“Good, good,” said Morand. “It’s almost exactly as I supposed. In brief, if we change the terminology, you have the power to render a fully-dressed man ungraspable. By means of the same operation, a man might laugh at bullets and daggers; and, as he can pass through all closed doors—including bank doors and prison doors—it’s mere child’s play for him to plunge his arm into some unbreakable strong-box, as meekly as an X-ray beam!”
“Oh!” exclaimed Bouvancourt, finally realizing the object of the visit. “But…ah! But…that’s….yes…except that…”
“Except that it doesn’t last forever, no? That’s what you were about to say? I know that. To assure myself of it, I bumped into you a little while ago, as a station porter.”
“I’ve recognized you. In fact, though, what did it matter to you whether I was tangible or not?”
“This,” replied the brigand. “That if you had not yet returned to your normal state this morning, I would have varied this dialogue, and if you had retained the gift of rarefaction forever, I would never have come back.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s essential to my plan that you aren’t invulnerable, Master, in view of the fact that I need to keep you under my thumb and in my sight—otherwise you could decamp through the very doors whose keys I’ve put in my pocket, and laugh at this little implement here.”
So saying, the redoubtable baccalaureate-holder pointed a revolver at the scientist—a melodramatic attitude too hackneyed to have the slightest effect on the reader, but always new—strangely enough—for the person thus threatened.
Bouvancourt reflected. His head was buzzing like a hive in which a swarm of ideas was whirling. For a few minutes, he had been wondering whether the ambiguous Morand might be a 30-year-old woman rather than a young man of 18. He expressed himself with such aplomb! He spoke with so much assurance and testified to the fact that he was well used to speaking. And then again, what grace and beauty! Simultaneously, though, Bouvancourt recalled the crimes committed by this male or female wild animal. The victims of the Morand gang rose up again in his horror, uttering cries of agony…
And all of that was drowned by the great confused perplexity in which the physicist’s will recoiled before the evil act that he was on the point of committing. In that regard, a thousand conceptions were so impetuously entangled in the hive of his brain that he could no longer see clearly within himself.
The creature that held him in check raised his weapon again. The gesture was imprinted with professional ease and effeminate delicacy—Cartouche and Mademoiselle de Maupin rolled into one. After a brief pause, Morand continued: “I therefore know, Monsieur Bouvancourt, that the ungraspability only lasts for a short time. That’s annoying, for it would otherwise by synonymous with impunity. No more possible arrests, escaping as simple as saying hello, and, finally, the blade of the guillotine…” Morand paused, and finished with a sardonic smile. “One would never be…culpable.14 So much the worse! But tell me—how many days does the property of rarefaction last?”
“Sixteen hours and 12 minutes,” replied Bouvancourt, trembling at the thought of the request he was anticipating.
“No more than that! But after all, it’s more than I’ll need today to carry out the raid on the Comptoir d’Escompte. By midnight the trick will have been played.”
Bouvancourt shuddered. “But…but there’s always a guard on watch in the vault, and…”
“Let’s get started right away,” instructed Morand.
Bouvancourt uttered an exclamation of revolt: “And what if I don’t want to?”
“I can force you to do it. I could force you to do it any time I like. For the present, this will suffice…”
The revolver touched the venerable physicist’s forehead. Bouvancourt closed his eyes…
When he opened them again, a different intention was reflected therein.
Morand, who was waiting for the change of heart, put his instrument of persuasion back in his pocket.
“All right!” said Bouvancourt, in a tone that was perhaps resigned, but more likely resolute. “Fifteen minutes—I need 15 minutes to accomplish your metamorphosis.” He added, lightly: “Naturally, you want your entire body to become ungraspable.”
“Of course—that goes without saying. From head to foot.”
“From head to foot—very well. I asked you the question because it was my duty. When you go to a photographer, he has to ask you…”
“Full length. My dear Master, I want to be intangible in full length. You can’t think otherwise—what good would it do me to have the ability to introduce myself into a strong-room if my heels, for example, had to remain outside and would hold me back? Come on, my associate!”
