Future Times Three Read online

  “Yes. I have coated the inside of the ticking of our mattresses, from which the wool has been removed. We sleep softly supported by nothingness. What an astonishing sensation to feel oneself lying on nothing. You see already what uses the new substance can be put to. Alas, the history of our time reveals to us that all inventions can be more easily used to bring misfortune to men than happiness. I wanted to ascertain for myself the harmfulness of noelite 3.”

  He put down his glass. A drop of Armagnac cognac shone near his lip, like a drop of light dew, between two golden threads.

  “I have forwarded to a distant headquarters, by indirect means, about three hundred gallons of it in its liquid state, in special containers. I indicated the precautions to take in order to line active bombs. I asked that they send me the results by radiophonic broadcast in Sanscrit. There are not too many men who understand that language in today’s world. Besides, those who do generally make fun of the wireless. That was six months ago. I fixed the hour and the day of the broadcast. I was waiting for you. It should be heard today, immediately. Let’s listen.”

  He opened the door of an ancient carved chest. A slab of ebonite was furnished with milled buttons. When the first button was turned on, the radio growled indistinctly.

  Essaillon searched for the wave length. A thread of blue light moved across the numbers of a dial. Echoes of the world sputtered into the room; a burst of brass instruments, three trills of a soprano, the staccato of the Morse code and the noise of jamming trains, all over the deformed voices of the speakers.

  “There it is,” said the scientist. He looked at the dial of a tall clock whose copper pendulum struck the time. “In two minutes.”

  The wireless gave out a strange station signal, five flute notes constantly repeated, magical as the music of a snake charmer.

  St. Menoux, who had risen, sat down again softly on the edge of his chair. He did not dare to make any noise with his breathing. Annette, her hands on the table, looked at her father with anxiety. The two minutes passed.

  “I wonder—” grunted the old man. He suddenly fell silent. A voice sounded from the wireless, a man’s voice, sharp, monotonous, speaking incomprehensible words full of the chant of vowels. Essaillon’s face lit up. He listened passionately. With his two hands, he made a sign to the others to be quiet; to cease all noise. Then he spoke in a low voice, in short broken phrases.

  “They tried it—on a small city—somewhere in Asia—

  St. Menoux felt his heart tighten. He had a premonition of the abominable. Annette’s little hands closed on the table.

  “One missile was sufficient. It is flying over the city, and delivers the bombs. They are bursting above the roofs. The noelite is falling like rain. No noise, no confusion. No blocks of houses reduced to dust. A few bombs only, bursting in the air with a dull sound. A little rain falling. The people raise their heads, see the sky streaked with black rays. The noelite is falling, the rain reaches beasts and men—reaches the ground. No blood, no bums. A little rain neither warm nor cold.”

  The voice on the wireless continued its story without emotion, like a litany. Little by little, Essaillon grew excited. No doubt he was imagining as he translated, replacing the abstract words of the ancient language with concrete phrases, adding what he guessed and what the stranger who was speaking so far away could not know.

  “A black rain which does not wetten—a rain of invisible ink. The man who receives a few drops of it on his hand and wishes to raise it to his face notices with fright that he can no longer move his hand. It is nailed to the air, nailed to the immutable present. He can no longer move his head. He had noelite in his hair, on his shoulders. He is bound. He screams in terror. The entire city is howling. All living beings have been touched here and there. Each untouched part continues to grow while the other part is immobilized in time. In place of an arm, a nose, they have only a weightless shadow fixed in space like cement.

  “The surface of the streets is strewn with spots. The houses are half phantoms. The trees along the avenues are covered with black leaves, which the winds no longer stir. A storm moves the river whose untouched water has to break its way through the solidified water. The air is full of millions of bars of darkness. Each drop of falling noelite has carried a thin pillar of shadow to the ground which no one can break nor free, it being only the thickness of a strand of hair. All which lives, all which ordinarily dies, is nailed with arrows to the immobile present.

