The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (61 page)

“Apple orchards over
there,” said Barbicane, indicating a section over to one side. “Pear trees over
there, orange groves down here.”

“We’ll need grasslands
for cattle,” Captain Nicholl enthusiastically joined in, while Fiona insisted
there also be room for the purely aesthetic, “The Selenite garden must be a
place of beauty, a new Eden if you like.”

“Roses, gardenias, et
cetera, over there,” said J. T. Maston. “Corn and wheatfields here.” He looked
up from his fevered sketching. “But how do we water all this vegetation?”

“India rubber,” said
Evangelina, speaking up for the first time.

“What?” said Nicholl.

“Children’s toy balloons
made from the sap of the India rubber tree,” Fiona explained. “Every shipment
to the moon will include a number of these balloons filled with water . . .

thanks to a suggestion
from one of our members who caught her grandson throwing a water-filled balloon
at the neighbours’ cat.”

“A garden on the moon,”
Mr Barbicane said wistfully. “If only it were possible.”

Fiona’s eyebrows shot up
in surprise. Even Captain Nicholl seemed a little startled.

“But it is possible,”
Fiona protested, sifting through her notes. “There’s much more I haven’t gone
into yet. Bees, for example. I didn’t mention the bees because they don’t come
in until a later stage. And there’ll be worms. Lots of worms . . .”

“My dear Mrs Wicke, I am
sure that your idea is more than possible in theory, it’s just impossible in
practice.” “But . . .”

“The one thing you have
not considered is: how on earth do you expect to send all these missiles to the
moon?”

“But you’ve done it
before,” Fiona sputtered. “The Columbiad cannon . . .”

“The cannon to which you
refer fired one projectile containing three men, two dogs, and a handful of chickens
towards the moon on one occasion more than twenty years ago. Firing that one —
comparatively lightweight — missile, one time only, required four hundred
thousand pounds of fulminating cotton. What you are proposing would seem to
involve the firing of an immense number of much heavier projectiles on a daily
basis over a period of many years, possibly a century or more. I doubt there is
that much explosive in the world, and even if there were, the cost would be
prohibitive.”

Fiona scoured her pages
of notes, searching for an answer.

“But the cannon still
exists,” said Evangelina.

Barbicane shook his
head. “Melted down, years ago.”

“And Moon City?” Fiona
asked, referring to the Florida base the Gun Club had constructed for that one,
long-ago, trip to the moon.

“Long since reclaimed by
jungle,” said Barbicane. “There was no reason to maintain it.”

Fiona turned an
imploring gaze to Captain Nicholl.

The Captain responded
with a sympathetic shrug.

“What is going on here?”
J. T. Maston demanded, slamming his good fist down on the table. “When did
Impey Barbicane ever fail to rise to a challenge? When did Captain Nicholl ever
withdraw from the prospect of difficulty with a shrug? These are not the men I
know! The men I know do not retreat from problems, they thrive on them!”

“Calm down, Maston,”
said Mr Barbicane. “I merely said it was impossible. I never said we wouldn’t
find a way to do it.”

That evening, Evangelina
sat down at her roll-top desk to compose an overseas cablegram.

Scorbitt House

New Park, Baltimore

Dear Monsieur Ardan,

We have never met, but
my husband has always said he considers you the best of men, and I thought you
would want to know what is happening here in Baltimore . . .

Over the next few weeks,
a company was formed, workers were hired, and rubbish collection contracts were
signed with cities up and down the eastern coast of America. A team was
dispatched to the Florida wilderness to begin the rebuilding of Moon City, the
ladies of the gardening society worked on refining their designs for the
Selenite garden, Barbicane and Nicholl attacked the problem of the explosives,
and J. T. Maston spent his days and nights at the chalkboard, covering it in
strange arithmetical symbols that meant nothing to Evangelina, but which he
assured her were absolutely vital to the project at hand.

And the following
cablegram arrived:

Le Plessis-Brion

France

Dear Madame Maston,

Thought my travelling
days were over, but your news has rekindled the only passion still burning in
this old man’s heart. Pull of Selene too strong for this Endymion, cannot stay
away. Passage booked on steamer Nereus, arriving Baltimore 7th September. Tell
Barbicane: explosives problem solved. Explanation on arrival.

Ardan

P.S. Sorry husband did
not notice new hat. Am sure it was very lovely.

The ladies of the New
Park Gardening Society gathered along a railing at the dockside, the new-style
S-bend corsets beneath their gaily-coloured outfits contorting their spines
into the latest fashionable silhouette: torso thrust forward as if leaning into
a wind. Evangelina stood near the front of the group, feeling rather splendid
in her ensemble of leg of-mutton-sleeved dress, white gloves, lace-trimmed
parasol, and hat bedecked with silk flowers.

A short distance away
from the women, a committee of Gun Club members waited in loose formation, the
men almost indistinguishable from one another in their uniform attire of dark
frock coats and stovepipe hats.

At long last, the ship’s
passengers began to disembark.

The ladies twittered in
excitement while the men went through a ritual of solemnly clearing their
throats, straightening their backs, and tugging at their waistcoats.

A man emerged from the
crowd, heading straight for the line of waiting ladies. Tall and
broad-shouldered, with weathered skin and a shock of white hair as thick and
wild as a lion’s mane, he wore no coat or hat, and was dressed more like a
farmhand than a gentleman in his open-necked shirt and trousers of the coarsest
material. Evangelina asked herself if this could possibly be the person she was
here to greet, but her doubts were soon dispelled as the men surged forward to
shake the oddly-dressed stranger’s hand and slap him on the back. “Is that him?”
she asked Prunella Benton.

