The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1)

by Georges Le Faure; Henri de Graffigny

“Saved!” stammered Voriguin, so emotional that he was hardly able to speak. “We’re saved!”

  Sharp was very pale. Mechanically, as if he did not understand the word’s meaning, he repeated: “Saved? Saved?”

  His accomplice was laughing, singing and gesticulating like a madman. Sharp seized him by the arm and held him still for a moment. “Answer me!” he cried. “What’s happened, and why are you claiming that we’re saved?”

  But Voriguin’s joy was too powerful; he sank into a seat, babbling: “Up there…the telescope…an object coming towards us…” And he fainted.

  Scarcely believing his ears, Sharp raced up into the nose-cone, but he was trembling so much that it took him a few minutes to adjust the ocular lens. Finally, he succeeded, and he too released a piercing exclamation. Out there in space, an object was advancing at considerable speed. His lie had, therefore, turned out to be true, and chance had sent him a savior.

  Suddenly, though, his brows furrowed, his mouth twisted into a grimace of fury and an oath escaped his lips. “Him!” he groaned. “Him again! Always him!” Drunk with rage, he waved his clenched fist in the direction of Mikhail Ossipoff’s vehicle.

  The joy of being saved, however, swelled his heart, along with the hope that he would now be able to continue on his route and land on the lunar shore. He would, it is true, find himself face to face with his enemy—but that enemy would get him out of the critical situation in which he was languishing and drag him in his wake. “Voriguin!” he cried. “Voriguin!”

  The assistant was just coming to; hearing the call, he emerged entirely from his torpor and rejoined Fedor Sharp. “Do you know what that is?” the latter asked.

  The other opened his eyes wide at this question. “Good God!” he said. “How should I know? It’s doubtless some aerolith…”

  Sharp shook his head.

  “A comet, perhaps?”

  “No,” said the Russian, in a hoarse voice strangled by choler. “No, it’s Mikhail Ossipoff.”

  At that name, which he had always heard pronounced as that of a mortal enemy, Voriguin took a step backwards. “Mikhail Ossipoff!” he exclaimed. “I don’t understand.”

  “The swine has found a means to escape, and there he is—he too is attempting to reach the Moon.”

  Voriguin shuddered and murmured: “Will he get there?”

  The Russian shrugged his shoulders furiously. “No doubt,” he said. “Or at least, there’s every indication of it.” He put his eye to the ocular lens of the telescope again. “His velocity is sufficient to carry him across the line of equal attraction,” he continued. “He’ll run aground…”

  “What about us?” asked Voriguin, in a tremulous voice.

  “He’ll drag us along with him.”

  Voriguin threw his cap in the air. “Hurrah!” he cried. “Hurrah for Mikhail Ossipoff!”

  Fedor Sharp’s face darkened. “Yes,” he growled. “But what will happen afterwards?”

  “Bah!” Voriguin retorted. “Aren’t there two of us?” He underlined the sentence with a menacing gesture.

  “Hmm,” thought the Russian. “Ossipoff won’t have set off alone.”

  For an hour, the two projectiles sailed in convoy, scarcely a few kilometers apart. The ex-permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences never ceased using the telescope to study the vehicle in which his former colleague and his friends were enclosed. He saw the astonished and curious faces of Gontran de Flammermont, Fricoulet and Selena appear in succession at the portholes. “So they’ve got an entire crew over there, have they?” he muttered—and he racked his brains to try to figure out what explosive had been powerful enough to launch into space, to such a distance from the Earth, a weight similar to that of the vehicle and its passengers.

  Suddenly, though, he pushed his telescope away, crying out in a strangled voice: “Farenheit!”

  Voriguin suddenly went pale and his trembling lips repeated the name. “Farenheit?”

  “Yes,” growled Fedor Sharp. “The accursed American is with them.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Voriguin stammered. “You must be mistaken. How do you imagine that the unfortunate Yankee could have escaped? He must have perished with the others.”

  Sharp stamped his foot impatiently and shoved his companion toward the telescope. “See for yourself,” he growled.

