The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1)

by Georges Le Faure; Henri de Graffigny

  Meanwhile, a singular animation had reigned in the streets of Ekaterinburg for a week, occasioned by the annual fair held in the town—an event of great importance—between mid-July and the end of August.

  The closer the time fixed by Gontran de Flamermont approached, the more Ossipoff trembled lest the slightest incident might upset his savior’s plans. Finally, one Sunday morning—August 8 30—having hidden the precious stones left to him by Yegor in his telescope, and having suspended the aforesaid telescope around his neck beneath his goatskin cloak, the old man asked Ismail Krekov for permission to go into the town to make a tour of the fête. It was not a favor that he was asking; the penitentiary administration deemed it a good idea to keep up the convicts’ spirits by means of a few treats, to the extent that the convicts had permission to mingle with the crowds, provided that they wore the coats identifying them as “state workers.”

  Having arrived in Ekaterinburg, Ossipoff, drawn along by the irresistible tide of curiosity-seekers soon found himself in the large town square—where, it seemed, all the attractions of the fair were gathered. These attractions mostly consisted of bands of bohemians who devoted themselves to strange exercises in the open air: singing, dancing, and performing feats of strength and skill, to the great amazement of onlookers.

  As one might imagine, these distractions were of no interest to Ossipoff; once in the square he had but one end: to get through the crowd that pressed around him to an isolated isba where he might rest and await developments in peace.

  Suddenly, a voice rose up from a circle of curiosity-seekers that made the old man shudder. Instinctively, with a force of which he had not thought himself capable, he cut through the human tide to arrive in the front rank of a circle, in the middle of which a young woman with a swarthy face, clad in a gaudy Bohemian costume, was making a little white kid dance to the accompaniment of her voice.

  “Selena!” cried the old man.

  “Father! My dear Father!” exclaimed the young gypsy girl in her turn, fainting into Ossipoff’s arms.

  Then, without paying any heed to the murmurs of the crowd, which did not like its entertainments to be so abruptly interrupted, he took the young woman to one of the isbas bordering the square.

  “You, here!” he said. “My poor child! But how?”

  Briefly, the young woman told the old man what had happened. She told him about Fricoulet’s visit, the confidence that she had in him, her subsequent impatience, and the decision she had made to come and find her father, if not to save him, at least to ameliorate the rigors of his captivity.

  “But I’ve had news from Monsieur de Flammermont!” Ossipoff exclaimed. He told Selena what he had found in the telescope sent to him from Paris, and then added: “Do you know what their plan is?”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” the young woman replied. “I only know one thing: Monsieur Fricoulet intended to construct an apparatus specifically designed for aerial navigation. That’s all.”

  “Do you know that it’s today that they’re supposed to arrive in Ekaterinburg?”

  Selena uttered a cry of joy. “Today! Oh, my dear Father!” Putting her arms around the old man’s neck, she kissed him tenderly on both cheeks.

  Suddenly, a policeman appeared at the door of the isba. He paused momentarily on the threshold, putting his hand over his eye like an eye-shade, scanning the interior of the isba, then advanced towards Ossipoff.

  “Number 7357?” he said, roughly.

  “That’s me,” the old scientist replied.

  “Is this your daughter?” the representative of the authorities asked, turning to Selena. The old man nodded his head affirmatively. “I’m placing you both under arrest,” he declared. Turning to the door, he made a gesture. Ten policemen came into the isba then, threw themselves on the old man and his daughter, and put heavy chains on their hands and feet.

  “What crime have we committed?” asked Ossipoff.

  “You’re planning to escape.”

  “What proof do you have?” retorted the scientist.

  “The Korosse will explain that.” The Korosse was the equivalent of a commissaire.

  Shoving the prisoner outside, the policemen set off for the police station. Crossing the marketplace was not accomplished without difficulty; in spite of the brutality with which the policemen pushed the crowds back, the latter were enthusiastic to see the prisoners—whose wretched appearance moved them to pity—at closer range. Muffled rumors even began to circulate in the crowd, and the policemen, sensing a sentiment on the part of the peasants favorable to their captives, were looking at one another anxiously, when one of them suddenly shouted: “Don’t you love the Tsar any longer, that you complain on behalf of those who have tried to put him to death?”

