The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3) Page 9

  When they had finished, one of them sat down. The other pulled him upright violently. They looked one another up and down, hissing threats. Men, in truth. But Carmen thought that she could profit from their quarrel. She took three steps toward the hiding place.

  Too late! Tornada reappeared on the threshold.

  “What! The next one hasn’t been brought?”

  He raised the whip over his aides and lashed them. Tragic and clownish, he was irresistibly droll. To calm him down, Tréfond went to detach a cart from the train that was waiting on the external rails and pushed it into the rotunda.

  This time, the diving-suit cradled an obsolete hemiplegic, suffering from a paralysis of one side originating in his brain. It was therefore necessary to accomplish the extraordinary prestidigitation of replacing the brain.

  The poor wreck was laid out on the bed and, as the scalp had been shaved in advance. Tornada had only to utter a sonorous “Seven!” to be presented with a saw in the form of a strawberry, which espoused the entire head in a circular fashion. The surgeon caused it to bite into the bone, removing the top of the skull but preserving a hinge.

  The cerebral hieroglyphs appeared, revealing a sludge. The surgeon circumscribed them with a trenchant helmet that excised them, took them away, and then returned to deposit in their stead the thought-creating viscera of a chimpanzee. Then, the entire system of adaptation went into action. The flesh-colored flood inundated the new organ, the cranial cavity was closed, the fluids acted, the serum was instilled and Tornada was overjoyed to have only devoted three minutes forty-five seconds to that feat. The patient belonged to a royal family; the operation had cost ten million, but he only remembered the operational curiosity.

  Tornada went into the other rotunda and the chimpanzees started cleaning up. This was the moment that Carmen judged propitious for her larceny. The ampoules attracted her like magnets. She lost all prudence, all sentiment of a certain verification, of the impossibility of getting out of the enclosure, of getting away with her treasure without raising the alarm. She forgot that she had enrolled herself for entirely different, far more fruitful, mission...

  And Tornada had not even locked the drawer!

  She approached it, stretched out her hand. But before she had even reached the coveted object, a force seized her muscles, ran along her arm, reached her brain, and caused a globe of red light to whirl therein, which became orange and stunned her. She no longer had the strength to do anything but move away from a position that might betray her and return to her post. Then, overwhelmed by the fluid, she lost consciousness.

  When she came round, outside, under a tree, anxious faces were leaning over her. The general administrator was flicking her with a damp cloth. The personnel director was making her breathe smelling salts. They were compassionate.

  “Are you feeling better? It’s doubtless the heat...”

  “Yes, I couldn’t bear it,” said the fake Savine, grasping the straw. “Furthermore, in spite of my desire to do well, the work exhausts me. I’ll be obliged to give it up, unless you can procure me another, milder form of labor.…”

  “We’ll ask the boss,” Théophraste promised.

  The next day, the shortage of chimpanzees led to the replacement of the she-ape in service with the Lapastilles. The latter was sent to the Acclimation to be subjected to the same fate as her fellows—which is to say, the piecemeal extraction of her organs for the profit of humans. Carmen took over her functions, with her virus in her pocket.

  She waited for three days for the opportunity of an aliment common to the parents and the children. That afternoon, Mélanie prepared with her own expert hands a soup, in accordance with an old recipe, to supplement the meal furnished by the machines. Then she entrusted the cooking to Carmen.

  “Two hours over a low heat, you understand, Savine?”

  No matter how profoundly inured a soul might be to crime, the execution nevertheless demands an effort of the nerves that is variously translated, and in Carmen, when she brought in the soup, it paralyzed her neck in the same fashion as the fluid that had struck her down in the rotunda.

  Even so, she smiled as she set down the tureen.

  “Lovely soup!”

  How tasty it seemed, that soup! It embalmed the room, covering itself with a plume of vapor! The children clapped their hands and Mélanie got ready to distribute it. She had the ladle in the air when someone interrupted the feast.

