CHAPTER 1
The Narrative of Miss Dorothy Brewster
EVER since I was just a little girl, the moon has been the most interesting and fascinating object in my life. Among my earliest memories as a four-year-old, is that of the time I asked Aunt Mary (who was the only mother I ever knew) to get it for me, and she answered it was so high she could not reach it. I could not understand this; for she had never before failed to get me anything I wanted. When I cried for the moon, she thought it was very funny and laughed at me. . Then, in my childish mind, an ambition was born. Today, at the age of twenty-two I am more determined on it than ever. In a measure, that ambition has been fulfilled. I have learned more about the moon than anyone on earth and I can not think of it, except as my own. So far as my fellow men are concerned, the moon belongs to me; but I am still as helpless as Aunt Mary, when it comes to reaching out and taking possession of it. Even as my childish mind grew more matured, after my great disappointment, the big silvery moon remained the same—the most beautiful, fascinating and mysterious object of my life. I could not learn much about it; some told me it was made of green cheese. Others said it was larger than the earth and people lived on it. Some told me it was red-hot, while others claimed it was covered with snow. Aunt Mary told me it was just placed in the sky so we could see at night; but she could not explain why it did not shine every night. Some of my books pictured on it the smiling face of a man. He was “the man in the moon”—and that was all I could find out about him.
Dissatisfied with these obviously dissimilar answers I carried my scientific research outside of the home, and asked Deacon Jones, whom I considered the wisest man in the world, about the man in the moon. And he told me a story that he had heard from his grandmother when he was quite young.1
According to this story, there was once a wicked man who refused to go to church on the Sabbath day and always stayed at home and burned brush-heaps. He would not listen to his more devout neighbors and live a better life. The sound of his ax and the smoke from his fires ascended into Heaven, and the Lord was very angry with him.
“Man,” asked the Lord: “Why do you work on the Sabbath?”
“Oh Lord,” this wicked man answered: “I have so much work to do and the days are so short. For six days I cut trees and on the Sabbath, I burn my brush. That is the only way I can get ahead of my neighbors.”
“Do you not remember the fourth commandment?” answered the Lord. “Because you have broken it in your greedy effort to get ahead of your neighbors, I will banish you to the moon, where each day is two weeks long. There you may cut trees and burn brush until Judgment Day; and your story shall be an example to all men who persist in breaking the Sabbath.”
“Now Dorothy,” said the deacon, smiling, “that is the story of the man in the moon as it was told to me fifty years ago. Then it was accepted as the truth; but today no one mentions it.”
“But, Mr. Jones,” I asked: “Is the moon really a world? Are the days two weeks long there?”
“Yes, and the nights are two weeks long, too. But no one lives there, because there is neither air nor water on the moon.”
He then explained that the moon always has the same face turned toward the earth. He told me, too, the reason why the moon apparently changes her shape from “new” to “full”; and why she is always later in rising each night. Some time later he called me to view the first lunar eclipse I had ever seen; and then he let me see the pictures of the moon in his books. He pointed out the so-called “seas” and “lakes,” as well as the familiar craters of Copernicus, Tycho and Newton. Before I had ever had a lesson in the geography of our own world, I knew more astronomy than many high-school graduates and more Selenography, or lunar geography, than many of the graduates of the larger universities.
A Mysterious Father
WHEN my father came home at Christmas that year (I was then nine), he was amazed and pleased with my knowledge of the moon; but he said: “Dorothy, I am glad you know the moon so well; yet there are other things you must learn before you give it such a special study. When you have really learned these other things, I promise to show you the moon as no one else has ever seen it before.”
My father was always a mystery to me. I saw him but once a year, when he came home to spend two weeks at Christmas with Aunt Mary and me. The remainder of his time was spent in Arizona, where he claimed to be working a mine. He had always an abundance of money; so Aunt Mary and I never wanted for anything that money could buy. Father said that his money came from his mine; but Aunt Mary (who was really not my aunt, but a widow whom Father had employed to care for me after the death of my mother) told me more about him than he intended me to know.
