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Updated: May 22, 2025
On the following day Barbicane, fearing that indiscreet questions might be put to Michel Ardan, was desirous of reducing the number of the audience to a few of the initiated, his own colleagues for instance. He might as well have tried to check the Falls of Niagara! he was compelled, therefore, to give up the idea, and let his new friend run the chances of a public conference.
"Very well," continued Michel Ardan, "the Scientific Commission assembled in the projectile of the Gun Club, after having founded their argument on facts recently observed, decide unanimously upon the question of the habitability of the moon `No! the moon is not habitable."
"But if you arrive smashed to pieces," replied J.T. Maston, "you will be as incomplete as I." "Certainly," answered Michel Ardan, "but we shall not arrive in pieces." In fact, a preparatory experiment, tried on the 18th of October, had been attended with the best results, and given rise to the most legitimate hopes.
The weather was magnificent. Despite the approach of winter, the sun shone brightly, and bathed in its radiant light that earth which three of its denizens were about to abandon for a new world. How many persons lost their rest on the night which preceded this long-expected day! All hearts beat with disquietude, save only the heart of Michel Ardan.
In their anxiety regarding their own and their friend's recovery, they had never thought of asking such a question. His words recalled them at once to a full sense of their situation. "Moving? Blessed if I can tell!" said Ardan, still speaking French. "We may be lying fifty feet deep in a Florida marsh, for all I know," observed M'Nicholl.
Besides he could not have done it in the midst of that compact crowd. There he held on in the front row with crossed arms, glaring at President Barbicane. The shouts of the immense crowd continued at their highest pitch throughout this triumphant march. Michel Ardan took it all with evident pleasure. His face gleamed with delight.
A discussion arose on this subject, and Michel Ardan, always ready with an explanation, gave it as his opinion that the projectile, held by the lunar attraction, would end by falling on the surface of the terrestrial globe like an aerolite.
Her absence made Ardan say "And the moon? Is she going to fail us?" "Do not frighten yourself," answered Barbicane, "Our spheroid is at her post, but we cannot see her from this side. We must open the opposite light-port." At the very moment when Barbicane was going to abandon one window to set clear the opposite one, his attention was attracted by the approach of a shining object.
"Oh! that's all very well!" cried Ardan, with an ironical smile. "You great x+y men think you settle everything by uttering the word Algebra!" "Ardan," asked Barbican, "do you think people could beat iron without a hammer, or turn up furrows without a plough?" "Hardly."
As to the upper sides of the projectile, they were lined with a thick wadding of leather, put upon the best steel springs as supple as watch-springs. The escape-pipes hidden under this wadding were not even seen. All imaginable precautions for deadening the first shock having been taken, Michel Ardan said they must be made of "very bad stuff" to be crushed.
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