Electric Life

by Albert Robida

  The great enterprise of the Paris-Peking Metal-Plated Paper Tubes—the Pneumatic Tubeway—won Philoxène Lorris the title of Emerald Button Mandarin in China, and that of Duke of Tiflis in Transcaucasia. He was already Count Lorris in the nobility created by the United States of America, a Baron in Danubia, and many other things elsewhere, and although he was proudest of all to be Philoxène Lorris, he never forgot to line up the interminable series of his titles when the occasion warranted, because it looked so impressive on prospectuses.

  Even though he was plunged neck-deep in his research and business interests, Philoxène Lorris, by sheer force of activity, found time for play and social life, and to give his exuberant nature all the true satisfactions that life can offer a vigorous man in possession of a healthy body and a well-balanced mind. Having married between discoveries and inventions, he had a son, Georges Lorris—the one whom we find him in the process of scolding on the day of the tornado.

  Georges Lorris is a handsome boy of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, as tall and solid as his father, with decisive features, distinguished by a forceful blond moustache. He is striding back and forth across the room and sometimes replying in a cheerful and agreeable tone to his father’s admonitions.

  The latter is not there in person—he is three hundred leagues away, in the house of the chief engineer of his vanadium mines in the mountains of Catalonia—but he appears on the crystal screen of the telephonoscope: that admirable invention, a great improvement of the simple telephone, recently brought to the utmost degree of perfection by Philoxène Lorris himself.

  The invention in question not only permits people to converse at long distances, with anyone linked electrically to the worldwide network of wires, but also to see their interlocutors, individually framed, in their distant homes: a fortunate suppression of absence, which secures the happiness of families that are often scattered throughout the globe in our busy era, but can come together in the evening if they wish, dining together at different tables, far apart, but almost forming a single family table.

  On the screen of the Tele—the customary abbreviation of the instrument’s name—Philoxène appears, also striding back and forth in his room, a cigar between his teeth and his hands behind his back. He is speaking.

  “But after all, my dear boy,” he said, “I’ve done everything possible and more to make of you what I, Philoxène Lorris, have the right to expect and demand—which is to say, a product of the highest cultivation, a superior, refined, improved Lorris—but look at all you can offer me by way of a son! A Georges Lorris who is well-behaved, I concede, and intelligent, I don’t deny—but that’s all: a mere lieutenant in the Chemical Artillery, at…how old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven, alas!” George replied, with a smile, turning toward the telephonoscope screen.

  “I’m not laughing—make some effort to be serious,” said Philoxène Lorris, with vivacity, taking a few energetic puffs on his cigar.

  “Your cigar’s gone out,” said the son. “I can’t offer you a match; you’re too far away...”

  “In sum,” the father continued, “at your age, I’d already launched my first major enterprises; I was already the famous Philox Lorris—but you’re content to be a ‘daddy’s boy,’ you calmly let the thread of life go by. What are you? No particular qualifications, emerged from the best schools with modest results, and, for the moment, a simple lieutenant in the Chemical Artillery...”

  “That’s all, alas,” said the young man, while his father, in the telephonoscope screen, turned his back angrily and went to the far end of his room, “but is it my fault that you’ve discovered or invented everything, and organized everything? I’ve arrived too late in a world too well-equipped and too well-honed. You’ve left nothing for the rest of us to discover!”

  “Get away! We’re only in the first infantile babblings of science; the next century will make fun of us. But let’s not stray from the point. Georges, my boy, I’m heart-broken, but, such as you are, you scarcely seem to me to be ready, now that your years of national service are over, to take up the thread of my work—which is to say, to direct my principal laboratory, the universally-reputed Philox Lorris Laboratory, and the two hundred factories or businesses that exploit my discoveries.”

  “Do you want to retire from business?”

