After perhaps eight hours the passage was done.
I took several astronomical readings of this event. I measured the angle under which the Earth and Moon traveled 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 a little more than a century since Captain James Cook, in 1769, sailed his Endeavor 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 dispatch-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 humor 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 travelers 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 crampirons 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 that 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!”
“No.” He shook his large, grizzled head. “M. Verne's account was fact. It is only a skeptical world that insists it must be fiction. And that, sir, is my tragedy.”
One hundred and thirty-fourth day. Seven million, four hundred and seventy-seven thousand leagues.
The air will be thin and bracing; it will be like a mountaintop on Earth. I must trust that the vegetable and animal life—whose treks and seasonal cycles have been observed, as color washes, from Earth—provide me with provision compatible with my digestion.
I have brought thermometers, barometers, aneroids, and hypsometers with which to study the characteristics of the Martian landscape and atmosphere. I have also carried several compasses, in case of any magnetic influence there. I have brought canvas, pickaxes and shovels, and nails, sacks of grain and shrubs and other seed stock: provisions with which to construct my miniature colony on the surface of Mars. For it is there that I must, of course, spend the rest of my life.
I dream that I may even encounter intelligence!— human, or some analogous form. The inhabitants of Mars will be tall, delicate, spidery creatures, their growth drawn upward by the lightness of their gravity. And their buildings likewise will be slender, beautiful structures…
With such speculation I console myself.
I will confess to a sense of isolation. With Earth invisible, and with Mars still no more than a brightening red star, I am suspended in a starry firmament—for my speed is not discernible—and I have only the dazzling globe of the Sun himself to interrupt the curve of Heaven above and below me. Has any man been so alone?
At times I close the covers of the scuttles, and strap myself to my couch, and expend a little of my precious gas; I seek to forget my situation by immersing myself in my books, those faithful companions I have carried with me.
But I find it impossible to forget my remoteness from all of humanity that ever lived, and that my projectile, a fragile aluminum tent, is my sole protection.
We stayed a night in the Franklin Hotel in Tampa Town. It was a dingy, uncomfortable place, its facilities exceedingly primitive.
At five A.M. Ardan roused me.
We traveled by phaeton. We worked along the coast for some distance—it was dry and parched—and then turned inland, where the soil became much richer, abounding with northern and tropical flora, including pineapples, cotton plants, rice, and yams. The road was well built, I thought, considering the crude and underpopulated nature of the countryside thereabouts.
I am not the physical type; I felt hot and uncomfortable, my suit of English wool restrictive and heavy, and my lungs seemed to labor at the humidity-laden air. By contrast Ardan was vibrant, evidently animated by our journey.
“When we returned to Earth—we fell back into the Pacific Ocean—our exuberance was unbounded. We imagined new and greater Columbiads. We imagined fleets of projectiles, threading between Earth, Moon, and planets. We expected adulation!”
“As depicted by M. Verne.”
“But Verne lied!—in that as in other matters. Oh, there was some celebrity—some little notoriety. But we had returned with nothing: not so much as a bag of Lunar soil; nothing save our descriptions of a dead and airless Moon.
“The building of the Columbiad was financed by public subscription. Not long after our return, the pressure from those investors began to be felt: Where is our profit?—that was the question.”
“It is not unreasonable.”
“Some influential leader-writers argued that perhaps we had not traveled to the Moon at all. Perhaps it was all a deception, devised by Barbicane and his companions.”
“It might be the truth,” I said severely. “After all, the Gun Club were weapons manufacturers who, after the conclusion of the War between the States, sought by devising this new project only to maintain investment and employment…”
“It was not the truth! We had circled the Moon! But we were baffled by such reactions. Oh, Barbicane refused to concede defeat. He tried to raise subscriptions for a new company that would build on his achievements. But the company soon floundered, and the commissioner and magistrate pursued him on behalf of enraged debtors.
“If only the Moon had not turned out to be dead! If only we could succeed in finding a world that might draw up the dreams of man once more!
“And so Barbicane determined to commit all to one throw of the die. He took the last of his money, and used it t
o bore out the columbiad, and to repair his projectile…”
My temper deteriorated; I had little interest in Ardan's rambling reminiscences.
