The Nickel Man

by Brian Stableford

  SGRAVESANDE: Right! I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Is this the way, Monsieur Jouroufle, in spite of your promises, that you betray our cause?

  JOUROUFLE: And what should I do, when I’ve seen that my glory will perish in defending your false theories? Look, when one has some intelligence, one wants to be admired by posterity, but posterity will close its doors to me and mock me if, after what I’ve just heard. I appear before it in Newtonian colors.

  SGRAVESANDE: You’re dreaming, I think. Don’t you know that, on the contrary, your glory would have be augmented if you had supported our opinions, good or bad, to the end, and that the more obstinate you had shown yourself to be, the more posterity would have admired our genius? By dint of saying that you were right and that Newton’s adversaries were wrong, you would have appeared to be the phoenix of beautiful minds.

  JOUROUFLE, to Sgravesande, in a low voice: Of course I didn’t know that! Well, when the Seigneur Concierge goes back inside, I promise you that I’ll retract everything I’ve just said. Is that what you want?

  SGRAVESANDE: No, you’re nothing but a pedant; we don’t need your help, we’ll do very well without you. Get out of our sight. We expel you from our society, and we call upon posterity to do likewise before it ceases to be Newtonian. Doubtless it will render us justice, and will judge, first and foremost, that you’re a fool.

  JOURSOUFLE: Call me a fool if you wish. But I was more of a fool, since you force me to say it, when I followed your theories full of contradictions and suppositions, and too often belied by a thousand phenomena. The posterity on which you’re counting so much will doubtless not always be under the rod of Monsieur Newton and his adorers, and it will be all the more severe in your regard because you’ve been so stubborn in supporting the English scientist’s false hypotheses

  SGRAVESANDE: Well, if posterity comes to condemn Newton, we’ll condemn posterity, and expel it from our company.

  JOUROUFLE: Expel it as much as you please, but we’ll see thereafter who emerges victorious or vanquished. Let our young geniuses launch themselves into a scientific career exempt from prejudices. Oh, how they’re going to mock your Magister dixit! Adieu, then, Messieurs. Go on dreaming, if you wish, that stones fall upon us from the moon.29 I no longer envy your sublime science. Adieu, adieu!

  (Everyone withdraws.)

  Ralph Schropp: The Automaton

  A Story Taken from a Palimpsest

  (1898)

  The heart is everything.

  Preface

  During a long sojourn at the Château de Beauregard in the south of France. situated in the middle of an ideally picturesque mountainous region, we employed long hours in ferreting through the shelves of the vast and rich library of that old manor. The books and manuscripts contained there in such large numbers originate, for the most part, from an old convent constructed in the vicinity, but nothing remains today of that spacious monastery but walls and ruins. The vaults under which the numerous and venerable monks with silvery hair ambled slowly while reciting the hours have suffered the destructive action of time; silent and deserted, one no longer sees anything but climbing plants that hide the fissures. Not the slightest trace any longer remains of the narrow cells that once gave birth to so many manuscripts, sometimes so precious!

  One day, while extending our curious research as far as the château’s archives, we found a parchment covered in mildew and spotted with the dust of centuries. After an attentive examination, we recognized a palimpsest. While striving to divine a few precious fragments of Latin or Greek literature that the sheets might have contained, the original characters of which had been washed away in order to make use of the parchment for a second time, we read, involuntarily at first, the new text that had been superimposed there. The Latin was very defective, but the story it contained captured our attention completely from the very first lines.

  We give here a translation as faithful as possible, given the deterioration that time has inflicted on the original. Words that have been effaced or have become illegible have had to be reestablished. The monk Theodulus whose name figures at the end of the manuscript seems to have been a man of the world before his entry into holy orders. He probably composed this story in accordance with the memories conserved in the cloister, based on the relation that was doubtless made by the two monks mentioned toward the end of the story.

  Nice-Maritime, 28 November 1878.

  R.S.

  Albert the Great, the pious Dominican and celebrated magician, had just finished his famous automaton. With joy he considered his work, the fruit of long sleepless nights and profound thought. He had been obliged to sacrifice the best years of his life to numerous trials; now, having almost arrived at the end of his career, the sight of his work consoled him for the past troubles and infinite difficulties that he had had to overcome. A most complete success had surpassed his expectations and crowned his desires. He had succeeded in executing to perfection the ideal that he had borne within him since the time of his youth, when he had concluded his studies in Padua.

  Homunculus—that was the name with which the new Prometheus had baptized his creation—left nothing to be desired. He resembled a veritable man of flesh and bone closely enough to be mistaken for one. So, in order to trace his portrait, it is a celebrated mortal rather than an automaton that is to be described.

  Albert the Great possessed in his soul, in his capacity as a scholar, no trace of the divine breath of the artist, so his creation, purely mechanical, absolutely lacked the imprint of beauty. He had been content to copy a human face and to reproduce nature exactly, without giving the slightest thought to poeticizing it. The features that he had succeeded in imitating were passably regular and agreeable enough; the physiognomy was more pleasing, in several regards, because he had chosen for models certain plastic figures, but empty of expression, such as one encounters in society, the sight of whom soon engenders lassitude. One could allow one’s eyes to linger on the visage of the automaton without experiencing either surprise or repulsion, and one always saw that physiognomy again with an equal pleasure.

