The America bent down and put out his hand. “By God!” he said. “Monsieur Fricoulet is right.” As he finished this sentence, there was a rather violent shock beneath their feet, and they all fell into a sitting position on the circular divan.
“Damn it!” groaned Fricoulet. “What’s happening down there?”
“It appears,” Ossipoff replied, “that the castors sustaining the floor have just jammed.”
Fricoulet’s pallor increased. “Oh!” he said, in a low voice. “That’s serious…”
“Serious?” exclaimed Gontran. “Why’s that?”
“Because…” He stopped, and murmured: “What good will it do to frighten them?” He turned to Ossipoff. “How distant are we from the neutral point?”
The old man reflected for a few seconds and replied, confidently: “1000 kilometers.”
“How long will it take to travel that distance?”
“About two hours.”100
The engineer’s face darkened. “We’ll never make it that far,” he muttered.
Everyone looked at him anxiously.
“But what are you thinking?” asked Gontran. “Come on—say it. We’re men, after all, and if we must die…well, we’ll die. Personally, I’d prefer to know what’s happening to me…and I presume these gentlemen are of the same opinion.”
“Certainly,” they said.
“Before answering,” Fricoulet said, “let me make certain…” He took a pair of pincers from his instrument-case, went to a corner of the cabin, gripped a ring and pulled it with all his might. It lifted up a square panel in the floor mounted on hinges like a door. At the same moment, a jet of flame shot up to the top of the metallic dome. The engineer let the panel fall back. “That’s what I feared,” he said, hoarsely.
“What’s that?” they asked, prey to the most profound amazement.
“Obviously,” Fricoulet retorted, “it’s a fire…”
“A fire!”
“Yes. We’re on fire, caused by the pivots of the floor seizing up. That’s the explanation of the intolerable heat in here. You wanted to know…now you know.”
The cause the engineer had cited was the only plausible explanation for the sudden fire. The pivot must be red hot, for the floor made of selenium—well known as a good conductor of heat—had become burning hot, even for feet clad in strong boots. Their soles were scorching and threatening to burst into flames at any moment.
Obedient to the same impulse, they all climbed up on to the circular divan.
“What can we do?” asked Ossipoff.
“By God!” cried the American, “Is there anything else to do but extinguish the fire?”
“If you have a means of cooling that metal,” said Fricoulet, angrily, “I’m ready to employ it.”
“Let’s douse it,” suggested Gontran.
They all raced to the water-bottles hanging on the walls and emptied their contents on to the floor. On contact with the hot metal, though, the water was transformed into hot vapor. The vehicle’s atmosphere became completely opaque, so that the voyagers could no longer see one another, and the noise of the vaporization made it difficult for them to hear one another.
“Let’s separate ourselves from the sphere!” Farenheit shouted, madly, throwing himself toward the levers that controlled the attachments.
Ossipoff and Fricoulet hurled themselves upon him. “Wretch!” howled the old man, “You’re insane!”
“Immediate death rather than this infernal torture!” groaned the Yankee, making unimaginable efforts to extract himself from the grip of his two companions.
Fricoulet had drawn his revolver. “If you won’t be still, Mr. Farenheit,” he said, with deadly calmness, “I’ll blow your brains out.”
“What does it matter?” roared the American, who was out of his mind. “I’m in too much pain.”
Suddenly, Gontran had an inspiration. “What about Sharp?” he asked. “Are you renouncing your vengeance, then?”
These words produced a complete transformation in the American’s attitude. He let go of the levers voluntarily and retreated into a corner, where he remained immobile, moaning in pain.
“Two hours,” said Ossipoff. “I ask for two hours. Then, we can abandon the sphere without any risk, for we’ll have penetrated the Venusian zone of attraction.”
They were two terrible, frightful hours, during which the voyagers gave proof of admirable courage and superhuman strength. They never ceased soaking the floor, which the continual friction of the pivot had rendered red hot in its entirety, and which emitted a torrid heat.
