Future Times Three Read online

  He clasped his hands with emotion. The invalid seemed as happy as he.

  “The war interrupted your works,” said the large man. “I was able to continue mine and with sensational results. But you must be hungry, my friend, having struggled so far along the road. Annette…

  The girl excused herself, returning in a few minutes with a steaming omelette, a cold half-chicken, cheese, a pie and a bottle of Alsatian wine.

  “Eat! Eat!” said Essaillon warmly, “and listen to me. What I am about to tell you is not ordinary.”

  St Menoux did not need to be prodded.

  “You are a mathematician and I am a physicist and chemist I have been involved, for my part, in some research which would have resulted in nothing had your articles in Mathematics Review not enlightened me. Thanks to you, I was able to overcome certain obstacles which seemed insurmountable. The result is this: I have developed a substance which allows me to command time at my discretion.”

  St. Menoux put down his fork, but the large man would not give him time to interrupt. He animatedly continued his story. At times he seized his beard like a bunch of flowers, separating it in two and rubbing it between his fingers. Or he would stop to take a breath, his short breathing, along with the crackling of the smoldering fire, the only noise in the otherwise silent room.

  His daughter was behind him in the shadows. She sat straight in the chair, her hands placed flat on her knees, grave as a child who is listening to a story. She was looking at the two men, each in turn, but especially at the new visitor, the tall thin soldier with the fair hair. From time to time she got up noiselessly to wipe her father’s forehead or to change the visitor’s plate. And none of that seemed for her work or habit To awake on a new day, to go to town, to come back laden with white bread and vegetables, to eat, to walk, to notice the neighbors passing by, to listen to the cry of the woodseller and to work in the laboratory—this was her life. It was never gray or banal—in this aura of warm light in sun or in snow, with bare trees or bouquets of foliage alive with birds.

  St. Menoux, engrossed with his host’s account did not acknowledge her eyes upon him, but he felt the presence of the girl in the room like that of a precious object a statue gilded with ancient gold which glows softly in a shadowy niche or a tapestry whose embroidered characters dance a woolen farandole upon a walk

  “Where do we come from?” continued Essaillon. “Where were we before our birth into the consciousness of this world? Religions speak of a lost paradise. Its regret haunts men of every race. This lost paradise I name the total universe. It is the universe that neither time nor space limit. It does not consist of three or four dimensions, but of every dimension. The light which illuminates it is composed, not of seven, or twenty, or one hundred, but of infinite colors. All that is, has been or will be, and all that will ever be, inhabits it Nothing finds itself formed there, because all forms are possible within it. It occupies the atom and the infinite cannot fill it. For the soul that participates in this universe, the future or the past do not exist, nor the near or the far. All is presence to it.”

  St Menoux had forgotten his meal. He saw, as in a dream, Annette’s white hands pouring him a draft to drink and placing the food on his plate.

  “Try to imagine now,” Essaillon went on, “the sin against perfection for which this soul was condemned to the fall. It is involved in what we call *life.’ For the soul it is a kind of corridor, a vertical tunnel, whose material walls hide the memory of the marvelous journey. That soul can neither go back nor wander to the right or the left It is inexorably attracted onward toward death, toward the end, toward the extremity of the tunnel which opens God knows where—into some frightful hell or to the rediscovered paradise. This soul is you, is me, during our terrestrial life. We who tumble in a free fall through time, like sand pebbles sifting through the fingers of God.”

  He raised his beard and dropped it to emphasize the image. It softly regained its harvest appearance.

  St Menoux drank the last drops of the clear wine.

  “If I succeed,” said Essaillon, “in changing the density of this soul, this pebble, it will be possible for me to either accelerate its fall or to stop it. I will even be able to free it from the power of gravity which attracts it to the future and to make it go back into the past. A means of accomplishing this intervention has been the goal of my work for twenty years. And I have succeeded!”

