But Scherrebek remained anxious.
“Let’s make sure now that the Selenit hasn’t suffered any damage. If the hull is beached, we’ll need to repair it immediately.
They set out to examine every inch of the interior wall of the Selenit. It was intact. But the exterior hull might have been cracked, which would have put the crew in serious danger.
The manometers, however, indicated no diminution in the pressure of the air contained within the vessel. As the output of the oxygen tubes had not been affected either, they could deduce that there had not been any loss.
“I’ll go out with Goffoël and Brifaut to examine the hull and reconnoiter our situation,” said Scherrebek. “In the meantime, Uberaba and Lang will mount guard here. The rest can install themselves as best they can to try to sleep. We’re all going to have to make great efforts; we mustn’t get overly fatigued unnecessarily.”
VIII. On Lunar Soil
They took the mattresses from the couchettes in order to lay them out on the lateral wall that would serve as a floor until further notice, and the members of the crew had not been designated to keep watch with Scherrebek lay down fully dressed. They were mostly very tired, for they had only slept poorly since the departure from Earth.
Scherrebek and his companions went into the suit-room, where, with the aid of Lang and Uberaba, they each enclosed themselves in an apparatus. The abnormal position of the Selenit made it awkward for them to get the suits and put them on, but they succeeded without too much difficulty, their movements being facilitated by the lack of weight. With his gigantic stature, Goffoël, who weighed a hundred kilos on Earth, weighed no more than seventeen on the Moon; he lifted up his suit like a feather, its weight having diminished from two hundred kilos to thirty-four.
“Aren’t you afraid of being affected by the cold?” Dr. Lang asked. “If, as is generally believed, the surface of our satellite reaches two hundred and seventy degrees below zero during the long lunar nights, you’re risking being frozen as soon as you step outside.”
“The double envelope of the suit constitutes a perfect thermic insulation,” Brifaut observed.
“Yes,” said Scherrebek, “and the temperature of a body in a vacuum can only be lowered by radiation; because we won’t be radiating heat, thanks to our insulating carapace, we won’t cool down. At any rate, the loss of heat will be very slow, and we’ll have all the time we need to examine the hull of the Selenit.”
It only remained to screw on the enormous helmets of the suits, provided with portholes. As the explorers were only illuminated by the Earth’s light, Scherrebek removed the screens of leaded glass garnishing the portholes, intended for excursions in sunlight.
The three suited men carried cables by means of which they could attach themselves to one another if necessary. They were able to establish electrical connections between them with flexible wires and plugs, which fitted into sockets mounted on the side of the helmet. That would permit them to talk to one another, a telephone powered by dry batteries being within reach inside the apparatus. They each had an electric lamp at the belt, protected by a metal tube and a network of iron wire, attached to a supple wire.
They equipped themselves with a few tools: picks, levers and irons bars, which would have been too heavy on Earth to be manageable, but whose weight on the surface of the Moon was barely sufficient to make them useful implements.
It was now necessary to accomplish the exit maneuver, passing through the release chamber. The explorers would be obliged to indulge in veritable acrobatics, the chamber being horizontal and the exterior hatch being located at the top like a trap-door.
“It’s still lucky,” Brifaut observed, “that the Selenit fell on its left side. If it were lying on its right side, the exit hatch would be applied to the ground and we’d have been imprisoned irredeemably.”
“Perhaps not irredeemably,” said Scherrebek. “Energetic men always end up triumphing over ill fortune.”
That was, for the time being, the final word. Uberaba placed his helmet on his shoulders and sealed it hermetically.
The apparatus had an abundant supply of oxygen.
The exit maneuver was executed perfectly. Scherrebek, Goffoël and Brifaut met up again on the hull of the Selenit.
Standing side by side in the earthlight, in their rigid and monstrous carapaces, they offered a fantastic sight. An astronomer who had not been alerted to the presence of the explorers and who had been able to perceive them at that moment with the aid of a giant telescope would have taken them for inhabitants of the Moon; he would have proclaimed that our satellite is populated by strange creatures with bodies armored like those of crustaceans or coleoptera.
