The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (24 page)

We installed ourselves as comfortably as possible. The Selenites had had the goodness to bring along the provisions stored in the shell, and so we were able to restore ourselves. Michel Ardan concocted one of his secret recipes, which he washed down with a glass of brandy as dessert.

On pouring the beverage, several drops fell on to the little table, made from a Selenite carapace. The drops drove themselves into it, bubbling furiously, melting all underneath them with the alacrity of boiling water poured on a sugar-cube.

“By God!” Barbicane swore religiously, “Alcohol attacks lunar chitin!”

“It’s like the effect of add,” I confirmed, probing the holes.

“Or rather a powerful solvent. This could certainly be of use, if the need arose.”

We decided to keep a litre of brandy on us at all times.

While my companions were slumbering, replete, I lost myself in contemplating the landscape which could be seen through a window, or, rather, a peep-hole.

I will not enter into detail of the tableaux which opened up as the successive strata passed rapidly before my eyes, for our journey sometimes took the form of a vertiginous fall. What I did see were fossils of monsters, each more exotic than the last, each more gigantic, such as the half-mile-long skull which served as a transit station at the centre of the Moon. Sometimes, a transparent tube replaced the rocky passage, and we plunged into huge lakes which filled immense caverns, furrowed by enormous machines with paddles. We passed through greenhouses full of giant cacti, empty, misty spaces of fearful dimensions; we passed cylindrical, bottomless wells where hoist-Selenites criss-crossed each other, using their abdomens like Montgolfiers.

Thanks to the speed of the machine, it only took us eleven hours and fifty minutes to traverse the Moon from side to side, taking account of the delays caused by the periodic changing of tracks.

On arrival at the terminus, Krrak’ack approached a kind of telegraph-machine, upon which he tapped, using his antennae. He was replied by a crackling. After five minutes of conversation, he turned his blank face towards us.

“The Great Planner is ready to receive you. He can only grant you a little time, as many tasks across the whole Moon monopolise his attention.”

“Oh, what it is to be a potentate!” Ardan joked.

A new living carriage, similar to the first, came to pick us up, then deposited us in a monumental amphitheatre, opposite a kind of temple with pagodas. It took me a moment to realize that these seeming pagodas were in reality bundles of metal wires, which stretched in their millions from the interior of the tall building. A buzzing arose like a hive of bees.

As soon as we had penetrated the temple’s interior, a hallowed silence fell.

Without the slightest consultation with each other, we had anticipated a Selenite with a huge head and an atrophied body. But it was not such a prodigious super-being that reigned over life on the Moon.

Nothing we already knew could have prepared us for the confrontation. The feeling that enveloped me when I saw the Great Planner (or at least a part of it) was a singular emotion, so rare that it has no name: a mixture of fear and ecstasy, of repugnance and of marvelling at the unknown. (Later, Michel Ardan confided to me that it gave him the feeling of an Iroquois at the court of Louis XIV).

The temple was no more than a wall buzzing with insects, minuscule Selenites ranged side by side, legs interlaced like the mesh of a net. The wall rose into darkness, and seemed to have no end. The first image that came to mind was that of a mechanical calculator, such as had existed for two centuries. This one was not mechanical, but organic-electrical. Each cog, each belt, each relay was replaced by a miniature Selenite whose eight or ten legs were connected to those of his fellow creatures. Individually, each would have had no more intelligence than a fly, but they had found the means to apply themselves in sequence. Each time a piece of information was transmitted to one of them, its abdomen lit up like a firefly. The wall blinked with a thousand fires.

“See their Great Planner,” cried Barbicane, accompanying his exclamation with an all-embracing sweep of the arm. “Not an individual, but a colony-organism, composed of a collective brain spread out before us . . . A philosophical calculator, sheltered from all passions of the flesh, and thus able to resolve all the problems of an evolved society. Is it not amazing?”

“You mean to say that this creature exists with the aim of producing thought, as a plant produces roots and leaves? You are right, Barbicane, that is the marvel.”

Michel Ardan did not share our opinion, and Krrak’ack did not give him the chance to develop his own. The creature tapped several words into the temple telegraph, and received a reply which he translated straight away. “The Great Planner has decided to keep you among us, to ensure our safety.”

Temperance was not one of Michel Ardan’s cardinal virtues. Upon hearing the verdict of the philosophical calculator, he swelled his cheeks with a glassful of brandy. In a single movement, he leapt in the air and sprayed a Selenite-relay, which immediately began to melt and shrivel up, a network of organs running away below it. The sudden recurrence of activity on the part of the fireflies revealed that the blow had struck home.

