The First Men in the Moon

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Title: The First Men in the Moon
Author: H. G. Wells
Release Date: July 5, 2016 [EBook #52501]
Language: English
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* * * * *
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
* * * * *
[Illustration: “I was progressing in great leaps and bounds”
_Frontispiece._]
The First Men in the Moon
By
H. G. Wells
Author of “Tales of Space and Time,” “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” and
“Anticipations”
“Three thousand stadia from the earth to the moon.... Marvel not,
my comrade, if I appear talking to you on super-terrestrial and
aerial topics. The long and the short of the matter is that I am
running over the order of a Journey I have lately made.”--LUCIAN’S
_Icaromenippus_
London
George Newnes, Limited
Southampton Street, Strand
1901
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. MR. BEDFORD MEETS MR. CAVOR AT LYMPNE 1
II. THE FIRST MAKING OF CAVORITE 28
III. THE BUILDING OF THE SPHERE 41
IV. INSIDE THE SPHERE 54
V. THE JOURNEY TO THE MOON 61
VI. THE LANDING ON THE MOON 70
VII. SUNRISE ON THE MOON 77
VIII. A LUNAR MORNING 85
IX. PROSPECTING BEGINS 92
X. LOST MEN IN THE MOON 107
XI. THE MOONCALF PASTURES 115
XII. THE SELENITE’S FACE 132
XIII. MR. CAVOR MAKES SOME SUGGESTIONS 140
XIV. EXPERIMENTS IN INTERCOURSE 152
XV. THE GIDDY BRIDGE 161
XVI. POINTS OF VIEW 178
XVII. THE FIGHT IN THE CAVE OF THE MOON BUTCHERS 191
XVIII. IN THE SUNLIGHT 207
XIX. MR. BEDFORD ALONE 221
XX. MR. BEDFORD IN INFINITE SPACE 238
XXI. MR. BEDFORD AT LITTLESTONE 249
XXII. THE ASTONISHING COMMUNICATION OF MR.
JULIUS WENDIGEE 271
XXIII. AN ABSTRACT OF THE SIX MESSAGES FIRST
RECEIVED FROM MR. CAVOR 277
XXIV. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SELENITES 289
XXV. THE GRAND LUNAR 316
XXVI. THE LAST MESSAGE CAVOR SENT TO THE EARTH 340
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“I WAS PROGRESSING IN GREAT LEAPS AND BOUNDS” _Frontispiece_
“HE GESTICULATED WITH HIS HANDS AND ARMS” _To face page_ 6
“I LOOKED BACK AT HIS RECEDING FIGURE” ” ” 11
“I SAT ACROSS THE EDGE OF THE MANHOLE AND
LOOKED DOWN INTO THE BLACK INTERIOR” ” ” 54
“WE WATCHED INTENSELY” ” ” 87
“I REALISED MY LEAP HAD BEEN TOO VIOLENT” ” ” 101
“INSECTS,” MURMURED CAVOR, “INSECTS” ” ” 130
“THERE THE THING WAS, LOOKING AT US” ” ” 137
“BEDFORD,” HE WHISPERED, “THERE’S A SORT OF
LIGHT IN FRONT OF US” ” ” 177
“THE NEARER I STRUGGLED, THE MORE AWFULLY
REMOTE IT SEEMED” ” ” 236
“THEY CARRIED HIM INTO DARKNESS” ” ” 292
THE GRAND LUNAR ” ” 322
* * * * *
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
I MR. BEDFORD MEETS MR. CAVOR AT LYMPNE
As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the
blue sky of southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of
astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr.
Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident. It might have
been any one. I fell into these things at a time when I thought myself
removed from the slightest possibility of disturbing experiences. I
had gone to Lympne because I had imagined it the most uneventful place
in the world. “Here, at any rate,” said I, “I shall find peace and a
chance to work!”
And this book is the sequel. So utterly at variance is Destiny with
all the little plans of men.
I may perhaps mention here that very recently I had come an ugly
cropper in certain business enterprises. Sitting now surrounded by
all the circumstances of wealth, there is a luxury in admitting my
extremity. I can admit, even, that to a certain extent my disasters
were conceivably of my own making. It may be there are directions in
which I have some capacity, but the conduct of business operations is
not among these. But in those days I was young, and my youth among
other objectionable forms took that of a pride in my capacity for
affairs. I am young still in years, but the things that have happened
to me have rubbed something of the youth from my mind. Whether they
have brought any wisdom to light below it is a more doubtful matter.
It is scarcely necessary to go into the details of the speculations
that landed me at Lympne, in Kent. Nowadays even about business
transactions there is a strong spice of adventure. I took risks. In
these things there is invariably a certain amount of give and take,
and it fell to me finally to do the giving. Reluctantly enough. Even
when I had got out of everything, one cantankerous creditor saw fit
to be malignant. Perhaps you have met that flaming sense of outraged
virtue, or perhaps you have only felt it. He ran me hard. It seemed
to me, at last, that there was nothing for it but to write a play,
unless I wanted to drudge for my living as a clerk. I have a certain
imagination, and luxurious tastes, and I meant to make a vigorous
fight for it before that fate overtook me. In addition to my belief in
my powers as a business man, I had always in those days had an idea
that I was equal to writing a very good play. It is not, I believe, a
very uncommon persuasion. I knew there is nothing a man can do outside
legitimate business transactions that has such opulent possibilities,
and very probably that biased my opinion. I had, indeed, got into the
habit of regarding this unwritten drama as a convenient little reserve
put by for a rainy day. That rainy day had come and I set to work.
I soon discovered that writing a play was a longer business than I had
supposed; at first I had reckoned ten days for it, and it was to have a
_pied-à-terre_ while it was in hand that I came to Lympne. I reckoned
myself lucky in getting that little bungalow. I got it on a three
years’ agreement. I put in a few sticks of furniture, and while the
play was in hand I did my own cooking. My cooking would have shocked
Mrs. Bond. And yet, you know, it had flavour. I had a coffee-pot, a
sauce-pan for eggs, and one for potatoes, and a frying-pan for sausages
and bacon--such was the simple apparatus of my comfort. One cannot
always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.
For the rest I laid in an eighteen-gallon cask of beer on credit, and
a trustful baker came each day. It was not, perhaps, in the style of
Sybaris, but I have had worse times. I was a little sorry for the
baker, who was a very decent man indeed, but even for him I hoped.
Certainly if any one wants solitude, the place is Lympne. It is in the
clay part of Kent, and my bungalow stood on the edge of an old sea
cliff and stared across the flats of Romney Marsh at the sea. In very
wet weather the place is almost inaccessible, and I have heard that at
times the postman used to traverse the more succulent portions of his
route with boards upon his feet. I never saw him doing so, but I can
quite imagine it. Outside the doors of the few cottages and houses that
make up the present village big birch besoms are stuck, to wipe off
the worst of the clay, which will give some idea of the texture of the
district. I doubt if the place would be there at all, if it were not a
fading memory of things gone for ever. It was the big port of England
in Roman times, Portus Lemanus, and now the sea is four miles away.
All down the steep hill are boulders and masses of Roman brickwork,
and from it old Watling Street, still paved in places, starts like an
arrow to the north. I used to stand on the hill and think of it all,
the galleys and legions, the captives and officials, the women and
traders, the speculators like myself, all the swarm and tumult that
came clanking in and out of the harbour. And now just a few lumps of
rubble on a grassy slope, and a sheep or two--and me! And where the
port had been were the levels of the marsh, sweeping round in a broad
curve to distant Dungeness, and dotted here and there with tree clumps
and the church towers of old mediæval towns that are following Lemanus
now towards extinction.
That outlook on the marsh was, indeed, one of the finest views I have
ever seen. I suppose Dungeness was fifteen miles away; it lay like a
raft on the sea, and further westward were the hills by Hastings under
the setting sun. Sometimes they hung close and clear, sometimes they
were faded and low, and often the drift of the weather took them clean
out of sight. And all the nearer parts of the marsh were laced and lit
by ditches and canals.
The window at which I worked looked over the skyline of this crest, and
it was from this window that I first set eyes on Cavor. It was just as
I was struggling with my scenario, holding down my mind to the sheer
hard work of it, and naturally enough he arrested my attention.
The sun had set, the sky was a vivid tranquillity of green and yellow,
and against that he came out black--the oddest little figure.
He was a short, round-bodied, thin-legged little man, with a jerky
quality in his motions; he had seen fit to clothe his extraordinary
mind in a cricket cap, an overcoat, and cycling knickerbockers and
stockings. Why he did so I do not know, for he never cycled and he
never played cricket. It was a fortuitous concurrence of garments,
arising I know not how. He gesticulated with his hands and arms, and
jerked his head about and _buzzed_. He buzzed like something electric.
You never heard such buzzing. And ever and again he cleared his throat
with a most extraordinary noise.
[Illustration: “He gesticulated with his hands and arms”]
There had been rain, and that spasmodic walk of his was enhanced by
the extreme slipperiness of the footpath. Exactly as he came against
the sun he stopped, pulled out a watch, hesitated. Then with a sort of
convulsive gesture he turned and retreated with every manifestation
of haste, no longer gesticulating, but going with ample strides that
showed the relatively large size of his feet--they were, I remember,
grotesquely exaggerated in size by adhesive clay--to the best possible
advantage.
This occurred on the first day of my sojourn, when my play-writing
energy was at its height, and I regarded the incident simply as an
annoying distraction--the waste of five minutes. I returned to my
scenario. But when next evening the apparition was repeated with
remarkable precision, and again the next evening, and indeed every
evening when rain was not falling, concentration upon the scenario
became a considerable effort. “Confound the man,” said I, “one would
think he was learning to be a marionette!” and for several evenings I
cursed him pretty heartily.
Then my annoyance gave way to amazement and curiosity. Why on earth
should a man do this thing? On the fourteenth evening I could stand
it no longer, and so soon as he appeared I opened the French window,
crossed the verandah, and directed myself to the point where he
invariably stopped.
He had his watch out as I came up to him. He had a chubby, rubicund
face with reddish brown eyes--previously I had seen him only against
the light. “One moment, sir,” said I as he turned.
He stared. “One moment,” he said, “certainly. Or if you wish to speak
to me for longer, and it is not asking too much--your moment is
up--would it trouble you to accompany me?”
“Not in the least,” said I, placing myself beside him.
“My habits are regular. My time for intercourse--limited.”
“This, I presume, is your time for exercise?”
“It is. I come here to enjoy the sunset.”
“You don’t.”
“Sir?”
“You never look at it.”
“Never look at it?”
“No. I’ve watched you thirteen nights, and not once have you looked at
the sunset--not once.”
He knitted his brows like one who encounters a problem.
“Well, I enjoy the sunlight--the atmosphere--I go along this path,
through that gate”--he jerked his head over his shoulder--“and
round----”
“You don’t. You never have been. It’s all nonsense. There isn’t a way.
To-night, for instance----”
“Oh! to-night! Let me see. Ah! I just glanced at my watch, saw that I
had already been out just three minutes over the precise half-hour,
decided there was not time to go round, turned----”
“You always do.”
He looked at me--reflected. “Perhaps I do, now I come to think of it.
But what was it you wanted to speak to me about?”
“Why, this!”
“This?”
“Yes. Why do you do it? Every night you come making a noise----”
“Making a noise?”
“Like this”--I imitated his buzzing noise.
He looked at me, and it was evident the buzzing awakened distaste. “Do
I do _that_?” he asked.
“Every blessed evening.”
“I had no idea.”
He stopped dead. He regarded me gravely. “Can it be,” he said, “that I
have formed a Habit?”
“Well, it looks like it. Doesn’t it?”
He pulled down his lower lip between finger and thumb. He regarded a
puddle at his feet.
“My mind is much occupied,” he said. “And you want to know _why_!
Well, sir, I can assure you that not only do I not know why I do these
things, but I did not even know I did them. Come to think, it is just
as you say; I never _have_ been beyond that field.... And these things
annoy you?”
For some reason I was beginning to relent towards him. “Not _annoy_,” I
said. “But--imagine yourself writing a play!”
“I couldn’t.”
“Well, anything that needs concentration.”
“Ah!” he said, “of course,” and meditated. His expression became so
eloquent of distress, that I relented still more. After all, there _is_
a touch of aggression in demanding of a man you don’t know why he hums
on a public footpath.
“You see,” he said weakly, “it’s a habit.”
“Oh, I recognise that.”
“I must stop it.”
“But not if it puts you out. After all, I had no business--it’s
something of a liberty.”
“Not at all, sir,” he said, “not at all. I am greatly indebted to you.
I should guard myself against these things. In future I will. Could I
trouble you--once again? That noise?”
“Something like this,” I said. “Zuzzoo, zuzzoo. But really, you
know----”
“I am greatly obliged to you. In fact, I know I am getting absurdly
absent-minded. You are quite justified, sir--perfectly justified.
Indeed, I am indebted to you. The thing shall end. And now, sir, I have
already brought you further than I should have done.”
“I do hope my impertinence----”
“Not at all, sir, not at all.”
We regarded each other for a moment. I raised my hat and wished him a
good evening. He responded convulsively, and so we went our ways.
At the stile I looked back at his receding figure. His bearing had
changed remarkably, he seemed limp, shrunken. The contrast with his
former gesticulating, zuzzoing self took me in some absurd way as
pathetic. I watched him out of sight. Then wishing very heartily I had
kept to my own business, I returned to my bungalow and my play.
[Illustration: “I looked back at his receding figure”]
The next evening I saw nothing of him, nor the next. But he was very
much in my mind, and it had occurred to me that as a sentimental comic
character he might serve a useful purpose in the development of my
plot. The third day he called upon me.
For a time I was puzzled to think what had brought him. He made
indifferent conversation in the most formal way, then abruptly he came
to business. He wanted to buy me out of my bungalow.
“You see,” he said, “I don’t blame you in the least, but you’ve
destroyed a habit, and it disorganises my day. I’ve walked past here
for years--years. No doubt I’ve hummed.... You’ve made all that
impossible!”
I suggested he might try some other direction.
“No. There is no other direction. This is the only one. I’ve inquired.
And now--every afternoon at four--I come to a dead wall.”
“But, my dear sir, if the thing is so important to you----”
“It’s vital. You see, I’m--I’m an investigator--I am engaged in a
scientific research. I live----” he paused and seemed to think. “Just
over there,” he said, and pointed suddenly dangerously near my eye.
“The house with white chimneys you see just over the trees. And my
circumstances are abnormal--abnormal. I am on the point of completing
one of the most important demonstrations--I can assure you one of _the
most important_ demonstrations that have ever been made. It requires
constant thought, constant mental ease and activity. And the afternoon
was my brightest time!--effervescing with new ideas--new points of
view.”
“But why not come by still?”
“It would be all different. I should be self-conscious. I should think
of you at your play--watching me irritated--instead of thinking of my
work. No! I must have the bungalow.”
I meditated. Naturally, I wanted to think the matter over thoroughly
before anything decisive was said. I was generally ready enough for
business in those days, and selling always attracted me; but in the
first place it was not my bungalow, and even if I sold it to him at a
good price I might get inconvenienced in the delivery of goods if the
current owner got wind of the transaction, and in the second I was,
well--undischarged. It was clearly a business that required delicate
handling. Moreover, the possibility of his being in pursuit of some
valuable invention also interested me. It occurred to me that I would
like to know more of this research, not with any dishonest intention,
but simply with an idea that to know what it was would be a relief from
play-writing. I threw out feelers.
He was quite willing to supply information. Indeed, once he was fairly
under way the conversation became a monologue. He talked like a man
long pent up, who has had it over with himself again and again. He
talked for nearly an hour, and I must confess I found it a pretty
stiff bit of listening. But through it all there was the undertone of
satisfaction one feels when one is neglecting work one has set oneself.
During that first interview I gathered very little of the drift of
his work. Half his words were technicalities entirely strange to me,
and he illustrated one or two points with what he was pleased to call
elementary mathematics, computing on an envelope with a copying-ink
pencil, in a manner that made it hard even to seem to understand.
“Yes,” I said; “yes. Go on!” Nevertheless I made out enough to
convince me that he was no mere crank playing at discoveries. In
spite of his crank-like appearance there was a force about him that
made that impossible. Whatever it was, it was a thing with mechanical
possibilities. He told me of a work-shed he had, and of three
assistants--originally jobbing carpenters--whom he had trained. Now,
from the work-shed to the patent office is clearly only one step. He
invited me to see those things. I accepted readily, and took care, by a
remark or so, to underline that. The proposed transfer of the bungalow
remained very conveniently in suspense.
At last he rose to depart, with an apology for the length of his call.
Talking over his work was, he said, a pleasure enjoyed only too rarely.
It was not often he found such an intelligent listener as myself, he
mingled very little with professional scientific men.
“So much pettiness,” he explained; “so much intrigue! And really,
when one has an idea--a novel, fertilising idea--I don’t want to be
uncharitable, but----”
I am a man who believes in impulses. I made what was perhaps a rash
proposition. But you must remember that I had been alone, play-writing
in Lympne, for fourteen days, and my compunction for his ruined walk
still hung about me. “Why not,” said I, “make this your new habit? In
the place of the one I spoilt? At least, until we can settle about the
bungalow. What you want is to turn over your work in your mind. That
you have always done during your afternoon walk. Unfortunately that’s
over--you can’t get things back as they were. But why not come and talk
about your work to me; use me as a sort of wall against which you may
throw your thoughts and catch them again? It’s certain I don’t know
enough to steal your ideas myself--and I know no scientific men----”
I stopped. He was considering. Evidently the thing attracted him. “But
I’m afraid I should bore you,” he said.
“You think I’m too dull?”
“Oh no; but technicalities----”
“Anyhow, you’ve interested me immensely this afternoon.”
“Of course it _would_ be a great help to me. Nothing clears up one’s
ideas so much as explaining them. Hitherto----”
“My dear sir, say no more.”
“But really can you spare the time?”
“There is no rest like change of occupation,” I said, with profound
conviction.
The affair was over. On my verandah steps he turned. “I am already
greatly indebted to you,” he said.
I made an interrogative noise.
“You have completely cured me of that ridiculous habit of humming,” he
explained.
I think I said I was glad to be of any service to him, and he turned
away.
Immediately the train of thought that our conversation had suggested
must have resumed its sway. His arms began to wave in their former
fashion. The faint echo of “zuzzoo” came back to me on the breeze....
Well, after all, that was not my affair....
He came the next day, and again the next day after that, and delivered
two lectures on physics to our mutual satisfaction. He talked with an
air of being extremely lucid about the “ether,” and “tubes of force,”
and “gravitational potential,” and things like that, and I sat in my
other folding-chair and said, “Yes,” “Go on,” “I follow you,” to keep
him going. It was tremendously difficult stuff, but I do not think he
ever suspected how much I did not understand him. There were moments
when I doubted whether I was well employed, but at any rate I was
resting from that confounded play. Now and then things gleamed on me
clearly for a space, only to vanish just when I thought I had hold of
them. Sometimes my attention failed altogether, and I would give it up
and sit and stare at him, wondering whether, after all, it would not be
better to use him as a central figure in a good farce and let all this
other stuff slide. And then, perhaps, I would catch on again for a bit.
At the earliest opportunity I went to see his house. It was large and
carelessly furnished; there were no servants other than his three
assistants, and his dietary and private life were characterised by
a philosophical simplicity. He was a water-drinker, a vegetarian,
and all those logical disciplinary things. But the sight of his
equipment settled many doubts. It looked like business from cellar to
attic--an amazing little place to find in an out-of-the-way village.
The ground-floor rooms contained benches and apparatus, the bakehouse
and scullery boiler had developed into respectable furnaces, dynamos
occupied the cellar, and there was a gasometer in the garden. He showed
it to me with all the confiding zest of a man who has been living
too much alone. His seclusion was overflowing now in an excess of
confidence, and I had the good luck to be the recipient.
The three assistants were creditable specimens of the class of
“handy-men” from which they came. Conscientious if unintelligent,
strong, civil, and willing. One, Spargus, who did the cooking and all
the metal work, had been a sailor; a second, Gibbs, was a joiner;
and the third was an ex-jobbing gardener, and now general assistant.
They were the merest labourers. All the intelligent work was done by
Cavor. Theirs was the darkest ignorance compared even with my muddled
impression.
And now, as to the nature of these inquiries. Here, unhappily, comes a
grave difficulty. I am no scientific expert, and if I were to attempt
to set forth in the highly scientific language of Mr. Cavor the aim to
which his experiments tended, I am afraid I should confuse not only
the reader but myself, and almost certainly I should make some blunder
that would bring upon me the mockery of every up-to-date student of
mathematical physics in the country. The best thing I can do therefore
is, I think, to give my impressions in my own inexact language, without
any attempt to wear a garment of knowledge to which I have no claim.
The object of Mr. Cavor’s search was a substance that should be
“opaque”--he used some other word I have forgotten, but “opaque”
conveys the idea--to “all forms of radiant energy.” “Radiant energy,”
he made me understand, was anything like light or heat, or those
Röntgen Rays there was so much talk about a year or so ago, or the
electric waves of Marconi, or gravitation. All these things, he said,
_radiate_ out from centres, and act on bodies at a distance, whence
comes the term “radiant energy.” Now almost all substances are opaque
to some form or other of radiant energy. Glass, for example, is
transparent to light, but much less so to heat, so that it is useful
as a fire-screen; and alum is transparent to light, but blocks heat
completely. A solution of iodine in carbon bisulphide, on the other
hand, completely blocks light, but is quite transparent to heat. It
will hide a fire from you, but permit all its warmth to reach you.
Metals are not only opaque to light and heat, but also to electrical
energy, which passes through both iodine solution and glass almost as
though they were not interposed. And so on.
Now all known substances are “transparent” to gravitation. You can use
screens of various sorts to cut off the light or heat, or electrical
influence of the sun, or the warmth of the earth from anything;
you can screen things by sheets of metal from Marconi’s rays, but
nothing will cut off the gravitational attraction of the sun or the
gravitational attraction of the earth. Yet why there should be nothing
is hard to say. Cavor did not see why such a substance should not
exist, and certainly I could not tell him. I had never thought of such
a possibility before. He showed me by calculations on paper, which
Lord Kelvin, no doubt, or Professor Lodge, or Professor Karl Pearson,
or any of those great scientific people might have understood, but
which simply reduced me to a hopeless muddle, that not only was such
a substance possible, but that it must satisfy certain conditions. It
was an amazing piece of reasoning. Much as it amazed and exercised me
at the time, it would be impossible to reproduce it here. “Yes,” I said
to it all, “yes; go on!” Suffice it for this story that he believed
he might be able to manufacture this possible substance opaque to
gravitation out of a complicated alloy of metals and something new--a
new element, I fancy--called, I believe, _helium_, which was sent to
him from London in sealed stone jars. Doubt has been thrown upon this
detail, but I am almost certain it was _helium_ he had sent him in
sealed stone jars. It was certainly something very gaseous and thin.
If only I had taken notes....
But then, how was I to foresee the necessity of taking notes?
Any one with the merest germ of an imagination will understand the
extraordinary possibilities of such a substance, and will sympathise a
little with the emotion I felt as this understanding emerged from the
haze of abstruse phrases in which Cavor expressed himself. Comic relief
in a play indeed! It was some time before I would believe that I had
interpreted him aright, and I was very careful not to ask questions
that would have enabled him to gauge the profundity of misunderstanding
into which he dropped his daily exposition. But no one reading the
story of it here will sympathise fully, because from my barren
narrative it will be impossible to gather the strength of my conviction
that this astonishing substance was positively going to be made.
I do not recall that I gave my play an hour’s consecutive work at any
time after my visit to his house. My imagination had other things to
do. There seemed no limit to the possibilities of the stuff; whichever
way I tried I came on miracles and revolutions. For example, if one
wanted to lift a weight, however enormous, one had only to get a
sheet of this substance beneath it, and one might lift it with a
straw. My first natural impulse was to apply this principle to guns
and ironclads, and all the material and methods of war, and from that
to shipping, locomotion, building, every conceivable form of human
industry. The chance that had brought me into the very birth-chamber
of this new time--it was an epoch, no less--was one of those chances
that come once in a thousand years. The thing unrolled, it expanded and
expanded. Among other things I saw in it my redemption as a business
man. I saw a parent company, and daughter companies, applications
to right of us, applications to left, rings and trusts, privileges
and concessions spreading and spreading, until one vast, stupendous
Cavorite company ran and ruled the world.
And I was in it!
I took my line straight away. I knew I was staking everything, but I
jumped there and then.
“We’re on absolutely the biggest thing that has ever been invented,” I
said, and put the accent on “we.” “If you want to keep me out of this,
you’ll have to do it with a gun. I’m coming down to be your fourth
labourer to-morrow.”
He seemed surprised at my enthusiasm, but not a bit suspicious or
hostile. Rather, he was self-depreciatory.
He looked at me doubtfully. “But do you really think--?” he said. “And
your play! How about that play?”
“It’s vanished!” I cried. “My dear sir, don’t you see what you’ve got?
Don’t you see what you’re going to do?”
That was merely a rhetorical turn, but positively, he didn’t. At first
I could not believe it. He had not had the beginning of the inkling
of an idea. This astonishing little man had been working on purely
theoretical grounds the whole time! When he said it was “the most
important” research the world had ever seen, he simply meant it squared
up so many theories, settled so much that was in doubt; he had troubled
no more about the application of the stuff he was going to turn out
than if he had been a machine that makes guns. This was a possible
substance, and he was going to make it! _V’la tout_, as the Frenchman
says.
Beyond that, he was childish! If he made it, it would go down to
posterity as Cavorite or Cavorine, and he would be made an F.R.S., and
his portrait given away as a scientific worthy with _Nature_, and
things like that. And that was all he saw! He would have dropped this
bombshell into the world as though he had discovered a new species
of gnat, if it had not happened that I had come along. And there it
would have lain and fizzled, like one or two other little things these
scientific people have lit and dropped about us.
When I realised this, it was I did the talking, and Cavor who said “Go
on!” I jumped up. I paced the room, gesticulating like a boy of twenty.
I tried to make him understand his duties and responsibilities in the
matter--_our_ duties and responsibilities in the matter. I assured
him we might make wealth enough to work any sort of social revolution
we fancied, we might own and order the whole world. I told him of
companies and patents, and the case for secret processes. All these
things seemed to take him much as his mathematics had taken me. A look
of perplexity came into his ruddy little face. He stammered something
about indifference to wealth, but I brushed all that aside. He had got
to be rich, and it was no good his stammering. I gave him to understand
the sort of man I was, and that I had had very considerable business
experience. I did not tell him I was an undischarged bankrupt at the
time, because that was temporary, but I think I reconciled my evident
poverty with my financial claims. And quite insensibly, in the way such
projects grow, the understanding of a Cavorite monopoly grew up between
us. He was to make the stuff, and I was to make the boom.
I stuck like a leech to the “we”--“you” and “I” didn’t exist for me.
His idea was, that the profits I spoke of might go to endow research,
but that, of course, was a matter we had to settle later. “That’s all
right,” I shouted, “that’s all right.” The great point, as I insisted,
was to get the thing done.
“Here is a substance,” I cried, “no home, no factory, no fortress, no
ship can dare to be without--more universally applicable even than a
patent medicine! There isn’t a solitary aspect of it, not one of its
ten thousand possible uses that will not make us rich, Cavor, beyond
the dreams of avarice!”
“No!” he said. “I begin to see. It’s extraordinary how one gets new
points of view by talking over things!”
“And as it happens you have just talked to the right man!”
“I suppose no one,” he said, “is absolutely _averse_ to enormous
wealth. Of course there is one thing----”
He paused. I stood still.
