Flammermont was chilled to the marrow on hearing these words, whose forcefulness proved their sincerity.
“Then again,” added the old man, in a mysterious tone, “I’ve had a great project in mind for many years, for the execution of which I’m counting count on the collaboration of a son-in-law—for a son-in-law is almost a son—in whom I can have complete confidence…while a stranger might deceive and steal from me…and I’d run the risk of having spent my life in sleepless nights and studies only for some wretch to deprive me, perhaps not of the honor of success, but at least of the honor of having made the attempt.”
There was so much bitterness in these last words that Gontran, involuntarily moved, got up and went to squeeze the old scientist’s hand. “Monsieur Ossipoff,” he said, “be assured that you would have in me, if not a useful collaborator, at least a son filled with respect and devotion.”
“Thank you, my friend—my son,” stammered the old man, making an effort to hold back a tear that was balanced on the edge of his eyelid. I’ve taken aboard your proposal, your request…but as I said to you just now, I’ll discuss that with you later. For the moment…”
Selena, for her part, had continued writing on the blackboard. Rapidly, with a few strokes of the chalk, she had completed the sidereal diagram.
Gontran, desirous of displaying the instant erudition that he had acquired by means of the young woman’s subterfuge to his future father-in-law, exclaimed: “And when one thinks that beyond those giant worlds, whose relative proximity permits us to appreciate their dimensions, there are others, and yet others, and others still…” He darted a rapid glance at the blackboard and added: “Thus, we shall never know whether Uranus and Neptune, which is more than a billion leagues distant from the Sun, really are the outermost planets of the Solar System. At such a distance from the cosmic torch, those worlds must be inert and icy…”
“Wait, wait!” cried Mikhail Ossipoff. “What is the billion leagues at which one encounters the planet Neptune, in comparison to the sidereal desert in which the Solar System moves as a unit, borne by the central star!”
“The sidereal desert,” the Comte de Flammermont repeated, mechanically.
Thinking that he detected a question in the tone in which these three words had been produced, the old scientist continued: “Represent by a meter the 37,000,000 leagues that separate our Earth from the Sun and the outermost planet—Neptune, about which we were speaking, which travels at million leagues from Apollo—would be 30 meters away. Now, to arrive at the zone of another sun, the nearest star to us, would require that step to be repeated 7,400 times—which represents 222 kilometers, on a scale of one meter per 37,000,000 leagues. 222 kilometers is the distance between St. Petersburg and Moscow. Such is the sidereal desert—and note that those 222 kilometers form, in reality, several trillion leagues, a figure so large as to be unimaginable.”
Gontran, immobilized by the amazement into which these figures had thrown him, fixed the old man with a wide-eyed stare.
Ossipoff went on: “You know that light travels 77,000 leagues, or 304,000 kilometers, in a second; well, it takes three and a half years to reach the nearest star to ours.20 As for sound, it only travels at 330 meters per second—so that, if that star exploded, the noise of the explosion would only reach us after 3,000,000 years.”
“But then,” said the Comte, quite bewildered, “given that a train only travels at 60 kilometers an hour, it would need….”
“To travel without interruption for 60,000,000 years before arriving at its journey’s end—which is to say, at the star.”
“In that case,” Gontran said, ingenuously, “the stars that we see sparkling in the immensity of the Heavens might be long extinct, and yet continue to illuminate us, since their light takes centuries to reach us.”
“Certainly.” As he pronounced this word, Mikhail Ossipoff’s eyes moved mechanically in the direction of the clock and he got up, murmuring: “9 p.m. already! It’s time to go.” Then, turning to Gontran, he said: “My friend, present your respects to my daughter, who will retire to her own room.”
“Oh, Father!” murmured the young woman, in a pleading tone. “Don’t go out tonight.”
“Duty calls, my child,” the old man replied.
“Just for this evening, for Monsieur’s sake, make an exception and stay here…”
“Monsieur is going with me,” Ossipoff replied. “In any case, I don’t want to delay the conversation that we must have with one another—and where I’m going, we’ll have plenty of opportunity to chat.”