But then Ardan digressed, and he began to describe how it was—or so he claimed—to fall toward the Moon. His voice became remote, his eyes oddly vacant.
Two hundred and forty-fifth day. Twelve million, one hundred and twenty-five leagues.
The projectile approaches the planet at an angle to the sunlight, so Mars is gibbous, with a slice of the night hemisphere turned toward me. The ochre shading seems to deepen at the planet's limb, giving the globe a marked roundness: Mars is a little orange, the only object apart from the Sun visible as other than a point of light in all my 360-degree sky.
To one side, at a distance a little greater than the diameter of the Martian disk, is a softly glowing starlet. If I trouble to observe for a few minutes, its relation to Mars changes visibly. Thus I have discerned that Mars has a companion: a moon, smaller than our own. And I suspect that a little farther from that central globe there may be a second satellite, but my observations are not unambiguous.
I can as yet discern few details on the disk itself, save what is known from observation through the larger telescopes on Earth. I can easily distinguish the white spot of the southern polar cap, however, which is melting in the frugal warmth of a Martian summer, following the pattern of seasons identified by William Herschel.
The air appears clear, and I can but trust that its thickness will prove sufficient to cushion my fall from space!
“I imagined I saw streams of oil descending across the glass of the scuttle.
“I thought perhaps the projectile had developed some fault, and I made to alert Barbicane. But then my eyes found their depth, and I realized I was looking at mountains. They slid slowly past the glass, trailing long, black shadows. They were the mountains of the Moon.
“Our approach was very rapid. The Moon was growing visibly larger by the minute.
“The satellite was no longer the flat, yellow disk I had known from Earth: Now, tinged pale white, its center seemed to loom out at us, given three-dimensional substance by Earthlight. The landscape was fractured and complex, and utterly still and silent. The Moon is a small world, my fiend. Its curve is so tight my eye could encompass its spherical shape, even so close; I could see that I was flying around a ball of rock, suspended in space, with emptiness stretching to infinity in all directions.
“We passed around the limb of the Moon, and entered total darkness: No sunlight, no earthlight touched the hidden landscape rushing below.”
I asked, “And of the Lunar egg shape which Hansen hypothesizes, the layer of atmosphere drawn to the far side by its greater mass…”
“We saw none of it! But…”
“Yes?”
“But…When the Sun was hidden behind the Lunar orb, there was light all around the Moon, as if the rim were on fire.” Ardan turned to me, and his rheumy eyes were shining. “It was wonderful! Oh, it was wonderful!”
We crossed extensive plains, broken only by isolated thickets of pine trees. At last we came upon a rocky plateau, baked hard by the Sun, and considerably elevated.
Two hundred and fifty-seventh day. One million, three hundred and thirty-five thousand leagues.
The nature of Mars has become clear to me. All too clear!
There is a sharp visible difference between northern and southern hemispheres. The darker lands to the south of an equatorial line of dichotomy are punctuated by craters as densely clustered as those of the Moon; while the northern plains—which perhaps are analogous to the dusty maria of the Moon—are generally smoother and, perhaps, younger.
A huge canyon system lies along the equator, a planetary wound visible even from a hundred thousand leagues. To the west of this gouge are clustered four immense volcanoes: Great black calderas, as dead as any on the Moon. And in the southern hemisphere I have espied a mighty crater, deep and choked with frost. Mars is clearly a small world: Some of these features sprawl around the globe, outsized, overwhelming the curvature.
I have seen no evidence of the channels, or canals, observed by Cardinal Secchi, nor of the other mighty works of Mind which many claim to have observed. Nor, indeed, have I espied evidence of life: No herds move across these rusty plains, and not even the presence of vegetation is evident to me. Such colorings as I have discerned appear to owe more to geologic features than to the processes of life. Even Syrtis Major—Huygens' ‘Hourglass Sea’—is revealed as a cratered upland, no more moist than the bleakest desert of Earth.
Thus I have been forced to confront the truth:
Mars is a dead world. As dead as the Moon!
We got out of our phaeton and embarked by foot across that high plain that Ardan called Stones Hill. I saw how several well-made roads converged on this desolate spot, free of traffic, enigmatic. There was even a rail track, rusting and long disused, snaking off in the direction of Tampa Town.
