“If you wish,” said Farenheit to his companions, “I’ll be the one to lighten the shell’s burden. I’m a good swimmer, and 50 fathoms above my head doesn’t trouble me at all. I’ll get up there quicker than you.”
This offer was accepted. As they had done when it was a matter of sinking like a stone, thanks to Fricoulet’s introduction into the projectile, Ossipoff and Sharp grasped the hatchway, ready to unscrew it at an agreed signal. As for Farenheit, he placed himself directly below the hatchway with his head encased in his respirol and his legs flexed, ready to straighten up when the hatchway had produced the opening necessary to his passage.
Finally, Gontran gave the signal. The hatchway was scarcely open when the American, launched by a violent contraction of his muscles, shot out like an arrow. Then the opening was hermetically sealed.
“Hey!” said Fricoulet, triumphantly. “Not a drop of water! That was a lovely maneuver.”
Ossipoff and Sharp looked at one another in astonishment. “Too good, in my opinion,” murmured the former.
“And in mine,” said the second in his turn. “There’s some mystery here.”
“All the more so,” exclaimed Selena, “as we’re not moving at all. It’s as if Mr. Farenheit weight no more than a man of straw.”
“That’s true!” exclaimed Gontran, leaping to on of the vehicle’s lateral portholes. Scarcely was he there than he uttered an exclamation of amazement. “There’s no more water!”
“No more water!” repeated the Terrans’ voices, like so many echoes, on perceiving around the shell, for as far as the eye could see, a kind of ocean of black dust, reflecting the gentle light of Venus. Then, as one, they all turned around to look at one another with bewildered expressions.
“What can it mean?” asked Fedor Sharp and Gontran de Flammermont, in chorus.
“Quite simply,” replied Fricoulet, “that, as we anticipated, the solar heat at perihelion was such that the liquid mass beneath which we were immersed has volatilized, and that we’re now resting on the bed of the cometary sea whose evaporation prevented us from being roasted.
“That seems to be the only plausible explanation,” said Ossipoff.
“At any rate,” added Selena, “it’s certain that we can get out of here with dry feet.”
Suddenly, Fricoulet exclaimed: “We’re forgetting poor Farenheit. What’s become of him?”
In the blink of an eye, the Terrans had put on their respirols and opened the manhole. They rushed outside. Gontran, who was in the lead, stumbled over Farenheit’s body, extended motionless on the ground. With Fricoulet’s help, he lifted him up and carried him into the shell. There, his helmet was opened and they found a deep gash on his head, from which blood was flowing abundantly.
“It’s nothing,” the engineer declared, applying a cloth strip impregnated with arnica to the wound. “He’ll come round in a few minutes.”
“But how could that have happened to him?” asked Selena.
“In the simplest imaginable fashion. “He launched himself through the hatchway with the full force of his legs, but instead of encountering the liquid mass that ought to have sustained him until he reached the surface he encountered empty space, and fell head-first on to the bed of the cometary ocean.”
“That’s it exactly, my dear Fricoulet,” stammered the wounded man, in a slightly weak voice, having opened his eyes at that moment. Then, rubbing his eyes, he added in a more forceful tone: “By God, what a shock! I saw, as you say in France, 36,000 candles.”
“Here!” said Gontran, handing him a glass of port. “This will put you back on your feet.”
The Amerian drained the glass in a single gulp, then leapt to his feet. “Now, to work!” he declared.
They all put their respirols on again and immediately began making preparations for departure. They sought out the makeshift chariot on which they had brought the sphere from the Mercurian hill in the location where they had left it before the immersion, and they rolled it to the place where Sharp’s shell had been immersed. Then the shell and the sphere were loaded on to the chariot and the Terrans—slowly and with difficulty—took the route back to their initial encampment.
