Finally, as in cases of cancer or fibroma, there were molecular transformations of matter, transmutations of metal that would have enchanted the alchemists of old. Certain items of steel transformed themselves gradually into bronze, pieces of tin germinated into iron and patches of gold were observed in the lids of sardine-tins.
There was soon a veritable agitation in the factory, a precursor of definitive revolt. Certain machines became ataxic, others were afflicted with Pott’s disease.30 For long weeks it was necessary to drown the workshop in iodoform vapor and surround the principal items of automatic machinery with tampons imbibed with chloroform. One sensed, however, that some muted and distressing project was in preparation throughout the factory, like a general strike or a revolt of finally-liberated matter.
On the fourth intercalary, the pressure of the current having been inadvertently increased, all the machines abruptly flew into pieces like shattering glass, twisting their arms, and collapsed. Throughout the day, the terrified engineers again bore witness to a dangerous displacement of matter, which formed into balls and rolled slowly but smoothly towards the doors. For a while, they thought that the Human Limb Depot next to the factory was going be destroyed by the moving blocks of matter. This depot contained incalculable riches: heads, arms, intestines and human hearts held in store following operations, which were used on a daily basis for grafting, in cases where damaged organs needed replacement.
On penetrating into the guard-room, the blocks of matter, charged with electricity, did indeed galvanize all these stored body-parts—which began to speak, walk and escape in every direction. It took two or three days to regain control of them and bring all the scattered organs back to the depot. In the meantime, their crazy and whimsical excursions sowed terror in the town, particular among the women. As for the matter, it was necessary to tame it by means of artificial gel and afterwards to dispatch it in barges, with infinite precautions, to the Arctic Ocean.
This was one of the most troubling incidents of that agitated era, for it was dreaded every day that this bad example might be followed by the machine-tools of other factories. Radical measures were taken in this respect: obscurantism was built into mechanical matter and machines were surrounded by a network of wires designed to intercept and channel all outside influences—and for some years thereafter, calm was restored.
XXX. The Industrial Plants
It was after the machine revolt that people gradually began to comprehend that man was not the unique master of creation, but that animals, plants and things must play a large part in the general life of the universe. Already, on thinking about it more attentively, they had taken account of the immense industrial superiority of vegetables—which, without colossal factories or ingenious and complicated mechanisms, succeeded with all the simplicity in the world in producing the most complicated materials in the universe.
A simple seed, germinating in the ground and then extending a few roots, a stem and leaves, was enough, according to the particular nature of the plant, to produce the most unexpected effects. From the same ground, one such grain, as it developed, could draw the richest coloring materials, another subtle perfumes, and yet another fruits capable of nourishing human beings in a substantial or delicious manner. What savant, what magician, calling to his aid all the resources of science, could have accomplished such prodigies with such simplicity?
From the chemical point of view, plants similarly outstripped the best-equipped scientific laboratories. Without recourse to complicated apparatus, they fixed carbon, where the soil had only given them carbonic acid; they created living matter, where it had furnished them nothing but inert substances. By themselves, in a word, by means of invisible processes that were doubtless bafflingly simple, plants realized the improbable transmutations of one simple substance into another of which the philosophers, alchemists and scientists of times past were only able to dream.
A violent reaction against traditional industrial chemistry was rapidly produced in the scientific world, and the fervent study began of the extremely ingenious mechanism of vegetable life. Was it not infinitely more skillful to capture that life—since it could not be reproduced—than to try in vain to counterfeit its effects?
Soon, with the aid of progress, there was a veritable hatching of industrial plants, cleverly adapted, profoundly modified and capable of reproducing on a large scale the phenomena of which nature had thus far produced, so to speak, only sample specimens. Undoubtedly, these new plants, thus adapted to new functions, were very different from the plants of old; they resembled those animals whose breeders had formerly developed some part useful for nutrition, which soon assumed monstrous aspects. Agricultural factories were, therefore, installed on considerable tracts of land. Forests composed of adapted trunks, fields of vegetation whose stems alone were conserved, took on the appearance of immense workshops entirely subservient to the needs of production.
Roots and stems alone subsisted between the ground and the machines. The soil, profoundly modified by chemical products and thermal or magnetic currents, guaranteed an exceptional fecundity to the vegetal stems, whose other extremities terminated in vendors’ show-rooms. Veritable marvels were immediately realized in this fashion. A few hours sufficed for transmutable matter to be incorporated into the soil, aspired by the stems, transformed, poured out on to display-tables, packaged and dispatched to the four corners of the universe. Mass-production was carried out by this means of perfumes, dyes, nutritional pastes and chemical products of every sort. It was an era of intense overproduction.
During the early days of this industrial adaptation of fields and forests, certain old men of previous eras complained about the transformation of nature, which definitively suppressed everything on the Earth’s surface that had formerly constituted its grace and beauty, but their esthetic opinion had no value in that industrial epoch and people only laughed at their complaints. It was only a few years later, when the adapted plants had gradually lost the memory of their primitive state, that people began to understand the profound implications that such regrets might have.