“It is just possible, you know, that we may not be able to make it
after all! It may be one of those things that are a theoretical
possibility, but a practical absurdity. Or when we make it, there may
be some little hitch----!”
“We’ll tackle the hitch when it comes,” said I.
II THE FIRST MAKING OF CAVORITE
But Cavor’s fears were groundless, so far as the actual making was
concerned. On the 14th of October 1899 this incredible substance was
made!
Oddly enough, it was made at last by accident, when Mr. Cavor least
expected it. He had fused together a number of metals and certain other
things--I wish I knew the particulars now!--and he intended to leave
the mixture a week and then allow it to cool slowly. Unless he had
miscalculated, the last stage in the combination would occur when the
stuff sank to a temperature of 60° Fahr. But it chanced that, unknown
to Cavor, dissension had arisen about the furnace tending. Gibbs, who
had previously seen to this, had suddenly attempted to shift it to the
man who had been a gardener, on the score that coal was soil, being
dug, and therefore could not possibly fall within the province of a
joiner; the man who had been a jobbing gardener alleged, however, that
coal was a metallic or ore-like substance, let alone that he was cook.
But Spargus insisted on Gibbs doing the coaling, seeing that he was a
joiner and that coal is notoriously fossil wood. Consequently Gibbs
ceased to replenish the furnace, and no one else did so, and Cavor was
too much immersed in certain interesting problems concerning a Cavorite
flying machine (neglecting the resistance of the air and one or two
other points) to perceive that anything was wrong. And the premature
birth of his invention took place just as he was coming across the
field to my bungalow for our afternoon talk and tea.
I remember the occasion with extreme vividness. The water was boiling,
and everything was prepared, and the sound of his “zuzzoo” had brought
me out upon the verandah. His active little figure was black against
the autumnal sunset, and to the right the chimneys of his house just
rose above a gloriously tinted group of trees. Remoter rose the Wealden
Hills, faint and blue, while to the left the hazy marsh spread out
spacious and serene. And then----!
The chimneys jerked heavenward, smashing into a string of bricks as
they rose, and the roof and a miscellany of furniture followed. Then
overtaking them came a huge white flame. The trees about the building
swayed and whirled and tore themselves to pieces, that sprang towards
the flare. My ears were smitten with a clap of thunder that left me
deaf on one side for life, and all about me windows smashed, unheeded.
I took three steps from the verandah towards Cavor’s house, and even as
I did so came the wind.
Instantly my coat tails were over my head, and I was progressing in
great leaps and bounds, and quite against my will, towards him. In the
same moment the discoverer was seized, whirled about, and flew through
the screaming air. I saw one of my chimney pots hit the ground within
six yards of me, leap a score of feet, and so hurry in great strides
towards the focus of the disturbance. Cavor, kicking and flapping, came
down again, rolled over and over on the ground for a space, struggled
up and was lifted and borne forward at an enormous velocity, vanishing
at last among the labouring, lashing trees that writhed about his house.
A mass of smoke and ashes, and a square of bluish shining substance
rushed up towards the zenith. A large fragment of fencing came sailing
past me, dropped edgeways, hit the ground and fell flat, and then the
worst was over. The aerial commotion fell swiftly until it was a mere
strong gale, and I became once more aware that I had breath and feet.
By leaning back against the wind I managed to stop, and could collect
such wits as still remained to me.
In that instant the whole face of the world had changed. The tranquil
sunset had vanished, the sky was dark with scurrying clouds, everything
was flattened and swaying with the gale. I glanced back to see if my
bungalow was still in a general way standing, then staggered forward
towards the trees amongst which Cavor had vanished, and through whose
tall and leaf-denuded branches shone the flames of his burning house.
I entered the copse, dashing from one tree to another and clinging
to them, and for a space I sought him in vain. Then amidst a heap of
smashed branches and fencing that had banked itself against a portion
of his garden wall I perceived something stir. I made a run for this,
but before I reached it a brown object separated itself, rose on two
muddy legs and protruded two drooping, bleeding hands. Some tattered
ends of garment fluttered out from its middle portion and streamed
before the wind.
For a moment I did not recognise this earthy lump, and then I saw that
it was Cavor, caked in the mud in which he had rolled. He leant forward
against the wind, rubbing the dirt from his eyes and mouth.
He extended a muddy lump of hand, and staggered a pace towards me. His
face worked with emotion, little lumps of mud kept falling from it.
He looked as damaged and pitiful as any living creature I have ever
seen, and his remark therefore amazed me exceeding. “Gratulate me,” he
gasped; “gratulate me!”
“Congratulate you!” said I. “Good heavens! What for?”
“I’ve done it.”
“You _have_. What on earth caused that explosion?”
A gust of wind blew his words away. I understood him to say that it
wasn’t an explosion at all. The wind hurled me into collision with him,
and we stood clinging to one another.
“Try and get back to my bungalow,” I bawled in his ear. He did not hear
me, and shouted something about “three martyrs--science,” and also
something about “not much good.” At the time he laboured under the
impression that his three attendants had perished in the whirlwind.
Happily this was incorrect. Directly he had left for my bungalow they
had gone off to the public-house in Lympne to discuss the question of
the furnaces over some trivial refreshment.
I repeated my suggestion of getting back to my bungalow, and this time
he understood. We clung arm-in-arm and started, and managed at last to
reach the shelter of as much roof as was left to me. For a space we sat
in arm-chairs and panted. All the windows were broken, and the lighter
articles of furniture were in great disorder, but no irrevocable damage
was done. Happily the kitchen door had stood the pressure upon it, so
that all my crockery and cooking materials had survived. The oil stove
was still burning, and I put on the water to boil again for tea. And
that prepared, I could turn on Cavor for his explanation.
“Quite correct,” he insisted; “quite correct. I’ve done it, and it’s
all right.”
“But,” I protested. “All right! Why, there can’t be a rick standing, or
a fence or a thatched roof undamaged for twenty miles round....”
“It’s all right--_really_. I didn’t, of course, foresee this little
upset. My mind was preoccupied with another problem, and I’m apt to
disregard these practical side issues. But it’s all right----”
“My dear sir,” I cried, “don’t you see you’ve done thousands of pounds’
worth of damage?”
“There, I throw myself on your discretion. I’m not a practical man, of
course, but don’t you think they will regard it as a cyclone?”
“But the explosion----”
“It was _not_ an explosion. It’s perfectly simple. Only, as I say,
I’m apt to overlook these little things. It’s that zuzzoo business
on a larger scale. Inadvertently I made this substance of mine, this
Cavorite, in a thin, wide sheet....”
He paused. “You are quite clear that the stuff is opaque to
gravitation, that it cuts off things from gravitating towards each
other?”
“Yes,” said I. “Yes.”
“Well, so soon as it reached a temperature of 60° Fahr. and the process
of its manufacture was complete, the air above it, the portions of roof
and ceiling and floor above it ceased to have weight. I suppose you
know--everybody knows nowadays--that, as a usual thing, the air _has_
weight, that it presses on everything at the surface of the earth,
presses in all directions, with a pressure of fourteen and a half
pounds to the square inch?”
“I know that,” said I. “Go on.”
“I know that too,” he remarked. “Only this shows you how useless
knowledge is unless you apply it. You see, over our Cavorite this
ceased to be the case, the air there ceased to exert any pressure, and
the air round it and not over the Cavorite was exerting a pressure
of fourteen pounds and a half to the square inch upon this suddenly
weightless air. Ah! you begin to see! The air all about the Cavorite
crushed in upon the air above it with irresistible force. The air
above the Cavorite was forced upward violently, the air that rushed in
to replace it immediately lost weight, ceased to exert any pressure,
followed suit, blew the ceiling through and the roof off....
“You perceive,” he said, “it formed a sort of atmospheric fountain, a
kind of chimney in the atmosphere. And if the Cavorite itself hadn’t
been loose and so got sucked up the chimney, does it occur to you what
would have happened?”
I thought. “I suppose,” I said, “the air would be rushing up and up
over that infernal piece of stuff now.”
“Precisely,” he said. “A huge fountain----”
“Spouting into space! Good heavens! Why, it would have squirted all
the atmosphere of the earth away! It would have robbed the world of
air! It would have been the death of all mankind! That little lump of
stuff!”
“Not exactly into space,” said Cavor, “but as bad--practically. It
would have whipped the air off the world as one peels a banana, and
flung it thousands of miles. It would have dropped back again, of
course--but on an asphyxiated world! From our point of view very little
better than if it never came back!”
I stared. As yet I was too amazed to realise how all my expectations
had been upset. “What do you mean to do now?” I asked.
“In the first place, if I may borrow a garden trowel I will remove some
of this earth with which I am encased, and then if I may avail myself
of your domestic conveniences I will have a bath. This done, we will
converse more at leisure. It will be wise, I think”--he laid a muddy
hand on my arm--“if nothing were said of this affair beyond ourselves.
I know I have caused great damage--probably even dwelling-houses may
be ruined here and there upon the country-side. But on the other hand,
I cannot possibly pay for the damage I have done, and if the real
cause of this is published, it will lead only to heart-burning and the
obstruction of my work. One cannot foresee _everything_, you know,
and I cannot consent for one moment to add the burthen of practical
considerations to my theorising. Later on, when you have come in with
your practical mind, and Cavorite is floated--floated _is_ the word,
isn’t it?--and it has realised all you anticipate for it, we may set
matters right with these persons. But not now--not now. If no other
explanation is offered, people, in the present unsatisfactory state of
meteorological science, will ascribe all this to a cyclone; there might
be a public subscription, and as my house has collapsed and been burnt,
I should in that case receive a considerable share in the compensation,
which would be extremely helpful to the prosecution of our researches.
But if it is known that _I_ caused this, there will be no public
subscription, and everybody will be put out. Practically I should
never get a chance of working in peace again. My three assistants may
or may not have perished. That is a detail. If they have, it is no
great loss; they were more zealous than able, and this premature event
must be largely due to their joint neglect of the furnace. If they
have not perished, I doubt if they have the intelligence to explain
the affair. They will accept the cyclone story. And if, during the
temporary unfitness of my house for occupation, I may lodge in one of
the untenanted rooms of this bungalow of yours----”
He paused and regarded me.
A man of such possibilities, I reflected, is no ordinary guest to
entertain.
“Perhaps,” said I, rising to my feet, “we had better begin by looking
for a trowel,” and I led the way to the scattered vestiges of the
greenhouse.
And while he was having his bath I considered the entire question
alone. It was clear there were drawbacks to Mr. Cavor’s society I had
not foreseen. The absent-mindedness that had just escaped depopulating
the terrestrial globe, might at any moment result in some other grave
inconvenience. On the other hand I was young, my affairs were in a
mess, and I was in just the mood for reckless adventure--with a chance
of something good at the end of it. I had quite settled in my mind that
I was to have half at least in that aspect of the affair. Fortunately
I held my bungalow, as I have already explained, on a three-year
agreement, without being responsible for repairs; and my furniture,
such as there was of it, had been hastily purchased, was unpaid for,
insured, and altogether devoid of associations. In the end I decided to
keep on with him, and see the business through.
Certainly the aspect of things had changed very greatly. I no longer
doubted at all the enormous possibilities of the substance, but I began
to have doubts about the gun-carriage and the patent boots.
We set to work at once to reconstruct his laboratory and proceed with
our experiments. Cavor talked more on my level than he had ever done
before, when it came to the question of how we should make the stuff
next.
“Of course we must make it again,” he said, with a sort of glee I had
not expected in him, “of course we must make it again. We have caught
a Tartar, perhaps, but we have left the theoretical behind us for good
and all. If we can possibly avoid wrecking this little planet of ours,
we will. But--there _must_ be risks! There must be. In experimental
work there always are. And here, as a practical man, _you_ must come
in. For my own part it seems to me we might make it edgeways, perhaps,
and very thin. Yet I don’t know. I have a certain dim perception of
another method. I can hardly explain it yet. But curiously enough it
came into my mind, while I was rolling over and over in the mud before
the wind, and very doubtful how the whole adventure was to end, as
being absolutely the thing I ought to have done.”
Even with my aid we found some little difficulty, and meanwhile we
kept at work restoring the laboratory. There was plenty to do before
it was absolutely necessary to decide upon the precise form and method
of our second attempt. Our only hitch was the strike of the three
labourers, who objected to my activity as a foreman. But that matter we
compromised after two days’ delay.
III THE BUILDING OF THE SPHERE
I remember the occasion very distinctly when Cavor told me of his idea
of the sphere. He had had intimations of it before, but at the time it
seemed to come to him in a rush. We were returning to the bungalow for
tea, and on the way he fell humming. Suddenly he shouted, “That’s it!
That finishes it! A sort of roller blind!”
“Finishes what?” I asked.
“Space--anywhere! The moon!”
“What do you mean?”
“Mean? Why--it must be a sphere! That’s what I mean!”
I saw I was out of it, and for a time I let him talk in his own
fashion. I hadn’t the ghost of an idea then of his drift. But after he
had taken tea he made it clear to me.
“It’s like this,” he said. “Last time I ran this stuff that cuts things
off from gravitation into a flat tank with an overlap that held it
down. And directly it had cooled and the manufacture was completed all
that uproar happened, nothing above it weighed anything, the air went
squirting up, the house squirted up, and if the stuff itself hadn’t
squirted up too, I don’t know what would have happened! But suppose the
substance is loose, and quite free to go up?”
“It will go up at once!”
“Exactly. With no more disturbance than firing a big gun.”
“But what good will that do?”
“I’m going up with it!”
I put down my teacup and stared at him.
“Imagine a sphere,” he explained, “large enough to hold two people
and their luggage. It will be made of steel lined with thick glass;
it will contain a proper store of solidified air, concentrated food,
water-distilling apparatus, and so forth. And enamelled, as it were, on
the outer steel----”
“Cavorite?”
“Yes.”
“But how will you get inside?”
“There was a similar problem about a dumpling.”
“Yes, I know. But how?”
“That’s perfectly easy. An air-tight manhole is all that is needed.
That, of course, will have to be a little complicated; there will have
to be a valve, so that things may be thrown out, if necessary, without
much loss of air.”
“Like Jules Verne’s thing in ‘A Trip to the Moon’?”
But Cavor was not a reader of fiction.
“I begin to see,” I said slowly. “And you could get in and screw
yourself up while the Cavorite was warm, and as soon as it cooled it
would become impervious to gravitation, and off you would fly----”
“At a tangent.”
“You would go off in a straight line--” I stopped abruptly. “What is to
prevent the thing travelling in a straight line into space for ever?”
I asked. “You’re not safe to get anywhere, and if you do--how will you
get back?”
“I’ve just thought of that,” said Cavor. “That’s what I meant when I
said the thing is finished. The inner glass sphere can be air-tight
and, except for the manhole, continuous, and the steel sphere can be
made in sections, each section capable of rolling up after the fashion
of a roller blind. These can easily be worked by springs, and released
and checked by electricity conveyed by platinum wires fused through
the glass. All that is merely a question of detail. So you see, that
except for the thickness of the blind rollers, the Cavorite exterior
of the sphere will consist of windows or blinds, whichever you like to
call them. Well, when all these windows or blinds are shut, no light,
no heat, no gravitation, no radiant energy of any sort will get at the
inside of the sphere, it will fly on through space in a straight line,
as you say. But open a window, imagine one of the windows open! Then at
once any heavy body that chances to be in that direction will attract
us----”
I sat taking it in.
“You see?” he said.
“Oh, I _see_.”
“Practically we shall be able to tack about in space just as we wish.
Get attracted by this and that.”
“Oh yes. _That’s_ clear enough. Only----”
“Well?”
“I don’t quite see what we shall do it for! It’s really only jumping
off the world and back again.”
“Surely! For example, one might go to the moon.”
“And when one got there! What would you find?”
“We should see--Oh! consider the new knowledge.”
“Is there air there?”
“There may be.”
“It’s a fine idea,” I said, “but it strikes me as a large order all the
same. The moon! I’d much rather try some smaller things first.”
“They’re out of the question, because of the air difficulty.”
“Why not apply that idea of spring blinds--Cavorite blinds in strong
steel cases--to lifting weights?”
“It wouldn’t work,” he insisted. “After all, to go into outer space is
not so much worse, if at all, than a polar expedition. Men go on polar
expeditions.”
“Not business men. And besides, they get paid for polar expeditions.
And if anything goes wrong there are relief parties. But this--it’s
just firing ourselves off the world for nothing.”
“Call it prospecting.”
“You’ll have to call it that.... One might make a book of it perhaps,”
I said.
“I have no doubt there will be minerals,” said Cavor.
“For example?”
“Oh! sulphur, ores, gold perhaps, possibly new elements.”
“Cost of carriage,” I said. “You know you’re _not_ a practical man. The
moon’s a quarter of a million miles away.”
“It seems to me it wouldn’t cost much to cart any weight anywhere if
you packed it in a Cavorite case.”
I had not thought of that. “Delivered free on head of purchaser, eh?”
“It isn’t as though we were confined to the moon.”
“You mean----?”
“There’s Mars--clear atmosphere, novel surroundings, exhilarating sense
of lightness. It might be pleasant to go there.”
“Is there air on Mars?”
“Oh yes!”
“Seems as though you might run it as a sanatorium. By the way, how far
is Mars?”
“Two hundred million miles at present,” said Cavor airily; “and you go
close by the sun.”
My imagination was picking itself up again. “After all,” I said,
“there’s something in these things. There’s travel----”
An extraordinary possibility came rushing into my mind. Suddenly I
saw, as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavorite
liners and spheres _de luxe_. “Rights of pre-emption,” came floating
into my head--planetary rights of pre-emption. I recalled the old
Spanish monopoly in American gold. It wasn’t as though it was just this
planet or that--it was all of them. I stared at Cavor’s rubicund face,
and suddenly my imagination was leaping and dancing. I stood up, I
walked up and down; my tongue was unloosened.
“I’m beginning to take it in,” I said; “I’m beginning to take it in.”
The transition from doubt to enthusiasm seemed to take scarcely any
time at all. “But this is tremendous!” I cried. “This is Imperial! I
haven’t been dreaming of this sort of thing.”
Once the chill of my opposition was removed, his own pent-up excitement
had play. He too got up and paced. He too gesticulated and shouted. We
behaved like men inspired. We _were_ men inspired.
“We’ll settle all that!” he said in answer to some incidental
difficulty that had pulled me up. “We’ll soon settle all that! We’ll
start the drawings for mouldings this very night.”
“We’ll start them now,” I responded, and we hurried off to the
laboratory to begin upon this work forthwith.
I was like a child in Wonderland all that night. The dawn found us both
still at work--we kept our electric light going heedless of the day. I
remember now exactly how those drawings looked. I shaded and tinted,
while Cavor drew--smudged and haste-marked they were in every line,
but wonderfully correct. We got out the orders for the steel blinds
and frames we needed from that night’s work, and the glass sphere was
designed within a week. We gave up our afternoon conversations and our
old routine altogether. We worked, and we slept and ate when we could
work no longer for hunger and fatigue. Our enthusiasm infected even our
three men, though they had no idea what the sphere was for. Through
those days the man Gibbs gave up walking, and went everywhere, even
across the room, at a sort of fussy run.
And it grew--the sphere. December passed, January--I spent a day
with a broom sweeping a path through the snow from bungalow to
laboratory--February, March. By the end of March the completion was
in sight. In January had come a team of horses, a huge packing-case;
we had our thick glass sphere now ready, and in position under the
crane we had rigged to sling it into the steel shell. All the bars and
blinds of the steel shell--it was not really a spherical shell, but
polyhedral, with a roller blind to each facet--had arrived by February,
and the lower half was bolted together. The Cavorite was half made by
March, the metallic paste had gone through two of the stages in its
manufacture, and we had plastered quite half of it on to the steel bars
and blinds. It was astonishing how closely we kept to the lines of
Cavor’s first inspiration in working out the scheme. When the bolting
together of the sphere was finished, he proposed to remove the rough
roof of the temporary laboratory in which the work was done, and build
a furnace about it. So the last stage of Cavorite making, in which the
paste is heated to a dull red glow in a stream of helium, would be
accomplished when it was already on the sphere.
And then we had to discuss and decide what provisions we were to
take--compressed foods, concentrated essences, steel cylinders
containing reserve oxygen, an arrangement for removing carbonic acid
and waste from the air and restoring oxygen by means of sodium
peroxide, water condensers, and so forth. I remember the little heap
they made in the corner--tins, and rolls, and boxes--convincingly
matter-of-fact.
It was a strenuous time, with little chance of thinking. But one day,
when we were drawing near the end, an odd mood came over me. I had
been bricking up the furnace all the morning, and I sat down by these
possessions dead beat. Everything seemed dull and incredible.
“But look here, Cavor,” I said. “After all! What’s it all for?”
He smiled. “The thing now is to go.”
“The moon,” I reflected. “But what do you expect? I thought the moon
was a dead world.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“What do you expect?”
“We’re going to see.”
“_Are_ we?” I said, and stared before me.
“You are tired,” he remarked. “You’d better take a walk this afternoon.”
“No,” I said obstinately; “I’m going to finish this brickwork.”
And I did, and insured myself a night of insomnia.
I don’t think I have ever had such a night. I had some bad times
before my business collapse, but the very worst of those was sweet
slumber compared to this infinity of aching wakefulness. I was suddenly
in the most enormous funk at the thing we were going to do.
I do not remember before that night thinking at all of the risks we
were running. Now they came like that array of spectres that once
beleaguered Prague, and camped around me. The strangeness of what we
were about to do, the unearthliness of it, overwhelmed me. I was like a
man awakened out of pleasant dreams to the most horrible surroundings.
I lay, eyes wide open, and the sphere seemed to get more flimsy and
feeble, and Cavor more unreal and fantastic, and the whole enterprise
madder and madder every moment.
I got out of bed and wandered about. I sat at the window and stared
at the immensity of space. Between the stars was the void, the
unfathomable darkness! I tried to recall the fragmentary knowledge of
astronomy I had gained in my irregular reading, but it was all too
vague to furnish any idea of the things we might expect. At last I got
back to bed and snatched some moments of sleep--moments of nightmare
rather--in which I fell and fell and fell for evermore into the abyss
of the sky.
I astonished Cavor at breakfast. I told him shortly, “I’m not coming
with you in the sphere.”
I met all his protests with a sullen persistence. “The thing’s too
mad,” I said, “and I won’t come. The thing’s too mad.”
I would not go with him to the laboratory. I fretted about my bungalow
for a time, and then took hat and stick and set off alone, I knew not
whither. It chanced to be a glorious morning: a warm wind and deep blue
sky, the first green of spring abroad, and multitudes of birds singing.
I lunched on beef and beer in a little public-house near Elham, and
startled the landlord by remarking _apropos_ of the weather, “A man who
leaves the world when days of this sort are about is a fool!”
“That’s what I says when I heerd on it!” said the landlord, and I
found that for one poor soul at least this world had proved excessive,
and there had been a throat-cutting. I went on with a new twist to my
thoughts.
In the afternoon I had a pleasant sleep in a sunny place, and went my
way refreshed.
I came to a comfortable-looking inn near Canterbury. It was bright
with creepers, and the landlady was a clean old woman and took my
eye. I found I had just enough money to pay for my lodging with her.
I decided to stop the night there. She was a talkative body, and
among many other particulars I learnt she had never been to London.
“Canterbury’s as far as ever I been,” she said. “I’m not one of your
gad-about sort.”
“How would you like a trip to the moon?” I cried.
“I never did hold with them ballooneys,” she said, evidently under the
impression that this was a common excursion enough. “I wouldn’t go up
in one--not for ever so.”
This struck me as being funny. After I had supped I sat on a bench by
the door of the inn and gossiped with two labourers about brick-making,
and motor cars, and the cricket of last year. And in the sky a faint
new crescent, blue and vague as a distant Alp, sank westward over the
sun.
The next day I returned to Cavor. “I am coming,” I said. “I’ve been a
little out of order, that’s all.”
That was the only time I felt any serious doubt of our enterprise.
Nerves purely! After that I worked a little more carefully, and took a
trudge for an hour every day. And at last, save for the heating in the
furnace, our labours were at an end.
IV INSIDE THE SPHERE
“Go on,” said Cavor, as I sat across the edge of the manhole and looked
down into the black interior of the sphere. We two were alone. It was
evening, the sun had set, and the stillness of the twilight was upon
everything.
I drew my other leg inside and slid down the smooth glass to the
bottom of the sphere, then turned to take the cans of food and other
impedimenta from Cavor. The interior was warm, the thermometer stood
at eighty, and as we should lose little or none of this by radiation,
we were dressed in shoes and thin flannels. We had, however, a bundle
of thick woollen clothing and several thick blankets to guard against
mischance. By Cavor’s direction I placed the packages, the cylinders of
oxygen, and so forth, loosely about my feet, and soon we had everything
in. He walked about the roofless shed for a time seeking anything we
had overlooked, and then crawled in after me. I noted something in his
hand.
[Illustration: “I sat across the edge of the manhole and looked down
into the black interior”]
“What have you got there?” I asked.
“Haven’t you brought anything to read?”
“Good Lord! No.”
“I forgot to tell you. There are uncertainties--The voyage may last--We
may be weeks!”
“But----”
“We shall be floating in this sphere with absolutely no occupation.”
“I wish I’d known----”
He peered out of the manhole. “Look!” he said. “There’s something
there!”
“Is there time?”
“We shall be an hour.”
I looked out. It was an old number of _Tit-Bits_ that one of the men
must have brought. Further away in the corner I saw a torn _Lloyds’
News_. I scrambled back into the sphere with these things. “What have
you got?” I said.
I took the book from his hand and read, “The Works of William
Shakespeare.”
He coloured slightly. “My education has been so purely scientific--” he
said apologetically.
“Never read him?”
“Never.”
“He knew a little you know--in an irregular sort of way.”
“Precisely what I am told,” said Cavor.
I assisted him to screw in the glass cover of the manhole, and then he
pressed a stud to close the corresponding blind in the outer case. The
little oblong of twilight vanished. We were in darkness.
For a time neither of us spoke. Although our case would not be
impervious to sound, everything was very still. I perceived there was
nothing to grip when the shock of our start should come, and I realised
that I should be uncomfortable for want of a chair.
“Why have we no chairs?” I asked.
“I’ve settled all that,” said Cavor. “We shan’t need them.”
“Why not?”
“You will see,” he said, in the tone of a man who refuses to talk.
I became silent. Suddenly it had come to me clear and vivid that I
was a fool to be inside that sphere. Even now, I asked myself, is it
too late to withdraw? The world outside the sphere, I knew, would
be cold and inhospitable enough to me--for weeks I had been living
on subsidies from Cavor--but after all, would it be as cold as the
infinite zero, as inhospitable as empty space? If it had not been for
the appearance of cowardice, I believe that even then I should have
made him let me out. But I hesitated on that score, and hesitated, and
grew fretful and angry, and the time passed.
There came a little jerk, a noise like champagne being uncorked in
another room, and a faint whistling sound. For just one instant I had
a sense of enormous tension, a transient conviction that my feet were
pressing downward with a force of countless tons. It lasted for an
infinitesimal time.
But it stirred me to action. “Cavor!” I said into the darkness, “my
nerve’s in rags.... I don’t think----”
I stopped. He made no answer.
“Confound it!” I cried; “I’m a fool! What business have I here? I’m not
coming, Cavor. The thing’s too risky. I’m getting out.”
“You can’t,” he said.
“Can’t! We’ll soon see about that!”
He made no answer for ten seconds. “It’s too late for us to quarrel
now, Bedford,” he said. “That little jerk was the start. Already we are
flying as swiftly as a bullet up into the gulf of space.”
