The Nickel Man

by Brian Stableford

  “Finally, on Christmas Eve three years ago, I understood by certain signs that the great mystery was nigh. I locked myself away in the laboratory. I stopped the clocks whose moaning irritates the powers of life and death. I sat down in front of my furnace, and I went into a trance, like the sages of old. The reasons for everything abruptly filed before my mind’s eye, but with such a racket, in such hasty pursuit, that I was unable to grasp them. All of a sudden, my retort exploded, and a kind of howling monster rolled from the furnace on to the floor. That was the so-called Vladislas, making his appearance.

  “I immediately plunged him into cold water. It wasn’t sufficient to have created him. It was also necessary to give him something with which to occupy his life—which is to say, the keyboard of human sentiments…and here I can be a little more explicit.

  “The Homunculus is like a piano. He is endowed with certain strings, whose sonorities form all possible sentimental combinations. Those strings end in a single bar, which is the stem of Egotism. From that stem, like the teeth of a comb, depart Pride, Lust and Dread. From those three secondary branches depart a multitude of subdivisions, which, via the vices and the virtues, terminate in simple sensations that are distributed over the skin of the Homunculus as over the skin of a human being, appended to the ears, the eyes, the nose, etc.

  “Two large keys, at the level of the hips, put my fellow in joy or in pain, giving his entire organism a particular inclination corresponding to one of those states. Finally, I’ve established in him the three degrees that are for my Homunculus what speed is for an automobile: heroism, simple life and bestiality. And now you have the outlines of the theory, let’s pass on to the practice.”

  Having finished his demonstration, parts of which seemed obscure to me, Otto Serpius ran to his automaton, who, at the sight of him, uttered a roar.

  The scientist burst out laughing. “I left him in pain last time I made use of him. Look, I’m putting him in joy.”

  He turned a key near the left hip. Immediately, Vladislas’ features relaxed, expressing the most vivid delight. He became incredibly polite. He apologized to me for his earlier insolence. He offered to explain the marvels of the laboratory one by one. Except for a little monotony in his expressions and grimaces, and a slight stiffness in his movements, it was impossible to discern anything artificial or unusual in the origin of the Homunculus.

  Meanwhile, Otto Serpius seemed plunged in the keenest satisfaction. He observed, while smiling, the behavior of the individual he called “his son,” and from time to time, he approved his speech by means of a little affectionate brutality—a rap on the hard skull, a kick on a leg that sounded like wood.

  “Does Vladislas know that he’s an automaton?” I asked him.

  He frowned. “That question is replete with mystery. In giving my Homunculus the exact appearance of life, I’ve given him the appearance of the laws and progress of life. Thus, I’m amazed to observe in his various performances a veritable change. I know that the springs are wearing away, but that’s not all. A particular mode of existence has formed in that semi-artificial being and—don’t laugh—he’s on the way to liberty. Yes, toward liberty. When I leave him at rest, with neither joy nor pain, do you know what he expresses in that neutral state? Melancholy! Now, according to my studies, melancholy is the condition of someone obtaining a clearer consciousness of himself, more anxious as to his destiny.

  “Stranger still”—at this point Serpius lowered his voice—“is that as time goes by, Vladislas has conceived a hatred for me, his Creator. He has begun to deny my existence. He’s on the point of murdering me. That’s the way it is. That assemblage of life and springs, which I’ve grouped together myself, suffers in my presence and my power. Two or three times I’ve surprised him sharpening knives with a strange expression when the work I’d give him to do was making up packets of bismuth.

  “When I catch him I those homicidal reveries, I switch him to pain and let him suffer for days on end. I’ve noticed that after those harsh ordeals, his intelligence is refined in an extraordinary fashion, and the cruelty in his gaze is reduced. He detests me less. He even comes, like a puppy, to rub himself against me, in quest of my caresses...

  “All the same, it’s quite possible that you’ll learn from the newspapers some day of my sudden death. You’ll know then that I’ve be killed by my automaton.”

  Vladislas had returned to work; I experienced a kind of indefinable dread. Otto Serpius divined my state of mind and said to me with his usual perspicacity: “Every time a mystery disappears, suffering and anguish increase. I’ve often noticed that, in the course of my work. After the creation of Vladislas, I was prey to an atrocious mental torture for two months. At any rate, the cholera ceased. My automaton scarcely suspects that his life is made from the death of so many peaceful and honest inhabitants of Hamburg, whose souls have passed into my furnaces. You’re right, my dear fellow—we live in a strange city.”

  Georges Espitallier: The Nickel Man

  (1897)

  I. A Singular Scientist

  Pilesèche was a man devoid of ambition.

  His present situation was sufficient for him, even though it was humble; he was a mere laboratory assistant to a physiologist who enjoyed both renown and a very bad character—in consequence of which the poor laboratory assistant was more accustomed to being shoved around than kind words.

  Népomucène Grillard—for, after all, it is appropriate to provide a portrait of the master before setting out that of the servant—belonged to the category of scientists who are surly and disagreeable to their fellow men. Born a peasant, his boorish behavior had conserved the rustic imprint of his origin. He had isolated himself, struggling against a life that was not easy at the outset, and developed an innate combative instinct. His obstinacy had triumphed over obstacles, but he had not tried to rid himself of his native rudeness, and, as his scientific notoriety had increased, that lack of amenity had seemed to grow, because he did not feel any need to repress it.

