The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3) Page 11

  “The wretch!” Théophraste muttered. But his insult was not for the braided dandy, nor for the government that had installed him, so young and inexperienced in that lucrative command. No, his anger surpassed that. It was directed at the true guilty party of that tortured society, ruined by utopia, already brought back to the inequality of the classes, the inertia of the weak and the avidity of profiteers. It was directed at the only man who could, with a gesture of his hairy finger, stop the tempest and return the social sea to its placid level: Tornada!

  Did he not have it in his power? Théophraste had observed the effects of prodigious rays—yesterday’s discovery—which prevented the deflagration of explosives at a distance, stopping the murderous voices of big guns. Could he not make use of them in these fratricidal struggles? Why did he leave men their engines of death? Why, sheltered by his intangible forces, did he retrench himself in criminal indifference? Was it to satisfy, still and for always, his humanitarian pride, or was it to aliment his operating theaters and reestablish the dying in life?

  Théophraste had never felt the toxicity of Tornada’s benefits as much as he did on that cloud-laden morning, which was now transporting the rumors of battle more distinctly. He reflected for some time, after the regiment had passed by, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk. Then he went into the gardens that had been closed for two years.

  Oh, what he found there did not reduce either his sadness or his rancor!

  Nothing any longer remained of the pleasant order that had once charmed him. It was a spectacle of dilapidations and profanations. Nothing remained of the magnificent trees but a few trunks supporting roofs made of sheet metal and bitumen-coated cardboard, beneath which ranged open air dormitories. Soon insufficient to shelter the innumerable host of mingled lunatics and political enemies, people had been content to lie down further away, on the ground, on heaps of straw or hay, rapidly transformed into dung-heaps, which still bore the imprints of those who had used them as beds. Around them was a litter of paper, detritus, broken glass and rusty utensils, the vestiges of an atrocious detention. What savage scenes, what crimes, must have unfolded there?

  Lapastille hastened his steps, shivering with revolt and pity. When he arrived at the principal fountain, though, before the broken statues and, to his left, the burned-out palace, already invaded by parasitic vegetation, he no longer had anything but disgust for his fellows.

  “The vandals! The butchers! And I would have reserved Uncle Louis’ collections for them? Oh no! Enough good deeds! Others can take on the task of keeping Beauty for them!”

  He went on, his anger reinforced by the spectacle of the Medici fountain similarly ravaged. He was about to go out into the Boulevard Saint-Michel when a howling stampede immobilized him behind the gate. Sabers drawn, striking blindly, soldiers were pursuing an innocent crowd, channeling them into the gardens. One man, holding his gashed cheek, collapsed in front of him. Théophraste picked him up and propped him up against the wall beside the gate.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Something good, it seemed,” said the man, through his blood. “The Fleur-de-lys, it’s said, not far away—that way, toward the Opéra. So we’d come out, stupidly, to take a look…when the Eglantines arrived. They were afraid of an attack from the rear, someone said…but then, it’s always the poor that suffer.” He spat out a tooth. “It’s time it was finished—if only one could die!”

  The unanimous redemption! To have done with the company of men! Nothing soothed it, not even the curiosity of a unique epoch.”

  It was, however, the attraction of the drama that pushed Théophraste to forget what he owed his family and to go out imprudently on to the boulevard, now freed of its myrmidons, who had departed in the direction of the Châtelet. Half-reassured by the distance of the explosions, which were knocking down walls even so, he reached the Pont Saint-Michel. There was no human presence there either, but on the far side of the Seine, in the Place de l’Hôtel-Dieu, which was before his eyes, there was an activity that interested him prodigiously.

  The space framed by Notre-Dame, with its broken towers, the hospital and the intact Prefecture of Police had become a sanitary center. Immense green aerial transports, in the form of helicopters—which gave them the ability to take off and land in a restricted space, were stationed there with their wings folded.

  Around those monsters a multitude of small airplanes, similar colored, was palpitating, taking away the casualties of the battle. They were hovering momentarily, waiting their turn to land, loading up their booty and then departing again immediately. A numerous white-clad personnel was carrying out the boarding, and, even though he was some distance away, Théophraste could tell that it was enslaved by an intransigent discipline.

