The Mysterious Fluid

by Paul Vibert

  “You’ll come to see me, won’t you?”

  “Certainly.”

  And a fortnight later, at half past one Paris time, I disembarked at her house. She had rented a kind of old manor, flanked by a farm, which did not lack a certain cachet, and which, with its large graveled courtyard and its green lawns, was genuinely lovely.

  When I had given her the news from Paris, she said: “By the way, that poor prince, with his fatal passions and tragic death, must have passed into the body of a creature inferior to humans. You laugh, but I have an intuition and am certain of it. He’s not like my poor soon, so noble and intelligent in spite of his youth…” And she lost herself in further reveries.

  We ate lunch cheerfully, however, and during dessert she showed me he prince’s last letter. It was a series of broad angular strokes, straight and emphatic, which would have revealed a plebeian origin had it not been a matter of a Russian prince.

  “A nobleman of the Middles Ages,” I said, laughing.

  “That may be—but his handwriting is very curious…”

  And we went out of the front door, to take coffee in the shade of the château, in front of the large graveled courtyard.

  I was calmly smoking a cigar and she a Levantine cigarette, in the state of bliss that follows a good lunch, when a young colt, escaped from the farm, came toward us, gamboling like a kitten. The farmer’s granddaughter ran after it to catch it by its halter, and as soon as she was within voice range she shouted: “Don’t be afraid—he won’t harm you. He’s so cunning that he’s coming to demand sugar from you, the brigand.”

  “Let him,” said Olympe, very amused—and she held out a large sugar-lump, which the horse swallowed daintily. He came to me, and had another lump, and we were laughing heartily at the juvenile grace of the colt when, suddenly taking three steps back, it began to draw in the gravel with the hoof of its left foot.

  That went on for a full minute, and all three of us, including the farm-girl, were astonished. Then he stopped and fled like an arrow in the direction of the farm.

  We bounded to the streaks, and read quite clearly, in large angular letters, solid and emphatic: Bonjour, Olympe.

  “The prince’s writing!” we exclaimed, both at the same time.

  “And the prince was left-handed, so the colt wrote it with his left foot. There’s the proof of metempsychosis…” And she fainted into my arms.

  The poor woman, afflicted with a cerebral fever, remained between life and death for three months, and during that interval the farmer sold the horse.

  When she returned to life, that event, strangely enough, consoled poor Olympe Audouard somewhat. From that day on, she no longer had any doubt as to the fortunate fate of her son. As for me, that was the day when the grave question of metempsychosis began to interest me.

  All in all, when one has been a Russian prince, it must be rather humiliating to pass into the body of a horse, even if it races and costs a million, like those for which Monsieur Edmond Blanc115 pays so readily.

  Poor Olympe, he would have forgiven her a great deal, for she loved him dearly.

  The Conquest of the Void

  Assault on the Himalayas. Getting rid of a balloon.

  The victorious deep-sea diver.

  People are always talking about the conquest of the air; it’s a bad joke, a noxious legend, which it’s time to destroy. It’s really the conquest of the void that ought to be in question, since everybody knows, the celebrated experiments of Gay-Lussac notwithstanding,116 that above 7000 meters—21,000 feet, if you prefer—one kicks the bucket for lack of breathable air.

  Humans have, until now, consoled themselves for the fact that one cannot rise up to 8000 meters in the atmosphere, or descend to the same depth in a watertight electric submarine vessel, but that one cannot explore the whole of the Earth because it is too high, that one cannot even climb Mount Everest, or Gauri-Sankar, at the summit of the Himalayan chain, because it is 8840 meters high. One cannot breathe there; blood comes out of one’s ears and pores. That’s simply too ridiculous, as the Duchess d’Urzé said on learning of the death of General Boulanger. I shan’t mention the numerous peaks that are between 7000 and 9000 meters—Chamalari, for example—but it’s certain that until now, nature seems to have said to humans, with respect to the abode of the snows, as the Indians say: you shall go no higher than 7000 meters and the superior regions of the Himalayas will always remain mysterious and inviolate regions, so far as you are concerned.

  Oh yes, it’s ridiculous, and even humiliating, for savant humankind.

  In the meantime, a rich and powerful rajah of the region, who had heard talk of my work on electricity and the upper atmosphere, and who was no miser, appealed to me to solve the problem, offering me as much gold as I wished to find the answer. As you can imagine, I set off for India right away.

  When I arrived in the foothills of the Himalayas, the rajah showed me, with a despairing gesture, a superb tethered balloon, which could not go up as high as it might because humans lose consciousness at an altitude of 7000 meters, if not 6000.

  Without any hesitation, I replied: “Get rid of that balloon, my prince, give me unlimited credit, and in six months, we’ll be organizing caravans with the agencies to the summit of Chamalari, 9000 meters above the Indian Ocean. It’s as good as done…but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  The rajah was so content with this formal promise, however, that, knowing that I was from Paris and not Marseilles, he immediately put the sash of the Order of the Coral Elephant around my neck.

  Still in a rush, utilizing a waterfall with a force of 11,731 horse-power, I established a powerful machine for storing ultra-compressed air in a valley at an altitude of 6800 meters, and I sent to Paris for an assortment of diving-suits of various sizes and models.

