The Eternal Adam and other stories (34 page)

‘And besides, what’s the use of threats? Is
war with our modern weapons possible? These asphyxiating shells which can be
sent a distance of a hundred miles, these electric flashes, sixty miles long,
which can annihilate a whole army corps at a single blow, these projectiles
loaded with the microbes of plague, cholera, and yellow fever, and which can
destroy a whole nation in a few hours?’

‘We realise that, Mr Bennett,’ the Russian
Ambassador replied. ‘But are we free to do what we like?... Thrust back
ourselves by the Chinese on our eastern frontier, we must, at all costs,
attempt something towards the west... ‘

‘Is that all it is, sir?’ Francis Bennett
replied in reassuring tones – ‘Well! as the proliferation of the Chinese is
getting to be a danger to the world, we’ll bring pressure to bear on the Son of
Heaven. He’ll simply have to impose a maximum birth-rate on his subjects, not
to be exceeded on pain of death! A child too many?... A father less! That will
keep things balanced.

‘And you, sir,’ the director of the
Earth
Herald
continued, addressing the English consul, ‘what can I do to be of
service to you?’

‘A great deal, Mr Bennett,’ that personage
replied. ‘It would be enough for your journal to open a campaign on our
behalf...‘

‘And with what purpose?’

‘Merely to protest against the annexation
of Great Britain by the United States... ‘

‘Merely that!’ Francis Bennett exclaimed.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘An annexation that’s 150 years old already! But
won’t you English gentry ever resign yourselves to the fact that by a just
compensation of events here below, your country has become an American colony?
That’s pure madness! How could your government ever have believed that I should
ever open so antipatriotic a campaign... ‘

‘Mr Bennett, you know that the Monroe
doctrine is all America for the Americans, and nothing more than America, and
not... ‘

‘But England is only one of our colonies,
one of the finest. Don’t count upon our ever consenting to give her up!’

‘You refuse?’...

‘I refuse, and if you insist, we shall make
it a
casus belli,
based on nothing more than an interview with one of
our reporters. ‘

‘So that’s the end.’ The consul was
overwhelmed. ‘The United Kingdom, Canada, and New Britain belong to the
Americans, India to the Russians, and Australia and New Zealand to themselves!
Of all that once was England, what’s left?... Nothing!’

‘Nothing, sir?’ retorted Francis Bennett.
‘Well, what about Gibraltar?’

At that moment the clock struck twelve. The
director of the
Earth Herald,
ending the audience with a gesture, left
the hall, and sat down in a rolling armchair. In a few minutes he had reached
his dining room, half a mile away, at the far end of the office.

The table was laid, and he took his place
at it. Within reach of his hand was placed a series of taps, and before him was
the curved surface of a phonotelephote, on which appeared the dining room of
his home in Paris. Mr and Mrs Bennett had arranged to have lunch at the same
time – nothing could be more pleasant than to be face to face in spite of the
distance, to see one another and talk by means of the phonotelephotic
apparatus.

But the room in Paris was still empty.

‘Edith is late,’ Francis Bennett said to
himself. ‘Oh, women’s punctuality! Everything makes progress, except that. ‘

And after this too just reflection, he
turned on one of the taps.

Like everybody else in easy circumstances
nowadays, Francis Bennett, having abandoned domestic cooking, is one of the
subscribers to the Society for Supplying Food to the Home, which distributes
dishes of a thousand types through a network of pneumatic tubes. This system is
expensive, no doubt, but the cooking is better, and it has the advantage that
it has suppressed that hair-raising race, the cooks of both sexes.

So, not without some regret, Francis
Bennett was lunching in solitude. He was finishing his coffee when Mrs Bennett,
having got back home, appeared in the telephoto screen.

‘Where have you been, Edith dear?’ Francis
Bennett inquired.