Ossipoff only took his eyes off his chronometer to measure the arc subtended by Venus with a micrometer.
Finally, he cried in a hoarse voice: “In ten minutes we’ll arrive at the neutral point—get ready!”
It was high time; the thermometer marked 42 degrees Centigrade, and the travelers were breathless. Nevertheless, the approach of deliverance gave them new strength; already they had attached everything that they wanted to keep aboard solidly to the walls, and they put on their diving suits skillfully.
The suits were made of an elastic fabric like rubber, in which the limbs and the torso were hermetically enclosed. The fabric itself was supported by a network of extremely fine metallic springs of remarkable elasticity, so as to resist the expansion of the gas contained in the travelers’ living tissues. The head was protected by an oval selenium helmet reminiscent of the respirols that Ossipoff and his companions had already used to explore the visible hemisphere of the Moon. They hastily packed a few tablets of solidified oxygen in receptacles built into the interior of the helmets; the air would deteriorate, even though the products of pulmonary combustion would be evacuated through a valve located on top of the head.
“Are you ready?” Ossipoff asked. Everyone replied affirmatively, each of them holding in his hand the helmet in which his head would be imprisoned. “Release the bolts,” he instructed. “Each of them pressed down on a lever connected to one of the four bolts, and the cabin was no longer attached to the apparatus, except by the central pivot.
“Follow my instructions to the letter,” the old man said then. “In a few seconds, as soon as we’ve penetrated the Venusian zone of attraction, we’ll turn over, as we did when we arrived on the Moon, so that our feet will be where our heads are at present. Imitate my movements exactly and hold on hard to the attachments disposed around the cupola, on the bottom of which we’ll find ourselves standing.”
He fell silent and quickly screwed his helmet on to the collar of his suit, while his companions did the same. Then, when he saw that they were firmly and resolutely attached to the hand-grips, he ran to the control-mechanism operating the central bolt and grabbed it firmly in one hand, while he lifted the other in a gesture that signified: “Pay attention!”
Chapter XXIII
Three million leagues by parachute
Mikhail Ossipoff operated the control-mechanism while Fricoulet pressed down with all his strength on the cables that reached the exterior by passing through wadded holes. They barely had time to grab hold of the hand-grips; with a terrible shock, the sphere separated from its alveolus and the voyagers found themselves caught in a kind of whirlwind, which prevented them having any consciousness of the rotation that the apparatus performed. They closed their eyes instinctively, and clung to the cords with all the strength of desperation, their hearts wrung by the prospect of the frightful death that awaited them.
When they recovered their self-composure they found themselves crouched in the rounded dome of the cabin, which now formed the floor under their feet. Above their heads, retained by a dozen selenium cables, the immense parachute extended its metallic surface.
Mikhail Ossipoff turned to Gontran and applied his “speaker” to the escape-valve of his helmet. These speakers had been slightly modified to alleviate inconveniences discovered during the excursion to the Moon’s visible hemisphere. Instead of being straight, they were strongly curved; one end connected to a little valve
pierced in the helmet in front of the mouth and the other was adapted to the escape valve situated, as we have said, at the top of the helmet. In this way, the voyagers could talk to one another without interruption, taking turns as they would in the open air. It was only necessary to apply the end of a speaker to the escape valve of the person with whom one wished to converse.
“Well,” said Mikhail Ossipoff, “we’re now definitely on our way to Venus.”
“How long before we arrive?”
“About 40 hours.”
“40 hours! We’ll never be able to go so long without eating—at least, I won’t.”
“But there’s no need to fast until our arrival; we only need to introduce into our helmets a provision of the nutritive product we fabricated in Maoulideck, and the artificial air that we breathe will become nutritive in its turn.”
“Perfect. I won’t try to hide the fact that I had some anxiety on that score, for—I don’t know if you’re like me—I find that emotion makes me enormously hungry.” And he added privately, with a profound sigh: A beefsteak aux pommes or a simple cutlet au cresson…O sheep and oxen of my childhood, shall I ever see you again! Then, pursuant to the idea of a kind of alimentation more in tune with his stomach’s tastes and habits, he said: “40 hours is a long time. Isn’t there any means of speeding up the fall?”