  “Never!” cried the father, forcefully. “But I intended to associate you seriously with my projects, to march to discovery with you, to do research with you, to seek and to find...that’s what I’d have done with the person I wanted to make of you, as if I had two selves to think and to act…but you can’t be that second self, my boy. It’s deplorable! I haven’t paid enough attention in the past to atavistic influences alas; I wasn’t sufficiently informed. O youth! I, the star pupil of the International Institute of Scientific Industry, have been negligent! For I’m obliged to confess, my poor boy, that it’s not entirely your fault if you don’t have a sufficiently scientific mind—it’s your mother’s fault, of course—or, rather, that of one of your mother’s ancestors. I’ve made my enquiries a trifle late in the day, I agree, and that’s where I’ve been culpable. I’ve made enquiries, and I’ve discovered in your mother’s family...”

  “What?” said Georges, intrigued.

  “Only three generations back…a flaw, a vice, a defect...”

  “A defect?”

  “Yes, 115 years ago, around 1840, her great-grandfather—which is to say, your great-great-grandfather—was...”

  “Was what? What are you telling me? You’re scaring me!”

  “An artist!” said Philox Lorris, piteously, falling into an armchair.

  George Lorris could not help laughing, irreverently—and in response to that laughter, his father leapt furiously to the telephonoscope.

  “Yes, an artist!” he cried, “And what’s more, an idealistic, nebulous artist—a romantic, as they said in those days: a dreamer, a trifler, a peddler of nonsense. You can take it from me that I’ve informed myself. In order to know the full extent of my misfortune, I’ve consulted our great present-day artists, the photo-painters of the Institut. I know what he was, your great-great-grandfather! I only had a light and evidently vaporous mind at his disposal, like yours, deprived of serious circumvolutions, like yours, for it’s from him that you’ve got this inaptitude for the positive sciences for which I’m reproaching you. O atavism! Such are your blows! How can the influence of this ancestor, who lives again in you, be obliterated? How can he be killed, the rascal? For you can take it for granted that I shall fight and kill him...”

  “How can an ancestor dead for more than a hundred years be killed?” said Georges Lorris, smiling. “You know that I’ll defend my ancestor, for whom I don’t profess the same superb disdain as you...”

  “I want to destroy him—metaphorically, of course, since the scoundrel who is ruining my plans is out of range; I want to combat his unfortunate influence and overcome it. You can take it for granted, my boy, that I’m not going to abandon you, you poor child. I won’t abandon my own flesh and blood, unlucky rather than culpable. Certainly not! I can’t remake you, alas; I can’t return you to the Intensive Scientific Institute for four or five years, as I’ve thought of doing...”

  “Thanks,” said Georges, fearfully. “I’d prefer something else...”

  “I have something else—something better, for you wouldn’t come out any stronger...”

  “What is this better plan?”

  “This: I shall marry you off. I’ll save us by marriage.”

  “Marriage!” exclaimed Georges, amazed.

  “Wait! A planned, rational marriage, in which I’ll have loaded the dice in our favor. I need four grandchildren, of any sex—I’d prefer boys if possible, but in any case, four chips off the Philox Lorris block: a chemist, a naturalist, a physician and a technologist, who will complement one another and perpetuate the Philox Lorris scientific dynasty. I consider the intermediate generation to be spoiled...”

  “Thanks.”
>
  “Utterly ruined! It’s worthless, of no account. I shall therefore set that intermediate generation aside, and make arrangements to stick around until the moment comes to hand over to my grandchildren. That’s my plan! So, I’m going to marry you off...”

  “May one know to whom?”

  “That doesn’t concern you. I don’t know myself, yet. I need a true scientific mind, sufficiently mature—as mature as possible, in order to have a head free from all frivolous notions...”

  Georges was about to reply when the first electric shock due to the accident at Station 17 was produced. Georges fell into his armchair and swiftly raised his feet, in order to avoid contact with the floor, which was transmitting further shocks.

  His father had not flinched. “Imbecile!” he shouted. “You don’t have insulating soles on, and you’re walking around like that, in a house where electricity is flowing everywhere, through a network of intersecting wires, circulating like the blood in a man’s veins! Put some on and pay attention. It’s a leak that’s just occurred somewhere, and one never knows how far these accidents might extend. No, I haven’t time—I’ll let you go. Besides which, the line’s breaking up...”