“I--” I said, and then it didn’t seem to matter what happened. For a
time I was, as it were, stunned; I had nothing to say. It was just as
if I had never heard of this idea of leaving the world before. Then
I perceived an unaccountable change in my bodily sensations. It was
a feeling of lightness, of unreality. Coupled with that was a queer
sensation in the head, an apoplectic effect almost, and a thumping of
blood-vessels at the ears. Neither of these feelings diminished as
time went on, but at last I got so used to them that I experienced no
inconvenience.
I heard a click, and a little glow lamp came into being.
I saw Cavor’s face, as white as I felt my own to be. We regarded one
another in silence. The transparent blackness of the glass behind him
made him seem as though he floated in a void.
“Well, we’re committed,” I said at last.
“Yes,” he said, “we’re committed.”
“Don’t move,” he exclaimed, at some suggestion of a gesture. “Let your
muscles keep quite lax--as if you were in bed. We are in a little
universe of our own. Look at those things!”
He pointed to the loose cases and bundles that had been lying on the
blankets in the bottom of the sphere. I was astonished to see that they
were floating now nearly a foot from the spherical wall. Then I saw
from his shadow that Cavor was no longer leaning against the glass. I
thrust out my hand behind me, and found that I too was suspended in
space, clear of the glass.
I did not cry out nor gesticulate, but fear came upon me. It was like
being held and lifted by something--you know not what. The mere touch
of my hand against the glass moved me rapidly. I understood what had
happened, but that did not prevent my being afraid. We were cut off
from all exterior gravitation, only the attraction of objects within
our sphere had effect. Consequently everything that was not fixed
to the glass was falling--slowly because of the slightness of our
masses--towards the centre of gravity of our little world, which seemed
to be somewhere about the middle of the sphere, but rather nearer to
myself than Cavor, on account of my greater weight.
“We must turn round,” said Cavor, “and float back to back, with the
things between us.”
It was the strangest sensation conceivable, floating thus loosely in
space, at first indeed horribly strange, and when the horror passed,
not disagreeable at all, exceeding restful; indeed, the nearest thing
in earthly experience to it that I know is lying on a very thick, soft
feather bed. But the quality of utter detachment and independence! I
had not reckoned on things like this. I had expected a violent jerk
at starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt--as if I were
disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like
the beginning of a dream.
V THE JOURNEY TO THE MOON
Presently Cavor extinguished the light. He said we had not overmuch
energy stored, and that what we had we must economise for reading. For
a time, whether it was long or short I do not know, there was nothing
but blank darkness.
A question floated up out of the void. “How are we pointing?” I said.
“What is our direction?”
“We are flying away from the earth at a tangent, and as the moon is
near her third quarter we are going somewhere towards her. I will open
a blind----”
Came a click, and then a window in the outer case yawned open. The sky
outside was as black as the darkness within the sphere, but the shape
of the open window was marked by an infinite number of stars.
Those who have only seen the starry sky from the earth cannot imagine
its appearance when the vague half-luminous veil of our air has been
withdrawn. The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered survivors
that penetrate our misty atmosphere. But now at last I could realise
the meaning of the hosts of heaven!
Stranger things we were presently to see, but that airless, star-dusted
sky! Of all things, I think that will be one of the last I shall forget.
The little window vanished with a click, another beside it snapped open
and instantly closed, and then a third, and for a moment I had to close
my eyes because of the blinding splendour of the waning moon.
For a space I had to stare at Cavor and the white-lit things about me
to season my eyes to light again, before I could turn them towards that
pallid glare.
Four windows were open in order that the gravitation of the moon might
act upon all the substances in our sphere. I found I was no longer
floating freely in space, but that my feet were resting on the glass
in the direction of the moon. The blankets and cases of provisions
were also creeping slowly down the glass, and presently came to rest
so as to block out a portion of the view. It seemed to me, of course,
that I looked “down” when I looked at the moon. On earth “down” means
earthward, the way things fall, and “up” the reverse direction. Now
the pull of gravitation was towards the moon, and for all I knew to the
contrary our earth was overhead. And, of course, when all the Cavorite
blinds were closed, “down” was towards the centre of our sphere, and
“up” towards its outer wall.
It was curiously unlike earthly experience, too, to have the light
coming _up_ to one. On earth light falls from above, or comes slanting
down sideways, but here it came from beneath our feet, and to see our
shadows we had to look up.
At first it gave me a sort of vertigo to stand only on thick glass
and look down upon the moon through hundreds of thousands of miles of
vacant space; but this sickness passed very speedily. And then--the
splendour of the sight!
The reader may imagine it best if he will lie on the ground some warm
summer’s night and look between his upraised feet at the moon, but for
some reason, probably because the absence of air made it so much more
luminous, the moon seemed already considerably larger than it does from
earth. The minutest details of its surface were acutely clear. And
since we did not see it through air, its outline was bright and sharp,
there was no glow or halo about it, and the star-dust that covered
the sky came right to its very margin, and marked the outline of its
unilluminated part. And as I stood and stared at the moon between my
feet, that perception of the impossible that had been with me off and
on ever since our start, returned again with tenfold conviction.
“Cavor,” I said, “this takes me queerly. Those companies we were going
to run, and all that about minerals?”
“Well?”
“I don’t see ’em here.”
“No,” said Cavor; “but you’ll get over all that.”
“I suppose I’m made to turn right side up again. Still, _this_--For a
moment I could half believe there never was a world.”
“That copy of _Lloyds’ News_ might help you.”
I stared at the paper for a moment, then held it above the level of my
face, and found I could read it quite easily. I struck a column of mean
little advertisements. “A gentleman of private means is willing to lend
money,” I read. I knew that gentleman. Then somebody eccentric wanted
to sell a Cutaway bicycle, “quite new and cost £15,” for five pounds;
and a lady in distress wished to dispose of some fish knives and forks,
“a wedding present,” at a great sacrifice. No doubt some simple soul
was sagely examining these knives and forks, and another triumphantly
riding off on that bicycle, and a third trustfully consulting that
benevolent gentleman of means even as I read. I laughed, and let the
paper drift from my hand.
“Are we visible from the earth?” I asked.
“Why?”
“I knew some one who was rather interested in astronomy. It occurred
to me that it would be rather odd if--my friend--chanced to be looking
through some telescope.”
“It would need the most powerful telescope on earth even now to see us
as the minutest speck.”
For a time I stared in silence at the moon.
“It’s a world,” I said; “one feels that infinitely more than one ever
did on earth. People perhaps----”
“People!” he exclaimed. “_No!_ Banish all that! Think yourself a sort
of ultra-arctic voyager exploring the desolate places of space. Look at
it!”
He waved his hand at the shining whiteness below. “It’s dead--dead!
Vast extinct volcanoes, lava wildernesses, tumbled wastes of snow,
or frozen carbonic acid, or frozen air, and everywhere landslip seams
and cracks and gulfs. Nothing happens. Men have watched this planet
systematically with telescopes for over two hundred years. How much
change do you think they have seen?”
“None.”
“They have traced two indisputable landslips, a doubtful crack, and one
slight periodic change of colour, and that’s all.”
“I didn’t know they’d traced even that.”
“Oh yes. But as for people!”
“By the way,” I asked, “how small a thing will the biggest telescopes
show upon the moon?”
“One could see a fair-sized church. One could certainly see any towns
or buildings, or anything like the handiwork of men. There might
perhaps be insects, something in the way of ants, for example, so that
they could hide in deep burrows from the lunar night, or some new sort
of creatures having no earthly parallel. That is the most probable
thing, if we are to find life there at all. Think of the difference in
conditions! Life must fit itself to a day as long as fourteen earthly
days, a cloudless sun-blaze of fourteen days, and then a night of equal
length, growing ever colder and colder under these cold, sharp stars.
In that night there must be cold, the ultimate cold, absolute zero,
273° C. below the earthly freezing point. Whatever life there is must
hibernate through _that_, and rise again each day.”
He mused. “One can imagine something worm-like,” he said, “taking
its air solid as an earth-worm swallows earth, or thick-skinned
monsters----”
“By-the-bye,” I said, “why didn’t we bring a gun?”
He did not answer that question. “No,” he concluded, “we just have to
go. We shall see when we get there.”
I remembered something. “Of course, there’s my minerals, anyhow,” I
said; “whatever the conditions may be.”
Presently he told me he wished to alter our course a little by letting
the earth tug at us for a moment. He was going to open one earthward
blind for thirty seconds. He warned me that it would make my head swim,
and advised me to extend my hands against the glass to break my fall. I
did as he directed, and thrust my feet against the bales of food cases
and air cylinders to prevent their falling upon me. Then with a click
the window flew open. I fell clumsily upon hands and face, and saw for
a moment between my black extended fingers our mother earth--a planet
in a downward sky.
We were still very near--Cavor told me the distance was perhaps eight
hundred miles--and the huge terrestrial disk filled all heaven. But
already it was plain to see that the world was a globe. The land below
us was in twilight and vague, but westward the vast grey stretches of
the Atlantic shone like molten silver under the receding day. I think
I recognised the cloud-dimmed coast-lines of France and Spain and the
south of England, and then, with a click, the shutter closed again, and
I found myself in a state of extraordinary confusion sliding slowly
over the smooth glass.
When at last things settled themselves in my mind again, it seemed
quite beyond question that the moon was “down” and under my feet, and
that the earth was somewhere away on the level of the horizon--the
earth that had been “down” to me and my kindred since the beginning of
things.
So slight were the exertions required of us, so easy did the practical
annihilation of our weight make all we had to do, that the necessity
for taking refreshment did not occur to us for nearly six hours (by
Cavor’s chronometer) after our start. I was amazed at that lapse of
time. Even then I was satisfied with very little. Cavor examined the
apparatus for absorbing carbonic acid and water, and pronounced it
to be in satisfactory order, our consumption of oxygen having been
extraordinarily slight. And our talk being exhausted for the time, and
there being nothing further for us to do, we gave way to a curious
drowsiness that had come upon us, and spreading our blankets on the
bottom of the sphere in such a manner as to shut out most of the
moonlight, wished each other good-night, and almost immediately fell
asleep.
And so, sleeping, and sometimes talking and reading a little, and at
times eating, although without any keenness of appetite,[1] but for the
most part in a sort of quiescence that was neither waking nor slumber,
we fell through a space of time that had neither night nor day in it,
silently, softly, and swiftly down towards the moon.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] It is a curious thing, that while we were in the sphere we felt not
the slightest desire for food, nor did we feel the want of it when we
abstained. At first we forced our appetites, but afterwards we fasted
completely. Altogether we did not consume one-hundredth part of the
compressed provisions we had brought with us. The amount of carbonic
acid we breathed was also unnaturally low, but why this was so I am
quite unable to explain.
VI THE LANDING ON THE MOON
I remember how one day Cavor suddenly opened six of our shutters and
blinded me so that I cried aloud at him. The whole area was moon, a
stupendous scimitar of white dawn with its edge hacked out by notches
of darkness, the crescent shore of an ebbing tide of darkness, out of
which peaks and pinnacles came climbing into the blaze of the sun.
I take it the reader has seen pictures or photographs of the moon,
so that I need not describe the broader features of that landscape,
those spacious ringlike ranges vaster than any terrestrial mountains,
their summits shining in the day, their shadows harsh and deep, the
grey disordered plains, the ridges, hills, and craterlets, all passing
at last from a blazing illumination into a common mystery of black.
Athwart this world we were flying scarcely a hundred miles above its
crests and pinnacles. And now we could see, what no eye on earth
will ever see, that under the blaze of the day the harsh outlines
of the rocks and ravines of the plains and crater floor grew grey
and indistinct under a thickening haze, that the white of their lit
surfaces broke into lumps and patches, and broke again and shrank and
vanished, and that here and there strange tints of brown and olive grew
and spread.
But little time we had for watching then. For now we had come to the
real danger of our journey. We had to drop ever closer to the moon as
we spun about it, to slacken our pace and watch our chance, until at
last we could dare to drop upon its surface.
For Cavor that was a time of intense exertion; for me it was an anxious
inactivity. I seemed perpetually to be getting out of his way. He leapt
about the sphere from point to point with an agility that would have
been impossible on earth. He was perpetually opening and closing the
Cavorite windows, making calculations, consulting his chronometer by
means of the glow lamp during those last eventful hours. For a long
time we had all our windows closed and hung silently in darkness,
hurling through space.
Then he was feeling for the shutter studs, and suddenly four windows
were open. I staggered and covered my eyes, drenched and scorched and
blinded by the unaccustomed splendour of the sun beneath my feet. Then
again the shutters snapped, leaving my brain spinning in a darkness
that pressed against the eyes. And after that I floated in another
vast, black silence.
Then Cavor switched on the electric light, and told me he proposed
to bind all our luggage together with the blankets about it, against
the concussion of our descent. We did this with our windows closed,
because in that way our goods arranged themselves naturally at the
centre of the sphere. That too was a strange business; we two men
floating loose in that spherical space, and packing and pulling ropes.
Imagine it if you can! No up nor down, and every effort resulting in
unexpected movements. Now I would be pressed against the glass with the
full force of Cavor’s thrust, now I would be kicking helplessly in a
void. Now the star of the electric light would be overhead, now under
foot. Now Cavor’s feet would float up before my eyes, and now we would
be crossways to each other. But at last our goods were safely bound
together in a big soft bale, all except two blankets with head holes
that we were to wrap about ourselves.
Then for a flash Cavor opened a window moonward, and we saw that we
were dropping towards a huge central crater with a number of minor
craters grouped in a sort of cross about it. And then again Cavor
flung our little sphere open to the scorching, blinding sun. I think
he was using the sun’s attraction as a brake. “Cover yourself with a
blanket,” he cried, thrusting himself from me, and for a moment I did
not understand.
Then I hauled the blanket from beneath my feet and got it about me and
over my head and eyes. Abruptly he closed the shutters again, snapped
one open again and closed it, then suddenly began snapping them all
open, each safely into its steel roller. There came a jar, and then we
were rolling over and over, bumping against the glass and against the
big bale of our luggage, and clutching at each other, and outside some
white substance splashed as if we were rolling down a slope of snow....
Over, clutch, bump, clutch, bump, over....
Came a thud, and I was half buried under the bale of our possessions,
and for a space everything was still. Then I could hear Cavor puffing
and grunting, and the snapping of a shutter in its sash. I made an
effort, thrust back our blanket-wrapped luggage, and emerged from
beneath it. Our open windows were just visible as a deeper black set
with stars.
We were still alive, and we were lying in the darkness of the shadow of
the wall of the great crater into which we had fallen.
We sat getting our breath again, and feeling the bruises on our limbs.
I don’t think either of us had had a very clear expectation of such
rough handling as we had received. I struggled painfully to my feet.
“And now,” said I, “to look at the landscape of the moon! But--! It’s
tremendously dark, Cavor!”
The glass was dewy, and as I spoke I wiped at it with my blanket.
“We’re half-an-hour or so beyond the day,” he said. “We must wait.”
It was impossible to distinguish anything. We might have been in a
sphere of steel for all that we could see. My rubbing with the blanket
simply smeared the glass, and as fast as I wiped it, it became opaque
again with freshly condensed moisture mixed with an increasing quantity
of blanket hairs. Of course I ought not to have used the blanket. In my
efforts to clear the glass I slipped upon the damp surface, and hurt my
shin against one of the oxygen cylinders that protruded from our bale.
The thing was exasperating--it was absurd. Here we were just arrived
upon the moon, amidst we knew not what wonders, and all we could see
was the grey and streaming wall of the bubble in which we had come.
“Confound it!” I said, “but at this rate we might have stopped at
home;” and I squatted on the bale and shivered, and drew my blanket
closer about me.
Abruptly the moisture turned to spangles and fronds of frost. “Can you
reach the electric heater,” said Cavor. “Yes--that black knob. Or we
shall freeze.”
I did not wait to be told twice. “And now,” said I, “what are we to do?”
“Wait,” he said.
“Wait?”
“Of course. We shall have to wait until our air gets warm again, and
then this glass will clear. We can’t do anything till then. It’s night
here yet; we must wait for the day to overtake us. Meanwhile, don’t you
feel hungry?”
For a space I did not answer him, but sat fretting. I turned
reluctantly from the smeared puzzle of the glass and stared at
his face. “Yes,” I said, “I am hungry. I feel somehow enormously
disappointed. I had expected--I don’t know what I had expected, but not
this.”
I summoned my philosophy, and rearranging my blanket about me sat down
on the bale again and began my first meal on the moon. I don’t think
I finished it--I forget. Presently, first in patches, then running
rapidly together into wider spaces, came the clearing of the glass,
came the drawing of the misty veil that hid the moon world from our
eyes.
We peered out upon the landscape of the moon.
VII SUNRISE ON THE MOON
As we saw it first it was the wildest and most desolate of scenes. We
were in an enormous amphitheatre, a vast circular plain, the floor of
the giant crater. Its cliff-like walls closed us in on every side.
From the westward the light of the unseen sun fell upon them, reaching
to the very foot of the cliff, and showed a disordered escarpment of
drab and greyish rock, lined here and there with banks and crevices of
snow. This was perhaps a dozen miles away, but at first no intervening
atmosphere diminished in the slightest the minutely detailed brilliancy
with which these things glared at us. They stood out clear and dazzling
against a background of starry blackness that seemed to our earthly
eyes rather a gloriously spangled velvet curtain than the spaciousness
of the sky.
The eastward cliff was at first merely a starless selvedge to
the starry dome. No rosy flush, no creeping pallor, announced
the commencing day. Only the Corona, the Zodiacal light, a huge
cone-shaped, luminous haze, pointing up towards the splendour of the
morning star, warned us of the imminent nearness of the sun.
Whatever light was about us was reflected by the westward cliffs. It
showed a huge undulating plain, cold and grey, a grey that deepened
eastward into the absolute raven darkness of the cliff shadow.
Innumerable rounded grey summits, ghostly hummocks, billows of snowy
substance, stretching crest beyond crest into the remote obscurity,
gave us our first inkling of the distance of the crater wall. These
hummocks looked like snow. At the time I thought they were snow. But
they were not--they were mounds and masses of frozen air!
So it was at first, and then, sudden, swift, and amazing, came the
lunar day.
The sunlight had crept down the cliff, it touched the drifted masses
at its base and incontinently came striding with seven-leagued boots
towards us. The distant cliff seemed to shift and quiver, and at the
touch of the dawn a reek of grey vapour poured upward from the crater
floor, whirls and puffs and drifting wraiths of grey, thicker and
broader and denser, until at last the whole westward plain was steaming
like a wet handkerchief held before the fire, and the westward cliffs
were no more than a refracted glare beyond.
“It is air,” said Cavor. “It must be air--or it would not rise like
this--at the mere touch of a sunbeam. And at this pace....”
He peered upwards. “Look!” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“In the sky. Already. On the blackness--a little touch of blue.
See! The stars seem larger. And the little ones and all those dim
nebulosities we saw in empty space--they are hidden!”
Swiftly, steadily the day approached us. Grey summit after grey summit
was overtaken by the blaze, and turned to a smoking white intensity.
At last there was nothing to the west of us but a bank of surging fog,
the tumultuous advance and ascent of cloudy haze. The distant cliff had
receded further and further, had loomed and changed through the whirl,
and foundered and vanished at last in its confusion.
Nearer came that steaming advance, nearer and nearer, coming as fast as
the shadow of a cloud before the south-west wind. About us rose a thin
anticipatory haze.
Cavor gripped my arm.
“What?” I said.
“Look! The sunrise! The sun!”
He turned me about and pointed to the brow of the eastward cliff,
looming above the haze about us, scarce lighter than the darkness
of the sky. But now its line was marked by strange reddish shapes,
tongues of vermilion flame that writhed and danced. I fancied it must
be spirals of vapour that had caught the light and made this crest of
fiery tongues against the sky, but indeed it was the solar prominences
I saw, a crown of fire about the sun that is forever hidden from
earthly eyes by our atmospheric veil.
And then--the sun!
Steadily, inevitably came a brilliant line, came a thin edge of
intolerable effulgence that took a circular shape, became a bow, became
a blazing sceptre, and hurled a shaft of heat at us as though it was a
spear.
It seemed verily to stab my eyes! I cried aloud and turned about
blinded, groping for my blanket beneath the bale.
And with that incandescence came a sound, the first sound that had
reached us from without since we left the earth, a hissing and
rustling, the stormy trailing of the aerial garment of the advancing
day. And with the coming of the sound and the light the sphere lurched,
and blinded and dazzled we staggered helplessly against each other.
It lurched again, and the hissing grew louder. I had shut my eyes
perforce, I was making clumsy efforts to cover my head with my blanket,
and this second lurch sent me helplessly off my feet. I fell against
the bale, and opening my eyes had a momentary glimpse of the air just
outside our glass. It was running--it was boiling--like snow into which
a white-hot rod is thrust. What had been solid air had suddenly at the
touch of the sun become a paste, a mud, a slushy liquefaction, that
hissed and bubbled into gas.
There came a still more violent whirl of the sphere, and we had
clutched one another. In another moment we were spun about again. Round
we went and over, and then I was on all fours. The lunar dawn had hold
of us. It meant to show us little men what the moon could do with us.
I caught a second glimpse of things without, puffs of vapour,
half-liquid slush, excavated, sliding, falling, sliding. We dropped
into darkness. I went down with Cavor’s knees in my chest. Then he
seemed to fly away from me, and for a moment I lay with all the breath
out of my body staring upward. A toppling crag of the melting stuff had
splashed over us, buried us, and now it thinned and boiled off us. I
saw the bubbles dancing on the glass above. I heard Cavor exclaiming
feebly.
Then some huge landslip in the thawing air had caught us, and
spluttering expostulation, we began to roll down a slope, rolling
faster and faster, leaping crevasses and rebounding from banks, faster
and faster, westward into the white-hot boiling tumult of the lunar day.
Clutching at one another we spun about, pitched this way and that,
our bale of packages leaping at us, pounding at us. We collided, we
gripped, we were torn asunder--our heads met, and the whole universe
burst into fiery darts and stars! On the earth we should have smashed
one another a dozen times, but on the moon, luckily for us, our weight
was only one-sixth of what it is terrestrially, and we fell very
mercifully. I recall a sensation of utter sickness, a feeling as if my
brain were upside down within my skull, and then----
* * * * *
Something was at work upon my face, some thin feelers worried my ears.
Then I discovered the brilliance of the landscape around was mitigated
by blue spectacles. Cavor bent over me, and I saw his face upside down,
his eyes also protected by tinted goggles. His breath came irregularly,
and his lip was bleeding from a bruise. “Better?” he said, wiping the
blood with the back of his hand.
Everything seemed swaying for a space, but that was simply my
giddiness. I perceived that he had closed some of the shutters in the
outer sphere to save me from the direct blaze of the sun. I was aware
that everything about us was very brilliant.
“Lord!” I gasped. “But this----!”
I craned my neck to see. I perceived there was a blinding glare
outside, an utter change from the gloomy darkness of our first
impressions. “Have I been insensible long?” I asked.
“I don’t know--the chronometer is broken. Some little time.... My dear
chap! I have been afraid....”
I lay for a space taking this in. I saw his face still bore evidences
of emotion. For a while I said nothing. I passed an inquisitive hand
over my contusions, and surveyed his face for similar damages. The
back of my right hand had suffered most, and was skinless and raw. My
forehead was bruised and had bled. He handed me a little measure with
some of the restorative--I forget the name of it--he had brought with
us. After a time I felt a little better. I began to stretch my limbs
carefully. Soon I could talk.
“It wouldn’t have done,” I said, as though there had been no interval.
“No! it _wouldn’t_.”
He thought, his hands hanging over his knees. He peered through the
glass and then stared at me. “Good Lord!” he said. “_No!_”
“What has happened?” I asked after a pause. “Have we jumped to the
tropics?”
“It was as I expected. This air has evaporated--if it is air. At any
rate, it has evaporated and the surface of the moon is showing. We are
lying on a bank of earthy rock. Here and there bare soil is exposed. A
queer sort of soil!”
It occurred to him that it was unnecessary to explain. He assisted me
into a sitting position, and I could see with my own eyes.
VIII A LUNAR MORNING
The harsh emphasis, the pitiless black and white of the scenery had
altogether disappeared. The glare of the sun had taken upon itself a
faint tinge of amber; the shadows upon the cliff of the crater wall
were deeply purple. To the eastward a dark bank of fog still crouched
and sheltered from the sunrise, but to the westward the sky was blue
and clear. I began to realise the length of my insensibility.
We were no longer in a void. An atmosphere had arisen about us. The
outline of things had gained in character, had grown acute and varied;
save for a shadowed space of white substance here and there, white
substance that was no longer air but snow, the arctic appearance had
gone altogether. Everywhere broad rusty brown spaces of bare and
tumbled earth spread to the blaze of the sun. Here and there at the
edge of the snowdrifts were transient little pools and eddies of
water, the only things stirring in that expanse of barrenness. The
sunlight inundated the upper two blinds of our sphere and turned our
climate to high summer, but our feet were still in shadow, and the
sphere was lying upon a drift of snow.
And scattered here and there upon the slope, and emphasised by little
white threads of unthawed snow upon their shady sides, were shapes
like sticks, dry twisted sticks of the same rusty hue as the rock
upon which they lay. That caught one’s thoughts sharply. Sticks! On a
lifeless world? Then as my eye grew more accustomed to the texture of
their substance, I perceived that almost all this surface had a fibrous
texture, like the carpet of brown needles one finds beneath the shade
of pine trees.
“Cavor!” I said.
“Yes.”
“It may be a dead world now--but once----”
Something arrested my attention. I had discovered among these needles a
number of little round objects. And it seemed to me that one of these
had moved.
“Cavor,” I whispered.
“What?”
But I did not answer at once. I stared incredulous. For an instant I
could not believe my eyes. I gave an inarticulate cry. I gripped his
arm. I pointed. “Look!” I cried, finding my tongue. “There! Yes! And
there!”
His eyes followed my pointing finger. “Eh?” he said.
How can I describe the thing I saw? It is so petty a thing to state,
and yet it seemed so wonderful, so pregnant with emotion. I have said
that amidst the stick-like litter were these rounded bodies, these
little oval bodies that might have passed as very small pebbles.
And now first one and then another had stirred, had rolled over and
cracked, and down the crack of each of them showed a minute line of
yellowish green, thrusting outward to meet the hot encouragement of the
newly-risen sun. For a moment that was all, and then there stirred and
burst a third!
“It is a seed,” said Cavor. And then I heard him whisper very softly,
“_Life!_”
“Life!” And immediately it poured upon us that our vast journey had
not been made in vain, that we had come to no arid waste of minerals,
but to a world that lived and moved! We watched intensely. I remember
I kept rubbing the glass before me with my sleeve, jealous of the
faintest suspicion of mist.
[Illustration: “We watched intensely”]
The picture was clear and vivid only in the middle of the field.
All about that centre the dead fibres and seeds were magnified and
distorted by the curvature of the glass. But we could see enough! One
after another all down the sunlit slope these miraculous little brown
bodies burst and gaped apart, like seed-pods, like the husks of fruits;
opened eager mouths that drank in the heat and light pouring in a
cascade from the newly-risen sun.
Every moment more of these seed coats ruptured, and even as they did
so the swelling pioneers overflowed their rent-distended seed-cases,
and passed into the second stage of growth. With a steady assurance, a
swift deliberation, these amazing seeds thrust a rootlet downward to
the earth and a queer little bundle-like bud into the air. In a little
while the whole slope was dotted with minute plantlets standing at
attention in the blaze of the sun.