  Voriguin looked, and he too perceived the menacing face of Jonathan Farenheit glued to the glass of the porthole; he could even make out the American’s muscular fist, aimed in their direction. He stepped back and gazed at Fedor Sharp with an expression in which genuine fear could be read. “That man is the Devil,” he murmured. “If he gets his hands on us, we’re doomed…inasmuch as there’s a whole band over there ready to lend him a hand to satisfy his vengeance.”

  Fedor Sharp made no reply, shaking his head.

  “Ah!” groaned the other. “I’d have preferred to choose my own way of dying, if I could…while that American’s capable of lynching us.”

  “You’ve got the revolvers on you,” the Russian replied, dully. “If you want to kill yourself, feel free.”

  “On the other hand,” Voriguin continued, “perhaps their shell won’t have enough force to draw us out from here and drag us to the Moon.”

  “That’s already done,” Sharp retorted.

  Voriguin looked at him fearfully. “Already done!” he stammered.

  “Yes,” the Russian replied. We’re no longer motionless. We’re now within the zone on lunar attraction. We’re falling.” And he remained angrily crouched over his telescope, while Voriguin, so fearful was he of the American, hoped that he might break his back in the fall.

  Chapter XIII

  A bird’s-eye view of the Moon

  While Fedor Sharp and his companion, prey to an anguish justly deserved by their infamy, await events tremulously, Mikhail Ossipoff and his friends were no more reassured. Their vehicle’s encounter with Sharp’s cannonball could have fatal consequences for them. If they deviated from their route even slightly, they might miss their intended target—and then, launched into space, what would become of them?

  Overwhelmed. Ossipoff was slumped on the divan, supporting Selena’s limp head on his shoulder. Gontran de Flammermont could not tear himself away from the porthole, thinking of the tremendous fall in which the shell might, at any moment, be crushed. Jonathan Farenheit was cursing the freak of chance that had brought him face to face with the traitor and thief without his being able to avenge himself as he deserved before dying.

  Only Fricoulet had conserved his self-composure. He had not budged from the observatory, where his eye was glued to the telescope, looking into space. Suddenly, he fell like a bomb into his companions’ midst. “Our vehicle is swinging around!” he cried.

  Gontran started. “Are we going to stand on our heads?” he murmured.

  His friend was the only one who heard this aside, which he treated as a joke.

  “Which is to say,” he replied, “That we shall have our feet where out heads were—in a word, the nose-cone our shell, which was pointing at the Moon, will be pointing at the Earth in a few minutes’ time.”

  Farenheit moaned with joy. “In that case,” he said, “I’ll be able to catch up with him.”

  “How?”

  “If we fall on to the surface of the Moon, of course.”

  Fricoulet raised his eyebrows “Did I say that?” he asked.

  “It seems logical to me.”

  “It may seem logical to you, but it’s still doubtful.”

  Gontran shuddered. “Then…?” he prompted.

  “Then…how do I know? We’re going to sail around the Moon, veering around its disk. In that case, God alone knows what awaits us.”

  “Let’s entrust ourselves to God, then,” murmured Selena. At the same time she looked at Gontran with an expression full of tenderness.

  “In any case,” Fricoulet added, cheerfully, “whatever happens, we’ll be the first to enjoy the spectacle…there�
��s always a silver lining.”

  Now that the engineer had told them about it, the voyagers were not long delayed in perceiving the rotational movement accomplished by the vehicle. It pivoted gently on its axis, gradually turning its inferior part—the heavier part—toward the Moon. The fall was beginning, but obliquely, as Fricoulet had foreseen and with almost imperceptible force.

  That force did not take long to increase, however.

  “We’re falling 10,000 leagues,” murmured the young engineer.

  Ossipoff had risen to his feet to measure the distance from the lunar surface again; he estimated it at 45,000 kilometers. Now, with the aid of the telescope’s strongest ocular lens—which reduced that distance to 150 kilometers, about 40 leagues—they could easily make out the configuration of that contorted surface. The entire disk appeared, full lit by the Sun’s rays and the entranced Ossipoff perceived a host of details that it was impossible to detect from Earth, even with the most powerful optical instruments.

