For the next two months, there was a succession of terrifying phenomena to beggar all human imagination. The river was transformed into a veritable volcano, spewing out boiling water, overflowing in a single surge, and then disappearing into the Earth, only to reappear abruptly, a few hours later, to resume its normal course. Mad things occurred in that interval, whose story one hardly dares to record. It seemed that the dog’s spirit, similarly dissociated, influenced the frightful phenomena that were produced. The waters of the river were covered at one time by a thick fleece of hair, at another by inchoate embryos.
One day, when the dog’s master, along with other curiosity-seekers, had gone down to the river, they saw that an enormous hairy tail projecting vertically from the waves and waving, while an immense tongue of water swept the banks and died out at the very feet of the fearful master. Evidently, the dog’s instinct had dissociated in its turn, and an inexpressible terror had been conceived.
Then, all the phenomena calmed down; the dissociation stopped—no one knows exactly why—and the scientific world recovered, if only for a few months, the calm of times past.
XX. A Visionary
It was in the 33rd year of the Absolute Savants’ reign, at the very moment when human science seemed to have reached its apogee, when a visionary, by means of criminal outrages contrary to all scientific wisdom, turned the world upside down at 48 degrees, 50 minutes and 30 seconds of north latitude and zero degrees, one minute and eight seconds of east longitude on the collective terrain A-327, at ground level.20 (It had been impossible for some time to designate localities in any other way, all the towns being confused and superimposed 11 deep on the surface of our marvelous planet.)
Science now reigned alone as absolute mistress and everyone was divinely happy to live in a world organized by her. A machine had been invented, in fact, to create that belief. The horror of the first outrages was only too palpable and there was temporary anxiety about the insufficiency of the projections of iodoform designed to calm minds.21 It was a matter of criminal acts perpetrated on three exhibits in the Great Central Museum, and the monstrosity of those acts denoted such an aberration of mind that everyone was confounded.
For a long time, in fact, these exhibits had been the last in the world still comprised of living animals, the sole survivors of terrestrial fauna, which recalled those distant eras when man still shared his home with the thousands of animals from which he had descended. These curious specimens, occupying three special palaces, were three in number: a dog, a flea and a horse—but no one knew those ancient names any longer.
The first was, it was said, a bizarre creature, always on all fours, with a depressed skull, pointed ears, often pronouncing the same words—yap! yap! yap!—and devoid of all mathematical knowledge. It had been classified among the ferocious prescientific animals of the anti-elephant genre because of its hairy trunk—set behind rather than in front, as in the elephants, and designed, it was believed, to withdraw nutriments from the body.
The second animal, lodged in a grandiose palace, was scarcely larger than a grain of tobacco, but it made prodigious leaps. It was thought to date from the chaotic period during which the Earth had been encumbered with blocks of stone, which rendering walking more difficult. It was mute, as ignorant as the other, but livelier.
The third animal, finally, was of considerable size. Walking on all fours, like the first, it made a sort of whinnying sound without any practical implication, sniffed the air and struck the ground with its foot. This fashion of self-expression, analyzed by calculation, had furnished nothing intelligible. According to vague items of information surviving the second deluge, it was thought possible to baptize it with its old name, inasmuch as it could be reconstituted—the Soliped—even though it had four feet rather than one, as the name appeared to indicate; it was assumed, in consequence, to be a degenerate specimen: a monster.22
These three animals were nourished, with great difficulty, with a synthetic artificial grass costing 2000 Europeans a roll, since all vegetation had had been suppressed on Earth by order of the Great Central Laboratory, the pernicious example of the loves of plants being disastrous to social order. By virtue of a laudable sentiment of scientific probity, people had abstained from teaching them to read, to calculate or to study the workings of interplanetary trains, in order to conserve them as they had once been—and also for fear the admirable electric engraver employed for the instantaneous education of all young citizens as soon as they emerged from the birth machine might be subject to a fatal return of ignorance by induction.
For a long time, in fact, the reproduction of the human species had been entrusted to special biological laboratories, and sexual love, the joy of the ancient world, was unknown to the mechanically-minded citizens of the new scientific State.
The assault upon the collections of the Great Central Museum was actually committed by the son of a high functionary of that establishment: young Antimony, a descendant of the noble Stibine family.23
From an early age, Antimony had given evidence a strange character, rebellious against all scientific information; it had been necessary to send him back four times to the engraver, whose fuses he continually blew by virtue of his obstinacy. When he came of age at 14 and a half he was refused the social joys of artificial marriage in the special State workshops responsible for the necessary sample-collection. His father died of shame and his uncle Kermes fell gravely ill.24
Antimony passed entire minutes dreaming instead of calculating. Sometimes, he spent a long time looking at his work-companion Benzamide, and asked her what reason there could be for the differentiation of the sexes. Benzamide, intrigued and quite disturbed, searched the logarithm tables for the answer, but could not find it.
A year later, contrary to all custom, Antimony had not wanted to have his brain taken out in order to have it replaced, as everyone else did, by a 12-tier electric filing-system, and that evidence of thoughtlessness had conclusively plunged the families Sb1O2 and Sb3O4, the young man’s closest relatives, into desolation.
