Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

by Gaston de Pawlowski

  Two minutes went by; then, suddenly, without knowing why, Benzamide felt hot tears running down her cheeks.

  Instinctively, the young woman got up, took up a test-tube and conducted a rapid analysis in the Atomometer: water, 983.0; sodium chloride 13.0; mineral salts, 0.2; albuminous matter, 5.0.

  I’m going mad, she thought. There’s nothing outside science; this madman is dishonoring the State.

  The third minute having elapsed, Benzamide went back into the session hall, resumed her place, and, with a movement of the head, signified that she had nothing to say; then she looked away.

  There was a click, and a see-saw motion; Antimony slid on to the iodoformed table, inert.

  No objection having been raised by anyone—even Benzamide—and Antimony posing a danger to the State by reason of his madness, the judges, exercising their discretionary power, proceeded by themselves, promptly and without further ado, to replace his brain with a logarithmic machine in arsenic bronze, of the regulation model furnished by the State

  Thus, the spectators of that tragic scene soon saw Antimony leave, a docile automaton devoid of personality or thought, to mingle with the crowd of slaves of the State outside, awaiting the scrupulously regulated mechanical impulses of the Master of the Workshop.

  And while Benzamide, her head bowed and her thoughts in disarray, went back to her social father’s laboratory, the 20 Old Men got up and went into the Privy Council Chamber. There, still trembling at the dangerous experiment they had just attempted, they looked at one another slowly, without saying anything. They alone, in all the world, knew that something immense had just been destroyed forever: something fabulous, with which ancient humanity had lived for centuries; something that might have put the state in peril simply by virtue of the pronunciation of its name.

  And over Love, definitively dead, over the ashes of the Divine Sufferance of yesteryear, assured henceforth of the passivity of citizens of bronze with automatic hearts, they were finally able to glimpse the colossal triumph on the artificial world, forever submissive to the claws of the Superhuman State.

  In the street, the docile crowd cried again: “Ninety-three! Ninety-three!”—which signified that the net output of the new central dynamos had reached 93 per cent.

  XXII. The Fear of the Thing Unknown

  “Materializations developing from the eye! Materializations developing from the eye!”

  This statement, repeated 100 times over, drove Paris mad at the end of the 20th century.

  For a long time, war had been non-existent, its very name forgotten, and the nations of the Earth enjoyed extremely polite diplomatic relations. No one will be astonished by that when they learn that armaments had developed to unprecedented proportions, and that the admirable progress of science did not permit them to be distinguished from other industrial productions.

  Peace was universal. There were no more armies, no more soldiers. When a nation had a grievance against another nation, it contented itself with killing 300,000 or 400,000 people by means known to itself alone; the heads of State exchanged hypocritically affectionate radio messages of condolence, accepting the lesson or trying to take their revenge, according to their strength, but nothing, externally, seemed to trouble the cordiality of their accord.

  In every country, war had become endemic; it was no longer anything more than a feature of science and of the general peace. Civilization thus appeared to have reached its apogee.

  Grieving minds sometimes regretted the barbarous era of brief, declared wars in which only military personnel were exposed, and which subsequently engendered veritable periods of peace, but they dared not say so, and scarcely to think so, so despotic were the police of the Absolute Savants who governed the world.

  It was, specifically, in the last year of the polar oscillation of the 20th century that a sequence of pacifist reprisals desolated humankind.

  The Northern Gauls having abruptly raised their customs duty on alimentary peat-mud,25 the Petty Prussians, vegetarians all, threatened by famine, sent 6000 aerial tourist helmets to Paris by devious routes, which they sold at a knockdown price to the central hatters in the arrondissements of Argenteuil and Saint-Germain.

  A few clients having lost their sight on trying on these helmets, it was established—fortunately in good time—that each item of headgear contained two particles of radiumite, which turned out the optic nerve within minutes without leaving a trace.

  The affair having been hushed up, as usual, by the Savant’s censors, it was announced in all the art magazines a few weeks later that, out of deference to Germanic high culture, the Parisian Academy of Music would put on a grand French season in Berlin, designed to make the masterpieces of modern vibratory orchestration better known.

  This announcement caused a sensation in Berlin society, where everyone had a passion for the new music—which, inspired by the old impressionism in the medium of painting, left each instrumentalist in the orchestra to play in an independent fashion according to his own inclination. The synthetic whole recomposed itself in the mind of the listener, who had only to plug his ears slightly to obtain a better sense of the general harmony, just as the connoisseurs of old had squinted in order to appreciate the luminosity of an impressionist canvas.

  The French concerts in Berlin were extended over several weeks. Every day the musicians caused the most curious and discordant notes to be heard, and their inharmonic folly reached such a point that it was necessary to cover all the theater windows to avoid the deadly effects of the vibrations shattering the panes. The French musicians seemed evidently expectant.

  On the last day, having called upon the collaboration of an eccentric American orchestra and a few Italian violinists, the strange and profound musical vibrations were abruptly interrupted by a powerful explosion in the suburbs of the capital, which cost the lives of 63,000 people: the colossal nitrogen fertilizer factory in Schweidenburg had just blown up.