  “Men and beasts are dying because a principal artery is obstructed, because the nerves no longer command the life to continue. Those who are least touched know, after the sufferings of immobility, the sufferings of hunger and thirst The streets are peopled with a crowd of ensnared beings who are struggling, trying in vain to tear themselves from this horror. In the houses, men and women preserved by the walls and roofs can no longer leave their homes. In the streets are erected prisons between whose bars it is impossible to slip. Hunger overcomes the beseiged.

  “Soon death extends its silent hand over the city. In the streets, cadavers are hanging, fastened to the air by pieces of their flesh which the noelite has touched. Decay, little by little, tears them from their bodies. The ground is strewn with carrion, fleshless bone, while the air remains peopled with profiles, ears, heads of hair, breasts, black fingers, stiff, eternal, bound to the sky by the immobile rain of the present.”

  The wireless was silent for a few minutes. Essaillon was silent in turn. Removing his glasses, he wiped his hand over his forehead and eyes.

  “It’s horrible,” said St. Menoux in a low voice.

  “Yes, it’s horrible,” agreed the invalid. “Horrible—but fantastic, isn’t it?”

  His eyes, the color of the sea, shone with a peculiar exaltation. He went on, “Imagine that there exists perhaps in this city a man on whom enough noelite fell to preserve him entirely in the present. Perhaps a signalman on a roof near the bomb’s explosion point. That man, alone in the silent city, neither living nor dead, continues to stand guard, outside of eternity. The end of the world will never touch him, because it will never reach him. Even God can no longer reach him…”

  Annette sighed. “You should perhaps drink something,” she said to St. Menoux in a sweet voice.

  Without waiting for his answer, she poured him two fingers of wine. He decided that maybe she was less affected by the horror of the story, because she found herself more sensitive to joys than to misfortunes, to beauty than to ugly things. Her body, aglow with life, was attracted to life and her mind remained closed to images of death.

  A great crash of broken dishes came from the direction of the kitchen.

  “Oh dear,” said Annette. “Poor Philomena is taking revenge on the china again.”

  She left the room. She was wearing blue suede shoes, very simple, with high heels, which made her bare ankles seem finer and which contracted a bit the outline of her calfs. She was humming the tune of the flute on the wireless. St Menoux did not see her leave. He was wondering how he was going to say what was on his mind.

  “I—hum,” he said, clearing his throat. “I do not wish to reproach you, don’t think that. I admire you very much. But I think you were perhaps wrong to give your invention to the military. Aren’t you afraid they will wreak havoc?”

  Essaillon ran the quail brush through his beard. The bristles caressed the hairs with a satin noise.

  “Set your mind at rest, my little Peter,” he said. “They will have no more noelite. They don’t know where it comes from and if they attempt to analyze it, they will only succeed in rendering useless their instruments, their laboratories and perhaps their chemists. A little while ago they offered me a lot of money. They added that they will call me back every day. I will not listen to them. It is a completed experiment.

  “I guess that you are angry at me for having done it. It does not seem to you to agree with my humanitarian goals. It is, however, because of this experiment that I will never hand over my noelite to the public. Before
acting, it is necessary to know. The Chinese who invented the powder for fireworks would perhaps have stopped his research if he had foreseen the cannon. On the other hand, We scientists must not show too much sentimentality. What is the death of a few thousand men when one works for the good of entire humanity?”

  He threw the brush on the table with an offhand gesture. His eyes had become cold as a frozen pond. But St. Menoux could not forget the excitement he had seen shining in these same eyes during the account of the bombardment.

  Essaillon rubbed his hands together and began to smile. He was once again the bon vivant, the gourmand, the happy scientist. “And now I shall show you my wonder, thanks to which you will soon be able to voyage in future centuries. Please be so kind as to push my wheelchair.”

