The engineer straightened up and, passing his hand over his brow, which was soaked with cold sweat, murmured: “You’re right. It’s doubtless emotion that’s spoiling my vision.”
“But what do you see?”
“The solar disk is increasing.”
Ossipoff started violently at these words. “You’re mad!” he exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders.
Unceremoniously, he shoved Fricoulet aside and took his place, but scarcely had he applied his eye to the ocular lens than he uttered a stifled exclamation and stepped back, raising his arms into the air in a gesture of stupefaction. “It’s prodigious, incomprehensible, supernatural…you’re right. To me, too, it seems that the disk has grown. It now measures 65 minutes, 18 seconds!”
For a moment, all four of them looked at one another in silence, overwhelmed by the incomprehensible phenomenon.
“By God!” cried Farenheit, all of a sudden. “We’re changing position, for the solar rays are now coming in through the side portholes.”
“It’s the apparatus that’s turning,” declare Fricoulet.
“So we’re falling, then?” asked Flammermont, anxiously.
“Of course!”
“But where?” roared the American, prey to a frightful over-excitement. “On Venus? On the Moon? On the Earth? Come on, say something. You’re scientists, and it’s your job to know these things.” He had seized Gontran by the collar of his jacket, putting him on the spot. A frightful scream, uttered by Ossipoff, made him let go.
Everyone looked at the old man. He was horribly pale and, leaning against the wall of the cabin, he seemed to be about to lose consciousness. Suddenly, he covered his face with his hands and murmured: “Oh, it’s horrible! It’s horrible!”
“Please, Monsieur Ossipoff!” implored Fricoulet. “Tell us what it is. If you know how the phenomenon has been produced, explain it to us—whatever the consequences might be!”
The old man fixed them with a stare in which there as a glimmer of madness, and stammered: “We’re falling into the Sun!”
Farenheit uttered a formidable curse, while, in his impotent rage, he waved his fists menacingly at the entire immensity, which was black and bleak, in spite of the dazzling rays of the Sun, where death—a frightful, horrible death—awaited them.
Gontran de Flammermont let himself collapse on to the divan, paralyzed—and there he stayed for long hours, devoid of movement and thought, as if death had struck him already, mechanically babbling a single name over and over: “Selena.”
Ossipoff had returned to his telescope, to measure the slow but continuous growth of the solar disk. As for Fricoulet, alone in a corner of the cabin, his notebook in his hand, he surrendered himself to gigantic algebraic operations, blackening the paper with figures and trigonometric diagrams, careless of the ocean of flame by which he and his companions would be engulfed in a few hours time.
Little by little, the temperature was rising, and, inside the cabin, the overheated air was becoming unbreathable. The American, who was prowling like a bear in a cage, went to the thermometer; it marked 42 degrees Centigrade. “By God!” he groaned. “Are we cowardly enough to wait until we’re in that frightful furnace, then? In any case, personally, I’ve made up my mind not to wait any longer.” And his hand groped for his revolver.
“My friends,” Ossipoff said then, in a pleading voice, turning his anguished face toward them, “will you forgive me for having dragged you to your doom?” His eyes full of tears, his features convulsed and his hair disordered, the old man offered an image of the most profound despair.
Without saying a word, Gontran and the American offered him their hands.
“And you, Monsieur Fricoulet?” said the old scientist. “Will you forgive me?”
As he finished speaking, the engineer leapt to his feet and cried, in a vibrant voice: “I forgive you, all the more willingly because there is nothing for which you need to be forgiven—for the very simple reason that it is not our doom to which you have dragged us, but our goal!”
Ossipoff looked at Gontran, shaking his head. “The poor boy is mad!” he murmured.
“Not as mad as all that, Monsieur Ossipoff, not as mad as all that. While you were despairing, I was working, and I’ve found that our velocity, presently 20,000 meters per second, is still increasing.”
“We’ll only arrive more rapidly in the ardent furnace that will devour us,” complained the American.