Selena looked at her father with a curious expression, which surprised Flammermont. “May I, without indiscretion, know where you’re taking me, Monsieur Ossipoff?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you that in a little while, when we’re alone.”
“Oh, Father!” exclaimed Selena, reproachfully. “Don’t you trust me?”
“It’s not that, my child—but at the point I’ve reached, the utmost prudence is required.” Addressing Gontran, he added, with a deep sigh: “Astronomy elevates minds, but—alas!—does not prevent certain hearts from crawling in the mud. Also…but I’ll explain that later…come on!”
The diplomat was increasingly troubled by the old man’s reticence, not to mention the fact that he dreaded having a scientific conversation with him in private—which would not take long to enlighten Ossipoff as to future son-in-law’s complete ignorance of astronomical matters. He could not retreat, though. Already, the old scientist was waiting for him on the threshold, enveloped in a thick cloak, with his head covered by a fur cap with ear-flaps, clicking his tongue impatiently to tell him that he had to hasten his farewells.
Gontran took the delicate hand that Selena extended to him in his own, bowed like the gentlemen of the 18th century, and deposited a kiss thereupon that illuminated the young woman’s cheek with a sudden blush, by courtesy of the emotion the caress invoked in her heart. She made no attempt to withdraw her hand and, with a slight smile, murmured in a low voice: “Be careful, Monsieur de Flammermont; remember that your happiness depends on the satisfactory replies that you make to my father.”
Just like the baccalaureat, thought Gontran, and replied: “Alas, I’m direly afraid of making a false step, now that I no longer have my star to guide me.”
Chapter II
In which Gontran conceives serious doubts about the cerebral stability
of his future father-in-law.
The door in the vestibule was wide open, and Vassily was standing on the threshold in a threatening attitude, shaking his fist at several individuals assembled in the street, whom he was cursing in a most vehement fashion. The domestic’s colorful language resonated continually with the words “dog,” “thief” and “bandit”—to which the crowd responded with savage howls accompanied by powerfully compacted snowballs, one of which had already injured the unfortunate Vassily’s nose.
At the sight of Mikhail Ossipoff the insults doubled in vigor and intensity; at the same time, a general discharge peppered the old scientist and his companion. Ossipoff went back into the house precipitately, but Gontran, whose patience was not the finest of his qualities, ran to his droshky, which was stationed in front of the door, seized the coachman’s whip and made its long lash whistle as it fell upon the crowd several times over, stinging calves, shoulders and faces at random.
Within two minutes, the street was deserted.
“What’s up with those brutes?” the Comte asked Vassily—who, forgetting the pain of his crushed nose, was writhing with laughter as he heard the howls of those attained by the vengeful lash.
“Those brutes accuse the old man of being a forger or a thief! There’s even one who claims he’s a nihilist!” Lifting his arms to the heavens in a gesture full of indignation, Vassily added: “The old man a nihilist! So, you understand, not wanting to hear that, I treated them as they deserved…and there you are!”
“But why do these people claim such things?” asked the young ma
n.
“The domestic looked around to make sure that Ossipoff was not listening, and replied in a low voice: “It must be admitted that the old man isn’t a good neighbor. I don’t know what he does down there”—Vassily struck the floor-tiles in the vestibule with his boot-heel—“but there are explosions all the time, loud enough to make one think that the entire quarter is about to be blown up.”
Gontran opened his eyes wide. “The thing is,” Vassily went on, “that this evening, some time before you arrived, the entire house trembled. The windows broke, and all the old man’s beautiful instruments rolled on the floor, along with a lot of his big books.” Then, drawing the young man to edge of the roadway and leaning over to look more closely at the ground, the domestic pointed to a long hairline crack, which extended all the way across the street, and added: “That’s more of the old man’s work—that was also made just now, and it’s what put the neighbors into the fury you just saw.”