‘What?’ Mrs Bennett replied. ‘You’ve
finished?... I must be late, then?... Where have I been? Of course, I’ve been
with my
modiste
... This year’s hats are so bewitching! They’re not hats
at all... they’re domes, they’re cupolas! I rather lost count of time!’

‘Rather, my dear? You lost it so much that
here’s my lunch finished. ‘

‘Well, run along then, my dear... run along
to your work,’ Mrs Bennett replied. ‘I’ve still got a visit to make, to my
modeleur-couturier. ‘

And this
couturier
was no other than
the famous Wormspire, the very man who so judiciously remarked, ‘Woman is only
a question of shape!’

Francis Bennett kissed Mrs Bennett’s cheek
on the telephote screen and went across to the window, where his aerocar was
waiting.

‘Where are we going, sir?’ asked the
aero-coachman.

‘Let’s see. I’ve got time...’ Francis
Bennett replied. ‘Take me to my accumulator works at Niagara.‘

The aero-car, an apparatus splendidly based
on the principle of ‘heavier than air’, shot across space at a speed of about
400 miles an hour. Below him were spread out the towns with their moving
pavements which carry the wayfarers along the streets, and the countryside,
covered, as though by an immense spider’s web, by the network of electric
wires.

Within half an hour, Francis Bennett had
reached his works at Niagara, where, after using the force of the cataracts to
produce energy, he sold or hired it out to the consumers. Then, his visit over,
he returned, by way of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, to Centropolis,
where his aero-car put him down about five o’clock.

The waiting room of the
Earth Herald
was crowded. A careful lookout was being kept for Francis Bennett to return for
the daily audience he gave to his petitioners. They included the capital’s
acquisitive inventors, company promoters with enterprises to suggest – all
splendid, to listen to them. Among these different proposals he had to make a
choice, reject the bad ones, look into the doubtful ones, give a welcome to the
good ones. He soon got rid of those who had only got useless or impracticable
schemes. One of them – didn’t he claim to revive painting, an art which had
fallen into such desuetude that Millet’s
Angelus
had just been sold for
fifteen francs – thanks to the progress of colour photography invented at the
end of the twentieth century by the Japanese, whose name was on everybody’s
lips –Aruziswa-Riochi-Nichome-Sanjukamboz-Kio-Baski-Kû? Another, hadn’t he
discovered the biogene bacillus which, after being introduced into the human
organism, would make man immortal? This one, a chemist, hadn’t he discovered a
new substance. Nihilium, of which a gram would cost only three million dollars?
That one, a most daring physician, wasn’t he claiming that he’d found a remedy
for a cold in the head?

All these dreamers were at once shown out.

A few of the others received a better
welcome, and foremost among them was a young man whose broad brow indicated a
high degree of intelligence.

‘Sir,’ he began, ‘though the number of
elements used to be estimated at seventy-five, it has now been reduced to
three, as no doubt you are aware?"

‘Perfectly,’ Francis Bennett replied.

‘Well, sir, I’m on the point of reducing
the three to one. If I don’t run out of money I’ll have succeeded in three
weeks. ‘

‘And then?’

‘Then, sir, I shall really have discovered
the absolute. ‘

‘And the results of that discovery?’

‘It will be to make the creation of all
forms of matter easy – stone, wood, metal, fibrin... ‘

‘Are you saying you’re going to be able to
construct a human being?’

‘Completely... The only thing missing will
be the soul!’

‘Only that!’ was the ironical reply of Francis
Bennett, who however assigned the young fellow to the scientific editorial
department of his journal.

A second inventor, using as a basis some
old experiments that dated from the nineteenth century and had often been
repeated since, had the idea of moving a whole city in a single block. He
suggested, as a demonstration, the town of Saaf, situated fifteen miles from
the sea: after conveying it on rails down to the shore, he would transform it
into a seaside resort. That would add an enormous value to the ground already
built on and to be built over.

Francis Bennett, attracted by this project,
agreed to take a half share in it.