“Not at all,” retorted the engineer. “Given our velocity, in conformity with the laws of celestial mechanics, we shall describe a curve around the Sun, open or closed: a parabola, a hyperbola or an ellipse. Well, I’ve just calculated that curve, and do you know?—it converges with the orbit of Mercury, with which we shan’t be long in catching up. Within 24 hours, we’ll make contact with Mercury…” So saying, he held out his calculations to Ossipoff, triumphantly.
The latter passed the sheet of paper to Gontran, stammering: “Here, see for yourself…I’m so anxious…”
Fricoulet shrugged his shoulders ironically; then, going to the young Comte, he took him by the hand. “You know,” he murmured in his ear, “you were definitely born under an unlucky star.” As Flammermont looked at him in astonishment, he added: “I’m beginning to believe that your marriage to Selena will end up being made.”
Chapter XXVII
Gontran recovers Selena and Farenheit gets news of Sharp
“The planet Mercury was one of the five planets known throughout antiquity but it was undoubtedly the last to be discovered and identified; the most ancient astronomical measurement that has been handed down to us dates from 265 B.C., the 294th year of the era of Nabonassar, 60 years after the death of Alexander the Great.120 We also possess Chinese observations of Mercury, of which the most ancient dates from 118 B.C.
“Because of its proximity to the Sun, Mercury is only visible to us in the evening or the morning, never in the middle of the night, and always in the twilight. That is why, at the times of the first observations, it was believed—as with Venus—that there were two different planets, one of the morning and the other of the evening…”
“Gontran! Are you asleep?”
Hearing himself called, the young man swiftly shut the copy of Les Continents célestes that he had been busy perusing, hid it under his blanket, and turned to face Ossipoff. “No, my dear Monsieur,” he replied. “I was merely drowsy. What can I do for you?”
“If it wouldn’t be too inconvenient for you to get up, I beg you to come and join me.”
Flammermont concealed a yawn; nevertheless, he got up.
“Here,” the old man said to him, standing away from his telescope. “Take a look. I don’t know whether I ought to attribute it to the ardor of the Sun’s rays, but I’ve had rather feeble eyesight for some time.”
While Ossipoff was speaking, the young man had applied his eye to the ocular lens. “Well, what do you want to know?” he asked.
“In what form do you perceive that planet?”
“As you must have perceived it yourself—in the form of its first quarter.”
“Good—but examine carefully, I beg you, the two horns of the crescent. Do you notice anything?”
Gontran paused momentarily before relying. “My word,” he said, “no—I don’t see anything odd.”
Ossipoff’s eyebrows contracted. “Then I must be mistaken,” he murmured, “and Schröter, Noble and Burton121 with me.” In a louder voice he added: “Mercury’s two horns seem to you to be absolutely identical?”
The young man was silent for several seconds; then he said: “No, the austral horn is nowhere near as sharp as the other…one might think that it is blunted.”
Ossipoff uttered a cry of triumph.
“It really is!” he stammered, emotionally. “It really is!” After a pause, he went on: “Some of us, among terrestrial astronomers, have thought that we noticed that inequality between the two Mercurian horns…and that observation has a considerable importance, since
it establishes the existence on the planet of uneven ground.”
“I’m curious to know,” said Farenheit, butting into the conversation, “how you can deduce that logically.”
“Nothing simpler. It’s sufficient to admit that there exists, near to that meridional horn, a very high mountainous plateau, which interrupts the light of the Sun and prevents it from reaching the point that the horn would extend without such a preeminence.”
“But that hypothesis is also Flammermont’s!” exclaimed Fricoulet.
“My hypothesis?” said Gontran.
“No—your namesake’s.”
“That’s proof,” the young Comte said, gravely, “that great minds often think alike, when it’s a matter of resolving the eternal problems of Nature.”
“And have you,” asked Farenheit, in a skeptical tone, “done the same as for the Moon—which is to say, measured the Mercurian mountains?”
Ossipoff favored the American with a disdainful glance. “You’re like St. Thomas, my poor Mr. Farenheit,” he replied. “You only believe in things that you can touch with your finger.”
