The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 2) Read online

  “Quickly! Send him back!” ordered Monsieur Danator. Then mopping his brow: “Sapristi! I’m sweating! One wouldn’t have as much trouble spurring on a cab-horse!”

  And Adam, half-triumphant, resumed the route of my bed, on to which I just had time to throw myself.

  But it was futile; he was as impotent as before.

  “I’ll be back...” he began.

  Oh, no! Enough of this joke! Enough defiling myself, making myself ridiculous! The lyricism of revolution took hold of me. Like Potiphar’s wife disappointed by Joseph, I set about trying to grab hold of my incapable lover. Less favored than Joseph, however, he only had his skin for a cloak, and it was his skin that I grabbed, twisting it and slapping it, laboring his torso with my fingernails...

  He was still smiling...

  “Will you kindly let go of my child!” grated a voice behind me, while two arms encircled me, in order to permit my victim to escape.

  Can you imagine the implausible scene in my bridal chamber at that moment! No painter would ever reproduce it; but someone among the contemplators of this work might be able to picture it, while vainly seeking its significance and attributing it to an artist struck with dementia.

  This, then, was the spectacle: near the bed, me, naked, foaming, disheveled, grabbed around the waist by a man in a white smock; then, taking refuge in a corner, Adam, naked, placid and smiling, watching the author of his days do it; and finally, on the doorstep, a dark patch amid those bright ones…the negro.

  Yes, the negro, who had followed his master. I’m not making anything up.

  Isn’t that a challenge to the imagination? All the more so as Monsieur Danator, in order to avenge his son, had started hammering the back of my neck with blows of his fist that wrung heart-rending cries from me.

  Well, someone took my side, but it wasn’t the person who had that mission. It was the negro. One can mock the mutilated for their fate, but they still have resources of nobility, strength and courage. Bounding toward us, he grabbed my assailant by the throat and knocked him down. Then swiftly taking hold of one of the bedsheets and making use of it as a straitjacket, he wrapped it around Monsieur Danator.

  Once he had tied him up, he carried him like a parcel to a chair.

  “Defend me! Defend yourself!” the swaddled individual ordered his son, his gaze furious.

  I anticipated that Ultra was about to find my husband a powerful opponent. Adam struck the pose of a boxer; his stature was triumphant by comparison with the paltry of my partisan; he would be able to settle his hash with a few flicks of his arm.

  But it was written that I was not yet at the end of my surprises. Taking an electric torch from his pocket, Ultra aimed the beam at his adversary. The effect of that novel weapon was prodigious. Adam, hypnotized by the light, remained fixed in is combative stance.

  Putting his torch down on a table, in such a fashion that the beam continued its paralyzing work, the negro then disappeared into the adjacent room and came back shortly carrying a bock—not the kind of bock that one drinks on the terrace of café while talking literature or politics, but the apparatus that consists of a metallic reservoir connected to a long rubber tube and a thing like a lollipop that serves for various uses on which it is not permissible for me to dwell—in sum, one of the most efficacious creations of modern hygiene.24

  Did he, then, intend to rid my adored spouse of a digestive superfluity? In front of me, that would have been utterly inappropriate.

  But that was not the usage he made of it.

  Taking advantage of the cataleptic state of his patient, he tied his arm above the elbow, causing a vein to stand out, which he opened with a scalpel, and precious blood escaped from the wound to mingle abundantly with the arabesques of the carpet.

  It did not astonish me that, having been a medical apprentice, Ultra could carry out a blood-letting—but why, I wondered, enfeeble a person who required his forces building up?

  In brief, when that stratagem was complete, the operator undertook another. To the bock with which he was already equipped he fitted a hollow needle; he introduced that needle into the swollen vein; then, lifting up the reservoir, he substituted, by means of the simple effect of atmospheric pressure, another liquid for the essential element of life that he had just withdrawn.

  Bravo, worthy negro! I cried, internally. You’re still struggling against my beloved’s weakness; you intend with the collaboration of an aphrodisiac, to stimulate his ardor! Bravo!

