The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Stories

by Mike Ashley

  2

  Columbus of the Moon

  We studied Beer and Moedler’s Mappa selenographica, the best map available at that time, in order to determine our landing-point. The shell flew over the lunar landscape at an altitude of less than eighty miles, so that its major configurations were visible in detail through the side windows. We admired the Sea of Clouds bordered by volcanoes, then Mount Copernicus, so high that it can be seen from Earth; then came a succession of ring-shaped mountains and palisades. Jagged and angular coastlines marked out fictional continents, vast archipelagos, oblong islands. There was no sign of vegetation or construction. The configurations of the soil indicated nothing more than the work of geology, with its stony avalanches, its mountains and its abysses, its runnels of cooled lava and its volcanic deposits. All was dead.

  I reported my observations to my companions: “I can see nothing but mineral strata: no trace of an atmosphere, which would make the horizon iridescent.”

  Barbicane shook his long beard in a gesture of annoyance. “The atmosphere could be hidden away at the bottom of the cirques; some of them are over five thousand yards high.”

  “All the same,” I protested, “it would not be dense enough to breathe. Experiments have proved that man cannot acclimatize himself to a pressure of less than half that of the Earth’s atmosphere.”

  “To be sure. But we will not remain outside for long. It is time to prepare ourselves; I fear another meteor, which would certainly carry us off.”

  Barbicane and I covered page upon page with ballistic calculations, determining the ideal moment to ignite the twenty fire-pieces mounted in the rear of the projectile. Thanks to the fact that the Moon’s mass was eight times less than that of the Earth and its diameter four times less, the fall would be six times easier to soften.

  We were aiming at a vast crater in the western hemisphere. To my great shame, I must admit that I have forgotten its name. Could this be one of those effects of the “unconscious” speculated upon by Professor Freud, who is so much in fashion at present in the bourgeois salons of New England? I know not.

  Following our plan, Barbicane removed the metal shutters in the rear, and replaced them with an array of cannon, already charged with powerful explosives.

  At 3.50, he put his lighter to the common wick. His tone was solemn. “Gentlemen, the time has come to find out whether there is a god of ballistics.”

  A sharp thrust below betrayed the ignition. The visible portion of the lunar disk began to grow, its horizon to level out, as if the porthole had suddenly changed into a telescope.

  “We’re going to crash!” I cried in spite of myself.

  The shell vibrated horribly, forcing us into immobility. I don’t know by what miracle Barbicane managed to light the four forward-facing, braking rockets at the exact second required. The god of ballistics inspired him, no doubt. An instant earlier, and the manoeuvre would have had no effect. Three seconds later, and the lunar surface would have pulverized us. A huge impact shock shot us up to the ceiling, arms and legs all mixed together. Without the sprung leather padding, my limbs would have been broken.

  “Is everyone all right?” I quavered weakly.

  No light appeared through the lateral portholes; the exterior was plunged into total darkness and we had to light the gas-lamps.

  “We’ve arrived!” Michel Ardan exclaimed, his moustaches bristling with excitement. “Us, Christopher Columbuses of the Moon!”

  “Oh,” Barbicane joked, “Who knows if Cyrano de Bergerac . . .”

  “In that case, long live Cyrano de Bergerac and all the Columbuses of the Moon who went before him! Long live us!”

  And the Frenchman went in search of the bottle of Dom Perignon that, unbeknownst to us, he had immersed in the water barrel in the depths of the hold. The shell was leaning by several degrees. We toasted the Moon, the Earth, the Gun Club and all the subscribing countries in one go; finally we drank to the honour of the poor dog Satellite, first victim of the conquest of space.

  “Now we must go out and explore,” said Barbicane, setting down his glass. “If, that is, the composition and the density of the air are suitable for us.”

  I regretted that we had not brought with us one of those waterproof diving suits attached to a pump, which have recently allowed divers to breath ten metres below the surface of the waves. Barbicane shrugged his shoulders and unlatched the circular door in the centre of the shell’s base. I crouched down and breathed in deeply. A dry, cold fragrance, straight out of a laboratory, suffused my throat, but no liquid, blood or lymph-fluid, began to run from my ears or nostrils.

