had hugged Lise and him very tightly.
“My poor darlings,” said François, “you’ve had a fright. In fact, the accident was more stupid than serious.”
“It was Monsieur Lavolige, wasn’t it?” asked Marianne.
“Yes. He made a mistake of which only he was capable. A child wouldn’t have made it. That’s what it’s necessary to make clear without delay—the exceptional, unique character of the error. I have to go see Laronce. He’ll advise me. He won’t be displeased to see me in an embarrassing situation, and he’ll be delighted to get me out of it. He’s a poor weather friend. I’m counting on the Bonjour to publish an explanation.”
“What about the other papers?”
“Oh, naturally, those who’ve shut up will talk. They’ll wax lyrical about the accident. We’ve had the conspiracy of silence; we’re about to have the alarm call. It’s inevitable. In truth, I think I prefer the second campaign to the first. I was stifling. It seemed to me that I’d been buried alive—whereas now, I think we’re going to be able to defend ourselves.”
On the threshold, he looked back. “Would you be kind enough to phone Briolle. It’s best to avoid my parents finding out about the explosion via the papers. They’d think that we’ve all been killed. They can send a message to your father, since he’s just taken up residence at Clos-Mussy again. Oh, this time Pierre Contal can declare: ‘All this will end badly’—but no, no, all this will end well. Or rather, all this will never end.”
A quarter of an hour later, François climbed the stairs at the Bonjour in the Place de la Madeleine and went into Laronce’s office. Very small and extremely cluttered with files, it resembled the cavities that rats hollow out in bales of old papers.
François understood, by the journalist’s firm and warm handshake, that he already knew about the accident at Bellevue. In fact, Laronce handed him the dispatch from the agency that he had just received.
An explosion that might have had the most serious consequences has just occurred at the Center for Studies in Physics at Bellevue. It was provoked by a “Starter.” It will be recalled that the apparatus in question, according to its partisans, was to represent an inexhaustible and gratuitous source of energy. A few industries have even adopted it. The cause of the explosion, which fortunately only caused material damage, is as yet unknown.
Having read the dispatch, François said: “Yes, it’s neutral, but it permits the incrimination of the apparatus itself. You see, old chap, I want to ask you the favor of explaining that the explosion resulted from a stupid mistake, and unparalleled and unrepeatable inadvertence—unrepeatable, you hear.”
“You don’t believe that it was malevolence?” Laronce insinuated.
The inventor had decided to spare Lavolige, however. After all, by dint of feigning distraction, confusion and overwork, he might perhaps have become truly distracted, confused and overworked. “No, no,” he said. “It was inimitable clumsiness, but it was clumsiness. Obviously, the papers that have undertaken the conspiracy of silence against the Starter will make the most of the accident...”
“Of that you can be sure,” Laronce said, sardonically.
“Well, it’s necessary to seize the initiative. It’s necessary to employ the preventive method, to immunize minds, to put them on their guard against that poison. Firstly, I repeat, the explosion is absolutely exceptional in nature. Secondly, it’s necessary to remember that the employment of energy, in any form whatsoever, always involves risks. There are short-circuits, gas explosions and boiler explosions, but one doesn’t renounce electricity, gas or steam. All the forces in play around us have their traitors. Gravity itself can be murderous; a mere fall will suffice.
Laronce was jotting down notes on a scrap of paper.
François continued: “The Starter is harmless in itself. Suppose a child were playing with a lens. If, instead of innocently setting fire to a shoelace, he set fire to a barrel of gunpowder and blew up the neighborhood, should one blame the lens? Should people declare it dangerous? Obviously not. You realize that I’m giving you these arguments as they occur to me. You’ll find others.
Laronce was jostled by disparate sentiments. He was triumphant in seeing his predictions come true; after having tried to stifle the invention, its danger would now be denounced. He savored the dark satisfaction of having got the better of his friend, of seeing him wounded while he, in his obscurity, escaped the blows of fate. A journalist without glory, he was proud of helping out the inventor of genius—and at the same time, he was frankly glad to be of service to François, to support him, to assist him. He would truly have liked to free him from an unjust concern, whose weight he felt on his own heart. That secret jubilation and sincere compassion lit a small flame in his gaze, behind his steel-rimmed pince-nez.
Cordially warmly, almost affectionately, he declared: “You can count on me. You know that the Bonjour hasn’t entered into the conspiracy against your company thus far. I don’t know what attitude the big boss, old Butat, will adopt after today’s accident, but I’ll write my article anyway. We’ll see whether it gets through.”
