The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [236]
Geist did not remove his gaze from him, but he gradually calmed down. Finally he exclaimed: ‘Come over here, to the table. Look, what is this?’
He showed him a metal ball of dark colour.
‘It looks to me like printer’s metal.’
‘Pick it up.’
Wokulski took the ball and was amazed to find it so heavy.
‘This is platinum,’ he said.
‘Platinum?’ Geist echoed with a mocking smile. ‘Here’s platinum for you.’
And he handed him a platinum ball of the same size. Wokulski weighed both in his hands: his amazement grew.
‘Surely this is almost twice the weight of platinum?’ he whispered.
‘Yes…yes,’ Geist laughed. ‘One of my academic friends even called it “compromised platinum”. A neat phrase, isn’t it? To indicate a metal whose specific gravity is 30.7. They always do that. Whenever they succeed in finding a name for a new thing, they at once say they have explained it on the basis of established laws of nature. Conceited asses—the wisest of all, such as so-called humanity abounds with. Do you recognise this?’ he added.
‘Well, it is a glass bar,’ replied Wokulski.
‘Ha ha!’ Geist laughed. ‘Pick it up, examine it. Curious glass, is it not? Heavier than iron, with a granulated cross-section, an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, which can be cut. Do you see how well this glass passes for metal? Perhaps you would like to heat it, or try it with a hammer?’
Wokulski rubbed his eyes. There was no doubt in his mind that such glass had never yet been seen in this world.
‘And this?’ asked Geist, showing him another bar of metal.
‘That must be steel.’
‘Not sodium or potassium?’ asked Geist.
‘No.’
‘Pick up this steel.’
Now Wokulski’s amazement became something like alarm: the supposed steel was as light as a scrap of paper.
‘Surely it is hollow?’
‘Cut it through, or if you haven’t anything to do so with, then come to my place. You will see there far more similar curiosities and will be able to submit them to any tests you choose.’
Wokulski gazed in turn at the metal heavier than platinum, at the transparent metal, at the metal lighter than fluff. As long as he was holding them, they seemed to him the most natural things under the sun: for what is more natural than an object which acts upon the mind? But when he gave the samples back to Geist, amazement overcame him as well as incredulity, wonder and alarm. So he inspected them again, shook his head, believed and doubted by turns.
‘Well, then?’ asked Geist.
‘Have you shown these to chemists?’
‘I have…’
‘And what have they to say?’
‘They inspected them, shook their heads and declared it’s all tricks and deceit, with which serious science cannot be concerned.’
‘How so! Didn’t they even make tests?’ asked Wokulski.
‘No. Some of them even said outright that if they had to choose between violating the laws of nature and delusions of their own minds, they prefer not to believe their own minds. And they added that to make serious experiments on such tricks might overturn a man’s common sense, and they finally declined.’
‘Are you not announcing the discoveries?’
‘Not for a moment. Indeed, their intellectual impotence gives me the best guarantee of preserving the secrets of my inventions. Were it otherwise, they’d have been seized upon, sooner or later the processes would have been discovered and they’d have found that which I do not want to give them.’
‘In other words?’ Wokulski interposed.
‘They’d have discovered a metal lighter than air,’ replied Geist calmly.
Wokulski threw himself into a chair. For a moment both were silent: ‘Why are you keeping this transcendental metal secret from mankind?’ Wokulski finally asked.
‘For many reasons,’ replied Geist. ‘In what is called mankind, barely one genuine man is to be found in ten thousand bulls, sheep, tigers and serpents. This has always been so, even in the Stone Age. Various inventions have been bestowed on this humanity in the course of centuries. Bronze, iron, gun-powder, the magnetic needle, printing, steam-engines and electric telegraphs