“Good, good…it’s your business. Indeed. Come this way.”
Bouvancourt headed toward a door—curtain. Before moving that mysterious threshold aside, he stopped and said: “Will you swear to me that you are Morand?”
The demand gave the murderer a sense of the ascendancy that his fashionable infamy exercised and how right he had been to reveal his identity. Pride warmed his temples. “And how!” was his vainglorious response.
“Come in, then,” said Bouvancourt, decisively.
He introduced the other into a cul-de-sac closet. The walls and the ceiling, the linoleum covering the floor and the internal face of the door-curtain—in sum, all the surfaces of the room—were gleaming with silver paint. The window had been daubed with an analogous coating, as translucent as frosted glass. One might have believed that one was inside a silver cube. In the middle, something resembling a coiled spring was set up—which was not a spring, since it was rigid. The apparatus was about two meters high. Its extended spiral consisted of a metal tube wound around thirty times to form a cylindrical cage. Two flexible wires, silvered and twisted, emerged from either end of the tube; the one from the top met up with the one from the bottom and their two threads, twisted into one, terminated in a plug. The power-point was located in the wall next to the entrance.
And that was all there was in the silver chamber.
“There’s the apparatus,” said Bouvancourt.
He tapped the spiral, which rang like a bell; it was like a knell tolling in some other world.
Morand questioned the physicist about the silver tint, He did not like it. The white metal displayed a funeral pomp that affected him.
“You have to place yourself inside it,” said the operator, tipping back the upper part of the coil. “You mustn’t be surprised when it becomes luminous. I was there for a quarter of an hour.”
Moran asked again for an explanation of the paint.
“It’s a solution immune to the light that I’ve called Y-light,” replied the scientist. “It’s a protective layer.”
“You mean that the objects that it’s shielding are no longer traversable by objects saturated with Y-light?”
“No. I mean that the objects painted with the antilux gum—with that silvering—escape the action of Y-light, so that, the rays being reflected by the gum, they don’t become rarefied. Those objects stay as they are, instead of acquiring the gift of absolute permeability. Thanks to the antilux that you see here, the effect of my radiation is confined to the interior of this closet, and the panes of that window aren’t rendered traversable—which would be inconvenient, if you think about it. The cold, rain and wind would come in as if the panes weren’t there!”
“Oh? Yes, that’s true. But in that case, when you’re ungraspable, you can feel the wind blowing through you?”
“Of course. Come on, quickly—let’s get on with it…”
“And knife-thrusts, pistol bullets, dogs’ teeth—one feels those too?”
“Inevitably; sensitivity….but let’s make haste. My housekeeper wasn’t there to let you in, and I’d prefer it if you left before she comes back.”
“And the walls that one goes through?” Morand persisted, ignoring Bouvancourt’s solicitations. “And the embankment in which one might
have to hide? Oh! And what about the lack of air? You can’t breathe inside an embankment, can you? So you have to get through it double quick. Hmm…”
“Eh? What’s that?” said Bouvancourt. “Come on, is this for today or tomorrow?”
He was supporting the heavy spiral cage with rigid arms.
“Oh! But…it’s just…” The trickster was obviously perplexed; Bouvancourt put the apparatus back and said to him brusquely: “After all, you’re right not to hurry. Our contract seems to me to be imperfect. I understand that you’ll kill me if I refuse to obey; I also presume that capturing you here, as in a mouse-trap, would doubtless lead to my execution by your…subordinates. But what will you give me in return for my services, for my submission? What will you give me from the Comptoir d’Escompte’s 500,000 francs?”
“Hang on!” grumbled the thief. “Ten thousand—is that enough?”
Bouvancourt held out his hand.
“Trust rules, damn it!” Morand retorted. “We’ll talk again. You have my word. To work!”
“It’s just…”
“To work, I tell you.” Morand took up a standing position within the spiral.
