The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Stories

by Mike Ashley

  In the end the torch slipped from my grasp and fate visited me again. It hit the floor, snapped on and bathed me with its strange light.

  I saw through my tears.

  Over the next few days I fell in love with Marlene all over again.

  I eventually persuaded her to meet me at Cicero’s and we sat there for hours, talking about everything except what had happened. I was never sure whether she truly believed that I had seen something, and I did my best to keep the haunting truth from my eyes. I think I succeeded. In all that time, I never saw the shadow of fear cross her face.

  We met again a day later, and three time the following week, and the week after that we sat outside at a pavement table. This was a huge step for us, eschewing the neutrality of the café’s interior, and it turned the meeting into a date. As I rose to leave Marlene stood up, closed in and kissed me on the lips. It did not surprise either of us, yet my heart paused for long seconds.

  I walked away smiling and stepped carelessly into the street, knowing that no car would knock me down. That was not my way.

  We take it one day at a time. The image of Marlene’s death haunts me still, but there is an unspoken agreement that it will never be mentioned again. Mystery cannot come between us, as it did before. Love holds so much more power over me.

  Especially knowing what I know.

  Having seen my own old, weathered face wither and bubble in flames, at least I know that we will be together until the end.

  THE SELENE GARDENING SOCIETY

  Molly Brown

  Gradually writing himself out of his depression, Verne produced another sequel. Sans dessus dessous (1890), translated as Topsy-Turvy but better known as The Purchase of the North Pole, brings back the members of the Baltimore Gun Club, twenty years after their moon venture. The Gun Club acquire the land at the North Pole where they believe are vast mineral deposits. In order to get at them they need to melt the ice cap and decide the best way to do this is to shift the axis of the Earth. Despite the cataclysmic consequences the Gun Club continue in their project only to fail because of a mathematical error in their calculations. While it appears to be another preposterous novel, it is in fact, like Hector Servadac and Robur the Conqueror, another parable about the potential irresponsibility of man in trying to act like God.

  Although Verne did not write again about the fellows of the Gun Club there is no doubt that these individuals would stop at nothing. We have already learned of their further adventures in space in two earlier stories. In the next two we learn of their later escapades.

  Chapter One

  J. T. Maston takes up gardening

  An open-topped carriage turned up the long drive to one of the grandest houses in New Park, Baltimore. The mansion’s doors flew open, a stream of servants filing out into the afternoon sun to greet their mistress, the former Mrs Evangelina Scorbitt.

  Evangelina patted the large box on the seat beside her. It contained her latest purchase: a wide-brimmed hat garnished with a cluster of tall feathers. Despite having invested – and lost – nearly half of the late Mr Scorbitt’s fortune in the Baltimore Gun Club’s failed scheme to melt the polar ice cap, she was still one of the wealthiest women in Maryland, well able to afford the occasional new hat. And this hat was something special.

  At the age of forty-seven, Evangelina was painfully aware that, even as a girl, she had never been a beauty. But the moment she’d tried on that hat, she’d felt transformed. The milliner insisted she looked ten years younger, and for the first time in her life, this overweight middle-aged woman with hair the colour of dirty straw had actually liked what she saw in the mirror. It was the most wonderful hat in the world, and she couldn’t wait for her new husband to see her in it.

  Her driver was slowing the horses to a walk when the ground beneath them was rocked by an explosion. Evangelina was thrown back in her seat as the horses reared up, then bolted across the lawn.

  She calmly grabbed hold of the side of the carriage as it careered across the grass, pursued by a gaggle of uniformed servants. And every dog in the neighbourhood was barking. “You’d think they’d be used to it by now,” she sighed.

  She was sitting in front of her dressing table when the house was shaken by another explosion. The maid standing behind her jumped, nearly skewering her with a hat pin. “Sorry, Ma’am.”

  Evangelina shook her head. The staff were as skittish as the horses. And the neighbourhood dogs were at it again. She told her maid to close the window.