‘You know, sir,’ said a third applicant,
‘that, thanks to our solar and terrestrial accumulators and transformers, we’ve
been able to equalise the seasons. I suggest doing even better. By converting
into heat part of the energy we have at our disposal and transmitting the heat
to the polar regions we can melt the ice... ‘

‘Leave your plans with me,’ Francis Bennett
replied, ‘and come back in a week. ‘

Finally, a fourth savant brought the news
that one of the questions which had excited the whole world was about to be
solved that very evening.

As is well known, a century ago a daring
experiment made by Dr Nathaniel Faithburn had attracted public attention. A
convinced supporter of the idea of human hibernation – the possibility of
arresting the vital functions and then re-awakening them after a certain time –
he had decided to test the value of the method on himself. After, by a holograph
will, describing the operations necessary to restore him to life a hundred
years later to the day, he had exposed himself to a cold of 172° Centigrade
(278° Fahrenheit) below zero; thus reduced to a mummified state, he had been
shut up in a tomb for the stated period.

Now it was exactly on that very day, July
25th 2889, that the period expired, and Francis Bennett had just received an
offer to proceed in one of the rooms of the
Earth Herald
office with the
resurrection so impatiently waited for. The public could then be kept in touch
with it second by second.

The proposal was accepted, and as the
operation was not to take place until ten that evening, Francis Bennett went to
stretch himself out in an easy chair in the audition room. Then, pressing a
button, he was put into communication with the Central Concert.

After so busy a day, what a charm he found
in the works of our greatest masters, based, as everybody knows, on a series of
delicious harmonico-algebraic formulae!

The room had been darkened, and, plunged
into an ecstatic half-sleep, Francis Bennett could not even see himself. But a
door opened suddenly.

‘Who’s there?’ he asked, touching a
commutator placed beneath his hand.

At once, by an electric effect produced on
the ether, the air became luminous.

‘Oh, it’s you, doctor?’ he asked.

‘Myself,’ replied Dr Sam, who had come to
pay his daily visit (annual subscription). ‘How’s it going?’

‘Fine!’

‘All the better... Let’s see your tongue?’

He looked at it through a microscope.

‘Good... And your pulse?’

He tested it with a pulsograph, similar to
the instruments which record earthquakes.

‘Splendid!... And your appetite?’

‘Ugh!’

‘Oh, your stomach!... It isn’t going too
well, your stomach!... It’s getting old, your stomach is!... We’ll certainly
have to get you a new one!’

‘We’ll see!’ Francis Bennett replied. ‘And
meantime, doctor, you’ll dine with me. ‘

During the meal, phonotelephotic
communication had been set up with Paris. Mrs Bennett was at her table this
time, and the dinner, livened up by Dr Sam’s jokes, was delightful. Hardly was
it over than:

‘When do you expect to get back to
Centropolis, dear Edith?’ asked Francis Bennett.

‘I’m going to start this moment. ‘

‘By tube or aero-train?’

‘By tube. ‘

‘Then you’ll be here?’

‘At eleven fifty-nine this evening. ‘

‘Paris time?’

‘No, no!... Centropolis time. ‘

‘Good-bye then, and above all don’t miss
the tube!’

These submarine tubes, by which one travels
from Paris in 295 minutes, are certainly much preferable to the aero-trains,
which only manage 600 miles an hour.

The doctor had gone, after promising to
return to be present at the resurrection of his colleague Nathaniel Faithburn.
Wishing to draw up his daily accounts, Francis Bennett went into his private
office. An enormous operation, when it concerns an enterprise whose expenditure
rises to 800,000 dollars every day! Fortunately, the development of modern
mechanisation has greatly facilitated this work. Helped by the
piano-electric-computer, Francis Bennett soon completed his task.

It was time. Hardly had he struck the last
key of the mechanical totalisator than his presence was asked for in the
experimental room. He went off to it at once, and was welcomed by a large
cortège of scientists, who had been joined by Dr Sam.