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

by Georges Le Faure; Henri de Graffigny

  The young engineer rubbed his eyes, raised his eyelids, yawned lazily and stammered, in a thick voice: “Well, what is it?”

  “You’re alive!” cried Gontran, joyfully. “You’re alive!”

  This exclamation woke Fricoulet up completely. “Yes, I’m alive,” he replied. “Why shouldn’t I be alive? You’re very much alive yourself.”

  Flammermont shook his head. “If you’d seen yourself as I saw you,” he said, “lying there, pale and motionless…just like the others…” He pointed to Ossipoff, Selena and Farenheit, who were as still as the stones. “But where are we, then?” he asked, oppressed by the great silence that reigned over that solitude.

  He had pronounced these words in a soft voice, but not so quietly that Fricoulet could not hear them. Even so, the engineer exclaimed: “Speak more loudly if you want me to hear you. What was it you just said?”

  “You didn’t hear?” Gontran repeated, very surprised. Raising his voice, he said: “I was talking reasonably loudly, though. What can have caused that?”

  Someone behind them replied: “Probably the composition of the atmosphere.”

  They turned round and saw Monsieur Ossipoff sitting up, looking around curiously.

  “Yes,” the old scientist added, speaking loudly, “the rarefaction of the air might be another reason why voices don’t carry.”

  The two young men went to Ossipoff and shook him cordially by the hand. “Nothing broken, Monsieur Ossipoff?” Fricoulet asked.

  “No, nothing…at least, it doesn’t appear so…but I don’t see Selena.”

  “Your daughter’s still asleep,” Gontran replied. “She’s there, behind you.”

  “Help me to wake her up, dear boy,” said the old man. “I feel quite numb.”

  The young man seized the old man by the wrists and, bracing himself solidly, pulled him up. He had undoubtedly miscalculated the required force, though—or, rather, was not conscious of his own strength—for Ossipoff came to his feet with a prodigious vigor, slipped out of Gontran’s hands, passed over his head like a feather and fell on top of Jonathan Farenheit, who had been sleeping as peacefully as if he were on the mattress of his hammock.

  Three cries rang out simultaneously: one of surprise, emitted by Gontran; one of pain, emitted by Ossipoff; and, finally, one of anger, accompanied by a forceful “By God!” The last, as will easily be guessed, was from the powerful lungs of the American, who was dreaming just then that he had finally got his hands on that villain Fedor Sharp. Instinctively, his fingers clenched around the throat of the unfortunate scientist, and squeezed with such violence that they would have caused him to pass from life to death if the others had not run to his rescue.

  On seeing the adversary that he had attacked, Jonathan Farenheit became very contrite. As for Flammermont, he showered the old man with apologies. The latter, still overwhelmed by emotion, contented himself with smiling while undoing his cravat, which was strangling him.

  “What’s happening?” asked Selena, who had been woken up by the tumult, and hurried over anxiously, to see her father pale and distraught in the midst of his disconcerted companions.

  It was the old man, having pulled himself together somewhat, who replied to the young woman’s question by saying to Gontran: “You’ve forgotten, dear boy, that we’re on the Moon, and than on the lunar surface, weight is six times less than on Earth—which is to say, equal to 0.164…that’s why you lifted me up so easily and why, thanks to he impulse you communicated to me, I slipped out of your grasp to disturb the slumber of the worthy Mr. Farenheit…you won’t hold it against me, will you, Jonathan?”

  The American offered his huge hand to the scientist and replied: “No—although you interrupted an adorable dream…” As he said these words, blood rushed to Farenheit’s face, while his eyes lit up with a dark gleam.

  “What were you dreaming, then?” asked Selena.

  “That I was strangling that bandit Sharp.”

  “That’s right!” cried Fricoulet, astonished. “That animal has parted company with us.” And he added, in jest: “We couldn’t have asked for anything better!”

  “What’s become of him?” asked Gontran. “By what miracle did he disappear?”

