Other Worlds<br />Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries, Garrett Putman Serviss [reading diary .txt] 📗

a fraction more than 56. Fifty-six feet in a second, then, was the critical ve[Pg 151]locity with which I must be kicked off in order that I might never return. I perceived at once that the giant would be able to accomplish it. I turned and shouted up at him:

"Hold on, I have something to say to you!"

I dimly saw his mountainous face puckered into mighty wrinkles, out of which his eyes glared fiercely, and the next moment I was sailing into space. I could no more have kept a balance than the earth can stand still upon its axis. I had become a small planet myself, and, like all planets, I rotated. Yet the motion did not dizzy me, and soon I became intensely interested in the panorama of creation that was spread around me. For some time, whenever my face was turned toward the little globe of Menippe, I saw the giant, partly in profile against the sky, with his back bent and his hands upon his knees, watching me with an occasional approving nod of his big head. He looked so funny standing there on his little seven-by-nine world, like a clown on[Pg 152] a performing ball, that, despite my terrible situation, I shook my sides with laughter. There was no echo in the profundity of empty space.

Soon Menippe dwindled to a point, and I saw her inhospitable inhabitant no more. Then I watched the sun and the blazing firmament around, for there was at the same time broad day and midnight for me. The sunlight, being no longer diffused by an atmosphere, did not conceal the face of the sky, and I could see the stars shining close to the orb of day. I recognized the various planets much more easily than I had been accustomed to do, and, with a twinge at my heart, saw the earth traveling along in its distant orbit, splendid in the sunshine. I thought of my wife sitting alone by the telescope in the darkness and silence, wondering what had become of me. I asked myself, "How in the world can I ever get back there again?" Then I smiled to think of the ridiculous figure I cut, out here in space, exposed to the eyes of the universe, a rotating, gyrating, circumambulating as[Pg 153]tronomer, an animated teetotum lost in the sky. I saw no reason to hope that I should not go on thus forever, revolving around the sun until my bones, whitening among the stars, might be revealed to the superlative powers of some future telescope, and become a subject of absorbing interest, the topic of many a learned paper for the astronomers of a future age. Afterward I was comforted by the reflection that in airless space, although I might die and my body become desiccated, yet there could be no real decay; even my garments would probably last forever. The savants, after all, should never speculate on my bones.

I saw the ruddy disk of Mars, and the glinting of his icy poles, as the beautiful planet rolled far below me. "If I could only get there," I thought, "I should know what those canals of Schiaparelli are, and even if I could never return to the earth, I should doubtless meet with a warm welcome among the Martians. What a lion I should be!" I looked longingly at the distant planet, the outlines of whose conti[Pg 154]nents and seas appeared most enticing, but when I tried to propel myself in that direction I only kicked against nothingness. I groaned in desperation.

Suddenly something darted by me flying sunward; then another and another. In a minute I was surrounded by strange projectiles. Every instant I expected to be dashed in pieces by them. They sped with the velocity of lightning. Hundreds, thousands of them were all about me. My chance of not being hit was not one in a million, and yet I escaped. The sweat of terror was upon me, but I did not lose my head. "A comet has met me," I said. "These missiles are the meteoric stones of which it is composed." And now I noticed that as they rushed along collisions took place, and flashes of electricity darted from one to another. A pale luminosity dimmed the stars. I did not doubt that, as seen from the earth, the comet was already flinging the splendors of its train upon the bosom of the night.

While I was wondering at my immunity[Pg 155] amid such a rain of death-threatening bolts, I became aware that their velocity was sensibly diminishing. This fact I explained by supposing that I was drawn along with them. Notwithstanding the absence of any collision with my body, the overpowering attraction of the whole mass of meteors was overcoming my tangential force and bearing me in their direction. At first I rejoiced at this circumstance, for at any rate the comet would save me from the dreadful fate of becoming an asteroid. A little further reflection, however, showed me that I had gone from the frying-pan into the fire. The direction of my expulsion from Menippe had been such that I had fallen into an orbit that would have carried me around the sun without passing very close to the solar body. Now, being swept along by the comet, whose perihelion probably lay in the immediate neighborhood of the sun, I saw no way of escape from the frightful fate of being broiled alive. Even where I was, the untempered rays of the sun scorched me, and I knew that within two or three[Pg 156] hundred thousand miles of the solar surface the heat must be sufficient to melt the hardest rocks. I was aware that experiments with burning-glasses had sufficiently demonstrated that fact.