The gauntlets that terminated the sleeves of the suits, into which the explorers had to slide their hands, had been the object of particular care, for it was necessary both to retain a certain flexibility and to render them sufficiently insulated to avoid frostbite in the fingers. It would have been possible to replace them with pincers maneuverable from inside the sleeves, but it had been deemed that that mechanism would limit the action of the suit-wearers too severely. The gauntlets had been all the more difficult to design because, in order to render them capable of resisting the internal pressure of the suit, it had been necessary to fit them with a metallic framework made of steel plates and wires. In those conditions, their usage was rather awkward, and the suit-wearers inevitably became a little clumsy.
The explorers had before them a mountainous massif in which a profound gorge opened directly facing the Selenit, between irregular, sinuous and chaotic cliffs. Rocks, which appeared to be white in the earthlight and whose shadows, by contrast, were impenetrably black, rose up behind one another like the steps of a gigantic stairway.
An accumulation of summits barred the horizon, their white points cutting into the black sky. The mountains seemed to be leaning backwards; as they extended further into the distance, one might have thought that their last peaks were about to collapse behind the horizon. That was an effect of the curvature of the lunar surface.
To their left—which is to say, toward the north-east—the explorers discovered another gorge, of which the flat, inclined bottom resembled the dry bed of a broad torrent, which might perhaps have been a flow of lava.
The three men linked themselves together by their telephonic wires in order to be able to exchange their reflections.
“It’s obviously down there that we rolled,” said Brifaut, indicating the slope.
“Yes,” said Scherrebek. “It’s a miracle that we weren’t shattered.”
Behind them, toward the east and the south, the explorers had nothing but the plain, which remained somber in spite of the earthlight, but was nevertheless sufficiently distinct for them to see the line of the horizon distinctly, rigorously circular in that direction. The brevity of the line of sight, which only extended for two and a half kilometers—a brevity to which the three men were not yet accustomed—procured them the strange sensation of being suspended in the void over a narrow platform.
In that direction, they could not perceive any trace of mountains. In spite of their proximity, the Tenerife Mountains, which are of relatively low altitude, were below the horizon.
The sky was splendid. Not only was the Earth, considerably indented in the east, shining with a magnificent blue-tinted glare, but the constellations had a purity and vivacity that the inhabitants of our globe do not know. The light of the stars was not attenuated by the thick atmosphere; it no longer had the scintillation that is due to the movement and variations in density of the layers of air at different altitudes. The Milky Way was almost dazzling. Their light being brighter, far more stars were distinguishable than can be seen with the naked eye from the surface of the Earth, and all the celestial gleams had a blue tint, to which the gaze gradually became accustomed, thus becoming less sensible.
The breadth of the Selenit, with its triple hull, being ten meters, it was at that height that the three men found thems
elves suspended above the ground.
“How are we going to get down?” asked Brifaut.
“We only have to jump,” said Goffoël.
Without waiting for a reply, he detached the telephonic wires linking him to his companions, and launched himself into space.
Although aware of the effects of the diminution of weight on the Moon, Scherrebek and Brifaut were astonished to see their comrade take more than four seconds to reach the lunar soil, when it would have required less than two on Earth. Goffoël was reminiscent of one of those large man-shaped balloons with which one plays during country fairs.
And to prove that everything becomes singularly easy on the surface of the Moon, Goffoël suddenly rose up like a sylph, and landed beside his companions on the Selenit, with a single bound.
After that exploit, which demonstrated the power that muscles habituated to rude exercise gave to Terrans transported to the Moon, the three men leapt to the ground and set about inspecting the hull of the Selenit minutely.
It was only after two hours that they acquired the conviction that their interplanetary vehicle had not suffered any injury. The solidity of its construction and the weakness of the lunar gravity had protected it. Even the system of caterpillar tracks and struts was undamaged.