  The first ranks of the curiosity-seekers moved backwards, several voices repeating: “They’ve tried to kill the Tsar!”

  “They’re witches,” the policeman added.

  At this word, a frightful cry of rage emerged from multitudinous throats. “Witches! Witches!” they repeated.

  “They’ll curse the crops!”

  “They’ll make the livestock die!”

  “Death to the witches!” cried one voice.

  Immediately, the entire audience howled: “Hang them! Hang them!”

  Faced with the hostile inclinations of the crowd, the anxiety of the policemen increased—for it was as much their duty to prevent the prisoners being lynched as to prevent them from escaping, and it was certainly the former fate that was in store for the unfortunate Ossipoff and his daughter.

  In vain, the policemen struck out pitilessly to the right and the left with their cudgels, belaboring the peasants; the latter, rendered furious, fought fiercely to take possession of the quarry they coveted.

  Suddenly, a policeman treacherously grabbed by the legs fell backwards, and was disarmed and tied up before he had time to get up. This capture increased the assailants’ courage. Uttering a loud cry, they surged forward unanimously, throwing themselves on the procession and breaking it up in spite of the determination with which the guards defended their prisoners.

  Within a few minutes, they were put out of action. Ossipoff and Selena passed into the hands of the convicts, who dragged them to the middle of the fairground, where there was a gigantic fir-tree, whose enormous branches extended horizontally a few meters from the ground.

  “My child! My beloved Selena!” murmured the old man, divining the barbarians’ intention.

  The young woman looked at her father boldly. “Don’t worry about me, Father,” she said, in a firm voice. “I’ll show these wretches what courage innocence can give a girl like me.”

  Tugged and jostled by the men, pinched and insulted by the women, the two prisoners were no more than ten meters from the fatal tree when a sharp whistling sound suddenly disturbed the air so terribly that the entire crowd looked up.

  In the blue sky, directly above Ekaterinburg, a black dot was floating, visibly increasing in size, seemingly descending vertically upon the town—and the same whistling sound continued to make itself heard.

  “A hailstorm! A hailstorm!” cried a voice. “The witches are drawing it down upon us! Put them to death!”

  But the dot was still growing, and something like a plume of smoke could now be seen emerging from it. Amazement was then transformed into fear, and the same cry emerged simultaneously from hundreds of throats: “A dragon! A dragon!”

  Ossipoff stared like everyone else, in spite of the imminent death that awaited him, impassively seeking an explanation for this surprising phenomenon.

  Suddenly, Selena uttered a cry of joy. Leaning toward her father’s ear, she murmured: “It’s them! It’s Monsieur de Flammermont and his friend.”

  Meanwhile, the bravest of the peasants were dragging the prisoners into the middle of the square when the ground began to shake in the distance and several voices shouted: “The Cossacks! The Cossacks!”

  It was, indeed, a platoon of cavalry, whic
h was galloping forward under orders to recover the prisoners from the crowd. There was a frightful tumult, in which the voices of women and children trampled by the horses mingled with howls of anguish from the men pricked by the Cossacks’ lances.

  Suddenly, the astonishing smoke-belching apparatus descended like a thunderbolt from the upper atmosphere and stopped dead 20 meters above the ground, reminiscent of a gigantic bird hovering with its wings extended. Then two gunshots rang out and two peasants, one of whom had been clinging to Ossipoff and the other to his daughter, rolled on the ground, screaming hideously—and a formidable voice that seemed to come from the sky rose above the hubbub, shouting: “Ossipoff! Look out! Hold on!”

  At the same time, a cable unwound, bearing a strange apparatus at its extremity, like two spools connected to a horseshoe. The branches of the horseshoe collided with the chains shackling the scientist’s hands and feet, and, so to speak, gathered them together so that they now seemed to form a single mass of iron. Instinctively, Selena threw herself into her father’s arms; he clasped her desperately to his breast, and both of them, lifted up by an unknown force, lost their footing.