  He had a good complexion, neither pale nor highly colored, and, as a whole, Homunculus was not remarkable, whether by an excessive stature or an exaggerated stoutness. He was the image of one of those men who can be counted in thousands, people who pass unperceived, giving no purchase to criticism, but not exciting any admiration either.

  His creator and master had dressed him in the latest fashion of the era; as regards elegance, his exterior was irreproachable. With the aid of an ingenious and well-designed mechanism, the secret of his inventor, Homunculus executed with facility and grace all the movements indispensable to material life. Everything about him was regulated and studied to such a point that he would never be able, in the sphere of action, to offend or irritate even the most susceptible people by abrupt or thoughtless behavior.

  Thanks to mechanisms that only their author could set in movement or return to repose, Homunculus’ thoughts took on the imprint of the character, intelligence and sentiments of the person speaking to him. In that fashion, he always found himself in perfect harmony with his interlocutor, and he made the most favorable impression from the outset.

  Although superficial, the automaton’s education had been well directed and was sufficient to his needs. He possessed notions of all things, and, as his mechanical resources could not let him down, he emerged victorious from the most arduous debates.

  His voice, established in a monotonous, indifferent and authoritative register, free of intonations and modulations, was perfectly suited to his nature. For those who make use of it, that manner of expression has something divine about it, for they believe that they are floating above various human situations, as in the time of the creative Spirit floating above the waters.

  That genre of conversation, which is merely a studied form in many people, was natural to Homunculus. Nothing was capable of gladdening him or saddening him. Like a god, he could traverse the keenest joys
and the sharpest pain without feeling the slightest emotion; a stereotyped smile sometimes wandered faintly over his lips.

  Those particular features of his character, enviable in some respects, are easily explicable. The great magician had succeeded perfectly in imitating a human similar to all others in gesture and thought, but he had been incapable of giving him a heart, of causing to spring forth within him the divine spark that warms all beings, as the sun exercises its benevolent attraction on the earth.

  The monotony of Homunculus’ voice, and the general lack of expression in his person, derived from his irremediable imperfections, caused by the impotence of his master to take any further a work above the range of mere mortals. That imperfection deprived the automaton of the sentiments and passions that ennoble humanity, and which flow from the principle of sensibility that we bear with us from birth, but which produces totally different effects in different individuals.

  A man who, living by the soul as well as the body, was put in direct communication with the automaton, would not have taken long, in the presence of those impassive features and that unmoving gaze, to feel a chill penetrating his heart. Albert the Great himself often experienced a pain in his ribs, and the sight of that living and yet artificial being, who was his work, sometimes plunged him into a kind of indefinable trouble and terror.

  By the efforts of his powerful intelligence, Albert had arrogated rights that only belonged to the Creator. Now, alas, he was about to suffer the consequences and submit to the immutable rules of destiny, which even a god cannot escape.

  The individual who creates always forms his work in accordance with plans based on fixed principles. If he submits his work to certain laws, he imposes them on himself by the power of reciprocity. As a creator, he can doubtless liberate himself when he pleases from those voluntary chains, but only by destroying his work. Thus, by the effect of those primordial laws, the master inevitably makes himself the slave of his creature.

  Many a time, Albert had been seized by regret for having conceived his insensate dreams and had forged needlessly, in realizing them, annoyances of all kinds. In his moments of discouragement and overexcitement, only self-esteem, combined with the memory of many lost hours, prevented him from destroying his work.

  The automaton was beginning to become a burden to him. He did not know how to utilize him. He could doubtless render him motionless, simply by pressing a switch known to him alone, but he would run the risk, in leaving him for more than a day in that fictive sleep, of causing serious damage to his work. The machine was so constructed that it was necessary, under pain of derangement, for it to be continuously active, for movement developed movement within it, giving heat to its limbs and thus becoming the source of Homunculus’ apparent life. He had no need of repose, his artificial existence only being the result of fortunate mechanical combinations.

  Those reasons obliged Albert only to immobilize him very rarely; in any case, that was not necessary, because the automaton, docile and diligent, carried out his master’s orders to the letter. As he never left he Dominican’s cell, there was no reason to fear any misfortune occasioned by his intervention, or that might be prejudicial to himself.

  But idleness is always dangerous, even for an automaton. That was what Albert the Great also thought. Not being able, even so, to open a career for Homunculus immediately, he made him his secretary and domestic. He retired to the bottom of a drawer the gentleman’s costume in which he had initially dressed the automaton and replaced it with a monk’s habit entirely similar to the one he wore in the cloister. From then on, Homunculus devoted himself to all kinds of work. He had no equal as a domestic, for what is more agreeable than to be served by machines? The master’s correspondence was also handled by him with a rigorous punctuality, and Albert, thus aided in his everyday occupations, was much better able to devote his time to new research and new inventions.

  Several months went by in the most perfect harmony between the master and his secretary, and their union would have lasted for long years but for certain circumstances that came to interrupt them.