But one serious problem was posed. In its present position, the Selenit was immobilized. It could not move over the lunar surface, nor, more importantly, could it reset itself to lift off and return to the Earth. It was therefore indispensable to reposition it, but at first glance, that task seemed beyond the strength of ten men, even if the muscle-power were sextupled. Although deballasted of a considerable load of explosives, and relieved of five-sixths of its weight, the Selenit still weighed about five hundred tons.
How could they move such a mass and set it upright? The large tubes of the reaction engine, which would have been able to furnish the necessary energy, was not orientated in the right direction, and the small ones, which served for steering, were too weak.
Having concluded their inspection, the three men leapt on to the Selenit and went back into the release chamber in order to return to their lodgings.
As Lang and Uberaba came forward in order to rid him of him suit, Scherrebek recoiled, gesticulating, to make them understand that they ought not to touch him. Indeed, the metallic carapace was covered with frost by the condensation of the water vapor contained in the Selenit’s atmosphere. The surface of the apparatus had been intensely chilled by the three explorers’ sojourn outside. If it had been touched at that moment with a bare hand, it would have been cruelly burned. The suit-wearers had to help one another to unscrew their helmets with their gloved hands, which was not without difficulty at first, because of the thick layer of ice that had formed on their glazed viewports and prevented them from seeing.
Everyone had got up on hearing the little crew come back in, avid to know the news, on which their lives depended.
“No damage,” Scherrebek announced. “Nevertheless, we’re in a bad situation, and I can’t see, at the moment, a means of improving it—but I confess that I’m very tired. If you wish, we’ll have a small snack, after which we can sleep for a few hours.”
IX. Plato
“Get up! Get up! It’s time!”
Madeleine’s voice resonated in the Selenit. The young woman, having woken up before anyone else, had got up without saying anything and had brought a pot of coffee, which she had found a means of heating up in the food-store, by setting up an electric stove.
The men sat up on the mattresses at the appeal of the gracious cup-bearer.
“Hip, hip, hurrah for Madame Brifaut!” exclaimed Garrick, with whom the other crew members joined in chorus.
In spite of their critical situation, the passengers of the Selenit had not lost their good humor.
Madeleine distributed buttered toast and everyone ate with a hearty appetite, while holding council.
Brifaut was the first to propose a practical solution.
“I can only see one means of turning the Selenit over,” he said, “And that’s to hollow out the ground on one side to lower the system of wheels until it finds a point of support.”
“You can’t think so!” exclaimed Bojardo. “A trench a hundred meters long and seven or eight broad would be a Herculean labor.”
“I believe however,” said Scherrebek, “that our comrade Brifaut is right. Let’s not forget that we are, indeed, Hercules on the surface of the Moon. The effort required would be scarcely greater than that required to dig a trench fifteen meters long and three or four wide and deep on Earth. It’s not a task beyond the strength of ten vigorous men. We’ll share it, in two groups of five, who’ll relieve one another every two hours.
A first crew was designated, and set to work immediately.
Nothing was stranger than the spectacle of the five suited men busy around the Selenit in the blue-tinted earthlight. In that motionless landscape, alongside the chaos of the mountains, the metal monsters struck the ground with forceful blows of their enormous picks, and tore away blocks that would have weighed a hundred kilos on Earth. They moved them out of the way as if they were masses of cork. When they hurled them into the distance the stones described an elongated curve and fell back solely and gently. And all of that was as silent as a cinematic vision, except that, sometimes, a slight vibration transmitted by the ground and the metallic envelopes of the suit reminded the workers that sound was not absolutely banished from the lunar surface. If there was an atmosphere—which the explorers, having other more urgent preoccupations, had not yet taken the trouble to ascertain—its pressure was too feeble to transmit sounds.
As Scherrebek had foreseen, the work progressed very rapidly. At the fourth change of shift—which is to say, after eight hours—the Selenit was only maintained in unstable equilibrium in its initial position; a relatively feeble effort would be sufficient to oblige it to turn over and bring it to rest on its wheels.