  “I’ve caught you having a party again without inviting me!”

  It was the master, exultant at his emergence from an amusing intervention on a political orator.

  “Can you imagine, old Phraste, that I had to graft the lungs of a pig into him. Then, on the same occasion, I played the joke on him of cutting his vocal cords with this razor.”

  “You’re just in time, old Nada, Sit down. You’re going to lick your chops. Smell that soup!”

  But Tornada did not share his enthusiasm. He considered the advertised feast with amazement. What was that iridescent skin floating on the soup? It reminded him singularly of a cuisine cooked up elsewhere than in this household, of which he believed himself to have been the only preparer...

  “What’s wrong, old Nada?”

  “What’s wrong…is this fine soup! Oh, my children, wait, wait! I forbid you to touch it!”

  “Because?”

  “Because…it lacks salt…and I’ll go fetch some!”

  He became terrible, and, from the doorway that he had just reached, brandishing his whip, he shouted: “I’ll kill the first one who tastes it! Wait! I’m coming back!”

  “He’s making me anxious,” Théophraste declared, as soon as they were alone.

  They remained patient for a moment. Then, as Tornada’s absence extended and the soup was getting cold, Théophraste said: “Go on then, Nymph.”

  He accepted the first ration—but just as he was raising the spoon to his lips he received a “Ping!” full in the face.

  What! That insult! A slap! A mighty slap, launched by his best friend! A slap that splashed the forbidden spoonful all over the table!

  “You’re mad!”

  “Sometimes. But not when I forbid you to eat without salt. Here it is.”

  Into the tureen, and the dishes that had already been filled, Tornada distributed a handful of little white particles, which caused the liquid to seethe slightly. After which he sat down, and ingurgitated a copious helping of the soup.

  “I’ve never eaten such a delicious puree of paracarbonic bacilli,” he declared, when his plate was empty.

  Théophraste shuddered. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying, my dears, that it’s fortunate that I knew about this one before the other, and prepared an antidote for it Otherwise, you’d all be on the ground, and it would be impossible for you ever to get up again.”

  “What other are you talking about?”

  “He asks that! Innocent!” Tornada twisted his beard. “Nothing remains to do now but compliment the cook.”

  But they searched in vain for Carmen. The alert was sounded by all the signals, bells, loud-hailers and rockets, and Tréfond, the chimpanzees, the orangutans and other ape police deployed all their flair, but in vain; she was not unearthed anywhere. In order to escape, she had been able to profit from a moment when one of the service doors had been opened to let in an opportune truck-load of nuts for the apes.

  “Let’s not persist,” Tornada concluded. “I’ll find her again in articulo mortis. I’ll make an article for her surer than the penal code—and you’ll see whether I give that worthy companion of Granive a taste for soup!”

  Chapter VII

  Ten years later, on a morning in July, while the rain was drumming on the windows outside, Tornada was pacing impatiently back and forth in his study. The study was improbably luxurious, with its walls paneled with sculpted woodwork and painting such as only the master of an empire can accumulate, In fact, was he not such a master, more powerful than the most powerful, ri
cher than the richest, since, having abandoned his clinic at Saint-Cloud, which had become insufficient for his worldwide success, he had come into possession of an entire French département, the Orne, with its fecund soil, its abundant farms, its solid châteaux, its pleasant valleys, its lush forests and its nourishing springs? And was that not, in spite of his generosity to the poor, and his desire to equilibrate the wealth of the world, still only a negligible fraction of his possessions, located in all the corners of the world?

  His procedures, of which he made use for his own conservation, had kept him astonishingly healthy. His sturdy little body belied the fact that he was almost a hundred years old. Only a few graying hairs, which he had forgotten to rejuvenate, by virtue of the same indifference that caused him to neglect his baldness, descended in his enormous beard, disappearing and then reappearing amid the curls. At an age where the reflexes relax, his effervescence had increased further, as was presently denoted by the violence of his tics as he paced agitatedly over the thick-piled carpet. Neither the gigantic projects that obsessed him untiringly, nor the execution of certain others, could deflect his nervousness at the moment, when he was being forced to wait.