  He was initially astonished by that organization in the open air. Did not the nearby hospital offer the shelter of its huge wards, its science and its physicians? On reflection, though, and even more so on noticing that a cable extended at head height encircled the field where the wounded were being picked up, he realized that it was Tornada’s doing, and that the half-mad genius was tranquilly taking possession of the wounded under the protection of his fluid forces.

  “He never misses an opportunity!”

  Confronted by an organization by which he had so long been impassioned, Théophraste would have been pleased to cross the barrier in order to observe improvement, recognize faces and see his successor in action. Thus, the workman regards the construction-site that he has quit. But he knew that the boundary was inviolable, and that a discharge would flatten anyone who approached it. He therefore turned away, following the quays to the left, toward the Tuileries, which were no longer anything but a sinister mass, and then the Pont de la Concorde, occupied by a squadron of red cavalrymen guarding an artillery battery.

  Behind the troops, a few hundred individuals tracked, pursued and beaten by the police but having decided nevertheless to flee along the open Boulevard Saint-Germain, had gathered together. They were listening to the battle engaged in the neighborhood of the Opéra, the great boulevards and the Madeleine, with a tidal ebb and flow in the direction of the Champs-Élysées. They were watching the swirling cloud of small green aircraft in the sky, and their sudden plunges, like birds of prey, to pick up the wounded brought to the Place de la Concorde and then taking off again to ferry them to the Hôtel-Dieu. Other aircraft—warplanes—were populating the sky, but they were red or white and paid no attention to the former. A convention kept Tornada outside the parties; it was known that he had the power to annihilate the world if he were ever attacked.

  The cannons had fallen silent. They were now only fighting with grenades and machine-guns in narrow streets. Théophraste moved stealthily, listening.

  “He’s quite a fellow, even so!” said a man shaking a batrachian head.

  But another, advancing a prognathous muzzle, said: “Possibly—but a blackguard nevertheless. Such as you see me, Comrade, I’ve been cleared out of the trenches by him…but if I could bloody Tornada...”

  “He’s worse than a murderer!” approved a thin woman with short-cropped hair. “His inventions, his serum, were made for our misfortune!”

  “You’re right, girl!” proffered a man in a maroon smock. “What good is his boutique of monkeys and pigs to us, if we’ve got nothing in the larder to eat?”

  But a tall fellow clad in a pale gray summer jacket with the collar turned up, from which a nose like a stork’s beak emerged equipped with a lorgnon with broken lenses, raised a doctoral voice. He must have been hoping for a reactionary triumph in order to dare to say: “Pardon me, my friend, pardon me! In the name of scientific truth I must protest. Tornada is an exceptional being, a genius, a seed-bed of ideas and realization. It’s not him who’s reduced us to starvation, it’s the communist hydra. Damn it, go into exile if you’re so keen to have something to eat. There are unlimited regions to exploit elsewhere in the world. Anyway, we’ll soon have no more need of vile nourishment. Don’t you know
? It’s been published in the newspapers, though. Well, know that a milligram of his alimentary substratum, quintessenced by ultra-violet rays, is sufficient to maintain a kilo of human flesh. How much do you weigh, my friend?”

  “Before, I weighed in the hundreds, but now I’m down to sixty-six. I’ve got a stomach you could make pleats with!” the maroon smock joked, darkly.

  “Sixty-six milligrams of substratum, wrapped up like a pinhead in gluten, would be your daily ration, then. With sixty-seven, you’d begin to get fat. With a hundred, you’d get back to your old weight. And Tornada can manufacture thousands of tons every day, enough to nourish the world! He’s making arrangements to do it. What do you say to that? It’s the pill predicted by Berthelot! Isn’t it admirable?”

  “Perhaps it is admirable, but it’ll be the death of the bistro!” the man with the stomach estimated, sadly.

  The advertiser of the substratum had been recognized, however. A plumber, who was his neighbor named him: Servières, a member of the Institut. Another scientist, a small-scale rival of Tornada! An agent of starvation! Hatred welled up against him.

