The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (53 page)

Fin, as
it says at the end of French movies.

As he was dressing he
realized that the. whiteness of the window was the sign of a general fog. Fog
in high summer in the Californian desert. How weird was
that?

He went downstairs, but
the house was deserted. The sofa looked somehow smug in the daylight; the whole
scene shrunk by its perfect visibility to a comical rather than a tragic arena.
Had he really believed he was going to die, just falling one storey? The most
he’d have suffered would have been a twisted ankle, maybe, at the worst a
broken bone. Yet the terror was still there, in mental aftertaste; the genuine
death-is-here terror.

An aftershock rumbled
and gave the floor an odd number of shakes. Hector flung his arms out, like a
high-wire artiste, to steady himself. The shocks settled.

Out on the porch the
world was milky and immediate, with an oceanic tang to the air, salty and
ozoney. The view had been perfectly opaqued; Hector couldn’t even see the
parked cars a few yards away.

Tom was sitting to the
left of the front door, cradling what Hector at first thought was a cup of hot
coffee, but which, looking twice, he saw was a pistol. The gun brought an
automatic hey-I’m-your-friend grin to Hector’s face.

“Hi,” he said.

Tom looked up, his grin
already broad. “Good morning,” he said. “Some night, yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Hector. “That
was some quake.”

“You could say that,”
said Tom, blinking with what looked like suppressed glee. “You could say that.”

“That one wasn’t
predicted,” said Hector. “At least, I didn’t see it in any papers. It wasn’t on
the TV.”

“No.”

“My Dad, is he about?”

“He’s checking the
perimeter with Pablo and Esther. They’ll be an hour more, I’d say.”

Hector said nothing for
several minutes. He took a seat next to Tom and stared at the blankness of the
fog. “This is pretty freaky weather. It was so hot and clear yesterday, and now
so white and chilly. I mean, I lived in California most of my life but never
saw anything like this. I mean, this far inland.”

“It’s very striking
weather,” said Tom, almost grinning with delight at the joke which he had a
portion of, but which Hector didn’t yet get.

“But,” said Hector,
groping inwardly for a laugh to lighten the words but not finding one, “hardly
the end of the world . . .”

The fog sat, motionless
as cataracts. After it became clear that Tom wasn’t going to reply, Hector
said. “I mean,
fog
is hardly the end of the world, is it?”

“It’s the Pacific,” said
Tom.

“What is?”

Tom gestured with the
pistol. “All this.”

“The fog is the Pacific?”

“What’s left of it. Much
of it boiled away to space, I guess, but a fair proportion of it ended up here.
Most of it will distil out again, eventually. It depends how close we come to
the sun.”

Hector tried to listen
to this, and the words made sense, of a sort. But they did not lodge in his
consciousness in a meaningful way. He could have been listening to an
engineering specialist explain some complex process in a technical language of
which Hector was himself ignorant. Forcing a laugh, that sounded accordingly
more like a bark, he replied, “so a comet hit the earth last night and boiled
the Pacific?”

“Something hit,” said
Tom, in a clear, low voice. “Not a comet.”

They sat in silence for
a while. The sound of two people talking became audible, somewhere away in the
fog, but
Hector could not pick out the words, only the fact that one
speaker was a man and one a woman. That conversation, whatever it was, came to
an end, and everything was quiet again.

Eventually Tom began
speaking. “Something hit,” he said. “Something very dense.
Ve-ery
dense,
and relatively small, and travelling fast. And something intelligent, I think.
That’s what I think. When — it — realized it was going to collide with the
earth it sent ahead, somehow, broadcast something to communicate with the
inhabitants, to warn them maybe, or maybe — who knows? — to brag.”

“Who knows?” repeated
Hector, amiably, trying not to hear exactly what was being said, but not
succeeding.

“I think it tried in the
1870s, to communicate I mean, which resulted in the strange and rather garbled
vision that Monsieur Servadac experienced.”

“I see,” said Hector,
thinking with focused fury and anxiety on an imagined mental picture of Vera,
called Dimmi, naked, stark naked. He tried to pour all his attention, his
mental energy, into that image. He tried to divert all his fear and
incomprehension into that inward vision, so that he could present an unruffled
and fearless visage to Tom. He fiddled in his pocket for cigarettes, but he’d
left the packet upstairs.

“The whatever-it-is,”
said Tom, “hit last night. Somewhere a little east of India, in the sea,
through
the sea and, thwack, into the earth. It penetrated pretty deep, breaking up
the globe, shattering it into myriad lumps, before losing its speed and
stopping — somewhere below us now. Not too far, couple of hundred miles I
think. Maybe a thousand.”

“Directly below us?”
asked Hector.

“The world was broken
apart, of course. But the lump we’re on, it’s in the best position. In terms of
survival. Maybe a sixth of the globe’s mass in size, but the — object — is so
massive, though small, that its gravitational pull is three times that of the
rock it’s embedded in. If the fog cleared, you’d see. We’re on a strange shaped
planetoid now, my friend.”

Hector wanted to say:
I
can’t believe you could speak aloud
a
sentence like that.
But he didn’t say anything.

“If the fog cleared,
then it would look as though the horizon were rearing up all around us. If you
tried to walk to Frisco, it would get steeper and steeper until eventually it’d
be more like mountain climbing. But that’s good, because it means that we’re in
the bottom of the concavity, so the air, and eventually the water, will settle
here.”

