The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Stories

by Mike Ashley

  I dealt the fatal blow.

  “If we reveal the truth world-wide, nothing short of a world war will break out. A war of the worlds, I tell you.”

  Barbicane’s tall frame slumped. He tugged at his moustaches without even noticing it. In a solemn gesture, he laid his left hand on Ardan’s shoulder, his right hand on mine.

  “You are a thousand times right, my friends. It will never be said that I threw the world into chaos. The role of science is to create order, not to destroy it. Our story will not only have the aim of astounding the general populace, it must content the most eminent scholars of Cambridge Observatory, and even our companions of the Gun Club, General Morgan, Major Elphiston, and the unavoidable, in terms of curiosity as much as girth, J. T. Maston.”

  “Bah,” Michel Ardan concluded, quite appropriately. “Aren’t scholars, more than anyone else, subject to excesses of fantasy?”

  And so it was done. In interviews for the Tribune, the New York Herald, the Times and the American Review, we each in turn repeated the same story: that the Columbiad had been thrown off its course by an asteroid, and consequently had circled the Moon without being able to land.

  The European reviews were not content. Upon returning to his country, Michel Ardan had to reply to a flurry of questions from the young, but already famous, Camille Flammarion for his review L’Astronomie, and from Tissandier for La Nature. La Revue des deux mondes, Cosmos and Le Siècle had broadcast preparations for the voyage. They harassed Ardan as far as his favourite retreat – an extravagant house made of sheets of glass. Weary of finding himself always in the spotlight, he seized the first excuse to go to the East Indies, where he stayed for more than a year and a half.

  He returned to see us for one last time at the Gun Club in Baltimore in February 1867, with important news: Monsieur Jules Verne was preparing to take to sea aboard the greatest (and most uncomfortable) ship in the world, the Great Eastern. He wished to rendezvous with us in New York the following month, in the hope of revealing to his readers the outcome of our adventure.

  Michel Ardan spoke to us with the wonderful enthusiasm which was usual for him. “This Verne, whose tales of voyages to worlds known and unknown I have read with unparalleled pleasure, is just the man for the job. His From the Earth to the Moon, published two years ago after his correspondence with us, is a model of exactitude.”

  Barbicane and I agreed in concert.

  “In addition, he possesses all the qualities of an adventure novelist, far from the vogue for character studies and their intimate atmospheres. He mixes fiction with an unparalleled contemporary realism, and turns the sight of a steam engine into a painting by Raphaël or Corrège. I foretell an immense and wonderful work, completely scientific. Like Edgar Allan Poe, this magician has his head in the stars, but in contrast to that fabulist, his feet remain firmly on the ground. He will produce a convincing version of our story for our contemporaries.”

  The motion was carried unanimously. By means of a cable sent by the brand-new transatlantic telegraph, Monsieur Verne provided us with a manuscript copy of Around the Moon, finished in February 1869, which appeared in the Journal des Débats, then as a volume two years later. This sealed our promise to the Selenites.

  Until just a week ago, I did not know there would be an epilogue to our incredible odyssey. But a book lent to me by a friend revived memories which I had believed buried for ever. This book, dating from the previous year, was titled The First Men in the Moon. Authored by a certain H. G. Wells and, to my taste, very pessimistic, it recounted the journey of two men in a vehicle impervious to the pull of gravity, then their encounter with Selenites living in the interior of the Moon. The coincidences vis-à-vis the anatomy of the Selenites and their society are so numerous that in spite of the opinion of Jules Verne, who classed Wells as a purely imaginative writer (as if he knew!), I wondered whether this Englishman, born a year after our journey, had not himself carried out a voyage comparable to ours, perhaps by other means.

  Reading his book convinced me, after long deliberation, to set down the true story of Barbicane’s Voyage . . . and thereby liberate my conscience.

  Now my hand feels lighter, and I can end my days on this Earth in peace.