  The plumber extended a dirty paw. “So you’re for the Superman?”

  “I’m suffering, as you are, but I admire him.”

  “A jack of all trades, good for none! It’s him that it’s necessary to demolish. Why don’t the Fleur-de-lys and the Eglantines, instead of bashing one another, join forces against him?”

  “He has the intangible force, my friend.”

  “So you say, Servières. But if we went at him all at once, as at the Front, we’d son see whether that wouldn’t make mincemeat of him and whether he can resurrect himself.” The plumber sniggered.

  “The proletariat is speaking through your mouth, Comrade! This Institut puppet is just one of Tornada’s pawns!” said a hairy orator of public meetings, a rabble-rouser and spreader of hatred. Gesticulating forcefully, he continued to rant.

  Anticipating a brawl, Théophraste moved away.

  It was as well that he did; as soon as he had distanced himself from the furious group, a shell fired by the Fleurs-de-lys at the artillery battery spotted by the white aircraft, missing its target, exploded in their midst. The accuser, the accused and the listeners were blasted into pieces.

  The monstrousness of the carnage was displayed in many frightful details. One citizen, gashed in the belly, fled, clutching the entrails scattered in his blouse. A woman, suddenly going mad, sketched a dance in front of the body of her quartered child. Another pushed back her eye, which was hanging out.

  Unscathed, but as livid as the victims, Théophraste hid his face. At that moment, an arm gripped his own.

  “What a broth! Funny, isn’t it?”

  He shivered.

  Oh, that falsetto, those fluttering eyelids, that vast fleece tucked into the gray blouse, in order that no one would recognize its legendary possessor! The Satan of our era!

  “Don’t you think it’s funny?” Tornada repeated.

  “I find it abominable, Monsieur! Théophraste exploded, pulling his arm away brutally. “What! You dare to come here, among these poor people? Didn’t you hear them, then?”

  “Yes, very clearly. What do you expect? Gratitude doesn’t flow in the streets...”

  “Nor in the hovels into which you force them, Monsieur!”

  “Oh! You call me Monsieur and vous now? And you talk about hovels? What a way to behave! Wouldn’t you like to come back to old Nada right away, and call him tu like a brother? What grievances do you have against me, for a start? Why did you leave me? Why haven’t you come back to see me? Why is that noggin refrigerated? Speak—I’m listening.”

  Théophraste’s only response was to indicate the carnage, the result of his old friend’s humanitarian error.

  But he scientist shrugged his shoulders. “For that? It’s for that? For those cuts and bruises? You don’t know, then, what I’m going to make of those bones and that mashed meat, no matter how little they bring me. That’s true, in fact, you don’t know. I’ve got a new trick in my bag now, old Phraste. I put the dead back together now, when they bring them to me within twelve hours. Yes, the dead. One step, ten steps, a hundred steps into the world beyond—that no longer stops me. On your way, Reaper, on your way! I resuscitate them, better than the Other before me, the one who worked the trick with a fellow named Lazarus!”

  He cracked his knuckles. Théophraste expected puns, the fatal accompaniment of his excitement. One might have thought that the man could only agitate his glory by belittling it with vulgarities. Or would he try to reclaim his friend by means of jokes?

  “Don’t worry, old Phraste. That Servières, dislocated before your eyes, will soon be rethroned at the Institut among his brethren, the Aliboron,14 and I’ll make him a gift of another nose into the bargain! The plumber will be reassembled, all the more brilliantly, for sure, because I’ve reassembled him. That brave man will recover honorable entrails, in the latest fashion. And the others, all the others to come, will resume their lives in a society maintained by the substratum! My substratum, which will keep them going, on and on...”

  “You’re making my head spin!” Théophraste complained, torn between the emotion of that fantastic genius and the fear of what he might hear next in favor of human pullulation—for one does not transgress the laws of life so easily, he thought. What would come of this new enlargement of destiny?

  “Don’t move!” Tornada ordered. “Wait for me here. I’ve had the gunfire rectified, and you’re safe, since I’m here. A quick glance at my recuperation services, and I’m all yours.”

