From the Earth to the Moon (15 page)

H
AD THE
casting operation been successful? No one could do anything more than make conjectures. There was every reason to believe it had been successful, however, since the mold had absorbed the entire mass of metal that had been melted in the furnaces. In any case, it would be impossible to make any direct verification for a long time.

When Major Rodman cast his 160,000-pound cannon, the cooling process took no less than fifteen days. How long, then, was the Gun Club’s monstrous cannon, wreathed in swirls of vapor and defended by its intense heat, going to be hidden from its admirers’ gaze? It was difficult to calculate.

Meanwhile the patience of the Gun Club members was being put to a strenuous test. But there was nothing to be done about it. J. T. Maston’s devotion nearly caused him to be roasted alive. Two weeks after the casting, an immense plume of smoke was still rising into the sky and the ground was too hot to stand on within a radius of two hundred yards around the top of Stone Hill.

Days went by, weeks followed one another. There was no way to cool the immense cylinder. It was impossible to go near it. There was nothing to do but wait, and the members of the Gun Club fretted anxiously.

“It’s already August 10!” J. T. Maston said one morning. “Less than four months till December! And we still have to take out the core, ream the bore of the cannon, and load it! We won’t be ready! We can’t even go near the cannon! Isn’t it ever going to cool? What a cruel joke it would be if it didn’t cool in time!”

The impatient secretary’s friends tried to calm him, without success. Barbicane said nothing, but his silence concealed an inner irritation. Being stopped by an obstacle that could be surmounted only by time, a formidable enemy under the circumstances, and being at the mercy of an adversary was hard for a seasoned warrior to endure.

Daily observations finally revealed a change in the state of the ground. By August 15 the rising vapors had diminished noticeably in intensity and thickness. A few days later, the ground was exhaling only a light mist, the last breath of the monster enclosed in its stone coffin. The tremors of the ground slowly died down and the circle of heat shrank. The more impatient onlookers moved closer. One day they gained ten feet, then twenty feet the next day. On August 22, Barbicane, the other members of the Gun Club, and Murchison were able to stand on the ring of iron at the top of Stone Hill. It was surely a healthy place, for it was impossible to have cold feet there.

“At last!” Barbicane exclaimed with a great sigh of satisfaction.

Work was resumed that same day. The first step was to take out the inner mold in order to free the bore of the cannon. Picks, mattocks, and drilling equipment were in motion day and night. The clayey earth and sand had been made extremely hard by the heat, but with the aid of machines, the workers overcame that mixture, which was still hot from contact with the cast-iron walls of the cannon.
The matter removed was rapidly taken away in railroad cars. The men worked so hard, Barbicane urged them on so earnestly, and his arguments were presented with such great force, in the form of dollars, that by September 3 all traces of the mold had vanished.

The reaming operation was immediately begun. The machines were installed without delay, and swiftly moved powerful reamers whose cutting edges hit into the rough surface of the cast iron. A few weeks later the inner surface of the immense tube was perfectly cylindrical and smooth.

Finally, on September 22, less than a year after Barbicane’s announcement, the enormous cannon’s verticality and inner dimensions were checked by delicate instruments and it was pronounced ready for action. There was nothing to do now but wait for the moon, and everyone was sure it would arrive on time.

J. T. Maston’s joy was boundless. He nearly had a disastrous fall when he looked down into the nine-hundred-foot tube. If it had not been for Bloomsberry’s right arm, which the worthy colonel had fortunately kept, Maston, like a new Erostratus, would have met death in the depths of the cannon.

The cannon was finished. There could no longer be any doubt that it would turn out perfectly, so on October 6 Captain Nicholl reluctantly paid his bet and Barbicane entered the sum of two thousand dollars in his books. We may assume that the captain was angry to the point of being ill. However, he still had bets of three, four, and five thousand dollars, and if he could win two of them he would still come out fairly well. But money was not his concern; his rival’s success in casting a cannon that not even fifty-foot armor could have withstood was a terrible blow to him.

Since September 23 the enclosure at Stone Hill had been open to the public. It is not difficult to imagine the influx of visitors that took place.

Swarms of people from all over the country converged on Florida. The town of Tampa had grown prodigiously during the year it had devoted entirely to the work of the Gun Club, and it now had a population of 150,000. After having swallowed up Fort Brooke in a maze of streets, it was now stretching out onto the tongue of land that divides the bay into two parts. New neighborhoods, new squares, and a whole forest of houses had sprung up on those formerly deserted shores, in the warmth of the American sun. Companies had been formed for the construction of churches, schools, and private dwellings, and in less than a year the area of the town increased tenfold.

It is well known that the Yankees are born businessmen. Wherever fate leads them, from the tropics to the far north, their business instinct must find some useful outlet. That is why people who had come to Florida entirely out of curiosity, to watch the operations of the Gun Club, let themselves be drawn into business ventures as soon as they settled down in Tampa. The ships that had been chartered for transporting workers and material had made the port an incredibly busy one. Soon other ships, of all shapes and sizes, laden with food, supplies, and merchandise, were moving across the bay. Shipowners and brokers established large offices in the town, and every day the
Shipping Gazette
reported new arrivals in the port of Tampa.