  Once in possession of these vestments, as heavy as they were inelegant, I said to the rajah: “The problem is solved, my prince. Tomorrow we’re going to swill champagne on the highest summit in the Himalayas, at 9000 meters.”

  He was bowled over, but bravely promised to go with me, along with his first minister, his silversmith, his favorite wife and three of his children.

  On the morning of the next day, having slept in my compressed-air factory, which was fitted out like a palace, and to which one gained access by means of a funicular railway made of galvanized camel-skin—another of my inventions—we each put on a diving-suit of the appropriate size, with a gutta-percha tube behind linked to the factory, which would furnish us with the air necessary to live at great heights. A telephonic wire also ran along the tube, linking our mouths to the factory.

  Gravely, slowly and heavily, we set out, and began to climb the eternally white and previously inviolate summit.

  At first, each thrust of the piston sending us air produced a certain trepidation, like the vent d’Autan117 in Toulouse, but the favorite wife soon declared that it provoked a charming sensation, and we all started to laugh inside our mica helmets—mica being lighter, though less transparent, than glass. As we couldn’t hear through the diving-suits, though, especially because of the lack of air in those high regions, we chatted by writing our impressions on the paper of our note-pads.

  After a few hours of slow ascent, we reached half way; as I had lined the diving-suits with fur and herring-skin, no one as suffering from the cold.

  Having made good use of our ice-axes, we reached the summit of Chamalari, and were able to swill champagne through an ad hoc tube.

  A week later we recommenced the expedition, with numerous diving-suited porters, and when we arrived at the summit we built a vast wooden hall in a matter of hours, with all the cracks perfectly sealed, and a wide ad hoc tube coming from the factory. With a barometer attached to the wall to measure the pressure, we filled the room with air, which permitted us to take off our dining-suits and like down on the spot, having had a veritable feast and made the customary speeches.

  The rajah wept with joy and pride for his reign, science
, progress, his estates and his august family.

  Today, the problem is solved. I have conquered—or, rather, vanquished—the void, which is better than conquering the air. My deep-sea divers are in the process of establishing a funicular all the way to the summit, where I shall furnish several rooms with compressed air, and people will even be able to go there without diving-suits, in chambers of compressed air replacing the carriages of the funicular.

  From up there, at an altitude of 9000 meters, on a sunny day, one enjoys a spectacle unique in all the world, and one is tranquil in the midst of the eternal snows; the silence there is absolute. It’s very cold, though, and the sun is no brighter than here, the ambient atmosphere being in default as a transmitter. Curiously enough, it’s like the so-called midnight sun of Lapland.

  To conclude, I’m glad to inform my readers that I’ve already organized caravans from at a price of twenty thousand francs, one class only, there and back, starting from the foot of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, from the first of next year. People who want to travel directly will find tickets given them the right of ascent and three glasses of champagne, at a single price of 1000 francs, on sale every day at my compressed air factory. No reduction for military personnel!

  Let no one be mistaken; it will be the fashionable excursion of tomorrow for truly chic people.

  Fireworks

  The trials and tribulations of an inventor. A strange concept,

  An inventor among my friends has had the generosity for many years to keep me informed of his research projects, his endeavors and his experiments, and I think the time has come, with his permission, to impart them to my readers.

  For a long time, he was haunted by the original idea of making fireworks in broad daylight: not luminous fireworks, like those fired in the evening—which would be absurd, since they would inevitably by eclipsed by the sunlight—but fireworks comprised of darkness and shadow, to slice through the light as classical fireworks slice through the night.

  “I know,” he told me, “that at first glance, the idea seems extravagant, and everyone that I have ever talked to about it has treated me as a madman, but I don’t allow myself to be discouraged by so little. From the moment when it become possible to pierce the night with a thousand fires, a thousand lights, with the rockets and sunbursts of ordinary fireworks, it was possible to invert the proposition and pierce the midday sky with rockets, skybursts, flowers and decorative motifs made of night and darkness—which is to say, of shadow and blackness. Two facts led me to formulate this strange reasoning, and, if you’ll permit it, I’ll tell you about them.”

  “Please do.”

  “The first was, for me, a sudden revelation: I’m referring to the luminous fountains that date, as you know, from the great Exposition of 1889, at least in Paris. There, I observed the strange and truly marvelous phenomenon that each droplet of water, for an appreciable length of time, stored light and kept it captive, even as it fell back. That was the flash of enlightenment for me, and I said to myself: since water is capable of storing light like that, I need to find another substance to retain and store night in the same way, darkness in broad daylight, and the problem of my fireworks made of darkness at noon is solved.

  “Yes, but where and how was I to find that substance, that liquid, or that gas? If it firmed a solid body, it would be brightened itself at the surface, and my objective would not be attained, while I dreamed of an immense bouquet of flowers of darkness in the noonday sky, very black, standing out vigorously in the atmosphere, and yet as if diaphanous, truly giving the impression of a bouquet of void….

  “That void I have found—and it was your own works on electricity only changing into light and heat in the environment of our atmosphere that were, for me, the second flash of enlightenment….”