They did not stand for long. The bundle-like buds swelled and strained
and opened with a jerk, thrusting out a coronet of little sharp tips,
spreading a whorl of tiny, spiky, brownish leaves, that lengthened
rapidly, lengthened visibly even as we watched. The movement was
slower than any animal’s, swifter than any plant’s I have ever seen
before. How can I suggest it to you--the way that growth went on? The
leaf tips grew so that they moved onward even while we looked at them.
The brown seed-case shrivelled and was absorbed with an equal rapidity.
Have you ever on a cold day taken a thermometer into your warm hand
and watched the little thread of mercury creep up the tube? These moon
plants grew like that.
In a few minutes, as it seemed, the buds of the more forward of these
plants had lengthened into a stem and were even putting forth a second
whorl of leaves, and all the slope that had seemed so recently a
lifeless stretch of litter was now dark with the stunted olive-green
herbage of bristling spikes that swayed with the vigour of their
growing.
I turned about, and behold! along the upper edge of a rock to the
eastward a similar fringe in a scarcely less forward condition swayed
and bent, dark against the blinding glare of the sun. And beyond this
fringe was the silhouette of a plant mass, branching clumsily like a
cactus, and swelling visibly, swelling like a bladder that fills with
air.
Then to the westward also I discovered that another such distended
form was rising over the scrub. But here the light fell upon its
sleek sides, and I could see that its colour was a vivid orange hue.
It rose as one watched it; if one looked away from it for a minute
and then back, its outline had changed; it thrust out blunt congested
branches until in a little time it rose a coralline shape of many feet
in height. Compared with such a growth the terrestrial puff-ball,
which will sometimes swell a foot in diameter in a single night,
would be a hopeless laggard. But then the puff-ball grows against a
gravitational pull six times that of the moon. Beyond, out of gullies
and flats that had been hidden from us, but not from the quickening
sun, over reefs and banks of shining rock, a bristling beard of spiky
and fleshy vegetation was straining into view, hurrying tumultuously to
take advantage of the brief day in which it must flower and fruit and
seed again and die. It was like a miracle, that growth. So, one must
imagine, the trees and plants arose at the Creation and covered the
desolation of the new-made earth.
Imagine it! Imagine that dawn! The resurrection of the frozen air, the
stirring and quickening of the soil, and then this silent uprising of
vegetation, this unearthly ascent of fleshiness and spikes. Conceive
it all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earth
seem watery and weak. And still around this stirring jungle, wherever
there was shadow, lingered banks of bluish snow. And to have the
picture of our impression complete, you must bear in mind that we
saw it all through a thick bent glass, distorting it as things are
distorted by a lens, acute only in the centre of the picture, and very
bright there, and towards the edges magnified and unreal.
IX PROSPECTING BEGINS
We ceased to gaze. We turned to each other, the same thought, the same
question in our eyes. For these plants to grow, there must be some air,
however attenuated, air that we also should be able to breathe.
“The manhole?” I said.
“Yes!” said Cavor, “if it is air we see!”
“In a little while,” I said, “these plants will be as high as we are.
Suppose--suppose after all--Is it certain? How do you know that stuff
is air? It may be nitrogen--it may be carbonic acid even!”
“That is easy,” he said, and set about proving it. He produced a big
piece of crumpled paper from the bale, lit it, and thrust it hastily
through the manhole valve. I bent forward and peered down through the
thick glass for its appearance outside, that little flame on whose
evidence depended so much!
I saw the paper drop out and lie lightly upon the snow. The pink flame
of its burning vanished. For an instant it seemed to be extinguished.
And then I saw a little blue tongue upon the edge of it that trembled,
and crept, and spread!
Quietly the whole sheet, save where it lay in immediate contact with
the snow, charred and shrivelled and sent up a quivering thread of
smoke. There was no doubt left to me; the atmosphere of the moon was
either pure oxygen or air, and capable therefore--unless its tenuity
was excessive--of supporting our alien life. We might emerge--and live!
I sat down with my legs on either side of the manhole and prepared to
unscrew it, but Cavor stopped me. “There is first a little precaution,”
he said. He pointed out that although it was certainly an oxygenated
atmosphere outside, it might still be so rarified as to cause us grave
injury. He reminded me of mountain sickness, and of the bleeding
that often afflicts aeronauts who have ascended too swiftly, and he
spent some time in the preparation of a sickly-tasting drink which he
insisted on my sharing. It made me feel a little numb, but otherwise
had no effect on me. Then he permitted me to begin unscrewing.
Presently the glass stopper of the manhole was so far undone that the
denser air within our sphere began to escape along the thread of the
screw, singing as a kettle sings before it boils. Thereupon he made me
desist. It speedily became evident that the pressure outside was very
much less than it was within. How much less it was we had no means of
telling.
I sat grasping the stopper with both hands, ready to close it again if,
in spite of our intense hope, the lunar atmosphere should after all
prove too rarified for us, and Cavor sat with a cylinder of compressed
oxygen at hand to restore our pressure. We looked at one another in
silence, and then at the fantastic vegetation that swayed and grew
visibly and noiselessly without. And ever that shrill piping continued.
My blood-vessels began to throb in my ears, and the sound of Cavor’s
movements diminished. I noted how still everything had become, because
of the thinning of the air.
As our air sizzled out from the screw the moisture of it condensed in
little puffs.
Presently I experienced a peculiar shortness of breath, that lasted
indeed during the whole of the time of our exposure to the moon’s
exterior atmosphere, and a rather unpleasant sensation about the ears
and finger-nails and the back of the throat grew upon my attention, and
presently passed off again.
But then came vertigo and nausea that abruptly changed the quality of
my courage. I gave the lid of the manhole half a turn and made a hasty
explanation to Cavor; but now he was the more sanguine. He answered me
in a voice that seemed extraordinarily small and remote, because of the
thinness of the air that carried the sound. He recommended a nip of
brandy, and set me the example, and presently I felt better. I turned
the manhole stopper back again. The throbbing in my ears grew louder,
and then I remarked that the piping note of the outrush had ceased. For
a time I could not be sure that it had ceased.
“Well?” said Cavor in the ghost of a voice.
“Well?” said I.
“Shall we go on?”
I thought. “Is this all?”
“If you can stand it.”
By way of answer I went on unscrewing. I lifted the circular operculum
from its place and laid it carefully on the bale. A flake or so of snow
whirled and vanished as that thin and unfamiliar air took possession
of our sphere. I knelt, and then seated myself at the edge of the
manhole, peering over it. Beneath, within a yard of my face, lay the
untrodden snow of the moon.
There came a little pause. Our eyes met.
“It doesn’t distress your lungs too much?” said Cavor.
“No,” I said. “I can stand this.”
He stretched out his hand for his blanket, thrust his head through its
central hole and wrapped it about him. He sat down on the edge of the
manhole, he let his feet drop until they were within six inches of the
lunar ground. He hesitated for a moment, then thrust himself forward,
dropped these intervening inches, and stood upon the untrodden soil of
the moon.
As he stepped forward he was refracted grotesquely by the edge of the
glass. He stood for a moment looking this way and that. Then he drew
himself together and leapt.
The glass distorted everything, but it seemed to me even then to be
an extremely big leap. He had at one bound become remote. He seemed
twenty or thirty feet off. He was standing high upon a rocky mass and
gesticulating back to me. Perhaps he was shouting--but the sound did
not reach me. But how the deuce had he done this? I felt like a man who
has just seen a new conjuring trick.
In a puzzled state of mind I too dropped through the manhole. I stood
up. Just in front of me the snowdrift had fallen away and made a sort
of ditch. I made a step and jumped.
I found myself flying through the air, saw the rock on which he stood
coming to meet me, clutched it and clung in a state of infinite
amazement.
I gasped a painful laugh. I was tremendously confused. Cavor bent down
and shouted in piping tones for me to be careful.
I had forgotten that on the moon, with only an eighth part of the
earth’s mass and a quarter of its diameter, my weight was barely
a sixth what it was on earth. But now that fact insisted on being
remembered.
“We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now,” he said.
With a guarded effort I raised myself to the top, and moving as
cautiously as a rheumatic patient, stood up beside him under the blaze
of the sun. The sphere lay behind us on its dwindling snowdrift thirty
feet away.
As far as the eye could see over the enormous disorder of rocks that
formed the crater floor, the same bristling scrub that surrounded us
was starting into life, diversified here and there by bulging masses
of a cactus form, and scarlet and purple lichens that grew so fast they
seemed to crawl over the rocks. The whole area of the crater seemed
to me then to be one similar wilderness up to the very foot of the
surrounding cliff.
This cliff was apparently bare of vegetation save at its base, and with
buttresses and terraces and platforms that did not very greatly attract
our attention at the time. It was many miles away from us in every
direction, we seemed to be almost at the centre of the crater, and
we saw it through a certain haziness that drove before the wind. For
there was even a wind now in the thin air, a swift yet weak wind that
chilled exceedingly but exerted little pressure. It was blowing round
the crater, as it seemed, to the hot illuminated side from the foggy
darkness under the sunward wall. It was difficult to look into this
eastward fog; we had to peer with half-closed eyes beneath the shade of
our hands, because of the fierce intensity of the motionless sun.
“It seems to be deserted,” said Cavor, “absolutely desolate.”
I looked about me again. I retained even then a clinging hope of some
quasi-human evidence, some pinnacle of building, some house or engine,
but everywhere one looked spread the tumbled rocks in peaks and crests,
and the darting scrub and those bulging cacti that swelled and swelled,
a flat negation as it seemed of all such hope.
“It looks as though these plants had it to themselves,” I said. “I see
no trace of any other creature.”
“No insects--no birds--no! Not a trace, not a scrap nor particle of
animal life. If there was--what would they do in the night?... No;
there’s just these plants alone.”
I shaded my eyes with my hand. “It’s like the landscape of a dream.
These things are less like earthly land plants than the things one
imagines among the rocks at the bottom of the sea. Look at that yonder!
One might imagine it a lizard changed into a plant. And the glare!”
“This is only the fresh morning,” said Cavor.
He sighed and looked about him. “This is no world for men,” he said.
“And yet in a way--it appeals.”
He became silent for a time, then commenced his meditative humming.
I started at a gentle touch, and found a thin sheet of livid lichen
lapping over my shoe. I kicked at it and it fell to powder, and each
speck began to grow.
I heard Cavor exclaim sharply, and perceived that one of the fixed
bayonets of the scrub had pricked him.
He hesitated, his eyes sought among the rocks about us. A sudden
blaze of pink had crept up a ragged pillar of crag. It was a most
extraordinary pink, a livid magenta.
“Look!” said I, turning, and behold Cavor had vanished!
For an instant I stood transfixed. Then I made a hasty step to look
over the verge of the rock. But in my surprise at his disappearance I
forgot once more that we were on the moon. The thrust of my foot that
I made in striding would have carried me a yard on earth; on the moon
it carried me six--a good five yards over the edge. For the moment
the thing had something of the effect of those nightmares when one
falls and falls. For while one falls sixteen feet in the first second
of a fall on earth, on the moon one falls two, and with only a sixth
of one’s weight. I fell, or rather I jumped down, about ten yards I
suppose. It seemed to take quite a long time, five or six seconds,
I should think. I floated through the air and fell like a feather,
knee-deep in a snowdrift in the bottom of a gully of blue-grey,
white-veined rock.
I looked about me. “Cavor!” I cried; but no Cavor was visible.
“Cavor!” I cried louder, and the rocks echoed me.
I turned fiercely to the rocks and clambered to the summit of them.
“Cavor!” I cried. My voice sounded like the voice of a lost lamb.
The sphere, too, was not in sight, and for a moment a horrible feeling
of desolation pinched my heart.
Then I saw him. He was laughing and gesticulating to attract my
attention. He was on a bare patch of rock twenty or thirty yards away.
I could not hear his voice, but “jump” said his gestures. I hesitated,
the distance seemed enormous. Yet I reflected that surely I must be
able to clear a greater distance than Cavor.
I made a step back, gathered myself together, and leapt with all my
might. I seemed to shoot right up in the air as though I should never
come down....
It was horrible and delightful, and as wild as a nightmare, to go
flying off in this fashion. I realised my leap had been altogether too
violent. I flew clean over Cavor’s head and beheld a spiky confusion
in a gully spreading to meet my fall. I gave a yelp of alarm. I put out
my hands and straightened my legs.
[Illustration: “I realised my leap had been too violent”]
I hit a huge fungoid bulk that burst all about me, scattering a mass of
orange spores in every direction, and covering me with orange powder.
I rolled over spluttering, and came to rest convulsed with breathless
laughter.
I became aware of Cavor’s little round face peering over a bristling
hedge. He shouted some faded inquiry. “Eh?” I tried to shout, but
could not do so for want of breath. He made his way towards me, coming
gingerly among the bushes.
“We’ve got to be careful,” he said. “This moon has no discipline.
She’ll let us smash ourselves.”
He helped me to my feet. “You exerted yourself too much,” he said,
dabbing at the yellow stuff with his hand to remove it from my garments.
I stood passive and panting, allowing him to beat off the jelly from my
knees and elbows and lecture me upon my misfortunes. “We don’t quite
allow for the gravitation. Our muscles are scarcely educated yet. We
must practise a little, when you have got your breath.”
I pulled two or three little thorns out of my hand, and sat for a time
on a boulder of rock. My muscles were quivering, and I had that feeling
of personal disillusionment that comes at the first fall to the learner
of cycling on earth.
It suddenly occurred to Cavor that the cold air in the gully, after
the brightness of the sun, might give me a fever. So we clambered back
into the sunlight. We found that beyond a few abrasions I had received
no serious injuries from my tumble, and at Cavor’s suggestion we were
presently looking round for some safe and easy landing-place for my
next leap. We chose a rocky slab some ten yards off, separated from us
by a little thicket of olive-green spikes.
“Imagine it there!” said Cavor, who was assuming the airs of a trainer,
and he pointed to a spot about four feet from my toes. This leap I
managed without difficulty, and I must confess I found a certain
satisfaction in Cavor’s falling short by a foot or so and tasting the
spikes of the scrub. “One has to be careful, you see,” he said, pulling
out his thorns, and with that he ceased to be my Mentor, and became my
fellow learner in the art of lunar locomotion.
We chose a still easier jump and did it without difficulty, and then
leapt back again, and to and fro several times, accustoming our muscles
to the new standard. I could never have believed had I not experienced
it, how rapid that adaptation would be. In a very little time indeed,
certainly after fewer than thirty leaps, we could judge the effort
necessary for a distance with almost terrestrial assurance.
And all this time the lunar plants were growing around us, higher and
denser and more entangled, every moment thicker and taller, spiked
plants, green cactus masses, fungi, fleshy and lichenous things,
strangest radiate and sinuous shapes. But we were so intent upon our
leaping, that for a time we gave no heed to their unfaltering expansion.
An extraordinary elation had taken possession of us. Partly, I think,
it was our sense of release from the confinement of the sphere. Mainly,
however, the thin sweetness of the air, which I am certain contained a
much larger proportion of oxygen than our terrestrial atmosphere. In
spite of the strange quality of all about us, I felt as adventurous
and experimental as a cockney would do placed for the first time among
mountains; and I do not think it occurred to either of us, face to
face though we were with the Unknown, to be very greatly afraid.
We were bitten by a spirit of enterprise. We selected a lichenous kopje
perhaps fifteen yards away, and landed neatly on its summit one after
the other. “Good!” we cried to each other; “good!” and Cavor made three
steps and went off to a tempting slope of snow a good twenty yards and
more beyond. I stood for a moment struck by the grotesque effect of his
soaring figure--his dirty cricket cap, and spiky hair, his little round
body, his arms and his knickerbockered legs tucked up tightly--against
the weird spaciousness of the lunar scene. A gust of laughter seized
me, and then I stepped off to follow. Plump! I dropped beside him.
We made a few gargantuan strides, leapt three or four times more, and
sat down at last in a lichenous hollow. Our lungs were painful. We sat
holding our sides and recovering our breath, looking appreciation at
one another. Cavor panted something about “amazing sensations.” And
then came a thought into my head. For the moment it did not seem a
particularly appalling thought, simply a natural question arising out
of the situation.
“By the way,” I said, “where exactly is the sphere?”
Cavor looked at me. “Eh?”
The full meaning of what we were saying struck me sharply.
“Cavor!” I cried, laying a hand on his arm, “where is the sphere?”
X LOST MEN IN THE MOON
His face caught something of my dismay. He stood up and stared about
him at the scrub that fenced us in and rose about us, straining upward
in a passion of growth. He put a dubious hand to his lips. He spoke
with a sudden lack of assurance. “I think,” he said slowly, “we left
it ... somewhere ... about _there_.”
He pointed a hesitating finger that wavered in an arc.
“I’m not sure.” His look of consternation deepened. “Anyhow,” he said,
with his eyes on me, “it can’t be far.”
We had both stood up. We made unmeaning ejaculations, our eyes sought
in the twining, thickening jungle round about us.
All about us on the sunlit slopes frothed and swayed the darting
shrubs, the swelling cactus, the creeping lichens, and wherever the
shade remained the snowdrifts lingered. North, south, east, and west
spread an identical monotony of unfamiliar forms. And somewhere, buried
already among this tangled confusion, was our sphere, our home, our
only provision, our only hope of escape from this fantastic wilderness
of ephemeral growths into which we had come.
“I think, after all,” he said, pointing suddenly, “it might be over
there.”
“No,” I said. “We have turned in a curve. See! here is the mark of my
heels. It’s clear the thing must be more to the eastward, much more.
No!--the sphere must be over there.”
“I _think_,” said Cavor, “I kept the sun upon my right all the time.”
“Every leap, it seems to _me_,” I said, “my shadow flew before me.”
We stared into one another’s eyes. The area of the crater had become
enormously vast to our imaginations, the growing thickets already
impenetrably dense.
“Good heavens! What fools we have been!”
“It’s evident that we must find it again,” said Cavor, “and that soon.
The sun grows stronger. We should be fainting with the heat already if
it wasn’t so dry. And ... I’m hungry.”
I stared at him. I had not suspected this aspect of the matter before.
But it came to me at once--a positive craving. “Yes,” I said with
emphasis. “I am hungry too.”
He stood up with a look of active resolution. “Certainly we must find
the sphere.”
As calmly as possible we surveyed the interminable reefs and thickets
that formed the floor of the crater, each of us weighing in silence the
chances of our finding the sphere before we were overtaken by heat and
hunger.
“It can’t be fifty yards from here,” said Cavor, with indecisive
gestures. “The only thing is to beat round about until we come upon it.”
“That is all we can do,” I said, without any alacrity to begin our
hunt. “I wish this confounded spike bush did not grow so fast!”
“That’s just it,” said Cavor. “But it _was_ lying on a bank of snow.”
I stared about me in the vain hope of recognising some knoll or shrub
that had been near the sphere. But everywhere was a confusing sameness,
everywhere the aspiring bushes, the distending fungi, the dwindling
snow banks, steadily and inevitably changed. The sun scorched and
stung, the faintness of an unaccountable hunger mingled with our
infinite perplexity. And even as we stood there, confused and lost
amidst unprecedented things, we became aware for the first time of a
sound upon the moon other than the stir of the growing plants, the
faint sighing of the wind, or those that we ourselves had made.
Boom ... Boom ... Boom ...
It came from beneath our feet, a sound in the earth. We seemed to hear
it with our feet as much as with our ears. Its dull resonance was
muffled by distance, thick with the quality of intervening substance.
No sound that I can imagine could have astonished us more, or have
changed more completely the quality of things about us. For this sound,
rich, slow, and deliberate, seemed to us as though it could be nothing
but the striking of some gigantic buried clock.
Boom ... Boom ... Boom ...
Sound suggestive of still cloisters, of sleepless nights in crowded
cities, of vigils and the awaited hour, of all that is orderly and
methodical in life, booming out pregnant and mysterious in this
fantastic desert! To the eye everything was unchanged: the desolation
of bushes and cacti waving silently in the wind, stretched unbroken to
the distant cliffs, the still dark sky was empty overhead, and the hot
sun hung and burned. And through it all, a warning, a threat, throbbed
this enigma of sound.
Boom ... Boom ... Boom ...
We questioned one another in faint and faded voices. “A clock?”
“Like a clock!”
“What is it?”
“What can it be?”
“Count,” was Cavor’s belated suggestion, and at that word the striking
ceased.
The silence, the rhythmic disappointment of the silence, came as a
fresh shock. For a moment one could doubt whether one had ever heard a
sound. Or whether it might not still be going on. Had I indeed heard a
sound?
I felt the pressure of Cavor’s hand upon my arm. He spoke in an
undertone, as though he feared to wake some sleeping thing. “Let us
keep together,” he whispered, “and look for the sphere. We must get
back to the sphere. This is beyond our understanding.”
“Which way shall we go?”
He hesitated. An intense persuasion of presences, of unseen things
about us and near us, dominated our minds. What could they be? Where
could they be? Was this arid desolation, alternately frozen and
scorched, only the outer rind and mask of some subterranean world?
And if so, what sort of world? What sort of inhabitants might it not
presently disgorge upon us?
And then, stabbing the aching stillness as vivid and sudden as an
unexpected thunderclap, came a clang and rattle as though great gates
of metal had suddenly been flung apart.
It arrested our steps. We stood gaping helplessly. Then Cavor stole
towards me.
“I do not understand!” he whispered close to my face. He waved his hand
vaguely skyward, the vague suggestion of still vaguer thoughts.
“A hiding-place! If anything came....”
I looked about us. I nodded my head in assent to him.
We started off, moving stealthily with the most exaggerated precautions
against noise. We went towards a thicket of scrub. A clangour like
hammers flung about a boiler hastened our steps. “We must crawl,”
whispered Cavor.
The lower leaves of the bayonet plants, already overshadowed by the
newer ones above, were beginning to wilt and shrivel so that we could
thrust our way in among the thickening stems without serious injury. A
stab in the face or arm we did not heed. At the heart of the thicket I
stopped, and stared panting into Cavor’s face.
“Subterranean,” he whispered. “Below.”
“They may come out.”
“We must find the sphere!”
“Yes,” I said; “but how?”
“Crawl till we come to it.”
“But if we don’t?”
“Keep hidden. See what they are like.”
“We will keep together,” said I.
He thought. “Which way shall we go?”
“We must take our chance.”
We peered this way and that. Then very circumspectly, we began to crawl
through the lower jungle, making, so far as we could judge, a circuit,
halting now at every waving fungus, at every sound, intent only on
the sphere from which we had so foolishly emerged. Ever and again
from out of the earth beneath us came concussions, beatings, strange,
inexplicable, mechanical sounds; and once, and then again, we thought
we heard something, a faint rattle and tumult, borne to us through the
air. But fearful as we were we dared essay no vantage-point to survey
the crater. For long we saw nothing of the beings whose sounds were so
abundant and insistent. But for the faintness of our hunger and the
drying of our throats that crawling would have had the quality of a
very vivid dream. It was so absolutely unreal. The only element with
any touch of reality was these sounds.
Figure it to yourself! About us the dreamlike jungle, with the silent
bayonet leaves darting overhead, and the silent, vivid, sun-splashed
lichens under our hands and knees, waving with the vigour of their
growth as a carpet waves when the wind gets beneath it. Ever and again
one of the bladder fungi, bulging and distending under the sun, loomed
upon us. Ever and again some novel shape in vivid colour obtruded.
The very cells that built up these plants were as large as my thumb,
like beads of coloured glass. And all these things were saturated
in the unmitigated glare of the sun, were seen against a sky that
was bluish black and spangled still, in spite of the sunlight, with
a few surviving stars. Strange! the very forms and texture of the
stones were strange. It was all strange, the feeling of one’s body was
unprecedented, every other movement ended in a surprise. The breath
sucked thin in one’s throat, the blood flowed through one’s ears in a
throbbing tide--thud, thud, thud, thud....
And ever and again came gusts of turmoil, hammering, the clanging and
throb of machinery, and presently--the bellowing of great beasts!
XI THE MOONCALF PASTURES
So we two poor terrestrial castaways, lost in that wild-growing moon
jungle, crawled in terror before the sounds that had come upon us. We
crawled, as it seemed, a long time before we saw either Selenite or
mooncalf, though we heard the bellowing and gruntulous noises of these
latter continually drawing nearer to us. We crawled through stony
ravines, over snow slopes, amidst fungi that ripped like thin bladders
at our thrust, emitting a watery humour, over a perfect pavement of
things like puff-balls, and beneath interminable thickets of scrub.
And ever more hopelessly our eyes sought for our abandoned sphere. The
noise of the mooncalves would at times be a vast flat calf-like sound,
at times it rose to an amazed and wrathy bellowing, and again it would
become a clogged bestial sound, as though these unseen creatures had
sought to eat and bellow at the same time.
Our first view was but an inadequate transitory glimpse, yet none the
less disturbing because it was incomplete. Cavor was crawling in front
at the time, and he first was aware of their proximity. He stopped
dead, arresting me with a single gesture.
A crackling and smashing of the scrub appeared to be advancing directly
upon us, and then, as we squatted close and endeavoured to judge of
the nearness and direction of this noise, there came a terrific bellow
behind us, so close and vehement that the tops of the bayonet scrub
bent before it, and one felt the breath of it hot and moist. And,
turning about, we saw indistinctly through a crowd of swaying stems
the mooncalf’s shining sides, and the long line of its back loomed out
against the sky.
Of course it is hard for me now to say how much I saw at that time,
because my impressions were corrected by subsequent observation. First
of all impressions was its enormous size; the girth of its body was
some fourscore feet, its length perhaps two hundred. Its sides rose
and fell with its laboured breathing. I perceived that its gigantic,
flabby body lay along the ground, and that its skin was of a corrugated
white, dappling into blackness along the backbone. But of its feet we
saw nothing. I think also that we saw then the profile at least of the
almost brainless head, with its fat-encumbered neck, its slobbering
omnivorous mouth, its little nostrils, and tight shut eyes. (For the
mooncalf invariably shuts its eyes in the presence of the sun.) We
had a glimpse of a vast red pit as it opened its mouth to bleat and
bellow again; we had a breath from the pit, and then the monster heeled
over like a ship, dragged forward along the ground, creasing all its
leathery skin, rolled again, and so wallowed past us, smashing a path
amidst the scrub, and was speedily hidden from our eyes by the dense
interlacings beyond. Another appeared more distantly, and then another,
and then, as though he was guiding these animated lumps of provender
to their pasture, a Selenite came momentarily into ken. My grip upon
Cavor’s foot became convulsive at the sight of him, and we remained
motionless and peering long after he had passed out of our range.
By contrast with the mooncalves he seemed a trivial being, a mere ant,
scarcely five feet high. He was wearing garments of some leathery
substance, so that no portion of his actual body appeared, but of
this, of course, we were entirely ignorant. He presented himself,
therefore, as a compact, bristling creature, having much of the quality
of a complicated insect, with whip-like tentacles and a clanging arm
projecting from his shining cylindrical body case. The form of his head
was hidden by his enormous many-spiked helmet--we discovered afterwards
that he used the spikes for prodding refractory mooncalves--and a
pair of goggles of darkened glass, set very much at the side, gave a
bird-like quality to the metallic apparatus that covered his face. His
arms did not project beyond his body case, and he carried himself upon
short legs that, wrapped though they were in warm coverings, seemed to
our terrestrial eyes inordinately flimsy. They had very short thighs,
very long shanks, and little feet.
In spite of his heavy-looking clothing, he was progressing with what
would be, from the terrestrial point of view, very considerable
strides, and his clanging arm was busy. The quality of his motion
during the instant of his passing suggested haste and a certain anger,
and soon after we had lost sight of him we heard the bellow of a
mooncalf change abruptly into a short, sharp squeal, followed by the
scuffle of its acceleration. And gradually that bellowing receded, and
then came to an end, as if the pastures sought had been attained.