Fricoulet nodded his head significantly. “May it please God that he doesn’t touch it too rudely,” he muttered. “With such a fall, God knows what would happen to our bones.”
A slight shiver ran through the American’s limbs; nevertheless, he put on a brave face and addressed himself to Ossipoff. “You still haven’t answered me,” he said.
“Schröter, calculating the degree of truncation of the crescent, estimated the height of certain Mercurian peaks at the 250th part of the planet’s diameter—which gives them about 19 kilometers…”
“Pooh!” said Farenheit. “What’s that beside the mountains of Venus?”
“Almost nothing, indeed—but it may appear to be a more respectable height if you consider that the highest mountain on our world, Gauri Sankar in the Himalayas, measures no more than 8840 meters.
“And the Mercurian volcanoes?” asked Gontran, assuming an air of expertise. “What do you think of them, Monsieur Ossipoff?”
“I agree with your illustrious compatriot, my dear Monsieur de Flammermont, that perhaps they exist, but they are in any case invisible to our terrestrial observers.”
“Are Schröter and Huggins122 mistaken, then?”
“I won’t hide it from you that that’s my opinion. At the Observatory of Pulkova I’ve conducted the most scrupulous searches, but it was impossible for me to find the luminous patch that both of them thought they had observed on the planet, not far from its center.”
Farenheit, who was examining the thermometer attentively, suddenly exclaimed: “It’s only 39 degrees!”
“Proof that we’re drawing away from the Sun,” said Fricoulet.
“Of course! To get closer to Mercury, that’s necessary,” said Gontran, laughing.
“How far away from it are we?” asked the American.
“Only a few 100,000 leagues,” the engineer replied. “Furthermore, we must now be within its zone of attraction, and the rapidity of the fall will increase further.”
The planet now seemed to occupy one entire side of the sky, and its black mass, like a colossal cannonball stood out clearly against the dark background of space. For some time, the voyagers contemplated the new world in silence with their eyes glued to the portholes. It was, so to speak, visibly increasing in size. They had to land there, but God alone knew how. That question was seriously tormenting Farenheit and Flammermont. The latter approached Fricoulet and murmured in his ear: “You seem to be looking forward to the prospect our fall with a good deal of equanimity. We’ve avoided the Sun, but I’m afraid that the fate that awaits us on Mercury might not be much more enviable.”
The engineer shrugged his shoulders, in a philosophically insouciant fashion. “What do you expect?” he replied. “We’ve stuck our little finger in the gears—it’s necessary that our entire bodies pas through.”
“If that’s all that you can say to reassure me…”
“Well, what else can I say? We’re falling—you know that as well as I do. We’re even falling at high speed. What will result from our encounter with the Mercurian surface? It’s impossible to foresee that.”
Gontran’s face darkened visibly. Fricoulet noticed it, and added, with a mocking laugh: “I know how you feel. If I were in your shoes, it would annoy me considerably to risk seeing my fiancée again in the condition of meat paste…but it’s necessary to look on the bright side and say that, after all, life is a vale of tears…”
Flammermont stamped his foot impatiently. “Alcide!” he complained. “You’re really getting on my nerves!”
“It’s the effect of the torrid heat in here…”
“You have no hope, then? It’s the end?”
The engineer started. “Are you mad?” he cried. “Why the end? Even if there were 99 chances in 100 that we’ll be smashed up, there’s still, in an adventure like the one in which we’re involved, one fraction unknown in which to invest our hope. That’s what I’m doing, and I suggest that you do likewise.”
Gontran shook his head. The unknown fraction to which Fricoulet was pinning his hopes did not inspire much confidence in him. “When we fell on the Moon,” he said, “the vehicle’s springs reduced the shock. When we landed on Venus, we had a parachute—and then again, plunging into the Ocean is always less dangerous than coming down on land…but in the circumstances in which we now find ourselves, we have no trump card in hand to save us.”
