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

by Georges Le Faure; Henri de Graffigny

  Farenheit shook his head. “You haven’t understood me. I meant that by finding the engineer, we’d also be getting back our food stores. Now I don’t know if your stomach is mute, but mine is claiming its due with unparalleled energy. By God! 16 hours without eating!”

  The old man slapped his forehead despairingly. “My poor Selena!” he murmured. Then, to the American, he said: “Let’s get going! We need to march until our air-supply is exhausted. Let’s hope that Providence, which has not abandoned us heretofore, is still watching over us, and that we’ll find Monsieur Fricoulet before it’s too late.” With these words, he adjusted his respirol and gave the signal to depart.

  In a few bounds, they descended the side of the hill on the summit of which they had spent the night, and found themselves on a plain of strange appearance. Immense fields extended as far as the eyes could see, churned up and turned over from top to bottom, occasionally forming hillocks 12 to 15 meters high. They were reminiscent, albeit on a gigantic scale, of the waste ground in the suburbs of large towns into which detritus of every sort is tipped—but it was all deserted, sterile and uncultivated; here were neither vegetables nor animals. A profound, sinister, implacable silence covered these disordered plains with its heavy and terrifying wing.

  For several hours the Terrans struggled through the midst of this inextricable chaos. Their strength ran out, however; in the meantime, they were tormented frightfully by hunger, and above all by thirst—and into their breathless lungs, a thin and polluted air no longer transported life, but asphyxia.

  Leaning on Gontran’s arm, Selena dragged herself painfully along behind her father, who seemed not to be feeling any of the suffering endured by his companions, and marched with a light step. Bringing up the rear, stumbling at every step and complaining incessantly, was Jonathan Farenheit.

  Finally, they came out of that desolate and devastated region, and walking became less difficult. Suddenly, Gontran uttered an exclamation and stopped. Selena’s hand had jus released the arm that had been supporting her, and the young woman, sliding to the ground, remained lying there, motionless. Alarmed, Flammermont fell to his knees. Hastily unscrewing the selenium apparatus that imprisoned her, he perceived her pale and discolored face, her closed eyelids—whose long lashes cast a shadow over her cheek—her blanched lips and her slender nostrils. The contours of the immobile nostrils were slightly blackened by the commencement of asphyxia.

  “Selena!” he moaned. “Selena!”—but this tender appeal was arrested by the walls of his selenium helmet. At the same time, a thick veil descended upon his eyes. With an incredible effort, his lungs dilated to breathe in the last puff of respirable air—but in vain. The supply had run out. The respiratory bellows expanded, closed again, expended anew. His face contracted and his fingers clenched upon the ground in a gesture of agony; then he fell backwards. Even at the approach of death, his last thought was to seize his fiancée’s hand once more and to press it to his breast.

  “By God!” groaned Farenheit, who had fallen some way behind the little troop but reached the two young people in a few bounds. “They’re dead! They’re dead!” Forgetting that his respirol would stifle the sound of his voice, he set about shouting at Mikhail Ossipoff with the full force of his lungs. The latter, not knowing what was happening behind him, continued placidly on his way.

  Torn between the desire to alert the old man and a perfectly understandable reluctance to leave Gontran and Selena alone, the American stayed where he was, hesitating over the two bodies extended at his feet. All of a sudden, he saw Mikhail Ossipoff stop, totter as he put his hands to his head, then beat the air with his arms and spin around several times before finally falling down.

  Farenheit thought that he was going mad, and was abruptly gripped by the sensation of the frightful solitude in which he found himself, on this unknown world, between the corpses of his companions. In a movement of despair, he raised his eyes to the heavens to beg for divine mercy.

  As if in response to his prayer, a black dot appeared in the east, visibly increasing in size, seemingly heading toward Phobos. “My God!” murmured the American, his heart wrung by an inexpressible anguish. “May that be help that Your generosity and benevolence is sending us!” As he finished this speech, he found incredible difficulty breathing, and his lungs produced a sort of hiss as they collapsed, empty.