They decided to leave Madeleine alone inside the Selenit. The ten men combined their efforts to make the heavy machine swing into the trench they had hollowed out. The young woman had learned to carry out the maneuvers indispensable for the reentry of the suit-wearers. She did not even experience a painful impression when she found herself alone in the entrails of the vessel, all the more so given that it was impossible for her to look outside through the periscopes because she had to be on her guard against falling when the machine toppled over.
The ten men had placed themselves on the side opposite the trench. They braced themselves against the side of the Selenit and shoved together with a simultaneous movement. The apparatus began to rotate slowly, and descended into the ditch as if into a bed of cotton wool. The maneuver had been carried out without the slightest hitch.
If the explorers had been on Earth they would have saluted their success with three cheers, but in the empire of lunar silence they could only mark their triumph by gesticulating with the sleeves of their suits.
The Selenit was inspected again. They made sure that it could climb the slope of the ditch without difficulty, and Scherrebek gave the order, by means of signs, to return aboard.
Now that the Selenit was in the normal position, they hastened to make arrangements to enjoy all the comforts that the constructors had been ingenious in creating. In fact that vehicle of a new genre was at least as habitable as a submarine, and the care that had been taken to ensure the perfect regeneration of the air meant that they could breathe there without any difficulty.
The diminishing crescent of the Earth announced that the Sun would not take long to rise over the region into which the explorers had fallen. Consulting their astronomical ephemeris, Scherrebek and his companions ascertained that they had no more than twenty-four hours to wait to see the first rays of sunlight skimming the soil of the Sea of Rains south of Plato.
The experiment that the explorers had carried out during their first sortie in the suits had convinced them that the apparatus was adequately well-con
structed to permit those occupying them to resist the action of cold almost indefinitely. The physiological heat disengaged by respiration and the oxidation of the tissues compensated amply for the loss by radiation into the void. It was therefore sufficient to be well-provided with reserves of oxygen and food to be able to undertake a long excursion.
The maps and photographs of the moon showed the exact position of breaches that existed to the south in the enclosure of Plato, the huge crater on the flank of which the Selenit had landed. Those breaches ought to resemble the rugged gorge of fantastic appearance that the explorers could see through the portholes, but the latter doubtless did not penetrate all the way to the center of the crater and it would not be prudent to venture into it.
Dr. Lang proposed the organization of an expedition in order to penetrate into Plato and study the interior plain, which is one of the enigmas of selenography.
“What’s so extraordinary about it, then?” asked Madeleine.
“That the bottom of the crater becomes darker the more brightly it’s illuminated. It will be interesting to discover whether it’s covered with vegetation, as the abnormal phenomenon incites one to think.”
“Personally,” said Galston, who was a first-rate mountaineer, “I’d rather climb the 2,470-meter peak that dominates the east of Plato’s rim, on the side of which one remarks, in photographs, the traces of a gigantic landslide. From that height, we’d see the sun rise over the other side of the crater and the Sea of Rains. It’s a spectacle that we ought not to miss. Perhaps we could even see the summits of the Alps, whose long chain extends south-west of Plato.”
“I doubt that,” Kito observed.
For a few moments, the Japanese had been rapidly tracing figures on a piece of paper.
“Calculation shows,” he said, “that from the top of a 2,470-meter peak, we wouldn’t even be able to see the entire width of the crater. That’s ninety-six kilometers, and our view would be limited by the horizon to ninety-three kilometers, so we wouldn’t even be able to see the foot of the other edge of the rim. Only the summits would be visible, and in any case, they’d hide the massif of the Alps from us even if—and I’m not certain about that—their altitude is sufficient to allow them to appear over the horizon. Note that the bottom of the crater is below the level of the Sea of Rains, and that the altitude of 2,470 meters has been measured in relation to that. It follows that, on the side of the exterior plain, the horizon would be even closer.
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