Roads multiplied around the town and, in view of the amazing growth of its population and business, it was finally connected by rail with the southern states of the Union. A railroad joined Mobile and Pensacola, the great southern naval dockyard; then, from this important point,
it went on to Tallahassee. There it met a small section of track, twenty-one miles long, by which Tallahassee was connected with Saint Marks, on the coast. This section was extended to Tampa, and on its way it revived and awakened the dead or sleeping parts of central Florida. Thus Tampa, thanks to those wonders of industry which sprang from an idea that had hatched in a man’s brain one day, was rightfully able to take on the airs of a big city. It had been nicknamed “Moon City,” and the capital of Florida went into a total eclipse, visible from all over the world.

It will now be easy to understand why the rivalry between Texas and Florida was so great, and why the Texans were so irritated when their claims were dismissed by the Gun Club’s choice. In their farsighted wisdom they had realized what a region could gain from Barbicane’s project, and the benefits that would flow from such a mighty cannon shot. Texas had lost a great business center, railroads, and a considerable growth in population. All these advantages had gone to that wretched Florida peninsula, lying like a breakwater between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Barbicane was therefore no more popular in Texas than General Santa Anna.

Meanwhile, despite its commercial and industrial ardor, Tampa was far from forgetting the Gun Club’s fascinating operations. On the contrary, its inhabitants took deep interest in the smallest details of the project and in every stroke of a pick. There was constant travel back and forth between the town and Stone Hill; it was a veritable procession, or, better still, a pilgrimage.

It could already be foreseen that on the day when the cannon was fired the spectators would number in the millions, for they were already gathering on the narrow
peninsula from all over the world. Europe was emigrating to America.

But it must be said that so far the curiosity of these many newcomers had been poorly satisfied. Many of them had counted on seeing the spectacle of the casting, and had seen only its smoke. It was very little for avid eyes, but Barbicane had refused to let anyone watch that operation. And so there was grumbling, dissatisfaction, and complaining. Barbicane was condemned; he was accused of despotism; his conduct was declared un-American. There was almost a riot around the stockade at Stone Hill. Barbicane, as we have seen, remained unshakable in his decision.

But when the cannon had been completely finished, the closed-door policy could no longer be maintained. It would have been ungracious, and even rash, to irritate public feeling. So Barbicane opened the enclosure to one and all. Prompted by his practical mind, however, he decided to make the public’s curiosity profitable.

It was a great experience merely to look at the immense cannon, but to descend into its depths was something that every American regarded as the most sublime happiness to be achieved in this world. There was not one visitor who did not want to have the pleasure of seeing that abyss of metal from the inside. Platforms hanging from a steam winch enabled them to satisfy their curiosity. The idea was wildly successful. Women, children, old people, everyone was determined to plumb the mysterious depths of the colossal cannon. The price was five dollars per person, which was by no means cheap, and yet during the two months preceding the experiment the rush of visitors enabled the Gun Club to put half a million dollars into its treasury.

Needless to say, the first men to descend into the cannon
were members of the Gun Club, an honor to which the illustrious organization was fully entitled. The solemn ceremony took place on September 25. A cage of honor lowered Barbicane, J. T. Maston, Major Elphiston, General Morgan, Colonel Bloomsberry, Murchison, and other distinguished members of the famous club. There were ten of them in all. It was still quite hot at the bottom of that long metal tube. They all smothered a little. But what joy! What elation! A table set for ten had been placed on the massive stone cube that supported the cannon, whose interior was brightly illuminated by a beam of electric light. Exquisite and numerous dishes, which seemed to descend from the sky, were successively placed on the table, and the finest French wines flowed freely during that magnificent meal served nine hundred feet underground.

The banquet was animated and even noisy. Toasts were proposed right and left. The men drank to the earth, the moon, the Gun Club, the United States, Phoebe, Diana, Selene, and the “peaceful courier of the firmament.” All those cheers, borne on the sound waves of the immense acoustic tube, reached its upper end like thunder, and the crowd gathered around Stone Hill cheered in reply, joining in spirit the ten men at the bottom of the cannon.

J. T. Maston was beside himself with joy. It would be difficult to say whether he shouted more than he gesticulated, or whether he drank more than he ate. In any case, he would not have given up his place for an empire—not even, he said, if the cannon were already loaded and primed and about to be fired, sending him into space in little pieces.

T
HE GREAT
task undertaken by the Gun Club was, practically speaking, finished, and yet two months still had to go by before the day when the projectile would be sent on its way to the moon. Because of the impatience on all sides, those two months were going to seem as long as two years. So far the newspapers had reported every detail of the operation, and their accounts had been eagerly devoured; but it now seemed likely that this “dividend of interest” distributed to the public was going to be seriously diminished, and everyone was afraid of no longer being able to get his daily ration of excitement.