  By God! he thought. That’s how these unfortunates died—and what I’ll die of too…lack of air. He looked back at the black dot and his eyes, already obscured by a light mist, thought they could distinguish, in the midst of the solar radiation, a strange apparatus moving through space with a magical rapidity.

  “As long as they see us!” he murmured. “A few minutes’ delay could cost all four of us our lives.”

  An idea came to him then—which was scarcely his habit, but the instinct of self-preservation let a light into his thick suet-merchant’s skull. Rapidly, he unbuttoned his vestment and unrolled a long, wide strip of flannel that was wrapped around his body in the manner of our zouaves—except that, by an eccentricity that could only be entertained by a man as excessively full of patriotic pride as Farenheit, this girdle was colored blue and sprinkled with stars, as was the flag of the United States.

  He waved this makeshift flag desperately, at arm’s length, exhausting the strength that the asphyxia had left him in one last effort. Then his mind was illuminated, as if by lightning; he suddenly remembered the adventure that had overtaken him a few hours earlier, by virtue of his incredible lightness.

  He bent his legs and put all his remaining strength and courage into straightening them, launching himself into space like an arrow, dragging his long girdle behind him. With the little lucidity that his frightful agony left him, he had thought of doing that, not so much to reach the savior dot that was advancing towards Phobos as, at least, to be more easily visible to it.

  Had he calculated correctly? That was what he could not know, for, suddenly defeated in his struggle against asphyxia, having exhausted the last gasp of air contained in his respirol, he closed his eyes and opened his mouth wide in one last intake of breath. Then his convulsed limbs stiffened in the immobility of death—and the body of Jonathan Farenheit, rolled up in the folds of the starry girdle as if by a shroud, began its slow and almost imperceptible fall upon Phobos.

  “By God!” said the American, sitting up on his elbows and rubbing his eyes energetically. “What a terrible dream I’ve just had!”

  “A bad dream! Not at all, my dear Mr. Farenheit—you’ve very nearly gone west!”

  At the sound of this voice, Farenheit shivered and rubbed his eyes harder. “I’m dreaming now, then—for I’m damned if that isn’t Monsieur Fricoulet’s voice that I thought I heard.”

  “Don’t think, but be certain, my dear Mr. Farenheit—for it’s certainly Monsieur Fricoulet in the flesh and bone who’s speaking to you.” So saying, the engineer—smiling mischievously, as was his habit—shook Farenheit’s hand energetically.

  The latter leapt down from the seat on which he was lying and looked at the young man with eyes full of bewilderment. “My word, it’s true!” he murmured, as if he had needed the testimony of his eyes in order to believe the engineer’s words. Then, after a moment of astounded stupor, the American looked around, and his face reflected the most profound astonishment. “Where am I, then?” he said.

  “In an apparatus belonging to the Martians.”

  “Then the black dot that I saw in space…”

  “The black dot was me, racing to your rescue. Thanks to your ingenious idea, I had no need to devote myself to a long and dangerous search to find you.”

  Farenheit’s features darkened with an anxious frown, and he asked: “What about the others? What’s become of them? Did you manage to bring them back to life, as you did me?” As he posed that question, the American’s voice had a slight tremor.

  “Would you see me in such good spirits, Mr. Farenheit,” Fricoulet replied, a trifle dryly, “if anyt
hing had happened to our friends?” Extending his hand toward a dark corner that had escaped the American’s investigations, he said: “There’s Monsieur de Flammermont, for one. He’s resting at the moment, for he suffered more than the others from the crisis, and even I was afraid that I might not be able to bring him back to life. Fortunately, thanks to his strong constitution, I’ve snatched him back from Pluto’s somber realm.”

  “What about Monsieur Ossipoff and his daughter?”

  “They’re in the next room, where it’s necessary that I pay them a visit now.”

  “I’ll accompany you, if you’ll allow it.”

  “Unfortunately, I can’t allow it. For one thing, you’re very tired and a little nap will do you the world of good; for another, being forced to absent myself, I don’t want to leave Gontran all alone.”

  The American stifled a formidable yawn. “By God!” he murmured, “I’m as hungry as all the devils in hell!”