We listened. For a space the moon world was still. But it was some time
before we resumed our crawling search for the vanished sphere.
When next we saw mooncalves they were some little distance away from us
in a place of tumbled rocks. The less vertical surfaces of the rocks
were thick with a speckled green plant growing in dense mossy clumps,
upon which these creatures were browsing. We stopped at the edge of the
reeds amidst which we were crawling at the sight of them, peering out
at them and looking round for a second glimpse of a Selenite. They lay
against their food like stupendous slugs, huge, greasy hulls, eating
greedily and noisily, with a sort of sobbing avidity. They seemed
monsters of mere fatness, clumsy and overwhelmed to a degree that would
make a Smithfield ox seem a model of agility. Their busy, writhing,
chewing mouths, and eyes closed, together with the appetising sound
of their munching, made up an effect of animal enjoyment that was
singularly stimulating to our empty frames.
“Hogs!” said Cavor with unusual passion. “Disgusting hogs!” and after
one glare of angry envy crawled off through the bushes to our right.
I stayed long enough to see that the speckled plant was quite hopeless
for human nourishment, then crawled after him, nibbling a quill of it
between my teeth.
Presently we were arrested again by the proximity of a Selenite, and
this time we were able to observe him more exactly. Now we could see
that the Selenite covering was indeed clothing, and not a sort of
crustacean integument. He was quite similar in his costume to the
former one we had glimpsed, except that ends of something like wadding
were protruding from his neck, and he stood on a promontory of rock
and moved his head this way and that, as though he was surveying the
crater. We lay quite still, fearing to attract his attention if we
moved, and after a time he turned about and disappeared.
We came upon another drove of mooncalves bellowing up a ravine, and
then we passed over a place of sounds, sounds of beating machinery, as
if some huge hall of industry came near the surface there. And while
these sounds were still about us we came to the edge of a great open
space, perhaps two hundred yards in diameter, and perfectly level.
Save for a few lichens that advanced from its margin this space was
bare, and presented a powdery surface of a dusty yellow colour. We
were afraid to strike out across this space, but as it presented less
obstruction to our crawling than the scrub, we went down upon it and
began very circumspectly to skirt its edge.
For a little while the noises from below ceased, and everything, save
for the faint stir of the growing vegetation, was very still. Then
abruptly there began an uproar, louder, more vehement, and nearer
than any we had so far heard. Of a certainty it came from below.
Instinctively we crouched as flat as we could, ready for a prompt
plunge into the thicket beside us. Each knock and throb seemed to
vibrate through our bodies. Louder grew this throbbing and beating, and
that irregular vibration increased until the whole moon world seemed to
be jerking and pulsing.
“Cover,” whispered Cavor, and I turned towards the bushes.
At that instant came a thud like the thud of a gun, and then a thing
happened--it still haunts me in my dreams. I had turned my head to look
at Cavor’s face, and thrust out my hand in front of me as I did so. And
my hand met nothing! Plunged suddenly into a bottomless hole!
My chest hit something hard, and I found myself with my chin on the
edge of an unfathomable abyss that had suddenly opened beneath me, my
hand extended stiffly into the void. The whole of that flat circular
area was no more than a gigantic lid, that was now sliding sideways
from off the pit it had covered into a slot prepared for it.
Had it not been for Cavor I think I should have remained rigid, hanging
over this margin and staring into the enormous gulf below, until at
last the edges of the slot scraped me off and hurled me into its
depths. But Cavor had not received the shock that had paralysed me. He
had been a little distance from the edge when the lid had first opened,
and perceiving the peril that held me helpless, gripped my legs and
pulled me backward. I came into a sitting position, crawled away from
the edge for a space on all fours, then staggered up and ran after
him across the thundering, quivering sheet of metal. It seemed to be
swinging open with a steadily accelerated velocity, and the bushes in
front of me shifted sideways as I ran.
I was none too soon. Cavor’s back vanished amidst the bristling
thicket, and as I scrambled up after him, the monstrous valve came
into its position with a clang. For a long time we lay panting, not
daring to approach the pit.
But at last very cautiously and bit by bit we crept into a position
from which we could peer down. The bushes about us creaked and waved
with the force of a breeze that was blowing down the shaft. We could see
nothing at first except smooth vertical walls descending at last into
an impenetrable black. And then very gradually we became aware of a
number of very faint and little lights going to and fro.
For a time that stupendous gulf of mystery held us so that we forgot
even our sphere. In time, as we grew more accustomed to the darkness,
we could make out very small, dim, elusive shapes moving about among
those needle-point illuminations. We peered amazed and incredulous,
understanding so little that we could find no words to say. We could
distinguish nothing that would give us a clue to the meaning of the
faint shapes we saw.
“What can it be?” I asked; “what can it be?”
“The engineering!... They must live in these caverns during the night,
and come out during the day.”
“Cavor!” I said. “Can they be--_that_--it was something like--men?”
“_That_ was not a man.”
“We dare risk nothing!”
“We dare do nothing until we find the sphere!”
“We can do nothing until we find the sphere.”
He assented with a groan and stirred himself to move. He stared
about him for a space, sighed, and indicated a direction. We struck
out through the jungle. For a time we crawled resolutely, then with
diminishing vigour. Presently among great shapes of flabby purple there
came a noise of trampling and cries about us. We lay close, and for a
long time the sounds went to and fro and very near. But this time we
saw nothing. I tried to whisper to Cavor that I could hardly go without
food much longer, but my mouth had become too dry for whispering.
“Cavor,” I said, “I must have food.”
He turned a face full of dismay towards me. “It’s a case for holding
out,” he said.
“But I _must_,” I said, “and look at my lips!”
“I’ve been thirsty some time.”
“If only some of that snow had remained!”
“It’s clean gone! We’re driving from arctic to tropical at the rate of
a degree a minute....”
I gnawed my hand.
“The sphere!” he said. “There is nothing for it but the sphere.”
We roused ourselves to another spurt of crawling. My mind ran entirely
on edible things, on the hissing profundity of summer drinks, more
particularly I craved for beer. I was haunted by the memory of a
sixteen gallon cask that had swaggered in my Lympne cellar. I thought
of the adjacent larder, and especially of steak and kidney pie--tender
steak and plenty of kidney, and rich, thick gravy between. Ever and
again I was seized with fits of hungry yawning. We came to flat places
overgrown with fleshy red things, monstrous coralline growths; as we
pushed against them they snapped and broke. I noted the quality of the
broken surfaces. The confounded stuff certainly looked of a biteable
texture. Then it seemed to me that it smelt rather well.
I picked up a fragment and sniffed at it.
“Cavor,” I said in a hoarse undertone.
He glanced at me with his face screwed up. “Don’t,” he said. I put down
the fragment, and we crawled on through this tempting fleshiness for a
space.
“Cavor,” I asked, “why _not_?”
“Poison,” I heard him say, but he did not look round.
We crawled some way before I decided.
“I’ll chance it,” said I.
He made a belated gesture to prevent me. I stuffed my mouth full. He
crouched watching my face, his own twisted into the oddest expression.
“It’s good,” I said.
“O Lord!” he cried.
He watched me munch, his face wrinkled between desire and disapproval,
then suddenly succumbed to appetite, and began to tear off huge
mouthfuls. For a time we did nothing but eat.
The stuff was not unlike a terrestrial mushroom, only it was much laxer
in texture, and, as one swallowed it, it warmed the throat. At first we
experienced a mere mechanical satisfaction in eating; then our blood
began to run warmer, and we tingled at the lips and fingers, and then
new and slightly irrelevant ideas came bubbling up in our minds.
“It’s good,” said I. “Infernally good! What a home for our surplus
population! Our poor surplus population,” and I broke off another large
portion.
It filled me with a curiously benevolent satisfaction that there was
such good food in the moon. The depression of my hunger gave way to an
irrational exhilaration. The dread and discomfort in which I had been
living vanished entirely. I perceived the moon no longer as a planet
from which I most earnestly desired the means of escape, but as a
possible refuge for human destitution. I think I forgot the Selenites,
the mooncalves, the lid, and the noises completely so soon as I had
eaten that fungus.
Cavor replied to my third repetition of my “surplus population”
remark with similar words of approval. I felt that my head swam, but
I put this down to the stimulating effect of food after a long fast.
“Ess’lent discov’ry yours, Cavor,” said I. “Se’nd on’y to the ’tato.”
“Whajer mean?” asked Cavor. “’Scovery of the moon--se’nd on’y to the
’tato?”
I looked at him, shocked at his suddenly hoarse voice, and by the
badness of his articulation. It occurred to me in a flash that he
was intoxicated, possibly by the fungus. It also occurred to me that
he erred in imagining that he had discovered the moon; he had not
discovered it, he had only reached it. I tried to lay my hand on
his arm and explain this to him, but the issue was too subtle for
his brain. It was also unexpectedly difficult to express. After a
momentary attempt to understand me--I remember wondering if the fungus
had made my eyes as fishy as his--he set off upon some observations on
his own account.
“We are,” he announced with a solemn hiccup, “the creashurs o’ what we
eat and drink.”
He repeated this, and as I was now in one of my subtle moods, I
determined to dispute it. Possibly I wandered a little from the point.
But Cavor certainly did not attend at all properly. He stood up as well
as he could, putting a hand on my head to steady himself, which was
disrespectful, and stood staring about him, quite devoid now of any
fear of the moon beings.
I tried to point out that this was dangerous for some reason that was
not perfectly clear to me, but the word “dangerous” had somehow got
mixed with “indiscreet,” and came out rather more like “injurious”
than either; and after an attempt to disentangle them, I resumed my
argument, addressing myself principally to the unfamiliar but attentive
coralline growths on either side. I felt that it was necessary to clear
up this confusion between the moon and a potato at once--I wandered
into a long parenthesis on the importance of precision of definition
in argument. I did my best to ignore the fact that my bodily sensations
were no longer agreeable.
In some way that I have now forgotten, my mind was led back to projects
of colonisation. “We must annex this moon,” I said. “There must be
no shilly-shally. This is part of the White Man’s Burthen. Cavor--we
are--_hic_--Satap--mean Satraps! Nempire Cæsar never dreamt. B’in all
the newspapers. Cavorecia. Bedfordecia. Bedfordecia--hic--Limited.
Mean--unlimited! Practically.”
Certainly I was intoxicated.
I embarked upon an argument to show the infinite benefits our arrival
would confer on the moon. I involved myself in a rather difficult proof
that the arrival of Columbus was, on the whole, beneficial to America.
I found I had forgotten the line of argument I had intended to pursue,
and continued to repeat “Simlar to C’lumbus,” to fill up time.
From that point my memory of the action of that abominable fungus
becomes confused. I remember vaguely that we declared our intention
of standing no nonsense from any confounded insects, that we decided
it ill became men to hide shamefully upon a mere satellite, that we
equipped ourselves with huge armfuls of the fungus--whether for
missile purposes or not I do not know--and, heedless of the stabs of
the bayonet scrub, we started forth into the sunshine.
Almost immediately we must have come upon the Selenites. There were
six of them, and they were marching in single file over a rocky
place, making the most remarkable piping and whining sounds. They all
seemed to become aware of us at once, all instantly became silent and
motionless, like animals, with their faces turned towards us.
For a moment I was sobered.
“Insects,” murmured Cavor, “insects! And they think I’m going to crawl
about on my stomach--on my vertebrated stomach!
“Stomach,” he repeated slowly, as though he chewed the indignity.
[Illustration: “Insects,” murmured Cavor, “insects”]
Then suddenly, with a shout of fury, he made three vast strides and
leapt towards them. He leapt badly; he made a series of somersaults in
the air, whirled right over them, and vanished with an enormous splash
amidst the cactus bladders. What the Selenites made of this amazing,
and to my mind undignified irruption from another planet, I have no
means of guessing. I seem to remember the sight of their backs as they
ran in all directions, but I am not sure. All these last incidents
before oblivion came are vague and faint in my mind. I know I made a
step to follow Cavor, and tripped and fell headlong among the rocks. I
was, I am certain, suddenly and vehemently ill. I seem to remember a
violent struggle, and being gripped by metallic clasps....
* * * * *
My next clear recollection is that we were prisoners at we knew not
what depth beneath the moon’s surface; we were in darkness amidst
strange distracting noises; our bodies were covered with scratches and
bruises, and our heads racked with pain.
XII THE SELENITE’S FACE
I found myself sitting crouched together in a tumultuous darkness. For
a long time I could not understand where I was, nor how I had come to
this perplexity. I thought of the cupboard into which I had been thrust
at times when I was a child, and then of a very dark and noisy bedroom
in which I had slept during an illness. But these sounds about me were
not the noises I had known, and there was a thin flavour in the air
like the wind of a stable. Then I supposed we must still be at work
upon the sphere, and that somehow I had got into the cellar of Cavor’s
house. I remembered we had finished the sphere, and fancied I must
still be in it and travelling through space.
“Cavor,” I said, “cannot we have some light?”
There came no answer.
“Cavor!” I insisted.
I was answered by a groan. “My head!” I heard him say; “my head!”
I attempted to press my hands to my brow, which ached, and discovered
they were tied together. This startled me very much. I brought them up
to my mouth and felt the cold smoothness of metal. They were chained
together. I tried to separate my legs, and made out they were similarly
fastened, and also that I was fastened to the ground by a much thicker
chain about the middle of my body.
I was more frightened than I had yet been by anything in all our
strange experiences. For a time I tugged silently at my bonds. “Cavor!”
I cried out sharply. “Why am I tied? Why have you tied me hand and
foot?”
“I haven’t tied you,” he answered. “It’s the Selenites.”
The Selenites! My mind hung on that for a space. Then my memories came
back to me: the snowy desolation, the thawing of the air, the growth
of the plants, our strange hopping and crawling among the rocks and
vegetation of the crater. All the distress of our frantic search for
the sphere returned to me.... Finally the opening of the great lid that
covered the pit!
Then as I strained to trace our later movements down to our present
plight, the pain in my head became intolerable. I came to an
insurmountable barrier, an obstinate blank.
“Cavor!”
“Yes?”
“Where are we?”
“How should I know?”
“Are we dead?”
“What nonsense!”
“They’ve got us, then!”
He made no answer but a grunt. The lingering traces of the poison
seemed to make him oddly irritable.
“What do you mean to do?”
“How should I know what to do?”
“Oh, very well!” said I, and became silent. Presently I was roused from
a stupor. “O _Lord_!” I cried; “I wish you’d stop that buzzing!”
We lapsed into silence again, listening to the dull confusion of noises
like the muffled sounds of a street or factory that filled our ears.
I could make nothing of it, my mind pursued first one rhythm and then
another, and questioned it in vain. But after a long time I became
aware of a new and sharper element, not mingling with the rest but
standing out, as it were, against that cloudy background of sound. It
was a series of relatively very little definite sounds, tappings and
rubbings, like a loose spray of ivy against a window or a bird moving
about upon a box. We listened and peered about us, but the darkness was
a velvet pall. There followed a noise like the subtle movement of the
wards of a well-oiled lock. And then there appeared before me, hanging
as it seemed in an immensity of black, a thin bright line.
“Look!” whispered Cavor very softly.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
We stared.
The thin bright line became a band, and broader and paler. It took upon
itself the quality of a bluish light falling upon a whitewashed wall.
It ceased to be parallel-sided; it developed a deep indentation on one
side. I turned to remark this to Cavor, and was amazed to see his ear
in a brilliant illumination--all the rest of him in shadow. I twisted
my head round as well as my bonds would permit. “Cavor,” I said, “it’s
behind!”
His ear vanished--gave place to an eye!
Suddenly the crack that had been admitting the light broadened out, and
revealed itself as the space of an opening door. Beyond was a sapphire
vista, and in the doorway stood a grotesque outline silhouetted
against the glare.
We both made convulsive efforts to turn, and failing, sat staring over
our shoulders at this. My first impression was of some clumsy quadruped
with lowered head. Then I perceived it was the slender pinched body and
short and extremely attenuated bandy legs of a Selenite, with his head
depressed between his shoulders. He was without the helmet and body
covering they wear upon the exterior.
He was a blank, black figure to us, but instinctively our imaginations
supplied features to his very human outline. I, at least, took it
instantly that he was somewhat hunchbacked, with a high forehead and
long features.
He came forward three steps and paused for a time. His movements seemed
absolutely noiseless. Then he came forward again. He walked like a
bird, his feet fell one in front of the other. He stepped out of the
ray of light that came through the doorway, and it seemed as though he
vanished altogether in the shadow.
For a moment my eyes sought him in the wrong place, and then I
perceived him standing facing us both in the full light. Only the human
features I had attributed to him were not there at all!
Of course I ought to have expected that, only I didn’t. It came to
me as an absolute, for a moment an overwhelming, shock. It seemed as
though it wasn’t a face, as though it must needs be a mask, a horror,
a deformity, that would presently be disavowed or explained. There
was no nose, and the thing had dull bulging eyes at the side--in the
silhouette I had supposed they were ears. There were no ears.... I
have tried to draw one of these heads, but I cannot. There was a
mouth, downwardly curved, like a human mouth in a face that stares
ferociously....
The neck on which the head was poised was jointed in three places,
almost like the short joints in the leg of a crab. The joints of the
limbs I could not see, because of the puttee-like straps in which they
were swathed, and which formed the only clothing the being wore.
There the thing was, looking at us!
[Illustration: “There the thing was, looking at us”]
At the time my mind was taken up by the mad impossibility of the
creature. I suppose he also was amazed, and with more reason, perhaps,
for amazement than we. Only, confound him! he did not show it. We did
at least know what had brought about this meeting of incompatible
creatures. But conceive how it would seem to decent Londoners, for
example, to come upon a couple of living things, as big as men and
absolutely unlike any other earthly animals, careering about among the
sheep in Hyde Park! It must have taken him like that.
Figure us! We were bound hand and foot, fagged and filthy; our beards
two inches long, our faces scratched and bloody. Cavor you must imagine
in his knickerbockers (torn in several places by the bayonet scrub),
his Jaeger shirt and old cricket cap, his wiry hair wildly disordered,
a tail to every quarter of the heavens. In that blue light his face
did not look red but very dark, his lips and the drying blood upon my
hands seemed black. If possible I was in a worse plight than he, on
account of the yellow fungus into which I had jumped. Our jackets were
unbuttoned, and our shoes had been taken off and lay at our feet. And
we were sitting with our backs to this queer bluish light, peering at
such a monster as Dürer might have invented.
Cavor broke the silence; started to speak, went hoarse, and cleared his
throat. Outside began a terrific bellowing, as if a mooncalf were in
trouble. It ended in a shriek, and everything was still again.
Presently the Selenite turned about, flickered into the shadow, stood
for a moment retrospective at the door, and then closed it on us; and
once more we were in that murmurous mystery of darkness into which we
had awakened.
XIII MR. CAVOR MAKES SOME SUGGESTIONS
For a time neither of us spoke. To focus together all the things we had
brought upon ourselves, seemed beyond my mental powers.
“They’ve got us,” I said at last.
“It was that fungus.”
“Well--if I hadn’t taken it we should have fainted and starved.”
“We might have found the sphere.”
I lost my temper at his persistence, and swore to myself. For a time
we hated one another in silence. I drummed with my fingers on the
floor between my knees, and gritted the links of my fetters together.
Presently I was forced to talk again.
“What do you make of it, anyhow?” I asked humbly.
“They are reasonable creatures--they can make things and do
things--Those lights we saw....”
He stopped. It was clear he could make nothing of it.
When he spoke again it was to confess, “After all, they are more human
than we had a right to expect. I suppose----”
He stopped irritatingly.
“Yes?”
“I suppose, anyhow--on any planet where there is an intelligent
animal--it will carry its brain case upward, and have hands, and walk
erect....”
Presently he broke away in another direction.
“We are some way in,” he said. “I mean--perhaps a couple of thousand
feet or more.”
“Why?”
“It’s cooler. And our voices are so much louder. That faded quality--it
has altogether gone. And the feeling in one’s ears and throat.”
I had not noted that, but I did now.
“The air is denser. We must be some depth--a mile even, we may
be--inside the moon.”
“We never thought of a world inside the moon.”
“No.”
“How could we?”
“We might have done. Only--One gets into habits of mind.”
He thought for a time.
“_Now_,” he said, “it seems such an obvious thing.
“Of course! The moon must be enormously cavernous, with an atmosphere
within, and at the centre of its caverns a sea.
“One knew that the moon had a lower specific gravity than the earth,
one knew that it had little air or water outside, one knew, too, that
it was sister planet to the earth, and that it was unaccountable that
it should be different in composition. The inference that it was
hollowed out was as clear as day. And yet one never saw it as a fact.
Kepler, of course----”
His voice had the interest now of a man who has discovered a pretty
sequence of reasoning.
“Yes,” he said, “Kepler with his _sub-volvani_ was right after all.”
“I wish you had taken the trouble to find that out before we came,” I
said.
He answered nothing, buzzing to himself softly as he pursued his
thoughts. My temper was going. “What do you think has become of the
sphere, anyhow?” I asked.
“Lost,” he said, like a man who answers an uninteresting question.
“Among those plants?”
“Unless they find it.”
“And then?”
“How can I tell?”
“Cavor,” I said, with a sort of hysterical bitterness, “things look
bright for my Company....”
He made no answer.
“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “Just think of all the trouble we took to get
into this pickle! What did we come for? What are we after? What was the
moon to us or we to the moon? We wanted too much, we tried too much. We
ought to have started the little things first. It was you proposed the
moon! Those Cavorite spring blinds! I am certain we could have worked
them for terrestrial purposes. Certain! Did you really understand what
I proposed? A steel cylinder----”
“Rubbish!” said Cavor.
We ceased to converse.
For a time Cavor kept up a broken monologue without much help from me.
“If they find it,” he began, “if they find it ... what will they do
with it? Well, that’s a question. It may be that’s _the_ question. They
won’t understand it, anyhow. If they understood that sort of thing they
would have come long since to the earth. Would they? Why shouldn’t
they? But they would have sent something--They couldn’t keep their
hands off such a possibility. No! But they will examine it. Clearly
they are intelligent and inquisitive. They will examine it--get inside
it--trifle with the studs. Off!... That would mean the moon for us for
all the rest of our lives. Strange creatures, strange knowledge....”
“As for strange knowledge--” said I, and language failed me.
“Look here, Bedford,” said Cavor, “you came on this expedition of your
own free will.”
“You said to me, ‘Call it prospecting.’”
“There’s always risks in prospecting.”
“Especially when you do it unarmed and without thinking out every
possibility.”
“I was so taken up with the sphere. The thing rushed on us, and carried
us away.”
“Rushed on _me_, you mean.”
“Rushed on me just as much. How was _I_ to know when I set to work on
molecular physics that the business would bring me here--of all places?”
“It’s this accursed science,” I cried. “It’s the very Devil. The
mediæval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all
wrong. You tamper with it--and it offers you gifts. And directly you
take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions
and new weapons--now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social
ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!”
“Anyhow, it’s no use your quarrelling with me _now_. These
creatures--these Selenites, or whatever we choose to call them--have
got us tied hand and foot. Whatever temper you choose to go through
with it in, you will have to go through with it.... We have experiences
before us that will need all our coolness.”
He paused as if he required my assent. But I sat sulking. “Confound
your science!” I said.
“The problem is communication. Gestures, I fear, will be different.
Pointing, for example. No creatures but men and monkeys point.”
That was too obviously wrong for me. “Pretty nearly every animal,” I
cried, “points with its eyes or nose.”
Cavor meditated over that. “Yes,” he said at last, “and we don’t.
There’s such differences--such differences!
“One might.... But how can I tell? There is speech. The sounds they
make, a sort of fluting and piping. I don’t see how we are to imitate
that. Is it their speech, that sort of thing? They may have different
senses, different means of communication. Of course they are minds and
we are minds; there must be something in common. Who knows how far we
may not get to an understanding?”
“The things are outside us,” I said. “They’re more different from us
than the strangest animals on earth. They are a different clay. What is
the good of talking like this?”
Cavor thought. “I don’t see that. Where there are minds they will have
something _similar_--even though they have been evolved on different
planets. Of course if it was a question of instincts, if we or they are
no more than animals----”
“Well, _are_ they? They’re much more like ants on their hind legs than
human beings, and who ever got to any sort of understanding with ants?”
“But these machines and clothing! No, I don’t hold with you, Bedford.
The difference is wide----”
“It’s insurmountable.”
“The resemblance must bridge it. I remember reading once a paper by the
late Professor Galton on the possibility of communication between the
planets. Unhappily, at that time it did not seem probable that that
would be of any material benefit to me, and I fear I did not give it
the attention I should have done--in view of this state of affairs.
Yet.... Now, let me see!
“His idea was to begin with those broad truths that must underlie all
conceivable mental existences and establish a basis on those. The great
principles of geometry, to begin with. He proposed to take some leading
proposition of Euclid’s, and show by construction that its truth was
known to us, to demonstrate, for example, that the angles at the base
of an isosceles triangle are equal, and that if the equal sides be
produced the angles on the other side of the base are equal also, or
that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal
to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstrating
our knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possession
of a reasonable intelligence.... Now, suppose I ... I might draw the
geometrical figure with a wet finger, or even trace it in the air....”
He fell silent. I sat meditating his words. For a time his wild hope
of communication, of interpretation, with these weird beings held me.
Then that angry despair that was a part of my exhaustion and physical
misery resumed its sway. I perceived with a sudden novel vividness
the extraordinary folly of everything I had ever done. “Ass!” I said;
“oh, ass, unutterable ass.... I seem to exist only to go about doing
preposterous things.... Why did we ever leave the thing?... Hopping
about looking for patents and concessions in the craters of the
moon!... If only we had had the sense to fasten a handkerchief to a
stick to show where we had left the sphere!”
I subsided, fuming.
“It is clear,” meditated Cavor, “they are intelligent. One can
hypotheticate certain things. As they have not killed us at once, they
must have ideas of mercy. Mercy! at any rate of restraint. Possibly of
intercourse. They may meet us. And this apartment and the glimpses we
had of its guardian. These fetters! A high degree of intelligence....”
“I wish to heaven,” cried I, “I’d thought even twice! Plunge after
plunge. First one fluky start and then another. It was my confidence
in you! _Why_ didn’t I stick to my play? That was what I was equal
to. That was my world and the life I was made for. I could have
finished that play. I’m certain ... it was a good play. I had the
scenario as good as done. Then.... Conceive it! leaping to the moon!
Practically--I’ve thrown my life away! That old woman in the inn near
Canterbury had better sense.”
I looked up, and stopped in mid-sentence. The darkness had given place
to that bluish light again. The door was opening, and several noiseless
Selenites were coming into the chamber. I became quite still, staring
at their grotesque faces.
Then suddenly my sense of disagreeable strangeness changed to interest.
I perceived that the foremost and second carried bowls. One elemental
need at least our minds could understand in common. They were bowls of
some metal that, like our fetters, looked dark in that bluish light;
and each contained a number of whitish fragments. All the cloudy pain
and misery that oppressed me rushed together and took the shape of
hunger. I eyed these bowls wolfishly, and, though it returned to me in
dreams, at that time it seemed a small matter that at the end of the
arms that lowered one towards me were not hands, but a sort of flap and
thumb, like the end of an elephant’s trunk.
The stuff in the bowl was loose in texture, and whitish brown in
colour--rather like lumps of some cold soufflé, and it smelt faintly
like mushrooms. From a partially divided carcass of a mooncalf that
we presently saw, I am inclined to believe it must have been mooncalf
flesh.