  “You’re very kind. You’ve found it, then?”

  “Theoretically, yes. Given that light is only manifest in our atmosphere, it was sufficient for me to find a means of making void for all my bouquets, skybursts, rockets, mounted pieces, and so on…and then I would have my fireworks of darkness at noon. That would be wonderful….”

  And, pursuing the vision he had glimpsed and caressed or so many years into space, his eyes fixed, my poor inventor was genuinely transfigured. I was simultaneously seized by admiration and terror before the power of the idea, even though it seemed extravagant to other people, and I felt something akin to remorse, and a great heartache, on thinking that my own research on electricity, as the unique agent of the universe, had been the determining cause of his own experiments.

  Suddenly, however, emerging from the ecstasy into which he had plunged for a few moments, he let himself fall back heavily into a squat armchair, exhausted and broken, his convulsive face expressing the most horrible suffering, and, thumping the table mightily with his fist, he cried out in a dull and hoarse voice:

  “Yes, certainly, I have it, I see it—the discovery unique in all the world—but how can the void be enclosed as a drop of water encloses light? Yes, in what can that void be enclosed and captured, rendering it obscure by isolating it from the ambient milieu that transforms electricity into light? You’re right, though—the Röntgen rays are there to prove it. But the void escapes me; I can’t domesticate it to my will. How can the pretty flowers of darkness that haunt my thoughts be rendered tangible and visible, as if palpable, to the eyes of everyone?”

  That effort had worn him out. I made him take a cordial and tried to make him smoke a good cigar, to alter the course of his ideas; it was wasted effort, and my poor friend returned to his laboratory, his mind tormented by the incessant obsession of his discovery.

  No matter; if, one day, he ever manages to give us fireworks made of darkness and shadow in the luminous and clear midday sky—nothing is impossible to science—I promise to let you know and to invite you all to the first great public performance.

  Scientific Consequences of Röntgen Rays

  I. Practical applications. Long-distance photography.

  The marvelous probabilities of tomorrow

  with regard to electricity.

  Open letter to M. Edison, Commander of the New York Legion of Honor, U.S.A.

  Monsieur,

  It is more than probable that you do not remember me, a poor devil of a Parisian journalist; I have, however, had the good fortune of meeting you several times, during our last Exposition Universelle in 1889, and I retain the fondest memories of your face—a trifle fleshy, as befits a man and a Yankee of our age, but deliberate—and that is why I am taking the great liberty today of writing to you directly, not to give you advice—far from me to be so audacious—but simply to make a humble request, in the name of the interests of science, which we must both love with an equal passion, if not equal good fortune with regard to my modest personality.

  That said, I shall get to the point.

  You cannot have failed to carry out numerous and various experiments with the famous Röntgen rays—X-rays, cathode rays black light, as you please—and cannot have been unaware, having taken immediate account of it with that American eye which distinguishes your compatriots and is far superior to that of an eagle, that you are in confrontation with a purely electrical phenomenon: a new and certain manifestation of electricity.

  So, since we are certainly in agreement on that point, and I have no need to wait for a cablegram on your part to confirm it, I shall continue with my demonstration.

  Since light, heat and electricity are merely, at one and the same time, a triple and unique phenomenon; since light is merely tangible electricity and since electricity is merely invisible light—invisible, at least to our feeble organs—and since it has now been clearly demonstrated, thanks to Röntgen’s admirable discovery, that one can obtain photographs with black or invisible light—which is to say, with electricity—do you not think that this suddenly raises up a vast field of research, doubtless hypothetical at first, but surely fecund thereafter, for the sagacious mind of an inventor like yours
elf? Do you not have the gift of double vision in the superior sense—which is to say, the almost divinatory power of foresight, of deducing rigorously the logical connections between facts, experiments and ideas.

  Are you not strong, since success has given you a self-confidence that has nothing to do with pride when it rests on a past like yours, overflowing with glorious labor? Do me the honor, then, of bearing with me for five minutes, and I hope that I shall have the good fortune, however imperfect my language might be in expressing the highest hopes of science, to share with you those exact hopes, as well as my ideas.

  Since light is unnecessary for photography, and Röntgen radiation—which is to say, an electric current of a particular and still ill-defined order—is sufficient, why do you not search for a means of taking photographs at a great distance, with the aid of the transmission of these mysterious rays, these currents which we employ today without knowing it?

  Can you, the king of electricians, see yourself maneuvering your electro-photographic apparatus in New York and photographing, here in Paris, the President of the Republic, across the Atlantic Ocean.

  What an inauguration and what a consecration! Immediately, I would demand for you the Cross of the Grand Officier de la Légion d’honneur, and I believe that you would have deserved it thoroughly.

  Can you see the operator cabling the traditional don’t move and pressing the switch or button, snapping his client at a distance of two thousand leagues?

  Why not?

  People will decry it as a dream, a utopia, a fantasy; let them say what they want, dear master, and search on, search forever—you have no lack of staying-power.

  I shall go even further; I have the profound conviction that the discovery of Röntgen rays will lead, logically and inevitably, to that of long-distance photography, or electricity would no longer be electricity, and that is not possible.