60 Space Sci-Fi Books. Филип Дик

light, he consulted the thermometer and cried out:

      "Seventeen degrees below zero, centigrade! that is certainly low enough to make an old fellow like me feel rather chilly!"

      "Just one degree and a half above zero, Fahrenheit!" observed Barbican; "I really had no idea that it was so cold."

      His teeth actually chattered so much that he could hardly articulate; still he, as well as the others, disliked to entrench on their short supply of gas.

      "One feature of our journey that I particularly admire," said Ardan, trying to laugh with freezing lips, "is that we can't complain of monotony. At one time we are frying with the heat and blinded with the light, like Indians caught on a burning prairie; at another, we are freezing in the pitchy darkness of a hyperborean winter, like Sir John Franklin's merry men in the Bay of Boothia. Madame La Nature, you don't forget your devotees; on the contrary, you overwhelm us with your attentions!"

      "Our external temperature may be reckoned at how much?" asked the Captain, making a desperate effort to keep up the conversation.

      "The temperature outside our Projectile must be precisely the same as that of interstellar space in general," answered Barbican.

      "Is not this precisely the moment then," interposed Ardan, quickly, "for making an experiment which we could never have made as long as we were in the sunshine?"

      "That's so!" exclaimed Barbican; "now or never! I'm glad you thought of it, Ardan. We are just now in the position to find out the temperature of space by actual experiment, and so see whose calculations are right, Fourier's or Pouillet's."

      "Let's see," asked Ardan, "who was Fourier, and who was Pouillet?"

      "Baron Fourier, of the French Academy, wrote a famous treatise on Heat, which I remember reading twenty years ago in Penington's book store," promptly responded the Captain; "Pouillet was an eminent professor of Physics at the Sorbonne, where he died, last year, I think."

      "Thank you, Captain," said Ardan; "the cold does not injure your memory, though it is decidedly on the advance. See how thick the ice is already on the window panes! Let it only keep on and we shall soon have our breaths falling around us in flakes of snow."

      "Let us prepare a thermometer," said Barbican, who had already set himself to work in a business-like manner.

      A thermometer of the usual kind, as may be readily supposed, would be of no use whatever in the experiment that was now about to be made. In an ordinary thermometer Mercury freezes hard when exposed to a temperature of 40° below zero. But Barbican had provided himself with a Minimum, self-recording thermometer, of a peculiar nature, invented by Wolferdin, a friend of Arago's, which could correctly register exceedingly low degrees of temperature. Before beginning the experiment, this instrument was tested by comparison with one of the usual kind, and then Barbican hesitated a few moments regarding the best means of employing it.

      "How shall we start this experiment?" asked the Captain.

      "Nothing simpler," answered Ardan, always ready to reply; "you just open your windows, and fling out your thermometer. It follows your Projectile, as a calf follows her mother. In a quarter of an hour you put out your hand—"

      "Put out your hand!" interrupted Barbican.

      "Put out your hand—" continued Ardan, quietly.

      "You do nothing of the kind," again interrupted Barbican; "that is, unless you prefer, instead of a hand, to pull back a frozen stump, shapeless, colorless and lifeless!"

      "I prefer a hand," said Ardan, surprised and interested.

      "Yes," continued Barbican, "the instant your hand left the Projectile, it would experience the same terrible sensations as is produced by cauterizing it with an iron bar white hot. For heat, whether rushing rapidly out of our bodies or rapidly entering them, is identically the same force and does the same amount of damage. Besides I am by no means certain that we are still followed by the objects that we flung out of the Projectile."

      "Why not?" asked M'Nicholl; "we saw them all outside not long ago."

      "But we can't see them outside now," answered Barbican; "that may be accounted for, I know, by the darkness, but it may be also by the fact of their not being there at all. In a case like this, we can't rely on uncertainties. Therefore, to make sure of not losing our thermometer, we shall fasten it with a string and easily pull it in whenever we like."

      This advice being adopted, the window was opened quickly, and the instrument was thrown out at once by M'Nicholl, who held it fastened by a short stout cord so that it could be pulled in immediately. The window had hardly been open for longer than a second, yet that second had been enough to admit a terrible icy chill into the interior of the Projectile.

      "Ten thousand ice-bergs!" cried Ardan, shivering all over; "it's cold enough to freeze a white bear!"

      Barbican waited quietly for half an hour; that time he considered quite long enough to enable the instrument to acquire the temperature of the interstellar space. Then he gave the signal, and it was instantly pulled in.

      It took him a few moments to calculate the quantity of mercury that had escaped into the little diaphragm attached to the lower part of the instrument; then he said:

      "A hundred and forty degrees, centigrade, below zero!"

      "Two hundred and twenty degrees, Fahrenheit, below zero!" cried M'Nicholl; "no wonder that we should feel a little chilly!"

      "Pouillet is right, then," said Barbican, "and Fourier wrong."

      "Another victory for Sorbonne over the Academy!" cried Ardan. "Vive la Sorbonne! Not that I'm a bit proud of finding myself in the midst of a temperature so very distingué—though it is more than three times colder than Hayes ever felt it at Humboldt Glacier or Nevenoff at Yakoutsk. If Madame the Moon becomes as cold as this every time that her surface is withdrawn from the sunlight for fourteen days, I don't think, boys, that her hospitality is much to hanker after!"

      Chapter XV.

       Glimpses at the Invisible.

       Table of Contents

      In spite of the dreadful condition in which the three friends now found themselves, and the still more dreadful future that awaited them, it must be acknowledged that Ardan bravely kept up his spirits. And his companions were just as cheerful. Their philosophy was quite simple and perfectly intelligible. What they could bear, they bore without murmuring. When it became unbearable, they only complained, if complaining would do any good. Imprisoned in an iron shroud, flying through profound darkness into the infinite abysses of space, nearly a quarter million of miles distant from all human aid, freezing with the icy cold, their little stock not only of gas but of air rapidly running lower and lower, a near future of the most impenetrable obscurity looming up before them, they never once thought of wasting time in asking such useless questions as where they were going, or what fate was about to befall them. Knowing that no good could possibly result from inaction or despair, they carefully kept their wits about them, making their experiments and recording their observations as calmly and as deliberately as if they were working at home in the quiet retirement of their own cabinets.

      Any other course of action, however, would have been perfectly absurd on their part, and this no one knew better than themselves. Even if desirous to act otherwise, what could they have done? As powerless over the Projectile as a baby over a locomotive, they could neither clap brakes to its movement nor switch off its direction. A sailor can turn his ship's head at pleasure; an aeronaut has little trouble, by means of his ballast and his throttle-valve, in giving a vertical movement to his balloon. But nothing of this kind could our travellers attempt. No helm, or ballast, or throttle-valve could avail them now. Nothing in the world could be done to prevent things from following their own course to the bitter end.

      If these three men would permit themselves to hazard an expression at all on the subject, which they didn't,