  Captain S. Nicholl,

  Philadelphia,

  26 December, 1902.

  Translated from the French by Finn Sinclair

  COLUMBIAD

  Stephen Baxter

  The initial detonation was the most severe. I was pushed into my couch by a recoil that felt as if it should splay apart my ribs. The noise was extraordinary, and the projectile rattled so vigorously that my head was thrown from side to side.

  And then followed, in perfect sequence, the subsidiary detonations of those smaller masses of gun-cotton lodged in the walls of the cannon. One after another these barrel-sized charges played vapour against the base of the projectile, accelerating it further, and the recoil pressed with ever increasing force.

  I fear that my consciousness departed from me, for some unmeasured interval.

  When I came to myself, the noise and oscillation had gone. My head swam, as if I had imbibed heavily of Ardan’s wine butts, and my lungs ached as they pulled at the air.

  But, when I pushed at the couch under me, I drifted slowly upwards, as if I were buoyant in some fluid which had flooded the projectile.

  I was exultant. Once again my Columbiad had not failed me!

  My name is Impey Barbicane, and what follows – if there are ears to hear – is an account of my second venture beyond the limits of the terrestrial atmosphere: that is, the first voyage to Mars.

  My Lunar romance received favourable reviews on its London publication by G. Newnes, and I was pleased to place it with an American publisher and in the Colonies. Sales were depressed, however, due to unrest over the war with the Boers. And there was that little business of the protests by M. Verne at the “unscientific” nature of my device of gravitational opacity; but I was able to point to flaws in Verne’s work, and to the verification of certain aspects of my book by experts in astronomy, astronomical physics, and the like.

  All of this engaged my attention but little, however. With the birth of Gip, and the publication of my series of futurological predictions in The Fortnightly Review, I had matters of a more personal nature to attend to, as well as of greater global significance.

  I was done with inter-planetary travel!

  It was with surprise and some annoyance, therefore, that I found myself the recipient, via Newnes, of a series of missives from Paris, penned – in an undisciplined hand – by one Michel Ardan. This evident eccentric expressed admiration for my work and begged me to place close attention to the material he enclosed, which I should find “of the most extraordinary interest and confluence with [my] own writings”.

  As is my custom, I had little hesitation in disposing of this correspondence without troubling to read it.

  But M. Ardan continued to pepper me with further fat volleys of paper.

  At last, in an idle hour, while Jane nursed Gip upstairs, I leafed through Ardan’s dense pages. And I have to confess that I found my imagination – or the juvenile underside of it! – pricked.

  Ardan’s enclosure purported to be a record made by a Colonel Maston, of Baltimore in the United States, over the years 1872 to 1873 – that is, some twenty-eight years ago. This Maston, now dead, claimed to have built an apparatus which had detected “propagating electro-magnetic emissions’: a phenomenon first described by James Clerk Maxwell, and related, apparently, to the more recent wireless-telegraphy demonstrations of Marconi. If this were not enough, Maston also claimed that the “emissions” were in fact signals, encoded after the fashion of a telegraph message.

  And these signals – said Maston and Ardan – had emanated from a source beyond the terrestrial atmosphere: from a space voyager, en route to Mars!

  When I got the gist of this, I laughed out loud. I dashed off a quick note instructing Newnes not to pass on to me any
further communications from the same source.

  Fifth Day. Two Hundred and Ninety Seven Thousand Leagues.

  Through my lenticular glass scuttles, the Earth now appears about the size of a Full Moon. Only the right half of the terrestrial globe is illuminated by the Sun. I can still discern clouds, and the differentiation of ocean blue from the land’s brown, and the glare of ice at the poles.

  Some distance from the Earth a luminous disklet is visible, aping the Earth’s waxing phase. It is the Moon, following the Earth on its path around the Sun. It is to my regret that the configuration of my orbit was such that I passed no closer to the satellite than several hundred thousand leagues.

