Columbus of Space Book

It reads like a Jules Verne book; no wonder the book had been dedicated to the Verne's readers.






An eccentric 30-year-old man called Stonewall is about to get his 4 friends into an undreamt adventure.

He's been working in his own lab on the power of the atom; he's "eloquent" on radioactivity; he knows about the "power" residing in a single "grain of radium": the so-called "inter-atomic energy". His peers at the club Olympus understand nothing about the issue.

One day, Stonewall manages to get his friends to visit his lab; soon they find they're travelling through space.

Despite all initial reluctance, all thoughts like "this is kidnapping" …soon, as I said, they're part of an "interesting expedition"…to Venus.

Only one friend was left on ground: to witness the ship departing skywards. It's a "diabolical" car disappearing westwards. Venus shines like a "diamond" , up there, in New Jersey.

Inside the spaceship, Henry and Jack can smoke freely, because, as Edmund Stonewall explains, the smoke has been turned into atomic energy.

Stonewall thinks Venus is more important than money; while Henry had another angle: Stonewall should be making good money, with a patent of the engine. Jack and the genius are the only "romantic souls".

According to the counts of the eccentric Stonewall they'll reach Venus in 15 days; no, 16, to be more exact. They'll be introduced to "the inhabitants of another world".

In the past 5 days they had a rough time with meteors. Through the "peepholes" of the craft they had , at the start of their journey, a view of the Pacific west. Their speed is of 20 miles per second.

Stonewall thinks of himself as the Columbus of space; being Jack and Henry his lieutenants. The self-entitled Columbus thinks humanity has been wasting money on steam and electricity, when in fact there's limitless energy in the atom.

They "know" of 14-feet giants of Mars; how about those of Venus?

-I'm very curious about,….too.




"Standing on the steps...was a creature shaped like a man, but more savage than a gorilla."

...


"They're mountains of crystal!"

"Mountains of crystal!" we echoed.

"Nothing else in the world, and I am ashamed not to have foreseen the thing. It's plain enough when you come to think about it. Remember that Venus being a world lying half in the daylight and half in the night, is necessarily as hot on one side as it is cold on the other. All of the clouds and floating vapors are on the day side, where the sunbeams act. The heated air charged with moisture rises over the sunward hemisphere, and flows off above, on all sides, toward the night side, while from the latter cold air flows in beneath to take its place. Along the junction of the two hemispheres the clouds and moisture are condensed by the intense cold, and fall in ceaseless snowstorms. This snow descending for ages has piled up in mountainous masses whose height may be increased in some places by real mountain ranges buried beneath. The atmospheric moisture cannot pass very far into the night hemisphere without being condensed, and so it is all arrested within a ring, or band, extending completely around the planet, and marking the division between perpetual day and perpetual night. The appearance of gigantic flames is produced by the sunbeams striking these mountains of ice and snow from behind and breaking into prismatic fire."