“What’s gone wrong now?” stammered Voriguin.
Without answering, Sharp grabbed him by the shoulders and stuck his face to the telescope. “Look!” he said, briefly.
It was the laboratory assistant’s turn to be astonished.
“Damn it!” he said. “That’s bizarre!”
“You can see it too?” Sharp said.
“Of course!” the other retorted. “One would have to be blind not to see that the demonic American’s cannonball is smaller that it was this morning.” He stood up and fixed an anxious gaze on the Russian. “What does it mean?”
Sharp did not reply; he was thinking.
“Are we stopping again?” Voriguin persisted.
Still silent, Sharp climbed the few steps that led to the cannonball’s nose-cone. There he uncovered a porthole and looked through it. Out there in space, very distant, a luminous crescent shone in the midst of a host of stars. He picked up a telescope, aimed it for a few seconds, then covered the porthole again, went down the ladder and said to Voriguin: “The shell has turned over.”
The other made a fearful gesture. “Turned over?” he exclaimed. “So what?”
Sharp grimaced a smile. “So nothing. It’s now the base of the shell that’s facing the Moon and the tip that’s pointed towards the Earth.”
Incredulous, Voriguin dropped to his hands and knees on the floor and looked out. Beneath him, the Moon was extended like a huge world-map. “What about them?” he asked.
Sharp shrugged his shoulders. “What about them?” he sniggered. “They’re flying through space.”
A joyful gleam came into the laboratory assistant’s eye. “Won’t they reach the Moon?”
“It’s improbable.”
On hearing this reassuring reply, Voriguin got to his feet swiftly and attempted to express his joy by means of an entrechat—but he had forgotten that, being so distant from the Earth—the laws of gravity were constantly modifying their effect on the cannonball and its contents, so that he bumped his head against the ceiling of the compartment and fell rather rudely on the floor.
Sharp’s austere face cleared as he saw the laboratory assistant grab his head in both hands. “Ha ha! That’s what comes of having so few brains,” he said.
Voriguin emitted a dull groan; then, without any retort, he went to the telescope and aimed it once again at Mikhail Ossipoff’s vehicle. Borne away by an unknown force, it continued to draw away in the direction of the Moon’s polar regions.
“To what do you attribute that, Master?” Voriguin asked.
“Doubtless to the influence exerted on their cannonball by ours—an influence sufficient to pull them off course.”
The laboratory assistant clapped his hands. “Oh!” he cried. “If what you say were true, it would give me sweet satisfaction to know that the accursed American would fly through space for ever, and that it was our fault! For you’re quite certain, aren’t you, that they won’t reach the lunar surface?”
“One can never be certain of these things, my dear chap,” Sharp replied, in a slightly disdainful tone. “One can only deal in probabilities.”
“And the probability is…?”
“That Ossipoff will curve around the entire lunar disk and then be lost in infinity.”
With a ferocious smile, Voriguin added: “Ha ha! I’d like to be a fly on the wall to see what will happen. It would be interesting, to be sure, when there are no more food-supplies on board. They’re capable of drawing straws to see who’ll be eaten, as in the song of Le Petit Navire.”76 The wretch had already forgotten the bloody scene what had almost taken place between his companion and himself when the savior shell had been spotted in space. Abruptly, his thoughts took another track and, abandoning Ossipoff’s projectile, returned to the one containing him. “Well fall, though?” he asked.
Sharp nodded his head affirmatively.
“And how will we fall?” Voriguin went on.
The scientist consulted his instruments. “It’s bizarre,” he murmured. “We’re following a rigorously perpendicular course.”
“And can you tell in advance exactly where we’re going to land?”
Sharp knelt down beside the window in the middle of the shell’s circular floor, with a plumb line in his right hand and a pair of binoculars in the left. After a brief investigation, he replied: “We’re falling into the dead center of the Sea of Serenity.”
“Isn’t that one of the most curious regions of the satellite?” asked the laboratory assistant.