Such antecedents foreshadowed tragic adventures.
For an entire year, Antimony became increasingly depressed; he no longer listened to the quotidian phonographs, was disinterested in the course of vibrations, and spent long hours in contemplation in front of the three living animals. Then he went out, arms dangling by his sides, to watch the chemical clouds drift across the sky between the artificial trees, spending days in the sunlight and going to bed when everyone got up at the electric dawn.
Sometimes, he wandered the streets like someone suffering from hallucinations, murmuring: “I love… I love…”—but he did not know what.
Mysteriously, in order to escape from his ennui, he then set about constructing a strange harness composed of interlaced cords and asbestos straps. Sometimes, he slipped into the deserted walkways of the Museum, went as far as the Soliped’s cage, took new measurements and returned home to work in secret.
When everything was ready, he waited patiently for the great festival of Benzilic Aldehyde and, taking advantage of the general inattention, took possessions of the three living animals. With frightful courage, he imprisoned the living flesh of the Soliped in a network of straps, leapt on the monster’s back, succeeded in taming its wild resistance, and set about exciting it by voice and gesture. The Soliped soon bounded forwards, carrying the visionary with it on its mad course.
The anti-elephant followed, gamboling and releasing its strange and terrible cry: “Yap! yap! yap!”
As for the jumping animal, it had immediately lodged itself in the anti-elephant’s fur, and let itself be carried off without resistance or fright.
The abomination of desolation then spread throughout the entire world, and a long S.O.S. of terror maddened the 11 tiers of science.
Like a whirlwind, the frightful cavalcade ran along entire autotracks, was engulfed in tunnels, launched itself over balloon-bridges, precipitated itself down parachute stairways and miraculously
evaded the thousands of items of security apparatus spread by science over the entire world.
Magnetic roads were short-circuited, rivers resumed their courses, and a veritable blade of grass grew in a laboratory; thus science knew every shame.
The scientific world was then so thoroughly mechanized, in fact, that it was defenseless against an individual initiative that it had not foreseen, and the slightest dust of intelligence, lifted by the wind, was able to throw that gigantic clock out of order.
Innumerable films, taken in flight, showed Antimony smiling in his crazy course, quite transfigured, sitting up on the Soliped—which he regarded avidly—shivering and gripping its living flesh. He was seen to bound forward, then stop abruptly on the summit of some mountain, while at his feet, stretching up towards him, the anti-elephant, indubitably tame, gently licked his hands.
It was not until the following evening that they were able to regain control of the disaster. It was observed with amazement that the animals had come to no harm, and they were returned without difficulty to their palaces.
As for young Antimony, even though he too had suffered no injury, it was decided his action could have had no other provenance than a sadistic counter-scientific madness of the third degree. He tried to explain, vaguely, that he had obeyed an irresistible inner desire, akin to a mysterious atavistic instinct, but he could give no reasonable explanation of his outrage and convinced himself that his criminal action had not satisfied the irrational aspirations that were devouring him.
It was decided to intern him in the laboratory where he worked and to monitor him closely for a year. Given the marvelous progress accomplished by science, the prisons and dungeons of old were long gone, and it is understandable that the new world took great pride in that reform, which placed men on a par with gods. To tell the truth, there was no difference between the condition of citizens submissive to the superhuman State and that of ancient convicts, except that the convicts of old enjoyed freedom of thought and the spectacle of nature. Prisons no longer had any utility in such circumstances.
The strict surveillance to which Antimony was subject was scarcely favorable to him. It revealed new scandals much more dangerous to public order than his assault on the Museum collections. It was thus that the terrified Absolute Savant learned what strange questions Antimony asked Benzamide regarding the utility of the sexes. His outrage reached its maximum when it was reported to him that Antimony and Benzamide were having frequent quarrels. In the new scientific world, all discussion was, in fact, unknown, since all discord could be immediately regulated by calculation.
The danger to the State became immense, but it was necessary, in order to bring a formal accusation against Antimony, to find a pretext that would not awaken any suspicion. He soon furnished one himself by writing, contrary to all the laws, an implausible manifesto from which all equations were excluded and which rested on nothing but ideas! For a citizen of the Superhuman State, that was a work of folly.
Antimony was arrested that same evening, and the Absolute Savant breathed more easily.
XXI. Dead Love
It was on the happy occasion of the great worldwide feast of the Acceleration that Antimony was brought to trial.
Since the already-distant hour when Kilowatt, the man with the rubber fingers, had opened the doors of the Workshop and released the radiant effluvia of the artificial Sun upon the world, hundreds of citizens with phosphor-bronze brains had been hurrying madly through the arterial highways and winding venous streets crying: “Ninety-three! Ninety-three! Ninety-three!” What this signified was that the net output of the new State dynamos had attained 93 per cent.
The scientific satisfaction was general, for everyone believed that the progress of the Superhuman State was now solely dependent on the increase of social speed. Human cells had been preoccupied with nothing else for a long time. Abundantly nourished with arsenophenol, provided with arms of bismuth, electrified brains and bacterial dust-covers, all they had to do was perform their functions in narrowly delimited conditions and their happiness, in accordance with the exact givens of science, could only increase.
