Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 06.djvu/49

"Don't tell! Don't tell!" shouted one of the audience.

"As to this lever—"

"Keep it secret! Keep it secret!" shouted the spectators.

"We will keep it secret!" said Barbicane.

Baldenak and Co. protested in vain. The orator continued, "As to the results of this mechanical operation—an operation unprecedented in industrial annals—which we have undertaken and will bring to a successful issue thanks to your capital, I will say a few words."

"Listen! listen!" shouted the crowd.

"The first idea of our enterprise occurred to one of the most learned, devoted, and illustrious of our colleagues. To him also belongs the glory of having made the calculations which rendered the theory practicable, for if the development of the Polar mines is child’s play, the displacement of the Pole is a problem which higher mechanics can alone deal with. That is why we addressed ourselves to our worthy secretary, J. T. Maston!"

"Hurrah! Hip! hip! hip! hurrah! for J. T. Maston!" shouted the whole assembly, electrified by the presence among them of that extraordinary man.

Ah! How much was Mrs. Scorbitt moved at the acclamations which resounded around the celebrated calculator!

He, with great modesty, bowed his head to the right; then to the left, and then saluted in front with his metal hook.

"Already," said Barbicane, "when the great meeting which celebrated the arrival in America of the Frenchman Michel Ardan, a few months before our departure for the Moon—"

The American spoke as coolly of the voyage to the Moon as of a railway journey to New York.

"J. T. Maston had exclaimed, 'Let us invent machines, let us find a fulcrum, and we will shift the axis of the Earth!' Many of you heard him, and will remember it. Well, the machines are invented, the fulcrum is found, and it is to the righting of the Earth's axis that our efforts will be directed."

"What!" exclaimed Donellan. "You will put the Earth's axis upright?"

"Yes, sir," said Barbicane; "or rather we can make a new axis on which the diurnal rotation formerly—"

"Modify the diurnal rotation!" exclaimed Karkof.

"Absolutely! and without touching its duration. The operation will bring the Pole to about the sixty-seventh parallel, and under such circumstances the Earth will behave like Jupiter, whose axis is nearly perpendicular to the plane of his orbit. This displacement of 23° 28′ will suffice to obtain for our Polar property sufficient warmth to melt the ice accumulated for thousands of years."

The audience looked at him in a state of breathlessness. No one dared to interrupt or even to aplaud him. All were overwhelmed with the idea, which was so ingenious and so simple; to change the axis on which the globe turns!

The representatives of the rival syndicates were astounded, annihilated, and remained without a word to say for themselves.

But the applause broke out when Barbicane concluded with sublime simplicity, "Thus it is the Sun himself who will melt the icebergs and ice-floes, and render it easy to obtain access to the Pole!"

"And so," said Donellan, "if man cannot get to the Pole, the Pole must come to man?"

"Just so!" said Barbicane.

Yes! Like Jupiter.

At the time of that memorable meeting in honor of Michel Ardan—so appropriately mentioned by the orator—if J. T. Maston had excitedly exclaimed, "Let us right the Earth's axis," it was because the daring and fantastical Frenchman, one of the heroes of the Moon Voyage, had chanted his dithyrambic hymn in honor of the most important planets of our solar system. In his superb panegyric he had celebrated the special advantages of the giant planet, as we briefly reported at the time.

The problem solved by the calculator of the Gun Club was the substitution of a new axis of rotation for the old one on which the Earth had turned ever since in popular phrase, "the world was a world." This new axis of rotation would be perpendicular to the plane of its orbit; and under such conditions the climatal situation of the old Pole would be much the same as that of Trondjhem, in Norway, in spring time. The palæocrystic armor would thus naturally melt under the rays of the Sun; and at the same time climate would be distributed over the Earth as the climates are distributed in Jupiter.

The inclination of our planet's axis, or in other terms, the angle which its axis of rotation makes with the plane of its ecliptic is 66° 32′. A few degrees would thus bring the axis perpendicular to the plane of the orbit it describes around the Sun.

But—it is important to remark—the effort that the North Polar Practical Association was about to make would not, strictly speaking, right the Earth's axis. Mechanically, no force, however considerable, could accomplish that. The Earth is not like a chicken on a spit, that we can take it in our hand and shift it as we will. But the making of a new axis was possible—it may be said easy—if the engineers only had the fulcrum dreamed of by Archimedes and the lever imagined by J. T. Maston.

But as it had been decided to keep the invention a secret until further orders, all that could be done was to study the consequences. And to begin with, the journals and reviews of all sorts appealing to the learned and the ignorant devoted themselves to considering how Jupiter was affected by the approximate perpendicularity of his axis to the plane of his orbit.

Jupiter, like Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, forms part of the solar system, and sweeps around at nearly five hundred million miles from the central fire; and his volume is about fourteen times that of the Earth.

If there be such a thing as Jovian life, that is to say, if there are any inhabitants on Jupiter, the following are the advantages they obtain by living on the great planet—advantages so poetically brought into relief at the memorable meeting above alluded to.