The Napus, page 15
18. Pantruche is an argot term that initially referred to a pantin [puppet] and then, by a mysterious process of association, became to be applied to Paris.
CHAPTER SIX
IN THE GREEN GLOW
As we arrived at the gates of Paris, after a rather morose return journey, in view of the double specter hanging over us of the Napus and the war, the previously-noted orb of green light suddenly doubled in size, and it was as if the eastern sky were aflame with it.
A dull shudder, seemingly issuing from the depths of the earth, shook the vehicles so violently that we thought they might tip over. No one uttered a cry, however, so highly developed was our scientific mentality, in which all the impulses of instinct were opposed by the powerful brake of curiosity. First find out why; then we shall see.
In any case, the knowledge that we had of the German character, the most indelible and deeply-rooted there is, left no doubt; it was the seismic machination described in the first chapter of von Herzius’ Archimedes that was announcing itself.19
In that famous work, the author, concluding that it is possible to produce cataclysms artificially, promised the palm of victory to whichever of two antagonists could make the earth tremble, rivers overflow, storms, tempests and cyclones burst and unleash tidal waves. Many people laughed at the Archimedes, declaring such deliveries incapable of realization, but it is necessary never to laugh at Boche projects, especially in epochs of pacifist propaganda and “intellectual cooperation,” like the one through which we had passed before the arrival of the accursed Napus. There has not been a century since the fourteenth, and even before, when such declarations, blowing from the Pomeranian marshes, the Prussian Rhineland, the cities of the Hanse, Saxony and Bavaria, have not preceded mass risings, savage aggressions, massacres, the burning of towns and forests—in brief, the issue of the furor teutonicus.
That first artificial quake was not immediately followed by another. It had, however, been powerful enough to make the pale troop of the inhabitants of Paris—less battle-hardened and infinitely less polyplastic than us—emerge from their houses in alarm, fearful for one another and suffering on one another’s behalf: parents for children and children for parents; sons and daughters-in-law, no matter what people say, for mothers-in-law, and mothers-in-law for sons- and daughters-in-law; maidservants for their mistresses and mistresses for maidservants..
All those people thus aroused were interrogating the sky, fearful of the green glow and its oscillations—sometimes it shrank, sometimes it expanded—reassuring one another without reason, becoming vainly indignant, swearing that they had finally finished believing in German promises and repentance and the rabble that stood surety for German good faith.
It is claimed that popular movements make history, but that which is incorrect, aberrant, blindly delivered to successive passions and the extravagant tall stories of the press cannot participate in the confection of that cold mosaic of consequences in which each chapter is determined by the stupidities related in the previous one, which is history. In fact, that product of events that have formed, bloodied, enriched and then dispersed, rebloodied and impoverished peoples, shows a few individuals acting on the surface and in the depths—and these figures dominate the fact, dominated themselves by a destiny that the sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ has transformed into Providence. Such, at least, is my humble opinion, to the extent that the history of the human body through its organs has not obscured in me the history of nations through the inert multitudes and their captains of every sort.
As in the first days after the Napus, people came to the Foundation—in which we had reintegrated out laboratories—in search of information about the green phenomenon, the earthquake and the degree of dread permissible in the wake of that first warning.
So long as people had hoped that the war might be limited to a struggle between the dollar and the analgo—a battle, financial or otherwise between Americans and Germans—hostilities had been imagined in a so-called objective spirit. Now, everyone took account of the fact that his own skin and those of his nearest and dearest were at stake, and that the fatherland was in peril again. Proclaimed an hour after the seismic shock, the state of siege was slightly reassuring, but utterly terrifying from another viewpoint. It was reassuring in promising the immediate execution of every spy caught in the act, but terrifying in threatening the same punishment to anyone diminishing public morale by inconsiderate speech. Stuck on top of the still-fresh posters of general mobilization, followed by general immobilization, large placards instructed everyone, in brief and imperious terms, to keep quiet and be wary. Thus, the attitude of the docile public was one of silence and suspicion.
Our first concern, on disembarking from the vehicle and resuming our respective duties had been the appointment of Aliette’s successor. The choice fell upon Cortenaz, a good scientist, but horribly timid, who was known as “the hatpin” by virtue of being tall and thin. He was afflicted by a verbal tic that caused him to reply: “Good, good, that’s all right,” to any proposal addressed to him.
“My dear boss”—or “My dear Master” or “My dear friend”—“I can’t come to the Foundation tomorrow, I’m marrying my sister.”
“Good, good, that’s all right.”
“Chief, I’d be very grateful if you’d increased my salary by so much a month.…”
“Good, good, that’s all right.”
His wife was very pretty and fickle, as un-Aristotelian as could be; it was rumored that when she said: “I’m going to see my lover,” he replied: “Good, good, that’s all right.”
This innocent mania had often made him recognize imaginary debts to the butcher, the baker and others, which dishonest maidservants submitted to his memory: “Monsieur will remember that he owes such-and-such a sum to the butcher.…” “Good, good, that’s all right.”
One of his friends, who had involved himself in a shady deal, having need of capital, asked him point-blank for a hundred thousand francs. Cortenaz bound himself by a “Good, good, that’s all right” pronounced in front of witnesses.
