Round the Moon, Jules Verne [e novels to read online .txt] 📗

the atmosphere I have only to calculate.”

The captain, like a man used to overcome all difficulties, began to calculate with frightful rapidity. Divisions and multiplications grew under his fingers. Figures dotted the page. Barbicane followed him with his eyes, whilst Michel Ardan compressed a coming headache with his two hands.

“Well, what do you make it?” asked Barbicane after several minutes’ silence.

“I make it 11,051 metres in the first second.”

“What do you say?” said Barbicane, starting.

“Eleven thousand and fifty-one metres.”

“Malediction!” cried the president with a gesture of despair.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Michel Ardan, much surprised.

“The matter! why if at this moment the velocity was already diminished one-third by friction, the initial speed ought to have been⁠—”

“Sixteen thousand five hundred and seventy-six metres!” answered Nicholl.

“But the Cambridge Observatory declared that 11,000 metres were enough at departure, and our bullet started with that velocity only!”

“Well?” asked Nicholl.

“Why it was not enough!”

“No.”

“We shall not reach the neutral point.”

“The devil!”

“We shall not even go half way!”

“Nom d’un boulet!” exclaimed Michel Ardan, jumping up as if the projectile were on the point of striking against the terrestrial globe.

“And we shall fall back upon the earth!”

V The Temperature of Space

This revelation acted like a thunderbolt. Who could have expected such an error in calculation? Barbicane would not believe it. Nicholl went over the figures again. They were correct. The formula which had established them could not be mistrusted, and, when verified, the initial velocity of 16,576 metres, necessary for attaining the neutral point, was found quite right.

The three friends looked at one another in silence. No one thought about breakfast after that. Barbicane, with set teeth, contracted brow, and fists convulsively closed, looked through the port-light. Nicholl folded his arms and examined his calculations. Michel Ardan murmured⁠—

“That’s just like savants! That’s the way they always do! I would give twenty pistoles to fall upon the Cambridge Observatory and crush it, with all its stupid staff inside!”

All at once the captain made a reflection which struck Barbicane at once.

“Why,” said he, “it is seven o’clock in the morning, so we have been thirty-two hours on the road. We have come more than half way, and we are not falling yet that I know of!”

Barbicane did not answer, but after a rapid glance at the captain he took a compass, which he used to measure the angular distance of the terrestrial globe. Then through the lower port-light he made a very exact observation from the apparent immobility of the projectile. Then rising and wiping the perspiration from his brow, he put down some figures upon paper. Nicholl saw that the president wished to find out from the length of the terrestrial diameter the distance of the bullet from the earth. He looked at him anxiously.

“No!” cried Barbicane in a few minutes’ time, “we are not falling! We are already more than 50,000 leagues from the earth! We have passed the point the projectile ought to have stopped at if its speed had been only 11,000 metres at our departure! We are still ascending!”

“That is evident,” answered Nicholl; “so we must conclude that our initial velocity, under the propulsion of the 400,000 lbs. of guncotton, was greater than the 11,000 metres. I can now explain to myself why we met with the second satellite, that gravitates at more than 2,000 leagues from the earth, in less than thirteen minutes.”

“That explanation is so much the more probable,” added Barbicane, “because by throwing out the water in our movable partitions the projectile was made considerably lighter all at once.”

“That is true,” said Nicholl.

“Ah, my brave Nicholl,” cried Barbicane, “we are saved!”

“Very well then,” answered Michel Ardan tranquilly, “as we are saved, let us have breakfast.”

Nicholl was not mistaken. The initial speed had happily been greater than that indicated by the Cambridge Observatory, but the Cambridge Observatory had no less been mistaken.

The travellers, recovered from their false alarm, sat down to table and breakfasted merrily. Though they ate much they talked more. Their confidence was greater after the “algebra incident.”

“Why should we not succeed?” repeated Michel Ardan. “Why should we not arrive? We are on the road; there are no obstacles before us, and no stones on our route. It is free⁠—freer than that of a ship that has to struggle with the sea, or a balloon with the wind against it! Now if a ship can go where it pleases, or a balloon ascend where it pleases, why should not our projectile reach the goal it was aimed at?”

“It will reach it,” said Barbicane.

“If only to honour the American nation,” added Michel Ardan, “the only nation capable of making such an enterprise succeed⁠—the only one that could have produced a President Barbicane! Ah! now I think of it, now that all our anxieties are over, what will become of us? We shall be as dull as stagnant water.”

Barbicane and Nicholl made gestures of repudiation.

“But I foresaw this, my friends,” resumed Michel Ardan. “You have only to say the word. I have chess, backgammon, cards, and dominoes at your disposition. We only want a billiard-table!”

“What?” asked Barbicane, “did you bring such trifles as those?”

“Certainly,” answered Michel; “not only for our amusement, but also in the praiseworthy intention of bestowing them upon Selenite inns.”

“My friend,” said Barbicane, “if the moon is inhabited its inhabitants appeared some thousands of years before those of the earth, for it cannot be doubted that the moon is older than the earth. If, therefore, the Selenites have existed for thousands of centuries⁠—if their brains are organised like that of human beings⁠—they have invented all that we have invented, already, and even what we shall only invent in the lapse of centuries. They will have nothing to learn from us, and we shall have everything to learn from them.”

“What!” answered Michel, “do you think they have had artists like Phidias, Michaelangelo, or Raphael?

“Yes.”

“Poets like Homer, Virgil, Milton, Lamartine, and Hugo?”

“I am sure of it.”

“Philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant?”

“I have