The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (70 page)

Jean winced. “That is
correct, Sir, to my deep shame. And it is in the hope of undoing that great
wrong that I have come to you.”

Wells gave him a sharp
look. Lecoeur was very young, not more than twenty-five. He radiated earnest
naiveté. In this world such innocence was almost a crime.

“And how do you propose
to rectify this social injustice?” he asked.

Lecoeur took a deep
breath. “I intend to see to it that the Golden Meteor never falls into the sea,”
he announced.

Wells raised his bushy
eyebrows. “Don’t you think it would be more practical simply to donate your
fortune to those in need?”

“No,” Lecoeur said
firmly. “Although that is certainly a laudable endeavour. It’s not just a
matter of redistributing wealth now. The damage was done nearly thirty years
ago.”

He leaned forward, his
hands clasped in entreaty.

“My father thought he
was getting rich, doing his duty as a banker to increase the wealth of his
clients,” he continued. “But you know what happened. With the cornering of the
gold market, social unrest increased. Anarchy became rampant. Eventually the
powder keg was lit. You know the results: assassination, revolution, the Great
War. Mr Wells, what do you think the world would be like if the War had been
avoided? We are now in the midst of an economic depression. Communists run
Russia and Germany is starting to rearm. What would England and France be like
if the best of our young men had lived to fulfil their potential? Sir, my own
two older brothers died at the Somme. I would do anything to prevent that.”

He gazed at Wells with
great brown puppy-like eyes. Despite himself, Wells was touched. But he knew
what was coming.

“M. Lecoeur,” he began. “I
know what you are going to ask me and it is literally impossible. The time
machine is highly imperfect. The one time it was used, the operator was nearly
lost.”

“I understand you have
been working on the machine since then,” Jean answered. “My informants tell me
that it now might be able to manage short trips through time with an
astonishing degree of accuracy.”

Wells leapt to his feet,
knocking over a vase full of chrysanthemums. “Just who have you been talking
to, Sir?” he asked in astonishment. “And what right have you to invade my
privacy in this manner?”

Lecoeur remained calm. “An
unlimited amount of money will buy almost any information,” he said sadly. “I
am prepared to commit such gross insults to social custom in order to achieve
my goal.”

“Are you also prepared
to die?” Wells glared down at him.

“Of course,” Jean
blinked away his tears. “I would give my life if my brothers could be spared as
well as the millions of others who died because of my father’s greed.”

Wells collapsed back
into his chair like a punctured zeppelin.

“You realize that, even
if you succeed, the War may come all the same,” he asked.

“I must try,” Jean
answered. “My studies indicate that it was this one event that led to all the
human disasters of this century.”

From the experience of a
lifetime, Wells was fairly sure this wasn’t true. It took more than one
avaricious banker to destroy the world. It needed at least two. But Lecoeur’s
argument was persuasive. Wells thought back on the horrors of the past years
and the fear that the worst was yet to come. Perhaps the man should be given
the chance. The recent tests of the machine did indicate that short jumps
through time might be completed with some accuracy It was possible that Jean
Lecoeur could go and come back alive.

Two weeks later Jean
Lecoeur sat in the cellar of Wells’ house, staring in awe at the fabled time
machine. Jean was dressed in the clothes of 1904. He had also procured a large
amount of pre-war money from various countries.

“I imagine life has not
changed that much,” he explained.

“Money seems to make
everything much easier. In the event of success, I shall be sorry to lose my
fortune, but it is for the greater good.”

Wells grunted as he
twiddled with various controls.

“You’ll arrive in
London,” he said. “In the basement of this house. After that it’s up to you to
get to Greenland where the meteor landed. If you succeed, you’ll need to get
back here and into the machine without anyone, especially my younger self,
seeing you. Otherwise, you may change history even more, perhaps undoing the
good you intended.”

“I understand,” Jean
tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. “You are certain that you can get
me there two weeks before the event?”

“Approximately,” Wells
answered. “Remember, this machine is still experimental.”

“I’m trying
not
to
remember,” Jean said. “Are you ready?” Without answering, Wells threw a switch
and the world around Jean Lecoeur turned inside out.

He woke up in the
blackness of the cellar, retching and cold. It took him a few moments to
remember where he was and that Wells had cautioned him to make no noise.

There was another moment
of complete terror as Jean groped his way to the door near the coal chute. What
if he had gone too far back? His money would be worthless if he arrived before
it was printed.

The cool rain of a
London summer evening greeted his exit into the alleyway. The clop of hooves
and the creak of coach wheels came from the street. There were no auto brakes
squealing, nor the blare of radios. He hurried out into the street. There was a
newsstand on the corner. Jean ran to it and gave a cry of joy. It was 1904 and
July 19th! He had a month before the fateful day.

Jean inhaled the moist
air. He had done it. Now to arrange passage to Greenland. He still had to
arrive before the meteor fell and then stop his father from sending it to the
bottom of the sea.

Even with the large
supply of antique cash he had brought, Jean found it difficult to book passage
to Greenland. Treasure seekers, government officials, and the curious were all
eager to see the landing of a meteor made of gold. At last he managed to get a
berth on a fishing boat for a price that would normally have bought him a suite
on an ocean liner.

The port of Upernevik,
in Greenland was equally chaotic. Jean had never heard so many languages spoken
at the same time or with such urgency. It seemed that everyone in the world had
come to see the meteor.

But, while the others
were all fixated on reaching the predicted landing site of the meteor, Jean
went at cross purposes to the crowd. He was desperate to find his father,
Robert Lecoeur, and the instigator of the event, Zéphyrin Xirdal.