  He took the handkerchief from his daughter’s hands, mopped his brow and his neck, and added in a calmer voice, “I imagine that this seems incredible to you. Therefore, before continuing, I would like to give you a demonstration.” He separated the gold curtain of hair which masked his chest, revealing a woolen vest with pockets swollen like udders. His fingers probed among the objects within, settling on a flat box which he held out to St. Menoux. He lifted the cover and saw an assortment of tiny spheres of various colors, laying on a bed of cotton.

  “If you eat one of these pills,” said Essaillon, “you will immediately be restored to youth. By an hour, a day, a week, a month, or a year, according to its color.” He drew a second box from his pocket. It contained other pills, oblong in shape. ’These ovules produce the opposite effect They accelerate your advance into the future.”

  He chose two violet pills and two ovules of the same color from the box and placed them before St. Menoux: “Try the experiment.”

  “Me?” asked the corporal, stupefied.

  “Yes. This is the only way I have of convincing you. Here you have all that is necessary to return into the past for a period of two hours and to return immediately if you wish. What have you decided?”

  St Menoux looked at the round fingers of the invalid as they pushed the pills toward him across the clear wood of the table. He felt flush with indecision, as if someone had proposed a forbidden game. This man must be mad.

  He raised his eyes toward the lamp and looked at the things it touched with its light: the fine furniture, this wheezing man, the daughter whose black eyes looked at him so seriously. In her calm eyes, he saw the doubled image of the bourgeois lamp. The startling words he had just heard contrasted with these seemingly ordinary surroundings. His scientific mind had easily followed the narration of his host, but his common sense refused to accept the conclusions. Perhaps these pills contained poison? Perhaps they were only candy I from the comer grocery.

  Still he had been welcomed into this house with such strange words! He did not know what to believe anymore. His hesitation amused his host, who began to laugh* His belly shook from top to bottom, shaking his gray vest.

  Abruptly, St. Menoux decided and placed his gaunt hand on the four pills. His curiosity had outweighed his fear.

  “Very good,” said Essaillon. Annette brought an envelope. St. Menoux slipped the two ovules into it, put it into his pocket, picked up the round pills and swallowed them.

  He suddenly felt pulled from the back by a powerful force. He sprang from his chair, the light grew dim, a door slammed, a bitter wind roared in his ears, a howling wind filled with oaths and cries and the sound of a thousand hoofs. The snow raked his face. His feet and fingers were suddenly numb with cold. He wanted to cough. He sneezed. From the top of his canteen, Pilastre called to him,

  “Corporal! Do you think we’ll get there tonight?”

  “We will get there when we can, my friend.”

  Before these words left his mouth, he recognized them. He had already answered the same question with the same words before. He waited for the response of the driver. The “shit” arrived exactly on its quarter-second.

  The convoy proceeded into the night. One mile ahead lay Tremplin-le-Haut and St. Menoux knew that it would take more than an hour to cover these few thousand feet and that they would stop four times before reaching the sleeping city. One driver lit his pipe. In the match light crossed with snowflakes, the corporal of the echelon saw a purple nose and two ice cubes hanging on a moustache. He had already seen the same face. But this time, to the face of the
man from Auvergne, his memory compared another face, the face of a young girl lit by a pink lamp.

  He began to relive two hours of his existence. Second by second, step by step, he relived again the events which he remembered. A tremendous exultation overcame him, driving the cold from his flesh. It seemed to him that he advanced surrounded by light. The night, the cold, the suffering, the filth, the stupid ignorance of the future toward which one proceeds like a blind man, all that was the concern of other men, of the herd. He felt light and powerful, like a demigod, as different from his drivers as they from their mules.

  A thought suddenly struck him. Just suppose, he said to himself, I change my route? Suppose I were to pass by without stopping in front of the three steps of the wizard’s house? I am free to choose. I can avoid the events I foresee, alter my destiny and still remain a soldier like the others for whom time is measured by the accumulation of sufferings. I could embark with the troops without seeing Noel Essaillon! In reality he could go no further. Curiosity had overcome him and nothing in the world could keep him from following out the experiment.