At every step, however, they experienced further surprises, occasioned by the complete transformation of the landscape. Where, 15 days earlier, they had crossed a plain, it was now necessary for them to climb a hill; to their left, where a chain of mountains with sparkling peaks had formerly loomed up, the ground seemed to have been leveled off as if by a giant’s axe; to the right, by contrast, where the down-sloping ground had hollowed out a funnel, there presently stood a monstrous peak. Here, they had been obliged to cross a sort of miry marsh which, completely dried out, was now transformed into a profound depression full of black and blinding dust; there, on the contrary, where they had previously walked with dry feet, a spring had emerged, running brim-full over a newly-hollowed bed.
Just as long as our hill, Fricoulet thought, hasn’t also been transformed, volatilized or evaporated…that would complicate things considerably.
Fortunately, this dread was vain. When they arrived, after ten days of prodigious effort, in sight of their former encampment, they found everything in the state in which they had left it; the bed of the stream, however, was dry, and the charred and desiccated forest trees extended their blackened and leafless branches into the air.
“There!” said Gontran, finally taking off his respirol. “That’s one of His Excellency the Sun’s jokes. This is charcoal underfoot.”
The following day, they set to work in with a view to preparing the selenium sphere for the new role that it was destined to play. While Gontran and Fedor Sharp transformed the floor of the former cabin into a valve designed to be fitted to the superior part of the metallic balloon, Osipoff constructed a gondola from a sort of plant that grew on the Mercurian hill, large enough to contain all of them and yet surprisingly light.
For his part, Fricoulet did not remain inactive. With Farenheit’s help, he constructed a gigantic barrel—a sort of tun with a volume of 2000 liters—which was provided with hoops by courtesy of the plant that served for the fabrication of the gondola. It was filled with iron ore, of which the engineer had found a deposit not far from the hill on which the Terrans had taken refuge. Two other barrels of smaller dimension were similarly fabricated, and joined to the first by strips of canvas steeped in gutta-percha; they would serve as gas-filters.
When that was done, it was necessary to get busy with the manufacture of the sulfuric acid necessary to the decomposition of the iron. While Gontran and Sharp, having completed their, were making a suitable excavation into a watertight cistern, Fricoulet, with the aid of a Pifre insulator recovered from the shell,147 distilled the strange liquid extant on the comet’s surface. Before long, the cistern was filled with the water in sufficient quantity for them to be able to busy themselves with the manufacture of the gas. Not far away, the ever-questing Fricoulet had discovered a deposit of pyritic shale; he had these nuggets grilled in contact with the air; that gave him a certain quantity of crystalline iron sulfate, which he introduced into earthen vessels places on a hot fire and connected to glass bulbs. Under the influence of the heat, the iron sulfate decomposed; sulfuric acid condensed in the bulbs and all that remained in the vessels was colcothar148 or “English rouge,” the residue of the manufacture. An immense wooden tub, constructed in the same fashion as the barrel, was filled with this acid and mixed with twice its own weight of distilled water. After that, to obtain hydrogen, it was sufficient to put the mixture in contact with the iron ore in the barrel.
All these preparations had taken nearly two months of relentless labor: two months during which the skill and patience of the Terrans, even more than their strength, was put to a rude proof; two months during which astronomical study was put on one side, to the point at which a spider might have spun a web over the objective lens of the telescope.
Gontran’s astonishment was, in consequence, considerable when
he aimed the instrument into space one evening and perceived his native planet, with its continents bizarrely marked out upon the dark stains of its oceans, the white patches of its polar snows, and its swirls of cloud extending through the atmosphere. He released a profound sigh.
“What’s the matter?” Fricoulet asked him, coming over to him.
Extending his hand toward the Earth in a tragic gesture, Flammermont replied: “Is it not there, alas that the municipal official is to be found, before whom I aspire to appear in company with my dear Selena?”
The engineer burst into laughter. “Eh? Don’t you find that the atmosphere that surrounds the Earth is affecting the tricolor tint of the aforementioned municipal official’s sash? It’s the torture of Tantalus.” And he added: “We’ve already had Mignon aspirant au ciel—now we have Gontran aspirant au maire.”149
The engineer would doubtless have continued in that vein for some time had he not been interrupted by Ossipoff’s voice.