  Ossipoff smiled. “By a very simple miracle,” he replied. “His projectile was an inert object—which is to say that, not being animated, as ours was, by its own velocity, which would have permitted him to combat the lunar attraction, his projectile, once in the zone of attraction into which we dragged him, abandoned us to obey a superior force, and so….”

  “Do you think he’s fallen far away from here?”

  The old man shook his head. “Unless my assumptions are false, Sharp must have fallen on the other hemisphere of the Moon.”

  Jonathan Farenheit brandished his fists in a menacing fashion. “Oh,” he growled, “I’ll catch up with him if I have to go all around the world.”

  “The lunar world,” added Fricoulet, jokingly.

  “Yes, Monsieur Fricoulet,” retorted the furious American. “If I have to, I’ll offer a reward of $1,000,000 and I’ll contrive a means of locomotion that will permit me to follow the bandit if he leaves the Moon to take refuge on another planet in order to escape me.”

  “My friends,” said Mikhail Ossipoff at that moment, “I think it would be as well to leave the subject of that uninteresting person and think about ourselves.”

  Gontran lent support to the old man’s opinion with a forceful gesture. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s hold a council. What are we going to do?”

  “The most urgent matter, I think, is to devise a way of getting out of this prison—or rather this cage,” said Fricoulet, pointing at the tree-trunks surrounding them.

  “A cage!” cried Jonathan Farenheit, going pale. “They’ve dared to put a citizen of free America in a cage!”

  “A cage,” repeated Ossipoff, joining his hands in an ecstatic gesture. “A cage!” And, running to the barrier that enclosed them, he carefully examined the manner in which the bars were embedded in the ground and joined together above their heads. “Ah, merciful Heaven!” he exclaimed, tremulous with emotion. “These are certainly evidence of the work of an intelligent being!”

  Gontran, who had heard him, drew closer. “Then, Monsieur Ossipoff,” he said, “you genuinely believe in the existence of a lunar humankind?”

  The aged scientist raised his arms to the heavens, staring at the young Comte with eyes wide with amazement. “What!” he said. “You can ask me such a question—you, who, before undertaking this perilous voyage with me, were familiar with the illustrious Flammermont’s opinion on that subject? You, who have just found further proof, at this very moment, of the existence of the humankind you seem to be putting in question?”

  Utterly nonplussed, Gontran silently hung his head. “Monsieur Ossipoff,” he said, after a pause, “would you permit me to ask you a question?”

  “Speak, my friend, speak.”

  “You said just now that you suspect that Sharp has fallen in the other hemisphere.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Which one did you mean?”

  “The visible hemisphere.”

  Gontran made a gesture of surprise. “I recall, however,” he said, “that a few hours before our fall, when we were surprised to pass with out transition from the most dazzling light to the most profound darkness, you gave us the explanation that we had just passed over the pole and penetrated into the invisible hemisphere.”

  “Yes—so what?”

  “Well, it was dark...while now…”

  “While it’s now the visible hemisphere that’s plunged into darkness.”

  Gontran shook his head. “Right!” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that…but it’s quite simple.” And he added: “I thought that we were in the visible hemisphere.”

  “If we were, we probably wouldn’t be breathing as easily as we are.”

  “But there’s an atmosphere….”

  “Yes, but it must be very
thin; if we were to make an excursion into that region, we’d probably, have to make use of our breathing apparatus.

  At that moment a strange noise, reminiscent of the crack of a whip, was audible behind them. Selena burst out laughing. “Father,” she said, “look at Jonathan—that’s the way to destroy our cage.”

  They turned round and saw the American breaking the young tree-trunks as easily as if they were reeds. While strewing the stripped and broken trees on the ground, he growled: “A citizen of the United States! A resident of New York, shut up like a chicken. By God! They did well to hide—I’d have broken them just like these trees.”

  Gontran watched this devastation with profound astonishment.

  “Try your strength, ladies and gentlemen,” said Fricoulet, in joking imitation of the tone of a fairground barker—and he grabbed a young sapling of respectable girth himself, which he snapped without any apparent effort.

