The World Above The World by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford [Stableford, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2012-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

II. Lost in the Tower

A great silence welcomed this declaration, made by Goldfeller without hesitation. People looked at him, and kept silent. I shrugged my shoulders again and said to Luneau: “It’s madness—pure madness.”

Goldfeller’s grey eyes turned in my direction; his gaze brushed me. As I turned round to follow the direction of that imperious glance, I found myself face to face with my two gigantic neighbors of a little while before. They were following me everywhere, smiling, with placid expressions on their savage faces. Was there any reason to take umbrage, in that crowd in which everyone was scrambling avidly after the official personages?

In any case, an abrupt surge—a sort of crush—suddenly separated me from those strange companions. Everyone moved sideways and huddled against the balustrade bordering the boulevard above the void, because an obstacle was barring the route, forcing the procession to break ranks.

I heard Piérard asking: “What’s that?”

Dryly, without stopping, in a slightly discontented tone, Goldfeller replied: “It’s our future lighting system.”

As they passed alongside the obstacle, people paused to examine it and took advantage of the pause to exchange reflections. Like everyone else, I lingered to take a look at the remarkable apparatus, extended like a beached cetacean for a length of a hundred meters.

Imagine a sort of monstrous iron seahorse, with its long tail and belly ringed and creased like an accordion, its head curved back, with its mouth wide open and excrescences of eyes in which one could imagine the future location of two immense lenses designed to spread afar the electric light channeled through that gigantic candelabra, all of whose rings seemed extensible, thanks to two sets of intersecting piston-rods. As it was, the entire apparatus was strange and disquieting in the inert sprawl, like a maleficent, supernatural, slumbering beast.

“Bizarre!”

“Curious!”

“That’s new!”

“Yes—not banal, at any rate.”

Everyone said his bit.

“Is that really a lantern?” I said, in my turn.

“But what do you think it is?” demanded the stout Buridan, laughing.

“How do I know? Admit that it’s more reminiscent of an engine of war than a peaceful lighting apparatus.”

Luneau started laughing. “What an imagination you have! Deep down, you’ve got something against Goldfeller.”

“Me? What? To construct this beast with an iron carcass, with neither rhyme nor reason…unless it’s to serve some maleficent purpose that none of us suspects.”

“Oh!”

“You’re insane, Bayoud.”

“Remember that it’s Piérard himself…”

“Eh? Exactly! What does that prove?”

Two years before Piérard, as Minister of Public Works, had signed the documents authorizing the works envisaged by M. Goldfeller, who threw millions into it recklessly. With money, one can buy anything one wants.

“Oh, if you’re talking politics…”

Everyone laughed. They were mocking me. Generally, enthusiasm was stifling criticism. One person praised the audacity of the work that Goldfeller would leave to France after his death, under certain undetermined conditions. Others, determined to find some utility in it, ended up discovering some: the military governor of Paris would make it a work of national defense, a station for our dirigibles and aviators, and the director of the Observatoire talked about transporting his telescopes there.

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