“The Sun will come later,” the old man replied, gravely. Then, as he detected a certain pity in the young man’s eyes, his eyebrows immediately contracted, and he said: “You think I’m mad, don’t you? You’re saying to yourself: ‘The old man’s lost his mind…but in addition to his mania he has a charming daughter…humor the mania to get the girl…’ ”
Gontran tried to protest.
“Well, my dear Comte, I’m not mad. What I’ve told you is perfectly serious and I haven’t brought you here this evening merely to convince you that the impossibility, proposed by many scientists, of the habitability of the Moon—by virtue of the non-existence of a lunar atmosphere—is not an impossibility at all. That first point having been established by 20 years of study and observation, what then remains for the final settlement of the problem to which I’ve devoted my life? To find a means of traveling to our satellite! For several years, I’ve had the plans for a gigantic cannon in my notebook and a little while ago, before your visit, I carried out my last experiment with a special powder, whose effects are sufficient to send to the Moon…everything that I might wish to send there. So, the Moon is habitable and I have found a means of getting there. What have you to say to that?”
Ossipoff had been speaking softly, calmly, and without seeming to be prey to any cerebral overexcitement. That made Gontran all the more suspicious. This tranquility seemed to him to presage an imminent storm, and he decided to try to prevent that storm from bursting. To deceive the old man, therefore, and make him believe that he was taking him seriously, he said: “In your situation, Monsieur Ossipoff, I would have disdained to bother with the Moon, an overly familiar world deprived of freshness by all the studies of which it has been the object, and I would have turned my attention to another world, of a conformity more similar to that of our own planet and also less frequented by imaginary voyagers. Why not go to Mars, for instance?”
The old scientist’s face lit up. “Ah, my young friend!” he said, cheerfully, “You’re getting a taste for it, from what I can see, and your mind seeks adventures…a little while ago, you offered to go seek Selena on the Moon; now you’re talking about Mars. I’m delighted to see your ideas taking such a direction so easily. But everything in its time…for the moment, it’s a matter of going to the Moon—firstly, I repeat, because the celestial highway has its stations, just like a railway, at which it’s necessary to stop, and then, I must admit, because my powder would be insufficient to permit us to travel millions of leagues….” He said this in the most natural tone in the world, although there was something akin to shame in his intonation at having to admit the imperfect nature of his explosive.
“But how can we continue our voyage, then?” asked Flammermont, earnestly. “Must we remain broken down on the Moon?”
“Why would we do that?”
“Well, if your powder is incapable of carrying us for long distances….”
“We’ll find the means of continuing our voyage there,” relied the old scientist, with a mysterious smile.
“That’s a relief,” said the young man, adding, privately: It’s odd; he seems to have full control of his reasoning…his ideas are connected with a precision and logic that would make one doubt the imbalance of his mind, if he were talking about any other subject…poor man. Humor his mania, then, until things get out of hand…. Then, in order to discover the full extent of the old man’s thinking, he said aloud: “Without being indiscreet, might I know why you’ve brought me here in such great secrecy? For yours seems to me to be a very praiseworthy occupation, and there’s no need for you not to dedicate yourself to it in broad daylight.”
This observation, seemingly so simple, brought about an abrupt change in Monsieur Ossipoff’s physiognomy. His expression suddenly darkened, his brows furrowed violently, his mouth turned down profoundly at each corner and he replied, in a low and chagrined tone: “The world is full of jealousy, my dear boy. Without being certain of it, I feel that I’m being watched, spied upon. Among scientists, one easily divines when a colleague has some project in mind that…”
“What!” exclaimed Gontran, earnestly. “Do you suppose that one of your colleagues wants to steal the fruit of so much work and effort from you?”
“God forbid,” cried the old man, “that I should direct that insult against eminent men, my colleagues…but at the end of the day, I don’t want my projects to be overtaken before I’ve even begun to put them into execution. That’s why I’ve been coming here, for many years, every evening when I was certain that I wouldn’t run into anyone—so that I’d be able to deliver myself, in complete solitude, to my studies and my research. I want the news of my departure to burst upon the scientific world like a bomb-blast…and as for you, as I told you at the house, your very pronounced taste for the sciences and your knowledge of astronomical matters leads me to consider you as the son-in-law I need. I want to associate you with my work; at the same time, your love for my daughter is a guarantee of your zeal and discretion.”
With an energetic squeeze of the hand Gontran assured the scientist that he could count on his total devotion.
“That said,” the old man continued, “we can go back to the house if you wish, where I’ll make haste to explain the mechanism of the cannon I’ve invented, and carry out a further experiment with selenite—that’s what I’ve baptized my powder—for your benefit.” While speaking, Ossipoff was busy putting everything back in its place, so that no one would suspect the following day that the observatory had received a nocturnal visit.
When the light was out, the scientist took his companion by the hand and led him by the hand, as he had when they arrived, to the exit door.
Their footsteps left no tracks in the compacted snow, and when Ossipoff had locked the door to the street, the white carpet extended in the interior courtyard was as immaculate as if no one had entered it.
They found the coachman where they had left him, stamping his feet beside his motionless horses, warmly wrapped up in furs taken from the droshky.