  Seeing that, the young Comte cried: “If that’s how things are, the Selenites can come; the four of us are strong enough to hold them off.”

  “And me,” said Selena, slightly offended. “Don’t I count? I assume that my strength has been increased just as much as yours.”

  Ossipoff could not help smiling at the sight of his daughter’s bellicose expression—but his face became suddenly anxious.

  “What’s the matter, Father?” she asked.

  Without answering, the old man went to Gontran. “Have you seen our vehicle?” he asked.

  “What did you say?” asked the young man, improvising and ear-trumpet with his hand.

  “I asked you if you knew where our vehicle is?”

  “How should I know, my dear Monsieur?” Gontran replied. “I fell at the same time as you, and it wasn’t five minutes after I ceased sleeping that you woke up yourself.” After a pause, he added: “You’re quite sure, aren’t you, that we’re on the Moon?”

  The old man shrugged his shoulders gently, then knelt down in the corner where all the instruments were gathered. “Well,” he said, “the compass is agitated, with no fixed direction, the barometer indicates 320 millimeters of atmospheric pressure and the hygrometer indicates absolute dryness.”

  Fricoulet added: “And we’re in a crater—look at the truncated form of the walls encircling us. Observe that the opening through which the light reaches us is regular, and situated far above our heads.” And he murmured, as if talking to himself: “There’s no doubt about it—we’re inside the cone of a lunar volcano.”

  “An extinct volcano, though?” Gontran hastened to ask.

  The engineer was opening his mouth to reply and to reassure his friend, when immense forms suddenly surged out of a dark tunnel. “The Selenites!” he cried. “Look out!”

  One by one, emerging from a cavern that the voyagers had not noticed, a dozen strange beings of gigantic size were advancing prudently.

  Petrified by astonishment, Ossipoff and his companions studied these giants, not without a certain terror.

  They were about 12 feet tall, but their structure differed very little from that of Earthly humans—except that the head was surprisingly large and seemed disproportionate to the rest of the body; it was balanced on the end of a long, thin neck, which reposed on narrow and fleshless shoulders. To these shoulders were connected thin arms terminating in hands as large as laundry-beaters. The torso was prodigiously flat, as if it enclosed neither lungs nor intestines; it extended to spindly legs somewhat reminiscent of those of wading birds, as were the voluminous feet on which they stood, thus serving as solid bases for the elevated edifice they supported. The round and beardless face was equipped with two bulging eyes in which no light shone, which gave the face a dull and icy stare; there were no eyelashes, nor eyebrows; by contrast, a mass of hair, which they all wore uniformly, fell in shoulder-length tresses. The mouth, widely cleft, was not rimmed by lips like those of the Earth’s inhabitants but resembled a saber-slash across the face. The most distinctive feature of these strange beings was the vast splayed ears, like acoustic funnels, one each side of the head.

  Instinctively, Gontran had grabbed a rifle, and had placed himself in front of Selena, determined to kill rather than permit one of these monsters to get near the young woman.

  “Peace, Gontran, my friend,” said Fricoulet, noticing the young Comte’s hostile attitude. “Stay calm, and don’t aggravate our situation by attacking these islanders first. There’ll still be time to resort to coercive means when we can’t do anything else. Let’s try to communicate with them first.”

  “How do you intend to make yourself heard?” asked Flammermont. “You’ve noticed that our voices scarcely carry when we speak loudly and put our ears close to our mouths—you’ll have to try hard, given the size of these fellows!”

  The young engineer shrugged his shoulders. “You’ll see,” he said. He took a few paces forward and, leaping into the air with a slight thrust of his feet, reached a rocky ledge situated about five meters above the ground. “Hey!” he called to his companions. “Am I tall enough now?”

