The Fiery Wheel Page 3

  He was a man of about forty, tall in stature, slim, muscular, with a thin face devoid of a beard or moustache. His complexion, his lips, the shape of his nose and his entire head were suggestive of Arabic origin. As no one had ever heard him mention his past, however, curiosity was reduced to conjectures, which did not cast any light on the dark mystery surrounding Dr. Ahmed Bey.

  His truly prodigious spiritualist séances, which he held on a weekly basis, had soon been attended by all the scientific, literary and political celebrities living in or passing through Paris. As for Monsieur Torpène, the Prefect of Police, he had been admitted into the circle of initiates because he was greatly interested, with a rare depth of intelligence, in psychic and spiritualistic questions.

  Dr. Ahmed Bey owned and lived in a magnificent house on the edge of the Parc Monceau. In a matter of minutes the Prefect’s carriage arrived at the gate to the exterior courtyard of the house. Two colossal negroes were on watch in the courtyard night and day. They recognized the carriage and the coachman and opened the gate. Monsieur Torpène ran up the perron.

  At the sight of him, the manservant on guard beneath the peristyle bowed and said: “The master is walking in the park, Monsieur. It will take me a few minutes to find him. Will Monsieur please wait in the drawing-room...”

  The valet opened a door, and flicked an electric switch. Chandeliers lit up in a green and gold room; Monsieur Torpène went in.

  Three minutes went by. The valet reappeared. “The Master,” he said, “requests that Monsieur join him in the park...”

  At that time of night the Parc Monceau was closed, but thanks to a special authorization, Dr. Ahmed Bey could go directly from his house into the park, which he thus had to himself from midnight to seven o’clock in the morning.

  Torpène found the doctor in the central pathway that extends from the Boulevard Malesherbes to the Avenue Hoche. He was smoking a cigar and strolling at a slow pace with his hands behind his back. The park’s electric lights were out, but the full moon was shining in the sky and the stars were scintillating in the large clearings between the trees.

  “Bonsoir, my dear Monsieur le Préfet,” said the Doctor, extending his hand to Torpène.

  “Bonsoir, Doctor.”

  After shaking the hand that was offered to him, Torpène opened his mouth to speak again, eagerly, but the Doctor cut him off.

  “Don’t waste words! I know why you’ve come.”

  “You know?”

  “Yes. There’s a Ministerial Council meeting in the Place Beauvau. A thousand stupid things are being said about the Fiery Wheel.”

  “But...”

  “Oh, my dear friend, I know you. You haven’t risked a word yourself, but when the torrent of futility had run its course, you mentioned me. And here you are, as a delegate of the Council, come to consult me on the subject of the Fiery Wheel...”

  “That’s right!” stammered Torpène, amazed. “But how did you know?”

  There was a momentary silence. Unable to restrain his impatient curiosity, however, the Prefect of Police repeated: “Yes, how did you know that the Ministers were meeting, and that they’d sent me...”

  “Bah! Child’s play!” Ahmed Bey replied.

  “Then, Doctor, you can tell me...”

  “Nothing.”

  “What! But...”

  “Nothing!”

  The Doctor stopped walking, threw away his cigar, turned abruptly to face Torpène, made a curt gesture, and said: “I don’t know anything at all about the Fiery Wheel…but I will know something else, soon, that will surely permit me to elucidate the mystery and avoid our globe suffering further catastrophes. I need a few days—eight, ten, perhaps a fortnight or three weeks. When I know, I’ll call you.”

  The Doctor paused briefly. Then, in a graver voice, he continued: “What you will see then will be so extraordinary, so astounding, so divine, that you will even forget the Fiery Wheel, Monsieur le Préfet.”

  He fell silent again, took another cigar out of his pocket, lit it, and resumed walking and smoking, his hands clasped behind his back. In a placid tone, he said: My dear Monsieur Torpène, officially, I have nothing more to say to you—but if you’ll give me the pleasure of conversing with me, I shan’t be going to bed for another hour...”

