Around the Moon
Three travelers shot from a cannon, a meteor that quietly bends their course, and the long, cold loop around a world they never quite land on
Page 1
In Florida, the great cannon called the Columbiad had fired its one enormous shot, and the aluminum projectile — with three men sealed inside it — had been hurled clean off the Earth and out into space. For a long moment after the firing, Michel Ardan, Impey Barbicane and Captain Nicholl lay stunned and silent, thrown flat by the force of the blast, not knowing if they were alive or dead. Slowly, one by one, they stirred. Nicholl was the first to open his eyes; then Barbicane sat up, feeling his own arms and legs in wonder; and last of all Michel Ardan, always the quickest to recover his spirits, burst out laughing with sheer delight to find himself breathing, thinking, and alive, hanging in the black sky with his two friends, further from the Earth than any man had ever traveled before.
Page 2
Once they had caught their breath, the three travelers set about taking stock of their strange round home. The padded walls had held; the air inside was good; the food, water and instruments had all come through the shot safely packed in cotton wool. But when Michel Ardan went to call the two dogs they had brought with them, Diana and Satellite, only Diana came to him, wagging and pressing close. Satellite lay still in the corner where he had been thrown, and did not move at all. Barbicane knelt and examined him gently, and found that the poor animal's heart had simply stopped from the terrible shock of the firing — he had died instantly, without any pain, in the very first moment of the shot. The three men were quiet for a while, sorry for the little dog, while Diana pressed anxiously against Michel Ardan's knee as if she understood.
Page 3
The little body of Satellite could not be kept inside the cabin, so the three men agreed to give him to space itself. Carefully, Barbicane unscrewed the small round scuttle set in the projectile's side, and for just a moment the window stood open to the black emptiness beyond. Michel Ardan lifted Satellite gently and passed him out through the opening, and the dog's still shape floated free, drifting away from the projectile into the dark. From now on, Michel said, Satellite would travel on forever through space exactly as the projectile itself did — a tiny, silent moon of his own, following his own quiet path among the stars. Diana watched from the window, her ears low, until the small shape could no longer be told apart from the darkness. Then Barbicane sealed the scuttle again, and the cabin's warm air settled back around them, and they turned to their instruments once more.
Page 4
Days passed quietly as the projectile sailed on through the emptiness between the Earth and the Moon. Then, without warning, a tremendous light flared outside the windows, so bright it lit the whole cabin like a flash of lightning. A great bolide — a flaming ball of rock bigger than the projectile itself — went tearing past them through space, blazing and smoking, missing them by what felt like no distance at all. For one breathless moment the three men stared at it in terror, certain they were about to be struck and destroyed. But the bolide swept on past and shrank away into the darkness behind them, as suddenly as it had come, leaving the cabin quiet and dim again. Only later would they understand that its passing had been close enough to tug at their course ever so slightly — a small, silent change that would matter a great deal before their journey was over.
Page 5
As the projectile traveled on, it reached a very particular place in space — the neutral point, where the pull of the Earth behind them and the pull of the Moon ahead of them canceled each other out exactly. At that moment, every scrap of weight simply vanished. A dropped pencil did not fall; it hung in the air exactly where it was let go. Water poured from a bottle broke into round floating balls instead of streaming down. Michel Ardan, always the one to make the most of things, pushed off from the wall and went sailing slowly across the cabin, turning happily head over heels, while Diana scrabbled in the air with all four paws, finding nothing solid to stand on, and barked in pure confusion. Barbicane and Nicholl, more serious by nature, held onto the instrument shelf and watched, half laughing themselves, as cups, books and loose clothing all drifted gently around the cabin like slow, silent fish.
Page 6
At last the projectile swept close enough to the Moon that its great grey surface filled the whole of the window, and the three men crowded together to look down at it, hardly able to believe what they were seeing. No human eye had ever looked upon this side of the Moon before, for it always faces away from the Earth and is never once seen from home. Below them rolled mountain ranges with knife-sharp peaks and no air to soften them, and deep round craters, some miles across, with walls that threw long black shadows in the sunlight. There were no seas, no clouds, no green of any kind — only grey and white rock, sharp and silent and utterly still, stretching away in every direction as far as they could see. Barbicane named the mountains and craters as they passed over them, checking each one against his charts, while Michel Ardan simply stared, for once almost without words.
Page 7
The projectile swept on over the Moon's far side, and soon it passed into the part of that hidden hemisphere where the Sun never reached at all during this part of its long, slow turning. Complete darkness closed over them. Without a single ray of sunlight to warm the ground below, the cold outside became more terrible than anything on Earth — a cold so fierce that Barbicane worried it might creep in through the padded walls of the projectile itself and freeze them where they sat. They wrapped themselves in every blanket they had and kept close together for warmth, watching their small lamp flicker and listening to the hull creak in the extreme cold. Through the window they could just make out the black shapes of enormous unlit mountains blotting out the stars, ghostly and silent, with no light anywhere on that vast frozen ground below. It was the darkest, coldest stretch of the whole long journey, and all three were glad when it finally began to pass.
Page 8
At last the projectile swung clear of the dark side and burst back into brilliant sunlight over the Moon's south pole, and the three men cheered to feel the warmth of the light again through the glass. Below them now lay the most spectacular sight of the whole journey: a vast, dazzlingly bright crater called Tycho, its floor and walls blazing white, with great streaks of pale light spreading out from it across the grey ground in every direction like the spokes of a wheel, some of them running for hundreds of miles. Barbicane and Nicholl worked quickly with their instruments, tracking the projectile's path against the stars — and it was here that Barbicane made a grim discovery. Their course was bending them around the Moon rather than down onto it. They were not going to land after all. The bolide's small nudge, days before, had curved their path just enough to carry them past the Moon entirely, and on round its far side, instead of down to its surface.
Page 9
As the projectile swept clear of the Moon at last and out into open space again, Barbicane bent over his instruments for hour after hour, working out their course with great care. Slowly a new and surprising truth took shape in his figures: the very same bolide that had startled them days before, and bent their path just enough to carry them past the Moon instead of down onto it, had also curved that path back the other way — out past the Moon and around, and now homeward, toward the Earth. They were not lost, drifting forever between the two worlds as Nicholl had quietly feared. They were falling, slowly and surely, back the way they had come. The Moon shrank steadily behind them as they watched, and ahead of them, small and blue and very far away, the Earth itself began to grow brighter in the blackness, calling them home. For the first time since the bolide's fright, the three men allowed themselves real hope.
Page 10
Down through the air the projectile fell, faster and faster, until it struck the surface of the Pacific Ocean in a tremendous splash and bobbed up again, floating steady and safe on the open sea exactly as its builders had planned. Inside, the three travelers and Diana, shaken but entirely unhurt, scrambled to the window and looked out at calm blue water stretching to the horizon in every direction, with gulls wheeling overhead in the bright morning sun. Before long, smoke appeared on the skyline, and a great American warship, the USS Susquehanna, came steaming toward them, her crew lining the rails and cheering at the extraordinary sight of a metal capsule floating on the open sea. Sailors lowered a boat, drew alongside, and hauled the round hatch open at last. Michel Ardan was first to climb out into the daylight, laughing and waving both arms over his head, with Barbicane and Nicholl close behind him, and Diana barking joyfully at the astonished sailors. Their long journey around the Moon and back again was over.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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