An Unknown World

by Pierre de Sélènes

  The Englishman was the owner of the Columbiad. A few minutes later, the saleroom was deserted.

  IV. Mathieu-Rollère

  While Marcel, accompanied by Lord Rodilan, who seemed to be lending the enterprise in which he was engaged more interest than he wanted to admit, went to Florida to direct the preparations for the projected voyage, Jacques Deligny, with the consent of his two friends, set off for Europe in order to accomplish what he considered to be a sacred duty.

  The old astronomer François Mathieu-Rollère had been living for nearly thirty years in the Rue Cassini in Paris, near the Observatoire. It was there, in a pleasant small house surrounded by a large garden that he had come to take up residence with his wife when he had been appointed to the post of astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris. The young scientist would have been completely happy with a spouse he loved and the science to which he had devoted his life if Heaven had blessed their union. For many years he despaired of being a father, and seemed resigned to that suffering when a daughter was born, to whom he gave the name Hélène. But he paid dearly for that happiness; the birth of the child cost the life of her mother.

  That unexpected death threw the scientist into great despair. To divert himself from his grief, he plunged even more resolutely into science, which was the only thing that could make him forget the person he had lost. Hélène thus grew up with a father who, entirely given over to his scientific work, scarcely gave her a thought and seemed no longer to remember how ardently he had desired to have a child. Although his aged housekeeper, the worthy Catherine, had transferred to her all the affection she had had for the deceased, the life of the child, deprived of maternal tenderness, who spent her days between a scientist lost in his books and an old maidservant, was rather sad. She rarely went out and never joined in with the games of children of her own age.

  She was eight years old when the arrival of a young companion profoundly modified her life.

  The astronomer had a sister married to a naval officer whom she loved profoundly. A brilliant future had opened up before ship’s lieutenant Deligny when, in the course of a campaign in the Far East, death had suddenly snatched him from the tenderness of his wife. The latter had followed him to the grave not long after, and Jacques, their only son, then aged fourteen, had been left an orphan. His uncle, whom the law appointed as his guardian, had taken the boy, who was then finishing his studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, into his home.

  From then on life had changed for young Hélène; a close affection had not taken long to unite the two children. That sentiment, growing with age, had become a serious love that nothing seemed likely to disrupt. The old scientist seemed only to be interested in matters of the skies; it did not seem likely that he would ever oppose the union of the two young people, and Jacques worked with confidence to build a secure and honorable situation for the person he adored. So, his surprise and despair were great when, on asking for Hélène’s hand, his uncle had replied with a categorical refusal. He knew that nothing would make the astronomer go back on his decision, and he had gone away heartbroken, and said to Hélène while stifling his sobs: “I’ll go in search of a means of being worthy of you.”

  From that moment on, life had been very sad for the young woman; she was consumed by a wait that every day rendered more desperate. Since his departure, Jacques had given no sign of life, and she sometimes wondered whether the man she loved might have forgotten her, or whether he had died in some perilous adventure. Her complexion had paled, her eyes had lost their gleam, and her health seemed to deteriorate.

  The old scientist, however, completely absorbed by his work, did not notice anything. He scarcely darted an occasional distracted glance at his daughter, whom he only saw at meal times; he did not notice the changes that had taken place in her.

  Eight months had gone by like that since Jacques’ departure; Hélène was no longer hopeful.

  One morning, in the latter days of February, the bell at the garden door rang noisily, as if shaken by a vigorous hand, and Hélène, who was sitting in her room, felt a shock in her heart without knowing why. The old maidservant went to open up.

  The visitor was Jacques.

  He erupted joyfully into the little room where he had so often sat between his uncle and his beloved. The old scientist, who was getting ready to go to the Observatory, had just come into it.

  “Oh, Uncle!” cried Jacques, throwing his arms around his neck. “How glad I am to see you! You’re going to be pleased with me. But where’s my cousin? I want to hug her too.”

  “Gently, gently,” said the astronomer, who had nearly been knocked over by the young man’s greeting. “You leave like a madman, you go away for eight months without sending any news, and you come back like an aerolith. What does it all mean?”

  Meanwhile, Hélène, overcoming her emotion, had run downstairs and come into the drawing room. Her cheeks were now covered with a vivid blush; her eyes had recovered a gleam that had not been seen there for a long time. She offered her forehead to Jacques, and while he deposited a burning kiss thereon, she murmured: “Wretch, how you’ve made me suffer.”

  When lunch was over and he was savoring his coffee, Jacques told his uncle and his cousin everything that he had done since he had left them.

  The young woman listened avidly to the story, in which she sensed all the love palpitating with which Jacques heart was filled. The old man only lent a distracted ear to it—but when the narrative reached his encounter with Marcel de Rouzé, and the most recent events that had filled his life, concluding with the audacious voyage that he had decided to undertake, the astronomer’s eye became animated, his attention became sustained, and an old residue of blood flowed to his cheeks; he was gained by his nephew’s enthusiasm, and in the end, his joy overflowed.

