The Eternal Adam and other stories (35 page)

Nathaniel Faithburn’s body is there, on the
bier, placed on trestles in the centre of the room.

The telephoto is switched on. The whole
world will be able to follow the various phases of the operation.

The coffin is opened... Nathaniel
Faithburn’s body is taken out ... It is still like a mummy, yellow, hard. dry.
It sounds like wood ... It is submitted to heat... electricity... No result...
It’s hypnotised... It’s exposed to suggestion... Nothing can overcome that
ultra-cataleptic state.

‘Well, Dr Sam?’ asks Francis Bennett.

The doctor leans over the body: he examines
it very carefully... He introduces into it, by means of a hypodermic, a few
drops of the famous Brown-Séquard elixir, which is once again in fashion ...
The mummy is more mummified than ever.

‘Oh well,’ Dr Sam replies, ‘I think the
hibernation has lasted too long... ‘

‘Oh!’

‘And Nathaniel Faithburn is dead. ‘

‘Dead?’

‘As dead as anybody could be!’

‘And how long has he been dead?’

‘How long?’... Dr Sam replies. ‘But... a
hundred years – that is to say, since he had the unhappy idea of freezing
himself for pure love of science!’

‘Then,’ Francis Bennett comments, ‘that’s a
method which still needs to be perfected!’

‘Perfected is the word,’ replies Dr Sam, while the scientific
commission on hibernation carries away its funereal bundle.

Followed by Dr Sam, Francis Bennett
regained his room, and as he seemed very tired after so very lull a day, the
doctor advised him to take a bath before going to bed.

‘You’re quite right, doctor... That will
refresh me...‘

‘It will, Mr Bennett, and if you like I’ll
order one on my way out...’

‘There’s no need for that, doctor. There’s
always a bath all ready in the office, and I needn’t even have the trouble of
going out of my room to take it. Look, simply by touching this button, that
bath will start moving, and you’ll see it come along all by itself with the
water at a temperature of sixty-five degrees!’

Francis Bennett had just touched the
button. A rumbling sound began, got louder, increased... Then one of the doors
opened, and the bath appeared, gliding along on its rails...

Heavens! While Dr Sam veils his face,
little screams of frightened modesty arise from the bath...

Brought to the office by the transatlantic tube half an hour before,
Mrs Bennett was inside it.

Next day, July 26th 2889, the director of
the
Earth Herald
recommenced his tour of twelve miles across his office.
That evening, when his totalisator had been brought into action, it was at
250,000 dollars that it calculated the profits of that day – 50,000 more than
the day before.

A fine job, that of a journalist at the end
of the twenty-ninth century!

‘Take care!’ cried my conductor, ‘there’s a step!’

Safely descending the step thus indicated
to me, I entered a vast room, illuminated by blinding electric reflectors, the
sound of our feet alone breaking the solitude and silence of the place.

Where was I? What had I come there to do?
Who was my mysterious guide? Questions unanswered. A long walk in the night,
iron doors opened and reclosed with a clang, stairs descending, it seemed to
me, deep into the earth – that is all I could remember. I had, however, no time
for thinking.

‘No doubt you are asking yourself who I
am?’ said my guide: ‘Colonel Pierce, at your service. Where are you? In
America, at Boston – in a station.‘

‘A station?’

‘Yes, the starting-point of the
"Boston to Liverpool Pneumatic Tubes Company".’

And, with an explanatory gesture, the
colonel pointed out to me two long iron cylinders, about a metre and a half in
diameter, lying upon the ground a few paces off.

I looked at these two cylinders, ending on
the right in a mass of masonry, and closed on the left with heavy metallic
caps, from which a cluster of tubes were carried up to the roof; and suddenly I
comprehended the purpose of all this.

Had I not, a short time before, read, in an
American newspaper, an article describing this extraordinary project for
linking Europe with the New World by means of two gigantic submarine tubes? An
inventor had claimed to have accomplished the task; and that inventor, Colonel
Pierce. I had before me.

In thought I realised the newspaper
article.

Complaisantly the journalist entered into
the details of the enterprise. He stated that more than 3,000 miles of iron
tubes, weighing over 13,000. 000 tons, were required, with the number of ships
necessary, for the transport of this material – 200 ships of 2,000 tons, each
making thirty-three voyages. He described this Armada of science bearing the
steel to two special vessels, on board of which the ends of the tubes were
joined to each other, and incased in a triple netting of iron, the whole
covered with a resinous preparation to preserve it from the action of the
seawater.

Coming at once to the question of working,
he filled the tubes – transformed into a sort of pea-shooter of interminable
length – with a series of carriages, to be carried with their travellers by
powerful currents of air, in the same way that despatches are conveyed
pneumatically round Paris.

A parallel with the railways closed the
article, and the author enumerated with enthusiasm the advantages of the new
and audacious system. According to him, there would be, in passing through
these tubes, a suppression of all nervous trepidation, thanks to the interior
surface being of finely polished steel; equality of temperature secured by
means of currents of air, by which the heat could be modified according to the
seasons; incredibly low fares, owing to the cheapness of construction and
working expenses – forgetting, or waving aside, all considerations of the
question of gravitation and of wear and tear.

All that now came back to my mind.

So, then, this ‘Utopia’ had become a
reality, and these two cylinders of iron at my feet passed thence under the
Atlantic and reached to the coast of England!

In spite of the evidence, I could not bring
myself to believe in the thing having been done. That the tubes had been laid I
could not doubt; but that men could travel by this route – never!

‘Was it not impossible even to obtain a
current of air of that length?’ – I expressed that opinion aloud.

