In this era there was a very curious fashion, followed by certain sensitive individuals—writers and poets—who still conserved the cult of emotions of times past. Every year they gladly adopted the habit of incarnating themselves for a few days, or during the entire holiday season, in the material bodies of animals or flowers. This delicate and charming custom necessitated infinite precautions and an entire special organization. The bodies of flowers or animals had to be prepared for this purpose by expelling the immaterial personalities, in order to permit people desirous of rest or reverie temporarily to occupy these fragile shelters. The Garden was monitored in a very particular fashion to ensure that no accident would trouble these peaceful retreats.
Some people spent exquisite weeks in this way in the same greenhouse or field, enjoying all the advantages of animal or vegetable life to the full—much better than the ladies of old had who played at being shepherdesses—sometimes even abusing, without modesty or restraint, borrowed bodies that were not their own.
This delicate fashion ameliorated to some degree the rigors of the Scientific Era, which was still in its early stages, and one could not help observing, in this regard, how all these scientific possibilities had been anticipated, in an obscure fashion, by antique religions and the naïve minds of the 19th and 20th centuries. When the Egyptians placed useful objects and weapons in tombs, respectful of a dead person’s mortal remains, it was with the intimate conviction that the material doubles of all the funereal objects would be used by the defunct individual in the afterlife. As for the spiritualists who believed in the evocation of the dead, they also liked to imagine that the soul of a dead young woman might gather the souls of dead flowers placed on her tomb in one of their naïve cemeteries.
I, having arrived in the land of the fourth dimension, have no need to say how primitive all these old beliefs in survival appear when one knows that death does not exist and that life, short as it may appear, has no value in duration but only in quality, outside of infantile notions of time and space.
These notions of the doubling of the body and the mind contained in ancient beliefs were, therefore, directly realized on Earth, during life. They were no more than a means of taking a holiday, available to everyone—infinitely banal, in sum, and placed under the surveillance of a scientific laboratory.
This charming custom too came to an end in a rather abrupt fashion, however, in the wake of painful incidents that desolated the Garden of Planets. That nickname was given to the large walled garden because it contained large fragments of extraterrestrial matter—bolides, as they were once called—perhaps detached from unknown other worlds, which had descended upon our Earth one night at that spot. Soon, they had been surrounded by strange vegetation, completely unknown to our naturalists until then, which was one of the principal curiosities of the Great Museum.
It was imagined that these strange and marvelous plants were vegetables analogous to ours, and no one hesitated, by virtue of the attractions of mystery and novelty, preferentially to choose these plants in order to place the doubles of vacationing poets therein. At first, things went very smoothly, but then a number of intellectual deaths were recorded, fearfully. Some minds on holiday in the planetary plants did not come back to their normal bodies.
Others, which did come back, explained the frightful and savage battles they had been forced to wage against the spirits of these unknown planets, which represented, in other worlds, the veritable inhabitants of foreign lands. Curious information was thus obtained about the universe, but it was necessary to put a hasty end to those murderous holidays, which cost the lives of the last poets of times past.35
There was even some suspicion, at the time, that the Absolute Savants of the Great Central Laboratory had premeditated these bizarre deaths, exciting the curiosity of the poets, their age-old enemies, and deliberately sending them forth on a calamitous adventure from which they would never return.
XXXVI. The Materialization of
Three-Dimensional Nightmares
Many people do not know of the existence of certain Japanese mice that are deprived of the sensibility of the third dimension. They can move easily on a lacquer tray but they never succeed in escaping it when it comes to getting over its edge. They completely lack the awareness of vertical displacement; they only comprehend two dimensions, and only ever go back and forth or left and right on the same plane, somewhat reminiscent of those chickens that are hypnotized by a unidimensional straight line traced on the ground in chalk.
One might think, at first, that this is simply a matter of an atrophy or a lesion in some nerve-center; it is known, in fact, that certain animals, after an accident or a bite, can become completely disoriented or turn in circles until they are exhausted, without recovering consciousness of the equilibrium of things. This is not the same thing; the little Japanese mouse, in a normal and healthy state, can only conceive two dimensions. It is quite capable, organically, of climbing, of displacing itself vertically, but that is a concept it lacks, and the idea never occurs to it.
In the same way, creatures that only know three external dimensions, like human beings, cannot conceive that it is as easy to exit from a locked room via the fourth dimension as it would be for the Japanese mice to get down from the rim of a tray—as easy as it would be in time, when one is old, to look down upon oneself as a sick child from the bedside, or in space, to hear the doorbell ring and to see oneself enter the room where one is sitting.
Nevertheless, when the useful idea of the fourth dimension was adopted by human beings at the end of the Second Scientific Era, it did not take long to comprehend that the problem did not end there, and that new ideas about space would inevitably modify other phenomena. The world of dreams immediately attracted the attention of researchers and savants, and it was quickly realized that this ungraspable but real world, in which human beings had for centuries taken refuge for a good third of their lives, was nothing more, in sum, than a two-dimensional world—and that it was solely for that reason that the events unfolding there had no direct effect on the human body.