  Fricoulet went to a shelf, on which stood a little flask. He picked it up and uncorked it. “Here,” he said, holding it out to Farenheit. “Drink a mouthful of this—but only one mouthful, or you’ll give yourself indigestion.”

  The American thought that the engineer was about to laugh, but the other spoke very seriously as he added: “It’s in this liquid form that the Martians absorb the substance necessary to the support of their muscular strength. It’s the quintessential product, raised to the highest power, of one of the aliments in use on the planet.”

  Farenheit looked suspiciously at the flask he was holding in his hand. “These people aren’t gourmets,” he said. “By this method, they deprive themselves of one of greatest pleasures there is on the surface of our world—the pleasure of the table.”

  Fricoulet shook his head. “These people have but one passion, albeit a mad and excessive one, pushed it its ultimate limits: curiosity. To extract from Nature the greatest possible number of secrets—that’s the goal to which, from generation to generation, over the centuries, their efforts are devoted.” He uttered a little mocking laugh and continued: “Ah, Mr. Farenheit, despite your pragmatic outlook on life, how far distant you are from these people, and how antiquated your famous motto Time is money sounds beside theirs! Which is to say that, compared to the Martians, the most agile, hard-working, restless Yankee is nothing but a dormouse…or a snail.”

  “Hang on! Hang on!”

  “For them, time is so precious that they scarcely rest. As for meals, they do without, replacing them by what you hold in your hand—just time enough to uncork the flask, to bend the elbow, and it’s done…to go more quickly, in fact, they’ve refined the liquid to its quintessence. Try a little.”

  The American said no more; he was convinced—and, deep down, a trifle humiliated. The activity of the citizens of the United States had been surpassed. He put the flask to his lips and swallowed a mouthful of it contents. He pulled a face and gave it back to Fricoulet.

  “I’ll put it up here,” said the engineer, replacing it on the shelf. “If Gontran wakes up before I come back, make him drink the same, for he too must have prodigious hunger pangs.” With that, the young man headed for the far end of the room.

  He lifted the curtain and found himself face to face with Mikhail Ossipoff. The old man immediately asked, anxiously: “How is Monsieur de Flammermont?”

  “Have no fear, he’s resting—but I don’t see Mademoiselle Selena.”

  “Here I am,” said the young woman, appearing in the doorway. Then, putting her hands to her abdomen with a painful expression, she moaned; “My God, I’m hungry!”

  The engineer nodded his head in an understanding manner and, as he had done with Farenheit, made Selena and her father drink a mouthful of the contents of a flask that he took from his pocket. “Now that you’re fed…” he began.

  Ossipoff did not let him continue. “Before anything else,” he said, “tell me where we are.”

  “On the national balloon that maintains a service between Mars and its satellites.”

  The old man started in amazement. “Really!” he said. “It’s a balloon? But I see nothing that resembles one.”

  The engineer smiled, took out his notebook, and rapidly scribbled a sketch on a blank page, which he showed to Ossipoff.

  The old scientist’s faced reflected the most profound bewilderment.

  “Certainly,” declared Farenheit, “this is an apparatus that will have the same effect on you that it had on me at first—this species of large cylinder defies all the ideas of aerial navigation that we have on Earth…and yet, do you recall the numerous models affecting the form of a cigar that you might have seen at various expositions? There’s some analogy between them and the apparatus that’s carrying us.”

  “That’s quite possible,” murmured Ossipoff.

  “I’ll resume my explanation,” said the engineer. “The cylinder that you see there, which appears to me to be made of a sort of metallic fabric, measures no less than 60 meters in length by 12 in diameter. Its various sections are traversed along its entire length by a tube, in which there’s an axis around which the apparatus—driven by an electric motor placed in the gondola—turns at a rate of between four and five cycles per second. What you see there, on the external surface of the apparatus, is a propeller 25 meters in diameter, making three complete turns, which gives it a span of 50 meters. The result is that the apparatus advances at about two meters a second, or about seven kilometers and hour.”