‘Quite easy, on the contrary!’ protested
Colonel Pierce; ‘to obtain it, all that is required is a great number of steam
fans similar to those used in blast furnaces. The air is driven by them with a
force which is practically unlimited, propelling it at the speed of 1,800
kilometres an hour – almost that of a cannon-ball! – so that our carriages with
their travellers, in the space of two hours and forty minutes, accomplish the
journey between Boston and Liverpool.’

‘Eighteen hundred kilometres an hour!’ I
exclaimed.

‘Not one less. And what extraordinary
consequences arise from such a rate of speed! The time at Liverpool being four
hours and forty minutes in advance of ours, a traveller starting from Boston at
nine o’clock in the morning, arrives in England at 3.54 in the afternoon. Isn’t
that a journey quickly made? In another sense, on the contrary, our trains, in
this latitude, gain over the sun more than 900 kilometres an hour, beating that
planet hand over hand: quitting Liverpool at noon, for example, the traveller
will reach the station where we now are at thirty-four minutes past nine in the
morning – that is to say, earlier than he started! Ha! ha! I don’t think one
can travel quicker than
that!’

I did not know what to think. Was I talking
with a madman? – or must I credit these fabulous theories, in spite of the
objections which rose in my mind?

‘Very well, so be it!’ I said. ‘I will
admit that travellers may take this mad-brained route, and that you can obtain
this incredible speed. But, when you have got this speed, how do you check it?
When you come to a stop, everything must be shattered to pieces!’

‘Not at all,’ replied the colonel,
shrugging his shoulders. ‘Between our tubes – one for the out, the other for
the home journey – consequently worked by currents going in opposite directions
– a communication exists at every joint. When a train is approaching, an
electric spark advertises us of the fact; left to itself, the train would
continue its course by reason of the speed it had acquired; but, simply by the
turning of a handle, we are able to let in the opposing current of compressed
air from the parallel tube, and, little by little, reduce to nothing the final
shock of stopping. But what is the use of all these explanations? Would not a trial
be a hundred times better?’

And, without waiting for an answer to his
questions, the colonel pulled sharply a bright brass knob projecting from the
side of one of the tubes: a panel slid smoothly in its grooves, and in the
opening left by its removal I perceived a row of seats, on each of which two
persons might sit comfortably side by side.

‘The carriage!’ exclaimed the colonel.
‘Come in.’

I followed him without offering any
objection, and the panel immediately slid back into its place.

By the light of an electric lamp in the
roof I carefully examined the carriage I was in.

Nothing could be more simple: a long
cylinder, comfortably upholstered, along which some fifty armchairs, in pairs,
were ranged in twenty-five parallel ranks. At either end a valve regulated the
atmospheric pressure, that at the farther end allowing breathable air to enter
the carriage, that in front allowing for the discharge of any excess beyond a
normal pressure.

After spending a few moments on this
examination, I became impatient.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘are we not going to
start?’

‘Going to start?’ cried the colonel. ‘We
have
started!’

Started – like that – without the least
jerk, was it possible? I listened attentively, trying to detect a sound of some
kind that might have guided me.

If we had really started – if the colonel
had not deceived me in talking of a speed of 1,800 kilometres an hour – we must
already be far from any land, under the sea; above our heads the huge,
foam-crested waves; even at that moment, perhaps – taking it for a monstrous
sea-serpent of an unknown kind – whales were battering with their powerful
tails our long, iron prison!

But I heard nothing but a dull rumble,
produced, no doubt, by the passage of our carriage, and, plunged in boundless
astonishment, unable to believe in the reality of all that had happened to me,
I sat silently, allowing the time to pass.

At the end of about an hour, a sense of
freshness upon my forehead suddenly aroused me from the torpor into which I had
sunk by degrees.

I raised my hand to my brow: it was moist.

Moist! Why was that? Had the tube burst
under pressure of the waters – a pressure which could not but be formidable,
since it increases at the rate of ‘an atmosphere’ every ten metres of depth?
Had the ocean broken in upon us?

Fear seized upon me. Terrified, I tried to
call out – and – and I found myself in my garden, generously sprinkled by a
driving rain, the big drops of which had awakened me. I had simply fallen
asleep while reading the article devoted by an American journalist to the
fantastic projects of Colonel Pierce – who, also, I much fear, has only
dreamed.

Zartog Sofr-Ai-Sr – meaning ‘Doctor, third
male representative of the hundred and first generation in the Sofr Family’ – was
slowly following the principal street of Basidra, the capital of the
Hars-Iten-Schu – otherwise known as ‘The Empire of the Four Seas’.

Four seas, indeed: the Tubélone or
northern, the Ehone or southern, the Spone or eastern, and the Mérone or
western. They bounded that vast irregularly shaped country, whose most remote
points – to use the means of reckoning familiar to the reader – lay
respectively in longitude 14°E and 72°W, and in latitude 54°N and 55°S.
^[v]

 As for the size of these seas, how was it
to be calculated, even approximately, for they all merged together, so that a
seaman leaving any one of their shores and always following a straight course
was bound to reach the shore diametrically opposite? For nowhere on the surface
of the globe did there exist any land other than the Hars-Iten-Schu.

Sofr walked slowly, partly because it was
very warm: the torrid season was beginning, and on Basidra, situated on the
edge of the Spone-Schu, or Eastern Sea, less than 20°N of the Equator, a
terrible cataract of rays was falling from the sun, then almost in the zenith.

But not only lassitude and the heat but
also the weight of his thoughts slowed the step of Sofr, the savant Zartog. As
he wiped his forehead with a heedless hand he recalled the session held the
previous evening, when so many eloquent orators, among whom he had the honour
of being counted, had magnificently celebrated the hundred and ninety-fifth
anniversary of their empire’s foundation.