  Indeed, the sharp image on the Tele screen suddenly faded, its contours becoming vague, and there was soon nothing but a series of confused and tremulous patches.

  II

  The tornado was at its height; the accidents caused by the terrible power of the crazy current—by the frightful natural forces stored, concentrated and measured by humans, suddenly escaped from the directive grip, now free from any inhibition—multiplied over a region representing almost a fifth of Europe. For an hour, all electrical communications had been cut off; one can imagine the disruption to business and the march of society. Aerial traffic was similarly interrupted; the sky had emptied of all aerial vehicles almost instantaneously, and the hurricane had complete freedom to unfold its dangerous spirals in the atmosphere.

  Although all the airships had been garaged as quickly as possible at the first alarm from their electrometers, a few crashes occurred. Several airships encountered by the whirlwind at the moment that it flowed out of the Storage Unit were literally pulverized over Lyon; nothing but shards fell to earth. Airships taken by surprise here and there, without having had time to surround themselves with envelopes of insulating gas—the role of which is analogous to that of oil in maritime tempests—came down broken, with their personnel killed or wounded.

  The worst disaster occurred between Orléans and Tours. The Touraine Aeronautic Club was holding its big annual regatta that day. Between a thousand and twelve hundred aerial vehicles of every size and shape were following the progress of the competitions on the racecourse, in which twenty-eight aerofleches2 were engaged. All eyes being on the competitors in most of the vehicles, the fact that the electrometer needles had begun to spin madly went unperceived, and even the alarm bells went unheard amid the cheers and shouts of the punters.

  When the danger was realized, there was a fantastic stampede among the crowd of airships to seek shelter on the ground. The thousand vehicles came down at top speed in a confused and entangled mass, in which landing accidents were numerous and often serious. The tornado, arriving with lightning rapidity, swept away all those that had not had time to flee; some of the broken airships carried off by the whirlwind were hurled to the ground a few seconds later fifty leagues away. Fortunately, in the midst of the disaster, the large airships carrying the members of the Aeronautic Club and their families were provided with new apparatus linking the electrometers to the cylinders of insulating gas by means of automatic valves. The apparatus opened of its own accord as soon as the needle marked danger, and the airships, enveloped in protective clouds, were only severely shaken; they were able to get back to the club’s airfield.

  If we return to Paris, to the Philox Lorris house, at the height of the tornado, we find the Sannois district in an easily-imaginable chaos: terrifying lightning-bolts are springing forth everywhere, and frightful explosions are rumbling in the distance, the echoes of which reverberate continually, gradually weakening only to resume abruptly and burst out with increased violence.

  George Lorris, clad in insulating shoes and gloves, is watching the spectacle of the convulsive sky from his bedroom window. There is nothing to do but wait, in prudent inaction, for the crazy current to be captured.

  Suddenly, after a crescendo of electrical discharges and thunderclaps accompanied by prodigious lightning-bolts, in sheets and zigzags, Nature seemed to utter an immense sigh of relief and calm descends instantaneously. The heroic engineers and employees of Station 28 at Amiens had just succeeded in cracking the tornado and channeling the crazy current. The deputy chief engineer and thirteen men had fallen victim to their devotion, but it was all over, and there were no further disasters to be feared.

  The danger had disappeared, but not the last traces of the great disturbance. Over Georges Lorris’ telephonoscope screen, and all the Teles in the region, thousands of confused images were passing with prodigious speed, and sounds brought from everywhere filled the houses with rumors reminiscent of the roar of a new and wilder tempest. It is easy to imagine that deafening rumor, which consisted of the sounds of life over an area of 1,600 square leagues—all the sounds collected everywhere by the ensemble of machines, condensed into a general racket, conveyed and rendered in total by each individual apparatus with a fearful intensity!