My hands were so tightly chained that I could barely contrive to reach
the bowl; but when they saw the effort I made, two of them dexterously
released one of the turns about my wrist. Their tentacle hands were
soft and cold to my skin. I immediately seized a mouthful of the food.
It had the same laxness in texture that all organic structures seem to
have upon the moon; it tasted rather like a gauffre or a damp meringue,
but in no way was it disagreeable. I took two other mouthfuls. “I
_wanted_--foo’!” said I, tearing off a still larger piece....
For a time we ate with an utter absence of self-consciousness. We ate
and presently drank like tramps in a soup kitchen. Never before nor
since have I been hungry to the ravenous pitch, and save that I have
had this very experience I could never have believed that, a quarter
of a million of miles out of our proper world, in utter perplexity of
soul, surrounded, watched, touched by beings more grotesque and inhuman
than the worst creations of a nightmare, it would be possible for me to
eat in utter forgetfulness of all these things. They stood about us
watching us, and ever and again making a slight elusive twittering that
stood them, I suppose, in the stead of speech. I did not even shiver at
their touch. And when the first zeal of my feeding was over, I could
note that Cavor, too, had been eating with the same shameless abandon.
XIV EXPERIMENTS IN INTERCOURSE
When at last we had made an end of eating, the Selenites linked our
hands closely together again, and then untwisted the chains about our
feet and rebound them, so as to give us a limited freedom of movement.
Then they unfastened the chains about our waists. To do all this they
had to handle us freely, and ever and again one of their queer heads
came down close to my face, or a soft tentacle-hand touched my head
or neck. I don’t remember that I was afraid then or repelled by their
proximity. I think that our incurable anthropomorphism made us imagine
there were human heads inside their masks. The skin, like everything
else, looked bluish, but that was on account of the light; and it was
hard and shiny, quite in the beetle-wing fashion, not soft, or moist,
or hairy, as a vertebrated animal’s would be. Along the crest of the
head was a low ridge of whitish spines running from back to front, and
a much larger ridge curved on either side over the eyes. The Selenite
who untied me used his mouth to help his hands.
“They seem to be releasing us,” said Cavor. “Remember we are on the
moon! Make no sudden movements!”
“Are you going to try that geometry?”
“If I get a chance. But, of course, they may make an advance first.”
We remained passive, and the Selenites, having finished their
arrangements, stood back from us, and seemed to be looking at us. I say
seemed to be, because as their eyes were at the side and not in front,
one had the same difficulty in determining the direction in which they
were looking as one has in the case of a hen or a fish. They conversed
with one another in their reedy tones, that seemed to me impossible to
imitate or define. The door behind us opened wider, and, glancing over
my shoulder, I saw a vague large space beyond, in which quite a little
crowd of Selenites were standing. They seemed a curiously miscellaneous
rabble.
“Do they want us to imitate those sounds?” I asked Cavor.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“It seems to me that they are trying to make us understand something.”
“I can’t make anything of their gestures. Do you notice this one, who
is worrying with his head like a man with an uncomfortable collar?”
“Let us shake our heads at him.”
We did that, and finding it ineffectual, attempted an imitation of the
Selenites’ movements. That seemed to interest them. At any rate they
all set up the same movement. But as that seemed to lead to nothing,
we desisted at last and so did they, and fell into a piping argument
among themselves. Then one of them, shorter and very much thicker than
the others, and with a particularly wide mouth, squatted down suddenly
beside Cavor, and put his hands and feet in the same posture as Cavor’s
were bound, and then by a dexterous movement stood up.
“Cavor,” I shouted, “they want us to get up!”
He stared open-mouthed. “That’s it!” he said.
And with much heaving and grunting, because our hands were tied
together, we contrived to struggle to our feet. The Selenites made way
for our elephantine heavings, and seemed to twitter more volubly. As
soon as we were on our feet the thick-set Selenite came and patted each
of our faces with his tentacles, and walked towards the open doorway.
That also was plain enough, and we followed him. We saw that four of
the Selenites standing in the doorway were much taller than the others,
and clothed in the same manner as those we had seen in the crater,
namely, with spiked round helmets and cylindrical body-cases, and that
each of the four carried a goad with spike and guard made of that same
dull-looking metal as the bowls. These four closed about us, one on
either side of each of us, as we emerged from our chamber into the
cavern from which the light had come.
We did not get our impression of that cavern all at once. Our
attention was taken up by the movements and attitudes of the Selenites
immediately about us, and by the necessity of controlling our motion,
lest we should startle and alarm them and ourselves by some excessive
stride. In front of us was the short, thick-set being who had solved
the problem of asking us to get up, moving with gestures that seemed,
almost all of them, intelligible to us, inviting us to follow him. His
spout-like face turned from one of us to the other with a quickness
that was clearly interrogative. For a time, I say, we were taken up
with these things.
But at last the great place that formed a background to our movements
asserted itself. It became apparent that the source of much, at least,
of the tumult of sounds which had filled our ears ever since we had
recovered from the stupefaction of the fungus was a vast mass of
machinery in active movement, whose flying and whirling parts were
visible indistinctly over the heads and between the bodies of the
Selenites who walked about us. And not only did the web of sounds that
filled the air proceed from this mechanism, but also the peculiar blue
light that irradiated the whole place. We had taken it as a natural
thing that a subterranean cavern should be artificially lit, and even
now, though the fact was patent to my eyes, I did not really grasp its
import until presently the darkness came. The meaning and structure of
this huge apparatus we saw I cannot explain, because we neither of us
learnt what it was for or how it worked. One after another, big shafts
of metal flung out and up from its centre, their heads travelling
in what seemed to me to be a parabolic path; each dropped a sort of
dangling arm as it rose towards the apex of its flight and plunged
down into a vertical cylinder, forcing this down before it. About
it moved the shapes of tenders, little figures that seemed vaguely
different from the beings about us. As each of the three dangling arms
of the machine plunged down, there was a clank and then a roaring, and
out of the top of the vertical cylinder came pouring this incandescent
substance that lit the place, and ran over as milk runs over a boiling
pot, and dripped luminously into a tank of light below. It was a cold
blue light, a sort of phosphorescent glow but infinitely brighter, and
from the tanks into which it fell it ran in conduits athwart the cavern.
Thud, thud, thud, thud, came the sweeping arms of this unintelligible
apparatus, and the light substance hissed and poured. At first the
thing seemed only reasonably large and near to us, and then I saw how
exceedingly little the Selenites upon it seemed, and I realised the
full immensity of cavern and machine. I looked from this tremendous
affair to the faces of the Selenites with a new respect. I stopped, and
Cavor stopped, and stared at this thunderous engine.
“But this is stupendous!” I said. “What can it be for?”
Cavor’s blue-lit face was full of an intelligent respect. “I can’t
dream! Surely these beings--Men could not make a thing like that! Look
at those arms, are they on connecting rods?”
The thick-set Selenite had gone some paces unheeded. He came back and
stood between us and the great machine. I avoided seeing him, because I
guessed somehow that his idea was to beckon us onward. He walked away
in the direction he wished us to go, and turned and came back, and
flicked our faces to attract our attention.
Cavor and I looked at one another.
“Cannot we show him we are interested in the machine?” I said.
“Yes,” said Cavor. “We’ll try that.” He turned to our guide and smiled,
and pointed to the machine, and pointed again, and then to his head,
and then to the machine. By some defect of reasoning he seemed to
imagine that broken English might help these gestures. “Me look ’im,”
he said, “me think ’im very much. Yes.”
His behaviour seemed to check the Selenites in their desire for our
progress for a moment. They faced one another, their queer heads moved,
the twittering voices came quick and liquid. Then one of them, a lean,
tall creature, with a sort of mantle added to the puttee in which the
others were dressed, twisted his elephant trunk of a hand about Cavor’s
waist, and pulled him gently to follow our guide, who again went on
ahead.
Cavor resisted. “We may just as well begin explaining ourselves now.
They may think we are new animals, a new sort of mooncalf perhaps! It
is most important that we should show an intelligent interest from the
outset.”
He began to shake his head violently. “No, no,” he said, “me not come
on one minute. Me look at ’im.”
“Isn’t there some geometrical point you might bring in _apropos_ of
that affair?” I suggested, as the Selenites conferred again.
“Possibly a parabolic--” he began.
He yelled loudly, and leaped six feet or more!
One of the four armed moon-men had pricked him with a goad!
I turned on the goad-bearer behind me with a swift threatening gesture,
and he started back. This and Cavor’s sudden shout and leap clearly
astonished all the Selenites. They receded hastily, facing us. For
one of those moments that seem to last for ever, we stood in angry
protest, with a scattered semicircle of these inhuman beings about us.
“He pricked me!” said Cavor, with a catching of the voice.
“I saw him,” I answered.
“Confound it!” I said to the Selenites; “we’re not going to stand that!
What on earth do you take us for?”
I glanced quickly right and left. Far away across the blue wilderness
of cavern I saw a number of other Selenites running towards us; broad
and slender they were, and one with a larger head than the others.
The cavern spread wide and low, and receded in every direction into
darkness. Its roof, I remember, seemed to bulge down as if with the
weight of the vast thickness of rocks that prisoned us. There was no
way out of it--no way out of it. Above, below, in every direction, was
the unknown, and these inhuman creatures, with goads and gestures,
confronting us, and we two unsupported men!
XV THE GIDDY BRIDGE
Just for a moment that hostile pause endured. I suppose that both we
and the Selenites did some very rapid thinking. My clearest impression
was that there was nothing to put my back against, and that we were
bound to be surrounded and killed. The overwhelming folly of our
presence there loomed over me in black, enormous reproach. Why had I
ever launched myself on this mad, inhuman expedition?
Cavor came to my side and laid his hand on my arm. His pale and
terrified face was ghastly in the blue light.
“We can’t do anything,” he said. “It’s a mistake. They don’t
understand. We must go. As they want us to go.”
I looked down at him, and then at the fresh Selenites who were coming
to help their fellows. “If I had my hands free----”
“It’s no use,” he panted.
“No.”
“We’ll go.”
And he turned about and led the way in the direction that had been
indicated for us.
I followed, trying to look as subdued as possible, and feeling at the
chains about my wrists. My blood was boiling. I noted nothing more
of that cavern, though it seemed to take a long time before we had
marched across it, or if I noted anything I forgot it as I saw it. My
thoughts were concentrated, I think, upon my chains and the Selenites,
and particularly upon the helmeted ones with the goads. At first they
marched parallel with us, and at a respectful distance, but presently
they were overtaken by three others, and then they drew nearer, until
they were within arm’s length again. I winced like a beaten horse as
they came near to us. The shorter, thicker Selenite marched at first on
our right flank, but presently came in front of us again.
How well the picture of that grouping has bitten into my brain; the
back of Cavor’s downcast head just in front of me, and the dejected
droop of his shoulders, and our guide’s gaping visage, perpetually
jerking about him, and the goad-bearers on either side, watchful, yet
open-mouthed--a blue monochrome. And, after all, I _do_ remember one
other thing besides the purely personal affair, which is, that a sort
of gutter came presently across the floor of the cavern, and then ran
along by the side of the path of rock we followed. And it was full
of that same bright blue luminous stuff that flowed out of the great
machine. I walked close beside it, and I can testify it radiated not
a particle of heat. It was brightly shining, and yet it was neither
warmer nor colder than anything else in the cavern.
Clang, clang, clang, we passed right under the thumping levers of
another vast machine, and so came at last to a wide tunnel, in which
we could even hear the pad, pad of our shoeless feet, and which, save
for the trickling thread of blue to the right of us, was quite unlit.
The shadows made gigantic travesties of our shapes and those of the
Selenites on the irregular wall and roof of the tunnel. Ever and again
crystals in the walls of the tunnel scintillated like gems, ever and
again the tunnel expanded into a stalactitic cavern, or gave off
branches that vanished into darkness.
We seemed to be marching down that tunnel for a long time. “Trickle,
trickle,” went the flowing light very softly, and our footfalls and
their echoes made an irregular paddle, paddle. My mind settled down
to the question of my chains. If I were to slip off one turn _so_, and
then to twist it _so_....
If I tried to do it very gradually, would they see I was slipping my
wrist out of the looser turn? If they did, what would they do?
“Bedford,” said Cavor, “it goes down. It keeps on going down.”
His remark roused me from my sullen preoccupation.
“If they wanted to kill us,” he said, dropping back to come level with
me, “there is no reason why they should not have done it.”
“No,” I admitted, “that’s true.”
“They don’t understand us,” he said, “they think we are merely strange
animals, some wild sort of mooncalf birth, perhaps. It will be only
when they have observed us better that they will begin to think we have
minds----”
“When you trace those geometrical problems,” said I.
“It may be that.”
We tramped on for a space.
“You see,” said Cavor, “these may be Selenites of a lower class.”
“The infernal fools!” said I viciously, glancing at their exasperating
faces.
“If we endure what they do to us----”
“We’ve got to endure it,” said I.
“There may be others less stupid. This is the mere outer fringe of
their world. It must go down and down, cavern, passage, tunnel, down at
last to the sea--hundreds of miles below.”
His words made me think of the mile or so of rock and tunnel that
might be over our heads already. It was like a weight dropping on my
shoulders. “Away from the sun and air,” I said. “Even a mine half a
mile deep is stuffy.”
“This is not, anyhow. It’s probable--Ventilation! The air would blow
from the dark side of the moon to the sunlit, and all the carbonic
acid would well out there and feed those plants. Up this tunnel, for
example, there is quite a breeze. And what a world it must be. The
earnest we have in that shaft, and those machines----”
“And the goad,” I said. “Don’t forget the goad!”
He walked a little in front of me for a time.
“Even that goad--” he said.
“Well?”
“I was angry at the time. But--It was perhaps necessary we should get
on. They have different skins, and probably different nerves. They may
not understand our objection--Just as a being from Mars might not like
our earthly habit of nudging----”
“They’d better be careful how they nudge _me_.”
“And about that geometry. After all, their way is a way of
understanding, too. They begin with the elements of life and not of
thought. Food. Compulsion. Pain. They strike at fundamentals.”
“There’s no doubt about _that_,” I said.
He went on to talk of the enormous and wonderful world into which we
were being taken. I realised slowly from his tone, that even now he was
not absolutely in despair at the prospect of going ever deeper into
this inhuman planet-burrow. His mind ran on machines and invention, to
the exclusion of a thousand dark things that beset me. It wasn’t that
he intended to make any use of these things, he simply wanted to know
them.
“After all,” he said, “this is a tremendous occasion. It is the meeting
of two worlds! What are we going to see? Think of what is below us
here.”
“We shan’t see much if the light isn’t better,” I remarked.
“This is only the outer crust. Down below--On this scale--There will
be everything. Do you notice how different they seem one from another?
The story we shall take back!”
“Some rare sort of animal,” I said, “might comfort himself in that way
while they were bringing him to the Zoo.... It doesn’t follow that we
are going to be shown all these things.”
“When they find we have reasonable minds,” said Cavor, “they will want
to learn about the earth. Even if they have no generous emotions, they
will teach in order to learn.... And the things they must know! The
unanticipated things!”
He went on to speculate on the possibility of their knowing things he
had never hoped to learn on earth, speculating in that way, with a raw
wound from that goad already in his skin! Much that he said I forget,
for my attention was drawn to the fact that the tunnel along which we
had been marching was opening out wider and wider. We seemed, from the
feeling of the air, to be going out into a huge space. But how big
the space might really be we could not tell, because it was unlit.
Our little stream of light ran in a dwindling thread and vanished far
ahead. Presently the rocky walls had vanished altogether on either
hand. There was nothing to be seen but the path in front of us and the
trickling, hurrying rivulet of blue phosphorescence. The figures of
Cavor and the guiding Selenite marched before me, the sides of their
legs and heads that were towards the rivulet were clear and bright
blue, their darkened sides, now that the reflection of the tunnel wall
no longer lit them, merged indistinguishably in the darkness beyond.
And soon I perceived that we were approaching a declivity of some sort,
because the little blue stream dipped suddenly out of sight.
In another moment, as it seemed, we had reached the edge. The shining
stream gave one meander of hesitation and then rushed over. It fell
to a depth at which the sound of its descent was absolutely lost to
us. Far below was a bluish glow, a sort of blue mist--at an infinite
distance below. And the darkness the stream dropped out of became
utterly void and black, save that a thing like a plank projected
from the edge of the cliff and stretched out and faded and vanished
altogether. There was a warm air blowing up out of the gulf.
For a moment I and Cavor stood as near the edge as we dared, peering
into a blue-tinged profundity. And then our guide was pulling at my
arm.
Then he left me, and walked to the end of that plank and stepped upon
it, looking back. Then when he perceived we watched him, he turned
about and went on along it, walking as surely as though he was on firm
earth. For a moment his form was distinct, then he became a blue blur,
and then vanished into the obscurity. I became aware of some vague
shape looming darkly out of the black.
There was a pause. “Surely--!” said Cavor.
One of the other Selenites walked a few paces out upon the plank, and
turned and looked back at us unconcernedly. The others stood ready
to follow after us. Our guide’s expectant figure reappeared. He was
returning to see why we had not advanced.
“What is that beyond there?” I asked.
“I can’t see.”
“We can’t cross this at any price,” said I.
“I could not go three steps on it,” said Cavor, “even with my hands
free.”
We looked at each other’s drawn faces in blank consternation.
“They can’t know what it is to be giddy!” said Cavor.
“It’s quite impossible for us to walk that plank.”
“I don’t believe they see as we do. I’ve been watching them. I wonder
if they know this is simply blackness for us. How can we make them
understand?”
“Anyhow, we must make them understand.”
I think we said these things with a vague half hope the Selenites
might somehow understand. I knew quite clearly that all that was
needed was an explanation. Then as I saw their faces, I realised that
an explanation was impossible. Just here it was that our resemblances
were not going to bridge our differences. Well, I wasn’t going to walk
the plank, anyhow. I slipped my wrist very quickly out of the coil of
chain that was loose, and then began to twist my wrists in opposite
directions. I was standing nearest to the bridge, and as I did this two
of the Selenites laid hold of me, and pulled me gently towards it.
I shook my head violently. “No go,” I said, “no use. You don’t
understand.”
Another Selenite added his compulsion. I was forced to step forward.
“I’ve got an idea,” said Cavor; but I knew his ideas.
“Look here!” I exclaimed to the Selenites. “Steady on! It’s all very
well for you----”
I sprang round upon my heel. I burst out into curses. For one of the
armed Selenites had stabbed me behind with his goad.
I wrenched my wrists free from the little tentacles that held them. I
turned on the goad-bearer. “Confound you!” I cried. “I’ve warned you of
that. What on earth do you think I’m made of, to stick that into me? If
you touch me again----!”
By way of answer he pricked me forthwith.
I heard Cavor’s voice in alarm and entreaty. Even then I think he
wanted to compromise with these creatures. “I say, Bedford,” he cried,
“I know a way!” But the sting of that second stab seemed to set free
some pent-up reserve of energy in my being. Instantly the link of the
wrist-chain snapped, and with it snapped all considerations that had
held us unresisting in the hands of these moon creatures. For that
second, at least, I was mad with fear and anger. I took no thought of
consequences. I hit straight out at the face of the thing with the
goad. The chain was twisted round my fist....
There came another of these beastly surprises of which the moon world
is full.
My mailed hand seemed to go clean through him. He smashed like--like
some softish sort of sweet with liquid in it! He broke right in! He
squelched and splashed. It was like hitting a damp toadstool. The
flimsy body went spinning a dozen yards, and fell with a flabby impact.
I was astonished. I was incredulous that any living thing could be so
flimsy. For an instant I could have believed the whole thing a dream.
Then it had become real and imminent again. Neither Cavor nor the other
Selenites seemed to have done anything from the time when I had turned
about to the time when the dead Selenite hit the ground. Every one
stood back from us two, every one alert. That arrest seemed to last at
least a second after the Selenite was down. Every one must have been
taking the thing in. I seem to remember myself standing with my arm
half retracted, trying also to take it in. “What next?” clamoured my
brain; “what next?” Then in a moment every one was moving!
I perceived we must get our chains loose, and that before we could do
this these Selenites had to be beaten off. I faced towards the group of
the three goad-bearers. Instantly one threw his goad at me. It swished
over my head, and I suppose went flying into the abyss behind.
I leaped right at him with all my might as the goad flew over me. He
turned to run as I jumped, and I bore him to the ground, came down
right upon him, and slipped upon his smashed body and fell. He seemed
to wriggle under my foot.
I came into a sitting position, and on every hand the blue backs of
the Selenites were receding into the darkness. I bent a link by main
force and untwisted the chain that had hampered me about the ankles,
and sprang to my feet, with the chain in my hand. Another goad, flung
javelin-wise, whistled by me, and I made a rush towards the darkness
out of which it had come. Then I turned back towards Cavor, who was
still standing in the light of the rivulet near the gulf convulsively
busy with his wrists, and at the same time jabbering nonsense about his
idea.
“Come on!” I cried.
“My hands!” he answered.
Then, realising that I dared not run back to him, because my
ill-calculated steps might carry me over the edge, he came shuffling
towards me, with his hands held out before him.
I gripped his chains at once to unfasten them.
“Where are they?” he panted.
“Run away. They’ll come back. They’re throwing things! Which way shall
we go?”
“By the light. To that tunnel. Eh?”
“Yes,” said I, and his hands were free.
I dropped on my knees and fell to work on his ankle bonds. Whack came
something--I know not what--and splashed the livid streamlet into drops
about us. Far away on our right a piping and whistling began.
I whipped the chain off his feet, and put it in his hand. “Hit with
that!” I said, and without waiting for an answer, set off in big bounds
along the path by which we had come. I had a nasty sort of feeling that
these things could jump out of the darkness on to my back. I heard the
impact of his leaps come following after me.
We ran in vast strides. But that running, you must understand, was an
altogether different thing from any running on earth. On earth one
leaps and almost instantly hits the ground again, but on the moon,
because of its weaker pull, one shot through the air for several
seconds before one came to earth. In spite of our violent hurry this
gave an effect of long pauses, pauses in which one might have counted
seven or eight. “Step,” and one soared off! All sorts of questions ran
through my mind: “Where are the Selenites? What will they do? Shall we
ever get to that tunnel? Is Cavor far behind? Are they likely to cut
him off?” Then whack, stride, and off again for another step.
I saw a Selenite running in front of me, his legs going exactly as a
man’s would go on earth, saw him glance over his shoulder, and heard
him shriek as he ran aside out of my way into the darkness. He was,
I think, our guide, but I am not sure. Then in another vast stride
the walls of rock had come into view on either hand, and in two more
strides I was in the tunnel, and tempering my pace to its low roof. I
went on to a bend, then stopped and turned back, and plug, plug, plug,
Cavor came into view, splashing into the stream of blue light at every
stride, and grew larger and blundered into me. We stood clutching each
other. For a moment, at least, we had shaken off our captors and were
alone.
We were both very much out of breath. We spoke in panting, broken
sentences.
“You’ve spoilt it all!” panted Cavor.
“Nonsense,” I cried. “It was that or death!”
“What are we to do?”
“Hide.”
“How can we?”
“It’s dark enough.”
“But where?”
“Up one of these side caverns.”
“And then?”
“Think.”
“Right--come on.”
We strode on, and presently came to a radiating dark cavern. Cavor was
in front. He hesitated, and chose a black mouth that seemed to promise
good hiding. He went towards it and turned.
“It’s dark,” he said.
“Your legs and feet will light us. You’re wet with that luminous stuff.”
“But----”
A tumult of sounds, and in particular a sound like a clanging gong,
advancing up the main tunnel, became audible. It was horribly
suggestive of a tumultuous pursuit. We made a bolt for the unlit side
cavern forthwith. As we ran along it our way was lit by the irradiation
of Cavor’s legs. “It’s lucky,” I panted, “they took off our boots, or
we should fill this place with clatter.” On we rushed, taking as small
steps as we could to avoid striking the roof of the cavern. After a
time we seemed to be gaining on the uproar. It became muffled, it
dwindled, it died away.
I stopped and looked back, and I heard the pad, pad of Cavor’s feet
receding. Then he stopped also. “Bedford,” he whispered; “there’s a
sort of light in front of us.”
[Illustration: “Bedford,” he whispered, “there’s a sort of light in
front of us”]
I looked, and at first could see nothing. Then I perceived his head and
shoulders dimly outlined against a fainter darkness. I saw, also, that
this mitigation of the darkness was not blue, as all the other light
within the moon had been, but a pallid grey, a very vague, faint white,
the daylight colour. Cavor noted this difference as soon or sooner than
I did, and I think, too, that it filled him with much the same wild
hope.
“Bedford,” he whispered, and his voice trembled. “That light--it is
possible----”
He did not dare to say the thing he hoped. Then came a pause. Suddenly
I knew by the sound of his feet that he was striding towards that
pallor. I followed him with a beating heart.
XVI POINTS OF VIEW
The light grew stronger as we advanced. In a little time it was nearly
as strong as the phosphorescence on Cavor’s legs. Our tunnel was
expanding into a cavern, and this new light was at the farther end of
it. I perceived something that set my hopes leaping and bounding.
“Cavor,” I said, “it comes from above! I am certain it comes from
above!”
He made no answer, but hurried on.
Indisputably it was a grey light; a silvery light.
In another moment we were beneath it. It filtered down through a chink
in the walls of the cavern, and as I stared up, drip, came a drop of
water upon my face. I started and stood aside--drip, fell another drop
quite audibly on the rocky floor.
“Cavor,” I said, “if one of us lifts the other, he can reach that
crack!”
“I’ll lift you,” he said, and incontinently hoisted me as though I was
a baby.
I thrust an arm into the crack, and just at my finger tips found a
little ledge by which I could hold. I could see the white light was
very much brighter now. I pulled myself up by two fingers with scarcely
an effort, though on earth I weigh twelve stone, reached to a still
higher corner of rock, and so got my feet on the narrow ledge. I stood
up and searched up the rocks with my fingers; the cleft broadened out
upwardly. “It’s climbable,” I said to Cavor. “Can you jump up to my
hand if I hold it down to you?”
I wedged myself between the sides of the cleft, rested knee and foot on
the ledge, and extended a hand. I could not see Cavor, but I could hear
the rustle of his movements as he crouched to spring. Then whack and he
was hanging to my arm--and no heavier than a kitten! I lugged him up
until he had a hand on my ledge, and could release me.
“Confound it!” I said, “any one could be a mountaineer on the moon;”
and so set myself in earnest to the climbing. For a few minutes I
clambered steadily, and then I looked up again. The cleft opened out
steadily, and the light was brighter. Only----
It was not daylight after all!
In another moment I could see what it was, and at the sight I could
have beaten my head against the rocks with disappointment. For I
beheld simply an irregularly sloping open space, and all over its
slanting floor stood a forest of little club-shaped fungi, each shining
gloriously with that pinkish silvery light. For a moment I stared at
their soft radiance, then sprang forward and upward among them. I
plucked up half-a-dozen and flung them against the rocks, and then sat
down, laughing bitterly, as Cavor’s ruddy face came into view.
“It’s phosphorescence again!” I said. “No need to hurry. Sit down and
make yourself at home.” And as he spluttered over our disappointment, I
began to lob more of these growths into the cleft.
“I thought it was daylight,” he said.
“Daylight!” cried I. “Daybreak, sunset, clouds, and windy skies! Shall
we ever see such things again?”
As I spoke, a little picture of our world seemed to rise before me,
bright and little and clear, like the background of some old Italian
picture. “The sky that changes, and the sea that changes, and the hills
and the green trees and the towns and cities shining in the sun. Think
of a wet roof at sunset, Cavor! Think of the windows of a westward
house!”