The Superhuman State, by complete contrast, remained perfectible. It had been taken in the earliest days of humankind for a simple juridical fiction, but with the unbounded progress of science, its living reality soon became undeniable. The replacement of a human cell was, therefore, an insignificant natural occurrence; the death of the Superhuman State, by contrast, would entail that of all the people who could not live artificially without it.
One after another, surrounded by universal respect the members of the Central Brain arrived on the roof of the State Palace and descended by the electric elevator to the Hall of Science, where the annual ceremony of the Acceleration was held.
The 118 State Scientists were there, sitting at their keyboards, impassive and mute. Above them, majestically enthroned, under the direction of the Absolute Savant, were the 20 Old Men of Yesteryear, the ancestors known to humanity by means of books now destroyed in the interests of the safety of the Superhuman State.
Everyone knew that judgment would be passed on the visionary Antimony in the first ten minutes of the session. To tell the truth, the madman’s idea hardly seemed worth such an expenditure of time, and the citizens with brains of bronze were trying in vain to figure out the true motive that might have led the 20 Old Men of Yesteryear to interrogate the lunatic in such solemn circumstances.
It was rumored in the crowd that Antimony had been diverted from the straight path by a sojourn of three months in the disaffected deserts of ancient Europe, and his assault on the collections in the Great Museum was recalled. All that the people and the 118 State Scientists could determine was that a capital accusation of scientific imprecision hung over him. Only the Absolute Savant and the 20 Old Men of Yesteryear understood the disturbing gravity of the debate, for they alone knew that, thanks to them, Love was extinct in the world and that its resurrection might bring down the Superhuman State.
A few seconds passed and the session was opened. Blue rays succeeded the red rays and Antimony appeared, introduced by an automaton and powerfully shackled by hypnoses of both feet. Briefly, his frank, clear and luminous gaze wandered indifferently to the dome, criss-crossed by the instantaneograms of the provincial journals, then settled, abruptly and ardently, on Benzamide, who was sitting on the witnesses’ bench, waiting anxiously.
Suddenly, the keyboards were activated and the Absolute Savant got up to summarize the ideograph of accusation.
Antimony claimed in his manifesto:
Firstly, that a qualitative reasoning ought to replace the scientific methods of the State, based on the illusions of time and space, in directing human cells.
Secondly, that man, without recourse to the Superhuman State, by the cultivation of his own will, would be able to tame the elements, fly in the skies, float without material support, and even escape death.
Thirdly, that with the increase of that same individual will, man would be able to displace himself instantaneously from one place to another, no longer subject to the infantile rules of space.
Fourthly, that this formidable augmentation of individual power could, undoubtedly, only be produced as a function of other passions, unknown today, but whose nature it was urgently necessary to research in the history of past centuries.
As this last paragraph was read, the 20 Old Men of Yesteryear felt themselves going fearfully pale. What, then, was this terrible force of Love that had contrived to come back to life in the cinders of an abolished world to challenge their omnipotence? Was science not the most powerful thing of all, then? It was necessary to settle the matter.
When the reading of the ideograph had finished, violent emanations of protest traversed the hall, and the Absolute Savant, addressing himself to Antimony, went on, sternly: “I cannot understand why, when you were under observation, you asked that your ideas be submitted to laboratory assistant Benzamide, the daughter of the illustrious Ant
hracite, with whom you conducted your studies. You have affirmed that, without her approval and presence, you cannot do anything. She is here today, in front of us, and I must warn you that this opportunity to explain yourself is the last that you will be given.”
A long silence descended.
Haggard, with eyes aflame, Antimony looked at Benzamide; his effort of comprehension seemed frightful. The 20 Old Men of Yesteryear followed the scene with anguish, ready to intervene; the 118 scientists, completely uncomprehending, stared at the accused impatiently. Benzamide, in her turn, studied Antimony with a lively curiosity, as if she were seeing him that day for the first time. The experiment was infinitely perilous; it was necessary that it cease immediately, and the Absolute Savant got up nervously.
“In the absence of any explanation on the part of the accused,” he said, dryly, “We shall suspend the session for three minutes, in order to permit Benzamide to draw conclusions. She alone knows the accused’s ostensible works well enough to be able to testify in his favor.”
Without knowing exactly what she was doing, Benzamide shut herself up alone in the laboratory adjoining the session hall. Her ideas were in turmoil, theories and methods dancing before her eyes as if seized by madness.
Violently, she tried to bring order to her thoughts, to look into herself. Fortunately, she was not in any doubt. Was not her father the glorious inventor of the system of repopulation of the artificial State that had replaced whatever primitive and outdated method had previously been in use? Nevertheless, she was not like other daughters, and strange ideas sometimes got into her head. Often, when she worked with Antimony, she had abrupt fits of annoyance when the young man employed methods that were not hers. Alone among all her companions, however, she did not like her name; she would rather have been called Narcotine or Codeine.
Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension Page 11