  Homunculus began to be subject to the common laws that claim their rights over all created beings; he experienced a need to exist for himself, for, from the day that he had been finished, he had been capable of providing for himself. Dependency weighed upon him, since he sensed the faculty of living and acting without outside help.

  The letters that he was responsible for writing, and his reading in his master’s library, had awakened intelligence and had given him an irresistible desire to see the world. An anxious ardor drove him to leave the cell in the convent, but, never daring to communicate his desires to Albert, he conceived his escape plan in silence.

  There is no deep-rooted habit that cannot be surprised by negligence. One day, Albert forgot to lock the door of his cell, or perhaps left it open intentionally, intending to take a walk in the garden of the cloister.

  Homunculus quickly perceived that negligence and took advantage of it immediately. From the drawer where it had been deposited, he took out his gentleman’s costume and, having made a bundle of it, hid it carefully under his robe. As he had learned that money is necessary to live in the world, which he only knew by name, he took possession of the convent’s cash-box, which received alms for the poor, and filed his pockets with the contents. Then, after having left the door of the cell ajar, he solely went down the common staircase. A few moments later, he was outside the cloister and in the world that he had such a keen desire to see and know.

  Thanks to his habit he had been able to emerge freely from the monastery. The porter had no paid any attention to him, doubtless thinking that he was a brother going out to collect alms.

  Scarcely was he outside the walls of the cloister than Homunculus wondered what he ought to do. To begin with he walked rapidly for some time, with the sole aim of getting away from the convent as quickly as possible. All the unfamiliar objects that struck his gaze only caused him a mediocre astonishment. Because of his lack of a heart, he remained a stranger to all impression. The springs that served him as a soul had been so well designed and executed that the automaton admitted the most astonishing things as simple and natural. Thus, he found himself all the more at ease in the world that he was seeing for the first time because his purely mechanical constitution inspired in him nothing but a superb indifference.

  Wandering at random, he had arrived on the bank of a river. Instinctively, a good idea occurred to him. He went to hide behind a bush, took off his monk’s habit and threw it, not into the nettles but into the water. Then he put on the gentleman’s costume and found himself suddenly metamorphosed and embellished. Over the next few hours he continued his route through the countryside, all the way to a highway, which he followed. After a day’s marching, it brought him to the gate of a large and prosperous city.

  In the interim, Albert the Great, his unfortunate inventor, abandoned himself to a profound despair. After his stroll in the cloister garden, he had returned to his cell. Finding it open and not seeing Homunculus, he had called out to him and looked for him in the vicinity but, being unable to discover him, he ordered a minute search in the enclosure of the convent. Everyone was put to work to rediscover the automaton. Albert did not believe definitively in his escape until the brother in charge of the door told him that he had opened it to a monk a short while before. Messengers immediately departed in all directions, but they came back without being able to report any precise news.

  Two days after Homunculus’ flight, a fisherman brought a habit to the convent. Albert immediately recognized it as his automaton’s.

  “Alas!” he exclaimed, desolate. “Must I lose the fruit of my late nights, the preoccupation of my entire life, in this fashion? Can I expect a similar destruction of my achievement? I have kept my invention secret; my name will not pass to posterity!”

  He continued to lament his negligence and his misfortune for a long time, without being able to resign himself to it.

&nbs
p; Meanwhile, the automaton was enjoying the supreme happiness of conducting himself in accordance with his own will.

  The great city to which hazard had led him soon offered him countless pleasures. He had taken a room in the principal hotel. A secret instinct having driven him to visit the city’s fencing and riding schools, he did not take long to cultivate the best of relationships with the young men who routinely frequent those places. Thanks to his particular organization, he possessed a remarkable aptitude for all bodily exercises that only demanded flexibility of movement. The most spirited horse became immediately docile in his hands, and the most skillful fencing-masters feared his blade.

  In a matter of weeks he had made numerous friends. In order better to position himself in their society he passed himself off as the son of a good family whose youthful follies had caused him to quarrel with his parents. He only became more interesting for it. Soon, women of the world, whose friends had described some of his brilliant qualities, desired to get to know him. That was not difficult. Two months after his escape from the convent, Homunculus was shining in the foremost salons in the city. Everyone admired his rare distinction, his exquisite tact and, above all, his imperturbable assurance.

  Only a few envious individuals permitted themselves to criticize him. They claimed to have sometimes detected in him the manners of a parvenu, contracted in another society than the one into which he had now introduced himself. They suggested that he only paid scant or no attention at all to those who did not have a high position or who were merely his equals. They alleged that he deliberately disparaged all those who were praised in his presence, and that in his conversation he incessantly had the sufficient tone that permitted no reply. They regarded him as one of those people who take pleasure in expressing their own opinions but do not permit others to express theirs. Finally, they reproached him—which was much more serious—for behaving basely and crawling with people of influence superior to his rank, especially with those from whom he hoped for some advantage, if only to receive invitations to dinner or obtain via their intermediation one of those facile decorations not earned on the battlefield, but accorded solely as a testimony of favor.