He made no answer.
“Here we are burrowing in this beastly world that isn’t a world, with
its inky ocean hidden in some abominable blackness below, and outside
that torrid day and that death stillness of night. And all those things
that are chasing us now, beastly men of leather--insect men, that come
out of a nightmare! After all, they’re right! What business have we
here smashing them and disturbing their world? For all we know the
whole planet is up and after us already. In a minute we may hear them
whimpering, and their gongs going. What are we to do? Where are we to
go? Here we are as comfortable as snakes from Jamrach’s loose in a
Surbiton villa!”
“It was your fault,” said Cavor.
“My fault!” I shouted. “Good Lord!”
“I had an idea!”
“Curse your ideas!”
“If we had refused to budge----”
“Under these goads?”
“Yes. They would have carried us!”
“Over that bridge?”
“Yes. They must have carried us from outside.”
“I’d rather be carried by a fly across a ceiling.”
“Good Heavens!”
I resumed my destruction of the fungi. Then suddenly I saw something
that struck me even then.
“Cavor,” I said, “these chains are of gold!”
He was thinking intently, with his hands gripping his cheeks. He turned
his head slowly and stared at me, and when I had repeated my words, at
the twisted chain about his right hand. “So they are,” he said, “so
they are.” His face lost its transitory interest even as he looked. He
hesitated for a moment, then went on with his interrupted meditation.
I sat for a space puzzling over the fact that I had only just observed
this, until I considered the blue light in which we had been, and which
had taken all the colour out of the metal. And from that discovery I
also started upon a train of thought that carried me wide and far. I
forgot that I had just been asking what business we had in the moon.
Gold----
It was Cavor who spoke first. “It seems to me that there are two
courses open to us.”
“Well?”
“Either we can attempt to make our way--fight our way if
necessary--out to the exterior again, and then hunt for our sphere
until we find it, or the cold of the night comes to kill us, or
else----”
He paused. “Yes?” I said, though I knew what was coming.
“We might attempt once more to establish some sort of understanding
with the minds of the people in the moon.”
“So far as I’m concerned--it’s the first.”
“I doubt.”
“I don’t.”
“You see,” said Cavor, “I do not think we can judge the Selenites by
what we have seen of them. Their central world, their civilised world
will be far below in the profounder caverns about their sea. This
region of the crust in which we are is an outlying district, a pastoral
region. At any rate, that is my interpretation. These Selenites we
have seen may be only the equivalent of cowboys and engine tenders.
Their use of goads--in all probability mooncalf goads--the lack of
imagination they show in expecting us to be able to do just what they
can do, their indisputable brutality, all seem to point to something of
that sort. But if we endured----”
“Neither of us could endure a six-inch plank across the bottomless pit
for very long.”
“No,” said Cavor; “but then----”
“I _won’t_,” I said.
He discovered a new line of possibilities. “Well, suppose we got
ourselves into some corner, where we could defend ourselves against
these hinds and labourers. If, for example, we could hold out for a
week or so, it is probable that the news of our appearance would filter
down to the more intelligent and populous parts----”
“If they exist.”
“They must exist, or whence came those tremendous machines?”
“That’s possible, but it’s the worst of the two chances.”
“We might write up inscriptions on walls----”
“How do we know their eyes would see the sort of marks we made?”
“If we cut them----”
“That’s possible, of course.”
I took up a new thread of thought. “After all,” I said, “I suppose you
don’t think these Selenites so infinitely wiser than men.”
“They must know a lot more--or at least a lot of different things.”
“Yes, but--” I hesitated.
“I think you’ll quite admit, Cavor, that you’re rather an exceptional
man.”
“How?”
“Well, you--you’re a rather lonely man--have been, that is. You haven’t
married.”
“Never wanted to. But why----?”
“And you never grew richer than you happened to be?”
“Never wanted that either.”
“You’ve just rooted after knowledge?”
“Well, a certain curiosity is natural----”
“You think so. That’s just it. You think every other mind wants to
_know_. I remember once, when I asked you why you conducted all
these researches, you said you wanted your F.R.S., and to have the
stuff called Cavorite, and things like that. You know perfectly well
you didn’t do it for that; but at the time my question took you by
surprise, and you felt you ought to have something to look like a
motive. Really you conducted researches because you _had_ to. It’s your
twist.”
“Perhaps it is----”
“It isn’t one man in a million has that twist. Most men want--well,
various things, but very few want knowledge for its own sake. _I_
don’t, I know perfectly well. Now, these Selenites seem to be a
driving, busy sort of being, but how do you know that even the most
intelligent will take an interest in us or our world? I don’t believe
they’ll even know we have a world. They never come out at night--they’d
freeze if they did. They’ve probably never seen any heavenly body at
all except the blazing sun. How are they to know there _is_ another
world? What does it matter to them if they do? Well, even if they
_have_ had a glimpse of a few stars, or even of the earth crescent,
what of that? Why should people living _inside_ a planet trouble to
observe that sort of thing? Men wouldn’t have done it except for the
seasons and sailing; why should the moon people?...
“Well, suppose there are a few philosophers like yourself. They are
just the very Selenites who’ll never hear of our existence. Suppose a
Selenite had dropped on the earth when you were at Lympne, you’d have
been the last man in the world to hear he had come. You never read
a newspaper! You see the chances against you. Well, it’s for these
chances we’re sitting here doing nothing while precious time is flying.
I tell you we’ve got into a fix. We’ve come unarmed, we’ve lost our
sphere, we’ve got no food, we’ve shown ourselves to the Selenites,
and made them think we’re strange, strong, dangerous animals; and
unless these Selenites are perfect fools, they’ll set about now and
hunt us till they find us, and when they find us they’ll try and take
us if they can, and kill us if they can’t, and that’s the end of
the matter. If they take us, they’ll probably kill us, through some
misunderstanding. After we’re done for, they may discuss us perhaps,
but we shan’t get much fun out of that.”
“Go on.”
“On the other hand, here’s gold knocking about like cast iron at home.
If only we can get some of it back, if only we can find our sphere
again before they do, and get back, then----”
“Yes?”
“We might put the thing on a sounder footing. Come back in a bigger
sphere with guns.”
“Good Lord!” cried Cavor, as though that was horrible.
I shied another luminous fungus down the cleft.
“Look here, Cavor,” I said, “I’ve half the voting power anyhow in this
affair, and this is a case for a practical man. I’m a practical man,
and you are not. I’m not going to trust to Selenites and geometrical
diagrams again, if I can help it.... That’s all. Get back. Drop all
this secrecy--or most of it. And come again.”
He reflected. “When I came to the moon,” he said, “I ought to have come
alone.”
“The question before the meeting,” I said, “is how to get back to the
sphere.”
For a time we nursed our knees in silence. Then he seemed to decide for
my reasons.
“I think,” he said, “one can get data. It is clear that while the
sun is on this side of the moon the air will be blowing through this
planet sponge from the dark side hither. On this side, at any rate,
the air will be expanding and flowing out of the moon caverns into the
craters.... Very well, there’s a draught here.”
“So there is.”
“And that means that this is not a dead end; somewhere behind us this
cleft goes on and up. The draught is blowing up, and that is the way we
have to go. If we try and get up any sort of chimney or gully there is,
we shall not only get out of these passages where they are hunting for
us----”
“But suppose the gully is too narrow?”
“We’ll come down again.”
“Ssh!” I said suddenly; “what’s that?”
We listened. At first it was an indistinct murmur, and then one picked
out the clang of a gong. “They must think we are mooncalves,” said I,
“to be frightened at that.”
“They’re coming along that passage,” said Cavor.
“They must be.”
“They’ll not think of the cleft. They’ll go past.”
I listened again for a space. “This time,” I whispered, “they’re likely
to have some sort of weapon.”
Then suddenly I sprang to my feet. “Good heavens, Cavor!” I cried.
“But they _will_! They’ll see the fungi I have been pitching down.
They’ll----!”
I didn’t finish my sentence. I turned about and made a leap over
the fungus tops towards the upper end of the cavity. I saw that the
space turned upward and became a draughty cleft again, ascending to
impenetrable darkness. I was about to clamber up into this, and then
with a happy inspiration turned back.
“What are you doing?” asked Cavor.
“Go on!” said I, and went back and got two of the shining fungi, and
putting one into the breast pocket of my flannel jacket, so that it
stuck out to light our climbing, went back with the other for Cavor.
The noise of the Selenites was now so loud that it seemed they must be
already beneath the cleft. But it might be they would have difficulty
in clambering into it, or might hesitate to ascend it against our
possible resistance. At any rate, we had now the comforting knowledge
of the enormous muscular superiority our birth in another planet gave
us. In another minute I was clambering with gigantic vigour after
Cavor’s blue-lit heels.
XVII THE FIGHT IN THE CAVE OF THE MOON BUTCHERS
I do not know how far we clambered before we came to the grating. It
may be we ascended only a few hundred feet, but at the time it seemed
to me we might have hauled and jammed and hopped and wedged ourselves
through a mile or more of vertical ascent. Whenever I recall that time,
there comes into my head the heavy clank of our golden chains that
followed every movement. Very soon my knuckles and knees were raw, and
I had a bruise on one cheek. After a time the first violence of our
efforts diminished, and our movements became more deliberate and less
painful. The noise of the pursuing Selenites had died away altogether.
It seemed almost as though they had not traced us up the crack after
all, in spite of the tell-tale heap of broken fungi that must have
lain beneath it. At times the cleft narrowed so much that we could
scarce squeeze up it; at others it expanded into great drusy cavities,
studded with prickly crystals, or thickly beset with dull, shining
fungoid pimples. Sometimes it twisted spirally, and at other times
slanted down nearly to the horizontal direction. Ever and again there
was the intermittent drip and trickle of water by us. Once or twice it
seemed to us that small living things had rustled out of our reach, but
what they were we never saw. They may have been venomous beasts for all
I know, but they did us no harm, and we were now tuned to a pitch when
a weird creeping thing more or less mattered little. And at last, far
above, came the familiar bluish light again, and then we saw that it
filtered through a grating that barred our way.
We whispered as we pointed this out to one another, and became more and
more cautious in our ascent. Presently we were close under the grating,
and by pressing my face against its bars I could see a limited portion
of the cavern beyond. It was clearly a large space, and lit no doubt
by some rivulet of the same blue light that we had seen flow from the
beating machinery. An intermittent trickle of water dropped ever and
again between the bars near my face.
My first endeavour was naturally to see what might be upon the floor
of the cavern, but our grating lay in a depression whose rim hid all
this from our eyes. Our foiled attention then fell back upon the
suggestion of the various sounds we heard, and presently my eye caught
a number of faint shadows that played across the dim roof far overhead.
Indisputably there were several Selenites, perhaps a considerable
number, in this space, for we could hear the noises of their
intercourse, and faint sounds that I identified as their footfalls.
There was also a succession of regularly repeated sounds--chid, chid,
chid--which began and ceased, suggestive of a knife or spade hacking at
some soft substance. Then came a clank as if of chains, a whistle and a
rumble as of a truck running over a hollowed place, and then again that
chid, chid, chid resumed. The shadows told of shapes that moved quickly
and rhythmically, in agreement with that regular sound, and rested when
it ceased.
We put our heads close together, and began to discuss these things in
noiseless whispers.
“They are occupied,” I said, “they are occupied in some way.”
“Yes.”
“They’re not seeking us, or thinking of us.”
“Perhaps they have not heard of us.”
“Those others are hunting about below. If suddenly we appeared here----”
We looked at one another.
“There might be a chance to parley,” said Cavor.
“No,” I said. “Not as we are.”
For a space we remained, each occupied by his own thoughts.
Chid, chid, chid went the chopping, and the shadows moved to and fro.
I looked at the grating. “It’s flimsy,” I said. “We might bend two of
the bars and crawl through.”
We wasted a little time in vague discussion. Then I took one of the
bars in both hands, and got my feet up against the rock until they
were almost on a level with my head, and so thrust against the bar.
It bent so suddenly that I almost slipped. I clambered about and bent
the adjacent bar in the opposite direction, and then took the luminous
fungus from my pocket and dropped it down the fissure.
“Don’t do anything hastily,” whispered Cavor, as I twisted myself up
through the opening I had enlarged. I had a glimpse of busy figures as
I came through the grating, and immediately bent down, so that the rim
of the depression in which the grating lay hid me from their eyes, and
so lay flat, signalling advice to Cavor as he also prepared to come
through. Presently we were side by side in the depression, peering over
the edge at the cavern and its occupants.
It was a much larger cavern than we had supposed from our first glimpse
of it, and we looked up from the lowest portion of its sloping floor.
It widened out as it receded from us, and its roof came down and hid
the remoter portion altogether. And lying in a line along its length,
vanishing at last far away in that tremendous perspective, were a
number of huge shapes, huge pallid hulls, upon which the Selenites were
busy. At first they seemed big white cylinders of vague import. Then
I noted the heads upon them lying towards us, eyeless and skinless
like the heads of sheep at a butcher’s, and perceived they were the
carcasses of mooncalves being cut up, much as the crew of a whaler
might cut up a moored whale. They were cutting off the flesh in strips,
and on some of the farther trunks the white ribs were showing. It was
the sound of their hatchets that made that chid, chid. Some way away a
thing like a trolley cable, drawn and loaded with chunks of lax meat,
was running up the slope of the cavern floor. This enormous long avenue
of hulls that were destined to be food, gave us a sense of the vast
populousness of the moon world second only to the effect of our first
glimpse down the shaft.
It seemed to me at first that the Selenites must be standing on
trestle-supported planks,[2] and then I saw that the planks and
supports and their hatchets were really of the same leaden hue as my
fetters had seemed before white light came to bear on them. A number
of very thick-looking crowbars lay about the floor, and had apparently
assisted to turn the dead mooncalf over on its side. They were perhaps
six feet long, with shaped handles, very tempting-looking weapons. The
whole place was lit by three transverse streams of the blue fluid.
We lay for a long time noting all these things in silence. “Well?” said
Cavor at last.
I crouched lower and turned to him. I had come upon a brilliant idea.
“Unless they lowered those bodies by a crane,” I said, “we must be
nearer the surface than I thought.”
“Why?”
“The mooncalf doesn’t hop, and it hasn’t got wings.”
He peered over the edge of the hollow again. “I wonder now ...” he
began. “After all, we have never gone far from the surface----”
I stopped him by a grip on his arm. I had heard a noise from the cleft
below us!
We twisted ourselves about, and lay as still as death, with every sense
alert. In a little while I did not doubt that something was quietly
ascending the cleft. Very slowly and quite noiselessly I assured myself
of a good grip on my chain, and waited for that something to appear.
“Just look at those chaps with the hatchets again,” I said.
“They’re all right,” said Cavor.
I took a sort of provisional aim at the gap in the grating. I could
hear now quite distinctly the soft twittering of the ascending
Selenites, the dab of their hands against the rock, and the falling of
dust from their grips as they clambered.
Then I could see that there was something moving dimly in the blackness
below the grating, but what it might be I could not distinguish. The
whole thing seemed to hang fire just for a moment--then smash! I had
sprung to my feet, struck savagely at something that had flashed out
at me. It was the keen point of a spear. I have thought since that its
length in the narrowness of the cleft must have prevented its being
sloped to reach me. Anyhow, it shot out from the grating like the
tongue of a snake, and missed and flew back and flashed again. But the
second time I snatched and caught it, and wrenched it away, but not
before another had darted ineffectually at me.
I shouted with triumph as I felt the hold of the Selenite resist my
pull for a moment and give, and then I was jabbing down through the
bars, amidst squeals from the darkness, and Cavor had snapped off the
other spear, and was leaping and flourishing it beside me, and making
inefficient jabs. Clang, clang, came up through the grating, and then
an axe hurtled through the air and whacked against the rocks beyond, to
remind me of the fleshers at the carcasses up the cavern.
I turned, and they were all coming towards us in open order waving
their axes. They were short, thick, little beggars, with long arms,
strikingly different from the ones we had seen before. If they had
not heard of us before, they must have realised the situation with
incredible swiftness. I stared at them for a moment, spear in hand.
“Guard that grating, Cavor,” I cried, howled to intimidate them, and
rushed to meet them. Two of them missed with their hatchets, and the
rest fled incontinently. Then the two also were sprinting away up the
cavern, with hands clenched and heads down. I never saw men run like
them!
I knew the spear I had was no good for me. It was thin and flimsy,
only effectual for a thrust, and too long for a quick recover. So I
only chased the Selenites as far as the first carcass, and stopped
there and picked up one of the crowbars that were lying about. It felt
comfortingly heavy, and equal to smashing any number of Selenites.
I threw away my spear, and picked up a second crowbar for the other
hand. I felt five times better than I had with the spear. I shook the
two threateningly at the Selenites, who had come to a halt in a little
crowd far away up the cavern, and then turned about to look at Cavor.
He was leaping from side to side of the grating, making threatening
jabs with his broken spear. That was all right. It would keep the
Selenites down--for a time at any rate. I looked up the cavern again.
What on earth were we going to do now?
We were cornered in a sort of way already. But these butchers up the
cavern had been surprised, they were probably scared, and they had no
special weapons, only those little hatchets of theirs. And that way lay
escape. Their sturdy little forms--ever so much shorter and thicker
than the mooncalf herds--were scattered up the slope in a way that was
eloquent of indecision. I had the moral advantage of a mad bull in a
street. But for all that, there seemed a tremendous crowd of them.
Very probably there was. Those Selenites down the cleft had certainly
some infernally long spears. It might be they had other surprises for
us.... But, confound it! if we charged up the cave we should let them
up behind us, and if we didn’t, those little brutes up the cave would
probably get reinforced. Heaven alone knew what tremendous engines of
warfare--guns, bombs, terrestrial torpedoes--this unknown world below
our feet, this vaster world of which we had only pricked the outer
cuticle, might not presently send up to our destruction. It became
clear the only thing to do was to charge! It became clearer as the
legs of a number of fresh Selenites appeared running down the cavern
towards us.
“Bedford!” cried Cavor, and behold! he was half-way between me and the
grating.
“Go back!” I cried. “What are you doing----”
“They’ve got--it’s like a gun!”
And struggling in the grating between those defensive spears appeared
the head and shoulders of a singularly lean and angular Selenite,
bearing some complicated apparatus.
I realised Cavor’s utter incapacity for the fight we had in hand. For
a moment I hesitated. Then I rushed past him whirling my crowbars, and
shouting to confound the aim of the Selenite. He was aiming in the
queerest way with the thing against his stomach. “_Chuzz!_” The thing
wasn’t a gun; it went off like a cross-bow more, and dropped me in the
middle of a leap.
I didn’t fall down, I simply came down a little shorter than I should
have done if I hadn’t been hit, and from the feel of my shoulder the
thing might have tapped me and glanced off. Then my left hand hit
against the shaft, and I perceived there was a sort of spear sticking
half through my shoulder. The moment after I got home with the
crowbar in my right hand, and hit the Selenite fair and square. He
collapsed--he crushed and crumpled--his head smashed like an egg.
I dropped a crowbar, pulled the spear out of my shoulder, and began to
jab it down the grating into the darkness. At each jab came a shriek
and twitter. Finally I hurled the spear down upon them with all my
strength, leapt up, picked up the crowbar again, and started for the
multitude up the cavern.
“Bedford!” cried Cavor. “Bedford!” as I flew past him.
I seem to remember his footsteps coming on behind me.
Step, leap ... whack, step, leap.... Each leap seemed to last ages.
With each, the cave opened out and the number of Selenites visible
increased. At first they seemed all running about like ants in a
disturbed ant-hill, one or two waving hatchets and coming to meet me,
more running away, some bolting sideways into the avenue of carcasses,
then presently others came in sight carrying spears, and then others. I
saw a most extraordinary thing, all hands and feet, bolting for cover.
The cavern grew darker farther up. Flick! something flew over my head.
Flick! As I soared in mid-stride I saw a spear hit and quiver in one
of the carcasses to my left. Then, as I came down, one hit the ground
before me, and I heard the remote chuzz! with which their things were
fired. Flick, flick! for a moment it was a shower. They were volleying!
I stopped dead.
I don’t think I thought clearly then. I seem to remember a kind of
stereotyped phrase running through my mind: “Zone of fire, seek cover!”
I know I made a dash for the space between two of the carcasses, and
stood there panting and feeling very wicked.
I looked round for Cavor, and for a moment it seemed as if he had
vanished from the world. Then he came out of the darkness between the
row of the carcasses and the rocky wall of the cavern. I saw his little
face, dark and blue, and shining with perspiration and emotion.
He was saying something, but what it was I did not heed. I had realised
that we might work from mooncalf to mooncalf up the cave until we were
near enough to charge home. It was charge or nothing. “Come on!” I
said, and led the way.
“Bedford!” he cried unavailingly.
My mind was busy as we went up that narrow alley between the dead
bodies and the wall of the cavern. The rocks curved about--they could
not enfilade us. Though in that narrow space we could not leap, yet
with our earth-born strength we were still able to go very much faster
than the Selenites. I reckoned we should presently come right among
them. Once we were on them, they would be nearly as formidable as black
beetles. Only!--there would first of all be a volley. I thought of a
stratagem. I whipped off my flannel jacket as I ran.
“Bedford!” panted Cavor behind me.
I glanced back. “What?” said I.
He was pointing upward over the carcasses. “White light!” he said.
“White light again!”
I looked, and it was even so, a faint white ghost of twilight in the
remoter cavern roof. That seemed to give me double strength.
“Keep close,” I said. A flat, long Selenite dashed out of the darkness,
and squealed and fled. I halted, and stopped Cavor with my hand. I
hung my jacket over my crowbar, ducked round the next carcass, dropped
jacket and crowbar, showed myself, and darted back.
“Chuzz--flick,” just one arrow came. We were close on the Selenites,
and they were standing in a crowd, broad, short, and tall together,
with a little battery of their shooting implements pointing down the
cave. Three or four other arrows followed the first, and then their
fire ceased.
I stuck out my head, and escaped by a hair’s-breadth. This time I drew
a dozen shots or more, and heard the Selenites shouting and twittering
as if with excitement as they shot. I picked up jacket and crowbar
again.
“_Now!_” said I, and thrust out the jacket.
“Chuzz-zz-zz-zz! Chuzz!” In an instant my jacket had grown a thick
beard of arrows, and they were quivering all over the carcass behind
us. Instantly I slipped the crowbar out of the jacket, dropped the
jacket--for all I know to the contrary it is lying up there in the moon
now--and rushed out upon them.
For a minute perhaps it was massacre. I was too fierce to discriminate,
and the Selenites were probably too scared to fight. At any rate they
made no sort of fight against me. I saw scarlet, as the saying is. I
remember I seemed to be wading among those leathery, thin things as a
man wades through tall grass, mowing and hitting, first right, then
left; smash, smash. Little drops of moisture flew about. I trod on
things that crushed and piped and went slippery. The crowd seemed to
open and close and flow like water. They seemed to have no combined
plan whatever. There were spears flew about me, I was grazed over the
ear by one. I was stabbed once in the arm and once in the cheek, but I
only found that out afterwards, when the blood had had time to run and
cool and feel wet.
What Cavor did I do not know. For a space it seemed that this fighting
had lasted for an age, and must needs go on for ever. Then suddenly it
was all over, and there was nothing to be seen but the backs of heads
bobbing up and down as their owners ran in all directions ... I seemed
altogether unhurt. I ran forward some paces, shouting, then turned
about. I was amazed.
I had come right through them in vast flying strides, they were all
behind me, and running hither and thither to hide.
I felt an enormous astonishment at the evaporation of the great fight
into which I had hurled myself, and not a little of exultation. It did
not seem to me that I had discovered the Selenites were unexpectedly
flimsy, but that I was unexpectedly strong. I laughed stupidly. This
fantastic moon!
I glanced for a moment at the smashed and writhing bodies that were
scattered over the cavern floor, with a vague idea of further violence,
then hurried on after Cavor.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] I do not remember seeing any wooden things on the moon; doors,
tables, everything corresponding to our terrestrial joinery was made of
metal, and I believe for the most part of gold, which as a metal would,
of course, naturally recommend itself--other things being equal--on
account of the ease in working it, and its toughness and durability.
XVIII IN THE SUNLIGHT
Presently we saw that the cavern before us opened on a hazy void. In
another moment we had emerged upon a sort of slanting gallery, that
projected into a vast circular space, a huge cylindrical pit running
vertically up and down. Round this pit the slanting gallery ran without
any parapet or protection for a turn and a half, and then plunged
high above into the rock again. Somehow it reminded me then of one
of those spiral turns of the railway through the Saint Gothard. It
was all tremendously huge. I can scarcely hope to convey to you the
Titanic proportion of all that place, the Titanic effect of it. Our
eyes followed up the vast declivity of the pit wall, and overhead and
far above we beheld a round opening set with faint stars, and half of
the lip about it well-nigh blinding with the white light of the sun. At
that we cried aloud simultaneously.
“Come on!” I said, leading the way.
“But there?” said Cavor, and very carefully stepped nearer the edge
of the gallery. I followed his example, and craned forward and looked
down, but I was dazzled by that gleam of light above, and I could see
only a bottomless darkness with spectral patches of crimson and purple
floating therein. Yet if I could not see, I could hear. Out of this
darkness came a sound, a sound like the angry hum one can hear if one
puts one’s ear outside a hive of bees, a sound out of that enormous
hollow, it may be, four miles beneath our feet....
For a moment I listened, then tightened my grip on my crowbar, and led
the way up the gallery.
“This must be the shaft we looked down upon,” said Cavor. “Under that
lid.”
“And below there, is where we saw the lights.”
“The lights!” said he. “Yes--the lights of the world that now we shall
never see.”
“We’ll come back,” I said, for now we had escaped so much I was rashly
sanguine that we should recover the sphere.
His answer I did not catch.
“Eh?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” he answered, and we hurried on in silence.
I suppose that slanting lateral way was four or five miles long,
allowing for its curvature, and it ascended at a slope that would
have made it almost impossibly steep on earth, but which one strode
up easily under lunar conditions. We saw only two Selenites during
all that portion of our flight, and directly they became aware of us
they ran headlong. It was clear that the knowledge of our strength and
violence had reached them. Our way to the exterior was unexpectedly
plain. The spiral gallery straightened into a steeply ascendent tunnel,
its floor bearing abundant traces of the mooncalves, and so straight
and short in proportion to its vast arch, that no part of it was
absolutely dark. Almost immediately it began to lighten, and then far
off and high up, and quite blindingly brilliant, appeared its opening
on the exterior, a slope of Alpine steepness surmounted by a crest of
bayonet shrub, tall and broken down now, and dry and dead, in spiky
silhouette against the sun.
And it is strange that we men, to whom this very vegetation had seemed
so weird and horrible a little time ago, should now behold it with the
emotion a home-coming exile might feel at sight of his native land. We
welcomed even the rareness of the air that made us pant as we ran,
and which rendered speaking no longer the easy thing that it had been,
but an effort to make oneself heard. Larger grew the sunlit circle
above us, and larger, and all the nearer tunnel sank into a rim of
indistinguishable black. We saw the dead bayonet shrub no longer with
any touch of green in it, but brown and dry and thick, and the shadow
of its upper branches high out of sight made a densely interlaced
pattern upon the tumbled rocks. And at the immediate mouth of the
tunnel was a wide trampled space where the mooncalves had come and gone.
We came out upon this space at last into a light and heat that hit and
pressed upon us. We traversed the exposed area painfully, and clambered
up a slope among the scrub stems, and sat down at last panting in a
high place beneath the shadow of a mass of twisted lava. Even in the
shade the rock felt hot.