  “Air,” I said in a hoarse voice. “Barbicane, you were right. There is no substantial vacuum. We can go outside without fearing illness.”

  Michel Ardan cheered again, and we set ourselves to opening the exit-door. I wasn’t sorry to leave the shell. At the end of the first day of the voyage the fifty-four square feet of its floor-space had shrunk in my mind until they seemed much less than ten.

  Barbicane claimed the right to exit first, which Michel Ardan and I accorded him without quibble. I followed him. A brief vertigo seized us one after the other, a sharp pain penetrated our ears, then we breathed freely.

  We had landed on a promontory jutting out from the side of the great crater, which descended steeply for fifty metres. The fire of the descent had blackened the portholes, so obscuring our view. We could see, however, that the landscape was a muddle of rocks of all kinds thrown together in powdery desolation as far as the distant walls that circled the crater.

  The vision was accompanied by a long silence. Now we were sure: no-one had come to the Moon before us, for literature had nowhere evoked a similar spectacle, nothing with the power of this prospect.

  Low clouds veiled part of the starry sky. A blue crescent marbled with white crested the horizon.

  “Mother Earth,” Barbicane murmured. “Will we ever return there?”

  “Home-sickness already?” said Michel Ardan, in spurious indignation, “When a whole world awaits discovery! Don’t you find that this crater lacks nothing, in dimensions or rotundity, when measured against Greek amphitheatres or Roman arenas? Who knows if the philosophers of ancient Greece were not Selenite tourists? Here, not only could thousands of spectators pack themselves in, but millions . . .”

  “And the spectacles would employ myriad extras!” Barbicane said, “Certainly, you’re right. The Earth is not so vast that the heavens cannot deliver us with new territories to be mapped out . . .”

  Michel Ardan blushed with pleasure. “You are not a geographer, but a poet, like all scholars . . . But look!” He was suddenly pointing below. Something crept from a crevice, towards our promontory.

  “A lichen,” he announced, having the keenest sight among us.

  There are no words strong enough to express what I felt then. “A life beyond Earth, a life beyond Earth . . .” For several minutes it was impossible to think of anything else.

  Each one of us was in agreement, following Plutarch, Swedenborg or more recently Flammarion, on the possibility, and even the necessity, of life on other planets. Why should a great horologer have set a sun in place just to light mankind! What derisory vanity.

  The apparent absence of atmosphere had closed the door on the subject. But here, through the window, was ample evidence of life!

  The tongue of lichen reached the promontory. I bent down carefully and seized a strand, mossy, purple and scalloped . . . only to let go of it swiftly, with a kick that propelled me five steps backwards. Barbicane caught me en route, interrupting my grotesque leap.

  “Gently, dear colleague. Don’t forget that here weight is six times less than on our native planet. What goes for the shell goes for us too. A trio of Herculeses, that’s what we are.”

  While I was brushing my elbows and knees, Michel in turn approached the lichen with the idea of plucking a tuft of it. I immediately dissuaded him by brandishing my thumb and index finger, which were turning red and
stinging with a lancing pain.

  As an experienced chemist, Barbicane had, like myself, a considerable knowledge of biology, the chemistry of life.

  “What would you say of this lichen,” I asked him, “which grows at the speed of a crystal, moves at that of a worm, and has organic matter as its everyday fare? As what species, or rather in which kingdom, would you classify it?

  “I would say,” interrupted Michel Ardan, “that I wouldn’t make a blanket of it!”

  In the hermetically-sealed shell, closed by an aluminium panel held fast by powerful pressure screws, we had nothing to fear from the lichen. We decided to shut ourselves up there and give ourselves time for several hours of rest, as we were beginning to suffer badly from sleep-deficiency.

