An International Mission to the Moon

by Jean Petithuguenin

  “In any case, the cables are so well-protected in their envelope that one couldn’t break them, even with explosives, without long and arduous toil. That explains why our saboteur operated at the extremity, at the most vulnerable point—but fortunately, the easiest to repair.

  “It’s sad to think that there are human beings who employ their intelligence and their energy in destroying rather that creating.”

  V

  It was the end of July; the great day had arrived. Construction work on the Great Current had concluded everywhere. The tropical base was in a functional state. The cables had been carefully checked in all their sections: the African, the Mediterranean, the Hispano-French, the British and the Nordic.

  The polar base was fully equipped. The extremities of the elements spread out beneath a simple mica envelope into the lodgings fitted out for that purpose. There was nothing more to do than demolish the exterior wall of the gallery to open the way to the ice of the fjord, which, under the effect of pressure, would quickly fill up the traverses of the Great Current.

  The inauguration of one of the most grandiose endeavors of human genius was an event whose phases the entire world was ready to follow.

  All the countries of Europe and Africa that were about to benefit from the energy of the Great Current, thanks to the numerous branches that had been established along the line had sent delegations to Scoresby. Tourism companies had chartered liners, large hydrogliders and aircraft to transport to Greenland the host of curiosity-seekers who wanted to be present to witness the prodigious opening of the great gallery and its invasion by the ice.

  Powerful radiotelephone and radiotelevision transmitters would also permit all those who could not make the journey to Greenland to enjoy the spectacle that was in preparation. Everyone was checking their wireless receivers in order not to miss that truly sensational broadcast.

  The countries that would not be served by the Great Current had also sent representatives, for the civilized world was following with a powerful interest the first large-scale attempt to be made the capture solar heat directly.

  There was, nevertheless, one exception to the surge of enthusiasm. The Asian Republics, whose President Wang-Ti-Pou had been for some while, were not represented, and the troubles that had followed the revolution were not sufficient to explain that absence.

  The fact had attracted much comment, and there was no shortage of pessimists to affirm that Asia resented the scientific and technological civilization of the other continents. Those prophets of woe claimed to know that Wang-Ti-Pou was secretly preparing massive armaments, and that he had been able to buy a large number to commercial aircraft since his accession to power in America and Europe, which would be easy to transform into bombers. He had, it was said, procured several thousand in less than a month. It could scarcely be denied; such purchases had not passed unperceived—but optimists affirmed that people were wrong to be alarmed. Had not Wang-Ti-Pou proclaimed that he wanted to direct his people along the path of progress, and was not large-scale commercial aviation the best rapid remedy for the insufficiency of communications between the immense territories of the Associated Republics?

  Without believing in an aggression, the directors of the European Federation, in order to reassure opinion, had nevertheless taken a few precautions. A few hundred warplanes and military helicopters had been concentrated in the East; a few large submersible cruisers that were in reserve in naval bases had been rearmed; the checking had been ordered of a few thousand battle automata that would have to guard the frontiers in case of conflict, as well as the fixed and mobile command posts from which the defensive engineers would have to guide them.

  The execution of these measures had hardly begun, though. Even those who admitted the danger did not think it was imminent, and the Ministry responsible for military forces, which had completely lost sight of its mission in a century and a half of peace, was not putting any haste into its preparations.

  After the criminal attempts that had been perpetrated against the Great Current, and which had remained deeply enigmatic in some respects in spite of the efforts of the police, Dr. Bormann had reinforced the protection of the bases and the entire line of the Great Current. There was a military helicopter at Scoresby and a telemechanical apparatus at the Franz-Josef base, with its direction-post, for which a shelter had be constructed between the tunnels of the cables of the Great Current.

  Paul Chartrain, who had done a period of military service as a pilot of telemechanical tanks and airplanes, had been designated to occupy that post in the case of an emergency. Professor Gainsworth had decided that the young man ought to train one of his colleagues in its operation, but he had not yet had time to do that.

  Those were in any case, precautions that were taken as a matter of duty, but which were deemed to be entirely superfluous.

  The opening of the frontal gallery was fixed for the first of August. At that time of year, when the sky was clear, the midnight sun could still be seen perched upon the mountains that limited the fjord to the north. The weather, which had been foggy on the previous days, cleared up, as if to participate in the glorification of the creators of the Great Current.

  At six o’clock in the morning, the mines were exploded.

  A swarm of aircraft, helicopters and dirigibles carrying official representatives and thousands of tourists were soaring over the fjord in order to permit their passengers to observe the effects of the explosion, which dislocated, with a rumble, the immense sixty-kilometer wall.

  Blocks of rock flew away, mingled with blocks of ice. The chaotic surface of the fjord seemed to quiver, and when the debris had fallen back, the cavern in which the cables of the Great Current terminated appeared, open from one end to the other.