  Mikhail Ossipoff was literally stunned, as if hypnotized by Fricoulet’s drawing.

  Selena whose ignorance sheltered her from excessive astonishment, and who had, in any case, had a surfeit of the extraordinary, asked the engineer: “Have we left Phobos, then?”

  “Yes, Mademoiselle—about three hours ago…with the consequence that we’ll arrive on Mars in about five hours.

  The young woman clapped her hands. “We’ve left Phobos! What luck! We’re no longer running the risk of seeing those frightful creatures!” Then she interrupted herself abruptly. “That’s right,” she said to Fricoulet, “you don’t understand—you haven’t seen them. Can you imagine that we landed, not on the actual ground of the satellite, but on a sort of gigantic cage in which hideous monsters were enclosed?”

  The engineer burst out laughing. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I know what it is—or, at least, I think so. If I’ve understood what was explained to me, Phobos is nothing but a penitentiary colony: a sort of celestial convict prison, where the Martians send those among them whose vices render them dangerous to society.”

  “But what’s the purpose of the net?”

  “To prevent the prisoners from flying to the planet. Being equipped with wings, that probably wouldn’t be impossible for them.”

  “In that case,” cried Selena, her hands meeting in a gesture of fright, “those winged monsters with the sinister appearance are the Martians?”

  “Yes, and despite the disgust and terror that they appear to inspire in you, Mademoiselle, these monsters seem to me to have arrived at a degree of perfection much superior to that of our world. It won’t be long, in any case, before you have proof of it—but it’s probable that the types glimpsed by you through the latticework are the sum of all the moral and physical ugliness of the globe.”

  “But how can they live in air so rarefied?” the young woman went on. “Without your miraculous appearance, we’d have been done for.”

  “Your reasoning might be false, Mademoiselle, in the sense that the lungs of these folk are doubtless less demanding than ours. On the other hand, it might perfectly well be that they’re sent to Phobos precisely because of the rarefaction of the air, in order to relieve them, gradually and without suffering, of all muscular strength. The asphyxia that renders the convicts apathetic and devoid of energy might be a punishment like any other.”

  “My dear Monsieur Fricoulet,” said Ossipoff at that moment, “Would it be possible to make a tour of this vehicle?”

  “Certainly—but for tha
t, you’ll have to put on your respirols.”

  “What?” said Selena. “It’s necessary to imprison ourselves in those helmets again?”

  “Undoubtedly—but this time there’s nothing to fear, for we have our supply of solidified oxygen with us. Then again, your father’s curiosity will be satisfied in a few minutes.” As they went to put on their respirols, the engineer added: “One last recommendation: be as sober as possible in your movements, for a single slightly-exaggerated gesture might throw you overboard—and this time, you’d be irredeemably lost.” With these words he climbed a small ladder, followed by Ossipoff and Selena. A few moments later, all three found themselves standing on a sort of deck serving as the roof of a lodgment, from which and around which ran a metal border.

  Above their heads, turning with vertiginous rapidity, the gigantic cylinder extended its enormous moving mass, which surrounded the propeller that appeared to them as a diaphanous outline. In a forward direction, the gondola narrowed like the prow of a ship and the balloon was elongated into a point, cleaving through space almost soundlessly. It was there, by courtesy of a little ladder about 30 meters high, that the Terrans went into the tube in the middle of which the central axis rotated; then, having passed along its entire length, they re-emerged at the rear, near the rudder—a vast circular surface that could be tilted at will in any direction.

  Once there, Ossipoff put himself in communication with Fricoulet. “But this apparatus can nether move not steer by itself…it must have a crew?”

  The engineer signaled to his friends to follow him and went inside through a narrow opening pierced in the stern of the gondola, hermetically sealed by a sort of lid. Once here, all three took off their respirols and Fricoulet then invited Ossipoff to admire the engine-room, in which incomprehensible machines—bearing no resemblance to any that the old man had seen on Earth—were manufacturing, without heat or sound, the electricity that activated the motors in order to make the gigantic cylindrical balloon rotate on its axis and spin its helical aerofoils.