  Everything worked out as well as it possibly could; the French musicians interrupted their concert as a sign of respect for the dead, the Margrave of Brandenburg himself distributed splendid baskets of bulbous begonias to the artists to thank them for their assistance, and a collection for the victims was organized in Paris…

  A terrible anguish subsequently gripped the capital of Northern Gaul. All enlightened minds understood, in fact, that the Schweidenburg catastrophe, caused by the French orchestra’s expert musical vibrations, would bring terrible reprisals.

  They dreaded the return of the pink poison clouds or the explosive migratory birds that had done so much damage, and the Absolute Savants themselves were afraid of discovering themselves disarmed against the ever-possible treasons of their subconscious: a direly ill-protected mental domain on which the enemy had already made several disturbing hypnotic espionage raids.

  It was, in consequence, a sort of relief for them when inspectors came to tell them that a poor workman in the Home Theater distribution factory had been strangled that same night by a phantom that had materialized progressively in the darkness of his bedroom. First, a luminous eye the color of emerald had opened about two meters above the ground, then a blurred head had manifested itself, from which filaments of matter soon extended in the form of muscles, arms and hands. These filaments, like the tentacles of an octopus, had rapidly ramified around the neck of the terrified unfortunate, and had provoked death by suffocation. A dozen identical cases were identified the following day in the suburbs of Mantes and Château-Thierry—which is to say, at the very extremities of the Parisian agglomeration.26

  These materializations at a distance were not entirely new and, despite all the danger they posed, the means of combating them was known. Had not 3000 analogous phantoms, captured ten years before and subdued by hypnotism, been employed for some time in draining marshes and the more repugnant sorts of refuse-disposal? This time, however, what troubled feeble minds was that each materialization started with an eye. Not, we hasten to say, that in that scientific era t
he appearance of an eye in the darkness was capable of frightening even the most timorous of people—but everyone knew that Petty Prussian phantoms materialized feet first, and the primary appearance of the eye disconcerted the observers.

  The Colonial Academy, meeting the next day, awoke greater anxiety in Paris by proving definitely that this was a matter of Oriental reprisals, doubtless due to the prohibition of exports of white worms, and that the Petty Prussians had nothing to do with it. Indeed, it is well-known that the Far Eastern mentality is, in every respect, the inverse of ours. Orientals fear the rod and scorn death; their cooks peel their vegetables outwards, instead of bringing the blade towards them as ours do; they write from right to left; and their painters, when they have to paint a large mural, first draw the eyes of birds, then the beaks, the feathers, and finally the surrounding countryside. The fact that these phantom materializations began with the eye was an indisputable indication of oriental action.

  Paris was therefore plunged once again into the fear of the unknown. Imaginative people, precisely describing all possible catastrophes to themselves, were dying suddenly of heart attacks on perceiving the slightest unexpected noise; others no longer dared venture into the streets; almost everyone experienced an unhealthy terror when they abandoned themselves to sleep. The more the waiting was prolonged the more extreme this nervousness became. People got to the stage of hoping for the worst catastrophes in order to be liberated, at whatever price, from an unbearable nightmare.

  It was, therefore, a veritable explosion of joy in Paris that greeted the arrival of the first male shells, engendered in their course by female shells of a very old type—which, incontestably, came from the Petty Prussians although they bore ostensible American trademarks.

  No one wanted to believe, at first, in reprisals so gross and infantile. Everyone ran to the impact-points to see these familiar—exceedingly familiar—shells, of which no one any longer had any atavistic fear. They laughed and sang in the streets; open-air balls were organized, as of old; a great distributor of electric nutriments was even seen to set up chairs and tables on the pavement of the boulevard, in the ancient manner.

  The joy was so great and popular gaiety so extravagant that the Absolute Savants themselves forgot for 45 minutes to operate the simple lever controlling the old magnetic apparatus they had designed long ago to deflect shells in case of an attack, and dispatch them with precision to the scrap-metal yard established for that purpose on waste ground near the Creusot foundries.

  Everyone believed that the good old days of puerile bombardments with shells had returned; no one yet suspected the inconceivable horrors that impending scientific progress had reserved for humankind.

  XXIII. Universal Levitation

  It was not long after the 20th century that man began to dominate nature and really to command the movement of the Universe. Until then, he had scarcely made progress, and it was only with difficulty that one could distinguish differences between a caveman and a man that lived at the beginning of the 20th century, utterly ignorant of himself and the Leviathan that surrounded him.

  It is sufficient to recall, for example, the stupidity and general incomprehension that greeted the periodic return of Halley’s comet in 1910. The men of that time probably attached less importance to that astronomical event than Chaldean herdsmen living 7000 years before them had. No scientific conclusion was drawn from that important encounter; no one, however intelligent, thought of making practical use of the providential passage of the wandering star for any industrial or scientific end. And yet, the men of that time did not have the excuse of not knowing about radioactivity, and that alone should have put them on the road to the marvelous discoveries that were to follow a few years later.