The scientist got up and nodded his head. “It’s one of the most enigmatic, at least,” he replied, “for it’s subject to changes with regard to which terrestrial astronomers are not in agreement.”
“They observe them, though.”
“It’s the causes of the changes about which they disagree.”
“I don’t understand.”
Sharp bent down again and beckoned to his companion to come closer. “Look,” he instructed.
Voriguin strained his eyes. “Well?” he said. “What’s extraordinary? It’s all the same: mountains, craters, peaks…”
“Don’t you see a small rockslide to the right of the Sea of Serenity?”
“Right…beside those shiny outcrops of rock.”
“That’s the Tumulus of Linné.”
“Well?”
“Well, that little circus, hardly perceptible today, was once very obvious, since one finds it marked on maps of the Moon originating in the year 1651. In 1788 the astronomer Schröter observed and described it. In the time of Lohrmann and Mädler that circus presented an internal diameter of 30,000 feet. It was darkly shadowed when lit obliquely; on the other hand, when the Sun was high above the horizon, the whole thing appeared as a white stain. Then, abruptly, in 1866, Schmidt—the director of the Observatory of Athens, one of the astronomers most interested in the Moon—observed that the crater had been replaced by a low-lying white cone with gently-sloping sides.77 Finally, very recently, the French scientist Flammarion, observing this mysterious point, concluded that the crater had more-or-less crumbled or disintegrated since 1830. And now, as you can see for yourself, it’s no more than a whitish dome without any cavity at the center, when it had a circus more than ten kilometers wide 200 years ago.”
“And what caused that collapse?” asked Voriguin.
Sharp straightened up and shrugged his shoulders. “We’ll know that,” he said, “once we’ve arrived down there.”
“But you must have an opinion on the subject,” the laboratory assistant persisted. “Is it the action of nature or must we see it as the result of the labor of intelligent beings?”
“I repeat, I don’t have any firm idea with respect to the phenomenon. I’ve only concluded one thing, which is that the astronomers of the terrestrial world are mistaken in propagating the opinion that the lunar world is completely dead and frozen.” He paused momentarily, then added: “What strange people they are! Being unable, with the feeble instruments at their disposal, to discover the causes of important changes observed in the lunar surface, they prefer to conclude that the satellite is dead. It’s absurd, in truth.” He folded his arms and looked at his companion angrily, as if he held him personally responsible for the stupidity of astronomers. “The Moon, a dead world!” he cried. “But that requires a willful denial of the evidence, or putting in doubt the observations made by the most illustrious of our predecessors! The German astronomer Gruithuisen was, no doubt, blind in 1824, when he perceived in the dark region of the Moon in its first quarter, in the same Sea of Fecundity over which we’re now flying, an enigmatic glow that measured no less than 100 kilometers in length and 30 in breadth. That glow extended as far as the crater of Copernicus, lasted ten minutes and then disappeared, to reappear shortly afterwards, like a pale flame that shines for a few moments and goes out, to be replaced by flickering electrical palpitations.”
“It was doubtless an aurora borealis,” stammered Voriguin.
“That’s exactly
what Gruithuisen thought,” said Sharp. After a few moments employed in drawing breath, he continued: “Monsieur Trouvelot78 has similarly observed evidence of changes in the form of the large crater Eudoxus, which we can see from here. On the twentieth of February 1877, while observing this crater, he was surprised to see a sort of narrow rectilinear wall crossing the circus at its greatest width—and it was not marked on the map. It was orientated east/west and was very high, to judge by the shadow it projected northwards. Well, a year later, on February 17, 1878, the same observer, examining the crater again, was very surprised to be unable to discover the slightest trace of that wall…”
“And since?” asked Voriguin.
“He has search in vain during the same phases and the same conditions of illumination…”
“Of course!” cried the laboratory assistant. “It has fallen down!”
“It raised itself up by itself, then,” retorted Sharp, “since it didn’t exist before!”
