The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (27 page)

Barbicane expressed the
despair of a geographer who will never have the opportunity to chart the Moon.

“Others will come, who
will do it,” he said suddenly. And, in a flight of fancy little worthy of a
member of the
Geography and Cartography Society,
he described the legions
of geographers, bedecked with instruments, drawing-blocks and
pencils, surveying the craters, the dead seas and the great plains, and tracing
the very latitudes and longitudes of the surface.

Other regrets gnawed at
me. We had not had the time to ask whether other human expeditions had taken
place before ours.

But I consoled myself:
others would come, of that I was certain. Meanwhile, Barbicane soliloquised on
the possibility of extracting some of the fireflies to make individual boxes of
thought that could be carried on one’s back . . . Then he wondered at the
eventual possibility of constructing a brain greater than the Great Planner: a
genial machine, to govern not only the Earth, but the rest of the universe as
well!

One final thought came
to me, or rather, a terrible doubt: what if the Great Planner had lied to us,
and was only claiming to be returning us to Earth? What if, on the contrary, it
was preparing to send us to Mars, or even to the extremities of the solar
system, into infinite space?

And if . . .

The return voyage was
undertaken in a stupefied state, as though opiate vapours had been mixed with
the air in the Reiset & Regnaut apparatus that ensured its renewal. The
Moon had revealed all its secrets to us. For our good, or for bad? When I asked
Barbicane, he gave me the following reply, surprising for a savant: “The
Persians were convinced of the sacred nature of the sea. Why should the same
not be true of space, that ocean of ether that surrounds stars and galaxies?
Have we not defiled a temple, just like the ignorant traveller who enters a
mosque in Baghdad without taking off his shoes?”

As everyone knows, we
splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, close to the American corvette,
Susquehanna,
at 1.17 a.m.

during the night of
11th-12th December, at 20° 7’ latitude north, and 41° 37’ longitude west. The
recovery, and our triumphant return to the United States, prevented us from
consulting each other. On the train we took to tour the states of the Union, we
discussed the version of our tale that would be best to present to the world.
Barbicane was the last to be reasonable on the subject of keeping the secret of
the Selenites.

“And why should we not
tell the truth!” exclaimed this man, to whom a lie was anathema.

“All the same,” began
Michel Ardan, “We promised . . .” It was I who produced the decisive argument.

“Our country has just
come to the end of a war, hardly months ago. You and I, who contributed to it,
know what carnage it was for our citizens. The revelation of a celestial life,
within reach of a cannon’s shot, would overturn the balance of power and would
hurl the globe into a conflagration of unheard-of proportions, into which all
states would be drawn. We Americans would incessantly strive to annexe this new
continent of the air and to display the star-spangled flag on its highest
summit, to make it the thirty-seventh state of the Union!”

“Don’t forget,” Michel
Ardan added, “that many nations, from the greatest to the most humble, offered
financial assistance which gave them the right to intervene in affairs
concerning their satellite. France, for example, contributed a sum of 1,253,930
francs.”

I dealt the fatal blow.

“If we reveal the truth
world-wide, nothing short of a world war will break out. A war of the worlds, I
tell you.”

Barbicane’s tall frame
slumped. He tugged at his moustaches without even noticing it. In a solemn
gesture, he laid his left hand on Ardan’s shoulder, his right hand on mine.

“You are a thousand
times right, my friends. It will never be said that I threw the world into
chaos. The role of science is to create order, not to destroy it. Our story
will not only have the aim of astounding the general populace, it must content
the most eminent scholars of Cambridge Observatory, and even our companions of
the Gun Club, General Morgan, Major Elphiston, and the unavoidable, in terms of
curiosity as much as girth, J.T. Maston.”

“Bah,” Michel Ardan
concluded, quite appropriately. “Aren’t scholars, more than anyone else,
subject to excesses of fantasy?”

And so it was done. In
interviews for the
Tribune,
the
New York Herald,
the
Times
and
the
American Review, we each
in turn repeated the same story: that the
Columbiad
had been thrown off its course by an asteroid, and consequently had circled
the Moon without being able to land.

The European reviews
were not content. Upon returning to his country, Michel Ardan had to reply to a
flurry of questions from the young, but already famous, Camille Flammarion for
his review
L’Astronomie,
and from Tissandier for
La Nature. La Revue
des deux mondes, Cosmos
and
Le Siècle
had broadcast preparations for
the voyage. They harassed Ardan as far as his favourite retreat — an
extravagant house made of sheets of glass. Weary of finding himself always in
the spotlight, he seized the first excuse to go to the East Indies, where he
stayed for more than a year and a half.

He returned to see us
for one last time at the Gun Club in Baltimore in February 1867, with important
news: Monsieur Jules Verne was preparing to take to sea aboard the greatest
(and most uncomfortable) ship in the world, the
Great Eastern.
He wished
to rendezvous with us in New York the following month, in the hope of revealing
to his readers the outcome of our adventure.

Michel Ardan spoke to us
with the wonderful enthusiasm which was usual for him. “This Verne, whose tales
of voyages to worlds known and unknown I have read with unparalleled pleasure,
is just the man for the job. His
From the Earth to the Moon,
published
two years ago after his correspondence with us, is a model of exactitude.”

