by Theo Varlet
From the second evening on, the conversation revolved around the planet that would be the objective of the voyage. In response to Madame Simodzuki’s request, the engineer Northwell summarized the question in these terms:
“The Moon has always been considered, by virtue of its proximity, as the first stage of an extraterrestrial flight, but we can eliminate it by virtue of having the material means at our disposal to go much further. The Moon is a dead world, scientifically demonstrated to have no atmosphere, and no potential for future colonization. It’s strange that a cinema scenarist, in 1930, showed us the characters in The Woman in the Moon wandering around there without any respiratory apparatus, as on Earth. That abuses the credulity of the public and neglects the most elementary rules of plausibility.
“Let us, therefore, leave the Moon to one side.
“We then come to Venus. Venus is the twin sister the replica of the Earth; the only important difference is that it has nine-month years. Very nearly the same size, the same duration of diurnal rotation, and an atmosphere at least as dense as ours, doubtless more heavily laden with water vapor, which tempers the stronger heat due to its greater proximity to the sun.
“Venus is a planet entirely ripe for colonization, but for our first voyage of reconnaissance it’s impossible to consider Venus. Its present distance forbids it. It is presently at a point in its orbit on the far side of the sun, and in consequence of the difference between its orbital velocity and that of the Earth, it won’t reach a proximity sufficient to permit the voyage—42 million kilometers—for another fifteen months.
“There remains Mars, which is presently 52 million kilometers away—a distance more acceptable for our means of action.”
“Yes,” Aurore objected, “but a twelve-day journey is very long.”
“Wait, my dear,” said the smiling Comtesse. “The engineer has something better to offer us.”
Northwell continued: “By a fortunate coincidence, we also have at present, much closer and in the same direction, another small world, much tinier and less well-known, but not negligible for those reasons to potential colonizers: the minor planet Eros. Although classed as an asteroid, Eros is no less than four or five hundred kilometers in diameter, which gives it a surface area twice the size of France. A considerable society could be accommodated there. For us, as for astronomers, Eros is the most interesting of the minor planets, because its highly elliptical orbit overlaps that of Mars and brings it much closer to Earth than any other celestial body, except for the Moon. In twelve days Eros will reach its minimum distance from the Sun and the Earth: a mere 17 million kilometers, about forty times the distance of the Moon, and a third of the distance of Mars—which is a four-day journey.
“It might be the case, however, and is to be feared, that Eros has no atmosphere—but that isn’t certain. We have no more information about that today than when it was discovered in 1898, and the minor planets have already provided astronomers with so many surprises! They’re such mysterious bodies, which raise so many problems and pose such troubling problems.
“Several thousand minor planets exist, a dust of heavenly bodies mostly circulating in a restricted zone marking out the orbit of the planet that ought to exist, according to Bode’s law, between Mars and Jupiter—but there are also a certain number of asteroids that follow divergent ellipses, some traveling beyond Jupiter and others, like Eros, coming closer to the Earth than Mars.
“Various explanations have been proposed to justify this unusual scattering. Some people see these bodies as the elements destined to form a planet during the constitution of the solar system, but which did not succeed, for some reason—perhaps the perturbatory attraction of Jupiter—in aggregating in to a single globe. It has also been suggested that the hypothetical planet once existed, but that a collision with a comet shattered it into fragments, some of which still follow an approximation of the original orbit, while others were dispersed to various distances in new trajectories. Finally, the great cosmologist Émile Belot has produced the most recent of these theories, that the minor planets were formed in the same way as comets.25
“In reality, we do not know; we are ‘at sea.’ One characteristic and troubling detail thickens the mystery further—to wit, the variable brightness of these tiny worlds. From one day to the next, and even from one hour to the next, a minor planet can vary in luminosity and pass, let us say, from the sixth magnitude to the eighth, as if its rotation were turning a less reflective part of its surface toward us. The abruptness of these variations obliges us to believe that these asteroids are not spherical globes, like the Earth and the other planets, but polyhedra, irregular blocks with angles, fissures, shiny faces and dark ones.