  Torpène knew Ahmed Bey, and knew that the Doctor would not say another word about the Fiery Wheel or about the promised mysterious phenomenon. He therefore suppressed his emotion and his curiosity in order to reply, calmly: “Excuse me, Doctor, if I leave you right away, but you can guess how impatient the Ministers and scientists who are waiting for me are...”

  “Go, go! And remember what I said to you...”

  In the Council, there was considerable annoyance when Ahmed Bey’s mysterious response had been revealed by Monsieur Torpène. The Ministers resumed making eloquent and confused speeches, trying to suppress the fear that had gripped them. Martial modified his hypothesis. Brularion shrugged his shoulders every two minutes and Torpène kept quiet.

  Finally, the Council agreed on the note to be communicated to the newspapers, which read as follows:

  The Ministers and a number of military and scientific experts met last night at the Place Beauvau, under the chairmanship of the Minister of the Interior and President of the Council. Monsieur Torpène, the Prefect of Police, was present at the meeting. After a profound examination of the situation created in France by the mysterious and perpetual threat of the Fiery Wheel, the Council decided to entrust the President of the Council with the drafting of a proclamation, which will be read today by the President of the Republic to the Chambre des Députés and the Sénat, meeting in extraordinary session, and will then be posted in all the communes in France.

  That proclamation will precede practical measures that will be ordered and taken incessantly throughout the territory, with the collaboration of the army.

  When the communiqué was finished, copies were handed to the reporters who were waiting in an adjacent room, who immediately hastened to their respective newspapers.

  Then, congratulating themselves but not without a dull and atrocious anxiety, and not without a certain shame at their absolute impotence, the members of the extraordinary Council went their separate ways. The chronometers marked three forty-seven a.m.

  At that exact moment, two-thirds of the way to the antipodes of the Place Beauvau, in Colombia, the Fiery Wheel picked up three human beings named Paul de Civrac, Arthur Brad and Jonathan Bild, like three wisps of straw, in the same fashion that the beautiful Lolla Mendès and the manservant Francisco had been lifted up in Barcelona.

  Chapter Three

  In which the fiery wheel yields some of its secrets

  Paul de Civrac never knew how long his insensibility lasted. When he recovered consciousness, his first action, in advance of any reflection, was to open his eyes—but he closed them again abruptly, dazzled.

  He kept his eyelids closed for several minutes then, trying to take account of his situation. It was impossible for him to move his head, his arms or his legs. His entire body was stuck to a flat surface, his legs straight and his arms outstretched. He could feel the back of his neck, his elbows, his hands, his back, his thighs, his calves and his heels indissolubly glued to a soft, cold substance. His left cheek was lashed by a violent and continuous wind. His ears were resounding with an enormous hum. Through his closed eyelids he could see a uniform pink hue, as when one turns non’s closed eyes toward the midday sun.

  Meanwhile, blood was throbbing in his ears, and he was having great difficulty breathing. It seemed to him that he was short of air. His breathing was abrupt and harsh, but without any sound in his nose or throat.

  He opened his mouth and uttered a cry. Two other cries replied, one from his right and the other from above.

  “Arthur! Jonathan!” he shouted.

  “Paul! Paul!”

  Bild and Brad were alive—but he was surprised to hear their voices, and his own, as if they were coming from far awa
y, thinly, as if produced in a rarefied atmosphere. And that continual oppression in his lungs!

  Of course! he thought. We’re outside the layer of breathable air that surrounds the Earth. If we continue to draw away, we’ll die...

  Then, very gently and gradually, he opened his eyes, in order to accustom himself progressively to the bright light that had dazzled him at first. It required a good quarter of an hour simply to maintain his eyes half-open. He could not see anything in front of him except the immensity of the sky—but it was an extraordinarily luminous sky. He was about to make the attempt to rotate his eyes in their orbits, in order to see as far as possible around him, when he felt himself slowly sinking into the substance to the surface of which he was stuck.