“Monsieur Fricoulet,” the old man said, “we’ll need to be ready for departure in 48 hours. How long do you think it will take to load the gas into the sphere?”
“Exactly 48 hours, Monsieur Ossipoff,” the young man replied, having thought about it for a few minutes.
“It’s necessary, then, for you to get to work immediately…for I repeat, the moment is approaching when we’ll need to leave this place.”
Two days later, the sphere—having been filled with hydrogen with the aid of a reciprocating pump, which had extracted the atmospheric air and replaced it with the gas—was swaying at the summit of the hill, contained by a sort of wide-meshed net formed by selenium wires crudely attached to the cabin, parachute-fashion. The gondola, full of stones, was fixed at the extremity of this net to prevent the apparatus from flying off into space.
While his companions were busy loading everything they needed to take into the aerial skiff, Ossipoff, his eye glued to his telescope, was scanning the celestial immensity. Suddenly, he clicked his tongue impatiently, thus attracting Fricoulet’s attention.
“What is it?” the engineer asked.
“Deimos isn’t there.”
“Damn! Was his Papa, Professor Hall, mistaken in thinking that he had discovered him? After all, it’s perfectly possible that Mars has no satellites at all.”150
The old man shook his head and frowned. “Hall was clear-sighted,” he replied, “and now I’ve found the key to the mystery. The satellite we’re looking for is, at present, at the other extreme of its orbit, hidden by Mars and more than 40,000 kilometers away from us.”
“What are we going to do, then?” asked Gontran.
Ossipoff remained pensive for a while. “There might be one means,” he said, finally. “That’s to change our plan and, instead of aiming for Deimos, attempt to land on Phobos, from which we’ll scarcely be separated, in six hours time, by a few 1000 kilometers. What do you think, Monsieur de Flammermont?” In serious situations the old man renounced the familiar modes of address that he was accustomed to employ with regard to his future son-in-law.
“My dear Monsieur,” said the young Comte. “I can only approve of the idea.”
“All the more so,” Fricoulet said, “as Phobos is only 6000 kilometers away from Mars—it will be easier for us to jump from the satellite to the planet.”
The aged scientist was undoubtedly about to launch into some supplementary explanation, but a noisy argument suddenly broke out between Sharp and Farenheit, distracting his attention and that of the two young men. The argument concerned a voluminous package, carefully wrapped in canvas, which the American had just introduced into the gondola, and which Sharp wanted to throw out—because, he said, it was not on the list of objects to be transported.
“By God!” Farenheit complained. “Have I not, like everyone else, worked on the construction of this balloon? Don’t I have the right…?”
“No,” interjected the ex-permanent secretary. “You don’t have the right to compromise the success of the expedition with unnecessary excess weight.”
Farenheit’s face became apoplectic. “Unnecessary!” he replied, grinding his teeth. “Yes, certainly, this excess would be unnecessary if you hadn’t robbed me, stripped me bare and ruined me, as you have done.”
Sharp advanced toward him, fists raised. The American struck a defensive pose. At that moment, Ossipoff intervened. “Come on,” he said, “What’s happening?”
“What’s happening,” roared Farenheit, “is that this blackguard, whose deadly advice has wiped out my fortune, wants to prevent me from rebuilding it.”
“How’s that?”
“Oh, I just put a fragment of crystallized carbon in the gondola, which, if I ever have the chance to see New York again, might slightly defray the losses and hardships that I’ll have suffered. Isn’t that fair?”
“Certainly, my dear Mr. Farenheit,” replied the old man, and I don’t think a few books more or less…”
Fricoulet, who had just cast a glance over Farenheit’s baggage, said: “But this weighs at least 60 kilos.”
“In that case,” Ossipoff went on, “Fedor Sharp is right. We can’t take a supplementary weight as considerable as that.”
Bizarrely enough, the American appeared to calm down at once, and he murmured: “Your calculations can’t be exact, though. If, by chance, the ascensional force of the sphere were greater than you imagine…”
“Hold on, Mr. Farenheit,” said the engineer, “there’s a means of reconciliation. Leave your rock in the gondola for now; before taking off we’ll test the force of the balloon. If it’s insufficient, you’ll sacrifice your 60 kilos. Is that agreeable to you?”