As soon as Ossipoff and his companion were muffled in their warm cloaks and seated on the cushions, the coachman shook the reins and the horses, spurred on by the cold, set off like swallows, moving soundlessly through the deserted streets.
As they turned into the street in which Mikhail Ossipoff’s small house was situated, two forms suddenly surged out of the shadow of the houses, and the coachman stopped his horses in response to an imperious gesture accompanied by a sonorously-pronounced instruction: “Halt!”
“What is it?” Ossipoff asked, leaning out—but he uttered an exclamation of surprise when he realized that the men who has stopped the droshky were two mounted policemen. The naked blades of their sabers gleamed in the moonlight.
One of the soldiers approached. “Where are you going, grandfather?” he asked, politely.
“Ah!” said the other policeman, excitedly, approaching in his turn. “Do you live near here, then?”
“My name is Mikhail Ossipoff, member of the Academy of Sciences,” the scientist replied, “and I live in the small house you see over there.”
It seemed that the policemen trembled on hearing the old man announce his name and quality; they contented themselves, however, with drawing aside slightly and saying: “That’s all right. You may pass, grandfather.”
The droshky resumed its course and Mikhail Ossipoff said to his astonished companion: “That often happens. The police have probably discovered some nihilist plot.”
At these words, Gontran felt a small shiver run along his spine. Why? He would certainly have been unable to say. Then he turned round, his ears having caught a sound they had not heard before. The two policemen were galloping 20 paces behind the carriage. The young man frowned momentarily; then he shrugged his shoulders and resumed thinking about Selena.
The droshky finally stopped; they had arrived. As he got down, following his companion, Flammermont could not help looking around suspiciously. The street was deserted; the façade
of the house was silent; everyone seemed to be asleep.
Ossipoff lifted up the copper knocker and brought it down several times, but the door remained closed. “That animal Vassily must be asleep,” he grumbled. Taking a key from his pocket, he introduced it into the lock; the door opened and the scientist went into the dark vestibule, followed by Gontran. They had not taken three steps, though, when they were seized and immobilized by arms emerging from the darkness. At the same time, amid the clinking of sabers and spurs on the floor-tiles, a curt voice ordered: “Tie them up securely.”
A suddenly-lit lantern showed the old man and his companion that the hallway was full of policemen and guardsmen. Vassily lay on the ground in a corner, bound and gagged, absolutely incapable of movement or speech.
“But there’s been some error!” exclaimed the old man. “My name is Mikhail Ossipoff.”
“That’s exactly who we’re looking for,” replied a colonel of the guard, haughtily.
“But I protest!” howled he scientist. “I protest…I’ll complain to the Tsar…I’ll…”
He was unable to say any more; in response to a gesture from the colonel, two guardsmen had put a gag over his mouth, which they tied securely behind his head.
At first, Gontran made as if to resist; he even reached into his pocket in search of his revolver—but he was thrown brutally to the ground, then disarmed, tied up and gagged. He was already in his droshky, lying on his back and rolling his eyes furiously but powerless, when Mikhail Ossipoff was thrown in beside him, as carelessly as a bag of old clothes. Then two guardsmen sat down in the front of the carriage, while a dozen mounted policemen surrounded the droshky, with their fingers on the triggers of their revolvers.
“Where are we going, Colonel?” asked the coachman, in a tremulous voice.
“To the central prison,” replied the officer, urging his horse to a trot—and the little troop son disappeared around the street corner, leaving Vassily, whom they had forgotten to set free, behind in the little house, along with Selena, who was sleeping peacefully in her bedroom, dreaming of the Moon and Gontran.
At the door of the house, two mounted policemen remained on watch, immobile in the whiteness of the snow.
Chapter III
How Fedor Sharp, the permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences, turned out to be a blackguard.
“Well then, most honorable Monsieur Sharp?”
“Well then, most esteemed Monsieur Mileradovich!”
That said, the two men maintained silence, examining one another covertly with straight faces, as befitted persons conscious of the importance of their mission, but with a hint of mockery in their expressions that would certainly have given an attentive observer something to think about.
One of them, tall, thin and bony, seemed to be suspended limply within an ample black frock-coat tightly fitted about the breast, whose unusually long tails were draped over similarly black trousers, twisted around the ankles. On his feet he wore coarse leather shoes with thick laces, whose enormous hobnails clicked noisily on the tiles flooring the room with every step he took. Long, straight hair, vainly softened with abundant supplies of perfumed oil, fell over the collar of his frock-coat, which was shiny with grease; it framed a sharp-featured visage whose prominent cheekbones jutted out from a wrinkled and sickly hide. The face, lit by two little eyes profoundly sunk in their orbits but as bright as polished jet, was clean-shaven, with the exception of a prominent tuft of grey hair mounted beneath the chin, which descended to a considerable length over the breast, reminiscent of a billy-goat’s beard.
The other was similar to all those men whose sedentary work and immoderate love of the dining-table have rounded their waists and rendered their complexion apoplectic.