But perforce I resigned myself to my fate. At any rate it would the sooner be all over. In fact, I almost forgot my awful situation in the interest awakened by the phenomena of the comet. I was in the midst of its very head. I was one of its component particles. I was a meteor among a million millions of others. If I could only get back to the earth, what news could I not carry to Signor Schiaparelli and Mr. Lockyer and Dr. Bredichin about the composition of comets! But, alas! the world could never know what I now saw. Nobody on yonder gleaming earth, watching the magnificent advance of this "specter of the skies," would ever dream that there was a lost astronomer in its blazing head. I should be burned and rent to pieces amid the terrors of its perihelion passage, and my fragments would be strewn along the[Pg 157] comet's orbit, to become, in course of time, particles in a swarm of aerolites. Perchance, through the effects of some unforeseen perturbation, the earth might encounter that swarm. Thus only could I ever return to the bosom of my mother planet. I took a positive pleasure in imagining that one of my calcined bones might eventually flash for a moment, a falling star, in the atmosphere of the earth, leaving its atoms to slowly settle through the air, until finally they rested in the soil from which they had sprung.

From such reflections I was aroused by the approach of the crisis. The head of the comet had become an exceedingly uncomfortable place. The collisions among the meteors were constantly increasing in number and violence. How I escaped destruction I could not comprehend, but in fact I was unconscious of danger from that source. I had become in spirit an actual component of the clashing, roaring mass. Tremendous sparks of electricity, veritable lightning strokes, darted about me in every direction,[Pg 158] but I bore a charmed life. As the comet drew in nearer to the sun, under the terrible stress of the solar attraction, the meteors seemed to crowd closer, crashing and grinding together, while the whole mass swayed and shrieked with the uproar of a million tormented devils. The heat had become terrific. I saw stone and iron melted like snow and dissipated in steam. Stupendous jets of white-hot vapor shot upward, and, driven off by the electrical repulsion of the sun, streamed backward into the tail.

Suddenly I myself became sensible of the awful heat. It seemed without warning to have penetrated my vitals. With a yell I jerked my feet from a boiling rock and flung my arms despairingly over my head.

"You had better be careful," said my wife, "or you'll knock over the telescope."

I rubbed my eyes, shook myself, and rose.

"I must have been dreaming," I said.[Pg 159]

"I should think it was a very lively dream," she replied.

I responded after the manner of a young man newly wed.

At this moment the occultation began.[Pg 160]

CHAPTER VI JUPITER, THE GREATEST OF KNOWN WORLDS

When we are thinking of worlds, and trying to exalt the imagination with them, it is well to turn to Jupiter, for there is a planet worth pondering upon! A world thirteen hundred times as voluminous as the earth is a phenomenon calculated to make us feel somewhat as the inhabitant of a rural village does when his amazed vision ranges across the million roofs of a metropolis. Jupiter is the first of the outer and greater planets, the major, or Jovian, group. His mean diameter is 86,500 miles, and his average girth more than 270,000 miles. An inhabitant of Jupiter, in making a trip around his planet, along any great circle of the sphere, would have to travel more than 30,000 miles farther than the distance between the earth and the moon. The[Pg 161] polar compression of Jupiter, owing to his rapid rotation, amounts in the aggregate to more than 5,000 miles, the equatorial diameter being 88,200 miles and the polar diameter 83,000 miles.

Jupiter's mean distance from the sun is 483,000,000 miles, and the eccentricity of his orbit is sufficient to make this distance variable to the extent of 21,000,000 miles; but, in view of his great average distance, the consequent variation in the amount of solar light and heat received by the planet is not of serious importance.

When he is in opposition to the sun as seen from the earth Jupiter's mean distance from us is about 390,000,000 miles. His year, or period of revolution about the sun, is somewhat less than twelve of our years (11.86 years). His axis is very nearly upright to the plane of his orbit, so that, as upon Venus, there is practically no variation of seasons. Gigantic though he is in dimensions, Jupiter is the swiftest of all the planets in axial rotation. While the earth requires twenty-four hours to make[Pg 162] a complete turn, Jupiter takes less than ten hours (nine hours fifty-five minutes), and a point on his equator moves, in consequence of axial rotation, between 27,000 and 28,000 miles in an hour.

The density of the mighty planet is slight, only about one quarter of the mean density of the earth and virtually the same as that of the sun. This fact at once calls attention to a contrast between Jupiter and our globe that is even more significant than their immense difference in size. The force of gravity upon Jupiter's surface is more than two and a half times greater than upon the earth's surface (more accurately 2.65 times), so that a hundred-pound weight removed from the planet on which we live to Jupiter would there weigh 265 pounds, and an average man, similarly transported, would be oppressed with a weight of at least 400 pounds. But, as a result of the rapid rotation of the great planet, and the ellipticity of its figure, the unfortunate visitor could find a perceptible relief from his troublesome weight by seeking the planet's[Pg 163] equator, where the centrifugal tendency would remove about twenty pounds from every one hundred as compared with his weight at the poles.

If we could go to the moon, or to Mercury, Venus, or Mars, we may be certain that upon reaching any of those globes we should find ourselves upon a solid surface, probably composed of rock not unlike the rocky crust of the earth; but with Jupiter the case would evidently be very different. As already remarked, the mean density of that planet is only one quarter of the earth's density, or only one third greater than the density of water. Consequently the visitor, in attempting to set foot upon Jupiter, might find no solid supporting surface, but would be in a situation as embarrassing as that of Milton's Satan when he undertook to cross the domain of Chaos: