They hastened to get Scherrebek out of his suit, very anxious as to his fate. The members of the crew who had remained aboard were distressed when they heard what had happened.
The captain was laid on a couchette, and they tried to bring him round. It was in vain. He was still breathing, but did not recover consciousness.
The other climbers were in a poor condition and it was necessary to lavish cares upon them.
Madeleine multiplied her efforts around the invalids. She thought, with horror, that the excursion to Mount Wolff might have ended up even more disastrously. It would not have taken much for all five of the mountaineers to be afflicted with congestion. They might have died up there, and by the time anyone had decided to send help, it would have been too late.
Scherrebek was dying. Revulsives, and even bleeding, proved ineffective.
That catastrophe made all the members of the expedition feel the terrible dangers that they were running on the surface of the Moon much more keenly. Thus far, thanks to the resistance of the Selenit, its perfect organization and the excellence of the apparatus with which they were equipped, the explorers had not had a very clear consciousness of the extraordinary risks to which they were exposing themselves in undertaking such an adventure. Now they understood that their lives were hanging by a thread.
The most redoubtable threat of all had not come from the complications of a fantastic journey through interplanetary space, nor the immense fall of the projectile-vehicle on to the Moon—the perils that struck the imagination, and which the genius of the constructors had been able to ward off. But there were other, more insidious angers more difficult to avoid. There had been the formidable differences in temperature, which no human being was capable of resisting. There was the absence of atmosphere, which made the explorers perpetual prisoners, condemned to be hermetically sealed in the flanks of the Selenit or the diving-suits that isolated them from one another.
Certainly, the members of the mission would be able to take pride, if they ever returned to Earth, in not having had a wasted journey. They would have made many observations that resolved in a definitive fashion many enigmas of the lunar world, and collected specimens of rocks that would permit the nature of the soil to be studied. They would have brought back photographs taken with special apparatus, either from inside the Selenit or in the course of excursions in suits.
Except that, in order for all those results to be achieved, it was necessary to get back to Earth, and what had just happened to Scherrebek awakened the same thought in all of them:
Who can tell whether we might share the fate of our chief, and whether the Moon might be the cemetery in which we’re destined to sleep our final slumber for all eternity?
XIII. Copernicus18
If there had been a colossal telescope on Earth powerful enough to permit an observer to perceive objects as small as the members of the mission on the surface of the Moon, a astronomer who had aimed his instrument at the Sea of Rains, in the region neighboring Mount Wolff, a few hours later, would have witnessed a scene worthy of the Apocalypse. He would have seen six monsters covered in carapaces emerge from the flank of the Selenit, dragging behind them a long inert mass enveloped in a cloth.
It was the members of the expedition rendering their final duties to their leader.
They had put Scherrebek’s dead body back in his suit, which would serve as his coffin.
They carried him some distance away from the Selenit, dug a grave with picks in the rocky soil, and placed him in it. Gathered around, they remained motionless for a minute, meditatively, and bid a whispered adieu to the man who had guided them so valiantly. Tears ran down their faces behind the viewports of their helmets.
They filled in the grave and piled large stones on top of it to form a crude pyramid. At the summit, with three carefully selected locks, they constructed a cross.
The sepulcher completed, they returned sadly to the Selenit.
Thus Scherrebek was buried on the inhospitable Moon, in accordance with the wish he had expressed before the accident that had cost him his life, and his tomb would remain, in that corner of the Sea of Rains, as a grandiose and tragic witness to the passage of the first explorers of the Moon.
The command of the mission reverted henceforth to Galston, who had previously been second-in-command.
“If we’re fortunate enough to return to Earth,” he said. “We’ll propose changing the name of the Sea of Rains and baptizing it the Scherrebek Plain.
They held council.
After the sad adventure on Mount Wolff, they hesitated to undertake a further expedition while the sun was at the zenith.
Sheltered by a spur of the mountain, the Selenit was in the shade and was at no risk of overheating, but it was necessary not to think of exposing suit-wearers for long hours in uncovered terrain.
The mission had not completed all of its program. It still had to visit Copernicus, the most beautiful crater on the Moon, and the one that possesses, after Tycho, the most magnificent aureole. They wanted to try to determine the exact nature of that aureole and the cause of the brightness that the bottom of the crater taken on when the sun’s rays strike it vertically.
From Mount Wolff to Copernicus is about three hundred and fifty kilometers in a straight line; with the obligatory detours, it was necessary to count on a journey of at least four hundred and fifty, not to mention the ascent of the rampart and he exploration of the crater. They could not, on the other hand, burn further quantities of explosive to move the Selenit and travel part of the distance inside it, because they had to keep more than enough in reserve to ensure the departure from the Moon and the deceleration of the fall on reaching the Earth. If they decided to attempt an expedition to Copernicus, they would have to accomplish it on foot. It was merely a matter of deciding whether such an endeavor as possible.
