All Around the Moon by Jules Verne (universal ebook reader txt) 📖

on the subject was removed by the position gradually, but decidedly, assumed by the Projectile. Its base was turning away slowly and steadily from the Moon, and pointing surely and unmistakably towards the Earth.

Barbican had been long carefully noticing this modification, but without being able to explain it. That the Projectile should withdraw a long distance from the Moon and still be her satellite, he could understand; but, being her satellite, why not present towards her its heaviest segment, as the Moon does towards the Earth? That was the point which he could not readily clear up.

By carefully noting its path, he thought he could see that the Projectile, though now decidedly leaving the Moon, still followed a curve exactly analogous to that by which it had approached her. It must therefore be describing a very elongated ellipse, which might possibly extend even to the neutral point where the lunar and terrestrial attractions were mutually overcome.

With this surmise of Barbican's, his companions appeared rather disposed to agree, though, of course, it gave rise to new questions.

"Suppose we reach this dead point," asked Ardan; "what then is to become of us?"

"Can't tell!" was Barbican's unsatisfactory reply.

"But you can form a few hypotheses?"

"Yes, two!"

"Let us have them."

"The velocity will be either sufficient to carry us past the dead point, or it will not: sufficient, we shall keep on, just as we are now, gravitating forever around the Moon—"

—"Hypothesis number two will have at least one point in its favor," interrupted as usual the incorrigible Ardan; "it can't be worse than hypothesis number one!"

—"Insufficient," continued Barbican, laying down the law, "we shall rest forever motionless on the dead point of the mutually neutralizing attractions."

"A pleasant prospect!" observed Ardan: "from the worst possible to no better! Isn't it, Barbican?"

"Nothing to say," was Barbican's only reply.

"Have you nothing to say either, Captain?" asked Ardan, beginning to be a little vexed at the apparent apathy of his companions.

"Nothing whatever," replied M'Nicholl, giving point to his words by a despairing shake of his head.

"You don't mean surely that we're going to sit here, like bumps on a log, doing nothing until it will be too late to attempt anything?"

"Nothing whatever can be done," said Barbican gloomily. "It is vain to struggle against the impossible."

"Impossible! Where did you get that word? I thought the American schoolboys had cut it out of their dictionaries!"

"That must have been since my time," said Barbican smiling grimly.

"It still sticks in a few old copies anyhow," drawled M'Nicholl drily, as he carefully wiped his glasses.

"Well! it has no business here!" said Ardan. "What! A pair of live Yankees and a Frenchman, of the nineteenth century too, recoil before an old fashioned word that hardly scared our grandfathers!"

"What can we do?"

"Correct the movement that's now running away with us!"

"Correct it?"

"Certainly, correct it! or modify it! or clap brakes on it! or take some advantage of it that will be in our favor! What matters the exact term so you comprehend me?"

"Easy talking!"

"As easy doing!"

"Doing what? Doing how?"

"The what, and the how, is your business, not mine! What kind of an artillery man is he who can't master his bullets? The gunner who cannot command his own gun should be rammed into it head foremost himself and blown from its mouth! A nice pair of savants you are! There you sit as helpless as a couple of babies, after having inveigled me—"

"Inveigled!!" cried Barbican and M'Nicholl starting to their feet in an instant; "WHAT!!!"

"Come, come!" went on Ardan, not giving his indignant friends time to utter a syllable; "I don't want any recrimination! I'm not the one to complain! I'll even let up a little if you consider the expression too strong! I'll even withdraw it altogether, and assert that the trip delights me! that the Projectile is a thing after my own heart! that I was never in better spirits than at the present moment! I don't complain, I only appeal to your own good sense, and call upon you with all my voice to do everything possible, so that we may go somewhere, since it appears we can't get to the Moon!"

"But that's exactly what we want to do ourselves, friend Ardan," said Barbican, endeavoring to give an example of calmness to the impatient M'Nicholl; "the only trouble is that we have not the means to do it."

"Can't we modify the Projectile's movement?"

"No."

"Nor diminish its velocity?"

"No."

"Not even by lightening it, as a heavily laden ship is lightened, by throwing cargo overboard?"

"What can we throw overboard? We have no ballast like balloon-men."

"I should like to know," interrupted M'Nicholl, "what would be the good of throwing anything at all overboard. Any one with a particle of common sense in his head, can see that the lightened Projectile should only move the quicker!"

"Slower, you mean," said Ardan.

"Quicker, I mean," replied the Captain.

"Neither quicker nor slower, dear friends," interposed Barbican, desirous to stop a quarrel; "we are floating, you know, in an absolute void, where specific gravity never counts."

"Well then, my friends," said Ardan in a resigned tone that he evidently endeavored to render calm, "since the worst is come to the worst, there is but one thing left for us to do!"

"What's that?" said the Captain, getting ready to combat some new piece of nonsense.

"To take our breakfast!" said the Frenchman curtly.

It was a resource he had often fallen back on in difficult conjunctures. Nor did it fail him now.

Though it was not a project that claimed to affect either the velocity or the direction of the Projectile, still, as it was eminently practicable and not only unattended by no inconvenience on the one hand but evidently fraught with many advantages on the other, it met with decided and instantaneous success. It was rather an early hour for breakfast, two o'clock in the morning, yet the meal was keenly relished. Ardan served it up in charming style and crowned the dessert with a few bottles of a wine especially selected for the occasion from his own private stock. It was a Tokay Imperial of 1863, the genuine Essenz, from Prince Esterhazy's own wine cellar, and the best brain stimulant and brain clearer in the world, as every connoisseur knows.

