The band of musicians that was to gather in the square to announce with clash and clatter the following day’s festivities, disintegrated. Within an hour the news had run from mouth to mouth. Like a lever, it made heads lean back to scan the skies. And there was a diversity of opinions, There were many who attempted, without success, to spot the cancer. “It must have been a piece of paper!” they exclaimed, incredulous. “It must have been a witch!” But, suddenly, someone would shout, “There it is!” And many forefingers became arrows. There was the greatest number of eyewitnesses at a few minutes past one, that is, when the cancer became dizzy and went off through space toward the west, crossing through various clean and clear areas.
At two o’clock sharp, all the observation posts were taken, and the diagnosis was positive and unanimous. The Red Egg, the mysterious presence, was a fact. When a photographer appeared with a plate on which the silhouette of the tumor could be seen clearly contrasted over the gas tank, the news was considered official, and a superstitious panic completely took hold of the populace.
The authorities met in the hurry of hysteria, but they could not prevent the tumultuous mobilization of the population’s reflexes, they could not prevent the men who used blowers at their work from looking at these instruments with the same fearful and impatient perplexity with which firemen look at their long metal stepladders. All the conjectures agreed on one point: there was something about the Red Egg, in its appearance, that was repugnant to the depths of a human being, and it was evident that, in spite of its smallness and its being called “a ball” or “a top” by the children, it represented a threat of unpredictable magnitude. Of course, no one thought of an object from another planet, and only a pair of cloistered nuns alluded to the devil; it was generally believed to be a complex robot, with electric and fulminating bowels, or a beast. An unknown animal, freed from some remote sleep. The bad thing was that its manner of moving about was reminiscent of beings endowed with free will.
The tumor soon noticed that the city had spotted him. But he didn’t care. Man was so limited, the sun had only to hide to blind him. And since the bells had been silenced, what stillness their muteness created! Almost insolently, he turned several cartwheels in the air, coming to rest at last by the lightning rod of an official building.
At that moment, two chemists in a canning factory who had been examining some photographic plates, insinuated a diagnosis: there was a possibility that the Red Egg was fleshy, that it contained flesh mitter. Upon hearing this suggestion, made with great timidity, an illustrious neighbor of the city, the gravedigger, had a sudden illumination. While the authorities continued their meeting without daring to take any measures, the gravedigger looked up and clenching his fists shouted, “It’s a cancer!” With the help of binoculars he looked up again and repeated, more firmly this time, “It’s a cancer!”
The impressive word ran through the streets and crossed bridges with as many feet as it had letters, or like an escaping stream of blood. “It’s a cancer!” Ah, no one knew those “quills” or “antennae” like the gravedigger! His own wife had been a victim of those quills and now lay in the cemetery, converted into one of those drops in that sea of crosses, fifty yards away from where her bedroom had once been. “The doctors!” demanded the gravedigger. “The doctors should act!”
The first reaction was a collective paralysis. Immobility. After that, fantastic ideas crossed men’s minds: to bury oneself in stone and mortar or, even better, to flee. But a cancer must run faster than an idea and must filter through walls without effort. And guns? And airplanes? And fumigating machines?
The authorities, in fact, did appeal to the doctors. Various internes advised keeping calm, realizing that the action of cancer in the organism is slow. On the other hand, others opined that the cellular degeneration was produced instantaneously, so that it was imperative to prevent the tumor from diving and penetrating a body. As for the specialists, they surprised everyone. They wanted to apprehend the tumor alive, not to destroy it. “This would at last enable us to discover its secret.”
The doctors reviewed the means at their disposal for attacking the growth. The Red Egg sharpened his antennae and smiled to hear them speak of washings of blood, of mustard gas, of mistletoe, celandine, hydrastis, creosote.... Actually, he feared only radio therapy and the surgeon’s knife, and neither of these two could hurt him at a distance. “Therefore, I’ll wait in peace....”
“I’ll wait. . . .” From his lightning rod, the cancer had returned to his philosophizing, now master of himself and without nausea. The fear imprinted in the eyes of the populace produced an excited euphoria in him. The city was already familiar to him, he knew its shadows and its most hidden corners. He observed that the human traffic seemed to increase around the churches, around the hospitals and the Air Base. The pious against him? The army against him? Pooh!
The cancer decided to wait until nightfall to throw himself into the attack, by sliding down any chimney hole. In the meantime, he would choose his victim. Who? Ah, this was his limitation: he could attack but one single creature.
He thought first of the old paralytic, the one in semi-death, who informed on his presence. He had degenerated intestinal flora and the task would be easy. Then he thought of the photographer who had taken the most revealing plate; there was a syphilitic inheritance in him, and the task would be even simpler. Then he thought of the priests, who spend their lives speaking of death, of the mayor, of the gravedigger! A pretty combination!
None of these victims was to his liking. The Red Egg pondered, while the sky clouded, permitting him to go undetected.
In midafternoon, the Red Egg felt hungry. He looked about him and saw nothing that would do. The factories had not reopened, and in consequence were not expelling smoke. The gas tank was out of the way, as were the gasoline stations: Finally he discovered that the weather vane on which he’d settled was covered with rust and mold, and by rubbing against it he absorbed it, immediately swelling out like a great beer drinker.
Sundown increased the general nervousness. Normally healthy people who had spent these hours saying the rosary began to notice alarming symptoms and even had fits of coughing and vomiting. “I have pains here!” “I feel this or that!” They feared that they had been attacked by the tumor. Their eyes interrogated each other and they avoided mirrors.
At seven sharp the hopeless ones, the people already afflicted by cancer, showed their faces. They went to the authorities, saying, “Tell us if we can help!”
The example of these sick was decisive. Decisive thanks, once again, to the gravedigger. The gravedigger thought of his dead wife and he flew out into the street ready to face up to the cancer. He was counting on the firemen’s ladders and on helicopters, but even more on his own instinct. He defied the Red Egg and his outcry caught on. Men who had lost their wives and women who had lost their husbands began opening their doors and coming out into the street. At the start, it was a timid gathering. But there were so many cancer-mutilated families! A throng grew in the main square. Heads looked up from various vantage points. Someone spat upward. A boy screamed out, “Try to come down! We’re waiting for you!” The cancer victims who had been operated on successfully were outstanding: with their crippled bodies, their withered lungs, their plastic Tectums. Those whose larynxes had been affected emitted grunts through a hole opened in their chests. They could not shout, “Try to come down! We’re waiting for you!” They could only think it. They could grunt it. And they did. And there were those who breathed asthmatically through rubber tubes.