“Thanks to the weakness of the gravity, which, so to speak, gives us seven-league boots,” said Galston, “We can cover twenty kilometers an hour, and ought to be able to make a journey of four hundred and fifty kilometers within twenty-four hours, to which it’s necessary to add an equal time for rest. That gives us forty-eight hours to go, and as much to come back, or our terrestrial days. We’re at the ninth day of the lunar cycle for the meridian of Mount Wolff, only the eighth for the meridian of Copernicus. The Sun will set for the Selenit in about five and a half days, and in a little more than six days for Copernicus.
“Our suits are constructed in such a way that we can enclose ourselves within hem without danger for five consecutive days. I propose to leave in three days, when the sun will already be too low to heat the ground on which we’ll be marching. We’ll follow its movement and we’ll arrive at the rampart of Copernicus twenty-four hours before sunset. We’ll have time to visit the crater, we’ll see the sun set, and we’ll come back by night, by the light of the Earth, whose eastern edge will already be designing its immense crescent in the sky.”
Galston’s plan was adopted. The chief designated Lang, Espronceda and Brifaut to take part in the expedition, but when Madeleine heard that her husband was about to leave for five days she could not contain her emotion.
“It’s folly to attempt such a voyage of nearly a thousand kilometers,” she groaned, weeping “You won’t come back.”
Brifaut tried to impose silence on her. “How can I refuse to march with the others?” he said to her, in a low voice. “Do you want me to pass for a coward?”
“Well then, take me! I don’t want to be separated from you.”
“You’re not being reasonable. You don’t have any pretention to be as resistant as a man. By taking you, we’d risk slowing down our progress, and your presence might be the cause of an accident that we’d avoid if we didn’t have to sustain and watch over you.”
“Didn’t I do well during the excursion to Archimedes?”
“Yes, but after all….”
“Well then, I’ve proved myself; there’s no reason to forbid me to accompany you on
this expedition to Copernicus. René, you can’t imagine the torture of waiting here for you for five days, tormented by doubt, always wondering whether something had happened to you, if I’d ever see you again!”
The young woman found such arguments, and pleaded her cause so ardently, that she finally obtained permission to take part in the expedition, just as she had obtained permission to embark on the Selenit at the outset of the mission.
During the following seventy-two hours, the members of the crew completed the shipboard log, redrafted their notes and carried out a few experiments in the vicinity of the Selenit.
They also designed an immense cross on the dark soil of the Sea of Rains, with bocks of white rock collected from the foot of the mountain, of which Scherrebek’s tomb formed the center. The principal branch of the cross measured two hundred meters, in order that the figure would be visible for the large terrestrial observatories equipped with powerful instruments. And, indeed, astronomers have since been able, with the aid of their telescopes, to make out its location at the foot of Mount Wolff, in the Scherrebek Plain.
The sun would only be shining over Copernicus for three more terrestrial days when Galston set out with Lang, Espronceda, René and Madeleine Brifaut.
They had decided to march at first, so far as possible, in a straight line, following the low chain of mountains that prolongs the Apennines toward the north-east as far as the crater Eratosthenes, and then the first foothills of the Carpathians, to the north of Copernicus. Then they would turn to march southwards, directly toward Copernicus, seeking a passage through one of the valleys of the Carpathians, a narrow and not very dense massif whose culminating point only rises to 1,600 meters. That route had one important advantage: it followed the shady fringe of the mountains and would permit the explorers to shelter easily from the ardor of the declining sun.
When the little troop had passed the crater Eratosthenes, with its high wall of more than four thousand meters, they penetrated into the zone of the aureole of Copernicus. The rocky soil was covered—or, rather impregnated—with a vitreous substance, as polished as ice, which reflected the rays of sunlight, and formed a dazzling surface whose glare the eyes could not sustain. The explorers were obliged to use smoked glass to reinforce the leaded screens with which they had lined their viewports to protect them from the ultra-violet rays of the sun.
Lang made the observation via the telephone that the discovery of that vitreous layer confirmed the hypothesis of the volcanic origin of aureoles like those of Copernicus, Kepler and Tycho.
“I don’t believe however,” he said, “that they’re due to lava flows that have spread out in sheets in the vicinity of the crater. They’re more likely, in my opinion to be matter exuded through the porous rock that constituted the original crust of the satellite.”
Less than twenty-four hours after their departure from the Selenit, as they had foreseen, and not without having accorded themselves the necessary repose, the explorers reached the rampart of Copernicus. None of them felt fatigued; Madeleine was as valiant as the others, and Galston, who had initially been annoyed by her joining the expedition, no longer regretted having brought her.
The troop undertook the ascent of the mountain, which the shadow was beginning to invade on the western side. The Sun was no more than thirty degrees above the horizon.
From the top of the rim, the explorers could still see the reflections of the vitreous aureole when they turned toward the Sun, almost as they would have seen light reflected in the same conditions on a beach recently abandoned by the sea, which the persistence of a thin liquid layer transforms into a mirror. When they looked in another direction, however, they could no longer discover anything but somber ground similar to that of the Sea of Rains, for the Sun’s rays were no longer reflected on that side.