  Melting the North Pole had seemed a good idea at the time. There must be limitless supplies of coal in the Arctic – once you got past all that ice. So a plan was devised to straighten the Earth’s axis by firing a gigantic cannon set into the side of Mount Kilimanjaro, the idea being that the recoil from the shot would nudge the planet into the desired position.

  Despite the cannon’s failure to affect the Earth’s orbit – due to a slight mathematical error involving the accidental erasure of three zeros – and the loss of all that money, Evangelina continually reminded herself that everything had worked out for the best in the end. Everyone now agreed that melting the polar ice would have drowned half the civilized world, including Baltimore. And so the mistake in calculations became a cause for celebration, and the man who had made it became a hero. And that hero was none other than Mr Jefferson Thomas Maston, generally known as J. T.

  J. T. Maston was nearly sixty, with an iron hook at the end of one arm (the result of an accident with a mortar during the Civil War), but he was a great man: not only a renowned mathematician, but an inventor (he’d designed the mortar that removed his hand himself). It was not long after their first meeting that Evangelina had decided she wanted nothing more than to be this great man’s wife, and it was now a little over three months since Evangelina had got her wish, and had become Mrs J. T. Maston.

  She should have been deliriously happy, if not for one thing: J. T. Maston had taken up gardening.

  She found her husband bending over a howitzer in a far corner of the grounds. “I thought that would be a good spot for the azaleas,” he said, pointing at a patch of cleared soil between the fountain and the grotto.

  She positioned herself directly in her husband’s line of sight. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  She did a little twirl, raising a hand to indicate her hat. “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  She stopped twirling. “Never mind.”

  Her husband shrugged and turned his attention back to the cannon. “Stand back.”

  Evangelina covered her ears as the gun went off, discharging a cloud of seeds.

  Chapter Two

  In which a solution is suggested

  “I wouldn’t even mention it,” Evangelina said, “but the neighbours are complaining, the staff are threatening to leave, and now he’s dug up all my rose bushes and is talking about turning the ornamental pond into an onion patch.”

  The monthly gathering of the New Park Ladies’ Gardening Society burbled their sympathy. They were meant to be discussing their annual “Best Delphiniums” award, but the conversation had drifted off-topic.

  It was a warm day, and the various scents of lavender, musk, rose, and vanilla emanating from the ladies around her seemed to be fighting a losing battle against the reek of garbage wafting in through the windows of the Methodist meeting hall.

  “And he didn’t even notice my new hat,” she added, fanning herself. This was greeted with such an eruption of clucking and tsk’ing that Fiona Wicke was forced to bring down her gavel.

  Once the most beautiful woman in Baltimore, these days the thrice-widowed chair of the gardening society contented herself with being the most fashionable. She leaned back in her seat – at least as far back as the stiff horsehair-padded bustle beneath her dress would allow – and formed a temple with her lace-gloved fingers. “I take it Mr Maston and Mr Barbicane are still not speaking?”

  It seemed everyone in Baltimore knew about the
rift between J. T. Maston and the president of the Gun Club. It all went back to those three silly little zeros. The one thing Mr Impey Barbicane refused to forgive was an error in calculations – even an error that had saved the world – with the end result that Mr Maston had not only resigned his position as club secretary, but had completely forsworn mathematics. And taken up gardening instead.

  “Therein lies the source of your problem,” Fiona said, “and also the solution. Find a way to reconcile those two men, and you shall have your garden back.”

  “But how?”

  “You might distract the men from their quarrel by providing them with a new goal on which to focus their attention.”

  “As you might distract a vicious dog by throwing it a piece of meat,” the society’s first vice-chair (and one of its youngest members), the forty-three-year-old Hermione Larkin, added.

  Fiona raised an eyebrow at her vice-chair before turning back to address Evangelina. “Give them a new project to work on and all past differences will quickly be forgotten.”

  “As your garden will also be forgotten . . . by your husband, I mean,” added Hermione.

