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Updated: June 17, 2025
And if the man did exist was he not a madman who would have to be inclosed in a strait-waistcoat instead of in a cannon-ball? But the message was known, and Michel Ardan's proposition was already all over the States of the Union, so Barbicane had no reason for silence.
This means, used with judgment, restored Nicholl, who opened his eyes, and instantly recovering his presence of mind, seized Ardan's hand and looked around him. "And Barbicane?" said he. "Each in turn," replied Michel Ardan. "I began with you, Nicholl, because you were on the top. Now let us look to Barbicane."
During the night, from the 14th to the 15th of December, the two irreconcilable friends were busy observing the lunar disc, J. T. Maston abusing the learned Belfast as usual, who was by his side; the secretary of the Gun Club maintaining for the thousandth time that he had just seen the projectile, and adding that he could see Michel Ardan's face looking through one of the scuttles, at the same time enforcing his argument by a series of gestures which his formidable hook rendered very unpleasant.
This conclusion was a signal for Michel Ardan's hips and hurrahs. And none of the audacious boobies remembered the question that they themselves had solved in the negative. No! the moon is not inhabited; no! the moon is probably not habitable. And yet they were going to try everything to reach her. One single question remained to be solved.
When the secretary of the Gun Club heard Barbicane and Nicholl accept Michel Ardan's proposition he resolved to join them, and make a party of four. One day he asked to go. Barbicane, grieved at having to refuse, made him understand that the projectile could not carry so many passengers.
And then we shall establish projectile trains between the Earth and the Moon! Hurrah for J.T. Marston!" "Hurrah for Secretary Marston!" cried the Captain, with an enthusiasm almost equal to Ardan's. "Hurrah for my dear friend Marston!" cried Barbican, hardly less excited than his comrades.
The lunar landscapes however, though seen under these new and ever varying conditions, "hardly gained much by the change," according to Ardan's expression. On the contrary, they looked, if possible, more dreary and inhospitable than before.
After this tirade of Michel Ardan's against savants and their billions, which he delivered without stopping to take breath, they set about burying Satellite. He was to be thrown into space like sailors throw a corpse into the sea. As President Barbicane had recommended, they had to act quickly so as to lose as little air as possible.
"Your fall would be violent enough," the Captain had urged, "to splinter you like glass into a thousand fragments." "And what shall prevent me," had been Ardan's ready reply, "from breaking my fall by means of counteracting rockets suitably disposed, and let off at the proper time?" The practical utility of this idea had at once impressed Barbican.
"Yes, startling is the word for it," observed Barbican, replying to a remark of Ardan's; "and still more so when we reflect that not only are both lunar hemispheres deprived, by turns, of sun light for nearly 15 days, but that also the particular hemisphere over which we are at this moment floating is all that long night completely deprived of earth-light.
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