“What are you doing!” cried Krrak’ack, in a deluge of maddened whistling, “You are destroying the memory of the Great Planner . . .”

Barbicane had understood his friend’s action. He set himself in front of Krrak’ack, with a series of appeasing gestures. Then he asked for his speech to be translated word for word.

“The Great Planner has everything to fear if he keeps us by his side. Our saliva can destroy the substance that forms your carapaces. We will be a constant menace to the community. Alternatively, if he lets us go, he has our word as gentlemen that we will never speak a word of what we have seen on the Moon.”

There remained fifty gallons of brandy with which to carry out our threat.

The philosophical calculator’s reply only took several seconds to reach us, and it relieved everything.

“He has decided that you will leave in two hours. The workers have just been notified.”

“Two hours!” repeated Barbicane, “But that’s impossible; it took us almost ten hours to reach you, and our shell is still on the other side of the Moon! How will you set us
en route
in such a short time?”

I suggested that the Selenites could re-launch the shell into orbit, and make it land on our side of the Moon. The Planner, however, had a different idea, which reflected their industrial genius: it was intending to construct a shell exactly like the
Columbiad.
No, not intending: the orders had been given, and they were already working on it. The original had been taken apart several minutes ago, and the plans had been transmitted by telegraph to the different units of production, which were at that very moment working on it.

Meanwhile, our host questioned us on the most wide-ranging subjects, from the pronunciation of certain slang-terms to our favourite colours!

“Has not a creature as ingenious and all-powerful as yourself ever had the wish to send an expedition to Earth?” Barbicane wondered.

The Great Planner told us that in the course of a past that was not counted in years, but in geological eras, the Selenites had visited the large blue planet. At that time it was covered by luxuriant forests, bereft of intelligent life except for a kind of octopus, very cunning, but with a limited consciousness. These had not survived the globe’s glaciation. The Selenites, crushed by a gravity six times stronger than their own, had been incapable of leaving and had perished. The Earth had been declared a forbidden planet. Since then, only the large telescopes continued their observation.

Michel Ardan, always the practical one, asked how many Selenites there were on the Moon. The Great Planner kept us waiting for several seconds, then: “At this second, there are 1,387,180,000,512 of us.”

Michel opened his mouth, then closed it, subdued.

I asked him about the formation of the Moon, which no specialist had as yet been able to demonstrate in any definitive way. The perfection of the Selenite civilization suggested the ancient nature of the globe. Once more the infinite carpet of fireflies began to shine in every direction.

“Long before the creation of the Planner,” Krrak’ack translated, “the surface of the Moon was hot, and our ancestors frolicked in the sun. Then the Earth came into being, and our atmosphere began to disappear, breathed in by the new planet. We had to take refuge in the sublunar grottoes. Our survival depended upon the strength of our industry, so our ancestors developed the machines that surround us. And they created myself.”

The idea that in times past the Moon’s air had been captured — stolen in fact! — by the Earth, affected us all.

“It is we,” said Michel Ardan, cast into the deepest depths of sadness, “we who have forced these brave Selenites to leave their welcoming sun and live like hermits or moles. Shame upon you, Earth, and all your generations!”

Time had run out; we had to leave. The cosmos has its laws, stronger than those of men or of Selenites. The new shell was ready, the provisions aboard. A cannon had just been loaded, one sufficiently powerful to propel us beyond the Moon’s field of gravity. The fuel mixture was not of guncotton, or some other derivative of pyroxilite, but a gas solution whose combustion produced nothing other than water!

We made our farewells to the Great Planner, then the Selenite-carriage set us down in an amphitheatre. In its centre was a steel pole which rose to a vaulted ceiling. An opening yawned at its base. A Selenite showed us into the interior.

“But it’s our shell,” cried Michel Ardan.

Slight differences, in the grain of the leather, or the greater fineness of the porthole-glass, witnessed the fact that it was a replica. Before the door closed upon us, I saluted our guide, Krrak’ack, with a pang. I knew that upon our departure his job as translator would cease, and quite naturally, his existence would too. It was out of the question to take him with us: we had promised that our voyage would leave no trace.

The Selenite who had shown us into the shell informed us that there remained twelve minutes before the shot that would fire us into space.

We seated ourselves, and Michel Ardan sighed, “Farewell, Moon,”

“Yes, farewell . . .”

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 . . .

5 “The Moon had revealed all its Secrets”

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.