  The projectile is extraordinarily convenient. I have only to turn a tap and I am furnished with fire and light by means of gas, which is stored in a reservoir at a pressure of several atmospheres. My food is meat and vegetables and fruit, hydraulically compressed to the smallest dimensions; and I have carried a quantity of brandy and water. My atmosphere is maintained by means of chlorate of potassium and caustic potash: the former, when heated, is transformed into chloride of potassium, and the oxygen thus liberated replaces that which I have consumed; and the potash, when shaken, extracts from the air the carbonic acid placed there by the combustion of elements of my blood.

  Thus, in inter-planetary space, I am as comfortable as if I were in the smoking lounge of the Gun Club itself, in Union Square, Baltimore!

  Michel Ardan was perhaps seventy-five. He was of large build, but stoop-shouldered. He sported luxuriant side-whiskers and moustache; his shock of untamed hair, once evidently red, was largely a mass of grey. His eyes were startling: habitually he held them wide open, so that a rim of white appeared above each iris, and his gaze was clear but vague, as if he suffered from near-sight.

  He paced about my living room, his open collar flapping. Even at his advanced age Ardan was a vigorous, restless man, and my home, Spade House – spacious though it is – seemed to confine him like a cage. I feared besides that his booming Gallic voice must awaken Gip. Therefore I invited Ardan to walk with me in the garden; in the open air I fancied he might not seem quite so out of scale.

  The house, built on the Kent coast near Sandgate, is open to a vista of the sea. The day was brisk, lightly overcast. Ardan showed interest in none of this, however.

  He fixed me with those wild eyes. “You have not replied to my letters.”

  “I had them stopped.”

  “I have been forced to travel here unannounced. Sir, I have come here to beg your help.”

  I already regretted allowing him into my home – of course I did! – but some combination of his earnestness, and the intriguing content of those unsolicited missives, had temporarily overwhelmed me. Now, though, I stood square on my lawn, and held up the newest copy of his letter.

  “Then perhaps, M. Ardan, you might explain what you mean by transmitting such romantic nonsense in my direction.”

  He barked laughter. “Romantic it may be. Nonsense – never!”

  “Then you claim this business of ‘propagating emissions’ is the plain and honest truth, do you?”

  “Of course. It is a system of communication devised for their purposes by Impey Barbicane and Col. Maston. They seized on the electro-magnetic discoveries of James Maxwell with the vigour and inventiveness typical of Americans – for America is indeed the Land of the Future, is it not?”

  Of that, I was not so certain.

  “Col. Maston had built a breed of mirror – but of wires, do you see? – in the shape of that geometric figure called a hyperbola – no, forgive me! – a parabola, for this figure, I am assured, collects all impinging waves into a single point, thus making it possible to detect the weakest –”

  “Enough.” I was scarcely qualified to judge the technical possibilities of such a hypothetical apparatus. And besides, the inclusion of apparently authentic detail is a technique I have used in my own romances, to persuade the reader to accept the most outrageous fictive lies. I had no intention of being deceived by it myself!

  “These missives of yours – received by Maston – purport to be from the inhabitant of a projectile, beyond the terrestrial atmosphere. And this projectile, you claim, was launched into space from the mouth of an immense cannon, the Columbiad, embedded in a Florida hill-side . . .”

  “That is so.”

  “But, my poor M. Ardan, you must understand that these are no more than the elements of a fiction, written three decades ago by M. Verne – your countryman – with whom I, myself, have corresponded –”

  Choleric red bloomed in his battered cheeks. “Verne indeed now claims his lazy and sensational books were fiction. It is convenient for him to do so. But they were not! He was commissioned to write truthful accounts of our extraordinary voyage!”

  “Well, that’s as may be. But see here. In M. Verne’s account the projectile was launched towards the Moon. Not to Mars.” I shook my head. “There is a difference, you know.”

  “Sir, I pray you resist treating me as imbecilic. I am well aware of the difference. The projectile was sent towards the Moon on its first journey – in which I had the honour of participating . . .”

  The afternoon was extending, and I had work to do; and I was growing irritated by this boorish Frenchman. “Then, if this projectile was truly built, perhaps you would be good enough to show it to me.”