  The coastline was not entirely straight, of course; it presented numerous sinuosities—capes and bays—and the gallery, which followed its contour, was occasionally hidden from view by a promontory, but in the clear weather, its general direction could nevertheless be followed all the way to the horizon by making use of a good pair of binoculars. The explosions had hollowed out a kind of ditch along its entire length, which allowed the gaze to plunge obliquely beneath the rock, even though there were numerous places where the ice cliffs surpassed the height of the gallery’s vault.

  Open water had appeared at the bottom of that cutting, and had absorbed the rocks thrown off by the explosion as well as collecting the disaggregated ice.

  Immobility reigned for a few minutes over the ice-field; then the blocks that the mines had just dislocated began to stir; they swayed, sliding over one another and sometimes turning over with a loud crash. That agitation was transmitted further and further toward the open sea. The entire ice-sheet quivered, and, under an irresistible pressure, slowly drew closer to the gallery, which the debris of floating ice, pushed by the enormous mass, was beginning to invade.

  The flank of the ice-sheet took about six hours to fill the space that separated it from the gallery, here a little more, there a little less. Then nothing was any longer visible but the rocky coast, the ice sheet dominated by immense bergs and, on the horizon, toward the west, the gigantic front of the glacier. It seemed that the titanic work of humans had been effaced by the still-formidable power of nature.

  In the service chambers, however, the engineers were poring over their measuring instruments, watching for the slightest flicker of the voltmeters and ammeters, for they were impatient to catch the first signs of the electric current that was about to flow if all the anticipations of the constructors were verified.

  At the other end of the line, in the desert to the north of Timbuktu, other engineers were observing other needles on other dials, whose immobility seemed to them to be an insult to human genius.

  Everywhere, those who were waiting for the prodigy were profoundly emotional. They were accustomed to considering their anticipations as perfectly logical, in conformity with calculations, and necessary. And yet, at the present moment they were li
ke neophytes who had been introduced into a mystical enclosure, having been told to expect a miraculous apparition. They were gripped by a kind of fear before the enormity of the work born of their genius, their audacity and their activity. The mathematical certainty that had sustained them thus far abandoned them. Might they not have made a mistake in solving their equations? Were those immense cables they had extended over the earth really capable of transmitting from one extremity to the other the instantaneous reactions of cold and heat?

  Eight hours after the explosion, nothing had yet budged on the indicative apparatus.

  “It’s not going to work,” someone said, in a loud voice.

  Professor Gainsworth turned round angrily toward the incredulous individual.

  “Everything has been anticipated; it has to work. It’s necessary to give the ice time to expand into the tunnel and to make contact with the elements.”

  No one replied. And for another quarter of an hour, they waited for the miracle.

  Then Paul Chartrain uttered an exclamation, which resembled the ancient cry of a triumphant Redskin removing the scalp of a fallen enemy.

  A hundred voices joined his in chorus.

  The voltmeter and ammeter of cable number one, the nearest to the depths of the fjord, had trembled, and their needles were moving slowly away from zero.

  There was a minute of mad enthusiasm. The engineers the section chiefs and the official representatives who were there, many of whom were of a venerable age, were leaping madly and shouting without any concern for their dignity.

  Other needles began to dance, announcing that cable 140, and then cable 326, had been touched by the ice in their turn.

  Then it no longer ceased. Sometimes it was one and something another of the cables that entered into action—and in each one, the intensity of the current increased as the ice, obedient to the pressure of the sheet, penetrated more profoundly into the gallery and made closer contact with the wires.

  They were able to proclaim the news of the victory through the loud-hailers, which the wireless broadcast. The telephone and the telegraph transmitted congratulations from all over the world to the general staff of the Great Current. They also had to communicate with the engineers at the Timbuktu base, who were demanding precisions and technical data. Chartrain thus had a new opportunity to correspond with Claire Nolleau, and their conversation was excited that day by the enthusiasm of success.

  When each of them had obtained from the other the information that they needed, the young people expressed their joy.

  “Let’s be proud, Chartrain, of having collaborated in this great work. The incredulous and the prophets of woe have been confounded. We’ve just proved to them that none of their objections had any foundation.”

  “Well, Nolleau, you know how much faith I have in our work. Even if the victory escapes us today, we’ll triumph in the end. We’ve demonstrated that the concept of the Great Current isn’t absurd, that its realization is possible, and that’s a vital point. But one danger still remains: in spite of all our calculations, we might have underestimated the enormous pressure of the ice and its power of traction. That’s a doubt that has been haunting me since I’ve been working at the Franz-Josef base. I’ve witnessed the birth of icebergs and the quivering of the ice-sheet. When one sees the facility with which blocks of several million cubic meters are lifted up, one wonders whether such prodigious forces can really be tamed. We’ll have to wait for days and weeks before being sure that our ice-dividers won’t be carried away, in spite of the solidity of their construction, with all the electric organs that they have to protect.”

  Chartrain was not the only one to experience such a dread. Professor Gainsworth also felt it, and it caused him to appear anxious at the banquet that was offered after the inauguration to the official representatives by the directors of the Great Current.

