First published in Russian: 1892
Translation by Anindita Banerjee
KONSTANTIN TSIOLKOVSKY
1893
ON THE MOON
I
I woke up and, still lying in bed, pondered the dream I’d just had: I was swimming, and since it’s winter now it felt especially pleasant to imagine summer swimming.
Time to get up!
I stretched, lifted myself up a bit… So easy! It was easy to sit, easy to stand. What was going on? Could I still be dreaming? I felt especially light, as if I were standing in water up to my neck: my feet barely touched the floor.
But where was the water? I didn’t see any. I waved my hands, and I sensed no resistance.
Was I still asleep? I rubbed my eyes, but everything stayed the same.
Strange!
Nonetheless, I had to get dressed.
I moved the chairs, opened the cupboards, got out my clothes, picked up various things, and – nothing made any sense!
Have I gotten stronger? Why is everything so weightless? Why could I pick up objects I couldn’t even budge before?
No! These were not my legs, not my arms, not my body!
Usually they were so heavy, and everything took them so much effort…
Where had I acquired such might in my arms and legs?
Or maybe some kind of power was pulling me and everything else upward, and making my work easier that way? But if so, what a strong pull! Just a little more, it seemed to me, and I’d float up to the ceiling.
Why was it I leapt instead of walking? Something was pulling me in the opposite direction to gravity; it tensed my muscles, forced me to take a jump.
I couldn’t resist the temptation – I jumped…
It seemed that I rose up fairly slowly and landed just as slowly.
I jumped harder and took a look around the room from a fair distance up… Ouch! Hit my head on the ceiling… The rooms are high, I hadn’t expected to hit it. I’d have to be more careful.
My shout woke up my roommate, though: I saw him start tossing and turning, and after a little while he jumped out of bed. I won’t describe his amazement, just like my own. I observed the same kind of spectacle I had acted out myself, without noticing it, a few minutes before. It gave me great pleasure to see my friend’s eyes bugging out, his funny poses and the unnatural liveliness of his movements. His strange exclamations, very like my own, amused me.
I waited for my friend the physicist to recover from his surprise, then I asked him to resolve my question: what on earth had happened – had our strength increased, or did our weight decrease?
Both suggestions were equally astounding, but there’s nothing a person won’t start to view with indifference once he gets used to it. My friend and I hadn’t gotten that far yet, but we already felt a desire to figure out the answer.
My friend, who was accustomed to analysis, soon made sense of the mass of phenomena that had overwhelmed and confused my mind.
“We can test our muscle strength on the dynamometer, with the spring weights,” he said, “and find out whether it has increased or not. Here, I’ll press my feet against the wall and pull on the lower hook of the spring. See – five poods:1 my strength hasn’t increased. You can do the same, and prove to yourself that you haven’t turned into a fairy-tale hero like Ilya Muromets.”
“It’s hard to agree,” I objected. “The facts contradict you. How is it that I can lift the edge of this bookcase, which has to weigh at least fifty poods? At first I thought it must be empty, but I opened it and saw that every book was still in place… Can you explain, by the way, how it is that I can jump twenty arshins high!?”2
“You aren’t lifting heavy weights, jumping high and feeling light because your own strength increased – we’ve already disproved that hypothesis with the dynamometer – but because gravity is lower, and you can prove that to yourself with the same spring weights. We can even find out how much lower it is…”
With these words he lifted the first weight he found, a twelve-pounder, and hung it on the dynamometer.
“Look!” he continued, pointing at the scale. “A twelve-pound weight turns out to weigh two pounds. That means gravity has weakened by a factor of six.”
After thinking for a minute, he continued, “That’s just the gravity on the surface of the Moon, due to its small volume and the low density of its composition.”
“So are we on the Moon now?” I laughed.
“If we are on the Moon,” the physicist laughed, in the same joking tone, “that’s not a huge misfortune, since we can repeat a miracle like that, given that it’s possible, in the opposite direction – that is, we’ll be able to go back where we came from.”
“Wait, enough playing games... But what if we weigh something on an ordinary cross-beam scale! Will we see a reduction in weight?”
“No, because the weight of the thing will be reduced by the same amount as the weight you put in the other cup of the scales, since balance is not violated, regardless of the decrease in gravity.”
“Yes, I see.”
Nevertheless I still tried to snap a stick, hoping to discover an increase in my strength. I didn’t succeed, by the way, though the stick wasn’t thick and I had already bent it yesterday.
“You’re so stubborn! Give it up!” said my friend the physicist. “Instead, think about how the whole world must be disturbed by these changes…”
“You’re right,” I said, throwing down the stick. “I had forgotten about everything. I forgot about the existence of humanity, with which I feel a passionate desire to share my thoughts, just as you do…”
“Has anything happened to our friends? Have there been any other major changes?”
I opened my mouth and yanked aside the curtain (they were all drawn at night to block the moonlight that kept us from sleeping), to exchange a few words with our neighbor, but I jumped back on the double. Oh horror! The sky was blacker than the blackest ink!
