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Updated: June 6, 2025
Michel Ardan, always easy, dressed in thorough traveler's costume, leathern gaiters on his legs, pouch by his side, in loose velvet suit, cigar in mouth, was full of inexhaustible gayety, laughing, joking, playing pranks with J. T. Maston. Ten o'clock struck! The moment had arrived for taking their places in the projectile!
On the 4th of December, from 8 p.m. till midnight, it would have been possible to follow the trace of the projectile, which would have appeared like a black speck on the shining disc of the moon. But the weather remained imperturbably cloudy, and exasperated the public, who swore at the moon for not showing herself. Sic transit gloria mundi! J.T. Maston, in despair, set out for Long's Peak.
He gave his right arm to President Barbicane, and his left to J.T. Maston, more radiant than the midday sun, and nearly as ruddy. Ardan mounted the platform, from which his eyes extended over a forest of black hats. He did not seem in the least embarrassed; he did not pose; he was at home there, gay, familiar, and amiable.
The people of the New World seem determined to live in peace, and our bellicose Tribune has gone as far as to predict approaching catastrophes due to the scandalous increase of population!" "Yet, Maston," said Colonel Blomsberry, "they are always fighting in Europe to maintain the principle of nationalities!" "What of that?"
Maston and Belfast announced that the projectile had just been perceived in the gigantic reflector of Long's Peak. This communication informed them also that the bullet, retained by the attraction of the moon, was playing the part of sub-satellite in the solar world. The truth on this subject is now known.
Belfast and Maston that it had deviated from its course from some unknown cause, and had not reached its destination; but that it had passed near enough to be retained by the lunar attraction; that its rectilinear movement had been changed to a circular one, and that following an elliptical orbit round the star of night it had become its satellite.
Calculate, and you will see that for the shot of half a ton weight, instead of 333 lbs. of powder, this quantity has been reduced to 116 lbs. only. "What are you driving at?" asked the president. "The extreme of your theory, my dear major," said J.T. Maston, "would bring you to having no powder at all, provided your shot were sufficiently heavy."
"It is that during the movement of rotation of the globe our wire would have been rolled round it like a chain round a windlass, and it would inevitably have dragged us down to the earth again." "By the thirty-nine stars of the Union!" said Michel, "I have nothing but impracticable ideas to-day ideas worthy of J.T. Maston!
"Yes," repeated J.T. Maston incessantly, whose confidence inspired everybody, "our friends are clever fellows, and they cannot have fallen like imbeciles. They are alive, alive and well, but we must make haste in order to find them so. He had no anxiety about provisions and water. They had enough for a long time! But air! air would soon fail them. Then they must make haste!"
Barbicane opened the meeting as follows: "Dear colleagues," said he, "we have to solve one of the more important problems in ballistics that greatest of sciences which treats of the movement of projectiles that is to say, of bodies hurled into space by some power of impulsion and then left to themselves." "Oh, ballistics, ballistics!" cried J.T. Maston in a voice of emotion.
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