  “Paul! Paul!” cried the implausibly thin voices of Bild and Brad simultaneously.

  “Arthur! Jonathan!”

  He had scarcely finished that desperate appeal when the substance on which he was lying disappeared from beneath him. He fell. Other human bodies collided with his own, and he suddenly found himself sitting in the darkness. Something was bruising his side; with one of his hands, now free, he felt it. It was a human foot enclosed in a large boot.

  “Paul!” said a voice to his left.

  “Paul!” said another voice, behind him.

  “Jonathan! Arthur!” he exclaimed. “Are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Injured?”

  “No. Are you?”

  “Me neither.”

  “I’m having difficulty breathing.”

  “Me too.”

  “Me too! We’re in thin air. It hurts the lungs...”

  “And our voice? Have you noticed our voices?”

  Indeed, they sounded bizarre, tenuous and distant, so that they had to shout in order to hear something quavering and indecisive.

  “It’s the thinness of the air,” Paul repeated.

  “Yes, obviously...”

  “But for God’s sake, where are we?” said the voice of the massive Jonathan Bild, as fragile as that of a little girl.

  “Yes, where are we?” Brad added.

  “I don’t know,” Paul replied.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Bild said, decisively: “We’re inside the hub of the Martian wheel.”

  “Or Saturnian,” said Arthur.

  “Have you got any matches? Damn, how dry and jerky my breathing is! Will we end up getting used to it if it lasts?”

  “Yes, certainly, after a few hours.”

  There was another brief silence…two scratching sounds…a light. Paul turned round excitedly, and the bewildered faces of his friends appeared to him. Bild and Brad were each holding a lighted match, but the two little flames were pale and minuscule, and the thin sulfurous wicks were being rapidly consumed.

  All three looked at one another, without saying a word. The matches went out simultaneously.

  “Wait!” said Paul. “I have my pocket torch.”

  He took an apparatus from his pocket shaped like a cigar-case. He pressed a button. A little beam of light sprang forth. He got to his feet abruptly—but to his great amazement, the perfectly normal effort he exerted caused him to leap into the air.

  “Where are we?” Jonathan Bild repeated.

  He stood up at the same time as Arthur Brad, and Paul saw them both leap up a meter above the surface on which they had been sitting. They came down on their feet, and Paul noticed that their feet, like his, sank slightly into the substance on which they were standing, like the feet of a light bird sinking into an eiderdown.

  Their hairless faces were pale; Arthur’s blue eyes were blinking, and Jonathan’s dark ones were sparkling with an extraordinary gleam; their hands were trembling.

  Paul took a step toward them, but the movement launched him violently into Arthur Brad’s abdomen.

  “Ah! What are you doing, Paul!”

  “I understand,” said Paul. “Don’t get annoyed. The air’s thin here—the atmosphere is different from the Earth’s. Density and weight are different too, do you see? Remember that, according to reliable calculations, a terrestrial kilogram transported to the surface of Mars would only eight 376 grams!”

  “A third as much!”

  “Yes—well, it’s the same thing here. We weigh less than we do on Earth…and as our muscles are exerting the same force…you see?”

  “Yes. The muscular force exerted to take a step...”

  “Causes us to make a big leap. Exactly! We have to measure our efforts… educate our muscles...”

  Paul was proud to observe that he was the calmest of the three. He was conscious that his possession of the electric torch, his self-composure and his scientific knowledge made him the leader of their little group. From now on, he had to think, speak and act like a leader.

  He felt extraordinarily overexcited. He had no doubt that the excitement in question, which he could also see on the faces of Bild and Brad, was caused by the ambient air, which was certainly richer in oxygen than the terrestrial atmosphere.

  “We’ll get used to it...”

  It seemed to him, in fact, that his respiration, although still halting and harsh, was less difficult, and hardly painful at all. They were beginning to adapt to the strange environment, in which they might have to live for a long time.

  “Right, let’s see!” Bild exclaimed. “Can you tell us where we are?”