All over the plain I found the ruins of magazines, workshops, furnaces, and workmen's huts. Whether or not Ardan spoke the truth, it was evident that some great enterprise had taken place here.
At the heart of the plain was a low mound. This little hill was surrounded by a ring of low constructions of stone, regularly built, and set at a radius of perhaps six hundred yards from the summit itself. Each construction was topped by an elliptical arch, some of which remained intact.
I walked into this ring, two-thirds of a mile across, and looked around. “My word, Ardan!” I cried, impressed despite my skepticism. “This has the feel of some immense prehistoric site—a Stonehenge, perhaps, transported to the Americas. Why, there must be several hundred of these squat monoliths.”
“More than a thousand,” he said. “They are reverberating ovens, to fuse the many millions of tons of cast iron that plated the mighty Columbiad. See here.” He traced out a shallow trench in the soil. “Here are the channels by which the iron was directed into the central mold—from all twelve hundred ovens, simultaneously!”
At the summit of the hill—the convergence of the thousand trenches—there was a circular pit, perhaps sixty feet in diameter. Ardan and I approached this cavity cautiously. I found that it opened into a cylindrical shaft, dug vertically into that rocky landscape.
Ardan took a coin from his pocket and flicked it into the mouth of the great well. I heard it clatter several times against metal walls, but I could not hear it fall to rest.
Taking my courage in my hands—all my life I have suffered a certain dread of subterranean places—I stepped toward the lip of the well. I saw that its sides were sheer, evidently finely manufactured, and constructed of what appeared to be cast iron. But the iron was extensively flaked and rusted.
Looking around from this summit, I saw now a pattern to the damaged landscape: the ovens, the flimsier huts, were smashed and scattered outward from this central spot, as if some great explosion had once occurred. And I saw how disturbed soil streaked across the land, radially away from the hill; from a balloon, I speculated, these stripes of discoloration might have resembled the rays around the great craters of the moon.
This Ozymandian scene was terrifically poignant: great things had been wrought here, and yet now these immense devices lay ruined, broken—forgotten.
Ardan paced about by the lip of the abandoned cannon; he exuded an extraordinary restlessness, as if the whole of the Earth had become a cage insufficient for him. “It was magnificent!” he cried. “When the electrical spark ignited the gun-cotton, and the ground shook, and the pillar of flame hurled aside the air, throwing over the spectators and their horses like matchstalks!…And there was the barest glimpse of the projectile itself, ascending like a soul in that fiery light…”
I gazed up at the hot, blank sky, and imagined this Barbicane climbing into his cannon-shell, to the applause of his aging friends. He would have called it bravery, I suppose. But how easy it must have been, to sail away into the infinite aether—forever!—and to leav
e behind the Earthbound complexities of debtors and broken promises. Was Barbicane exploring, I wondered—or escaping?
As I plunge toward the glowing pool of Martian air—as that russet, cratered barrenness opens out beneath me—I descend into despair. Is all of the Solar System to prove as bleak as the worlds I have visited?
This must be my last transmission. I wish my final words to be an utterance of deepest gratitude to my loyal friends, notably Colonel J. T. Maston and my partners in the National Company of Interstellar Communication, who have followed my fruitless journey across space for so many months.
I am sure this new defeat will be trumpeted by those jackals who hounded my National Company into bankruptcy; with nothing but dead landscapes as his destination, it may be many decades before man leaves the air of Earth again!
“Sir, it seems I must credit your veracity. But what is it you want of me? Why have you brought me here?”
After his Gallic fashion, he grabbed at my arm. “I have read your books. I know you are a man of imagination. You must publish Maston's account—tell the story of this place…”
“But why? What would be the purpose? If Common Man is unimpressed by such exploits—if he regards these feats as a hoax, or a cynical exploitation by gun manufacturers—who am I to argue against him? We have entered a new century, M. Ardan: the century of Socialism. We must concentrate on the needs of Earth—on poverty, injustice, disease—and turn our faces to new worlds only when we have reached our manhood on this one…”
But Ardan heard none of this. He still gripped my arm, and again I saw that wildness in his old eyes—eyes that had, perhaps, seen too much. “I would go back! That is all. I am embedded in gravity. It clings, it clings! Oh, Mr. Wells, let me go back!”
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