  “Well done!” cried a voice that Ossipoff recognized as Flammermont’s. “Well done! Hang on! You’re saved!”

  The old man and the young woman were already 15 meters above the ground, suspended in mid-air by the cable that supplied the electric current to the electromagnet, while the Cossacks, recovering from their surprise and furious at seeing the prisoners escape them so miraculously, took aim at the fugitives and opened fire.

  Ossipoff released a cry of pain; a bullet had just struck him in the shoulder, and it required an uncommon strength of will for him to hold on to Selena, clasped in his arms. Gontran, however, galvanized by the danger to the woman he loved, redoubled his efforts and imparted a vertiginous rapidity to the winch that was reeling in the cable.

  In a few seconds, the electromagnet had rejoined the aeroplane, and the Comte de Flammermont, aided by Fricoulet, pulled Ossipoff and his daughter on to the deck. Then, leaving his friend to take care of the two fugitives, the engineer leaned over the guard-rail and looked down at the crowd swarming beneath them, shouting threats at the aeroplane, while the Cossacks reloaded their weapons in response to orders given to them by their commanding officer, who was pointing at the apparatus.

  Fricoulet knew that a general discharge might tear the fabric of the aircraft apart. “So much the worse for them,” he growled. Bending down, he took several shiny metal spheres from a box that was open at his feet, and dropped them on the enemy.

  The soldiers were already taking aim when frightful screams burst forth; as they hit the ground the spheres had exploded, producing a black cloud—through which the engineer saw several dismounted cossacks writhing in horrible convulsions, while their maddened horses bucked and pranced in the midst of the fearful crowd.

  “Let’s go!” he cried.

  Gontran, who had hurried to the side of the unconscious Selena, abandoned the young woman, ran to a tap and turned it. Instantly, the aeroplane rose upwards, splitting the air with its deep and continuous sound. It was soon at such a height that Ekaterinburg appeared as no more than a cluster of little black dots lost in the immensity the Siberian waste. Then it stopped.

  Fricoulet turned round then, and saw Ossipoff, who was staring at him in astonishment. “My dear Gontran,” he said, “would you do me the honor of introducing me to Monsieur Ossipoff?” He drew nearer and, with his hat raised and his body inclined, as casually as if he had been standing in his laboratory, he waited.

  The young Comte approached in his turn and pointed to his friend. “Monsieur Ossipoff,” he said, “will you permit me to introduce to you Monsieur Alcide Fricoulet, my best friend?”

  “And a passionate admirer of your work,” the engineer added, cordially shaking the hand that the old man held out to him. Then, immediately, he said: “Let me look at your wound.”

  “Are you a physician, then, Monsieur Fricoulet?” Ossipoff asked, taking off his fur cloak.

  “Is he a physician?” cried the Comte de Flammermont, laughing. “Ah, Monsieur Ossipoff, when you know my friend Alcide better, you won’t ask him whether he’s this or that. He’s everything: physicist, chemist, mathematician, botanist, electrician, mechanic, astronomer…and I don’t know what else.”

  “You’re an astronomer?” asked the old scientist, excitedly.

  “Gontran exaggerates,” Fricoulet replied, smiling. “I’m little more of an astronomer than he is, which is to say…” He bit his lip, understanding from his friend’s furious expression that he was about to commit a gaffe. He leaned over the wound to conceal his confusion, which prevented him from seeing the singular expression with which the old man had greeted his last words. “It’s nothing,” he said, eventually, having made a careful examination of Ossipoff’s shoulder. “A mere scratch. The angle of the shot was acute; the bullet only grazed the clavicle and rebounded, according to the angle of reflection.” He turned away to fetch the bandages that a careful man always carries with him from a box.

  Ossipoff took advantage of the pause to murmur in Gontran’s ear: “I’m afraid that your friend’s science has more breadth than depth.”

  “Bah! Why’s that?”

  “He knows too many things. Then there’s what he said about you—a true scientist isn’t jealous of other people’s knowledge.”

  Gontran had enormous difficulty keeping his face straight.

  At that moment, Fricoulet returned; he dressed the bloody bullet-wound with the skill of a consummate surgeon, then put a simple spica bandage around the shoulder and helped the scientist put his coat on again.