  “Bravo, my dear boy!” he exclaimed. “That is indeed a great and noble enterprise, which will make all the astronomers in Europe dry up with jealousy, and furnish science with an inexhaustible mine of rich documents and discoveries, whose range can’t yet be anticipated.”

  “But Father,” put in Hélène, whose joy seemed suddenly to have faded away, and who felt gripped by an inexpressible anguish, “you can’t think that! To consent to Jacques engaging in this insensate adventure is to send him to certain death and to condemn me too—for I certainly won’t survive him.”

  “Ta ta ta!” said the old scientist. “That’s little girls all over—ignorant and timid. If one listened to them, one would never attempt anything and science would remain immobile. But, ignoramus that you are, this voyage that causes you so much dread has already been made once, and they came back. It’s a matter today of beginning again in conditions of absolute security. You’ve been told that up there, on our satellite, there are people waiting for us, who are eager to enter into communication with us. Nothing will be easier for those who will have reached the Moon than to come back again.”

  Hélène did not share her father’s enthusiastic conviction, and during the days that followed, she used all her influence on Jacques to make him take back his terrible resolution—but her efforts were futile; Jacques had gradually become intoxicated by the thought of that voyage into the immensity. Marcel’s ardent faith in the ultimate success had won him over. In any case, he could not see any other means of obtaining the hand of the woman he loved.

  His love rendered him eloquent and persuasive, and although he did not succeed in making the young woman share his confidence, he eventually contrived to stop her opposing his plan. She wanted at least to remain close to the man she loved until the last possible moment, however, and to follow him in his perilous enterprise with her eyes.

  “I can see,” she said to her father one day, “that everything I might try to persuade you, Jacques to abandon this enterprise, and you, Father, from approving of it, would be pointless. It’s necessary, therefore, for me to resign myself to it. But why shouldn’t we accompany you to America? And since there’s a telescope in the Rocky Mountains that
permits the projectile to be followed in its flight, why not go there in order to remain, for as long as possible, in communication with the person who is so dear to us?”

  “You’re right!” exclaimed the astronomer. “That’s an excellent idea. Nothing will be easier than obtaining a special mission from the Observatoire.”

  It was therefore agreed that they would leave together for New York, and that while Jacques went to Florida, the old scientist and his daughter would go to the Rocky Mountains, there to await the departure of the Columbiad’s projectile.

  V. Preparations for Departure

  For several months, an extraordinary activity reigned in the Florida peninsula. Several crews of European workmen had disembarked there. New workshops had been constructed, replacing those that had been built eighteen years before and which, greatly neglected since that era, had fallen into ruins and become useless for the new enterprise. There was, in fact, no more need for the innumerable furnaces that had served to found the Columbiad; the number of workmen required for what needed to be done now was much less considerable.

  A few temporary houses sufficed to lodge them, but it was necessary to retire to working order the railway liking Tampa to Stone’s Hill, by which all the machinery and necessary provisions would reach the construction yards, for that track, which had been so busy for a few months and had transported so many materials and passengers had become singularly dilapidated in the interim.

  It was no longer a case, as before, of digging the vast hole in which the gigantic cannon would be encased, or of pouring in the enormous quantity of cast iron that was to form its walls. All that colossal, frightful labor, which had surpassed all known proportions, had been carried out magisterially and brought to a successful conclusion by the forerunners of our explorers. Even the aluminum shell that had served them as a habitat was there, under the sealed hangar, with its internal furnishings.

  It was, however, necessary to review the cannon and the projectile very carefully. How would both of them stand up at the moment of departure? Had they not suffered in some measure from the long abandonment in which they had been left? Undoubtedly, the public advertisement that had appeared in the American press had affirmed that they were in good condition, but our men were too shrewd to trust in such an assertion.

  The National Society for Interstellar Communications had taken care to have a kind of roof erected above the orifice of the Columbiad in order to protect it from bad weather, but such precautions could not be taken for granted; it was necessary to carry out a serious and profound examination.

  Marcel and Lord Rodilan directed the work. The presence of Jacques, who would not have brought any special competence to those circumstances, had not been judged to be indispensable. He had, moreover, informed his two comrades of the result of his conversations with his uncle, and they had obligingly let him know that he could make preparations for the departure of the astronomer and his daughter for the Rocky Mountains completely at his ease. They both took responsibility for making sure that everything was for the best, given the epoch in which the journey had to be undertaken.

  The orifice of the Columbiad was cleared of its protective roof, and lifting-tackle was installed in its place that would permit penetration into the depths of the gigantic tube, to check its condition. Marcel did not want to entrust the responsibility for that examination to anyone else. Equipped with a powerful electric reflector lamp, he descended slowly along the walls, and recognized with satisfaction that the barrel of the cannon had been coated internally along its entire length with a thick layer of tar in order to protect it from damp. He was able to ascertain by scrupulous inspection that the layer had not cracked anywhere, which was sufficient proof that the cast iron cylinder, sustained by the solid mass of masonry in which it was encased, had resisted the formidable gas pressure admirably.

