The Begum's Millions

13. Letter from Marcel Bruckmann to Professor Schultze, Stahlstadt

 over them and, as rapid as a heartbeat, soon passed from view beyond the city with a sinister whistling sound. “Bon voyage!” shouted Marcel, breaking into a laugh. “With that initial speed, Herr Schultze’s cannon shell has already exceeded the limits of the atmosphere and can never again fall upon terrestrial soil!” Two minutes later, a detonation was heard, a sort of dull rumble , that one might have thought emerged from the entrails of the earth! It was the noise of the cannon arriving from the Tower of the Bull. This sound was arriving one hundred and thirteen seconds behind the projectile itself, which was moving with a speed of one hundred and fifty leagues per hour.3 Letter from Marcel Bruckmann to Professor Schultze, Stahlstadt “France-Ville, September  “It seems appropriate for me to inform the King of Steel that I most fortunately passed over the border of his possessions the evening before yesterday, preferring my own health to that of the model for the Schultze cannon. “In presenting my farewell, I should be completely lacking in my duties if I failed to let you know, in turn, my own secrets; but you can rest easy, for you will not pay for this knowledge with your life. “My name is not Schwartz, and I am not Swiss. I am Alsatian. My name is Marcel Bruckmann. I am a passably competent engineer , according to your own judgment, but above all I am French. You have shown yourself to be the implacable enemy of my country, my friends, my family. You devised odious plans to destroy all that I love. I risked everything, I did all I could to learn of them. I shall do anything now to foil them. 13  “I hasten to inform you that your first shot has failed and, thank heaven, did not hit its mark. Nor could it have! Your cannon is no less a wondrous piece of armament, but the projectiles that it discharges—and may yet discharge—with such enormous charges of powder will never hurt anyone! In fact, they will never fall anywhere ! I suspected that this was the case, and now it is, to your greater glory, an established fact that Herr Schultze has invented a terrifying cannon that is . . . entirely harmless. “So it is with great pleasure that we tell you that we saw your alltoo -perfect shell pass above our city last night at eleven forty-five and four seconds. It was heading west, circling in a vacuum, and it will continue on its route around the earth until the end of time. A projectile, raised to an initial speed twenty times faster than its primary speed, that is to say ten thousand meters per second, can never ‘fall’! Its forward motion, combined with the attraction of the earth, destines it to continue circling our globe forever. “You should have known that. “I hope, moreover, that the cannon in Tower of the Bull has been completely ruined by this first trial. After all, two hundred thousand dollars is not too much to pay for the pleasure of having endowed the planetary system with a new star and the world with its second satellite! “Marcel Bruckmann.” An express mail left France-Ville immediately for Stahlstadt. One must forgive Marcel for not having been able to resist the jeering satisfaction of immediately sending this letter to Herr Schultze. Indeed, Marcel was right when he said the infamous projectile, at that speed and circling above the atmosphere, would no longer fall to the earth’s surface. He was also right when he hoped that, due to its enormous charge of pyroxylin, the cannon in the Tower of the Bull had most likely been damaged beyond use. The receipt of this letter was a harsh discovery for Herr Schultze, a dreadful shock to his vanity. Reading it turned him livid, and after reading it his head fell to his chest as though he had been blud-  geoned. He did not recover from that state of prostration until a quarter of an hour later, but with such a raging fury! Arminius and Sigimer alone could have described those tantrums of rage. However, Herr Schultze was not a man to admit defeat. The fight between Marcel and himself would be to the death. Did he not still have those projectiles loaded with liquid carbon dioxide that less powerful but more practical cannons could...