  As Flammermont, returning to Selena, took the young woman’s hands in his own and looked at her anxiously she opened her eyes. “Saved!” she stammered, in a weak voice.

  “Yes, my dear Selena, saved—and reunited forever, for nothing shall separate us now.”

  “I will ask you, nevertheless to let Mademoiselle alone for a few moments,” said Fricoulet, cheerfully, coming forward, “for if we don’t intend to stay here, it’s time to thin about the destination of our journey.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Selena.

  “To Paris, Mademoiselle.”

  “To Paris?” repeated Ossipoff, surprised. “What are we going to do in Paris?”

  “Isn’t it our only refuge?” Gontran replied. “Don’t you know that you no longer own anything, that your fortune has been confiscated; even your little house has been sold. Henceforth, Russian territory is forbidden to you.”

  Mikhail Ossipoff lowered his head, suddenly plunged into painful reflection. He saw himself banished from society, hunted everywhere as a criminal, even though he was innocent of the crime of which he had been accused. The sly and sinister face of his former colleague in the Institute of Sciences appeared before his eyes: Sharp, into whose possession all his papers had fallen, and who might, at this very moment, be putting into operation his scientific ideas, the results of an entire life dedicated to research.

  Meanwhile, Fricoulet was preparing to leave; having darted a rapid glance around him, to make sure that everything was ready, he was consulting the compass, with one hand on the tap controlling the steam and the other on the wheel operating the rudder, when a voice whispered in his ear: “Monsieur Fricoulet, I have a favor to ask you.”

  He turned round. Selena was standing beside him.

  “A favor? Of me, Mademoiselle? What is it?” he asked, suppressing a gesture of impatience.

  “Quietly,” she said, darting a sideways glance at her father, who was still absorbed in his dark thoughts. Blushing slightly, she added: “I want to talk to you about Gontran.”

  “Very well, then,” muttered Fricoulet. “Here I am, reduced to the state of a confidante on tragedy.”

  “I don’t know,” she continued, “whether Gontran has told you….”

  “That he loves you! Yes, Mademoiselle, Gontran has told me that…�
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  She shook her head. “It’s not that. Has he told you that, in order to get into my father’s good graces, he was obliged to feign scientific knowledge of which he does not know the first thing!”

  “Oh, yes!” said the engineer, laughing. “He mentioned that to me, vaguely. Well, what has it got to do with me?”

  She remained silent for a moment, as if embarrassed, then went on: “This: I want to ask you—you, who are a true scientist—to help him out a little, when my father asks him embarrassing questions…for you understand quite well that I know very little myself, and that my stock will be quickly exhausted.”

  “Ah!” said Fricoulet, smiling. “I understand. I remember when I used to whisper his lessons to him in college. Very well! It’s understood, Mademoiselle, that you can count on me.”

  She thanked him with a smile and went to sit down beside her father.

  Fricoulet, annoyed by the promise he had just made—for he now found himself, a hardened bachelor, constrained to assist his friend’s marriage—privately called himself a coward for lending a hand to such a comedy. Selena was so polite and gracious, though, and she has asked him in such a charming fashion! He turned the tap. The vapor acted more powerfully on the spindle of the helices, and they began to turn with vertiginous speed, drawing the aeroplane, which had been motionless, through the air.

  Ossipoff had raised his head. “With a favorable wind,” he said to Gontran, “how long do you think it will take us to reach Paris?”

  It was Fricoulet who replied. “30 or 40 hours. The aeroplane can easily make the journey at 100 or 150 kilometers an hour.”

  “A nice speed,” murmured the scientist, marveling, while alternating his gaze between the motor, the propellers and the rudder. He added: “Is it you, Monsieur Fricoulet, who imagined and built this apparatus?”

  “Built, yes, Monsieur, but imagined, no—all the honor of its invention belongs to my friend Gontran.” Obviously, the young engineer was in a hurry to prove to Selena that he was a man of his word; at the same time, he was by no means reluctant to increase Gontran’s matrimonial anxieties by putting the wind up him.