  He looked at the clock. It marked five past eight. He had made the appointment for eight o’clock. He was definitely being mocked. He picked up a precious Sèvres vase and smashed it to smithereens on the door.

  Summoned in that fashion, a majordomo appeared, trembling. He was two meters tall, wore a jacket and trousers in the French style, was shod in red and gloved in white. His beard was regulation, as long as possible, like his master’s, but he was distinguished by Absalomian hair: the head of a sapper grafted on to the body of a boxer.

  “Well, what about this superintendent?”

  “He’s in the antechamber, Superman.”

  “And he didn’t think to come in?”

  Another giant was introduced, or rather, a species of mastiff, with bushy red hair, glowering eyes and a butcher’s fingers. He was sheathed in a white smock.

  “Well, what does this signify, Von Karl Winer? At a hundred and six years old, you don’t yet dare come in without knocking when I’m waiting for you?”

  “I did not zink so, Superman.”

  “It’s necessary to zink, Superintendent. It’s also necessary to try to speak correctly. Your accent disgusts me. All men are brothers—so it’s said, at least, and I accept it, but on condition that they don’t express themselves like oxen from beyond the Rhine. Your papers.”

  The colossus bowed, salivated on his thumb, and held out the daily radio reports from the various districts of the vast domain, over the desk where Tornada had just sat down. They recorded the sanitary condition of the police centuries and the peasants—always perfect since the suppression of the alcoholic beverage known as calvados and pitilessly prescribed hygienic measures. They also recorded the state of the harvests, which the scientists fattened, and the efficacious contest against the elements rendered prosperous; the animal husbandry transformed and intensified by the added value of the pasturage and the suppression of foot-and-mouth disease; and, in sum, everything concerned with material life, scientifically organized in the department, where, in the agreeable frame of the Norman Switzerland, extended centers of Hospitalization, Acclimation, and Revivification as vast as cities. No more railways; nothing but impeccable aerial transport, monstrous aircraft and elegant airplanes, parked by the hundred near energy-sources.

  Thus was realized the incredible prosperity of the realm of Biocolia.

  Tornada read rapidly, sometimes adding a signature approving the launch of rockets, which, according to the calculations of his meteorologists, would dissipated the clouds in some region deprived of sunlight, or agglomerate those same clouds to determine rain somewhere else. His genius was no longer content with human regeneration; he applied it to the domination of the elements. He was on the point of dissociating the atom. He captured the power of the tides. He accumulated sunlight. He was going to nourish people with chemical products...

  Arrogantly raising his head, he said: “I’ve got nature where I want her, eh?”

  The superintendent nodded his head. He estimated that the Superman was not exceeding a legitimate pride. The Superman was a denomination that was compulsory, and which pleased Tornada.

  The Superman: the new Creator.

  Von Karl Winer had been recreated by him. He now accompanied, as a frenetic servant, the prodigious ascent of his master. What an epic! The entire world under the heel of the Superman!

  If Tornada wanted it, he could name himself king or emperor. He had tamed all hostile forces: governments first, which feared his power, and saw him as a threat to Republican institutions; then, later, the famous League for the Right to Die, a product of the danger of overpopulation, even more redoubtable than depopulation. It had at its head Dr. Marcel Granive, and an elite of official scientists as his lieutenants. They brandished the threats of unemployment, ruination and famine. After the economic impetus resulting from an equilibrium between handiwork and labor, events proved them right. One day, with the complicity of the government, they launched their partisans against the parasite realm, with orders to exterminate it completely, but extraordinary forces prevented the deflagration of explosives. The aircraft that flew over the domain fell to earth like asphyxiated flies. And when, in order to fight with cold steel, the infantry had tried to penetrate into Biocolia, the first ranks collapsed, thunderstruck, two kilometers from a simple cable extended to delimit the département. An utter debacle; a treaty followed, which gave Tornada the enjoyment of his domain and the freedom of his practices.