“You’re forgetting the manner in which the aeroplane landed on Mont Boron,” Fricoulet retorted. “On that day, as at this moment, we were falling through the air like a stone.”
“With the difference that we were falling a few 100 meters, while today we’re falling a few 100,000 leagues.”
Fricoulet smiled. “Fortunately, to counterbalance that enormous difference, we have in our favor the fact that weight on Mercury’s surface is only half of what it is on Earth.”123
The young Comte opened his eyes wide.
“You’re mocking me,” he said. “I’m not a scientist, but I’m not an imbecile who can be made to believe that black is white.”
“Far be it from me to think that, my dear chap,” replied the engineer, “but if, instead of falling asleep over Les Continents célestes, as you did yesterday, you had studied your namesake’s work a little harder, you’d know that it’s by studying the perturbation produced on comets that pass close by it that we have succeeded in determining the exact mass of Mercury…”
Gontran slapped his forehead. “I’ve got it,” he said. “I remember now—it was Le Verrier, wasn’t it, who was the first to achieve that result by studying Encke’s comet…and the conclusion…”124
“Is that the Mercurian globe weighs about five times less than the terrestrial globe, and that weight, on its surface, is about half what it is on our native planet.”125
“That’s true, that’s true…I read all that,” murmured Gontran, slightly humiliated by his poor memory. “In that case, we have only half as much chance of being reduced to pulp as we would if we were falling on Earth.”
“Perfectly logical,” said Fricoulet, with an approving nod of the head.
“So that’s 50 chances in 100 that we have of breaking our heads, not 99, as you claimed just now,” said Farenheit, in his turn.
“Scrupulously exact, Mr. Farenheit.”
The American manifested his joy with an entrechat, but a few words from the engineer were sufficient to cool his enthusiasm.
“Don’t forget, however, that we’re falling from a height of 500,000 leagues, that we weigh, including the apparatus, 1000 kilograms, and that, multiplying the height by the square of the time of the fall, we should hit the Mercurian surface with a velocity of 12 kilometers a second.
Gontran and Farenheit cried out in fright.
“Given that the weight is reduced by half, let’s halve that velocity—but you’ll agree with me that it’s still sufficient to reduce us t
o our simplest expression.”
Flammermont folded his arms across his chest. “To judge by your calm tone,” he said, “I swear that one would think that there isn’t a word of truth in what you just said. You remind me of a nurse terrifying her children with the story of the bogeyman or Bluebeard.”
“I wish to Heaven it were not so,” replied the engineer. “Unfortunately, Mercury is there to convince us of the reality.”
Beneath the apparatus, indeed, the planet extended its enormous and terrifying mass, whose titanic ruggedness still seemed very vague, bathed in a thick gaseous atmosphere.
The American took Gontran’s hands in his. “Come on, Monsieur de Flammermont,” he said, in a slightly anguished voice. “You’ve got us out of trouble too often already for one more time…”
Ossipoff had his back turned, which permitted the young Comte to be able to raise his arms to the heavens in a gesture signifying his impotence, without compromising himself. The American was tenacious, though; he did not release his prey. “By God!” he growled. “Think of your reputation, your glory, your love…and my hatred too…and get us out of this alive.” Clenching his fists, he added: “By God! If I were a scientist like you, instead of a simple pig-merchant, I wouldn’t want it said that I’d left my fiancée in the hands of a wretch like Fedor Sharp. Come on—think! Think!”
Gontran made a gesture of impatience.
“Think, eh?” he cried. “That’s easy to say. You think it’s enough to rack one’s brains to find an idea. I’d like to see you do it…”
He remained silent and still for a few moments, his head bowed, in a meditative attitude. “My God!” he said, suddenly, looking at Fricoulet. “I’ve got an idea…”
Farenheit uttered an exclamation of joy. “I was sure of it!” he cried. “It’s impossible that a man like you…”
The young Comte imposed silence on the over-exuberant American with a gesture and turned to Fricoulet. “Why don’t we do what mariners do when a ship is about to sink—throw everything we can into the sea to lighten ourselves.”
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1) Page 52