  He was anxious to know more, to leave this snow and cold, this trudging journey. He looked for the accelerating pills, blinked his eyes under the falling snowflakes and shook the envelope between his lips.

  The pills slipped onto his tongue. His muscles contracted in anticipation of the shock. He swallowed with a gulp of saliva. He felt the pills descend his esophagus. They settled, warm and luminous, in his stomach. Their light radiated through him, filling the room around him. Noel Essaillon was looking at him, somewhat mockingly it seemed. Above the great man’s shoulder, he saw the face of the smiling girl whose eyes seemed to him so full of sweetness. He smiled in return.

  “Here I am—back,” he said. “Did you have to wait long?”

  “You just left,” replied the invalid. “You left us with an anguished face and you return with a smile. We hardly had time to notice that your chair was empty. I won’t ask you if you are convinced.”

  St Menoux rose to shake Essaillon’s hand. He wanted to hug him, but he thought that would look ridiculous. He did not succeed in suppressing his excitement altogether. He knocked over a cup with his jacket coattails. Annette was laughing as he apologized.

  “Pull yourself together, my dear friend,” said Essaillon. “Your perplexity touches me more than your compliments. I am very happy to see you are so enthusiastic. How can one not be, it is true, after such an experience. Now do you understand the value of my discovery? Reaching forty years of age, you decide to begin your life again. You return to your adolescence. You launch out into life with a brand-new body in a new existence. You avoid the misfortunes which struck you in your first existence. You seize all of the good fortune that eluded you. You begin again one hundred times, one thousand times. You are in possession of all the sciences in the world, speak all languages. You have loved all women and are familiar with all your contemporaries. You have seen all, heard all and known all. You are God!”

  Essaillon again was overcome with excitement. He seemed ready to rise up, to break away like an athlete from his deformed body.

  “Someday, perhaps,” he continued, “tired of this earthly eternity, you will let yourself be carried to death, which will be the only knowledge which you will not have tasted.”

  “If my eyes are not deceiving me, you have not ‘begun again* yourself,” St. Menoux remarked. His eyes went from the obese man’s face, to his stomach, to his truncated legs.

  The invalid’s exuberance faded. He sank into his armchair and fell silent for a few seconds. Then he began again in a low voice. “No. No, 1 could not. I have made short voyages into the past. I return from them each time to continue my research. But I have not changed my destiny. I haven’t had the courage.

  “No doubt it seems to you that I have no need of courage to leave this deformed carcass, that on the contrary I should have abandoned it with pleasure. But to do that I would have to change my heart I could not deliberately separate myself from my child. I did not wish to avoid the accident that made me an invalid. It is thanks to it that I found Annette’s mother. She was my nurse. We married. She died on the day she gave birth to this treasure.”

  He held out his arms. The sleeves of his vest, shortened by the folds at the elbows, revealed his round wrists, white as a baby’s bottom. His daughter came to kneel near him, placing her head on his knees. Essaillon tenderly caressed the brown locks which mixed with the golden flow of his beard.

  “These ties have bound me to the present,99 he said. “I could not imagine life in which my child would no longer be at my side.”

  St. Menoux nodded. “I understand.”

  Essaillon again spoke with the clear voice of a scientist. “I let myself be carried away a moment ago by my dreams,” he said. “In reality, I do not believe that a man possessing my pills, no matter how egotistical or determined he might be, could freely use them. He would always find a love or a hatred to enchain him. Besides, it is not the secret of immortality or of the all-powerful that I am searching. I am not working for myself but for mankind.