“That enigma alone warrants going to take a look...”
The Comtesse interrupted him. “That’s agreed, my dear Northwell—but, only considering the interests of our expedition, that fact is that Eros will be approximately in our line of flight between the fifteenth and the twenty-fifth, If we leave in six days, on the eighteenth, we’ll have the possibility, after four days of travel, to land on that little world if we find that, for one reason or another, it will be impossible to undertake the entire journey all the way to Mars.”
“Which is, unfortunately, only too probable,” said my wife, in an anxious tone. “It’s not only a matter of breathable air and food supplies. We need to know exactly how well our organisms can adapt to the exceptional conditions to which a spaceship voyage will subject them. I’m not sure that human beings will be able to tolerate the total absence of gravity for twelve days.”
“Explain yourself, Aurore,” said the Comtesse. “You’ve already mentioned that, and I’ve thought about it since, but I can’t grasp it very well. It seems to me that until we enter the gravitational sphere of another planet, we’ll be subject to the gravitational attraction of the Earth.”
“No, Madame—that’s precisely the error that Jules Verne made in his immortal romance De la Terre à la Lune, when he situated the passengers’ loss of weight solely within the limits of a “neutral zone”—which is to say, the region in which the Earth’s attraction is counterbalanced by the Moon’s. No, it’s throughout their journey that Barbicane and his two friends should have been weightless…if the brutal launch of the shell by the Columbiad had not pulverized them, as it infallibly would have—a second error, let us mention in passing, of that scientific precursor, who was poorly inspired for once in adopting a cannon as a means of dispatch. The shock-absorber of water and springs that he imagines, having an extent of some thirty centimeters, could not provide any remedy; it would have been necessary to make it operate over several tens of kilometers.
“But let’s get back to our loss of weight. So long as the engine functions, accelerating the velocity of the rocket, the same phenomenon will occur as when a Metro train moves off rapidly…or, better, when an elevator begins to rise: the travelers will have the sensation of weighing more than normal. But when the acceleration has become sufficient to detach the apparatus from the grip of terrestrial gravitation, and, the engine having ceased to function, the vehicle begins to move by virtue of its own momentum, weight will cease to exist inside the rocket. It will be as if the passengers are in free fall; they will no longer experience weight. I remember the extremely painful impression that I experienced during the few hours of my flight two years ago. That is what I call, by analogy with sea-sickness, space-sickness. Now, it’s only in flight that one can appreciate someone’s resistance to that malady. I’m informed as to mine. I think that I can endure four days and more, aided by adaptation, but you, Madame, and my husband…that’s why I think it absolutely necessary to make one or two trials before departure...”
The Comtesse resigned herself to that, but with difficulty. By virtue of its inevitable publicity, an excursion in space did, indeed, risk brutally revealing the secret of the preparations, and it would be convenient to delay those trials until the last possible moment, until the eve of the departur
e...
What was to be feared, from that viewpoint, was not so much the trail of fire left by the escaping gas; its visibility would only last some ten seconds, after which time the rocket would have achieved a velocity of 300 meters per second and would already have reached an altitude of 1,500 meters, so that unless it were held exactly within the field of a pair of binoculars it would escape the gaze completely. The real danger was the noise, a frightful din more powerful than the thunder of twenty aircraft engines. It would be audible all over the island, on the naturalists’ land and all the way to the lighthouse situated at the eastern extremity, eight kilometers from Uraniville. It would also be audible at sea within a radius of some five or six miles, and perhaps all the way to the African coast.
Hearing the sound, of course, would not necessarily reveal that it was made by a spaceship flight, but it would excite public curiosity, when we had taken so much care to avoid it.