People had automatically adopted the habit, in dreams, of fleeing from imaginary dangers, escaping catastrophes, of desperately thwarting the enterprises of terrible assassins—but that, properly understood, was nothing but a game. After a few seconds of terror, it was sufficient for a person to wake up, thus recovering his three-dimensional senses, to understand they were nothing but chimeras of no importance.
When human beings became gradually accustomed to the idea of the fourth dimension, however, their faculties became extraordinarily overexcited and singular accidents were soon produced in dreams.
There were people who were found in the morning cut in two in their beds by the wheels of a locomotive. Others found themselves, after a night of nightmares, feverishly walking on the ceiling, their heads down and feet up. One fat man was discovered crushed in his bed, flattened as if by an incredible steamroller—and it was known that the man had long had a recurrent dream of an immense stairway slowly invaded by an inundation of molten lead, which ended in a rock-face from which the only means of exit was a minuscule mouse-hole.
These various events attracted the attention of the scientific world by virtue of their extreme gravity. A few subjects were chosen from among those familiar with the fourth dimension to undertake a minute examination of the world of dreams and to make personal observations of the disturbing events that were happening there.
After a few nights of observation, they came back in a state of terror. One of them, despite very energetic self-defense, had had his right arm devoured by a steam-crocodile with the body of a cow. Another, having spent all night running back and forth from one airplane to another with incredibly heavy little bags, had eventually been deprived of his last items of clothing and the bones of his skeleton, in open country, by a flock of white clouds that had shown themselves to be pitiless.
These new phenomena left no more room for doubt: the dreams that had, until now
, added charm to life—the dreams that had been the sole replacements, during the tedious Scientific Era, for the fairy tales of old, which children awaited with joy as they went to bed in the evening—were becoming real, and presenting the most formidable danger that humankind had ever faced.
By dint of externalizing his imagination, of researching all the joys that the use of the fourth dimension might give him, man had not taken precautions against the third dimension that he was instinctively introducing, little by little, into his dreams, thus giving them all the dangerous reality of quotidian reality.
Certain braggarts—poets, of a sort that is found everywhere—declared themselves enchanted by the adventure, and undertook fabulous hunts worthy of mythology. They realized in dreams all the heroic exploits that the ancients, by some strange presentiment, had only imagined. Strengthened by the impunity that their entire possession of the fourth dimension assured them, they delivered themselves to all excesses in their new three-dimensional dreams. They amused themselves by jumping in front of express trains traveling at top speed; they threw themselves from the tops of high monuments, hurled themselves upon swords, had themselves attached to the muzzles of loaded cannon. Sometimes they amused themselves by carving entire armies into pieces, remaining intact under intense fire. Sometimes, they gave themselves the exquisite sensation of going alone and unarmed into the dark underground passages of châteaux, populated by phantoms, or reconstituting solely for their own pleasure the most famous orgies or massacres of antiquity.
Unfortunately, such fantasies were not without danger. These materializations of objects entirely formed by the will of sleepers and constituted in a tangible three-dimensional fashion soon became cumbersome. In the morning, the houses of the seers would be found heaped with broken wagons and bloody chairs, and fusillades or cannonballs, materialized in three dimensions, sometimes reached inoffensive passers-by and set fire to entire towns.
Severe regulations therefore had to be enacted in that era, against sleepers capable of maintaining themselves in four-dimensional dreams, constraining them to take a special potion every night that prevented all dreams. Four-dimensional imaginations were restricted, no longer permitting any excursions but those in time—which, at least, passed unperceived, remaining invisible. They only inconvenienced the people of previous eras, who, confronted with these interventions—incomprehensible to them—attributed them to hazard and fatality.
Finally, three-dimensional dreams were forbidden, on pain of death, to persons incapable of taking refuge in the fourth dimension, experience having sufficiently demonstrated that all dreams were not subject to the human will, but that they were engendered, on the contrary, by a subconscious common to all beings, whose true nature would not be revealed until much later, in the Age of the Golden Bird.
XXXVII. The Giant Bacteria
The beginning of the second scientific era was marked by the establishment of the definitive tyranny of the 12 Absolute Savants and by an inconceivable offense against humankind committed by the Great Central Laboratory.
For a long time it had been understood, in the regions of African Europe and Atlantis, that something extraordinary was in preparation in the Great Central Laboratory, but precise information was lacking.
From its frequent instructions and the measures that it ordained in the industrial world, it was imagined that the Great Central Laboratory was concerned with the general wellbeing of humankind. People were, therefore, surprised to see communications with the external world becoming rarer and rarer, and to observe that the vast palace was gradually being transformed into a sort of inaccessible fortress. It was forbidden to come within two degrees of its borders; no one, in any case, dared venture into that dangerous zone.