VI
The Bonjour’s antechamber was bare and dismal. The dirt on the doors, the rips and ink-stains in the wallpaper and the dust on the ledges testified to the fact that the building did not have a woman’s touch.
Behind a small table, a fat and morose usher in a blue uniform with silver buttons was reading a newspaper. From time to time, people came in, headed toward him, and tried to interest him in their requests, leaning over and confiding their destiny to him. Sated with power, he maintained the impassivity of an idol. Miserly with his gestures, he merely entered a name in a list or confided a brief word to an internal telephone system. Then he resumed his reading.
Sitting on the bench, François envied that serenity. Early that morning he had scrutinized the daily issue of Le Bonjour; he had not discovered the anticipated article. Immediately, he had come in search information, but the impassive usher, having listened to a voice on the telephone, had rendered his verdict. Monsieur Laronce was opening his mail and begged Monsieur Thibault to wait momentarily.
François was impatient to know why Laronce’s article had not appeared. Had it not been written? Had it been suppressed? He remembered the care, the fever, with which he had searched the paper column by column. There was something comical about it. He had been unable to abandon the search of the pages; an article can so easily hide. Don’t we sometimes read a headline and then find ourselves unable to find it again?
A door opened. Laronce showed his mahogany hair, his darkly wrinkled forehead, his steel-rimmed pince-nez and his copper-filing beard. He drew François into his den, which seemed to be hollowed out of stacks of paper.
“So, you’ve seen? My paper didn’t print it. I was written, and even set up in type. Look, here are the proofs. When I left the office yesterday evening, I was convinced that it wouldn’t be spiked—then, this morning, I saw, as you did, that it hadn’t appeared. I haven’t had time to find out why, but I’ll demand explanations. I’ll insist...”
“I forbid it!” exclaimed François. “Above all, I don’t want to make enemies. Above all, you hear. I’ve simply come to find out what happened. I thought you’d know...”
“What happened?” said Laronce, sarcastically. “Oh, it’s quite simple. I can tell you that without fear of error. The editor must have read my article late in the evening and submitted it to the bosses, who v
etoed it. Just like that. The Bonjour, you understand, is one of the rare papers that remained neutral in the Sidereal Energy affair. It even accepted paid advertisements—except that, in wanting to defend you the day after the accident, we forced it to choose a side. There was a change of mind.”
“That’s strange,” François murmured. “The Butats aren’t threatened personally. Are they really entering the conspiracy for the sake of solidarity?”
“Obviously, your invention is no threat to them. Their fortune is mostly based on forests in Scandinavia, but I repeat, all these people support one another. They’re connected. Look, there’s René Foucard, Butat’s son-in-law, who takes a high hand with the editing—‘the black on white,’ as he calls it. Well, René Foucard’s father is a born administrator; he sits on twenty-five boards. He must have interests in coal, oil, explosives and armaments manufacture. There’s the link. He must have been consulted. I can hear his verdict from here. The astonishing thing is that the Butat clan hasn’t taken note of his hostility earlier, and taken a harder line.”
Sincerely irritated by not having been able to help his friend he wanted to show, in his defense, that his paper could have done even less. “After all,” he said, hoarsely, “Le Bonjour has only abstained. Not all the newspapers have done likewise. Have you seen this morning’s press?”
“No. I read Le Bonjour and got out my car.”
“Well, you’ll see. Many papers have commented on the accident.”
He must have read the papers himself and then thrown them away without folding them up, because the flood surrounded his armchair. He picked one up.
“Here—read this.”
It was one of the serious and sententious papers that Laronce called “the heavy press.” The sentences filed before François’ eyes in solemn procession.
In time, perhaps it will be possible to liberate intra-atomic energy safely. Yesterday’s accident demonstrates that that time has not yet come. The event has revealed that the invention is not yet perfected, that its usage is still dangerous. People should only make use of the energies that can be unleashed once they have been properly mastered. It seemed that, in this case, nature has rebelled. Sometimes, it gives these warnings to the reckless individuals who strive to extract its secrets. It puts us on our guard against the pretended progress of a science whose excesses end up rendering it hateful. Nature wants us to pause, to cast a glance toward the peaceful times when our forefathers wisely obeyed its laws. Never has the myth of Prometheus appeared so just or so profound: woe betides the man who aspires to steal the fire of heaven.
The Eternal Flame Page 5