  Seeing him perched thus, one of the Selenites—which was marching at the head of the company and seemed to be their leader—appeared to understand the intention with which he had made that rapid ascent and headed in his direction. Once close to him, he made a long speech in a sonorous language whose syllables echoed from the immense walls. From time to time he stopped, looked carefully around at all the Terrans as if to determine whether they had understood, and then resumed talking.60

  “Sing, my lad, sing,” muttered Jonathan Farenheit. “If you think that we understand a single word of your harangue…”

  Fricoulet made a signal to the American with his hand, bidding him to be silent. The Selenite perceived the gesture and, presumably taking it for a commanding gesture, deduced that Fricoulet was the strangers’ leader. From that moment on he addressed itself directly to him; then he stopped, looking at the engineer and seemingly awaiting a response.

  Fricoulet reflected briefly. Then, suddenly, he had a bright idea. That idea was that the whole of the long speech that he had just heard was probably nothing but an enquiry as to where he and his companions came from. He plunged his hand into his pockets, which were always full of the most disparate assortment of objects, and pulled a piece of chalk out of one of them. Rapidly, on the crater’s blackened lava wall, he drew two spheres of unequal size, which he connected by means of a straight line to represent the course followed through space by the shell. Then, putting the index-finger of his right hand on the larger sphere, he applied his left hand to his breast.

  The Selenite seemed to be following this mime with keen interest. Then Fricoulet pointed to the smaller sphere and extended his arm toward the inhabitant of the Moon. The latter seemed surprised, came closer, and considered the drawing attentively. Then he summoned its companions, which came to look at it, one after the other—after which they drew away, seemed to confer with one another, and then went back into the dark tunnel from which they had emerged.

  Ossipoff and his companions looked at one another silently for a moment.

  “Well, what do you think of the Lunarians?” asked Gontran.

  “They’re much as I imagined they would be,” the old man replied.

  “At any rate, they’re not very handsome,” murmured Selena.

  “For myself,” said Fricoulet, “I expected to see beings much stranger and more dissimilar to us than they are.”

  “Why is that?” asked the old scientist. “Although the conditions of habitability of their world are very different from ours, they originated, as we did, from the solar nebula…”

  “Their physiological conformation, however,” Fricoulet observed, “does not appear to be absolutely identical to ours. Did you notice those enormous heads, the large pupils of their eyes, and the narrow torso?”

  “Of course.”

  “To what do you attribute that?”

  “At present, we can only draw inferences.”

  “Well, w
hat inferences do you draw?”

  “That if the Selenites have very voluminous skulls, it’s because their brains are more highly developed than ours…”

  “And it is therefore necessary to conclude,” Fricoulet prompted, “that they’re more intelligent than us?”

  “Perhaps not—but in any case, they ought to possess more acquired knowledge. Now, if their chests are narrow, it’s because their lungs are conformed differently from ours, in order to function without hindrance under an atmospheric pressure as low as the one that pertains here. As for the stomach and the abdomen, if they’re not as pronounced as those of Terrans, it’s because the latter belong to a planet on which it’s necessary to eat to live, where the law of life is the law of death, and where the weak are absorbed by the strong.”

  Selena opened her eyes wide as she listened to her father speaking. “Are there worlds in the universe, Father,” she asked, “in which creatures do not eat?”

  “It’s probable,” he old man replied. “It would be sad to think that such a ridiculous function and its consequences are compulsory on every world. It is good for a wretched planet still in a state of infancy, as the Earth is, but that reflects the powerlessness of Nature in proportion to our size….”61

  “I can’t imagine the external form of beings that don’t eat,” Fricoulet put in.

  “It’s certain,” Ossipoff replied, “that such beings must be clothed in fantastic appearances and strange conformation: men without heads, torsos or limbs—for our brain is nothing but the blossoming of the spinal cord; it’s that which makes the skull, and the skull the head. Our legs and arms are only the quadruped’s limbs transformed and improved…it’s the gradual development of a vertical stance that makes the feet and repeated exercise that makes the hands. The abdomen is merely the envelope of the intestine; the form and length of the intestine depends on the kind of alimentation. In the final analysis, there is not a single cubic centimeter on or within our bodies that isn’t due to our vital functioning in the environment that we inhabit.”