  They proceeded to an adjoining room which must have been die laboratory. Four large tables of pink marble were arranged along the walls. A half-circle was cut into each one of them to allow the obese Essaillon to work there without leaving his chair. The surface of the tables was bare. Under each there were steel cupboards with closed doors. Above one table a uniform of green cloth was hanging on a nail. Essaillon pointed it out. ’There is the object,” he said. ’Take it down.”

  St. Menoux spread out on the table a kind of coverall, in one piece from the hood to the pants. A zipper parted it down the front. Two holes were cut in it for the eyes. Two similar openings were set into the material at the ear level. The material seemed to have been dipped in a wash of sulphate.

  “Here are the necessary accessories,*’ added Essaillon, who drew from a cupboard a pair of boots, gloves with very long cuffs, motorcycle glasses, and a leather belt to which was fixed a square metal fitting, as large as those the Parisian bus conductors carry on their belts.

  He added two haversacks and a knapsack. Leather, metal and glasses—all were equally green. “All this,” said the scientist, “is covered with a combination of noelite 3 and noelite 1 and 2. When you have put on this uniform, put on these glasses, and slipped on these gloves and boots, the device attached to your belt will allow you to walk through the centuries. Switching it on activates both noelite 3 and one of the two others, at your choice. You wish to move a hundred years ahead? Noelite 2 will transport you there instantly. Noelite 3 will preserve you as you are. It preserves your present state while the others throw you into the future or the past

  “Operating the device is very simple. These five buttons allow you to move the index along the markings of the hours, days, months, years and centuries. The middle of the scale, marked with a zero, is the time of your departure. To the left is the past, to the right the future. With the index set you push this round button and you are immediately transported to the point of time which you determined. To return, push on this square button. There you are, brought back to your point of departure like a rubber band.

  ‘This triangular button starts a vibrator. You only set it into motion upon your arrival. The vibrator makes your time vary from one second ahead and behind, to a very rapid rhythm. Through each coming and going, you jump over the present. For the people who surround you, you are never there, always late or ahead by one second in their time. You are therefore invisible, untouchable. If a wall appears before you, do not hesitate to cross through it It cannot stop you since you are not yet there, or already passed. Nothing is an obstacle to you.

  “Don’t forget, when you put on the glasses, to insert the earphones into these little holes. The glasses and earphones are, in fact, synchronized with the vibrator. As soon as the latter begins, the glasses and the membrane of the earphones vibrate in harmony with it, but in the opposite direction. They delay the light and sounds when your time is accelerated, and accelerate them when you are behind. They restore the world to you—without diem you would only have a blurred, chaotic sensation of it Perhaps there will be at times a slight fading effect in your hearing, and it may seem to you that your vision is dimmed. But your senses will adjust very quickly. Nothing will obstruct you and if you judge it safe to show yourself, you may stop the vibrator. One more push on the button will suffice. The haversacks contain provisions, arms, tools, a movie camera, and pieces of rubber cloth to rapidly repair any tear in the “diving suit of time.” That’s what I have named this uniform. The sack will allow you to bring back some objects or small living beings from your explorations.”

  St Menoux was no longer astonished. “You keep saying ‘you,”’ he suddenly remarked. Aren’t you coming with me?”

  “Alas, how could I come?” answered the invalid, his brow darkening.

  He pointed to his stumps. “I can’t even stand.”

  “Well then, all this has not yet been tried?”

  “Yes, by me,” said Annette gaily, as she entered the room. St. Menoux looked at her in astonishment. He would not have thought that she would take an active part in her father’s research. His astonishment awoke his desire and he saw the young woman in a flash as she was, both frail and strong, her body firm and full, tender and radiant.

  “You are so—” he began. He was going to say “so beautiful,” but he was aware that his compliment was also an absurdity. He stopped and blushed.

  “These trials have shown us,” repeated the inventor, “that the voyage in time is accompanied by a voyage in space. But if my apparatus commands the first, the second seems to be determined by desires or unconscious memories. Your experiments will no doubt familiarize you with the course of these displacements rather quickly. When will you go, my dear friend?”