  “I have also explored the future,” he continued, “but with extreme caution, since I don’t know where death is waiting for me. I did not go far. I feared each minute that I might go beyond my lifespan. In short, my invention, which excites you so, doesn’t really satisfy me. This substance, to which I have given the name ‘noelite,’ operates only within the limits of our existence. It does not allow us to leave this tunnel through which we are falling toward death, to leap into infinite time while retaining our present personalities. That is what interests me. My pills can only serve my egotistical designs. I dream of being useful to humanity. I don’t know if that, will be possible. Men have always refused the aid of one who offered to lead them from their pain and have followed instead in the path of those who led them into misfortune. Still, still…

  He fell silent for a moment His green eyes, flooded with dreams, followed some astounding vision. He passed his fleshy hand across his brow, saying in a low voice, “It is not presumptuous of me to hope that after having traveled through the centuries, studied at its source past and future history, sought out the exact causes of wars, revolutions and great miseries, that it may be possible to avoid some of them. Perhaps we could accelerate progress, borrow from our grandsons some inventions or reforms which brought them happiness, in order to offer them to our grandfathers. Why not?”

  He fell silent again. St Menoux, overwhelmed by these words, no longer saw the invalid. He forgot the mutilated legs, the deformed stomach, the face which expressed as much skepticism as intelligence, the fat hands that bespoke a glutton. In his mind another image of Essaillon took form—a giant, standing triumphant who held out his arms to the wretched multitude. A genius, the kind of person who appears now and again among men to change their destiny.

  Essaillon struck the arm of his chair. “Yes,” he said in a firm voice. “I must find a substance which will liberate us from the walls of our lifespan. I know that I will find it, but it will take a long time. How much time? It doesn’t matter—I have eternity at my command. I can begin again indefinitely on any given day and make it last a century. In any case, I have chosen you to assist me in the explorations that I plan to undertake when I have succeeded. I am not asking for your answer. I know it. Your intelligence, your scientific nature, sister to my own, assures me of your cooperation. Already it is thanks to your articles that I was able to bring my previous work to some fruition, when otherwise it would have failed. From now on I am counting on you. Here is my plan.”

  He straightened himself in his chair. His beard flowed like a river. He wore a look of such gravity and nobleness that St. Menoux could not raise the slightest objection.

  “You must not shy from your duty to the country. You will resume your life as a soldier. Go back into the night and the cold, serve in the war, knowing that you will emerge from it uninjured. Moreover, the noelite will permit you to pass t
hrough it so quickly that you will know it only as a memory.

  “I am going to give you two one-year pills. Take them at the same time. In two years you will find yourself in Paris. I will join you there. While you are fighting the speedy war, I will have lived ten, one hundred, one thousand years—all the time necessary for the culmination of my research. Now it is time for you to leave us, to return to us later.”

  St Menoux stood up, deeply moved. Annette held his cloak out to him. She had to raise her arms high to cover his shoulders with the steaming coat. He gave a last glance at the room where the pink mist floated, and then leaned over to place a kiss on the girl’s hand.

  He hesitated. One must not kiss young unmarried ladies’ hands, he said to himself. On the other hand, I am not an ordinary man, but a soldier. He completed his gesture and plunged into the icy night The swirling snow enveloped him.

  In two years, he thought. The war will be over in two years.

  He saw himself marching along the Champs-Elysees, his beret over his ear, after the great assault into the heart of the enemy nation. Then he realized that this was really of no importance. The task awaiting him loomed higher.

  A snowflake flicked at his eyeball, causing him to close the lid. A frozen tear glued his eyelashes. The trampling of horses passed by him in the night, accompanied by cursing, the gnashing of harnesses and carriage shafts. He lowered his helmet and snatched up the two pills. They tickled his throat going down. He sneezed.

  2

  “What miserable weather!” he said. “And this window won’t close!”

  Crossing the small bedroom, he rubbed his hands together to warm them. A wool scarf wound around his neck three times and came up to his eyes. He pushed aside the navy blue curtain which covered the window and tried to tighten the shutters, caked with ice. A burst of cold air struck him in the stomach. He sneezed again and returned to sit at his white wooden table. A lamp with a newspaper for a lampshade was placed near the office calendar. The date was circled—February 21, 1942. It was one o’clock in the morning. February 22nd had begun. St. Menoux turned the sheet