“A convulsion of the ground, perhaps,” the other hazarded.
“In that case,” Sharp exclaimed, “why affirm that the Moon is dead? Only animate entities can experience convulsions.” Then, furious at Voriguin’s silence, he went on: “Well, have you nothing to say? You’re just going to stand there, mute as a carp? Answer me—what do you think?”
“But I think the same as you,” the laboratory assistant hastened to say. “The people who dare to put it about that the Moon is a dead world are the worst of cretins.”
These words appeared to appease the scientist. “Well,” he said, in a softer voice, “if you’d like further proof of the vitality of our satellite, look at the green tint that the Sea of Serenity presents. What’s that, in your opinion?”
“Hmm!” murmured Voriguin. “I daren’t affirm anything…but it seems to me that it’s very like vegetation.”
Sharp raised his arms into the air triumphantly. “Well done!” he cried. “You’re right!”
“Are you certain of that?” asked the other, ingenuously.
“As certain as the astronomer Klein,79 who attributes that general tint of the Sea of Serenity to a thick and dense vegetal carpet formed of plants of unknown height, while the white streak that cuts the ‘sea’ in two represents, in his eyes, a sterile desert zone.”
Voriguin was pensive; while he appeared to be listening attentively to his companion’s explanations, his mind was elsewhere. While Sharp became engrossed in the consideration of theories that divided terrestrial astronomers, the laboratory assistant, whose ideas were more practical, thought about the actual goal of the voyage. In his opinion, it was not to enlighten the scientists of Earth as to the vitality or otherwise of the Moon that the shell had been commissioned and Jonathan Farenheit had put together a company with a capital of several million dollars. The walls of the crater Eudoxus and the vegetation of the Sea of Serenity were certainly interesting, and not lacking in a certain charm, but if, as Sharp had affirmed, life on the Moon, was, so to speak, cost-free, the same was unfortunately not true of life on Earth; it was necessary to think about their return. Now, Vorigin had only consented to accompany Sharp on this perilous voyage on the condition of having a proportional share in the produce of the diamond mines discovered by the scientist’s spectroscope—and it seemed to Voriguin that the aforesaid diamond mines were being neglected.
“What are you thinking about?” Sharp asked him, after a brief pause, surprised by his silence and his serious expression.
“I’m thinking about the diamond-fields,” the laboratory assistant replied.
An imperceptible scornful smile creased the scientist’s thin lips. “What about them?” he said.
“How far away are they from the point where we’re gong to set down?”
Sharp consulted a map that was hanging on the wall. “About 500 kilometers,” he said.
“Eh? But that’s quite a journey!” Voriguin exclaimed.
“Pooh! A week’s journey, no more.”
“Will we be staying on the Moon for long?”
Sharp shrugged his shoulders. “That depends on circumstances.”
The laboratory assistant’s face darkened. “It’s just that the food-store is almost empty,” he said.
“Bah! What are you worried about?” the scientist replied. “In ten hours we’ll have arrived—and if there’s vegetation on the lunar surface, as I have every reason to suppose, it will be devilishly odd if there aren’t foodstuffs there too.”
Voriguin shook his head. “Brr!” he muttered. “Better not to think about that.” Then, all of a sudden, an idea occurred to him. “But how are we going to get back?” he cried. “We’ve been entirely preoccupied with getting here, without thinking about getting back.”
“In truth, Voriguin,” Sharp said, disdainfully, “you’re the most pusillanimous man I’ve ever met!”
“You have a knowledge of science that I don’t possess, Master,” the laboratory assistant replied, humbly. “That’s what gives you such great assurance.”
Appeased by these words, the scientist replied: “If you’d only take the trouble to think about it a little, you’d avid a great deal of anxiety. When we left the Earth, it was necessary for us to have an initial velocity sufficient for us to reach the point at which the spheres of attraction of the Earth and the Moon met. Now, that point was 86,856 leagues from our point of departure. To go back, on the other hand, we only have 9,244 leagues to travel to arrive at that point, and to do that, we only need an initial velocity of 2,500 meters a second.”