Prunella nodded,
apparently too overcome to speak.

And then before she knew
it, the Frenchman was standing before her, taking her gloved hand in his large,
callused paw and raising it to his lips. “My dear Madame Maston, it was your
siren call that lured this simple man of the soil away from his little cabbage
patch. And now I am, and shall ever remain, your devoted admirer,” he said, his
dark eyes gazing at her with an intensity that made her feel, for that one
moment, as if she were the only woman in the world.

“I . . . I . . .” she
said.

“Your husband is the
most fortunate of men,” Monsieur Ardan told her before moving on to give his
full attention to the next woman down the line.

A forty-ish bearded man
in a brown wool suit approached the group, followed by at least a dozen
stevedores wheeling an assortment of trunks and crates.

“Ah, there you are at
last!” Ardan exclaimed, striding over to the man. He threw an arm around his
shoulders and introduced him to the assembled party. “My travelling companion,
Professor Stefan Halstein of the University of Christiania.”

The professor bowed to
the assemblage before turning to say something to Ardan.

“My friend the professor
begs your indulgence as he speaks little English, and asks me to present you
with his gift of Norwegian pine cones,” Ardan explained, indicating one of the
crates, “so there may be a little bit of Norway on the moon. While I . . .” he
went on, touching the crate beside it, “have brought you cabbage seeds from
France.”

The group started to
applaud, but Ardan raised a hand for silence. “And herein,” he said, denoting
the remaining crates and trunks with a sweeping gesture, “lies the solution to
the problem of explosives.”

“What is it?” everyone
demanded to know.

The Frenchman
once
again
signalled silence. “My friend the professor is a pioneer in the field of
electromagnetism. Later we will organise a demonstration.”

Evangelina sat in a box
at the Baltimore Opera House, which Monsieur Ardan and the Norwegian professor
had hired for their demonstration. A row of thick wooden planks and metal
sheets hung suspended from the ceiling above the central aisle, the seats below
them cordoned off. On the stage, Michel Ardan and the professor stood either
side of a tiny cannon connected to an array of Leyden jars. Professor Halstein
spoke in French; Ardan translated his words into English.

Ardan said something
about coils of wire and electromagnetic forces of attraction and repulsion —
none of which she understood — then held up a piece of metal so small she could
barely see it. “Please keep in mind, the apparatus we are using today is merely
a miniature model expressly designed for this indoor demonstration, to fire a
projectile barely one pound in weight. The full-sized version of the professor’s
electromagnetic cannon will be not be powered by Leyden jars, but by a
steam-driven dynamo the size of this room, and will be capable of firing
missiles weighing up to two tonnes, with almost no sound, and no recoil.” He
then went on to talk about the row of targets hanging from the ceiling. There
were thirty of them, fifteen metal and fifteen wood, none less than five inches
thick.

Ardan handed the piece
of metal back to the professor. The professor popped it down the barrel, then
threw a switch. Something inside the cannon began to glow bright red; the only
sound was a low, deep hum. The professor threw the switch a second time. There
was a sudden sound of metal hitting wood, then metal, then wood, then metal,
and then everything went silent once more. The targets were lowered from the
ceiling. Every single one had a big round hole through the middle.

“But where is the
projectile?” someone asked. A search was instigated, which continued until one
of the men noticed a hole in the wall at the back of the upper balcony.
Everyone hurried upstairs and into the lobby beyond the balcony, where they
found a hole punched through to the outside of the building. One of the men
looked through and reported seeing a broken window in the top floor of a
building across the street.

“Tell the professor we
need to get started immediately,” Mr Barbicane instructed Ardan.

It was after 11 p.m.,
but thanks to the array of dynamos thrumming in the night, the crowded streets
of Moon City were awash with light. Even the tall cannon looming over the
rooftops at the edge of town had been bathed in light for the occasion, and it
was to the cannon that everyone was heading. It was the 31st of December, 1899,
and the first Earth-to-Moon garbage missile was scheduled for deployment at the
stroke of midnight.

Evangelina and J. T.
joined the throng making their way past rows of vast warehouses filled with
vats of percolating garbage, to the specially-erected stands where the Mastons
were to have seats of honour alongside Fiona Wicke, Monsieur Ardan, and the
head of the worm department. By 11.30, everyone was seated and glasses of
champagne had been distributed to those in the seats of honour.

Monsieur Ardan dabbed at
his eyes as the cannon was levered into position. “Oh, to be a piece of rubbish
inside that capsule!”

At one minute to
midnight, Professor Halstein placed a hand on the switch, and at midnight
exactly, he pulled the switch down. There was a brief dimming of the lights
combined with a whooshing sound, and then someone shouted, “There it goes, the
first of thousands!”

Mr Barbicane raised his
glass of champagne. “To the moon, and a new century.”

“To the moon, and a new
beginning,” Fiona said, clinking her glass against his.

Monsieur Ardan and the
head of the worm department drank a toast to “the lovely Selene, soon to turn
green,” then joined in a chorus of Auld Lang Sine. Evangelina turned to face
her husband. “Just think about it, J. T., a hundred years from now, people will
be living on the moon.”

J. T Maston turned his
face up to the blackness into which the projectile had vanished, his mind
already racing into the future. “When we get home,” he said, “I really must dig
out that ornamental pond.”

“Then, Mr Fuller, you
pretend that a woman’s personality will never be suitable for the making of
mathematical or experimental science progress?”