Gontran shook his head and murmured: “He’s a peculiar old chap.” And he added, with a little mocking laugh: “I hope he isn’t taking me out by night to subject me to his experiments in ballistics…he’s quite capable of sending me to the Moon, to see with my own eyes whether his theories are correct.”
As he finished this private reflection, the old scientist arrived at a run. “Excuse me for having kept you waiting,” he said, “but I’d forgotten some papers. We can go now.” As he said this he climbed into the carriage.
Flammermont installed himself by his side and asked, not without a certain curiosity: “Where are we going?”
“Please would you tell your coachman to go to the Pulkova neighbnorhood. Once we get there, I’ll tell him when to stop.”
What a mystery! thought Gontran. Those clowns might have been right after all…who knows whether the old lunatic might be taking me to a secret meeting of nihilists? Nevertheless, he transmitted the old man’s instructions to the coachman—who, shaking up his horses, touched them with the long and flexible lash of his whip, adding a particular clicking of the tongue to this stimulant. The animals departed at a fast trot and the droshky, sliding noiselessly over the snow, headed for the wealthier quarters of St. Petersburg.
The snow had stopped falling and the sky, very clear and cloudless, extended its dark blue cupola, studded with stars like golden nails, over the silent city. The two men, wrapped up in their furs to protect them from the cold—which was much more intense than it had been earlier in the evening—maintained silence, each absorbed in his own thoughts of very different sorts.
Gontran, his eyes vague, was thinking about Selena, whose grace and beauty had entirely seduced him. The vision of the young woman caused a little smile to form on the Comte’s lips: a reflection of the great happiness with which his soul was filled. Sometimes, though, that smile disappeared, giving place of an anxious moue whenever Flammermont’s gaze happened to fall upon his companion and he thought about the tête-à-tête that might cast a shadow over his love. Mentally, the young man went over in his memory all the names and figures with which the tea gracefully served by Selena had been seasoned, promising himself to utilize those astronomical notions and to get as much out of them as possible. After all, he thought, I’m no more stupid than the next man, and this Monsieur Ossipoff is so distracted…. Then, after a moment, still privately, he added: All the same, I’d rather go to a congress of nihilists…it would probably be more dangerous, but at least my love wouldn’t be running any risk.
For his part, Ossipoff was deep in thought—and, contrary to what Gontran supposed, the old scientist had not “set off for the Moon.” He was entirely preoccupied with the situation—as the young man might have guessed had he noticed the many rapid glances that the old man darted at him on the sly. Moreover, it seemed that, in the course of their long familiarity with spectacles and telescopes, Ossipoff’s eyes had acquired something of the property of magnifying lenses, and that they possessed a particular acuity, thanks to which he could sound the depths of the human soul as he sounded the immensity of the Heavens. With his brows slightly furrowed, his eyelids half-closed and his lips a trifle pinched, analyzing in his brain as if in an alembic, he concentrated inwardly all the particulars that his gaze had seized from the physiognomy and attitude of the young man, trying to divine the personality in the presence of which he found himself. Was this a father who wanted to determine the measure of happiness that the man who wanted to become his son-in-law might give to his daughter? Was it not rather a scientist desirous of knowing the extent to which he might confide in the natural collaborator that love had procured from him?
Meanwhile, the droshky, having gone along the right bank of the Neva, had crossed the river opposite the headquarters of the Admiralty and, leaving Garskovaya and the Nevsky Prospect on its left, had gone into the Voznesenskaya, which it followed for its entire length, drawn at a rapid trot by its horses, whose hooves kicked up clouds of powdery snow, bloodied by the red glare of its lanterns. Turning right, the carriage suddenly found itself in the suburbs of St. Petersburg and glided soundlessly for a quarter of an hour through the silent and sleepy streets of the Pulkova district.
Suddenly, the coachman pulled on his reins; the horses stopped and he leaned down from his seat to ask: “Where shall I go now, Monsieur le Comte?”