As Sharp spoke, the laboratory assistant’s face cleared.
“And then,” added the scientist, “We have to take the difference in weight into account. How much did our shell weigh when we left?”
“About 3000 kilos,” Voriguin replied.
“Well, down there it will only weigh 500 kilos, which is six times less.”
A smile expanded the laboratory assistant’s anxiously pursed lips. “All this is better than I thought,” he murmured. Then, after a pause, he asked: “How long do you think it will be before we arrive?”
“About eight hours.”
“In that case, I ask your permission to get a little rest; all this emotion’s worn me out.”
Sharp took out his watch. “It’s 2 a.m. in St. Petersburg at present,” he said, earnestly. “At 10 a.m. precisely, we’ll set foot on the Moon.”
Voriguin lay down on the divan that ran around the projectile and turned his face to the padded wall. “You can wake me up,” he stammered, through a yawn.
Sharp studied him momentarily with a furious expression, then shrugged his shoulders and went to install himself at a little table covered with papers and books. Five minutes later, the sound of snoring filled the vehicle; Voriguin was asleep.
For several hours, Sharp continued his calculations to the sound of that strange music, only putting down his pen to take up his instruments and measure the projectile’s the ever-increasing speed.
8 a.m. was chiming when Voriguin stirred on his divan. “Well, anything new?” he asked.
“Nothing…we’re still falling, in accordance with the law of gravity.”
“Are we far away?”
“Still 2000 leagues to cross.”
The laboratory assistant started on hearing these words. “2000 kilometers more!” he exclaimed. “But will there be time to make our preparations for landing?” So saying, he ran to one of the portholes, and an involuntary cry escaped him at the sight of the immense world over which the shell was flying.
The spectacle was, in fact, marvelous. The last buttresses of a mountain chain appeared on the horizon, the summits looming up into space like giants. Then, in the immense greenish plain that extended to infinity, small volcanoes were now clearly distinguishable, with their gaping craters and their sharp peaks, measuring scarcely half a kilometer in diameter. The shell was traveling with a velocity of nearly 10,000 kilometers an hour, and the panorama was becoming more distinct by the second. The mountains that
barred the horizon formed a continuous line rising to the altitude of the projectile and the ground seemed to be hollowing out to receive the explorers.
Sharp looked at his watch. “Another half-hour,” he said. “Let’s get ready for the shock of impact—which, I warn you, will be rude.”
Voriguin paled slightly.
The bolts of the portholes were carefully tightened. Then they checked the solidity of the powerful toroidal springs with which the base of the projectile was furnished. Finally, they tested the resistant strength of the hammocks’ suspensions.
“Everything’s in order,” murmured Voriguin.
“Let’s go,” said Sharp. “We have no more than five minutes. Lie down, Voriguin. I’ll put out the incandescent lamps myself.”
When the laboratory assistant was installed in his hammock, the scientist turned a switch and plunged the vehicle abruptly into darkness. Then he lay down next to his companion. A deathly silence reigned; side by side, the two men silently waited for the impact—and perhaps, in consequence of it, death.
Suddenly the temperature rose abnormally, the half-light filtering through the portholes from outside disappeared, and a frightful noise resounded. Then a terrific shock shook the shell from the base to the nose-cone. At the same time, the springs of the hammocks broke, with a dry snap that was scarcely audible amid the racket of breaking glass and apparatus, tumbling furniture, collapsing walls and the friction of steel digging into the ground….
Stunned and senseless, the two voyagers rolled unconscious on the floor, which was already strewn with all sorts of debris.
They lay there side by side, motionless and corpse-like, for a long time. The interior of the projectile was dark and silent.
Suddenly, a faint and plaintive groan was heard.
“Sharp!” murmured Voriguin. “Sharp!”
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1) Page 34