“If you can find a means, I’d like nothing better than to employ it.”
It seemed to Gontran that in pronouncing these words, Ossipoff’s voice had taken on a hint of mockery. It was, therefore, with some hesitation that he replied; “What if we were to reduce the surface area of the parachute?” He understood that he had been right to hesitate when he saw the old man shrug his shoulders.
“We’re falling through the void,” the latter growled, “so that parachute has no effect.” With these words, pronounced in an irritated tone, Ossipoff removed his speaker and turned on his heel.
Poor Gontran was still quite nonplussed by this abrupt interruption of the conversation when Fricoulet came over and put himself in communication.
“Another gaffe?” he asked.
“Lower your voice,” retorted the young Comte.
“You’re forgetting that he can’t hear what we’re saying. What happened?”
Briefly, Flammermont told his friend about the suggestion he had made to the old scientist for reducing the journey-time.
“Bah!” replied the engineer. “There’s no need to worry about such a small thing. After the gymnastics we’ve just performed, it’s permissible to have had your head turned upside-down.” Laughing, he added: “All the more so as it’s the exact truth, since our heads are now where our feet were a little while ago. Then, seriously, he asked: “How do you feel?”
“Why, quite well. What about you?”
“The absence of atmosphere isn’t troubling you?”
“Not at all.”
“There we go! So much the better.”
The engineer was about to cut off communication when his friend caught him by the arm and asked: “What’s that little shining dot we can see out there?”
The engineer turned to look in the direction indicated.
“Do you think it might be our vibratory sphere?” Gontran went on.
“Perhaps,” Fricoulet replied, distractedly. After a brief pause, he added: “No, it isn’t…like us, the sphere must be falling towards Venus.”
“Then what is that thing?”
“Of course!” said Fricoulet. “That thing is simply the Moon—the excellent Selene, whose company we quite three days ago. Now, do you see that large star shining with a bluish light a little further away?”
“One would have to be myopic not to see it. So what?”
“That’s the Earth.”
“That’s not possible!”
Fricoulet slapped him on the shoulder. “There’s an exclamation that would certainly compromise your marriage,” he said, “if Monsieur Ossipoff heard it. My poor Gontran, you haven’t the slightest idea where you were born, and I now understand how mistaken those people are who say that travel broadens the mind.”
“That’s not very polite,” retorted Flammermont.
“For you,” the engineer went on, imperturbably, “the sublimities of creation remain a closed book. The globe that gave birth to you is a veritable world…”
“…Measuring 12,000 kilometers in breadth, rotating on its axis in 24 hours and around the Sun with a velocity of 29 and a half kilometers per second, completing an orbit 74,000,000 leagues in diameter in 365 days.” Flammermont had pronounced this without pausing, in one breath, in the same monotonous voice that a schoolboy employs in reciting his lesson. Having drawn breath, he added: “You see what a good memory I have, my dear chap; I was 12 when I learned that at the Lycée Henri IV.”
“Didn’t you, in fact, read it very recently in Les Continents célestes?”
Flammermont shrugged his shoulders. Without answering the question, he asked: “Is there any risk in going to sleep trussed up like this?”
“Look!” said the engineer, pointing at Farenheit, lying at the bottom of the gondola, rolled up in his blanket and sleeping peacefully.
“Wake me up when we’re within sight of Venus,” said Gontran, lying down beside the American.
The engineer went over to Mikhail Ossipoff, who was leaning over the guard-rail, with his eye glued to the ocular lens of a telescope discovered in Sharp’s vehicle, sounding the celestial immensity. Fricoulet put himself in communication with him. “Well, Monsieur Ossipoff,” he said, “can you see anything?”
“Nothing yet—but I’m on the lookout for a propitious moment to make a few preliminary studies of the world we’re heading towards.”