A singular smile creased the American’s lips. “Suits me,” he muttered. And he continued loading baggage as if nothing had happened.
Soon, the loading was finished and it was necessary to proceed with the embarkation.
Selena and Gontran were installed first, then Ossipoff and Fricoulet joined them. After that, Farenheit also took his place in the gondola. Fedor Sharp had wanted to be the last, in order to verify the force of the balloon personally. His animosity against the American was such that he was anticipating great pleasure at the thought of making him throw his block of diamond overboard like a vulgar sack of ballast.
The selenium sphere was now only attached to the cometary soil by a cable woven from the same plant that had provided the barrel-hoops, and it was swaying lightly; little tremors seemingly bore witness to its desire to gain its liberty.
“You see! You see!” cried Farenheit, triumphantly. “I was right! My surcharge won’t prevent the balloon from lifting off.”
“What about me?” replied Fedor Sharp, mockingly. “Do you think I weight no more than a feather?” So saying, he suspended himself from the rim of the gondola—whose bottom immediately struck the ground hard. “Come on,” he sniggered, letting go of the gondola to grab the cable with both hands, “it’s necessary to sacrifice your little millions—unless, at least, you prefer to surrender your place to it and stay here.”
“There’s something else you haven’t thought of!” roared the American—and before anyone had time to stop him he opened his knife and cut the cable retaining the selenium balloon with a single stroke.
The balloon rose rapidly into the sky, while Fedor Sharp, losing his balance, rolled like a ball to the bottom of the Mercurian hill. A cry of horror escaped the throats of the voyagers; even Ossipoff threw himself toward Farenheit, with his arms raised in a threatening manner. “Wretch!” he exclaimed.
The American looked him up and down, with his arms folded and a mocking smile on his lips. “There!” he said. “That’s what’s called killing two birds with one stone. I’ve repaired the breach made in my fortune, and I’ve satisfied my vengeance.”
“But I gave my word that the past was forgotten, villain!” howled the old man.
“Proof that you have a very easy-going memory. Anyway, you haven’t broken your word. I’m willing to testi
fy—in writing, if necessary—that I alone planned and carried out this execrable deed.”
Mikhail Ossipoff, leaning over the edge of the gondola, scanned the space below him, searching the sparkling infinity for the cometary nucleus, now scarcely perceptible. Fricoulet looked at Gontran, and a skeptical smile played on his lips. “Poor devil!” he said. “And we promised him to keep him alive.”
“Proof that we made our promise wantonly,” replied the young Comte, “since Providence did not wish to ratify it.”
In less than half an hour, they had covered nearly 100 kilometers. Lost in the solar radiation, the comet was invisible to the naked eye. The increasingly rarefied air had constrained the voyagers to don their respirols, and the intensity of its gravity was diminishing rapidly.
When Ossipoff’s timetable marked midnight, they had traveled about 4000 kilometers and were virtually weightless, to the extent that the Terrans had to attach themselves to the gondola to avoid being thrown overboard by their slightest movement. Suddenly, the apparatus appeared to perform a pirouette, and the appearance of the sky suddenly changed.
“We’ve just penetrated the Martian zone of attraction,” Ossipoff told Gontran, by way of his speaker.
“And that’s doubtless Phobos that we see beneath us,” Flammermont replied, by the same means, pointing to a little ball a few 100 kilometers away in space, which seemed to be enveloped by a reddish radiation.
The old scientist nodded his head affirmatively. Suspending himself from the metallic wire that controlled the valve, he opened it all the way, thus permitting a certain quantity of gas to escape. Immediately, the heavier balloon began to descend and the star they had to reach increased in size with a vertiginous rapidity before the Terrans marveling eyes. It seemed that they were immobile in space and that Phobos was racing to meet them.
“How long do you think the descent will last?” asked Flammermont.
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1) Page 64
