The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (25 page)

“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

COLUMBIAD  by Stephen Baxter

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!

When I got the gist of this, I laughed out loud. I dashed off a quick note instructing Newnes not to pass on to me any further communications from the same source.

Fifth Day. Two Hundred and Ninety Seven Thousand Leagues.

Through my lenticular glass scuttles, the Earth now appears about the size of a Full Moon. Only the right half of the terrestrial globe is illuminated by the Sun. I can still discern clouds, and the differentiation of ocean blue from the land’s brown, and the glare of ice at the poles.

Some distance from the Earth a luminous disklet is visible, aping the Earth’s waxing phase. It is the Moon, following the Earth on its path around the Sun. It is to my regret that the configuration of my orbit
was
such that I passed no closer to the satellite than several hundred thousand leagues.

The projectile is extraordinarily convenient. I have only to turn a tap and I am furnished with fire and light by means of gas, which is stored in a reservoir at a pressure of several atmospheres.

My food is meat and vegetables and fruit, hydraulically compressed to the smallest dimensions; and I have carried a quantity of brandy and water. My atmosphere is maintained by means of chlorate of potassium and caustic potash: the former, when heated, is transformed into chloride of potassium, and the oxygen thus liberated replaces that which I have consumed; and the potash, when shaken, extracts from the air the carbonic acid placed there by the combustion of elements of my blood.

Thus, in inter-planetary space, I am as comfortable as if I were in the smoking lounge of the Gun Club itself, in Union Square, Baltimore!

Michel Ardan was perhaps seventy-five. He was of large build, but stoop-shouldered. He sported luxuriant side-whiskers

and moustache; his shock of untamed hair, once evidently red, was largely a mass of grey. His eyes were startling: habitually he held them wide open, so that a rim of white appeared above each iris, and his gaze was clear but vague, as if he suffered from near-sight.

He paced about my living room, his open collar flapping. Even at his advanced age Ardan was a vigorous, restless man, and my home, Spade House — spacious though it is — seemed to confine him like. a cage. I feared besides that his booming Gallic voice must awaken Gip. Therefore I invited Ardan to walk with me in the garden; in the open air I fancied he might not seem quite so out of scale.

The house, built on the Kent coast near Sandgate, is open to a vista of the sea. The day was brisk, lightly overcast. Ardan showed interest in none of this, however.

He fixed me with those wild eyes. “You have not replied to my letters.”

“I had them stopped.”

“I have been forced to travel here unannounced. Sir, I have come here to beg your help.”

I already regretted allowing him into my home — of course I did! — but some combination of his earnestness, and the intriguing content of those unsolicited missives, had temporarily overwhelmed me. Now, though, I stood square on my lawn, and held up the newest copy of his letter.

“Then perhaps, M. Ardan, you might explain what you mean by transmitting such romantic nonsense in my direction.”

He barked laughter. “Romantic it may be. Nonsense — never!”

“Then you claim this business of ‘propagating emissions’ is the plain and honest truth, do you?”

“Of course. It is a system of communication devised for their purposes by Impey Barbicane and Col. Maston. They seized on the electro-magnetic discoveries of James Maxwell with the vigour and inventiveness typical of Americans — for America is indeed the Land of the Future, is it not?”

Of that, I was not so certain.

“Col. Maston had built a breed of mirror — but of wires, do you see? — in the shape of that geometric figure called a hyperbola — no, forgive me! — a
parabola,
for this figure, I am assured, collects all impinging waves into a single point, thus making it possible to detect the weakest —”

“Enough.” I was scarcely qualified to judge the technical possibilities of such a hypothetical apparatus. And besides, the inclusion of apparently authentic detail is a technique I have used in my own romances, to persuade the reader to accept the most outrageous fictive lies. I had no intention of being deceived by it myself!

“These missives of yours — received by Maston — purport to be from the inhabitant of a projectile, beyond the terrestrial atmosphere. And this projectile, you claim, was launched into space from the mouth of an immense cannon, the
Columbiad,
embedded in a Florida hill-side . . .”

“That is so.”

“But, my poor M. Ardan, you must understand that these are no more than the elements of a fiction, written three decades ago by M. Verne — your countryman — with whom I, myself, have corresponded —”