  “A project?” Evangelina said. “What kind of project?”

  Prunella Benton rose to her feet. “Wasn’t your husband involved in that expedition to the moon some years back?”

  “That’s it!” a voice at the back of the room exclaimed. “That’s your project, a return to the moon!”

  Chapter Three

  A delegation

  “There is no point in returning to the moon,” Mr Impey Barbicane stated categorically, the beads of sweat on his upper lip betraying his discomfort at being confronted by a delegation of middle-aged women. “The moon is uninhabitable.”

  “Baltimore was uninhabitable a hundred years ago,” Prunella Benton said, dismissing Barbicane’s argument with a wave of her hand. “No society to speak of, at any rate.”

  “My house was uninhabitable until I replaced those awful curtains,” Hermione Larkin added, rolling her eyes.

  Barbicane, exasperated, turned to his compatriot, Captain Nicholl. Though it was only a few months since Evangelina had last seen them, both men looked older than she remembered. The face below Barbicane’s trademark stovepipe hat seemed thinner and more haggard, while Captain Nicholl seemed pale and tired.

  Even the room seemed different from how she remembered it. The formerly gleaming clusters of muskets, blunderbusses, and carbines that adorned the walls now seemed dingy and uncared-for, the glass display cases of ammunition were covered in a layer of dust, and the exuberant atmosphere she recalled from her previous visits had been replaced by an air of gloom.

  It felt as if everything in the place had somehow become smaller. Even the men seemed smaller.

  “It’s not the same thing at all,” Captain Nicholl stepped in. “There is no air or water on the moon.”

  “And there are no sandwiches in a forest,” Hermione responded. “If you wish to have a picnic in the woods, you bring the sandwiches with you!”

  “Sandwiches?” said Barbicane.

  “What Mrs Larkin means is: if a place is not inhabitable, you find a way to make it so,” Evangelina explained.

  “May I remind you,” said Captain Nicholl,“Mr Barbicane and I have actually orbited the moon, and in our close observations of its surface, we saw no sign of life, and no sign of anything that might sustain life.”

  Fiona Wicke spoke up at this point. “If, as you say, there is no air on the moon, it is worth bearing in mind that vegetation produces oxygen.”

  “But there is no vegetation on the moon,” Mr Barbicane responded, a trace of irritation creeping into his voice.

  “And there was precious little vegetation in my garden until I planted it,” said Hermione.

  “Ladies,” said Captain Nicholl. “From what I have seen with my own eyes, I am forced to conclude that the lunar soil is incapable of supporting vegetation. You must believe me when I tell you that nothing can survive there. Nothing.”

  Hermione seemed about to speak again, but Fiona silenced her with a discreet shake of the head. “Just one last question,” Fiona said. “Why did you send a projectile to the moon in the first place?”

  “To prove it could be done,” said Barbicane.

  “They were laughing at us,” Fiona said as the women emerged into the sunlight. “Not aloud, but inwardly; you could see it in their faces. And they had every right to do so. We were not prepared, we had not thought it through.”

  A sudden gust of wind sent several sheets of discarded newspaper flapping about the square. Hermione grimaced in disgust as one of the dusty sheets plastered itself across the front of her carefully draped and bustled skirt. “When is someone going to do something about the garbage problem in this city?” she demanded, shaking her skirt free.

  Fiona watched the paper blow away down the street, her face creased in thought.

  Chapter Four

  Fiona thinks it through

  “Is Mrs Wicke at home?” Evangelina asked, handing the maid her card.

  Evangelina was left to wait in the front parlour while the maid went to see if her mistress was at home. She was admiring a cloisonne vase when she heard Fiona’s voice coming from behind her: “I’ve never really liked that vase, it was a gift from my first husband’s mother.”

  Evangelina’s first reaction on turning around was to ask Fiona if she was all right. Though it was half past two in the afternoon, her hair was down and she was still in her dressing gown.