Toward the interior of the crater, the slope, which might have been ten kilometers in extent, descended in successive terraces to a depth of three thousand meters. Without earthlight it would no longer have been discernible, because the Sun was too low and no longer illuminated it. The spectacle of the vitreous rocks, which seemed to have been heaped up by titans, and which, with a general movement, descended in steps to a prodigious extent, was gripping. The explorers saw them at their feet, under the soft light of the Earth. On the other side of the crater, in the middle of which a small isolated group of mountains rose up from the bottom, they could see the opposite edge, bathed in dazzling sunlight.
However much they desired to contemplate a fine spectacle, the climbers had to renounce waiting for sunset at the summit of the rampart; the subsequent descent would have been too perilous over a slope that the Earth no longer illuminated and which would have been plunged in complete darkness.
They went back down to the bottom of the mountain, where they arrived when the shadows of objects projected by the oblique rays of sunlight were elongating immeasurably. They too were accompanied by slender and gigantic silhouettes lying on the ground ahead of them.
Such effects of oblique light are produced on the Earth at sunset, but there the rays are attenuated; their color changes and becomes rosy; the contours of objects are softened and everything is impregnated with mildness. There was nothing similar here. The setting sun retained the same intensity and the same hue as when it floated at the zenith. Its light was as harsh and its heat as fierce for the surfaces as when its rays struck the vertically.
Finally, as it touched the horizon, the explorers climbed a small hill to contemplate it. Heights that depended on the outline of the Carpathians, whose summits could be distinguished in the distance, gave further extent to the perspective. The flanks of Copernicus were streaked with innumerable glittering wrinkles.
The edge of the Sun balanced on the summits marking the horizon, and the star slowly plunged, while the shadows continued to elongate, extinguishing the reflected gleams, drowning the lower ridges, which floated momentarily like sparks, crawling all the way to the hill where the members of the expedition were standing and gradually climbing the high rampart of Copernicus, whose cliff continued to shine like a streak of light against the black sky.
When the last ray of daylight had abandoned the lunar terrain and the desolate world was no longer illuminated except by the Earth in its first quarter, the explorers resumed the route to the Selenit.
It was not an entirely simple matter to orientate themselves by night in that desert, where the landscape always had the same appearance, where all the rocks, all the wrinkles and all the crevasses resembled one another and the brevity of the horizon prevented the gaze from discovering reference points. To be sure, they had the Earth, whose position permitted them to take a bearing, but it was still possible to stray a few kilometers to the north or south, which would then have obliged them to make a long detour—and they had no time to waste.
Thanks to the precision of their observations, however, and the care they took to send one of their number on reconnaissance from time to time, the explorers avoided that accident and succeeded in returning to the foot of Eratosthenes in the first stage of the journey, after which it was no longer possible for them to go astray, guided as they were by the Apennines.
They were extremely careful not to lose sight of one another because, in that world of silence where they did not have the resource of calling to one another, they might have searched for a long time without finding someone. When they were obliged to separate temporarily—in order to carry out a reconnaissance, for example—they signaled to one another from a distance with the electric lanterns that they carried externally, suspended from hooks on their suits.
Five times twenty-four hours after their departure, they arrived within sight of the Selenit and went past Scherrebek’s tomb.
After being refortified by a good meal, taken under electric lights in the crew section, the varied menu of which seemed delicious after five days on a diet of chocolate and pemmican, the excursionists lay down on their couchettes and savored their flexibility voluptuously, be
cause sleeping in a suit was definitely not the last word in comfort. Now, at least their bodies were free; they could stretch themselves out at their ease, and turn over without being impeded by an enormous metal carcass. They were soon all plunged into a profound slumber, including Madeleine, whose bunk was separately installed in the food-locker.
Eight hours later, when the members of the expedition gathered around the table to drink a milky coffee, which Madeleine had made using condensed milk, they began discussing the final phase of the expedition, that of the return.
XIV. The Return
The Selenit had been lightened by about seven thousand tons of explosive, which had been employed in drawing away from the Earth and slowing down its fall on to the surface of the Moon. On the other hand, the gravity on the Moon was much weaker, and it would be much easier to take off for the return journey than the outward one.
Thanks to those favorable circumstances, the explorers could envisage without anxiety the final act of their voyage, even though they were isolated, deprived of all help, on a hostile world.
First of all, it was necessary for the Selenit to depart in a direction close to the vertical, in order not to be brought back to the Moon by gravity after having followed a curved trajectory of some length. The explorers therefore set about searching for a mountain that offered a smooth slope ending in a crest as clear-cut as possible. The part of the Apennines at the foot of which the Selenit had stopped presented numerous near-flat surfaces orientated in the most various directions, but they had difficulty finding one that met all the requisite conditions.
When they had found it, it was necessary to make an ascent in order to examine it attentively and clear away any obstacles that might have caused the Selenit to slide or tip over. It was necessary to break up the inconvenient projections with pick-axes, flatten the wrinkles and fill in the crevices.
An International Mission to the Moon Page 10