  “Of course,” Paul replied, violently. And, measuring his gestures with circumspection, he set about examining their surroundings.

  The exploration was brief. They were inside a bizarrely-formed chamber. Imagine a polyhedral box with twenty faces about five meters high; put yourself inside it, standing on one of the triangular faces, and you will have an idea of the appearance their prison presented to them—for it was definitely a prison. No door, no window, no opening of any kind was visible. The walls were smooth; but the most astonishing thing was the substance of which the walls were made. One could not describe it better than by comparing it to an extremely dense fog, dark gray in color—the walls of a dense cloud!

  How had they been precipitated into that geometric cell? A mystery.

  With the butt of his revolver, Paul rapped on the walls that he could reach. His revolver and his arm sank into them soundlessly.

  Suddenly, like a gap opening in clouds, a large opening appeared in front of them, through which a flood of dazzling light came.

  Instinctively, without a moment’s hesitation, the three friends leapt into that gap together—but they had not taken the new conditions of weight into account. Their unmeasured bound took them a long way, and instead of taking a long step outside the cell, they remained suspended in the air for half a minute, gliding toward a kind of gray dome, into which they were thrown. They penetrated into a dark and suffocating environment, which rejected them immediately, as an elastic mattress would have done. They tumbled into one another pell-mell, bruisingly, but without sustaining any great harm. When they got up again, it was just in time to see the gap that they had just come through close up again.

  Paul thought that he was the victim of a fantastic dream; he wiped sweat from his forehead with a cold hand, and then rubbed his eyes. He had his revolver in his hand, though, and the cold of the steel passed from his hand into his whole body. He understood then that he really was awake, living in reality and not in a dream.

  He felt that he had the simple, bare and feeble soul of a young child, an obedient and docile soul, but madly curious. He sat down slowly on the bizarre floor that seemed to be made of dense and opaque cloud, and it appeared to him that he was stretching himself out on a soft divan. His hand, moved forcefully, penetrated into the cloudy substance, and he perceived a slight resistance.

  Bild and Brad sat down with him.

  “What the devil is all this, Paul?” said Bild.

  “I don’t know. We’ll observe…reflect...”

  “And we’ll end up understanding,” said Brad.

&nb
sp; The “room” in which they were located represented the interior of an immense polyhedron; the faces were so numerous that it seemed almost round.

  It was illuminated by a diffuse green light—coming from where? The light seemed to emanate from the very substance composing the spherical wall of their strange abode…and abode that was otherwise absolutely empty.

  “Obviously,” said Paul, “we’re inside a cloud...” But that presented an association of ideas so crazy that he fell silent.

  There was a long silence.

  “May I be electrocuted,” Jonathan Bild suddenly began, “if...” But he trailed off.

  Brad sniggered, and said: “Jonathan, old man, whether you like it or not, this is the start of an unimaginable electrocution. These Saturnians that...”

  “Martians!” howled Bild, furiously.

  “Come on, Arthur, Jonathan!” said Paul. “Calm, down!” But the ridiculous tenuousness of his voice, which he had tried to strengthen and make energetic and vibrant, took him by surprise again, and he stopped. His two friends seemed slightly mad. He wanted to show them how calm and strong he was, and got up to walk around. This time, he thought about his minimal weight and moved gently, with an extreme prudence. He observed then, with pleasure, that he was breathing with increasing ease, although his breath was still short and unusual.

  In spite of the immensity of the room, the declivity of its polygonal walls was very evident. Imagine the interior of a polyhedral sphere, if mathematicians will permit me that unaccustomed alliance of words, which creates the right image. As he walked, he felt his body, incessantly perpendicular to the soft surface in contact with his feet, remain “upright” in the direction of the radii of the circumference, and, walking on determinedly in spite of his bewilderment, he soon found himself above Bild and Brad, head “down,” with his feet on the “ceiling.” He continued walking, and made a circuit of the room in that fashion, as an ant might do in a hollow cannonball, and came back toward the astonished Bild and Brad from the direction opposite to the one in which he had set out.