According to her story, his mine was merely a mask to hide his scientific experiments, and his money was an inheritance. My father, an only child, had inherited a scientific mind from his father, and from his mother over two hundred million dollars, the residuary estate of Caleb Brown, which was once considered one of the largest private fortunes in America.
My own mother died when I was born. Father returned with me to New England, where he left me in the care of Aunt Mary. He then turned all his property into secure investments, which would not require his continual attention, and returned to his “mine” in the mountains.
My eighteenth birthday found me in my last year of high school. My school work had been a pleasure, for I was learning much about the moon. My father had sent me a telescope, ten feet long, which was mounted on a tripod so that I could turn it to any part in the skies I desired to view. Through this, I received my first glimpses of the rings of Saturn, the red spot of Jupiter, the canals of Mars and the dead craters, high mountains and dry sea bottoms of my own beloved Luna.
While other young people were using the moon only as an inspiration for love-making, I was studying it with my telescope. Every time I looked at it, I saw something new and interesting that had hitherto escaped my attention. While my friends were reading love stories, I was perusing such things as Jules Verne’s “Trip to the Moon” and serious scientific works on the earth’s satellite. As I looked at the moon through my telescope, I loved to imagine myself in the rocket with Michael Arden, Capt. Nichol and President Barbicane. These fictitious characters were to me real men.
“The First Men in the Moon,” by H. G. Wells, had an equally great effect on me. With Cavor and Bedford, I often explored the vast caverns, the home of the strange Selenites. Their gravity-resisting material was reality to me. I wondered how it could be made, and often imagined myself the inventor or discoverer of such an element and later using it for inter-planetary travel. I enjoyed thinking of myself as a sort of female Christopher Columbus, whose destiny it should be to open the moon to all mankind. It would be my San Salvador, a small island in the vast sea of space; a stepping stone to the greater worlds that lay beyond. I would establish colonies on the moon, Mars, Venus or any of the worlds that proved habitable. And although these fancies carried me through the length and breadth of space, the moon, which I knew to be a dead world without a breath of air on it, always held the center of my interest.
Father’s secret work continually excited my curiosity. It was my dream that he should discover the means to control gravity. But, as years passed and he was growing old without discovering the secret, I naturally hoped to fall heir to the solution of the problem.
When he was home for his annual visit during my last year in high school, I asked him pointedly if he were working on the problem of gravity control.
“No,” he said at once. “The control of gravity has always seemed impossible to me. I am devoting my life to the mastery of a problem that I thought could be solved, and I am making a giant telescope with which I hope to be able to see an object on the moon as small as a man.
“No one knows of this except a few trusted assistants, who are sworn to secrecy. When I first started work on this telescope, over thirty years ago, all astronomers and lens makers laughed at me and declared it impossible to build. It would have to be too long. But now the most difficult part of the task is completed; the making of the giant lens, 1200 inches in diameter.”
“100 feet!” I exclaimed. “That does not sound possible! Such a telescope must be over a mile long! What machinery will you use in handling it! How could you cast and cool a lens of such proportions?” I became aware immediately of my own scientific knowledge carefully accumulated for years. I would show my father that I was worthy of his confidence.
“I’ll explain it all when I show it to you,” father said smilingly, “but that will not be until it is finished. Such a lens is not made in a few months; I employed twenty of the best lensmakers of the old world for a period of over twelve years to construct the big lens, while the eyepieces were being made by a firm in Paris. I now have a staff of mechanical and electrical engineers working on the machinery for handling it; but it will be years before the observatory is completely equipped.”
“But Daddy, why did you not tell me before! Let me go back with you and help.”
“No, you would not be able to help much at present. I have other plans for you. You are to enter college this fall and if you can master such subjects as optics, mathematics, astronomy and their kindred sciences, you could carry on my work when I die.”
“Oh Daddy, I’m sure it will. I take to science and mathematics as readily as a duck takes to water; and if I ever marry, it will be to some scientific man who will consider me a co-worker and equal, not a domestic pet.”