  In the course of the tornado, a number of serious breakdowns had naturally occurred at the telephone exchanges; wires had melted and amalgamated on the lines. These minor accidents did not pose any risk to anyone—provided, of course, that people did not touch the apparatus.

  Having picked up a book with photographic illustrations, Georges Lorris patiently installed himself in an armchair, in order to let the telephonic crisis run its course. It did not take long. After twenty minutes, the rumor suddenly died down. The central exchange had just established an escape wire. While waiting for the damage to be repaired, however—which would require at least two or three hours of work—every apparatus received some random communication or other that could not be interrupted before order was fully restored.

  On the Tele screen, the faces ceased to flicker in mad confusion, and gradually settled down; the procession slowed, and then, all of a sudden, a clear and precise image formed within the frame, and no longer changed.

  It was a simply-furnished bedroom, a small room with bare wood paneling, with only a few chairs and a table laden with books and papers, with a sewing-basket in front of the fireplace. Huddled in a corner, almost on her knees, a young woman still seemed prey to the most profound terror. She had her hands over her eyes, and only took them away in order to put them over her ears, in a gesture of panic.

  At first, Georges Lorris only saw a tall, slim and graceful figure, pretty delicate hands and beautiful blonde hair, slightly unkempt. He immediately spoke, in order to draw the unknown woman out of her prostration. “Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!” he said, sufficiently gently.

  The young woman, however, her hands over her ears and her head still full of the terrible rumors that had only just ceased, did not seem to be able to hear him.

  “Mademoiselle!” Georges shouted, in a loud voice.

  The young woman, turning her head without lowering her hands and, without budging, looked at her bedroom Tele with a fearful expression.

  “The danger is over, Mademoiselle,” Georges went on, gently. “Pull yourself together. Can you hear me?”

  She nodded her head, without making any other reply.

  “You have nothing more to fear. The tornado is over...”

  “You’re sure it won’t come back?” said the young woman, in a voice so tremulous that Georges Lorris could scarcely understand her.

  “It’s completely finished; everything’s back in order; we won’t hear any more of the racket that seems to have frightened you so much...”

  “Oh, Monsieur, how scared I was!” cri
ed the young woman, scarcely daring to straighten up. “How scared I was!”

  “But you don’t have your insulating slippers on!” said Georges, who had noticed, when the young woman moved, that she was only wearing dainty shoes.

  “No,” she replied. My insulators are downstairs; I didn’t dare go to look for them.”

  “Silly girl—you might have been electrocuted if your house had been directly in the path of the crazy current; never do anything so imprudent! Accidents as serious as that tornado are rare, but it’s necessary nevertheless to be constantly on one’s guard, and always to keep the preservatives that science provides against the dangers it has created, as a precaution against major or minor accidents, within range of one’s hands…or feet.”

  “Science would have done better not to multiply the causes of danger so much,” said the young woman, pursing her lips slightly.

  “I confess that I’m of the same opinion,” said Georges, smiling. “I can see, Mademoiselle, that you’re beginning to recover. Go and fetch your insulating slippers, I beg you.”

  “There’s no more danger, then?”

  “No, but the electric squall has thrown everything into such disorder that a few petty accidents might occur in consequence—damaged wires, pockets of electricity left behind by the tornado in a few places suddenly emptying out, and so on. Prudence is indispensable for another hour or two.”

  “I’ll run and fetch my insulators!” exclaimed the young woman.

  After two minutes the young woman came back, wearing her protective slippers over her dainty shoes. Her first glance, when she came back into the bedroom, was at the Tele screen; she seemed surprised to see that Georges Lorris was still there.

  “Mademoiselle,” the latter said, understanding her astonishment, “I ought to warn you that the tornado has confused the telephones somewhat; while they’re looking for leaks and reconnecting broken wires at the central exchange, all the machines have been connected up at random for as long as the work lasts. Don’t worry—it won’t take long. Permit me to introduce myself: Georges Lorris, of Paris; an engineer, like everyone else...”