Barbicane and I agreed
in concert.

“In addition, he
possesses all the qualities of an adventure novelist, far from the vogue for
character studies and their intimate atmospheres. He mixes fiction with an
unparalleled contemporary realism, and turns the sight of a steam engine into a
painting by Raphaël or Corrège. I foretell an immense and wonderful work,
completely scientific. Like Edgar Allan Poe, this magician has his head in the
stars, but in contrast to that fabulist, his feet remain firmly on the ground.
He will produce a convincing version of our story for our contemporaries.”

The motion was carried
unanimously. By means of a cable sent by the brand-new transatlantic telegraph,
Monsieur Verne provided us with a manuscript copy of
Around the Moon,
finished
in February 1869, which appeared in the
Journal des Débats,
then as a
volume two years later. This sealed our promise to the Selenites.

Until just a week ago, I
did not know there would be an epilogue to our incredible odyssey. But a book
lent to me by a friend revived memories which I had believed buried forever.
This book, dating from the previous year, was titled
The First Men in the
Moon.
Authored by a certain H.G. Wells and, to my taste, very pessimistic,
it recounted the journey of two men in a vehicle impervious to the pull of
gravity, then their encounter with Selenites living in the interior of the
Moon. The coincidences
vis-a-vis
the anatomy of the Selenites and their
society are so numerous that in spite of the opinion of Jules Verne, who
classed Wells as a purely imaginative writer (as if he knew!), I wondered
whether this Englishman, born a year after our journey, had not himself carried
out a voyage comparable to ours, perhaps by other means.

Reading his book
convinced me, after long deliberation, to set down the true story of Barbicane’s
Voyage . . . and thereby liberate my conscience.

Now my hand feels
lighter, and I can end my days on this Earth in peace.

Captain S. Nicholl,
Philadelphia,

26 December, 1902.

Translated from the French by
Finn Sinclair

The initial detonation
was the most severe. I was pushed into my couch by a recoil that felt as if it
should splay apart my ribs. The noise was extraordinary, and the projectile
rattled so vigorously that my head was thrown from side to side.

And then followed, in
perfect sequence, the subsidiary detonations of those smaller masses of
gun-cotton lodged in the walls of the cannon. One after another these
barrel-sized charges played vapour against the base of the projectile,
accelerating it further, and the recoil pressed with ever increasing force.

I fear that my
consciousness departed from me, for some unmeasured interval.

When I came to myself,
the noise and oscillation had gone. My head swam, as if I had imbibed heavily
of Ardan’s wine butts, and my lungs ached as they pulled at the air.

But, when I pushed at
the couch under me, I drifted slowly upwards, as if I were buoyant in some
fluid which had flooded the projectile.

I was exultant. Once
again my
Columbiad
had not failed me!

My name is Impey
Barbicane, and what follows — if there are ears to hear — is an account of my
second venture beyond the limits of the terrestrial atmosphere: that is, the
first voyage to Mars.

My Lunar romance
received favourable reviews on its London publication by G. Newnes, and I was
pleased to place it with an American publisher and in the Colonies. Sales were
depressed, however, due to unrest over the war with the Boers. And there was
that little business of the protests by M. Verne at the “unscientific” nature
of my device of gravitational opacity; but I was able to point to flaws in
Verne’s work, and to the verification of certain aspects of my book by experts
in astronomy, astronomical physics, and, the like.

All of this engaged my
attention but little, however. With the birth of Gip, and the publication of my
series of futurological predictions in
The Fortnightly Review,
I had
matters of a more personal nature to attend to, as well as of greater global
significance.

I was done with
inter-planetary travel!

It was with surprise and
some annoyance, therefore, that I found myself the recipient, via Newnes, of a
series of missives from Paris, penned — in an undisciplined hand — by one
Michel Ardan. This evident eccentric expressed admiration for my work and begged
me to place close attention to the material he enclosed, which I should find “of
the most extraordinary interest and confluence with [my] own writings”.

As is my custom, I had
little hesitation in disposing of this correspondence without troubling to read
it.

But M. Ardan continued
to pepper me with further fat volleys of paper.

At last, in an idle
hour, while Jane nursed Gip upstairs, I leafed through Ardan’s dense pages. And
I have to confess that I found my imagination — or the juvenile underside of
it! — pricked.

Ardan’s enclosure
purported to be a record made by .a Colonel Maston, of Baltimore in the United
States, over the. years 1872 to 1873 — that is, some twenty-eight years ago.
This Maston, now dead, claimed to have built an apparatus which had detected “propagating
electro-magnetic emissions’: a phenomenon first described by James Clerk
Maxwell, and related, apparently, to the more recent wireless-
telegraphy demonstrations of Marconi. If this were not enough,
Maston also claimed that the “emissions” were in fact signals, encoded after
the fashion of a telegraph message.

And these signals — said
Maston and Ardan — had emanated from a source
beyond the terrestrial
atmosphere:
from a space voyager, en route to Mars!