“Ah! I’ve just thought—give me back my keys,” said the physicist.
“Why? What’s the hurry? I’ll give them to you in a little while.”
“Oh no! In a little while, if you keep them, they’ll be transformed and permeable, like you, and then I won’t be able to get hold of them for 16 hours and 12 minutes…oh!” He interrupted himself to exclaim, in a curiously abrupt and excited fashion: “How stupid! I’ve forgotten the most important thing. You see, I’ve got to protect myself against the Y-light, otherwise…”
He opened a cupboard in which several silvered garments were hanging He chose one and parted to put it on. It was a large hooded cape that came down over his head, concealing him entirely, as if permanently. A penitent, a figure from some expiatory procession or auto-da-fe, replaced the professor. The hood was fitted with goggles, whose glass disks were silvered like the window-panes; Bouvancourt’s eyes could see without being seen behind these skull-like orbits whose inanimate tint stared into space. Only the hands remained bare; gloves silvered them. The robe was too long; silvery folds piled up on the silver floor. This apparition of repentance and luxury stood as still as a statue, like an allegory of inestimable value and a representation of the De profundis.
While donning this costume, the physicist joked continuously about the forbidding appearance that he would present once costumed. His loquacity never let up, but acquired a muffled, subterranean and quasi-sepulchral tone beneath the fabric.
“Quickly,” he said. “The keys!” His statuesque hand passed through a gap between two turns of the spiral.
“There they are,” said Morand, who had gone slightly pale. “Whether you have them now or later is of no importance.” He tried to laugh, and added: “On the contrary, it proves that you’re not going to electrocute me—because then you’d have taken them back afterwards…”
“Exactly!” Bouvancourt said, approvingly. “I can see that we understand one another. Don’t worry—I give you my word of honor that I’ll rarefy you, nothing more.”
He tucked up the penitential frock, the color of the absolute, and slid the keys into his old jacket. Morand shook the slender tower that imprisoned him, afraid that it might suddenly become riveted to the floor. The machine shifted and swayed, emitting the music of some celestial campanile…
“You mustn’t touch anything during the irradiation,” the penitent recommended. “The solenoid would freeze you grievously. Stand up straight, in the very center. Are you ready? A quarter of an hour!”
He picked up the flexible wire that was dangling and placed the plug in the power-point.
Immediately, one might have thought that the sunlight had been amplified; the spiral lit up with a dazzling glare that was to broad daylight what broad daylight is to moonlight. It became a magical light, continuously rising and swirling. A serpent of white fire ringed Morand with its splendid coils. That light gave a velvety appearance to the contours of the incandescent tubulature; its drill ran from the bottom to the top with a fiery rapidity. Thus, the machine appeared to be rotating in a frantic ascent.
Morand shut his eyes. He was resplendent. So young and so handsome, so wicked, so pale and so radiant, he was the living portrait of Lucifer, a split second before the fall.
There was no crackle of sparks. The miracle was accomplished with humble simplicity. The igneous snake wound around indefatigably in the quiet bosom of its motionless ascent. Cold made itself felt, radiating all around.
Morand, his eyelids partly open and blinking, was the first to speak. “It’s certainly not warm in here! But I don’t feel anything else…does it have to happen like this? Can’t the rarefaction be done gradually?”
“No,” replied the voice from beyond the Earth. “After a quarter of an hour, when the saturation point is reached, you’ll enter that state abruptly. Impalpability has no degrees.”
“But I don’t understand…” objected the superirradiated individual, imparting all his juvenile innocence to his tone.
The penitent lifted his arm in a priestly pose: “It would be better if you remained silent.”
The other obeyed.
Bouvancourt took out his watch; holding his two hands tightly together, he shielded it from the radiation. “Twelve minutes more…11…10…”
The refrigerating hearth continued to lower the temperature. The physicist knew that leaves of frost were beginning to coat the windows. The patient was shivering. Bouvancourt went to lean on the wall to the left, almost directly behind him; his teeth were chattering like castanets beneath the hood, and shivers were galvanizing him, making his joined hands shake. In a laborious tone, with trembling jaws, he declared that it was much warmer inside the serpentine spiral—which was a lie.