The industrial plants, deprived of the joys of reproduction, maintained in a state of excitation, became bad-tempered, underhanded and cruel. Little by little, chemical products no longer being enough for them, they developed tentacles on the surfaces of their leaves analogous to those of the Drosera rotundifolia once described by Darwin, which nourishes itself on insects that it seizes in order to absorb their substance.31 Sometimes these tentacles were enormous, and the demands of the plants became limitlessly voracious. It was necessary to feed them on dogs, cats and rabbits.
The spectacle of plants that had become carnivorous, disdaining the old and gentle nourishment of the soil, was infinitely repugnant. Their roots gradually lost their alimentary functions, but they developed the former sensibility of their tips in an extraordinary fashion. They soon became veritable organs, analogous in many ways to the brain, which formed underground. As before, sensations were transmitted by the roots, and movements effectuated, without it being possible to discover animal nerves and muscles in the plant.
This primitive sensibility, as it developed, gradually led to the disintegration of the ill-centralized plants and the radicular extremities were soon transformed into little sensitive mushrooms, isolated and useless, stupidly bumping into stones in the ground, fleeing or seeking the light, often traveling long distances through the soil.
The industrial plants were soon no longer producing anything but noxious substances, dangerous toxins or fragments of ill-digested animals, and the true cause of this degeneracy, which the obstinate old men had prophesied, was realized.
The plants were dying of ugliness.
Deprived of those ornaments that nature, in spite of its frugality, had judged indispensable, they were dying, no longer having the beauty that had once been their whole strength to excite their activity.
Attempts were then made to console them by painting brilliant flowers on the factor
y walls, and decorating the machines that imprisoned them with barbaric medleys of color, but it was a futile effort; soon, all the industrial plants died, one by one, of having been deprived of their flowers.
XXXI. The Phantom Hunt
The failure of the industrial plants did not discourage the scientists of the Great Central Laboratory, whose ambition was insatiable. They merely attempted to direct their researches in a more skillful fashion, no longer addressing them to inferior beings but to superior animals, in order to realize their fervent desire to capture inimitable Life.
Already, researches concerning the fourth dimension seemed to prove that the various bodies of living beings were composed of three external dimensions and a sort of fourth dimension completing their intimate structure. That was, in sum, the only possible justification that could be given for the irreducible difference that had been observed since time immemorial between inanimate objects and living beings.
This fourth dimension had been revealed to humankind, since humans uttered their first stuttering grunts, by the functioning of intelligence. It had also been revealed by the first hypnotic researches effectuated in barbarian times. In that distant epoch, the duality of the personality had already been established; curious phenomena had been recorded due to the creation of the phantasmal double that emanated from the hypnotized subject, remaining by his side, linked to him by a simple thread of imponderable matter.
It had even been observed, from the outset, that the hypnotized subject, no longer reasoning in three dimensions, became absolutely unintelligent during these doublings, while all the phenomena of consciousness were localized in the double, representing the fourth dimension.
With the progress of science, these phantoms had undoubtedly been restored to their true status. They were no longer, as had once been believed, evil beings, mysterious and extraterrestrial, but simple emanations of living individuals, forming part of their personality—and, in consequence, submissive to their initiative or to their subconscious.
A few skillfully-made observations had proved, from the start, that animals, primarily endowed with instinct, were more clairvoyant in these matters than intelligent men and that these very simple manifestations of duality were more easily sensible to them than to their masters.
The scientists even cited the story of the clairvoyant lady who, while walking in the countryside with a friend who was not endowed with second sight, had declared that she could see the phantom of a dog walking in front of them. Her word was doubted until the moment when, as they went past a farm, a cat was seen to come out of the farmhouse, make as if to cross the empty path and stop abruptly at the moment when it encountered the phantom of the dog, which had just crossed its path. Suddenly, its fur bristled and it extended its claws, breathed noisily and, panicking, returned at top speed into the house from which it had emerged.
Animals, therefore, better than humans, clearly discern the phantasmal emanations scattered throughout the universe.
When the day came when people understood how useful it would be for the new factories to appropriate the vital fluid lost here and there in the form of useless phantoms, they directed their attention to animals with a view to tracing down and capturing these errant forces. Instead of letting phantoms frighten timorous spirits needlessly, permitting them to upset items of furniture, haunt houses or abandoned châteaux, devoting themselves to all sorts of absurd endeavors, they tried to capture them in order to put their vital forces at the disposal of science. Special three-dimensional traps were set up nearly everywhere, each containing a four-dimensional living seed as bait, and use was made of numerous clairvoyant dogs, analogous to the hounds of old, to drive the phantoms towards the traps. There was then an energetic—sometimes terrifying—beating, which lasted several months.