  And I hoped, madly, for the method’s success.

  Far from rallying under the effect of the injection, however, Adam was almost immediately struck by mortal distress. His dear face went pale, and then became livid; his eyes, entirely pink at that moment, filled with agony; his noble body, the admiration of female bathers, became thinner, melting as if under the ravages of a consumptive malady.

  He was soon no more than a frightful skeleton plastered with skin, which vacillated, collapsed and shrank in its turn. The ensemble was further transformed into a glutinous sac, like the repugnant jellies that one sees lying here and there on the seashore: a glistening, viscous, unidentifiable agglomerate that released bubbles of air, dried out, and then…pop!

  An explosion, a little puff of smoke…a few grains of sand...

  And that was all that remained of my marvelous husband. The great sentence hung over me: “Dust thou art...”

  Monsieur Danator had witnessed the annihilation of his son while emitting plaints so soft, and so desperate, that they would have softened the heart of a torturer. But I, in whom the amazement of observing that new method of destruction had not ceded to the dolor of losing the object of my transports, could not retain a cry of rage.

  “Wretch! Wretch!” I howled at the negro. “Your crime will kill me too! Know that I expected paradisal joys from that man!”

  “Do you think so?” the murderer retorted.

  What! The deaf man could hear! The mute could speak! And his voice, vibrant in my heart, evoked the imperishable emotions of my disdained amour!

  “Let’s go, Made.”

  That abrupt drama, and even more, the presence of its author, suddenly delivered me from the madness that possessed me.

  First of all, I felt the shame of my nudity, and leapt upon my clothes, while Marcel, like me reconquered by decency, turned his back.

  I was ready in a trice—and we were about to quit, never to see again, that chamber where me virtue had been to strangely exposed, when a groan from Monsieur Danator immobilized us.

  “The poor man!” I said, compassionately. “Remember, Marcel, that he’s a father.”

  “It isn’t the father in him that’s suffering.”

  “Release me!” begged Monsieur Danator.

  “No,” Marcel refused. “I’ll send you the negro shortly—yes, the true, the authentic Ultra—to untie you. But before then, Made and I have a little visit to make, and as you doubtless won’t authorize it...”

  “Oh, now...” sighed Monsieur Danator. Then, enveloping Marcel with his admiration, he went on: “All the same, I didn’t believe official science had fellows of your stripe! Why don’t you stay with me, Germaud? The two of us could achieve integral creation. Look, you’re going to examine my cultures…you’ll see whether there’s material there to exercise our combined genius! Reproduction, Germaud, osmosis and the race—what a marvelous domain! What consequences for humankind…this degenerate, worn out, rotten humankind, the target of all those infections, prey to all those parasitisms, in spite of all the serums, all the vaccines. Well, the two of us, we’ll mend it, by infusing it with the original semination! Yes, in no time at all, it’ll be able to live eucrasically.”25

  But Marcel shook his head. “No—your system is based on fundamental errors, and nothing can be done with it…nothing. The genesic instinct is impossible, you see, in an artificial creature. For that instinct to reveal itself and to be active, the slow stages of transformism are required, and you’ve abbreviated them. It also req
uires to contemporaneity of the seed-germs. Even if the instinct had materialized in your created Adam, from the viewpoint of reproduction he would have remained a ‘white cabbage,’ my poor old fellow, because, with regard to founding a family, he lacked...”

  “What?”

  “Love.”

  These considerations went over my head, but I remember the final word and the smile, addressed to me, that accompanied it.

  “Wait!” cried Monsieur Danator. “One more word…the hose…yes, with regard to your hose, tell me, what solvent did you use to annihilate...to annihilate my child?”

  “Distilled water,” said Marcel.

  “Pure water! His poison! He found it! Decidedly, Monsieur Germaud, you’re an ace!”

  “You’re another, Professor Tornada…and I salute you profoundly, in bidding you adieu.”