The location chosen by Madame Simodzuki to establish the camp of Uraniville was a primary guarantee of discretion in itself. Nowhere in the entirety of France, perhaps, would it have been as easy to deny access to an installation as on the Île du Levant. The impenetrable brushwood around the plateau formed the best of enclosures. Unless one cleared a path with an ax or a saber, it was impossible to cross that zone, several hundred meters wide around the clearing. The spiky gorse and the terribly thorny goat’s-bane, in particular, added their barbs to the compact entanglement of arborescent brier, rosemary and rock-roses. Other than the cable-car, the sole access-route, leading northwards toward Petit-Avis and the naturist camp, was guarded day and night by an armed sailor from the crew of the Fusi-Yama, all of whose men were Japanese, loyal and devoted servants of their mistress.
It was equally impossible to get to the inlet from the sea by following the coast At the bottom of the sheer cliffs, which were similar topped by dense brushwood, the littoral rocks formed insurmountable landslides. The one means was by swimming, or in a boat—but a vigilant watch was maintained on the yacht, and when night fell, a searchlight periodically scanned the neighboring waters.
Even the fisherman from Lavandou had had to resign themselves for months to seeing that inlet transformed into a private domain, into which it was forbidden for them to come, as before, to shelter from bad weather or occasionally disembark to make bouillabaisse. Their discontentment had quickly been attenuated, however, by the windfall that the new state of affairs brought them. The billionairess’ employees, especially since the arrival of the yacht, bought their fish at miraculous prices. Notwithstanding the Revolutionary names of their boats—Danton, Marat, Robespierre—and their advanced political opinions, they soon became fanatical supporters of “Madame la Comtesse” and swore by no name but hers.
So far as they were concerned, the wealthy foreigner was simply in the process of building a villa provided with all modern comforts, and it was certainly not their indiscretions that might put journalists on the track of the truth.
The alert had been sounded, however. Several times a day, so-called walkers, not to mention placid naturists bizarrely decked out with binoculars or photographic apparatus were stopped at the frontier of the domain on the path to Petit-Avis by the sentinel on guard, who made them retrace their steps. Other observers, perched on neighboring hilltops, attempted to see with the aid of telescopes what was happening in the clearing at Uraniville, but none of the crests was sufficiently elevated to permit them to see over the edge of the pines.
On the other hand, the newspapers and the wireless showed us that public opinion had becoming more sensitive and anxious every day since our departure from Paris. Far from attenuating, the excitement stirred up by Oscar Frémiet’s reportage had increased in the press. Following the Jour and the Intran, papers of every political hue had embarked on a campaign against the rocket as a weapon of war. Discoveries of flying torpedoes, real or imaginary, multiplied in the most various latitudes. There were even claims that they had been seen rising into the air here and there. The revelations became more precise. All States, great and small, were accused successively of having undertaken the study and manufacture of these terrifying devices. In consequence of the mutual distrust of populations, a sudden and general tension reigned over the whole of Europe.
Even in France, a few days had sufficed to shake off the quasi-anesthetic indifference opposed for years by people to threats of war that had been too frequently renewed. The frisson of fear that had passed in 1930-31 when Victor Marguerite’s revelations of the next war published in several newspapers and La Patrie Humaine,26 were renewed, even more intensely on this occasion. All the dailies contained articles of this sort:
Already, with elektron bombs,27 Lewisite, phosgene and others, a thousand pilots and two or three hundred aircraft would be sufficient to annihilate large cities in a matter of hours and obtain a decisive advantage. Taking things to the extreme, one could say that a republic like Andorra, led by agitators and mounting a surprise attack, might reduce a great nation—France, Germany or Italy—to helplessness. Against aviation and its incendiary and gas bombs, permanent armies, in spite of all their improvements of motorization an automatic weapons, are an institution as obsolete and outdated as it would be to oppose tanks and machine-guns with a corps of Vatican halberdiers with the costumes and weapons painted by Michelangelo.
