The electric auto moved silently, like all those traveling along the avenue, seeming at times to submerge it like a flood, but the air was vibrant with confused sounds: the buzzing rumors of the street, fragments of orchestral harmonies or songs, confused speeches, a cacophony of innumerable loudspeakers that were resonating on all the floors of the houses, the purr of aircrafts and airships. That was a sonorous ambiance to which one became accustomed in all great cities, and which did not prevent the young people, brought together by an increasing sympathy, from experiencing a keen pleasure in their nocturnal excursion.
However, Paul and Claire, who had had the opportunity, while participating in the endeavor of the Great Current to penetrate, the former into the icy solitudes of the Pole and the latter into the sparsely populated regions of tropical Africa, were dreaming at that moment of a less encumbered world. They would have liked to be transported together to one of those distant locations where nature had not yet been tamed, where the rivers and streams, the waves of the sea, the snows of the mountains and the wind had not yet been disciplined and subjugated to human needs and pleasures. They had a nostalgia for virgin territory.
“You’re not very cheerful, my children,” Madame Chartrain put in. “The end of the world has been prophesied for you, or at least the end of civilization, but in the meantime, civilization is still triumphant and is doing quite well. Let’s live tranquilly, if you please, and not give ourselves nightmares for tonight.”
III
Consider a planisphere, in the Mercator projection. Everyone knows that the principal property and the great advantage of that mode of representation of the terrestrial surface is easily to furnish the shortest route from one point to another, by simply tracing a line between the two points.
Mark, to the north, on the eastern coast of Greenland, at the twenty-ninth degree of longitude west of Paris, Mount Petermann, which overlooks, from an altitude of 3,480 meters, the Franz-Josef fjord. The fjord is merely the mouth of a powerful glacier, which descends from the flanks of Mount Petermann and its satellites.
Mark, on the other hand, in the center of Africa, the point of intersection of the equator with the meridian of the twentieth degree longitude east of Paris.
Now connect the latter point, which is in the loop of the Congo, by means of a straight line, with Mount Petermann.
If you could displace yourself without meeting any obstacle over the surface of the Earth, that straight line would represent the shortest route that you would need to follow in order to go from the center of Africa to the depths of the Franz-Josef fjord.
Now, see where it passes over the planisphere. It chips the oriental extremity of Iceland and leaves the Faroe archipelago slightly to the east; insinuates itself between Ireland, on the one hand, and Scotland and England on the other; penetrates into France near Mont Saint-Michel; cuts through the Pyrenees east of the vale of Andorra and Spain near Barcelona’ reaches Algeria level with Bougie22 and traverses the Sahara.
If one wanted to build a bridge between Greenland and Africa, one would scarcely have to deviate from that line to find the most advantageous conditions, because it is studded with lands that would serves as so many natural piles for that giant endeavor. One would scarcely have to make a detour via the Faroes to avoid too long a span between Iceland and the British Isles. For a stepping-stone over the Mediterranean one would use Minorca, the most easterly of the Balearics.
That approximate line is the most direct route and offers the fewest obstacles, from the Franz-Josef fjord, the reserve of cold, and tropical Sahara, the source of heat. Now, that is precisely the one chosen by the constructors of the Great Current to establish the first polar-equatorial thermoelectric circuit.
The laying of the cables only presented real difficulties in the coastal zone of Greenland, almost always locked by ice at the latitude in which the northern base was to be installed. Once the cold current of three or four hundred kilometers of sea hat flows along the east of the Greenland littoral has been crossed, however, one no longer encounters any but warm seas, and temperate or hot lands.
In addition, the Sahara, although its southern edge remains far above the equator, offers conditions in its tropical zone essentially favorable to the installation of the hot base of the immense thermoelectric pile that it was proposed to create.
In order better to comprehend the magnitude of the task that the people of the twenty-third century were in the process of accomplishing, it is always necessary to bear in mind that life on earth is maintained by solar radiation.
Whatever form of the energy of living beings one envisages, it is always obtained from the immense star around which we gravitate.
Vegetables assimilate the carbon contained in the atmosphere in the state of carbon dioxide, thanks to the action that daylight exercises on certain organs they possess, especially in the leaves; and the quantity of energy absorbed by the plant in the form of luminous radiation corresponds exactly to the quantity of carbon assimilated.
It is the same for all the other physico-chemical reactions that accompany the phenomena of vegetal life.
It follows that plants are nothing but transformers and condensers of solar energy.
Coal and oil, which result from the decomposition of large masses of fossil vegetables, are accumulated solar energy placed in reserve. When we burn combustibles, we are liberating the rays that the plants that provided them absorbed millions of years ago, in the same way that by burning wood we are liberating the heat that the tree has obtained from the sun in the course of the previous fifteen or twenty years.
Animals do not receive all the heat and light they need to move and constitute their own substance directly from the sun, but it is nevertheless from there that they extract their energy by an indirect route: herbivores obtain it from vegetables, which have received it from the sun; carnivores get it from other animals, which have themselves, in their turn, obtained it from vegetables.