The former was none other than Fedor Sharp, the permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences. The other was named Mileradovich, and served the important function in St. Petersburg of a criminal magistrate. Both of them, at the moment we make their acquaintance—which is to say, the day after the one in which we witnessed the surprising arrest of Mikhail Ossipoff and Gontran de Flammermont—were in the scientist’s laboratory, which they had been searching thoroughly for nearly three hours.
Mileradovich, sitting at a large table in front of a blank piece of paper, was taking notes from the dictation of Sharp, who was pacing back and forth across the room, nosing around, examining everything with extreme care, shaking flasks, lifting the lids of crucibles, looking at test-tubes, aided in his research by a large ledger that he held in his hands, at which he glanced frequently. Suddenly, while the examining magistrate was bent over his piece of paper, writing, Sharp had stopped in front of a rather large flask placed on a furnace that had gone cold, beside which was the blackened metal tube that Osssipoff, at the beginning of this story, had shown his daughter so triumphantly.
This discovery undoubtedly had a particular significance for the secretary of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, for he could not suppress an exclamation of joyful surprise—and it was this exclamation that had prompted the examining magistrate to make the interrogative remark with which this chapter began. We have seen what response Monsieur Sharp had thought himself obliged to make to that inquiry. Then both of them shut up, the judge half-turning around in his seat in order to see his companion more clearly, the other standing with his back to the furnace, his hands holding the flask on which his ardent eyes were fixed.
“Well then,” repeated Mileradovich, “what have you found, Monsieur Sharp?”
The latter pointed a thin and bony finger at the flask. “Here it is,” he said.
A gleam of joy appeared in the judge’s eyes. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“I won’t be absolutely sure until I’ve carried out a careful analysis, and—more importantly—an experiment that will permit me to base my opinion on undeniable results…but something tells me, my most esteemed Monsieur Mileradovich, that this is definitely what we’re looking for.” And he put his hand on his heart.
The examining magistrate put down his pen and rubbed his hands together, manifesting a contentment that swelled his torso. Then, suddenly, he became motionless, his eyes fixed on his companion. “You know,” he said, “this is a business from which we might obtain numerous advantages.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Sharp, in a singular tone.
“Why, if the Tsar is just, he’ll give me a promotion and you the Order of Merit—at least.”
“I’m not asking for anything,” Sharp replied, promptly.
“Without asking, one may still accept.”
The permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences made an energetic gesture of protest. “I’ve only done my duty,” he retorted, “and I don’t hold that to be sufficient cause for the Tsar’s gratitude. I was given a mission; I’ve carried it out, with no more thought of recompense than of denying myself…a few regrets that I’ve experienced in acting against my excellent colleague Monsieur Ossipoff.” He pronounced these words with emphasis, raising his shining eyes, in which a tear seemed to be trembling, toward Heaven.
Mileradovich uttered a little mocking laugh. “That disinterest is very edifying, my most esteemed Monsieur Sharp,” he said, “but you’ll permit me, given that I don’t have the same reasons as you”—he stressed the final phrase—“for not aspiring to the generosity of the Tsar, to rely on your support in extracting a few benefits from this affair, won’t you?”
Monsieur Sharp undoubtedly thought that he could detect a threat in the rather strange tone in which these words had been pronounced, for, hurriedly setting the flask and the tube down on the furnace, he went precipitately to the judge and shook his hands with a strong grip. “Rely on me,” he aid. “Rely on me…”
“It must be admitted,” Mileradovich continued, after a short pause “that without this denunciation, the police would never have suspected that the St. Petersburg Institute was concealing such a dangerous conspirator in its bosom.”
A slight redness
tinted Monsieur Sharp’s sallow complexion for a few seconds. “It’s sometimes the most improbable things that are the truest,” he replied, sententiously.
At that moment, there was a sound of sleigh-bells in the street, accompanied by the tramping feet of horses and a dull murmur of voices; then the bells and the hoofbeats suddenly stopped; only the murmur, transformed into shouts and vociferations, continued to rise in a crescendo.
“There they are,” said the judge, with an expression of keen satisfaction.
“There they are,” repeated Sharp, whose eyebrows immediately furrowed, in response to an intense annoyance.
Mileradovich invited his companion to sit down beside him; then he rang a bell, and a small, shifty and shabby individual, who had presumably been waiting in the next room, came in. He was the magistrate’s clerk. In response to a sign from his superior, he sat down on a stool at the same table.
Scarcely were these preparations terminated when the door opened and a policeman appeared, stopping respectfully on the threshold. “The prisoners are here,” he said.
“Bring in Mikhail Ossipoff,” ordered Mileradovich, leaning back self-importantly in his chair.
Sharp, by contrast, who was sitting with his elbows on the table and his face hidden by his hands, appeared to be deep in thought. One might have thought that a violent battle had been joined within the man’s soul; beneath his deeply-furrowed eyebrows, his little eyes were burning with dark fire; a profound wrinkle split his forehead vertically in two, and his sharp teeth bit his thin, pale lip until it bled. Finally, he recovered his composure, raised his head, folded his arms over his chest, fixed his eyes on the doorway through which the prisoner would enter, and waited impassively.
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1) Page 7