  We had (it seemed to me) hardly closed our eyes when a shock-wave shook the shell. Scraping noises reached us through the twelve-inch-thick walls, indicating the enormous force that was being exerted on the shell. The floor began to pitch. Without wishing it, had we provoked a landslide?

  I threw myself towards the porthole and let out a cry of amazement: huge claws, shiny and black, had seized our dwelling. We were flying over the floor of a crater at an altitude of nearly a thousand feet.

  “Look, out of the upper porthole!”

  A phenomenal abdomen, segmented like that of an insect, was wavering close to the point of the shell and covered us completely with its shadow. Through one of the lateral portholes, we could see the beating of wings like cathedral windows, overhung by wing-cases as large as ships, and, finally, part of a head with globular eyes.

  I imagined the extraordinary strength of this creature, which was able to lift the 19,250 pounds of the projectile . . . But no, I was forgetting that on the Moon one had to subtract five-sixths of this weight, which left 3,208 pounds. This still remained considerable, out of all proportion for any terrestrial animal, a fortiori an aerian one. To be sure, we were like Hercules in this world. But it was one inhabited by Titans.

  “Can this monster have taken us for one of its eggs?” Michel Ardan asked.

  No-one replied, for the animal, whose general form resembled that of a Lucanus cervus (a beetle commonly called a flying-kite), bent its flight towards a hole, hardly larger than the diameter of our shell. It deposited us in this rocky declivity with all the delicacy of an entomologist handling a rare specimen.

  The fall into the shadows was brief and, against expectation, quite gentle. Michel Ardan stood up, pulling himself together.

  “This time, I think we have well and truly arrived.”

  3

  The Selenites

  “Here we are under the moon’s crust,” I murmured.

  The portholes revealed the interior of a cavern some quarter of a mile in diameter, sealed above by a dome and pierced by holes where shadows moved. The prospect of being confronted by the larvae of a giant insectoid cooled our enthusiasm, but Michel Ardan remarked that there was nothing to be gained by remaining enclosed.

  Barbicane opened the shutter and we stepped outside.

  I cursed myself for not having brought a daguerreotype – or better still, a talbotype – to photograph the Selenite who was approaching us with the hopping gait of a bird. But the latter would doubtless not have allowed me to photograph it – something that was confirmed later on.

  Perched on spindly legs, the Selenite was perhaps four feet high (which, by the way, reduced to nothing my theory that their size should have been in proportion to the mass of their globe, and consequently should not have exceeded one foot. Reality proved more complex: a Selenite could be either Lilliputian or Brobdingnagian, according to his role in society). It was a compact creature, which had much in common with a cockroach raised up on its back legs, from the chitinous integument that served simultaneously as skeleton, clothing, or armour, to the head capped by a helmet spiked with antennae above, and mandibles below. On its chest hung what I identified as a little fairground drum. The Selenite held out a truncated hand towards Barbicane. Automatically, the savant seized it . . . and gave it a vigorous handshake!

  Visibly satisfied, the Selenite proceeded to tap on his drum. It only took me a few seconds to realize that the rhythm had nothing in common with African tribal music, but was quite simply Morse code! This was the method this individual had found to compensate for its inability to articulate audible sounds. But it heard and understood everything we said to it.

  I only had the vaguest notion of this codified language. Fortunately, Michel Ardan knew it, and agreed to act as interpreter.

  “In the name of the people of the Moon . . . I bid you welcome . . . Soon we will be able to speak aloud.”

  I don’t know whether the greatest surprise was that the Selenite expressed itself in perfect English, or that it shook each of us in turn by the hand. But the frontiers of the absurd had been crossed so long ago that we found all of this quite natural. Our guide emitted a trill through its mandibles, at the limit of audibility. Straight away another Selenite appeared, one of quite a different make-up, resembling a horse (carriage included) and a beetle.

  “One would swear that its carapace had been moulded to hold us comfortably,” Ardan mumbled.

