“Are you in a great hurry?” asked the professor coolly.
The Jew was about to speak again, when Captain Servadac interposed: “Allow me to say that, in somewhat more scientific terms, I was about to ask you the same question. Did I not understand you to say that, as the consequence of the collision, the character of the comet’s orbit has been changed?”
“You did, sir.”
“Did you imply that the orbit has ceased to be a parabola?”
“Just so.”
“Is it then an hyperbola? and are we to be carried on far and away into remote distance, and never, never to return?”
“I did not say an hyperbola.”
“And is it not?”
“It is not.”
“Then it must be an ellipse?”
“Yes.”
“And does its plane coincide with the plane of the earth?”
“Yes.”
“Then it must be a periodic comet?”
“It is.”
Servadac involuntarily raised a ringing shout of joy that echoed again along the gallery.
“Yes,” continued the professor, “Gallia is a periodic comet, and allowing for the perturbations to which it is liable from the attraction of Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, it will return to the earth again in two years precisely.”
“You mean that in two years after the first shock, Gallia will meet the earth at the same point as they met before?” said Lieutenant Procope.
“I am afraid so,” said Rosette.
“Why afraid?”
“Because we are doing exceedingly well as we are.” The professor stamped his foot upon the ground, by way of emphasis, and added, “If I had my will, Gallia should never return to the earth again!”
CHAPTER IV. A REVISED CALENDAR
All previous hypotheses, then, were now forgotten in the presence of the one great fact that Gallia was a comet and gravitating through remote solar regions. Captain Servadac became aware that the huge disc that had been looming through the clouds after the shock was the form of the retreating earth, to the proximity of which the one high tide they had experienced was also to be attributed.
As to the fulfillment of the professor’s prediction of an ultimate return to the terrestrial sphere, that was a point on which it must be owned that the captain, after the first flush of his excitement was over, was not without many misgivings.
The next day or two were spent in providing for the accommodation of the new comer. Fortunately his desires were very moderate; he seemed to live among the stars, and as long as he was well provided with coffee, he cared little for luxuries, and paid little or no regard to the ingenuity with which all the internal arrangements of Nina’s Hive had been devised. Anxious to show all proper respect to his former tutor, Servadac proposed to leave the most comfortable apartment of the place at his disposal; but the professor resolutely declined to occupy it, saying that what he required was a small chamber, no matter how small, provided that it was elevated and secluded, which he could use as an observatory and where he might prosecute his studies without disturbance. A general search was instituted, and before long they were lucky enough to find, about a hundred feet above the central grotto, a small recess or reduct hollowed, as it were, in the mountain side, which would exactly answer their purpose. It contained room enough for a bed, a table, an arm-chair, a chest of drawers, and, what was of still more consequence, for the indispensable telescope. One small stream of lava, an off-shoot of the great torrent, sufficed to warm the apartment enough.
In these retired quarters the astronomer took up his abode. It was on all hands acknowledged to be advisable to let him go on entirely in his own way. His meals were taken to him at stated intervals; he slept but little; carried on his calculations by day, his observations by night, and very rarely made his appearance amongst the rest of the little community.
The cold now became very intense, the thermometer registering 30 degrees F. below zero. The mercury, however, never exhibited any of those fluctuations that are ever and again to be observed in variable climates, but continued slowly and steadily to fall, and in all probability would continue to do so until it reached the normal temperature of the regions of outlying space.