It was near four o'clock in the morning when our travellers, now well fortified physically and morally, once more resumed their observations with renewed courage and determination, and with a system of recording really perfect in its arrangements.

Around the Projectile, they could still see floating most of the objects that had been dropped out of the window. This convinced them that, during their revolution around the Moon, they had not passed through any atmosphere; had anything of the kind been encountered, it would have revealed its presence by its retarding effect on the different objects that now followed close in the wake of the Projectile. One or two that were missing had been probably struck and carried off by a fragment of the exploded bolide.

Of the Earth nothing as yet could be seen. She was only one day Old, having been New the previous evening, and two days were still to elapse before her crescent would be sufficiently cleared of the solar rays to be capable of performing her ordinary duty of serving as a time-piece for the Selenites. For, as the reflecting reader need hardly be reminded, since she rotates with perfect regularity on her axis, she can make such rotations visible to the Selenites by bringing some particular point on her surface once every twenty-four hours directly over the same lunar meridian.

Towards the Moon, the view though far less distinct, was still almost as dazzling as ever. The radiant Queen of Night still glittered in all her splendor in the midst of the starry host, whose pure white light seemed to borrow only additional purity and silvery whiteness from the gorgeous contrast. On her disc, the "seas" were already beginning to assume the ashy tint so well known to us on Earth, but the rest of her surface sparkled with all its former radiation, Tycho glowing like a sun in the midst of the general resplendescence.

Barbican attempted in vain to obtain even a tolerable approximation of the velocity at which the Projectile was now moving. He had to content himself with the knowledge that it was diminishing at a uniform rate—of which indeed a little reflection on a well known law of Dynamics readily convinced him. He had not much difficulty even in explaining the matter to his friends.

"Once admitting," said he, "the Projectile to describe an orbit round the Moon, that orbit must of necessity be an ellipse. Every moving body circulating regularly around another, describes an ellipse. Science has proved this incontestably. The satellites describe ellipses around the planets, the planets around the Sun, the Sun himself describes an ellipse around the unknown star that serves as a pivot for our whole solar system. How can our Baltimore Gun Club Projectile then escape the universal law?

"Now what is the consequence of this law? If the orbit were a circle, the satellite would always preserve the same distance from its primary, and its velocity should therefore be constant. But the orbit being an ellipse, and the attracting body always occupying one of the foci, the satellite must evidently lie nearer to this focus in one part of its orbit than in another. The Earth when nearest to the Sun, is in her perihelion; when most distant, in her aphelion. The Moon, with regard to the Earth, is similarly in her perigee, and her apogee. Analogous expressions denoting the relations of the Projectile towards the Moon, would be periselene and aposelene. At its aposelene the Projectile's velocity would have reached its minimum; at the periselene, its maximum. As it is to the former point that we are now moving, clearly the velocity must keep on diminishing until that point is reached. Then, if it does not die out altogether, it must spring up again, and even accelerate as it reapproaches the Moon. Now the great trouble is this: If the Aposelenetic point should coincide with the point of lunar attraction, our velocity must certainly become nil, and the Projectile must remain relatively motionless forever!"

"What do you mean by 'relatively motionless'?" asked M'Nicholl, who was carefully studying the situation.

"I mean, of course, not absolutely motionless," answered Barbican; "absolute immobility is, as you are well aware, altogether impossible, but motionless with regard to the Earth and the—"

"By Mahomet's jackass!" interrupted Ardan hastily, "I must say we're a precious set of imbéciles!"

"I don't deny it, dear friend," said Barbican quietly, notwithstanding the unceremonious interruption; "but why do you say so just now?"

"Because though we are possessed of the power of retarding the velocity that takes us from the Moon, we have never thought of employing it!"

"What do you mean?"

"Do you forget the rockets?"

"It's a fact!" cried M'Nicholl. "How have we forgotten them?"

"I'm sure I can't tell," answered Barbican, "unless, perhaps, because we had too many other things to think about. Your thought, my dear friend, is a most happy one, and, of course, we shall utilize it."

"When? How soon?"

"At the first favorable opportunity, not sooner. For you can see for yourselves, dear friends," he went on explaining, "that with the present obliquity of the Projectile with regard to the lunar disc, a discharge of our rockets would be more likely to send us away from the Moon than towards her. Of course, you are both still desirous of reaching the Moon?"

"Most emphatically so!"

"Then by reserving our rockets for the last chance, we may possibly get there after all. In consequence of some force, to me utterly inexplicable, the Projectile still seems disposed to turn its base towards the Earth. In fact, it is likely enough that at the neutral point its cone will point vertically to the Moon. That being the moment when its velocity will most probably be nil, it will also be the moment for us to discharge our rockets, and the possibility is that we may force a direct fall on the lunar disc."

"Good!" cried Ardan, clapping hands.

"Why didn't we execute this grand manoeuvre the first time we reached the neutral point?" asked M'Nicholl a little crustily.

"It would be useless," answered Barbican; "the Projectile's velocity at that time, as you no doubt remember, not only did not need rockets, but was actually too great to be affected by them."

"True!" chimed in Ardan; "a wind of four miles an hour is very little use to a steamer going ten."

"That assertion," cried M'Nicholl, "I am rather dis—"

—"Dear friends," interposed Barbican, his pale face beaming and his clear voice ringing with the new excitement; "let us just now waste no time in mere words. We have one more chance, perhaps a great one. Let us not throw it away! We have been on the brink of despair—"

—"Beyond it!" cried Ardan.

—"But I now begin to see a possibility,