  St Menoux stopped short, not knowing what to answer. He felt the cowardly soul of a guinea pig rise in him. The calm self-assurance of the invalid, instead of calming him, terrified him. The horror he had felt at the account on the radio rose again and overwhelmed him. In all truth, his life did not matter any more to the scientist than the life of the last coolie. To whit terrifying unknown was he committing himself?

  He thought he saw in Essaillon’s eyes an avarice which terrified him and which, because of his silence, seemed to be growing little by little into a menace.

  He turned around, considering the diving suit spread out on the pink marble. In an offhand manner which suited him poorly, he pinched the fabric of a sleeve, feeling it like a tailor. “Not today,” he said sharply, “No, positively not today. I ate too much and especially drank too much. I don’t feel master of myself. I would probably see the future with double vision.”

  He began to laugh, relieved at having got himself off the hook with a joke.

  Excusing himself from his hosts, he strode off into the snow. In the cold fresh air he breathed a sigh of joy like a drowning man who had just been revived.

  3

  St. Menoux had hardly got inside his door when remorse overtook him. Why should he be afraid when Annette, that child, had fearlessly offered herself to the experiments. If there was some danger, wasn’t it worth a risk to undertake this stupendous adventure?

  He reproached himself for having mistrusted his host It was normal that Essaillon should appear impatient to know, normal also that he undertook the difficult experiments without emotion. The prodigious task which he had set for himself was justification enough.

  Peter blamed the alcohol for his mistrust of the scientist and his fear of the moment of action. He slept soundly, waking up before dawn, sneezing in the freezing room.

  He went down to the Bourgnat bar and was happy to find Mr. Michelet there, who helped him to kill time with a new account of his misadventures. The architect, delighted, led him to the other side of the boulevard, to,the foot of his masterpiece, pointing out its virtues in detail.

  The roof was sheathed with tiles glazed in different colors and arranged in a mosaic which showed a cat playing, one paw in the air. Eight black chimneys were topped by china animals—a sparrow as large as a turkey, a bull of the same stature, a bulldog, a pigeon, a rooster, a peacock and a carp. At the four corners of the building were bell towers, each one topped with a copper ball. Some figures sculpted
in the round decorated the facade. A stag hunt was depicted at the level of the second floor. There was a pointed window between the stag and the pack. A row of hunting horns supported the overhanging roof.

  “It’s more modem than acanthus leaves, at least,*’ said Mr. Michelet

  This innovator had only given into tradition for the ornament over the entrance door, three classical heads of Medusa. He had begun a speech on the grace and nobility of the two steps that led to said door when nine o’clock sounded from a nearby bell tower. St. Menoux suddenly deserted the architect

  A half hour later, he rang the bell at No. 7 Racine Street and declared himself ready to begin the experiments.

  At 10:30 A.M. standing in the middle of the laboratory, he buckled on the last strap of the knapsack. Annette, looking somewhat anguished, checked out all of his equipment Tall and thin, clothed in his green attire, he resembled a tree trunk covered with moss. Through his glasses he saw Es-saillon signal “Go.” He pushed the departure button.

  At the moment he pushed, he sneezed. His finger slipped on the button, putting only a little pressure on it. It seemed to him that his eyes and ears detached from his face, as well as his tongue, whose heat fled before him. His nose, swollen from a cold, broke off from his head like a loose tooth. He felt extraordinarily relieved. His feet no longer carried his weight. His body was as light as dust. His head was a bubble.

  He felt himself become porous, invaded by a devouring penetration. This was his last impression. Even the weight of thought left him.

  During the experiments in which Annette had participated, Essaillon had seen his daughter disappear suddenly, leaving the world without a transition. So he guessed that something irregular had happened when before his eyes, St Menoux appeared as a phantom, the outline of his own form. A vertical force stretched this phantom upward, twisted it spirally, shaking him, trying to tear him from the floor where his feet were planted. Each second, he became more tenuous, more transparent.