Where was the city? Where were all the people?
It was some kind of wild, unimaginable, brightly sunlit place!
Could we really have been taken away to some desert planet?
All that stayed in my thoughts. I couldn’t say anything, I just mooed something incoherently.
My friend was about to rush over to me, thinking that I must be sick, but I gestured towards the window. He leaned to look out and also fell silent.
If we didn’t fall down in a faint, it was only thanks to the low gravity, which kept too much blood from flowing to our hearts.
We looked at each other.
The curtains on the windows were still drawn; the thing that had struck us wasn’t visible to our eyes. The ordinary look of the room and the familiar things in it calmed us down even more.
We drew together with a certain timidity and lifted only the edge of the little curtain first, then lifted the whole thing and then, finally, made up our minds to go out of the house to observe the sky, black as mourning, and our surroundings.
Even though our thoughts were preoccupied by the stroll we were about to take, we were still noticing certain things. So, as we walked through the spacious and high-ceilinged rooms, we had to move our large muscles with extreme care, otherwise our soles would slide uselessly on the floor – without the risk of falling, however, the way there is on wet snow or on frozen ground. When we did this our bodies jumped noticeably. When we wanted to put ourselves into rapid horizontal motion, to start moving we had to lean forward noticeably, the way a horse leans to pull an overloaded wagon. But it only seemed that way – in fact all our movements were extremely light… Going downstairs from one step to the next – how boring! Moving step by step – how slow! Soon we got rid of all those ceremonious habits, which suited the Earth but were ridiculous here. We learned to move by leaping; we started going up and down stairs ten or more at a time, like the most reckless schoolboys; or sometimes we’d jump the whole length of the staircase or right out the window. In a word
, circumstances forced us to turn into leaping animals like grasshoppers or frogs.
Thus, after running around the house a bit, we jumped outside and galloped off towards one of the nearest mountains.
The Sun was blinding and looked a bit bluish. Shading our eyes with our hands against the Sun and the brilliant reflected light from the surroundings, we could see the stars and planets, also for the most part bluish. None of them were twinkling, which made them look like silver-headed nails hammered into the black firmament.
Ah, and there was the Moon – in its last quarter! Well, it couldn’t fail to surprise us, since its width seemed three or four times greater than the diameter of the Moon we had seen before. And it shone brighter than by day on Earth, when the Moon shows up like a white puff of cloud. Silence… clear weather… a cloudless sky… There were no plants and no animals.. A desert with a black sky and a blue, dead Sun. No lake, no stream, and not a drop of water! Even the horizon wasn’t any paler – that would have indicated the presence of vapors, but it was just as dark as the zenith!
There was none of the wind that rustles the grass and tosses the tops of the trees on Earth… There was no chirping of crickets… No sign of any birds, or colorful butterflies! Just mountains and more mountains, horrible, high mountains, whose peaks didn’t gleam with snow. Not a flake of snow anywhere! There were the valleys, plains, plateaus… How many rocks were scattered there… Black and white, large and small, but all sharp, shining, not rounded, not softened by a wave, since no sea ever rolled here, ever played with them with a cheerful sound, ever labored over them!
But there was a completely smooth place, though rippled: you couldn’t see a single pebble, only black cracks crawling in all directions, like snakes… Hard ground – stony... No soft black soil: no sand and no clay.
A gloomy picture! Even the mountains were bare, shamelessly unclothed, since we didn’t see the light veil, the transparent bluish smoke that the air casts over earthly mountains and distant objects… Severe, strikingly precise landscapes! And the shadows! Oh, what dark shadows! And what sharp transitions from shade to light! There were none of the soft tones that we’re so used to and that can be produced only by an atmosphere. Even the Sahara – even that would seem a paradise in comparison with what we saw here. We missed its scorpions, the locusts, the hot sand lifted by the dry wind, not to mention the occasional sparse vegetation and groves of fig trees… We had to think about returning. The ground was cold and exuded cold, so that our feet were chilling, while the Sun baked us. Overall, we felt an unpleasant sensation of cold. It was like when a person comes in from the cold to warm up in front of a blazing fireplace and can’t get warm, because it’s too cold in the room: his skin feels pleasant waves of warmth that can’t overcome the chill.
On the way back we warmed ourselves by leaping as lightly as deer over piles of stones two sazhens high…3 There was granite, porphyry, syenite, quartz crystals and various pieces of transparent and opaque quartz and flint, all of igneous origin. Later, though, we noticed traces of neptunic activity.
We were back in the house!
Inside you feel good: the temperature’s more even. That put us in the mood to start trying new experiments and to discuss everything we had seen and noticed. Clearly, we were on some other planet. This planet had no air, nor any other kind of atmosphere.