One can see, therefore, that the existence of animals is narrowly linked to that of plants. Where there are no vegetables, animals can no longer live. But vegetables are self-sufficient, and one could easily imagine a world that would be exclusively populated by them.
Humans do not escape this general law. That is what determines the importance of agriculture, for, as soon as they begin to adapt the planet with a view to their particular needs, they must above all create provisions of energy in a utilizable and assimilable form, both for themselves and the other animals from which they obtain their substance. The simple picking of wild fruits, and the harvesting of uncultivated edible plants, which can, strictly speaking, content primitive populations already nourished by hunting and fishing, quickly become insufficient when human groups acquire some density.
Agriculture has, in consequence, long appeared to be an inevitable servitude for civilized peoples. Since the nineteenth century, however, scientists such as Berthelot and Fischer, or more recently Vernadsky,23 have had no fear of affirming, more or less explicitly, that future humankind might be liberated from it.
What is necessary for that? That humans become capable of fabricating their aliments from minerals and with the aid of energy directly obtained from the sun. It is, in sum, a practical matter of effecting the synthesis of the organic compounds by which the human being is nourished.
Now, the research long pursued in this direction by the greatest chemists had finally concluded. Humans were capable of preparing their own aliments and those of the animals with which they thought it good to associate themselves industrially, collecting by new methods the solar energy that they had previously only obtained via the intermediary of plants.
Thus, the first step had been taken toward an evolution whose consequences were incalculable. Sources of energy other than the sun already entered into the equation; without mentioning waterfalls, the great motor of which is also the sun, humans captured the force of the tides to make them serve for the production of aliments.
But it was
a matter, most importantly, of recovering the heat lost in vast desert spaces such as the Sahara. They set out to adapt great extents to collect and accumulate it. Transformed into electric currents, it would be transported to factories, some of which would have the mission of effecting the synthesis of aliments.
The construction of the Great Current was a decisive phase in that evolution, which would eventually change the conditions of human life completely.
Certainly, one could ask the question, as Wang-Ti-Pou did, of whether the new order of things that would result from that transformation was capable of ensuring human happiness.
It is not easy to reply to such a question, for happiness depends on to many factors and is not synonymous with prosperity. However, when one thinks that in the twentieth century, the inhabitants of the Earth only employed a millionth of the energy that they received from the sun and foolishly squandered that which had been accumulated in the form of coal and oil, one is forced to recognize that the rational and complete utilization of all sources of energy attempted by the scientists of the twenty-third century would enrich humankind in enormous proportions and render life much easier.
The physical principle on which the engineers of the Great Current based their conception is simple. In figure 1, the equator is represented by E and the pole by P.24 A thermoelectric element would be constituted by two wires of different elements, maintained in contact at E and free at their extremities at P. Between the extremities, (X and Y) there is a difference in potential that depends, in the one hand, on the nature of the metals of which the wires are composed, and on the other hand, on the temperatures at the point of contact (A) and the extremities X and Y.
The thermoelectric couple has long remained difficult to exploit because of the small difference of potential that one obtains even with the best chosen metals. That difference does not exceed three-tenths of a volt for a temperature difference of a hundred degrees, and in practice, a tenth of a volt, when one renounces metals too costly for industrial usage.
The physicists of the twenty-third century, however, had invented complex alloys that permitted, thanks to phenomena of ionization unsuspected by their forebears, to realize a relatively considerable difference of fifty volts between the two conductors AX and AY for a difference in temperature of a hundred degrees.
At the equator, contact A would be plunged into a vat of heavy oil endowed with a great ability of calorific absorption, capable of being heated to some five hundred degrees without decomposing. An apparatus for concentrating solar radiation by means of transparent mirrors would permit the temperature of the bath of oil to rise during the day to the vicinity of five hundred degrees, whereas at the other extremity, at X and Y, the temperature is maintained lower than fifty degrees below zero. In those conditions, with a temperature difference of more than five hundred degrees, the difference in potential between X and Y would reach at least 150 volts.
By night, the condensers at the equator would naturally cease to function. But the mass of mineral oil, heated during the day and protected against nocturnal cooling by mirrors and shutters, retains a reserve of heat sufficient for the temperature not to drop by more than a hundred degrees between sunset and sunrise, with the result that the tension does not diminish significantly.
In order to utilize that source of electric energy it would be sufficient to link the points B and Bʹ by a circuit (C) made of some conductive material. All the derivations of the users of the Great Current would branch from the circuit BCBʹ. The section of the wires of the element BABʹ and the circuit BCBʹ would be calculated to admit a current of 20,000 ampères.