  “I cannot comply.”

  “Why so?”

  “Because it is no longer on the Earth.”

  “Ah.”

  Of course not! It was buried in the red dust of Mars, with this Barbicane inside.

  “But –”

  “Yes, M. Ardan?”

  “I can show you the cannon.”

  The Frenchman regarded me steadily, and I felt an odd chill grow deep within me.

  Seventy-Third Day. Four Million One Hundred And Eighty Four Thousand Leagues.

  Today, through my smoked glass, I have observed the passage of the Earth across the face of the Sun.

  The planet appeared first as a mar in the perfect rim of the parent star. Later it moved into the full glare of the fiery ball, and was quite visible as a whole disc, dwarfed by the Sun’s mighty countenance. After perhaps an hour another spot appeared, even smaller than the first: it was the Moon, following its parent towards the Sun’s centre.

  After perhaps eight hours the passage was done.

  I took several astronomical readings of this event. I measured the angles under which Earth and Moon travelled across the Sun’s disk, so that I might determine the deviation of my voyaging ellipse from the ecliptic;and the timing of the passage has furnished me with precise information on whether the projectile is running ahead or behind of the elliptical path around the Sun which I had designed. My best computations inform me that I have not deviated from the required trajectory.

  It is more a little than a century since Captain James Cook, in 1769, sailed his Endeavour to Tahiti to watch Venus pass before the Sun. Could even that great explorer have imagined this journey of mine?

  I have become the first human being to witness a transit of Earth! – and who, I wonder, will be the second?

  It took two days for us to travel by despatch-boat from New Orleans to the bay of Espiritu Santo, close to Tampa Town.

  Ardan had the good sense to avoid my company during this brief, uncomfortable trip. My humour was not good. Since leaving England I had steadily cursed myself, and Ardan, for my foolishness in agreeing to this jaunt to Florida.

  We could not ignore each other at dinner and breakfast, however. And at those occasions, we argued.

  “But,” I insisted, “a human occupant would be reduced to a thin film of smashed bone and flesh, crushed by recoil against the base of any such cannon-fired shell. No amount of water cushions and collapsing balsa partitions would be sufficient to avert such a fate.”

  “Of course that is true,” Ardan said, unperturbed. “But then M. Verne did not depict the detail of the arrangement.”
/>
  “Which was?”

  “That Barbicane and his companions in the Gun Club anticipated precisely this problem. The Columbiad, that mighty cannon, was dug still deeper than Verne described. And it did not contain one single vast charge of gun-cotton, but many, positioned along its heroic length. Thus a distributed impulse was applied to the projectile. It is an elementary matter of algebra – for those with the right disposition, which I have not! – to compute that the forces suffered by travellers within the projectile, while punishing, were less than lethal.”

  “Bah! What, then, of Verne’s description of conditions within the projectile, during its Lunar journey? He claims that the inhabitants suffered a sensation of levitation – but only at that point at which the gravitational pulls of Earth and Moon are balanced. Now, this is nonsense. When you create a vacuum in a tube, the objects you send through it – whether grains of dust or grains of lead – fall with the same rapidity. So with the contents of your projectile. You, sir, should have floated like a pea inside a tin can throughout your voyage!”

  He shrugged. “And so I did. It was an amusing piece of natural philosophy, but not always a comfortable sensation. For the second journey we anticipated by installing a couch equipped with straps, and hooks and eyes on the tools and implements, and additional cramp-irons fixed to the walls. As to M. Verne’s inaccurate depiction of this sensation – I refer you to the author! Perhaps he did not understand. Or perhaps he chose to dramatize our condition in a way which suited the purposes of his narrative . . .”

  “Oh!” I said. “This debating is all by the by. M. Ardan, it is simply impossible to launch a shell to another world from a cannon!”

  “It is perfectly possible.” He eyed me. “As you know! – for have you not published your own account of how such shells might be fired, if not from Earth to Mars, then in the opposite direction?”

  “But it was fiction!” I cried. “As were Verne’s books!”