  The engineers of Franz-Josef base had calculated that the gallery would not be completely invaded by the ice for three days, and the observations they never ceased to carry out confirmed that prediction. It was, in consequence, only toward the end of the third day that the pressure would have acquired its full power and they would know, one way or the other, whether the ice dividers were adequate to their task.

  The phenomenon was tracked by the constant increase in the intensity of the current that was manifest in the cables as the terminal surfaces of the elements entered into closer contact with the source of cold.

  As there was no surprise to be feared, either at the tropical base or, for even better reasons, by the sector heads in Liverpool and Algiers, the senior directors of the company, Dr. Bormann and Chief Engineer Hurtaut decided to travel to the Franz-Josef base to keep watch, with Professor Gainsworth, on the progress of the ice.

  They too were anxious, and they told themselves that their collaboration would be useful is the mechanism they had adopted or the installation of the cold base of the Great Current proved to be incapable of the effort expected of it.

  Sector Chief Hurtaut decided to take Claire Nolleau with him, in order to fulfill the role of his secretary. The young woman experienced great joy in consequence. Not only could she congratulate herself on being able to observe on location the phenomena that were in the process of giving birth to the Great Current, but she would be very happy to see Paul Chartrain again.

  Thus on the third day, at the moment when it was anticipated that that the great cooling gallery would be entirely invaded by the ice, the principal heads of the general staff of the Great Current were assembled at Franz-Josef base.

  Dr. Bormann and Sector Chief Hurtaut arrived at Scoresby by rocket-plane. That was the most rapid means of locomotion. Rocket-planes, which accomplish the greater part of their journey at an altitude of about twenty thousand meters, in regions where the rarefied atmosphere no longer opposes sensible resistance to forward motion, travel at a speed of two thousand kilometers an hour. It required four hours to make the journey from Timbuktu to Scoresby, including the maneuvers of take-off and landing.

  By the end of the third day, the regime of the cables had attained the anticipated maximum of ten million kilowatts per cable, which, for the ensemble of a thousand cables, represented a total of ten billon kilowatts, or an approximate yield of thirteen million six hundred thousand horsepower. That was already a considerable source of energy, more than double the hydraulic power of a country like France, but which still only utilized a tiny part of the reserves of the ice. It could be rapidly quadrupled by means of new installations, if the first gave the expected results.

  Now, the result had been attained. The ice-dividers were holding. The hopes of the constructors were becoming firmer by the hour.

  On the fifth of August, however when everything was still functioning normally, and haste had already been made in all the countries served by the Great Current to make the numerous branches already constructed enter into function, alarming news regarding the international political situation was spread by the printed and spoken outlets.

  First the wireless, and then the papers that came from Paris via rocket-plane to Scoresby and the Franz-Josef base, spread alarm regarding a possible general strike in the factories of North Africa.

  In Cairo, Tunis, Tangiers, Tangier and Casablanca, individuals had been arrested, suspected of preaching anti-technological revolution.

  Those agitators affirmed that the prodigious development of technology in Europe, Africa and America would end with the reestablishment of slavery and that the working masses would find themselves definitively enslaved by the machinery supposedly created to liberate them from constraint of labor, but in reality more tyrannical than the worst of despots. The theories of Wang-Ti-Pou and his Asiatic partisans were recognized. The interrogation of the suspects seemed to indicate, in fact, that they were more or less narrowly linked with the revolutionaries of Mukden and Peking.

  The news from North Arica was not, however, the most disquieting, for the authorities were boasting that they had the situat
ion well in hand; they affirmed that the general strike would be avoided.

  There were more troubling events. All communications via wireless or cables with the Asian Republics had been cut off the day before at eight o’clock in the evening and all the frontiers closed; in ports, an embargo had been placed on departing ships. There had been no notification of those extraordinary measures prior to their application and no justification had yet been received in Europe.

  A few travelers who had succeeded in crossing the frontier fraudulently and reaching Japanese or Indochinese posts during the night reported that the entire country was effervescent. A general mobilization had been decreed, and a huge concentration of aircraft was being organized on the coast of Canton.

  There was no news from the embassies.

  VI

  The engineers of the Great Current were looking at one another with consternated expressions and discussing the great question of the day.

  “Is it war?”

  “They’ve gone mad,” said Chartrain to Claire Nolleau. What do they want from us? If they demanded something from us, we’d have been able to discuss it.”

  “So you think they’re going to launch a surprise attack on us, without any plausible motive?”

  “How can their attitude be explained otherwise? They doubtless think that their only chance of victory is to strike a great blow to defeat us before we’re able to mount a defense.”

  Paul was only too correct.

  At nine o’clock in the morning on the Scoresby meridian—which corresponded to seven o’clock in the evening for the Mukden meridian—the latter city’s radio broadcasting station, which had been silent since the day before, made its powerful voice resound in order to launch a proclamation from Wang-Ti-Pou across the world.

  It was an ultimatum, in English, addressed to Europe and its allies.

  Wang-Ti-Pou enjoined those tyrannical nations to “render independence to oppressed Africa,” accused them of preparing for war and declared that he was forced to launch his armies to attack their territories in order to prevent them from putting their criminal plan into execution.