Given the length of the cables from Greenland to the Sahara and from the Sahara to Greenland, however, which would have to cover a distance of between eight and nine thousand kilometers twice over, and the considerable losses that would result in spite of the excellence of the conductors and the perfection of the insulation, they would only have obtained an insignificant current with a single element. They had, therefore, anticipated that several elements would be mounted in series in accordance with the schema of figure 2, the first element BABʹ being in contact at Bʹ with the second element BʹAʹBʹʹ, the second at Bʹʹ with the third BʹʹAʹʹBʹʹʹ, etc., and the utilization circuit BCBʹʹʹ being installed between the extremity Bʹʹʹ and the latter. In those conditions, if the difference in potential between B and Bʹ, for instance, taking account of losses, fell to only fifty volts, there would be 150 volts between B and Bʹʹʹ for three elements and 500,000 volts if one assembled ten thousand elements in that fashion.
The conductors BA, ABʹ, BʹAʹ, AʹBʹʹ, etc. having been suitably insulated in advance, were associated in a bundles and affected the appearance of an enormous cable. A thousand bundles of ten thousand elements had already extended between the Sahara and the Franz-Josef fjord, but it remained to construct the electrode bases where the bundles would spread out to their extremities in order to offer themselves, on the one hand, to the intense solar radiation, and on the other, to the influence of the cold.
The system would develop an enormous mechanical power obtained from the solar heat. The heat would be transported, in the form of electricity, from A, Aʹ, Aʹʹ to B, Bʹ, Bʹʹ, where the production of the current would be accompanied by the melting of the ice in which the polar extremities would be plunged. The quantity of mechanical energy produced, taking account of the intermediate losses, would be exactly proportional to the number of calories captured at the equator and transmitted to the pole.
That transportation of heat, which nature operates by means of marine currents and winds, but at a pure loss, would thus be realized by humans, thanks to the instantaneous action of electricity, to the profit of civilization and all terrestrial life.
At the end of June 2280 a fleet of large cargo vessels, accompanied by a few ice-breakers, a flotilla of helicopters and a large dirigible, left the port of Liverpool, bound for Scoresby Sound, where a base had already been established.
The bay was free of ice in that season. It was only necessary to be wary, beyond Iceland, of collisions with icebergs liberated by the break-up of the ice-sheet or detached from glaciers in the coastal fjords. In places, they would have recourse to the ice-breakers to complete the disaggregation of the ice-field—which is to say, the fringe of ice still adhering to the coast and blocking its sinuosities—where the spring had not yet succeeded in doing so.
The fleet, which was transporting machines, provisions and a great deal of equipment, was well-protected against the particular dangers of navigation in Arctic waters. The aerial flotilla reconnoitered the route and signaled the presence of any icebergs that might have escaped the attention of the watchmen of the Greenland littoral.
For a long time, Greenland had no longer been a wilderness. The few wretched stations that had vegetated on the coast at the beginning of the twentieth century, which scarcely merited the name of villages, had become prosperous towns populated by the employees of shipwrights, large-scale fishing industries, and mining enterprises. They possessed comfortable hotels, which accommodated, in winter as well as summer, numerous tourists curious to see the Far North and experience the sensations of the long polar night or the strange spectacle of the midnight sun.
One of these agglomerations had developed on the shores of Scoresby Sound, about three hundred kilometers south of the Franz-Josef fjord but more than four hundred kilometers above the Arctic Circle—which is to say, in a region where humans could only subsist thanks to the powerful means furnished to them by the temperate lands.
Particular effort had been made in favor of Scoresby Sound when the works of the Great Current had commenced, for it was indispensable to possess a well-organized polar base capable of offering the resources of a refuge to the pioneers who proposed to exploit the ice of the Franz-Josef fjord.
The houses were surmounted by steep roofs whose slope was calculated to prevent the accumulation of snow. They were elevated on terraces in order not to be buried in
winter, and mutually supported by stays.
In order to combat the cold and bad weather, the township possessed all the powerful means of civilization: dredgers, snow-plows, vehicles with caterpillar tracks, and a central power plant. Underground tunnels provided silent moving pathways, doubling all the roads and permitting circulation sheltered from the cold even when the roads on the surface were buried under four or five meters of snow. Electric lighting, conceived in accordance with the latest progress in the industry, permitted the endurance of the tenebrous winter.
As there was no waterfall or appreciable tide available for exploitation and coal had become far too scarce to be employed as mere fuel, the energy that Scoresby required to power its dynamos and ensure its heating was furnished in the form of hydrogen, which was sent in cylinders from the great ports of Europe. That hydrogen was extracted from water, decomposed by electrolysis in the factories of Europe. It could be burned either in contact with the air or, if very high temperatures were required, by mixing it with the oxygen obtained by the same process.
In essence, that form of latent energy, furnished by the factories of Great Britain and the continent, was a transformation of natural energies already captured by humans, such as those of waterfalls or tides.
When the Great Current began to function, there would be no further need for that expedient. Diversions would procure energy directly, in the form of electricity, for Scoresby and the other establishments on the Greenland coast.
Pushing through the floes—blocks of ice of small dimension—and avoiding icebergs, the fleet reached Scoresby Sound without any accidents.
It was not the first time that Paul Chartrain had disembarked in Greenland. The previous year, at the beginning of spring, before his trip to Paris, he had often shuttled between Liverpool and Scoresby, and had pushed on as far as the Franz-Josef fjord.
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