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Updated: May 9, 2025
"We're not!" answered M'Nicholl, also hardly speaking above his breath. "The base of the Projectile is still turned away as far as ever from the Moon!" Barbican, who had been looking out of the window, now turned hastily towards his companions. His face frightened them. He was deadly pale; his eyes stared, and his lips were painfully contracted. "We are falling!" he shrieked huskily.
Whence proceeded this strange intoxication whose consequences might have proved so disastrous? A little forgetfulness on Ardan's part had done the whole mischief, but fortunately M'Nicholl was able to remedy it in time. After a regular fainting spell several minutes long, the Captain was the first man to return to consciousness and the full recovery of his intellectual faculties.
"Very well," continued Barbican. "Now m prime over m, that is the ratio of the Moon's mass to that of the Earth is about the 1/81. g gravity being at Florida about 32-1/4 feet, of course g x r must be how much, Captain?" "38,465 miles," replied M'Nicholl. "Now then?" asked Ardan.
At these details, Ardan's imagination became unusually excited and of course it was not without some result. It even happened that he hit on an idea that had already suggested itself to Schmidt of Athens. "Why not consider them," he asked, "to be the simple phenomena of vegetation?" "What do you mean?" asked Barbican. "Rows of sugar cane?" suggested M'Nicholl with a snicker.
Brighter, but smaller than we have ever seen them before! We have left the Earth and the Earth's atmosphere far behind us!" "Hurrah! Hurrah!" cried M'Nicholl and Ardan, feeling as if electric shocks were coursing through them, though they could see nothing, looking down from the side light, but the blackest and profoundest obscurity.
"You mean it's all the Moon's fault, don't you, in setting herself like a screen between us and the Sun?" "No, I don't!" cried Ardan, not at all soothed by his friend's patronizing tone, and sticking like a man to his first assertion right or wrong. "I know what I say! It will be all the Sun's fault if we use up our gas!" "Nonsense!" said M'Nicholl.
"An eclipse it is called; and the trouble is that, instead of flying off into the boundless regions of space, our Projectile will probably describe an elliptical orbit around the Moon " "What!" cried M'Nicholl, in amazement, "and be her satellite for ever!" "All right and proper," said Ardan; "why shouldn't she have one of her own?"
But Barbican was the first to get through his work at one of the side lights, and M'Nicholl and Ardan soon heard him shouting: "No, my friends!" he exclaimed, in tones of decided emotion; "we have not fallen back to Earth; nor are we lying in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. No! We are driving through space! Look at the stars glittering all around!
"You don't mean to say, Barbican," observed M'Nicholl, "that Petit has seen this very one?" "So it appears," replied Barbican. "And do all astronomers admit its existence?" asked the Captain. "Well, some of them have their doubts," replied Barbican "If the unbelievers had been here a minute or two ago," interrupted Ardan, "they would never express a doubt again."
"They become invisible when the trees lose their leaves, and they reappear when they resume them." "His explanation is not without ingenuity," observed Barbican to M'Nicholl, "but, my dear friend," turning to Ardan, "it is hardly admissible." "Probably not," said Ardan, "but why not?"
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