  It was now a matter of proceeding with a new boring process to remove the tar and returning the polish it had lost to the inside of the barrel. To do that they had only to follow the example of the constructors of the Columbiad, and the work, directed and supervised at close range by Marcel—who was everywhere at once and communicated to the souls of the workmen the ardor by which he was animated—got the job done in as little time as possible.

  Lord Rodilan, to whom it made no difference to parade his ennui in one part of the globe rather than another, did not take a very active part in those preparations. He followed them with a slightly mocking expression; Marcel’s robust confidence had not shaken his incredulity, and he did not spare his friend his unkind reflections and sinister predictions.

  “For me, my dear fellow,” he told him, “you’re the object of a sufficiently interesting curiosity, and I really would admire you if I were capable of experiencing such a sentiment. To see the seriousness that you bring to all these preparatory operations, one might that you were sure of arriving safe and sound at the end of your voyage.”

  “Am I sure of that? But my dear Lord, so far as I’m concerned, that is mathematically demonstrated, and it’s necessary for you to shut your eyes to the evidence in order not to be convinced by the calculations I’ve so often submitted to you.”

  “La la—don’t get annoyed, incorrigible engineer that you are. Since I’m leaving with you, what more do you want? I certainly hope that we’ll have a memorable fall up there—can you have a fall up there? That’s what’s original—that and the fact that we’ll be smashed to smithereens before even being able to recognize the color of that satanic satellite that’s attracting you like a veritable magnet.”

  “But we won’t fall, as you know very well. Perhaps we’ll come down a little quickly...”

  “Yes, yes, I know, the famous rockets, which won’t allow the shell to fall on to the Moon.”

  “Agreed—but this time, I hope, we won’t encounter an inconvenient bolide that will throw us off course, and my new system of rockets will prevail against any event.”

  Marcel was, in fact, preoccupied with that question; he had remade the calculations of Barbicane and Nicholl, and remained convinced that the means they had devised for slowing down the rapidity of the descent to the lunar surface was absolutely insufficient, especially given the absence of an atmosphere, the resistance of which the shell would not have to overcome. But the idea of rockets whose ignition would oppose the shell’s fall and deaden its impact was ingenious. Marcel was determined to stick to it; he merely thought it useful to increase their number and to organize three series, which would be brought into play at calculated intervals in inverse proportion to the distance to be traveled. He would thus obtain three successive resistances, which, if his calculations were accurate—and he did not doubt their exactitude—ought to allow the travelers to arrive at their destination without an excessively violent impact.

  The shell that the first expedition had used was also subjected to an attentive examination. It had successfully resisted the pressure of the gas whose explosion had projected it into space and its formidable plunge into the depths of the Pacific. The thick walls had been made of pure aluminum and, having the resistance of a single block, had not been subjected to any considerable deformation. Only the interior fittings had suffered much from the insults of time.

  The padding of the walls and the circular divan had been completely replaced, and Marcel took advantage of that circumstance to have the fine but resistant steel springs replaced, which had rusted over time and lost their elasticity. The lenticular panes of the portholes and the metallic frames in which they were held were similarly renewed. It was also necessary to reestablish the metal plates designed to protect them against the shock of the departure, which the original voyagers had simply thrown outside. Finally, all the containers were replaced: the boxes of water and food, the gas reservoirs, and the Regnault-Reiset apparatus designed to maintain the respirability of the air throughout the journey.5

  With the certainty that he had of encountering living beings on our satellite with whom it would be possible to
enter into intellectual communication, Marcel had wanted, if to instruct them or cause them to marvel, at least to acquaint them with the degree of civilization and moral development that their terrestrial neighbors has reached. With that in mind he had take care to equip the projectile-vehicle in which he was about to visit them with everything that he thought likely to inform them of that. To the most improved and carefully-wrapped optical and mathematical instruments—telescope microscope, compass, chronometer, theodolite, sextant, etc.—he had added a small printing press, a phonograph with several cylinders, capable of reproducing the most beautiful of our operatic arias, a telephone, an instantaneous camera fitted with the latest improvements, specimens of our various metals, seeds of the most useful and precious vegetables, including a dozen saplings of the fruit-bearing tree species that were most productive and easiest to acclimatize.

  He had taken care, above all, to establish a rich collection of albums containing photographs of terrestrial landscapes and seascapes, and our most famous monuments; works of art, including paintings and statues by the greatest masters, were abundantly represented therein, as well as our principal industrial, agricultural, navigational and locomotive apparatus.

  An atlas of the terrestrial globe completed that collection, in which all the effort of centuries and all the conquests of modern civilization were summarized. Everything concerning everyday life among the various peoples covering the surface of the world—habitations, furniture, costumes, weapons, utensils and objects of every sort—were encountered there in sufficient quantity.

  They took with them a few advanced weapons: repeating rifles and revolvers, with ammunition. “Because,” Marcel said, “We don’t know much about what we’ll be dealing with, and in spite of the hospitable inclinations of which they seem to be giving evidence, we might also encounter people of a difficult humor, with whom it will be necessary to reckon.”