“I thought the thickness of the Venusian atmosphere made all geographical observation very difficult, not to say impossible.
“For terrestrial astronomers perhaps—but for us, floating in the void…anyway, look.”
The engineer had leaned a long way over the guard-rail but he could not make anything out; the disk of Venus, melted into a kind of mist, allowed none of the details of its surface to be seen, especially by the naked eye. “We’re quite certain of the existence of an atmosphere, aren’t we?” he said.
“Of course!” retorted the old scientist. “It’s as clear as day, not only that we have irrefutable proof of its existence, but that we also know its height, density and composition. Already, you can see how rounded and truncated the extremities of the Venus crescent’s horns appear to be…” He sniggered briefly and added: “Although you don’t know much about astronomy, you must know that that bluntness is entirely due to the presence of an atmosphere. On the other hand, on studying Venus spectroscopically, astronomers have recognized the absorption lines due to an atmosphere containing water vapor, analogous to the terrestrial atmosphere, but denser.”
“Weren’t those astronomers Tacchini and Vogel?” said the engineer.101
The old scientist could not retain an exclamation of surprise. “How do you know that?” he murmured.
“By listening to Monsieur de Flammermont, who was talking to me about Venus just now,” Fricoulet replied, imperturbably.
Ossipoff nodded his head, which clearly signified: “Gontran! There’s a man who knows a great many things!” Then he continued: “He must also have told you that all the terrestrial observers noticed the atmosphere of the world, like a luminous aureole surrounding it, during the transit of the planet across the Sun.”
“He also told me,” Fricoulet hastened to add, “that, based on very precise measurements, it has been calculated that the atmosphere in question measures no less that 194 kilometers in height—which is to say that it’s twice as high as the Earth’s atmosphere, and denser.”
“So you see, Monsieur,” the scientist replied, “that you were wrong to be anxious. You’ll be able to breathe as well on Venus as on Earth…the air might perhaps be richer in oxygen, but that’s not an inconvenience.”
“On the con
trary.” With these words, Fricoulet turned away, leaving Ossipoff to strain his eyes for a few hours more, seeking to solve the mysteries of the Venusian world, and went to take his place in the bottom of the gondola, next to Gontran.
How long was he asleep? A long time, no doubt, for when he awoke, shaken by an energetic hand, he perceived—to his great amazement—Mikhail Ossipoff standing over him, disencumbered of his diving-suit. Immediately, he realized how far the apparatus had traveled while he had been asleep. Dexterously, he took off his selenium helmet and exclaimed: “We’re already in the Venusian atmosphere!”
“Whether you like it or not, yes, Monsieur,” the old man replied, mockingly. “In 15 hours, we’ve covered several 100,000 leagues.”102
“15 hours!” exclaimed Fricoulet. “I’ve slept for 15 hours?” Slightly confused, he added: “It’s the Sun, no doubt.” Then, leaning towards Flammermont, he applied his speaker to the valve of his helmet. “Let’s go!” he cried, in a thunderous voice. “On your feet—we’re here!”
The young man, waking up with a start, made such a violent movement that Farenheit also sat up, abruptly snatched from his slumber. No words could describe the bewilderment of the two sleepers on seeing their traveling companions liberated from the diving-suits that had imprisoned them.
Without needing to be told, they released themselves rapidly, avid to breathe veritable air. Their nostrils dilated and their mouths opened wide to inhale the greatest possible quantity of the cool and vivifying atmosphere, which penetrated their lungs and send new life flowing through their entire being.
“One could believe that one were on Earth,” murmured Gontran, in the grip of unalloyed bliss.
Farenheit breathed the air in avidly, continually repeating: “Air! Real air! Like American air!”
The old scientist had unpacked his instruments and suspended them from the strings of the parachute.
“What does the thermometer say?” asked Fricoulet.
“It indicates 30 degrees Centigrade, and the barometer 780 millimeters.”
The engineer rubbed his hands. “We can’t be more than 20 kilometers away, can we?” he said.
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1) Page 45