Gradually, all the howling, desperate phantoms were made captive in public workshops, enclosed in machines that imitated—roughly, but adequately—the different organs of the human body.
To begin with, it was imagined that life was definitively subject to the orders of science and that the imprisoned phantoms would be constrained to animate the three-dimensional machines in which they were imprisoned as in cages of flesh. Gradually, though, it was necessary to admit the comprehensive failure of this new attempt. The imprisoned phantoms no longer stirred themselves; they did not produce any useful work; they could only live in total independence. In order to act, they needed the fantasy and the liberty of vanished eras. Emanating from exceptional individuals they could not submit to a social discipline. Sons of imagination and not of science, they were beyond the reach of orders and reasoning; dream-artists for centuries, indicating possibilities outside time and space to human beings, the phantoms were incapable of being artisans of the real.
People therefore limited themselves to imprisoning the phantoms forever in simple bodies—and industrial life, disembarrassed of these troublesome elements, calmly pursued new researches towards the rational unknown.
XXXII. The Supermen
It was entirely natural that the industrial research carried out to capture life prepared the way for the appearance of the first supermen, a more rational creation that provoked a lively and legitimate curiosity in the scientific world.
Furthermore, certain philosophers, for several centuries, had delighted in the anticipation of the arrival on Earth of these marvelous beings, and their poetic renown had preceded the noise that the scientists of the Great Central Laboratory made about their new superhuman products. There was, however, nothing particularly strange in the fabrication and education of supermen in a century in which surgical techniques had obtained extreme limits of perfection.
By pursuing the attentive study of the human body, it had been determined that it was, in fact, composed of two very different sorts of cells, some immortal, devoted to the reproduction of the species, others mortal and perishable, giving the body its terrestrial appearance and equipping it, for some years, for the functions it had to fulfill.
Properly understood, the life of immortal cells was no different from that of amoebas, which reproduced themselves perpetually by duplication. In the same way that, in primitive animals, there is neither mother nor child, properly speaking, but a simple duplication, the reproductive cells constituting the ovules never die, save by accident; they duplicate themselves indefinitely, living as long as the race that they perpetuate. When it comes to forming a new individual, they are content to sacrifice some among themselves for the transitory and plastic formation of the mortal body of a new individual.
The body of a human being, therefore, is of no definitive importance; it is merely a simple temporary ornament. By contrast, the reproductive cells interest us because they are immortal, because they conserve and collect within themselves, without necessarily having to transmit then, the characteristics and improvements of the race.
It is on this very simple principle that the construction of supermen was established.
After isolating the reproductive cells of a few handsome specimens of the race, it was enough to educate them, over many years, by grafting them successively on to individuals of every species, human beings or animals. This method was similar to that employed on the schoolchildren of old, who were placed successively in a series of preparatory schools. Instead of bothering with the whole body of the schoolchild, the operation was limited to placing the productive cells of the future supermen in different bodies, in which they could complete their instruction, acquiring good breeding and experience.
Carefully-labeled cells destined to engender the bodies of supermen at a later date were, therefore, grafted, for observational purposes, on to lions, birds, whales, dogs, poets or scientists. As for the body itself, it was ingeniously prepared in the most marvelous fashion. The body of the future superman was, in effect, only a simple tool, an indispensable but subordinate plastic form whose value depended entirely on the value of the central reproductive cell that was incorporated into it.
Furthermo
re, for a long time, savant humankind had been able to establish a fundamental difference between the general direction of the body and the body itself. Since the most distant eras, all the way back to the creation of those primitive instruments called the bicycle, the automobile and the airplane, men had understood how easy it might be to complete their body by adjoining new mechanical limbs to it, augmenting its power without violating natural laws in any way.
A cyclist, after traveling a few kilometers, felt awkward when it was necessary for him to return to walking; he had lost the habit, stumbling and feeling disorientated without the instrument of transport that had become indispensable to him. It had similarly been observed that an automobilist or aviator, in case of danger, instead of letting go of the steering-wheel or the joystick, clung to it forcefully. He sensed, in fact, that, far from being an instrument independent of his body, the automobile or airplane was no longer anything but an extension of it, and the instinct of conservation drove him to keep that augmentation of his strength and increase in his being in his possession for as long as possible in the presence of danger. Like a telegraph-operator clinging with all his strength to his apparatus in the case of a shipwreck, calling for help, the collective instinct of social conservation had replaced the old instincts of a man who had nothing but his own natural resources to call upon in the world mechanized by science.
With animal grafts, whose techniques advanced so rapidly during the scientific era, this artificial growth of the body was no longer anything but a game; assisted by snobbery, the game soon resulted in a few exaggerations. Just as automobilists had earlier been seen successively to adopt 6, 8, 12 and 24 cylinders, certain people thought it interesting to augment their vital forces indefinitely. Men with four lungs, three hearts or double nervous ignition acquired by grafts, eventually became a common sight, along with supplementary spare limbs for normal walking or mountaineering.
Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension Page 15