If there had been gas, then the stars would have twinkled; if there had been air, the sky would have been blue and there would have been a blue veil on the distant mountains. But how was it that we could breathe and hear each other? We couldn’t understand it. A multitude of phenomena made it clear to us that there was no air or any kind of gas at all: for example, we couldn’t light a cigar and in our haste we spoiled a lot of matches. We could also compress a sealed rubber bag without the slightest force, which wouldn’t have been the case if there had been any kind of gas inside it. Scientists have indicated this lack of gasses on the Moon.
“Could it be that we’re on the Moon?”
“Have you noticed that from here the Sun doesn’t seem any bigger or any smaller than from the Earth? Such a phenomenon can be observed only from the Earth or from its satellite, since these heavenly bodies are located almost the same distance from the Sun. From other planets the Sun must appear either smaller or larger: so, from Jupiter the visible diameter of the Sun is five times smaller, and from Mars, one and a half times smaller, but from Venus, on the other hand, one and a half times greater. On Venus the Sun burns twice as brightly, but on Mars, only half as brightly. And that’s just the difference from the two planets closest to the Earth! On Jupiter, for example, the Sun gives twenty-five times less heat than on the Earth. We see nothing like that difference here, even though measuring it would be entirely possible thanks to the store of instruments for measuring carbon and other things.”
“Yes, we’re on the Moon: everything points to that!”
“Even the size of the clouded moon we saw suggests that – it’s obviously the planet we left, not of our own volition. Too bad we can’t examine its spots now and definitively define our own location. We’ll wait for night time…”
“How can you say that Earth and the Moon are at the same distance from the Sun?” I objected to my friend. “I thought the difference was quite significant! Why, as far as I know, they are three hundred sixty thousand versts apart!”
“I’m saying they’re almost at the same distance, since those three hundred sixty thousand versts comprise only one four-hundredth of the entire distance to the Sun,” objected the physicist. “A four-hundredth can be disregarded.”
II
How tired I was, and not so much physically as mentally! I felt irresistibly drawn to sleep… What did the clock say? We got up at six, now it was five… eleven hours had passed. At the same time, judging by the shadows, the Sun had hardly moved: there the shadow from the steep mountain had barely moved towards the house, and even now it didn’t quite reach, while over there the shadow from the weathervane was still touching the same stone…
This was one more proof that we were on the Moon.
In fact, its rotation around its axis is so slow… Here a day should last around fifteen of our days, or three hundred and sixty hours, and a night should last just as long. It’s not entirely comfortable… The sun would interfere with your sleep! I remember, I experienced the same thing when I had to live several weeks in the summer in polar countries: the Sun never set on the horizon, and it got really tiresome! Here the Sun moves slowly, but in the same order; there it moves quickly, and every twenty-four hours it makes a circle low above the horizon…
Here and there you could use one and the same solution: close the shutters.
But was the clock right? Why was there such a disagreement between my wristwatch and the clock on the wall? My wristwatch said five, but the one on the wall showed just ten… Which one was right? Why was the wall clock’s pendulum swinging so lazily?
Obviously, that clock was slow!
My wristwatch couldn’t be wrong, since it didn’t have a pendulum swung by weight, but the tension of a steel spring, which was the same on the Moon as it was on Earth.
You could check that by measuring your pulse. Mine was seventy beats per minute… Now it was seventy-five. A bit faster, but that could be due to the nervous excitement from the unusual setting and strong impressions.
Anyway, there was still one more way to check the time: at night we would see the Earth, which turns once every twenty-four hours. That’s the best, the least erroneous clock!
Regardless of the sleepiness that had overcome both of us, my physicist couldn’t bear not to fix the wall clock. I saw him lifting the long pendulum, measuring it exactly and shortening it to one sixth or thereabouts. The honorable clock turned into a little tick-tock. But here it wasn’t a tick-tock, for the shortened pendulum behaved gravely, though not so gravely as the long one had. Thanks to this metamorphosis the wall clock started to agree with my wristwatch.
At las
t we went to bed and covered up with our light blankets, which seemed weightless here.
We hardly needed to use our pillows and mattresses. Here, it seemed, you could sleep even on bare boards.
I couldn’t get rid of the thought that it was still too early to go to bed. Oh, this Sun! This time! You were both standing still, like all time on the Moon!
My comrade stopped answering me, and I fell asleep too.
A jolly waking… cheerfulness and a wolf’s appetite… Until now our excitement had displaced our usual appetite.
I was thirsty! I pulled out the cork… But what’s this – the water was boiling! Only slightly, but it was boiling. I touched the decanter with my hand. I didn’t want to burn myself… No, the water was merely warm. It was unpleasant to drink water like that!
“What do you say, my physicist?”
“There’s a complete vacuum here, that’s why the water’s boiling, it’s not prevented by the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere. Let it boil a bit more: don’t close the stopper! In a vacuum boiling ends up by freezing....But we won’t let it get to freezing… That’s enough! Pour some water in the glass, and put the stopper in, otherwise a lot will boil away.”
Liquid poured slowly on the Moon!
The water calmed down in the decanter, but in the glass it continued its lifeless boiling – though the longer it went on, the more weakly.
Red Star Tales Page 4