  There was, however, still nothing to confirm the presence of living beings on the surface of that stony world; there was nothing but arid rocks, gaping craters, sharp crags, muddled up in an exceedingly complicated orographic network, brightened by a raw and uniform light. If the shell had fallen vertically upon the surface of the Moon, it would have landed not far from the North Pole, but what velocity it retained, partly neutralizing the lunar attraction, was curving it around the entire visible hemisphere and steering it to the south-west of the satellite—whose immense disk was filling the sky, reflecting an intense light.

  “We might close the portholes to permit Mademoiselle Selena to sleep for a while,” Fricoulet proposed.

  “Me, sleep!” cried the young woman. “Not before we get there!”

  “Remember, Mademoiselle,” the engineer persisted, “that it will take 48 hours, at least.”

  “Yes, darling,” Ossipoff said, in his turn. “The gentleman is right. We ought to get a little rest, in order to be ready to weather the new fatigues that await us. Anyway, there’s no shame in sleeping. Look!” And he pointed at Farenheit, who, overwhelmed by fatigue, was snoring peacefully, lying on the divan. Fury taxes strength as heavily as the most violent exercise, and in the 24 hours since he had first spotted his enemy Fedor Sharp, the American had not calmed down. Besides, the panorama of lunar craters did not interest him enough for him to admire it for 48 hours on the trot.

  At that moment, the vehicle was passing over the Sea of Humboldt, the Lake of Dreams and the Lake of Death,55 which, seen from that height, formed greenish patches similar to forests seen from a great distance. Soon, they were directly over the Sea of Serenity.

  Ossipoff, enraptured, could not tear himself away from the contemplation of this world, all of whose mysteries were gradually unveiling themselves to him. “See,” he said to his companions, “what an uneven face the Selenian world presents…you recognize, don’t you, my dear Gontran, those chains of immense mountains that you can see on your right, which seem to be several kilometers high—they’re the Apennines, the Carpathians and the Caucasus.” After a pause, the astronomer murmured, as if to himself: “Ah! There’s the Sea of Tears, the Marsh of Mists, the Marsh of Putrefaction…”

  Gontran jogged Fricoulet’s elbow. “Seas?” he whispered in his hear. “Where does he see these seas?”

  The young engineer replied in a whisper. “In selenographic terms, ‘seas’ are what those dark patches are called, whose nature has not yet been determined, and which resemble dry plains.”

  “There you are,” grumbled the Comte, shaking his head. “A bizarre appellation, which seems to me to be totally lacking in logic.”

  “Thus,” Fricoulet went on, “the oval patch that you perceive over there, on the left-hand edge of the disk, is the Sea of Crises.”

  “Mare Crisium, in Molière’s Latin,” joked Gontran.56

  “Just so—and beside it, the Marsh of Sleep.”

  “Palus Somniorum.”

  “Again, just so.”

  “So called,” Gontran added, “because its inhabitants sleep perpetually.”

  “Its inhabitants!” said the engineer. “If there are any…”

  For several hours, the vehicle continued its oblique trajectory towards the Moon in this fashion, permitting the voyagers to study the slightest features of the uneven ground quite easily.

  “How far away are we now?” Fricoulet asked.

  “About 8000 leagues,” Ossipoff replied.

  “That’s odd,” said Gontran. “We seem to be slowing down.”

  “On the contrary—at present we’re traveling, or rather falling, with a velocity of no less than 500 meters a second—which is 30 kilometers a minute.”

  “Hold on,” Gontran suddenly said. “I’m curious to see what the Earth looks like at this distance.” He climbed the steps of the little stairway and uncovered the porthole pierced in the nose-cone of the shell.

  He uttered a cry of surprise. Lost in the solar glare, the Earth seemed no more than an increasingly slender crescent of exceedingly small dimension. “And that’s my native planet!” murmured the young Comte, disdainfully shrugging his shoulders. As he came back down he asked: “How far from the Earth are we now?”

  Fricoulet looked at him in amazement. “Didn’t you hear just now that we’re 8000 leagues from the Moon?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Well, 90,000 minus 8000 is 82,000—it’s as simple as that.”

  “Indeed,” retorted Gontran, slightly vexed, “but it’s necessary to think of it.” Then his thoughts abruptly veered in another direction. “But why is it,” he said, “that the Earth, seen from here, appears more voluminous to me than the Moon seen from the Earth’s surface?”