  His first impulse—the best, it is said—was always to receive anyone who approached him with an initial attack. The burlesque odyssey of his academic visits, when he had thought of trying to obtain a chair in the Institut, was legendary in the vicinity of the Sorbonne. By dint of effort he had then succeeded in putting on an almost smiling face when he passed the threshold of the scientist whose vote he was trying to win in the great struggle, but after five minutes of conversation, the animal inside him found itself unleashed, and, trampling the flower-bed of his future colleague, gradually increasing the pitch of his dry falsetto voice, he would take a stand opposed to his interlocutor’s theories, pouring out irony by the bucketful and arguments by the mouthful, and the conversation would end in a dispute, with a loud noise of slammed doors that left him, the last man standing, alone on the academician’s landing.

  He cut his visits short before arriving at the contest, and renounced forever the hope of ever putting on the coat with green palms.

  If he was aggressive with his colleagues, it is easy to deduce what his relationship was like with the students who aspired to learn science in his shadow. His laboratory was an inferno; gradually, a void had formed around the scientist, to whom only the timid Pilesèche remained faithful.

  The latter would perhaps have preferred an easier master, but he was a creature of habit, and in any case, he had never had sufficient energy to detach himself from bonds to which he gradually became accustomed. He was a kind of eccentric, a great timid child devoid of will-power, whose only passion was for study, with a certain nonchalance in the fashion in which he devoted himself to it.

  The physiology on which he worked possessed him entirely, but when he had poured out his contingent of ideas in the common endeavor, it never entered his head that he had anything to do with the result; never, even in the depths of his soul, did he make any kind of claim to their paternity. Népomucène Grillard appeared to him to be a divinity looking down from on high upon feeble humani
ty, and one does not collaborate with the gods; one serves them.

  In any case, having no needs and satisfied with very little, Pilesèche went through life full of an insouciance that was painted all over his person. He had long, unkempt hair; its gray color might have been natural, but was more probably due to an abundant dust generously spread all the way to the dirty collar of the worn and discolored frock-coat that enveloped, without really dressing, his long bony body. The rest of his costume was in keeping.

  Along with his athletic appearance, the man had a timid, adolescent expression; his gestures were gauche and maladroit. For anyone who considered him at a glance, he might have passed for a scholar or a Bohemian; he was both at the same time.

  There are bilious individuals who live for a long time, to the misfortune of their contemporaries, but it is nevertheless necessary to recognize that exaggerated movements of bile are not favorably to the principles of sound hygiene. For that reason and many others, Népomucène Grillard, when he reached the age of sixty-five, felt himself declining—physically declining, that is; his mentality was not afflicted, nor his energy, nor, most of all, his character. And yet, the aged scientist had embarked on a whole series of experiments that he would not have wanted to leave incomplete.

  As time was pressing, he had the imprudent temerity to test some of his physiological discoveries on himself, which was the surest fashion of hastening his end, for the human body is not an experimental field in which the infinitely small can deliver battle without causing damage to the substratum of that microcosm.

  The scientist had also launched himself into the new sciences that claim to approach the problems of hypnosis and life after death, and which solicit so many people nowadays. All that overwork had ended up ruining his constitution, to the point that one day, it was necessary to take to his bed.

  With his bulldog manners, Monsieur Grillard had never managed to keep a domestic servant for more than a week, and when he fell ill, he could not abide any other care than that of his laboratory assistant, to which he was accustomed. It was necessary then for the latter to comply with all the old man’s caprices and not impose his presence on him more than was necessary.

  Occasionally, he risked an observation, such as: “It’s imprudent to remain alone at night, my dear master; allow me to stay with you...”

  “Leave me alone,” the other replied.

  “You have to eat; make a little effort, or you’ll die of starvation.”

  “What are you doing? Besides, starvation or something else, what does it matter? I feel that I’m at the end of my tether.”

  “Oh, my dear master, you’re not there yet. You’re going to get your strength back—but it’s necessary to look after yourself.”

  “Go away. Stop harping on and leave me in peace. You can’t tell me anything, damn it! I know better than you are how I am...”

  Sometimes, Pilesèche exerted himself on another subject, perhaps even more scabrous.

  “You have a nephew, Monsieur; you need to think about asking him to come...”

  “A fine fellow, who makes music!”

  “Pardon me, but I’m told that he’s given up music for sculpture. I imagine he thought that the change might give you pleasure.”

  “Ha ha! Music or sculpture, it’s all one: I don’t like the arts. What is there in them that’s positive? Can one find theorems that regulate those strings of sensations? And those statues, fixed and frozen—are they worth as much as a morsel of flesh palpitating under my scalpel? Get away—you can talk to me about all that when the arts are sciences.”

  Thus rejected, his efforts wasted, the poor assistant, undiscouraged, brought up the subject of an orphan niece, with whom the scientist scarcely occupied himself except for paying her boarding-school fees, even doing good in an egotistical fashion.