  He bounded across the space cleared by the explosion. His small airplanes had landed in the Place de la Concorde, and the mutes cut through the barrage of red cavalrymen without meeting any resistance, running to pick up the dead and the dying. They placed them, one by one, in oblong boxes, like the sarcophagi in the clinic, which they drew away on carts in order to load them into the airplanes. Tornada slipped into the crowd, coming and going, running around, gesticulating orders, and roaring them at the same time, as if he could make himself heard by his personnel by other means than signs.

  “No, you triple idiot! Can’t you see that that arm belongs to this corpse? Pick this up for me! Take that to number five! Bring the arm from the five here!... And you, over there...yes, you…load this corpse on to the twelve…don’t worry about the eye...I can replace that!”

  His harvest complete and his airplanes departed, delighted and fatigued, cracking his knuckles, he came back to Lapastille.

  “Are you coming, old Phraste?”

  “Where to?” said the painter, hesitantly, urged by a secret hope to follow him.

  “To the center. Come on, You’ll see...”

  A little monoplane with golden helices marked with a green T was waiting in the Rue de Bourgogne. Tornada installed himself in it and sat the painter behind him, recommending that he strap himself in securely. A simple pressure on a button deployed the wings; another caused them to beat toward the sky.

  At a height of a hundred meters the apparatus had no more to do than allow itself to glide. A strange sensation! Without protection against the air, suffocating. Théophraste closed his eyes during the bare minute that the vertiginous flight lasted, as far as the Place de l’Hôtel-Dieu. The danger of the cable having been avoided by the vertical plunge, the landing was effected in a narrow corridor in between the vast transports.

  Like a general passing a review, Tornada drew Théophraste along the row to the portal of Notre-Dame. The work of recuperation continued silently, with an incomparable method and discipline.

  The small airplanes gently deposited their prizes enclosed in the sarcophagi. Each one was loaded on to a cart rolling along a track, immediately pushed to a makeshift hut where Tornada, alone with his magic, came to instill his heroic substance in an instant, sometimes directly into the heart, at other times into the marrow, according to the condition of the subject. Emerging from there via another exit, t
he operable matter was maneuvered to the side of one of the large transports, fitted with rows of slots. Before the box was slid in, the corpse was clad in a diving-suit fitted with equipment for oxygenation and radiography. Then it was placed in the rack, and would not be touched again until the surgeons intervened definitively. Once full, the powerful vessel, flown by a single pilot, took to the air.

  Tornada explained these details to his rediscovered friend. Théophraste saw therein the realization of the most fantastic hypotheses: order and method in the service of madness.

  “Oh, what will there be when we’ve obtained a little more extension?” murmured Tornada.

  “Extension? What do you mean by that word?”

  “I mean what it signifies: the expansion of Biocolia, englobing the Eure, and, later, probably the Eure-et-Loire. We’ll need more space, now that the nutritive substratum is finished and we can occupy ourselves with the animals.”

  “To do what?”

  “Prolong them, of course! It’s certainly their turn, the poor beasts, so long sacrificed to the appetites of humans.”

  “But damn it, the substratum will, on the contrary, be a reason to get rid of them, since we’ll no longer need livestock to nourish ourselves.”

  Tornada shuddered. Then, looking the painter up and down with disgust, he said: “So that’s how you treat Life!” He turned on his heel. “I’m going to work.”

  Oh, the madman, the madman! What would that future world be, which, by the accomplishment of his designs, following the path already traced, was about to return to chaos, as the lianas of a tropical forest become entangled, as microbial pullulations are stifled; without possible extinction, or, at least, without anyone being able to foresee a limit, a stop, since, until now, no erosion was manifest in the people on whom Tornada had operated, none having yet died, none having left room?

  Deceptive results, directly contrary to wellbeing to happiness. Thanks to Tornada’s genius, was not even the fratricidal struggle from which the airplanes were successively bring back the breathless victims, that social drama susceptible of bringing some equilibrium to nature, going to end in the propagation of the evil of number, in swelling the torrent of life?