  Fricoulet looked at Gontran in terror, but the old man, absorbed in his contemplation, had not heard. “Don’t you love Selena, then, my unfortunate friend?” the engineer murmured, rapidly drawing Gontran to the far end of the room.”

  The young man was so astounded by this question that he did not reply immediately. Finally, he stammered: “Are you mad?”

  “It’s you who ought to be asked that question,” retorted Fricoulet. “You still love your fiancée and you’re doing everything possible not to marry her!”

  “I don’t understand,” Gontran stammered.

  “Weren’t you just astonished that, at this equal distance, the Earth seems larger than the Moon?”

  “So what?”

  “Don’t you know, then—or, rather, shouldn’t you know—that the Moon is 49 times smaller by volume than the planet around which it gravitates…?”

  “…In 28 and a half days,” Gontran added. “That’s true—I recall that now.”

  Fricoulet put his hand on his friend’s shoulder to attract his attention. “Do you also recall,” he went on, “that the density of the materials comprising the lunar world is considerably less than that of terrestrial rock; it’s only six tenths. That means that the Selenian globe weighs no more than a sphere of water of the same diameter; surface gravity there is extremely feeble—the weakest observed on all the planetary surfaces in the Solar System. It’s six times less than the Earth’s…”

  The young engineer smiled at the seriousness with which Flammermont was listening to him. “Well,” he asked, “what do you say to that?”

  “I’m doing my best.”

  “You understand, don’t you,” Fricoulet added, amicably, “that if I tell you all these details, it’s not to show off my scientific knowledge, but quite simply to enable you to reply in a fairly satisfactory fashion when your future father-in-law subjects to you an oral examination?”

  The Comte thanked his friend by squeezing his hand firmly.

  Then, after a pause, Fricoulet sighed and added: “You know, I’m doing this against my will. I even think I’m committing a crime, betraying our friendship, for I’m contributing to your unhappiness by smoothing the route that will lead you to marriage.”

  Gontran shrugged his should
ers and laughed. “You great fool!” he said. “Still the same.”

  “Always,” Fricoulet muttered. He turned on his heel, bad-temperedly, and put his face to the porthole to his left, through which he could see the whole lunar panorama.

  At that moment, the vehicle was passing directly over the Sea of Vapors, scarcely 20,000 kilometers from the lunar surface, which it was rapidly approaching. It passed over the Circus of Triesnecker and thus arrived over the crater Pallas, whose wrinkled and confused surface stood out with rigorous clarity.

  Gontran had come to stand beside his friend, and was absorbed by the spectacle of that fantastic magic lantern. “But it seems to me,” he murmured, “that all these mountains are prodigiously high for the world that supports them. I don’t believe that there are peaks as monstrous on Earth, even though it’s 49 times as voluminous.”

  “This time,” Fricoulet relied, “you’re right. They all measure several kilometers in height, and if we were arriving here during one of the phases if the Moon, you’d be able to judge their dimensions even better—for then, lit from the side by the Sun, they’d be projecting dark shadows far over the ground, magnified by their crags and their jagged crests.

  Momentarily, the Comte was no longer listening; he was curiously examining a sparkling dot that had appeared in the center of an immense white plain more than 300 leagues wide in the east of the Moon.

  “The Circus of Aristarchus,” said Fricoulet. “One of the most beautiful specimens of Selenian orography. A few 100 kilometers to the north you can make out its elder brother, Mount Kepler, similarly situated at the center of a whitish plain that advances like a promontory into the Ocean of Tempests.

  Gontran stared, mute with astonishment.

  “But these mountains,” the engineer went on, “are nothing compared with certain others, one of which is nearer to us, and which you see to the north of the Carpathian mountain chain; it’s the Circus of Copernicus, which measures no less than 160 kilometers in diameter—almost as large as the surface of Bohemia enclosed in he Carpathian Mountains of Europe.”

  “I can see it,” Flammermont said, finally. “The volcanic circle you’re talking about.57 But I can see two other craters at the foot of Copernicus, which also seem to be enormous.”