Gontran touched Mikhail Ossipoff’s right arm. “The coachman wants to know which road he should take.”
As if awakening with a start, the scientist sat up in the midst of his furs, darted a rapid glance outside, saw where they were and replied: “We get out here!” And, before Flammermont could raise any objection, Ossipoff jumped down on to the compacted snow and gestured an invitation to his companion to follow him. Then, addressing the coachman, he commanded: “Stay here and wait until we come back.”
That said, he took Gontran’s arm and, with more agility than one might have expected in a man of his age, drew him into a dark and narrow side-street, solely illuminated by the whiteness of the carpet of snow extended underfoot.
“For sure,” the young man murmured, inaudibly, “we’re going to attend some secret meeting at which various means of putting the Emperor of all the Russias to death will be discussed. In truth, here I am! This is a fine occupation for an attaché of the embassy of the French Republic!” And yet, the sweet image of Selena drew him onwards in spite of the reasoning that told him to stop. Not for an instant did he think of turning back, or even asking his guide a question. Love rendered him fatalistic and he thought, as the Orientals do: what is written is written.
Suddenly, the buildings bordering the right-hand side of the street vanished, giving place to a high wall, alongside which Mikhail Ossipoff and Gontran de Flammermont went on for some 50 meters. Then the old scientist suddenly stopped, rummaged in his thick furs, and brought a key out of his pocket. He introduced it into the lock of a little door in the wall, which Gontran had not noticed.
“Have we arrived?” murmured the young man.
“Almost,” Ossipoff replied, standing aside to let him go through the doorway, the door having turned silently on its hinges.
To his great surprise, the young Comte found himself in a vast courtyard, surrounded on three sides by a high wall similar to the one he had just passed along, thus forming a parallelogram whose fourth side was occupied by an imposing monument surmounted by a cupola rounded like the dome of a church.
What can that be? Gontran asked himself, darting curious glances around him while Ossipoff carefully closed the door again.
“If you’d care to follow me,” said the old scientist, crossing the courtyard in the direction of the black and silent buildings that loomed up in front of them.
With the aid of another key Ossipoff opened a second door and pushed Gontran in front of him. The latter was slightly choked with emotion. The two men were now in pitch darkness.
“Give me your hand,” whispered the old man in Gontran’s ear, “and let yourself be led without fear…above all, be careful to make a
s little noise as possible.”
An imposing silence reigned in this place, which Flammermont judged very high-ceilinged, on the basis of the sonority of the dull echoes that his steps, and those of his companion, awakened. A considerable coldness seemed to be descending upon his shoulders, and he thought that they must be moving beneath stone vaults. That was, however, all he could deduce regarding the mysterious dwelling—through which Mikhail Ossipoff was guiding him without any hesitation, in spite of the thick shadow that enveloped them, thus proving that it was all entirely familiar to him.
After successively climbing up and going down several flights of steps, opening and closing several doors, the scientist eventually pushed one last hinged door and said, in a low voice: “Here were are…stay here quietly, without moving, while I go put the light on.” With these words he let go of Gontran’s hand, headed confidently for the wall—avoiding objects whose mass could be vaguely divined in the darkness—and pushed a button. Immediately, a bright light sprang from an electric lamp, inundating the place where Ossipoff and his companion were with its radiance.
It was a vast circular room topped by a semicircular dome—the same one that Gontran had seen from outside—quite similar to the one surmounting the old Cornmarket in Paris, but not as large. In the middle of this cupola—to employ the technical term—on a carriage of cast iron and steel, stood a monstrous tube measuring 50 or 60 meters in length, with a diameter of about two meters.
The sight of this gigantic machine made Gontran open his eyes very wide, immediately reminding him of the mysterious occupations to which, according to popular rumor and the honest Vassily himself, Ossipoff devoted himself in the basement of his house. A connection was made in his mind between the terrible explosives that the scientist must be researching and this instrument. “A cannon!” he murmured, loud enough to be heard.
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1) Page 5