The emotion caused him by Ailette’s succession caused him to inscribe, in the interval between “Good, good, that’s all rights” a new formula, “Put it there,” which he applied even when his interlocutor had not brought him anything.
Less than an hour after the inhabitants had emerged from their dwellings, they suddenly went back inside. The rumor had gone around that the German plan consisted of simulating an earthquake shortly before an aerial bombardment; thus the hecatomb would be worse in urban areas.
Meanwhile, New York telephoned us the news that immense bankruptucies were succeeding one another in the United States at a rate of ten per minute, and that a large Boche ship, flying the Dutch flag, had just inundated the States with incredible quantities of analgos. People were snapping up those farcical bills, thus furnishing Germany with fabulous sums for the fabrication of its Archimedisms. In Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, London and Marseilles—not to mention Lyon and Clermont-Ferrand—we had to expect the worst.
My tour of duty appointed me to take this news to Cortenaz. Polyplasts intimidated him more than everyone else, because of their complex ethnicity, inasmuch as he had to deal with several interlocutors at the same time. I discovered him in his office, consulting a cinetext with colored films, which represented an earthquake in Colorado in 2219. On seeing me come in he raised his pale face, which sketched a slight embarrassed smile. I brought him up to date with the American news.
“Good, good,” he said, “that’s all right.”
Those ritual words were pronounced with a desire so intense and so profound that the conversation stopped there, and stood there petrified. At the same time, Eustache arrived, in a state of agitation, holding an ugly-looking diagram.
“All right, put it there.”
But Eustache had perceived the fatal book and, instead of “putting it there,” he flew into a violent rage, which was nothing but displaced fear.
“So, Monsieur le Directeur, by keeping such works here, bringing them into your office and consulting them, you’re exposing yourself and all of us to the risk of aphanasia! Is it necessary to repeat to you, once again, that the statistics are clear, that the ascension of the Napus is in direct proportion to the recent publication of a hundred new cinebooks in the countries afflicted by the scourge. Now the scourges of war and the Archimedes have been added to that of death without remains, and here you are, newly appointed, you, the pilot of the Foundation, setting the worst example and risking the disappearance of all your collaborators!”
“Good, good, that’s all right,” moaned Cortenaz, trembling all over. He would have liked to close the cinebook again, but that was impossible as long as the earthquake lasted, reproduced with an astonishing exactitude in a tenth of the time. In Colorado there had been four seismic shocks over a duration of ten hours; the book had been on the desk for half a hour. Cortenaz broke into a sweat. Eustache was only restrained from his desire to hurl himself upon the culpable book and annihilate it by his dread of summoning the Napus upon himself.
Brooom, patabooom, grooom, hidigrooom, longpatapom, bobom, broom, bom.…
All three of us were thrown to the floor, along with the clock, several bookshelves, a bust of Ailette, five recorders of seismic shocks, sunspots, spots on Jupiter and cyclones in the Îles de la Sonde.
We got up as best we could, observing with pleasure that we had not broken or dislocated anything. The clock had stopped, but by a marvelous circumstance that one might call “homeopathic” that earthquake in Colorado, which had not suffered any damage, continued to unfurl its episodes concurrently with those of its Parisian colleague.
“It’s the end of everything!” howled Eustache, who seemed to have lost his mind. Although he was an unbeliever he threw himself on his knees and recited a prayer to Saint Barbara, Saint Helena and Saint Mary Magdalen, which, since time immemorial, has been recited by the men and women of Provence during storms. It is necessary to add, by way of excuse, that he had had a Marseillaise nurse.
Our comrades came running from all directions, demanding instructions. The Archimedic earthquake had done what Sidoine had demanded in vain, stopping all the electromagnetic and other apparatus in the Foundation. The engineers responsible for repairs, always at their posts and ready for action, hesitated over proceeding with readjustments that might perhaps be undone in five minutes if the earthquake recommenced.
For want of electric light, we had a so-called reserve of rosy emanations of elephantium, obtained by the distillation of bison horns treated with the subnitrate of colloidal triniethane of eurhythmine. They had the side-effect, however, of provoking a tendency to drowsiness by bulbary action, which Sidoine saw as a kind of prenapus.
It was reported that a great deal of damage had been done in Ménilmontant and Père-Lachaise, through which the fault-line passed; that numerous houses had collapsed in La Chapelle and La Villette; that there had been deaths in considerable quantity; and that the orb of green light in the eastern sky had been further augmented.
For the timid Cortenaz, that was a terrible debut in his new functions. After two resounding “Good, good, all rights,” he slumped as if prostrated by terror in front of his devil of a cinetext, on which the drama of Colorado was fading away to completion.
Giving up on the possibility of obtaining methodical instruction from the distressed director, the Polyplasts, including your humble servant, took the initiative and gave orders in his stead.
My first preoccupation had been to make sure that my valiant Henriette had not come to any harm and that the costly instruments in our cytology laboratory had not been damaged or put beyond use.