Today, when the new weapon is perfected, which will not take long—and who can tell whether it might not already have been realized in some country in Europe, Asia or America?—and two or three thousand rocket torpedoes are constructed and disposed on their launch-tripods, provided with fuel and explosives, there will not even be any need of a thousand resolute and devoted pilots. A dozen mechanics at the disposal of a dictator of dubious sanity will suffice—and who can tell, perhaps a single wealthy and megalomaniac individual—for the fatal order to be given in a moment of madness. And less than half an hour later, the two or three thousand rocket-torpedoes, supposing, for example, that they have been launched by the imaginary republic of Andorra at its gigantic transatlantic rival the United States, would rain down on New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and New Orleans—all the great cities. A cataclysm adapted to the scale of modern progress, which, in the few years separating us from the war of 1914-18, has covered more ground than in the entire nineteenth century—a cataclysm without precedent in the history of humankind—would annihilate in an hour the resources of a country of 120,000,000 inhabitants and half of the urban population...
That effervescence of opinion was as inconvenient as could be for us. It was only to be expected that the journalists rebuffed in their attempts to penetrate the secrecy surrounding Uraniville would take advantage of the opportunity to avenge themselves by calling for an investigation or even alerting the Navy.
Already, on the thirteenth of April, the newspapers of the Provençal region were publishing items of this sort:
THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND. It would perhaps be interesting to know exactly what certain installations are hiding, established by rich foreigners who, not content with acquiring a portion of national territory and providing it with a private wireless station, have enclosed it as a kind of fief guarded by armed sailors. It is certainly legitimate to want to be left in peace in one’s own home, but the Press has a duty to inform and, for our part, we have no intention of failing in that duty. Such a desire for secrecy authorizes all suppositions. What is happening behind that terrestrial and maritime barrage? Who knows whether some petty Nero might not be preparing some grandiosely destructive festival, for which modern science might furnish the means to anyone with sufficient cash. If Monsieur X or Madame Z has nothing reprehensible to hide, he or she will not fail to grant an interview to our next envoy.
In addition, on the fifteenth, Le Grand Varois spoke of a sensational affair of espionage ready to explode. It was connected to another, of Bolshevist propaganda, which had just provoked several arrests at the Arsenal in Toulon. By way of conclusion, the paper asked whether ther
e was any connection between these two scandals and what was called “the intolerable mystery of a Provençal island.”
IX. Space Baptism
At ten o’clock in the morning on the sixteenth, the Ad Astra I emerged from its hangar and proceeded on its chassis to the center of the esplanade. The three of us embarked—the Comtesse first, then me and finally Aurore—through the man-hole giving access to the cabin. This time, however, the three of us remained together, and once the hatch was closed we went down into the engine room.
Harshly lit by naked electric bulbs, the metal cell resonated under foot at the slightest touch. Three small mattresses were laid out in parallel on the floor.
“Please lie down,” Aurore ordered. “You there, Madame and you here, Gaston.”
She took the final place herself, in front of the dashboard where the levers with ebonite handles that I had learned to manipulate were aligned beneath dials and warning lights.
“What is the program for the first trial…Captain?” asked the Comtesse.
“As follows, Madame,” Aurore replied. “Emerge from the atmosphere at an acceleration of 2G and continue for five minutes at 3G, to an altitude of 1,500 or 2,000 kilometers. In the meantime, we will have the impression of weighing, first twice and then three times as much as usual. It will be slightly uncomfortable. The real ordeal will come thereafter, with space-sickness, when I allow the apparatus to travel under its own momentum…in free fall. If all goes well, and no one is too seriously inconvenienced, I shall then carry out tests of radiophonic communication with Uraniville and, as we shall be left behind by the rotation of the Earth and deviated westwards, we’ll return by traveling at an angle toward the zenith of the Levant in order to land. In total we’ll remain in flight for about an hour. Pay attention—are you ready? Are you securely wedged on your mattresses. I’m releasing the gas. In three seconds I’ll start the burner. One, two...