  There was nothing to do but to seat ourselves on this unusual vehicle. The seats proved comfortable, endowed with rolls of chitin in the guise of armrests. The animal-vehicle set off by itself. It was silent and extremely fast. Barbicane entered into conversation with our guide, who replied without standing on ceremony. The Selenites comprised a united society, based on the perpetual progress of industry and aiming at the complete development of the Moon. They had learned our language by observing us through immense telescopes. These offered a magnification sufficient to scrutinize a fellow in the street, in London or in Peking, and to read his lips. Consequently, our arts, history and customs were by no means unknown to them. The Selenites had set up hundreds of such telescopes, spread across the surface of the Moon, which transmitted their received images with the aid of mirrors and projected them on to enormous public screens. A highly entertaining spectacle, no doubt.

  It was in this way that they had had wind of our attempt to make a landing on the night star. Not wishing to be discovered, they had sent an asteroid designed to throw us off our linear trajectory. The manoeuvre had succeeded, but the plan had failed: they had hoped that we would use the shell’s rockets to return to Earth, yet the opposite had occurred, despite the second meteor that their pyrotechnicians had caused to explode some hundreds of miles ahead of the shell.

  “But why should you wish to remain hidden at all cost?” Barbicane questioned.

  The Selenite drummed in reply that the Great Planner judged that humanity was not ready for a fruitful exchange. In the light of past history, we had been compared to a rudderless ship that no longer responded. On the other hand, certain Selenites saw the appearance of a few frail barques, but our guide remained evasive on this point. It did, however, make a comment that left me thoughtful, and a little shocked: pursuing the marine analogy, some Selenites had formed the hypothesis that the visitors – ourselves, in fact – were “rats leaving the sinking ship”. Michel Ardan hastened to disabuse it. Moreover, added the Selenite, no representative of the feminine gender formed part of our expedition. I must admit that this point plunged us into embarrassment. Despite a few exceptions, science remained, and was destined to remain, a masculine affair.

  Our curious equipage traversed a series of amphitheatres teeming with Selenites of different sizes, occupied with various tasks. The amphitheatre appeared to be at the heart of Selenite architecture, in imitation of the natural formations on the surface. They had known of electricity since time immemorial, and made abundant use of it. I wondered who this Great Planner could be, who was obeyed by thousands of creatures, each one different from the other.

  We were quite rightly being taken to it. Before this, our equipage came to a halt in front of an incubator, a monstrous building pierced with holes of all sizes. A Selenite quite similar to t
he first came from it, to replace the latter.

  This one was provided with a phonatory organ, a muddle of palpes and mandibles that produced a voice like an oboe. In the meantime, Michel, Impey, and I had worked out a system for naming the Selenites we met, from the noise of their carapaces as they moved. Thus, our new interpreter was called Krrak’ack.

  “Krrak’ack . . . Good day,” said Krrak’ack with an upper-class English accent. “I am charged with taking you to the Great Planner, so your fate may be decided.”

  “Our fate?” repeated Ardan, with an imperceptible frown.

  “It has not been decided whether it would be better to allow you to leave, or to keep you here. It is vital that our existence remain secret.”

  “By my faith,” said Barbicane, “if the guest quarters are agreeable . . .”

  Ardan and I jumped in at these words.

  “It is out of the question! We are expected below. Our friends in the Gun Club would be inconsolable . . . and they would definitely send a rescue expedition!”

  Krrak’ack seemed responsive to this argument, as far as the frantic ballet of his antennae revealed. The reproduction of this species, which manifested a stupefying intelligence in many respects, interested me greatly. This differed from that of all other species on Earth. Selenite scientists were able to take a standard egg (and they were all so) and modify the characteristics, be they physical or mental, of the young creature prior to birth. Krrak’ack had been conceived a few days before our arrival. His carapace was as fine and supple as a leather suit, for he would do no manual work. Thanks to his enlarged brain, his learning had been accelerated, and it had taken him only two hours to master English and to assimilate the rudiments of our culture. The Selenite-vehicle that had transported us had been manipulated in the same manner. Its brain was no more than a ganglion of nerves, hardly bigger than a nut.