The Meteor Race

Snowy (and Tintin) hunt a shooting star

The Shooting Star by Hergé

Things never go wholly smoothly for boy reporter Tintin (and his dog Snowy). Snowy and Tintin merely happen to be out and about, it seems, when they notice two things. First, that it is most infernally hot. And two, that there appears to be another star in the sky than usual — another feature among the constellations. Snowy and Tintin head off as fast as they can to the observatory, trying to confirm what they have seen. They’re strangely blocked at the door by an oddly hostile attendant, but that does not stop them for long. Things are stranger and sinister. Clearly, this is a job for Snowy (and Tintin).

Decoying the guard, the two of them fast arrive in the hall of the telescope. It’s where an eccentric professor (is there another kind?) is watching another scientific underling check some calculations, all while Tintin (first spooked by a gigantic-seeming spider on the lens) tries to see out of the biggest telescope they have. To look out into the heavens and spy the new star. He sees it. It’s burning hot, unlike a comet — and hence the high temperatures on earth. But it is also getting closer. Getting brighter and closer by the minute. This is not good news for Snowy (and Tintin).

Tintin asks the scientists what they think. They tell him, with absolute mathematical certainty — and check the calculations if you really think we’re wrong, they say, throwing notepapers at him — that this is a meteor; that it will strike earth; and that it will end the world as we know it. At just past 8 o’clock tomorrow.

With his head spinning, Tintin is pushed out of the observatory and sent on his way. The professors are sure they will be famous — and scientific fame is still good even if it only holds for less than a day until the earth and all sentient life are destroyed. But this is not good news, you’ll bet, for Snowy (and Tintin). The two of them go home in a daze, encountering a madman in the street who bangs a gong and says he is a prophet and then, as Tintin slinks back to his flat, apparently breaks in and accosts him with banners of gigantic spiders. Only then, of course, does Tintin notice that he has been dreaming, and that he has woken up at precisely the time when the meteor was meant to end all life on earth.

The ground shakes; people scream and flee. But the world does not end. It is just an earthquake.

There has been an error, it seems. Tintin, because he’d heard about the meteor and expected the end, is jubilant. Others, suffering the earthquake, are less so.

It’s off to the observatory again for Snowy (and Tintin), where the two professors are having a hell of a row.

You clot! one of them says to the other. Your calculations were all wrong!

Meanwhile the other says he isn’t to blame.

But then the two of them think. The meteor did not smash into the earth en bloc. But parts of it surely did. They must have caused the earthquake. And — one of the professors conjectures — there might be a novel metal found in the meteor, if it could be recovered. A new metal that might — he is a modest man — be named after him. He eagerly calls around to see where it might have landed.

But he is dismayed. The meteor appears to have struck in the frozen north. If it disappeared in the sea, it could never be found. The poor professor would not be able to name his new element without a sample.

But this is not how these stories end, these stories of Snowy (and Tintin). Tintin has an idea. He notices that fragments of brick float above puddles. Perhaps the meteor, though it ditched into the sea, might still be floating as an island somewhere in the high north. An expedition to claim it — and to bring home the metal — might yet be organised.

Very quickly, one is. An expedition filled with eminent scientists — captained by Captain Haddock, the allegedly reformed and sober sailor. (A sober sailor whose crates and crates of whisky must be carried abroad during their solemn ceremony of leave-taking.) And featuring, of course, the presence of Snowy (and Tintin).

It’s a dangerous mission. The seas are treacherous; the ice on the deck is treacherous; and people — despite the maritime codes that are really more guidelines than codes — can also be treacherous. As our heroes’ ship makes its way north, another is sent to intercept and beat them there. This ship is the fly in the ointment, as it were: the grit in the oyster. A devious, grotesque south American banker type is trying to corner a market in meteorite or otherwise get up to essentially Eric Ambler types of skulduggery.

Now then, gentlemen, it becomes a race.

To this end, the devious banker-businessman type tries all manner of bad behaviour. He has our heroes’ boat almost rammed by another. He attempts to prevent them from stocking up on fuel oil in Reykjavik. And then, in the most unsailorly thing in the whole book, he feigns a distress call from a non-existent ship, just to divert them from their course.

This means, quite naturally, that there will be many demands for boldness and heroism from Snowy (and Tintin). It means each of them must, in their own ways, be very brave.