Let the Germans come to talk to us about Archimedes again! All our directors of works, surprised by the event accompanying the disembarkation from the vehicles, had remained at their posts without flinching, receiving messages and replying to them, communicating with the Ministers and the Royal Palace, where a cabinet meeting of the greatest importance was being held without interruption. The new German malice once again federated the people of Europe against the enemy of the human species.
Unfortunately, a few hours later, just as we were regaining our confidence, four cases of the Napus occurred simultaneously within a radius of two kilometers, one of which was at the Foundation. There were thirty more in Paris alone, in the quarters where, for lack of electricity and disposable phosphorescence, the pink light of elephantium had been deployed in the aftermath of the earthquake. Sidoine’s thesis seemed to be victorious.
The night passed in fear, but without further shocks. As long as the magnetic “geotome,” or “earth-cutter” invented by those blackguards did not cut through our 7, and we did not suffer any “fringe” aftershocks, we were almost certainly safe. But there was still a risk, and the annihilation of the Arostotle Foundation, in the present circumstances, would have been an irreparable misfortune. Our fellow citizens were aware of that. Every city in France and also abroad asked us for confirmation that the catastrophe had not reached us.
From Berlin in Germany, with which communications could not be completely severed, a simple warning reached us by ultra-rapid wireless: “Soon!” That was, in fact, the big question-mark—knowing whether the Boche had discovered a means of orientating their earthquakes in a given direction, over a particular distance. We discovered subsequently that they had made a mistake in operating their controls, and that the giant cutter had gone through the Père-Lachaise quarter instead of ours. In addition, the cost of the maneuver and the risks run by its executors—every artificial quake killing fifty trigger-men and costing two billion analgos—rendered a recommencement impossible. We did not know these reassuring facts at the time however, and the pessimists concluded that there would be an indefinite renewal of the first ordeal.
The day after this excitement, we learned from the newspapers, with joyful astonishment, that the Boche quake had been stopped dead by a counter-quake devised at the Aristotle several years before by its new director, the celebrated Cortenaz. A headline proclaimed in large print:
PARIS SAVED BY THE ARISTOTLE.
The reporter related that the scientist in question, with a exceptional power of realization, compared with whom Murmelthier was nothing but a child, had directed the counter-Archimedes with an unprecedented sang-froid, and that we were proposing to set fire, at a distance, to Berlin, Dresden and Hamburg within an interval that would not exceed forty-eight hours. There was no mention of the napusification of Ailette, nor of the Napus in general, and we concluded that a benevolent censorship had already been imposed on the gossip of the press.
That same day, Henriette and I, now officially engaged, set out with the commission charged with assessing the damage to Ménilmontant, Père-Lachaise and other places. I had us added to it quite easily, even though it was not our turn to go out. I simply went to see Papa Cortenaz in his office, to whom I explained my plan, and who replied with the liberating: “Good, good, that’s all right.”
As I came out I crossed paths with the beautiful Madame Cortenaz, who darted an indefinable glance at me; she was said to be fond of Polyplasts. She was very pretty, but I had sworn to be faithful to Henriette—who had, after all, discovered the fourth magnetic center of the cell and rendered sterling service to cytology.
A first agreeable observation on leaving the Underground was that the damnable green glow was greatly diminished. What remained of it, amalgamated with a pale late autumn sunlight, diffused a light akin to an eclipse, quite appropriate to the day after a catastrophe. This time the inhabitants remained inside their houses, brooding their anxiety. A few, however, reassured by reading the newspapers, stuck their noses outside again and laughed as the alarm passed. Some of them insinuated that the earthquake attributed to the malignity of the Germans had been purely fortuitous. Others, it is true, claiming to be better-informed, announced that there was worse to come, and demanded the conclusion of an immediate, even separate, peace. About a dozen of the latter, mostly nationalized Turks or Bulgars, were arrested and shot.
The cracks, evidently deep, began in the middle of the Rue de Ménilmontant—one of the oldest quarters in Paris—and broadened out on reaching Père-Lachaise. A divergent branch ran from there toward La Chapelle and La Villette. Another, much less significant, extended in the direction of Saint-Ouen. The most formidable spectacle, however, was the great necropolis. A little more than a third of the graves, and the entire Napus quarter, the surviving wardens told us, had fallen into a gulf in the form of a crevasse fifty meters wide and a hundred meters deep. The rest had slipped or folded up, deforming the ground and lifting it up, while thousands and thousands of skeletons were emerging among the broken tombstones and the uprooted trees.
A spectacle of horror! They were the bones of individuals of all sizes, fixed in attitudes of fear—which we attributed to them—and gestures of panic. Tibias fled, metacarpal implored, and the “lanterns” composing the faces expressed, by contrast, hideous laughter. That debris, those fleshless remains—some, even worse, not completely so—seemed to have been rejected by peaceful death into a second existence full of tumult and immodesty. Shrouds fluttered in the gentle breeze like giant butterflies. All that breakage, suggestive of noise, was contradicted by a solemn silence, in which there was a suggestion of reproach.
Old women and pimps from the neighborhood, the former out of compassion and the latter with a vague hope of pillage, exchanged their impressions.
“So long as it doesn’t bring bad luck to see all that.”