  Those whom the potentate had taken under his aegis, whether they were intellectuals or laborers, were favored with unprecedented material bounty. Elsewhere, however, in the rest of France, Europe and the entire world, the communist doctrine prepared by centuries of egotism and Gehenna, and served by overpopulation, took fatal root. An admirable ideal of Christ, delivered to the instincts of men, it could only sink at its dawn. Once the storms of the great evening had passed, there were still the strong and the weak, the leisured and the laborious, the avid and the resigned. Property, encouraged by the example of Biocolia, was reborn in the bloody mire.

  Tornada did not seem to be interested in these great human stirrings, of which he was the sole provocation. His only ambition was to increase the size of his laboratories, his operating theaters and his hospital services, in order to resuscitate more and more people. He was singularly aided in that by the dogged desire to survive that everyone possessed; for, when the Leaguers proclaimed the right to die, it goes without saying that it was the deaths of their neighbors, and not their own, that they meant. Unobservant as Karl Winer was, that rudimentary psychology did not escape him, and his admiration for his master and servile submission augmented it further.

  Weary of fastidious administrative tasks, Tornada pushed away the other files.

  “Let’s see the press, now.”

  The superintendent coated his thumb with saliva again and detached a collection of newspaper cuttings, carefully mounted on other pieces of paper, in which there was mention of the domain of Biocolia. Tornada only scanned the headlines. He enveloped himself too carefully in mystery for anyone to find out what happened in his abode. Sleep on arrival, sleep in the rotundas and another six days of sleep in a box: nothing had changed. The subjects only woke up when it was time to get dressed for departure. Furthermore, his personnel knew the punishment for an indiscretion. Thus, everything that was published was pure fantasy. It amused him, however, on his good days.

  After the cuttings, the ensalivated thumb brought the news of world events. They did not interest Tornada much, with the exception of massacres that happened sufficiently close at hand for him to send aircraft in search of work. The rest he treated with scorn.

  “Let’s see what’s going on here now.”

  Karl Winder opened one of the sculpted wooden panels. Behind it there was a televisor, with its sc
reen, and its network of wires transmitting, by means of waves, the animated spectacle of what was happening in the factory of life. By attaching plugs to a switchboard placed on his desk, each one corresponding to a different sector, Tornada could inspect his services from his chair: the master’s eye at the end of a wave.

  He saw his six operating theaters in full activity. His surgeons, all deaf-mutes that he had created, were leaning over bodies brought out of sarcophagi, manipulating apparatus with multiple fingers. They were dexterously repeating the actions he had taught them, substituting the viscera, coating the organs, distributing the fluids and then sending away the diving-suits to be replaced on the wagons waiting at the iron door of the laboratory for the instillation of the regenerative serum that Tornada alone produced in batches. They were supervised by Dr. Tréfond.

  He saw his physicists and chemists attending to the functions of their apparatus, the immense retorts and alembics in which the dissociation and regrouping of atoms was carried out, and the marriage of the fluids necessary to the subsistence and protection of the realm.

  He saw his great dormitories with thousands of full cicatrization cells, and other rooms, identically fitted out, where the anesthetized aspirants for life were waiting patiently.

  He saw his aviation hangars, his huge helicopters charging their flanks with the fluid that carried them toward the zenith. Around them, the aviators and security guards had the tranquil bearing of men who know that no peril and no threat of crashing existed any longer for them.

  He saw his vast acclimation parks, where apes, no longer collaborating other than by the donation of their organs, lived in families, and where other quadrupeds, chosen from among the echelons nearest to humanity, as well as zebras and bison, were bred in the vicinity of the pigs.