  Tornada? Had I heard correctly? Tornada—that name reminded me of a famous individual, a biologist and surgeon, an extraordinary cutter, a half-mad genius who had disappeared some years before after tangling with the law. But what connection was there between the two men?

  “You called him Tornada?” I queried, as soon as Marcel had withdrawn into the power-supply room in order to remove his make-up.

  “Tornada, indeed.”

  “So it’s really him?”

  “Under the anagram of Danator, it’s him.”

  “Oh! I was lucky to get out of this intact!”

  It was a purely physical integrity. I was conscious of that as I gazed at Marcel’s bare torso, while he was busy restoring the whiteness of his skin. It would not have displeased me to daub myself with a little soot…but he divined the suggestion and hastened to finish getting dressed.

  He took me through the subterranean passages then to the bronze door. He had discovered its mechanism, and this time, it opened. We found ourselves back at the crypt where, a few hours earlier, I had been married to my poor Adam. I would have paused there; I would have knelt down there, out of decency, as a weeping widow—a widow who experienced no resentment against the murderer of her deceased spouse—but Marcel hurried me along.

  “Come on! Come on!”

  In the semi-darkness of the grotto, we followed a path along the edge of the channeled sea for about a kilometer; then we confronted by a sheer rockslide.

  “A wall of flint,” I said. “Nothing behind.”

  “Life, Made!”

  Now the master of the secrets of that fantastic realm, Marcel only had to put pressure on an asperity that adopted, it’s true, the significant form of a T, for an opening to appear in the wall of stone. There, the gulf accentuated its menace; a warm exhalation mingled with pestilence blew over us. We took a few steps into a rocky tunnel, and bent down in order to go forward. We reached a second cavern.

  “This is what he called his laboratory,” said Marcel. “But first, a precaution...” He handed me a pair of dark glasses, and donned a pair himself.

  It was, in fact, a salutary precaution, for we advanced into a kind of overheated inferno, tense with electricity, in which, at times, zigzags of an unsustainable intensity burst forth, while an irritant odor of phosphorus grabbed us by the throat. Oh, how far away we were from the peaceful sanctuaries in which scientists pore over microscopes! This was a lair in which everything was striking by virtue of its gigantic proportions: the lair of the macroscopic, in verity.

  Insofar as that rapid visit left its imprint upon me, my first emotion was caused by observing, to either side of the path we were following, improbable masses of water enclosed within walls of translucent glass. It was sea-water, evidently aspired from elsewhere, with the aid of the powerful pumps distributing it in that colossal aquarium. One could see the tubing furrowing the rock, coupled with cables transmitting energy. In certain places the water was turbulent, mixed, it seemed to me, with variously-hued crystalline substances, which fell into the depths to dissolve there and change the nature of the marine solution.

  My God! What would happen—what catastrophe, what frightful death—if ever one of those glass sheets were to give way under the pressure and let the waters through? What a torrent would drag us away, and swallow us up! My hand clutched my companion.

  “Have no fear, Made. All of this is expertly contrived. Just look, and admire!”

  I did, indeed, have to admire and entire marine flora, growing there at hazard—I thought so, at least, at that moment—and adopting the most diverse, most complicated and sometimes most graceful forms. Born of a cellular nucleus, those plants soon resembled mushrooms, aloes, spiny bouquets issued from the same rootstock. There were also some that one might have sworn were flowers from our gardens, so much did they present, like them, the seduction of colors. Sometimes they were grouped together in an entanglement of branches; sometimes they were isolated, and their development was all the more vivacious for it.

  Once could follow their evolution toward the animal realm; then they took on the precise forms of huge infusoria, cephalopods and crabs; others surrounded themselves with shells; and there was a simultaneous mixture of marine and terrestrial types, seemingly alert, waiting for an opportunity to devour one another. But hatred did not dominate those rudimentary beings as yet, for they preferred to seek their nourishment in crystalline substances reaching them via the liquid medium, and they emitted prolongations toward them, antennae that seized them in passing.

