“There is nothing to answer,” said Nicholl.
“Is there nothing to try?”
“No,” answered Barbicane. “Do you pretend to fight against
the impossible?”
“Why not? Do one Frenchman and two Americans shrink from such
a word?”
“But what would you do?”
“Subdue this motion which is bearing us away.”
“Subdue it?”
“Yes,” continued Michel, getting animated, “or else alter it,
and employ it to the accomplishment of our own ends.”
“And how?”
“That is your affair. If artillerymen are not masters of their
projectile they are not artillerymen. If the projectile is to
command the gunner, we had better ram the gunner into the gun.
My faith! fine savants! who do not know what is to become of us
after inducing me—-”
“Inducing you!” cried Barbicane and Nicholl. “Inducing you!
What do you mean by that?”
“No recrimination,” said Michel. “I do not complain, the trip
has pleased me, and the projectile agrees with me; but let us do
all that is humanly possible to do the fall somewhere, even if
only on the moon.”
“We ask no better, my worthy Michel,” replied Barbicane, “but
means fail us.”
“We cannot alter the motion of the projectile?”
“No.”
“Nor diminish its speed?”
“No.”
“Not even by lightening it, as they lighten an overloaded vessel?”
“What would you throw out?” said Nicholl. “We have no ballast
on board; and indeed it seems to me that if lightened it would
go much quicker.”
“Slower.”
“Quicker.”
“Neither slower nor quicker,” said Barbicane, wishing to make
his two friends agree; “for we float is space, and must no
longer consider specific weight.”
“Very well,” cried Michel Ardan in a decided voice; “then their
remains but one thing to do.”
“What is it?” asked Nicholl.
“Breakfast,” answered the cool, audacious Frenchman, who always
brought up this solution at the most difficult juncture.
In any case, if this operation had no influence on the
projectile’s course, it could at least be tried without
inconvenience, and even with success from a stomachic point
of view. Certainly Michel had none but good ideas.
They breakfasted then at two in the morning; the hour mattered little.
Michel served his usual repast, crowned by a glorious bottle drawn
from his private cellar. If ideas did not crowd on their brains,
we must despair of the Chambertin of 1853. The repast finished,
observation began again. Around the projectile, at an invariable
distance, were the objects which had been thrown out. Evidently, in
its translatory motion round the moon, it had not passed through
any atmosphere, for the specific weight of these different objects
would have checked their relative speed.
On the side of the terrestrial sphere nothing was to be seen.
The earth was but a day old, having been new the night before at
twelve; and two days must elapse before its crescent, freed from
the solar rays, would serve as a clock to the Selenites, as in
its rotary movement each of its points after twenty-four hours
repasses the same lunar meridian.
On the moon’s side the sight was different; the orb shone in all
her splendor amid innumerable constellations, whose purity could
not be troubled by her rays. On the disc, the plains were
already returning to the dark tint which is seen from the earth.
The other part of the nimbus remained brilliant, and in the midst
of this general brilliancy Tycho shone prominently like a sun.
Barbicane had no means of estimating the projectile’s speed, but
reasoning showed that it must uniformly decrease, according to
the laws of mechanical reasoning. Having admitted that the
projectile was describing an orbit around the moon, this orbit
must necessarily be elliptical; science proves that it must be so.
No motive body circulating round an attracting body fails in
this law. Every orbit described in space is elliptical. And why
should the projectile of the Gun Club escape this natural arrangement?
In elliptical orbits, the attracting body always occupies one of
the foci; so that at one moment the satellite is nearer, and at
another farther from the orb around which it gravitates. When the
earth is nearest the sun she is in her perihelion; and in her
aphelion at the farthest point. Speaking of the moon, she is