Jean had never met M.
Xirdal. His father had explained that the man was very rich, very brilliant and
completely mad. M. Xirdal was also a recluse, not from any particular
misanthropy, but because, if he were invited to join a party, he would forget
about it immediately upon returning home. Consequently, he received few
invitations.

It was Zéphyrin Xirdal
who had first noticed the meteor, although others claimed that honour. It was
also Zéphyrin who had invented a machine to attract the golden orb toward the
earth, not for any particular desire for gain, but to see if he could. Jean’s
father, Robert, was possibly Zéphyrin’s best friend, as well as his banker and
godfather. So it was to Robert Lecoeur that Xirdal applied when he decided to
set the meteor down in Greenland. Robert had purchased the landing site for
Zéphyrin.

It was this advance
knowledge of the landing that allowed Robert Lecoeur to speculate in gold
mines. Somehow, Robert had convinced Zéphyrin to use his machine to send the
meteor into the ocean, thus causing mining stock, at an all time low, to
increase to a hundred times the price Robert had paid. Jean had heard the story
many times as a child.

It was this artificial
tampering with the world economy that, Jean believed, led to the social unrest
that resulted in the horrors of the Great War. It was for this that Jean set
out on this dangerous quest. Zéphyrin Xirdal must be prevented from sinking the
meteor!

Jean knew that his
father and Xirdal had arrived on the yacht
Atlantic.
He managed to find
a member of the crew who told him that M. Lecoeur and his odd friend had
arrived several weeks earlier and were already on the property that M. Xirdal
had bought near Upernevik.

With growing uneasiness,
Jean joined the flock of treasure hunters. He was frantic to get to the front
of the pack. What if he arrived too late? Of course his efforts were entirely
misunderstood by everyone else.

“Who do you think you
are?” a badly-dressed man shouted at him in English when Jean tried to pass
him. “It’ll do you no good, young man. That meteor is mine!”

“Of course, Sir, if you
wish it,” Jean replied soothingly. “I have no interest in the gold. I’m only
concerned for my father, who left earlier. I really must find him before he
comes to harm.”

At that statement, the
young woman standing next to the man smiled in commiseration.

“Then we must let you
go,” she said. “My name is Jenny Hudelson, and this is
my
father, Dr
Sidney Hudelson, the co-discoverer of the meteor.”

Jean bowed. He
remembered something about two Americans who had happened to be the first to
spot the golden meteor and exactly at the same time. It had been an amusing
paragraph in the history of the event.

Another man pushed his
way into the group. “‘Co-discoverer’ indeed!” he snorted, over the attempts of
a young man to quiet him. “I, Dean Forsyth, was the first to gaze upon the
meteor. This man is a charlatan!”

The two young people
looked at each other and sighed. Jenny explained the situation to Jean, who
would have preferred to take his leave at once.

“Francis is Mr Forsyth’s
nephew,” she nodded toward the young man. “We were to be married until this
horrid meteor caused a rift between our families. How I hope it sinks into the
ocean! That would make everything the same as it was before.”

“Oh, no, Mademoiselle!”
Jean said in horror. “You do not know what you are saying. That would be a
catastrophe!”

He tipped his hat and
hurried on. It was already the eighteenth of August. The meteor was due to land
the following morning.

A storm blew in that
night, driving all the visitors to seek shelter. It would be impossible to
reach his father in such conditions. Jean was able to find a few square metres
of floor space in one of the wooden buildings of the town. He tried to remain
awake in order to set off as soon as the wind died down but weariness from
travel and anxiety caused him to fall into a deep slumber.

The arctic summer dawn
shone directly into his eyes, waking him. Was it his imagination or did the
light seem brighter than usual?

Cursing himself for
giving in to sleep, Jean dressed quickly and set off to find the but where his
father and Zéphyrin had set up the machine to attract the meteor.

At once he realized that
the light of the sun, low on the horizon, was nothing to the glowing splendour
of the meteor, now descending rapidly toward the earth. The heat of the
approaching ball of gold was intense. It was so bright that Jean couldn’t see
the path in the glare. He was forced to crawl the final distance to the hut.

He had almost reached it
when there was a crash that shook the entire island and caused Jean to be
thrown flat against the ground, clutching at it as if he feared he might slide
off the earth.

He didn’t see the door
of the but open and two men rush out toward the fallen meteor, only to be
driven back by the piercing temperature of the glowing gold.

Zéphyrin Xirdal and
Robert Lecoeur stared in rapture at the giant golden nugget.

“It’s not solid, of
course,” Zéphyrin explained. “You can
see the fissures. But it’s
still more gold than any one country has ever possessed.”

“And now it’s yours,” Robert breathed.

“Yes.” Zéphyrin seemed
less enthralled than the banker. “I wonder what I can do with it.”

“Don’t worry, my boy,”
Robert smiled. “I’ll help you think of something.”

Zéphyrin nodded. “Those
people from the town will be here soon. Why don’t you go back to the but while
I let them know that I have claimed the meteor.”

Robert protested this,
but Zéphyrin was firm that the machine should be guarded and that only he could
convince the crowd that the meteor was only on this earth as a result of his
invention.

The crowd rushed to the
place where the meteor now gleamed, brighter than the sun and, seemingly,
almost as hot. Jean had just ascertained that he was neither blind nor deaf as
a result of being so close to the crash. He had just commenced his trek to the
but when the masses overtook him. Once there, they were astonished to find the
way to the meteor blocked by a ring of fences and the person of Zéphyrin
Xirdal.

“This is my property,”
he announced. “As is the meteor.”

In the uproar that
followed, Jean was able to sneak past and make his way up to the crude but
where he knew his father had waited. Eagerly, he knocked on the door.