“It’s a good story,”
said Hector, eventually.

They sat in silence a
while longer.

“And this object, stuck
in the soil below us,
spoke
to my Dad, did it?” Hector asked,
eventually. “It communicated with him? Warned him?”

Tom didn’t answer.

“And,” Hector went on,
finding at last, with a sense of gratitude to the gods of the subconscious,
reserves of scorn inside himself after all, and able to give his words a
withering tone, “and this intelligent super-heavy whatever-it-is is happy just
to sit embedded in a huge fragment of a broken planet is it? I mean, why didn’t
it swerve and avoid the earth, if it’s so intelligent?”

“We’ve most of us had
visions,” said Tom, mildly. “Since we came here, although none as detailed as
Hector’s. Why didn’t it swerve? Who knows? Maybe this is part of its alien
life-cycle. You know, a mole’s gotta dig in the earth, salmon’ve gotta swim
upstream to spawn, this thing’s gotta crash into planets and embed itself, destroying
them in the process. I don’t know. You don’t know.”

Hector stood up,
reaching for anger, although actually all he felt was fear, the other’s emotion’s
close kin. “But I
do
know,” he said. “I know you’re all wacko. There was
a quake last night — big deal, it’s California for fuck’s sake. I
know
that
I’ll get in my hire car and drive back to LA and get a room in a flicking
hotel. Tell my Dad I’ll call later.”

“Go for a drive, sure,”
said Tom, with infuriating patronage. “Only, belt up, and take care. The roads’ll
get steep sooner than you realize. Roads you think should be flat’ll get steep.”

“Right,” said Hector,
meaning
no
way. Meaning
never.

The light was thinning,
the fog growing darker. It was dusk. Hector could see the dial on Tom’s watch,
on his wrist, sitting in his lap, on top of the pistol; it said eight-oh-five.
He must have slept right through the day, which unnerved him, because he had
thought it was morning. Still, he could drive through the night if he had to.

Yet he stood there hovering,
on the porch.

“Things,” he tried, “don’t
feel any different to yesterday.”

“We’re on a curious
ellipse, orbitally speaking,” said Tom, looking into the fog, as if talking to
himself. “I’ve been trying to calculate it, but it’s tricky to do the numbers.
I reckon we’ll move away from the sun for seven months, and up from the
ecliptic, but not too far, not so far that the fog would freeze solid. Or so we
hope. But then we’ll swing back in and down, and things’ll warm up. We need to
plan to have the first children by then.”

“Yeah. Right,” said
Hector. “I’m getting into my car now.” “You go ahead,” said Tom.

“I will. I’m driving
away.”

“Have a drive around,
sure. But be sure you can find your way back.”

“I’m going now,” said
Hector. But he was still standing there on the porch, with the fog in every
direction away from the house, as if the ranch had been wrapped in
mother-of-pearl.

Most of Verne’s novels
over the next ten years, 1877-1886, have largely been forgotten. Only a few of
their titles, listed here in English, will raise more than a little recognition
—
The Black Indies
(1877),
A Captain at Fifteen
(1878),
The
Begum’s Fortune
(1879),
The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China
(1879),
The Steam House
(1880),
The Giant Raft
(1881),
Robinson’s
School
(1882),
The Green Ray
(1882),
Kéraban the Inflexible
(1883),
The Southern Star
(1884),
The Archipelago on Fire
(1884),
The
Waif of the
Cynthia, written with André Laurie (1885) and
The Lottery
Ticket
(1885). Perhaps only
Mathias Sandorf
(1885), in the style of
Alexandre Dumas is remembered, and this includes another mysterious scientist,
Dr Antekirtt, who has a super-scientific castle on a remote island. Possibly
this work was enough to inspire Verne again because in 1886 he created another
of his great characters, Robur in
Robur le conquérant,
also called
The
Clipper of the Clouds.
Robur, like Nemo, is on a vengeful mission against
the world, except that whereas Nemo achieves his aims with his submarine, Robur
works through a massive flying machine, the
Albatross.

By the time of this
novel Verne’s attitude to scientific advance was changing. He still saw the
need to progress but was aware of its dangers and warned that we needed to move
cautiously.

Robur, who would return
as an even greater avenger
in The Master of the World
(1904),
knew that mankind was not ready for advanced science. Paul Di Filippo takes
that cue for the following story.

“I am inclined to think
that in the future the world will not have many more novels in which mind
problems will be solved by the imagination. It may be the natural feeling of an
old man with a hundred books behind him, who feels that he has written out his
subject, but I really feel as though the writers of the present day and the past
time who have allowed their imaginations to play upon mind problems, have, to
use a colloquialism, nearly filled the bill.”

— Jules Verne, “Solution of

Mind Problems by the Imagination.”

On the morning of 24 May
1898, Mr Bingham Wheatstone disembarked from the transcontinental train
famously dubbed “The Grey Ghost” for its swift and whisper-quiet mode of
propulsion, alighting at the very doorstep of the city known far and wide as
Lincolnopolis, the capitol of the enigmatic sovereign empire known as Lincoln
Island, a dominion incongruously situated in the vast heartland of the United
States of America, bounded roughly by the borders of what had once been the
state of Iowa.