Nothing in that vast plain, to tell the truth, betrayed the presence of any fortifications, but it was known that asphyxiating barriers and radiant cordons capable of reducing the hardest steel to dust gave adequate protection to the borders of the Laboratory on the ground and in the air. It was understood that this retreat and magnificent isolation were indispensable to the efficient conduct of scientific research and no one was unduly astonished, at first, by these formidable defensive precautions. Anxiety increased, however, on the day when the rumor spread at the speed of light that tons of culture medium had just been poured into the conduits of drinking water and the equatorial rivers, undoubtedly originating from the Great Central Laboratory.
Everyone was familiar with various means of destroying dangerous microbes and protecting themselves therefrom, but they did not have the necessary serums in great enough quantity to defend themselves against the mounting flood of invisible enemies. Amazement, consternation and, finally, terror, took hold of all minds when it was learned that the Great Central Laboratory was refusing to reply to all radiograms, and that it would not consent, under any pretext, to concern itself with the frightful epidemics that seemed imminent.
There was no doubt about it; the Great Central Laboratory was carrying out an unknown and terrifying plan, and people could no longer count on its assistance. Rapid analyses however, established the fact that the most frightful diseases—syphilis, yellow fever, encephalic herpes, rabies, tetanus and many diseases long-forgotten by virtue of energetic measures taken against them—were present in all the conduits and were accumulating there, ready to introduce themselves directly into the human organism with a virulence that defied all commonly-employed methods of defense.
The bacteria from the Great Central Laboratory were not, in fact, microbes like any other; they had been specially bred in particularly favorable conditions. They could not be compared to humble bacilli growing in the body, combated on a daily basis by the organism, overwhelmed by the number of their enemies, weakened and then eliminated.
The general panic would have had grave consequences if the fortunate intervention of a Japanese scientist who happened to be there had not abruptly averted the danger in the most elegant fashion.
Far from trying to destroy microbes, this physician had had the excellent idea of conducting research into the origins and causes of gigantism among them. Thanks to his discoveries, the means of increasing the size of these primitive organisms, which had formerly been called microbes, and allowing them to grow to dimensions perceptible to the naked eye, had already been known for some time. Originally, his discovery had had no object save facilitating medical studies, but at that particular moment it saved a substantial fraction of the human race.36
Thanks to tons of a special nutriment that was manufactured in a matter of days, the dangerous bacilli in circulation slowly grew in size, becoming visible to the naked eye—and, by the same token, henceforth incapable of introducing themselves into the human organism.
The only amusing aspect of this adventure was the excessive extent to which the manufacture of his precious product was taken. People were soon fearful of the invisible enemy, and had such faith in the salvation that the new nutriment offered them that they made it in vast quantities; as a result of flooding all the channels, they soon found themselves in the presence of microbes as large as small domestic animals.
It was an infinitely repugnant spectacle to see thousands of long silvery serpents, enormous crabs, viscous sponges and gelatinous hedgehogs—representing the terrible bacilli of the day before, and secreting hideous poisons—first heaping up in the streets, then being swept into the rivers. A few were kept for the sake of curiosity; others were stuffed, in memory of the terrible danger that everyone had been in—but these momentary distractions soon gave way to new anxieties.
XXXVIII. The Disgust for Immortality
When the terrible danger of microbial cultures was averted, after an initial reaction of joy, there was a pause for reflection and people wondered what the reason might be for the sudden hostility of the Great Central Laboratory. To what new dangers were they exposed? They had every right to fear anything. Then, by means of words and surprised gestures communicated by wireless photophone, they eventual
ly understood the unexpected reasons for that abrupt rupture between the Absolute Savants and the human cells. A great revolution had turned the great Central Laboratory upside down; six months before, the Absolute Savants had finally found the source of life itself and the formidable secret of immortality.
The secret was undoubtedly not unique. It apparently involved hundreds of methods, ancient procedures designed automatically to renew the cells of the human body and to render men practically immortal by prolonging life indefinitely. It was remembered then that no death had occurred in the Great Central Laboratory for a very long time. Did its occupants intend to maintain a monopoly on immortality, to make a selection of human beings, annihilating the weakest from now on? All sort of conjectures were made on this subject. At first, fear held them back; then, as the news of the discovery of immortality spread throughout the entire world, there was a vast irresistible rush towards the Great Central Laboratory, a spontaneous gathering of crowds such as had not been seen since the prehistoric era of Medieval mysticism.
People dragged themselves along on their knees, skinning them on the stones in the road; others threw down any precious objects they might have in front of them, offering their entire fortunes, without thinking of the absurdity of such offers made to scientists who possessed the empire of nature. There were ardent supplications and touching pleas made on behalf of beloved wives or children. Finally, when it was understood that all the supplications were in vain, there was a brutal, torrential surge, an unleashing of all the animal forces of humankind denied the secret of immortality, determined to take possession of the Great Central Laboratory at any cost, in order to extract its formidable secret—by force, if necessary.
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