  When one compares that extraordinary indifference to the frenetic activity that reigned on Earth when it was decided to capture a comet, one remains veritably astounded by the thought of the gigantic strides made by humankind in that short space of time. That formidable step, it must be admitted, was entirely due to the sensational discovery of the general law of universal levitation—which, completing that of gravitation, previously known in isolation, explained the general movement of the universe. It was, in sum, the definitive revelation of two antagonistic forces of attraction and repulsion, association and dissociation, two contrary energies on which depended the appearance and disappearance of worlds—in a word, of matter.

  How had people not realized sooner the necessity of that contrary factor? They asked themselves that in astonishment. Kepler alone seemed to have been preoccupied with laws of energy but it was with a truly surprising indifference that Laplace had hastened to set the question aside. Newton’s law was sufficient to explain everything. In the same way that ancient religions supposed a deus ex machina at the origin of the world responsible for giving the primal impulsion to creation, the physicists were enthusiastic to accept the energy of matter—the primitive and rectilinear movement of nebulae—as an undemonstrable axiom.

  Once this point of departure was accepted without discussion, universal gravitation sufficed to account for everything else regarding the formation of worlds. The primitive nebula, agitated by a rotational movement, successively emitted rings under the influence of centrifugal force; these rings broke up like smoke-rings and, under the influence of attraction, condensed into spheres, forming planets. When the central nucleus was of sufficiently restricted dimensions for no further rings to be detached, it condensed in its turn into a central Sun. All that was quite exact, but no one dreamed for a moment of seeking the origin of centrifugal force that formed each solar system, and which, combining thereafter with attraction, permitted each planet to describe its regular ellipse around the central Sun.

  When the structure and laws of the tiny solar system that is the atom were definitively discovered, it was easy to resolve this problem and to explain the gigantic universe clearly by means of the microscopic one. The comets themselves, of a matter often less dense than the relative vacuum of a pneumatic machine, were no more than alpha particle equivalents traversing the immense interplanetary voids of the atom-universe between the solar nucleus from which hydrogen is dissociated and the planetary electrons in fixed orbits that gravitate around it.

  After that, people no longer thought about anything but utilizing the formidable rectilinear force that the comets possessed, in imitation of primitive nebulae.

  Indeed, on the day when the dissociation of terrestrial matter in considerable proportions began, in order to extract useful energy therefrom, people observed, with amazement, a slight augmentation of the day, and then the year—which is to say, a slight slowing of the Earth’s movement around the Sun. Insufficient notice was taken, at first, of this deceleration, due to the dissipation of a part of our centrifugal force. By compensation, in fact, attraction had made itself felt and had drawn the Earth proportionately closer to the Sun, thus re-establishing, almost exactly, the length of the year.

  It was no less urgent to repair these losses of centrifugal energy as quickly as possible, and people immediately began to think of capturing the radiant force of comets. It was a triumph of the new science that soon diverted a part of the energy of Halley’s comet; that was, properly speaking—I repeat—the first act of veritable royalty that man exercised upon the universe.

  There was then, as usual, a quickly-restrained period of excess. In the joy of triumph, people went so far as to utilize all that newly-amassed centrifugal force and amused themselves, purely out of pride, by considerably augmenting the speed of the Earth’s rotation. The days were no longer more than a few hours long—until the day when, the speed of rotation having reached exactly 17 times the initial speed, alarmed telegraph messages were received from the Equator, saying that men and objects were no longer adhering to the surface of the Earth. The planet’s rotation was then returned, progressively, to its former speed, and people contented themselves with storing the new forces, as before, solely for the needs of industry, without
thinking any longer of the momentarily-glimpsed direction of the Earth.

  XXIV. The Enlargement of Memory

  In the year of Transmutation, when the Social Surgeon performed the first successful cephalotomy, substituting a calculating sponge for the left hemisphere of the brain, he had scarcely any inkling of the formidable consequences that his audacious intervention would have. He proposed, in fact, quite simply, to operate on another young man who had initially emerged from the Workmen’s Teacher Training College, and to transform him into an elite subject capable of calculating in a few minutes all the new income-tax bills. He scarcely imagined that this operation would soon permit all the curiosity-seekers in the world to journey into past history and to observe for themselves, in the minutest detail, events that had taken place several centuries before.

  It had already been observed, however, in the course of surgical operations, that new methods of anesthesia did not, strictly speaking, suppress sensation, but amplified it in the manner of a microscope. In the course of a minor surgical operation, the patient, locally anesthetized by cocaine or ether, perceived the work accomplished by the surgeon magnified a thousand times, like an image of a cinema screen—and it is conceivable that it was this magnification that relieved the pain of all its acuity. Without suffering, the patient became a mere spectator of an immense operation, soft and muffled, accomplished by cotton-wool giants.

  When it first became feasible to anesthetize the brain, these phenomena suddenly took on an unexpected character. It was no longer the dimensions of the world or the surgeon’s instruments that appeared to be formidably enlarged in the patient’s mind; it was old facts stored by the memory in the deep layers of the brain, which were abruptly brought back to the plane of immediate consciousness, in the broad light of day.