  “Yes, yes, of course. I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Evangelina persisted, trying not to stare at Fiona’s state of undress.

  “Yes, yes! I’m glad you came, actually; I want to show you something.”

  She led Evangelina out into the garden. “What is that?” she asked, pointing at a mound of grass cuttings and kitchen scraps.

  “It’s a compost heap,” Evangelina said. “Are you quite sure you’re all right?”

  “Take a look at it,” Fiona insisted. “What does it consist of?”

  “Fiona, I don’t need to examine your compost heap to ascertain its contents. I know what’s in a compost heap, I have one myself.”

  “Potato peelings, eggshells, coffee grounds,” Fiona began, counting each item off on her fingers. “Apple cores, hedge trimmings –”

  “Fiona, what are you getting at?”

  “Garbage! It’s all garbage! And what is the biggest problem in Baltimore today? The garbage problem.”

  “So?”

  “So we send our garbage to the moon!”

  “But that’s what I came here to tell you about. Immediately after we left the gun club the other day, Mr Barbicane contacted my husband to tell him about our proposal – which they both found rather amusing – with the end result that Mr Maston has since been reinstated as club secretary and returned to the pursuit of mathematics, while I have this morning hired two men to repair the damage to my garden. So everything has turned out as planned and we can forget about the moon.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand,” Fiona insisted. “This isn’t about your husband’s rift with Barbicane. This is about making the moon a place where human beings can survive, and it can work! What was Barbicane and Nicholl’s main objection to the possibility of making the moon habitable? The lack of an atmosphere. But what I am proposing will create that atmosphere.”

  “How?”

  “Of what does our own atmosphere consist?” Fiona asked her.

  Evangelina shrugged. “Oxygen, I suppose.”

  “I think you’ll find some seventy-eight per cent of the air we breathe is nitrogen. And what gas does a compost heap produce in abundance?”

  “Nitrogen?”

  “Exactly! So . . . we send our garbage to the moon where it decays into compost, producing nitrogen to enrich the soil, thus enabling the growth of vegetation. The vegetation produces oxygen. Then we throw in some worms, insects, and small animals to pro
duce carbon dioxide, and voilà! We have an atmosphere.”

  Evangelina’s mouth dropped open. “Where do you get such ideas?”

  “Come upstairs and I will show you.”

  Evangelina followed her back into the house and up the stairs to a large study lined with overflowing bookcases.

  Fiona walked over to a desk piled high with open books and several stacks of handwritten notes. “My second husband, though he made his living in textile sales, had a great interest in science, especially chemistry. I’ve still got all his books, and have been conducting further research of my own at the public library.”

  Evangelina picked up one of the handwritten sheets and began reading its contents out loud: “Corncobs, cotton, paper, sawdust, wood chips, straw, hops, restaurant scraps, market scraps, hair, feathers, hooves, horns, peanut shells, seashells, seaweed . . . What is this?”

  “Just a partial list of things that can be composted, all of which are thrown out every day. When I was at the library yesterday, I found a survey predicting that over the next twenty-five years, the average American city will produce an average of eight hundred and sixty pounds of garbage per capita. With the current population of Baltimore standing at approximately five hundred thousand souls, that makes a total of . . .” She paused to riffle through her notes. “Ah, here we are: 430 million pounds of garbage. Keep in mind this figure is for Baltimore alone, and assumes no further growth in population, which strikes me as unlikely. Now, consider the population of New York, currently standing at over three and a quarter millions –”

  Evangelina didn’t need to hear any more figures to grasp what Fiona was telling her. “In just twenty-five years, we could turn the moon into a gigantic compost heap!”

  “And that is just the beginning,” Fiona said, concluding her address to an extraordinary meeting of the New Park Ladies’ Gardening Society, called at less than forty-eight hours notice. “Upon his return to Earth, the third passenger in Barbicane and Nicholl’s projectile, the Frenchman Michel Ardan . . .”