  Then, as we advanced further, all those plants and inferior animals were modified, reorganized, becoming similar to more familiar and more harmonious structures, although still strangely associated. They became a population creping forms, and others, slimmer moving by means of contortions rather than locomotive organs, making contact with one another, interlacing, sticking to one another only to separate again thereafter. Fish? Perhaps, for some of those creatures, although they didn’t have fins, opened a kind of gill to aspire—but perhaps also amphibians, for some among them presented the particularities of a double respiratory system.

  Suddenly, without appreciable transition, there was a monster.

  “Look, Marcel—that one has human feet, the belly of a frog and the crown of a tree!”

  “I’ll explain all that in a little while. For the moment, let’s pass on quickly, for the atmosphere...”

  Indeed, we had arrived in a part of the infernal cavern where the heat become more oppressive and the air more heavily charged with phosphoric emanations, while around us, above our heads and beneath our feet, the electric furnace was amplifying its incandescences and its rumblings.

  Fire! White fire, livid fire, yellow fire, almost-black fire—fire everywhere!

  I was beginning to suffocate; my temples were throbbing; an indefinable taste of chalk glued my tongue. But I forgot all those dangers, so much was my curiosity exacerbated.

  In fact, the life-forms swarming there were becoming progressively harmonized in familiar contours; I recognized quite a few animals that populate forests or fly through the air—but for the most part, they were incomplete, deprived of a leg, a wing or a head; sometimes tumors replaced organs; sometimes the absence of a tegument allowed viscera to be discerned. A small elephant had a trunk that terminated in a bird’s head; a pig had a horse’s leg grafted on to its abdomen; a monkey had a child’s hand superimposed on its shoulder: in sum, a thousand traces of natural aberration; a veritable teratological museum...

  And all of it, formless segments, detached or superfluous pieces, trunks without heads or heads without trunks, all of it was nevertheless alive, and living under water! To the right and the left, it revealed itself in infinite varieties...

  “It’s fantastic!”

  “Let’s press on! Press on!” Marcel urged.

  Then we went through a zone that was even more prolific, where the multitude was agitating around luminous blocks so intense and so pure that they must have been constituted by masses of radium. Given its price per gram, those effluvia alone would have confounded transatlantic financiers; they were certainly acting on the evolution
of the creatures assembled there, for once that dazzling zone was crossed, the human series was affirmed.

  And what a series! What specimens! I was horrified to see butcheries of which no Chinese torturer ever dreamed: open abdomens, scalped heads, limbs without an epidermis, and more, stumps or fragments of skeletons perforating throbbing masses of flesh, the majority corroded by a chalky leprosy.

  “That man...” I said, thinking of my father in law. “That man is a torturer, then? He finds a sadistic joy in tearing apart his fellows and reuniting them in a museum of horrors and conserving them in sea-water!”

  “Press on! Press on! Here’s the most incredible of all…”

  Oh, my amazement! My dazzlement! My distress! There, before me, behind the glass: Adam!

  Not my Adam, evidently, since he had been returned to dust, but an Adam exactly similar to mine, a copy cast from the same mold as mine, his identical twin. apart from one detail: he lacked the organ that, a little while ago, had so pitifully failed in its physiological duty. That twin, however, in spite of the apparatus that he lacked, was showing every gallantry, under water, toward a trio of divinely beautiful young women, his kindred; he was caressing the rumps of all three, which became possible with only two hands because two of the creatures were fused together at the buttock.

  Bewildered, I contemplated that double of my husband. Oh, how he reanimated burning suggestions! How I quivered again! Also the more so because, as if he had divined the effect that he was having, he darted a mauve glance at me—yes, mauve, because of the ambient light—and a smile as charming, as delightful and as innocently perverse as the smile of my poor deceased spouse.

  I would have lingered near that suggestive phantom if my guide had not shaken me brutally.

  “You’ve seen enough. Let’s go now!”

  It was high time. Under the deleterious action of that formidable workshop, its poisonous gases, invisible energies and dazzling lights, I felt that I was about to faint. We headed for the way out, in order to liberate ourselves from that nightmare, to find salutary oxygen again.