  “She’s in a convent, isn’t she?” Grillard interrupted. “Let her stay there!”

  Pilesèche was, therefore, quite astonished when the old man, one day, softening his voice, summoned him to his bedside and made him party to his intentions.

  “I sense that I don’t have much longer to go, and, before dying, I want to see my nephew Népomucène. He’s an animal, but he’s my nephew, and I want to give him my instructions. Go look for him tomorrow evening and bring him here. If you don’t find him, search—I don’t want to see you without him, you hear me?”

  “What if I were to bring him tomorrow morning?”

  “How painful it is never to be understood! Not before tomorrow evening, I tell you. I’m not in the habit of repeating myself!”

  A few moments later, the scientist called out: “Pilesèche, prepare me an electric bath!”

  An electric bath!

  The assistant did not believe in the efficacy of that medical treatment, which Monsieur Grillard had improved for his own usage, but how could he oppose his master’s will?

  “Are you going to contradict me incessantly?” the old man growled.

  In order not to excite his bile any further, Pilesèche heated up the water and, uncovering a long vat that was normally used for galvanoplasty, he poured in the liquid, slightly sharpened with a little acid to increase its electrical conductivity.

  While taking his bath, Grillard had the custom of lying down on a rattan trellis placed in the bottom of the vat and serving as an insulator. He gripped the cylinders in both hands. The electric current thus ran through his body, while on slight electrolytic reactions occurred on the surface of his skin. He felt a frisson running over his sickly limbs. It felt like ants swarming throughout his being, which at least procured him a temporary relief.

  That evening, he made a new demand. He took it into his head to increase the conductivity of his body by having it coated in plumbago. Pilesèche tried in vain to resist, but it was finally necessary for him to grip the heavy brush steeped in a pot where the black lead was thinned down, and to start daubing the maniac, who had stripped off his last garment.

  Grillard stood on the floor, trembling, his hands leaning on the bed, and there was no more lugubrious sight than that skeleton, scarcely covered by parchment-like skin, gradually coated with a layer of black, as shiny as wax.

  When the grotesque operation was terminated, Grillard signified to his assistant that he was to go away and leave him alone.

  “But what about your bath?” said the latter.

  “I can take it perfectly well on my own.”

  And as Pilesèche was accustomed by habit to passive obedience, he left, while the old man, his back bent, supporting himself on the walls, headed toward the half-full vat.

  As he went past the slate-topped table mounted in sliding grooves, however, he stopped, listened to make sure that the door of the apartment had closed behind Pilesèche, and, seizing a piece of chalk with one hand and some pieces of paper lying on the table with the other, he began rapidly transcribing a previously-prepared inscription, the letters of which followed one another in complete incoherence.

  Having done that, the ambulant black phantom finally reached the galvanoplastic vat. He poured into it the contents of a bottle full of a glittering crystalline salt, lit a reflector lamp placed nearby, and lay down in the bath, after having opened the tap of a small reservoir, whose water began to flow into the vast in a thin trickle, with a monotonous murmur.

  The old man had placed himself in the vat in his usual position. Thus extended, with his knees brought back toward is meager breast, only his face, tilted backward, emerged from the water. He searched with his gaze for a brilliant point that the lamp picked out on a silver ball suspended in front of him. Motionless, his eyes jaundiced by icterus and immeasurably wide open in fakiristic contemplation, he waited...

  Silence had fallen, lugubriously. Nothing could be heard but the purr of the stove and the susurrus of the trickle of water that was solely causing the level in the vat to rise. Gradually, the water covered the scientist’s closed mouth. Only the nostrils, eyes and forehead appeared above the liquid surface. Alre
ady, however, all consciousness had disappeared from the inert and rigid body. Népomucène Grillard had put himself into complete catalepsy by staring fixedly at the luminous dot trembling on the polished surface of the silvery ball.

  The water was still rising, its meniscus climbing to assault the projections of the emaciated face.

  And the electricity did its work on the molecules of that exsanguinated flesh, gently and slyly depositing solid particles appropriated from the decomposing salts: an impalpable dust of nickel, which clung on to the layer of plumbago and gradually covered it...

  II. A Sinister Discovery

  On the 31 December 1890, St. Sylvester’s Day, at eight o’clock in the morning, the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève was crowded, in spite of the glacial fog, with businessmen and housewives who were running in quest of breakfast, their heads swathed in wool, clutching the traditional milk-jug in their numb fingers.

  Two eccentrics, rather incongruous in their appearance and costume, were striding over the damp and sticky paving stones; they did not seem excessively out of place, however, in the midst of the other passers-by, the stiff slope in question not normally being the rendezvous of the flower of the aristocracy.

  One of the two, his figure clasped in a black velvet jacket, had a simple scarf wound around his neck; it was the only concession he made to the rigor of the temperature, for he was holding his hat in his hand in spite of the season, proudly throwing back his long back hair, lustrous a well-groomed, with a leonine gesture.

  The other, by contrast, was very negligently clad, with no attention to detail; that was Népomucène Grillard’s laboratory assistant, and the succinct portrait previously painted dispenses us with describing the costume he was wearing.