“Eight…Seven…Six…”
The silence, broken from afar by the sound of motor cars and trams, was insistently re-established. Then the persistent little concert of the familiar sounds of the house became deafening; a sewing-machine started up on the ground floor; the clinking of bottles emerged from the cellar’s ventilation shaft; there were intermittent footsteps on the floor above…
An in the meantime, in the glowing polar closet, whose walls seemed to be melting, the marvel followed its course, and the serpent of light continued to perform its incantatory swirl around the charming criminal.
“Three…Two…One…”
Suddenly, without anything more being heard, the reprobate sank into the floor, a thousand times faster than Méphisto at the Opéra. In the time it takes to fall, he had disappeared. There was no hole or trapdoor, and yet there was no longer anyone in the middle of the spiral, which persevered in vain.
The penitent, sprawled in a corner, felt a tightness in his chest. All the murmurs of intimacy fell silent, save for the footsteps on the second floor, which came and went as before.
Bouvancourt dragged himself along the wall and cut off the current. The spiral was extinguished. One might have supposed that night had fallen. A clock chimed ten, however, and daylight whitened the frost-caked windows.
The scientist took off his macabre domino and reappeared in the solitude. Was it really him? Was it even a man? Given the mechanical movements, the chalk-white hands and the plaster mask, who would have maintained that it was? But he was streaming with cold sweat, so he was a man. He said “Justice is done!” and began to weep, so he was Bouvancourt.
He wept in the silver chamber, and then, not wanting to remain alone with his secret, he ran to my house.
When he had finished his story, my wife and I looked at one another without understanding, and we listened to him groaning, desperately: “I’ve killed someone! Me—I’ve killed! Voluntarily! I’ve killed a child---perhaps a woman—deliberately! I’m a murderer! Oh. Sambreuil, it’s horrible, isn’t it?”
“Er…it’s just that…I don’t quite unde
rstand what happened…”
Bouvancourt fixed me with a hard and almost mistrustful state. “I had a higher expectation of your knowledge and intelligence.”
“Ahem!” I resumed. “I can certainly see that Morand fell through the floor—but why? Since you, a few days earlier…oh! I get it. You deceived him! The operation wasn’t the one…”
“Shut up! I haven’t deceived anyone. I’ve rarefied him, as agreed. Except that I’ve rarefied him in both senses of the term. You see, Sambreuil, for myself, on Tuesday, I was very careful not to treat myself entirely. During my irradiation, I wore boots coated with antilux. Thus, my feet remained as they had been since my birth—which is to say, incapable of passing through other solids, and of being traversed by them.
“Remember that, once saturated with Y-light, it was no longer possible for me to lean against a tree—I would have passed through it! If I had attempted to put my coat and hat on, both of them would have fallen through my anatomy exactly as they would through a body of smoke! Do you think that I would even have been able to grasp them with my fingers? Of course not! My rarefied hands were incapable of getting hold of anything whatsoever, of acting upon anything whatsoever. That’s why I asked my housekeeper to open the door for me and wait for me to come back when I went out. I had no way to turn a doorknob or ring a bell! I was only good for walking or kicking…I had no more material leverage except pedestrian.
“You’ll understand that I could only go out decently in such a state by night. And when I came back…if you only knew! Impossible to lie down, no matter how much I wanted to! For—it was frightful—my body would have gone through the bed, the floor and everything, until my benevolent feet finally retained it. But how, then, in that posture, could I have disengaged myself, without any leverage, without even being able to touch anything, however ineffectively! Oh, a strange night—spent standing up, in idleness, transparent to impacts, diaphanous to touch, and thus an authentic phantom! I was falling over with fatigue, but I couldn’t sit down!
The Doctored Man Page 6