The air was intensely hot, and we were in great physical discomfort,
but for all that we were no longer in a nightmare. We seemed to have
come to our own province again, beneath the stars. All the fear and
stress of our flight through the dim passages and fissures below
had fallen from us. That last fight had filled us with an enormous
confidence in ourselves so far as the Selenites were concerned. We
looked back almost incredulously at the black opening from which we
had just emerged. Down there it was, in a blue glow that now in our
memories seemed the next thing to absolute darkness, we had met with
things like mad mockeries of men, helmet-headed creatures, and had
walked in fear before them, and had submitted to them until we could
submit no longer. And, behold, they had smashed like wax and scattered
like chaff, and fled and vanished like the creatures of a dream!
I rubbed my eyes, doubting whether we had not slept and dreamt these
things by reason of the fungus we had eaten, and suddenly discovered
the blood upon my face, and then that my shirt was sticking painfully
to my shoulder and arm.
“Confound it!” I said, gauging my injuries with an investigatory hand,
and suddenly that distant tunnel mouth became, as it were, a watching
eye.
“Cavor!” I said; “what are they going to do now? And what are we going
to do?”
He shook his head, with his eyes fixed upon the tunnel. “How can one
tell what they will do?”
“It depends on what they think of us, and I don’t see how we can begin
to guess that. And it depends upon what they have in reserve. It’s as
you say, Cavor, we have touched the merest outside of this world. They
may have all sorts of things inside here. Even with those shooting
things they might make it bad for us....
“Yet after all,” I said, “even if we _don’t_ find the sphere at once,
there is a chance for us. We might hold out. Even through the night. We
might go down there again and make a fight for it.”
I stared about me with speculative eyes. The character of the scenery
had altered altogether by reason of the enormous growth and subsequent
drying of the scrub. The crest on which we sat was high, and commanded
a wide prospect of the crater landscape, and we saw it now all sere
and dry in the late autumn of the lunar afternoon. Rising one behind
the other were long slopes and fields of trampled brown where the
mooncalves had pastured, and far away in the full blaze of the sun
a drove of them basked slumberously, scattered shapes, each with a
blot of shadow against it like sheep on the side of a down. But never
a sign of a Selenite was to be seen. Whether they had fled on our
emergence from the interior passages, or whether they were accustomed
to retire after driving out the mooncalves, I cannot guess. At the time
I believed the former was the case.
“If we were to set fire to all this stuff,” I said, “we might find the
sphere among the ashes.”
Cavor did not seem to hear me. He was peering under his hand at the
stars, that still, in spite of the intense sunlight, were abundantly
visible in the sky. “How long do you think we have been here?” he asked
at last.
“Been where?”
“On the moon.”
“Two earthly days, perhaps.”
“More nearly ten. Do you know, the sun is past its zenith, and sinking
in the west. In four days’ time or less it will be night.”
“But--we’ve only eaten once!”
“I know that. And--But there are the stars!”
“But why should time seem different because we are on a smaller planet?”
“I don’t know. There it is!”
“How does one tell time?”
“Hunger--fatigue--all those things are different. Everything is
different--everything. To me it seems that since first we came out of
the sphere has been only a question of hours--long hours--at most.”
“Ten days,” I said; “that leaves--” I looked up at the sun for a
moment, and then saw that it was half-way from the zenith to the
western edge of things. “Four days!... Cavor, we mustn’t sit here and
dream. How do you think we may begin?”
I stood up. “We must get a fixed point we can recognise--we might hoist
a flag, or a handkerchief, or something--and quarter the ground, and
work round that.”
He stood up beside me.
“Yes,” he said, “there is nothing for it but to hunt the sphere.
Nothing. We may find it--certainly we may find it. And if not----”
“We must keep on looking.”
He looked this way and that, glanced up at the sky and down at the
tunnel, and astonished me by a sudden gesture of impatience. “Oh! but
we have done foolishly! To have come to this pass! Think how it might
have been, and the things we might have done!”
“We may do something yet.”
“Never the thing we might have done. Here below our feet is a world.
Think of what that world must be! Think of that machine we saw, and
the lid and the shaft! They were just remote outlying things, and those
creatures we have seen and fought with no more than ignorant peasants,
dwellers in the outskirts, yokels and labourers half akin to brutes.
Down below! Caverns beneath caverns, tunnels, structures, ways....
It must open out, and be greater and wider and more populous as one
descends. Assuredly. Right down at last to the central sea that washes
round the core of the moon. Think of its inky waters under the spare
lights--if, indeed, their eyes _need_ lights! Think of the cascading
tributaries pouring down their channels to feed it! Think of the tides
upon its surface, and the rush and swirl of its ebb and flow! Perhaps
they have ships that go upon it, perhaps down there are mighty cities
and swarming ways, and wisdom and order passing the wit of man. And we
may die here upon it, and never see the masters who _must_ be--ruling
over these things! We may freeze and die here, and the air will freeze
and thaw upon us, and then--! Then they will come upon us, come on our
stiff and silent bodies, and find the sphere we cannot find, and they
will understand at last too late all the thought and effort that ended
here in vain!”
His voice for all that speech sounded like the voice of some one heard
in a telephone, weak and far away.
“But the darkness,” I said.
“One might get over that.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. How am I to know? One might carry a torch, one might
have a lamp--The others--might understand.”
He stood for a moment with his hands held down and a rueful face,
staring out over the waste that defied him. Then with a gesture of
renunciation he turned towards me with proposals for the systematic
hunting of the sphere.
“We can return,” I said.
He looked about him. “First of all we shall have to get to earth.”
“We could bring back lamps to carry and climbing irons, and a hundred
necessary things.”
“Yes,” he said.
“We can take back an earnest of success in this gold.”
He looked at my golden crowbars, and said nothing for a space. He stood
with his hands clasped behind his back, staring across the crater. At
last he sighed and spoke. “It was _I_ found the way here, but to find
a way isn’t always to be master of a way. If I take my secret back to
earth, what will happen? I do not see how I can keep my secret for a
year, for even a part of a year. Sooner or later it must come out,
even if other men rediscover it. And then.... Governments and powers
will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another, and
against these moon people; it will only spread warfare and multiply
the occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while, if I
tell my secret, this planet to its deepest galleries will be strewn
with human dead. Other things are doubtful, but that is certain....
It is not as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the
moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a
battle-ground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is,
and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far
more than he can do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons
for fools to use. It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for
himself again--in a thousand years’ time.”
“There are methods of secrecy,” I said.
He looked up at me and smiled. “After all,” he said, “why should one
worry? There is little chance of our finding the sphere, and down
below things are brewing. It’s simply the human habit of hoping till
we die that makes us think of return. Our troubles are only beginning.
We have shown these moon folk violence, we have given them a taste of
our quality, and our chances are about as good as a tiger’s that has
got loose and killed a man in Hyde Park. The news of us must be running
down from gallery to gallery, down towards the central parts.... No
sane beings will ever let us take that sphere back to earth after so
much as they have seen of us.”
“We aren’t improving our chances,” said I, “by sitting here.”
We stood up side by side.
“After all,” he said, “we must separate. We must stick up a
handkerchief on these tall spikes here and fasten it firmly, and from
this as a centre we must work over the crater. You must go westward,
moving out in semicircles to and fro towards the setting sun. You must
move first with your shadow on your right until it is at right angles
with the direction of your handkerchief, and then with your shadow on
your left. And I will do the same to the east. We will look into every
gully, examine every skerry of rocks; we will do all we can to find my
sphere. If we see Selenites we will hide from them as well as we can.
For drink we must take snow, and if we feel the need of food, we must
kill a mooncalf if we can, and eat such flesh as it has--raw--and so
each will go his own way.”
“And if one of us comes upon the sphere?”
“He must come back to the white handkerchief, and stand by it and
signal to the other.”
“And if neither----?”
Cavor glanced up at the sun. “We go on seeking until the night and cold
overtake us.”
“Suppose the Selenites have found the sphere and hidden it?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Or if presently they come hunting us?”
He made no answer.
“You had better take a club,” I said.
He shook his head, and stared away from me across the waste.
But for a moment he did not start. He looked round at me shyly,
hesitated. “_Au revoir_,” he said.
I felt an odd stab of emotion. A sense of how we had galled each other,
and particularly how I must have galled him, came to me. “Confound
it,” thought I, “we might have done better!” I was on the point of
asking him to shake hands--for that, somehow, was how I felt just
then--when he put his feet together and leapt away from me towards the
north. He seemed to drift through the air as a dead leaf would do, fell
lightly, and leapt again. I stood for a moment watching him, then faced
westward reluctantly, pulled myself together, and with something of the
feeling of a man who leaps into icy water, selected a leaping point,
and plunged forward to explore my solitary half of the moon world. I
dropped rather clumsily among rocks, stood up and looked about me,
clambered on to a rocky slab, and leapt again....
When presently I looked for Cavor he was hidden from my eyes, but the
handkerchief showed out bravely on its headland, white in the blaze of
the sun.
I determined not to lose sight of that handkerchief whatever might
betide.
XIX MR. BEDFORD ALONE
In a little while it seemed to me as though I had always been alone on
the moon. I hunted for a time with a certain intentness, but the heat
was still very great, and the thinness of the air felt like a hoop
about one’s chest. I came presently into a hollow basin bristling with
tall, brown, dry fronds about its edge, and I sat down under these to
rest and cool. I intended to rest for only a little while. I put down
my clubs beside me, and sat resting my chin on my hands. I saw with a
sort of colourless interest that the rocks of the basin, where here and
there the crackling dry lichens had shrunk away to show them, were all
veined and splattered with gold, that here and there bosses of rounded
and wrinkled gold projected from among the litter. What did that matter
now? A sort of languor had possession of my limbs and mind, I did not
believe for a moment that we should ever find the sphere in that vast
desiccated wilderness. I seemed to lack a motive for effort until the
Selenites should come. Then I supposed I should exert myself, obeying
that unreasonable imperative that urges a man before all things to
preserve and defend his life, albeit he may preserve it only to die
more painfully in a little while.
Why had we come to the moon?
The thing presented itself to me as a perplexing problem. What is
this spirit in man that urges him for ever to depart from happiness
and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, to risk even a
reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon
as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply
to go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Almost
any man, if you put the thing to him, not in words, but in the shape of
opportunities, will show that he knows as much. Against his interest,
against his happiness, he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable
things. Some force not himself impels him, and go he must. But why?
Why? Sitting there in the midst of that useless moon gold, amidst the
things of another world, I took count of all my life. Assuming I was to
die a castaway upon the moon, I failed altogether to see what purpose
I had served. I got no light on that point, but at any rate it was
clearer to me than it had ever been in my life before that I was not
serving my own purpose, that all my life I had in truth never served
the purposes of my private life. Whose purposes, what purposes, was I
serving?... I ceased to speculate on why we had come to the moon, and
took a wider sweep. Why had I come to the earth? Why had I a private
life at all?... I lost myself at last in bottomless speculations....
My thoughts became vague and cloudy, no longer leading in definite
directions. I had not felt heavy or weary--I cannot imagine one doing
so upon the moon--but I suppose I was greatly fatigued. At any rate I
slept.
Slumbering there rested me greatly, I think, and the sun was setting
and the violence of the heat abating, through all the time I slumbered.
When at last I was roused from my slumbers by a remote clamour, I felt
active and capable again. I rubbed my eyes and stretched my arms. I
rose to my feet--I was a little stiff--and at once prepared to resume
my search. I shouldered my golden clubs, one on each shoulder, and went
on out of the ravine of the gold-veined rocks.
The sun was certainly lower, much lower than it had been; the air was
very much cooler. I perceived I must have slept some time. It seemed to
me that a faint touch of misty blueness hung about the western cliff.
I leapt to a little boss of rock and surveyed the crater. I could see
no signs of mooncalves or Selenites, nor could I see Cavor, but I could
see my handkerchief afar off, spread out on its thicket of thorns.
I looked about me, and then leapt forward to the next convenient
view-point.
I beat my way round in a semicircle, and back again in a still remoter
crescent. It was very fatiguing and hopeless. The air was really very
much cooler, and it seemed to me that the shadow under the westward
cliff was growing broad. Ever and again I stopped and reconnoitred, but
there was no sign of Cavor, no sign of Selenites; and it seemed to me
the mooncalves must have been driven into the interior again--I could
see none of them. I became more and more desirous of seeing Cavor.
The winged outline of the sun had sunk now, until it was scarcely the
distance of its diameter from the rim of the sky. I was oppressed
by the idea that the Selenites would presently close their lids and
valves, and shut us out under the inexorable onrush of the lunar night.
It seemed to me high time that he abandoned his search, and that we
took counsel together. I felt how urgent it was that we should decide
soon upon our course. We had failed to find the sphere, we no longer
had time to seek it, and once these valves were closed with us outside,
we were lost men. The great night of space would descend upon us--that
blackness of the void which is the only absolute death. All my being
shrank from that approach. We must get into the moon again, though we
were slain in doing it. I was haunted by a vision of our freezing to
death, of our hammering with our last strength on the valve of the
great pit.
I took no thought any more of the sphere. I thought only of finding
Cavor again. I was half inclined to go back into the moon without him,
rather than seek him until it was too late. I was already half-way back
towards our handkerchief, when suddenly--
I saw the sphere!
I did not find it so much as it found me. It was lying much further
to the westward than I had gone, and the sloping rays of the sinking
sun reflected from its glass had suddenly proclaimed its presence in a
dazzling beam. For an instant I thought this was some new device of
the Selenites against us, and then I understood.
I threw up my arms, shouted a ghostly shout, and set off in vast leaps
towards it. I missed one of my leaps and dropped into a deep ravine and
twisted my ankle, and after that I stumbled at almost every leap. I
was in a state of hysterical agitation, trembling violently, and quite
breathless long before I got to it. Three times at least I had to stop
with my hands resting on my side, and spite of the thin dryness of the
air, the perspiration was wet upon my face.
I thought of nothing but the sphere until I reached it, I forgot even
my trouble of Cavor’s whereabouts. My last leap flung me with my hands
hard against its glass; then I lay against it panting, and trying
vainly to shout, “Cavor! here is the sphere!” When I had recovered a
little I peered through the thick glass, and the things inside seemed
tumbled. I stooped to peer closer. Then I attempted to get in. I had
to hoist it over a little to get my head through the manhole. The
screw stopper was inside, and I could see now that nothing had been
touched, nothing had suffered. It lay there as we had left it when we
had dropped out amidst the snow. For a time I was wholly occupied in
making and remaking this inventory. I found I was trembling violently.
It was good to see that familiar dark interior again! I cannot tell
you how good. Presently I crept inside and sat down among the things.
I looked through the glass at the moon world and shivered. I placed my
gold clubs upon the bale, and sought out and took a little food; not so
much because I wanted it, but because it was there. Then it occurred to
me that it was time to go out and signal for Cavor. But I did not go
out and signal for Cavor forthwith. Something held me to the sphere.
After all, everything was coming right. There would be still time for
us to get more of the magic stone that gives one mastery over men. Away
there, close handy, was gold for the picking up; and the sphere would
travel as well half full of gold as though it were empty. We could go
back now, masters of ourselves and our world, and then----
I roused myself at last, and with an effort got myself out of the
sphere. I shivered as I emerged, for the evening air was growing very
cold. I stood in the hollow staring about me. I scrutinised the bushes
round me very carefully before I leapt to the rocky shelf hard by, and
took once more what had been my first leap in the moon. But now I made
it with no effort whatever.
The growth and decay of the vegetation had gone on apace, and the whole
aspect of the rocks had changed, but still it was possible to make out
the slope on which the seeds had germinated, and the rocky mass from
which we had taken our first view of the crater. But the spiky shrub
on the slope stood brown and sere now, and thirty feet high, and cast
long shadows that stretched out of sight, and the little seeds that
clustered in its upper branches were brown and ripe. Its work was done,
and it was brittle and ready to fall and crumple under the freezing
air, so soon as the nightfall came. And the huge cacti, that had
swollen as we watched them, had long since burst and scattered their
spores to the four quarters of the moon. Amazing little corner in the
universe--the landing-place of men!
Some day, thought I, I will have an inscription standing there right
in the midst of the hollow. It came to me, if only this teeming world
within knew of the full import of the moment, how furious its tumult
would become!
But as yet it could scarcely be dreaming of the significance of our
coming. For if it did, the crater would surely be an uproar of
pursuit, instead of as still as death! I looked about for some place
from which I might signal to Cavor, and saw that same patch of rock to
which he had leapt from my present standpoint, still bare and barren in
the sun. For a moment I hesitated at going so far from the sphere. Then
with a pang of shame at that hesitation, I leapt....
From this vantage point I surveyed the crater again. Far away at the
top of the enormous shadow I cast was the little white handkerchief
fluttering on the bushes. It was very little and very far, and Cavor
was not in sight. It seemed to me that by this time he ought to be
looking for me. That was the agreement. But he was nowhere to be seen.
I stood waiting and watching, hands shading my eyes, expecting every
moment to distinguish him. Very probably I stood there for quite a long
time. I tried to shout, and was reminded of the thinness of the air.
I made an undecided step back towards the sphere. But a lurking dread
of the Selenites made me hesitate to signal my whereabouts by hoisting
one of our sleeping-blankets on to the adjacent scrub. I searched the
crater again.
It had an effect of emptiness that chilled me. And it was still! Any
sound from the Selenites in the world beneath, even had died away. It
was as still as death. Save for the faint stir of the shrub about me in
the little breeze that was rising, there was no sound nor shadow of a
sound. And the breeze blew chill.
Confound Cavor!
I took a deep breath. I put my hands to the sides of my mouth. “Cavor!”
I bawled, and the sound was like some manikin shouting far away.
I looked at the handkerchief, I looked behind me at the broadening
shadow of the westward cliff, I looked under my hand at the sun. It
seemed to me that almost visibly it was creeping down the sky.
I felt I must act instantly if I was to save Cavor. I whipped off my
vest and flung it as a mark on the sere bayonets of the shrubs behind
me, and then set off in a straight line towards the handkerchief.
Perhaps it was a couple of miles away--a matter of a few hundred leaps
and strides. I have already told how one seemed to hang through those
lunar leaps. In each suspense I sought Cavor, and marvelled why he
should be hidden. In each leap I could feel the sun setting behind me.
Each time I touched the ground I was tempted to go back.
A last leap and I was in the depression below our handkerchief, a
stride, and I stood on our former vantage point within arm’s reach
of it. I stood up straight and scanned the world about me, between
its lengthening bars of shadow. Far away, down a long declivity, was
the opening of the tunnel up which we had fled, and my shadow reached
towards it, stretched towards it, and touched it, like a finger of the
night.
Not a sign of Cavor, not a sound in all the stillness, only that the
stir and waving of the scrub and of the shadows increased. And suddenly
and violently I shivered. “Cav--” I began, and realised once more the
uselessness of the human voice in that thin air.
Silence. The silence of death.
Then it was my eye caught something--a little thing, lying perhaps
fifty yards away down the slope, amidst a litter of bent and broken
branches. What was it? I knew, and yet for some reason I would not know.
I went nearer to it. It was the little cricket-cap Cavor had worn. I
did not touch it, I stood looking at it.
I saw then that the scattered branches about it had been forcibly
smashed and trampled. I hesitated, stepped forward and picked it up.
I stood with Cavor’s cap in my hand, staring at the trampled reeds and
thorns about me. On some of them were little smears of something dark,
something that I dared not touch. A dozen yards away, perhaps, the
rising breeze dragged something into view, something small and vividly
white.
It was a little piece of paper crumpled tightly, as though it had been
clutched tightly. I picked it up, and on it were smears of red. My eye
caught faint pencil marks. I smoothed it out, and saw uneven and broken
writing ending at last in a crooked streak upon the paper.
I set myself to decipher this.
“I have been injured about the knee, I think my kneecap is hurt, and I
cannot run or crawl,” it began--pretty distinctly written.
Then less legibly: “They have been chasing me for some time, and it is
only a question of”--the word “time” seemed to have been written here
and erased in favour of something illegible--“before they get me. They
are beating all about me.”
Then the writing became convulsive. “I can hear them,” I guessed the
tracing meant, and then it was quite unreadable for a space. Then came
a little string of words that were quite distinct: “a different sort
of Selenite altogether, who appears to be directing the--” The writing
became a mere hasty confusion again.
“They have larger brain cases--much larger, and slenderer bodies, and
very short legs. They make gentle noises, and move with organised
deliberation....
“And though I am wounded and helpless here, their appearance still
gives me hope--” That was like Cavor. “They have not shot at me or
attempted ... injury. I intend----”
Then came the sudden streak of the pencil across the paper, and on the
back and edges--blood!
And as I stood there stupid and perplexed, with this dumbfounding relic
in my hand, something very soft and light and chill touched my hand
for a moment and ceased to be, and then a thing, a little white speck,
drifted athwart a shadow. It was a tiny snowflake, the first snowflake,
the herald of the night.
I looked up with a start, and the sky had darkened now almost to
blackness, and was thick with a gathering multitude of coldly watchful
stars. I looked eastward, and the light of that shrivelled world was
touched with a sombre bronze; westward, and the sun, robbed now by a
thickening white mist of half its heat and splendour, was touching the
crater rim, was sinking out of sight, and all the shrubs and jagged and
tumbled rocks stood out against it in a bristling disorder of black
shapes. Into the great lake of darkness westward, a vast wreath of mist
was sinking. A cold wind set all the crater shivering. Suddenly, for
a moment, I was in a puff of falling snow, and all the world about me
grey and dim.
And then it was I heard, not loud and penetrating as at first, but
faint and dim like a dying voice, that tolling, that same tolling that
had welcomed the coming of the day: Boom!... Boom!... Boom!...
It echoed about the crater, it seemed to throb with the throbbing of
the greater stars, the blood-red crescent of the sun’s disk sank as it
tolled out: Boom!... Boom!... Boom!
What had happened to Cavor? All through that tolling I stood there
stupidly, and at last the tolling ceased.
And suddenly the open mouth of the tunnel down below there, shut like
an eye and vanished out of sight.
Then indeed was I alone.
Over me, around me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the
Eternal; that which was before the beginning, and that which triumphs
over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being
is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold,
the stillness, the silence--the infinite and final Night of space.
The sense of solitude and desolation became the sense of an
overwhelming presence that stooped towards me, that almost touched me.
“No,” I cried. “_No!_ Not yet! not yet! Wait! Wait! Oh wait!” My voice
went up to a shriek. I flung the crumpled paper from me, scrambled back
to the crest to take my bearings, and then, with all the will that was
in me, leapt out towards the mark I had left, dim and distant now in
the very margin of the shadow.
Leap, leap, leap, and each leap was seven ages.
Before me the pale serpent-girdled section of the sun sank and sank,
and the advancing shadow swept to seize the sphere before I could reach
it. I was two miles away, a hundred leaps or more, and the air about
me was thinning out as it thins under an air-pump, and the cold was
gripping at my joints. But had I died, I should have died leaping.
Once, and then again my foot slipped on the gathering snow as I leapt
and shortened my leap; once I fell short into bushes that crashed and
smashed into dusty chips and nothingness, and once I stumbled as I
dropped, and rolled head over heels into a gully, and rose bruised and
bleeding and confused as to my direction.
But such incidents were as nothing to the intervals, those awful pauses
when one drifted through the air towards that pouring tide of night.
My breathing made a piping noise, and it was as though knives were
whirling in my lungs. My heart seemed to beat against the top of my
brain. “Shall I reach it? O Heaven! shall I reach it?”
My whole being became anguish.
“Lie down!” screamed my pain and despair; “lie down!”
The nearer I struggled, the more awfully remote it seemed. I was numb,
I stumbled, I bruised and cut myself and did not bleed.
[Illustration: “The nearer I struggled, the more awfully remote it
seemed”]
It was in sight.
I fell on all fours, and my lungs whooped.
I crawled. The frost gathered on my lips, icicles hung from my
moustache, I was white with the freezing atmosphere.
I was a dozen yards from it. My eyes had become dim. “Lie down!”
screamed despair; “lie down!”
I touched it, and halted. “Too late!” screamed despair; “lie down!”
I fought stiffly with it. I was on the manhole lip, a stupefied,
half-dead being. The snow was all about me. I pulled myself in. There
lurked within a little warmer air.
The snowflakes--the airflakes--danced in about me, as I tried with
chilling hands to thrust the valve in and spun it tight and hard. I
sobbed. “I will,” I chattered in my teeth. And then, with fingers that
quivered and felt brittle, I turned to the shutter studs.
As I fumbled with the switches--for I had never controlled them
before--I could see dimly through the steaming glass the blazing red
streamers of the sinking sun, dancing and flickering through the
snowstorm, and the black forms of the scrub thickening and bending
and breaking beneath the accumulating snow. Thicker whirled the snow
and thicker, black against the light. What if even now the switches
overcame me?
Then something clicked under my hands, and in an instant that last
vision of the moon world was hidden from my eyes. I was in the silence
and darkness of the inter-planetary sphere.
XX MR. BEDFORD IN INFINITE SPACE
It was almost as though I had been killed. Indeed, I could imagine a
man suddenly and violently killed would feel very much as I did. One
moment, a passion of agonising existence and fear; the next, darkness
and stillness, neither light nor life nor sun, moon nor stars, the
blank infinite. Although the thing was done by my own act, although
I had already tasted this very effect in Cavor’s company, I felt
astonished, dumbfounded, and overwhelmed. I seemed to be borne upward
into an enormous darkness. My fingers floated off the studs, I hung
as if I were annihilated, and at last very softly and gently I came
against the bale and the golden chain, and the crowbars that had
drifted to the middle of the sphere.
I do not know how long that drifting took. In the sphere of course,
even more than on the moon, one’s earthly time sense was ineffectual.
At the touch of the bale it was as if I had awakened from a dreamless
sleep. I immediately perceived that if I wanted to keep awake and
alive I must get a light or open a window, so as to get a grip of
something with my eyes. And besides I was cold. I kicked off from
the bale, therefore, clawed on to the thin cords within the glass,
crawled along until I got to the manhole rim, and so got my bearings
for the light and blind studs, took a shove off, and flying once round
the bale, and getting a scare from something big and flimsy that was
drifting loose, I got my hand on the cord quite close to the studs, and
reached them. I lit the little lamp first of all to see what it was I
had collided with, and discovered that old copy of _Lloyd’s News_ had
slipped its moorings, and was adrift in the void. That brought me out
of the infinite to my own proper dimensions again. It made me laugh and
pant for a time, and suggested the idea of a little oxygen from one
of the cylinders. After that I lit the heater until I felt warm, and
then I took food. Then I set to work in a very gingerly fashion on the
Cavorite blinds, to see if I could guess by any means how the sphere
was travelling.
The first blind I opened I shut at once, and hung for a time flattened
and blinded by the sunlight that had hit me. After thinking a little
I started upon the windows at right angles to this one, and got the
huge crescent moon and the little crescent earth behind it, the second
time. I was amazed to find how far I was from the moon. I had reckoned
that not only should I have little or none of the “kick-off” that the
earth’s atmosphere had given us at our start, but that the tangential
“fly off” of the moon’s spin would be at least twenty-eight times less
than the earth’s. I had expected to discover myself hanging over our
crater, and on the edge of the night, but all that was now only a part
of the outline of the white crescent that filled the sky. And Cavor----?
He was already infinitesimal.
I tried to imagine what could have happened to him. But at that time I
could think of nothing but death. I seemed to see him, bent and smashed
at the foot of some interminably high cascade of blue. And all about
him the stupid insects stared....
Under the inspiring touch of the drifting newspaper I became practical
again for a while. It was quite clear to me that what I had to do was
to get back to earth, but as far as I could see I was drifting away
from it. Whatever had happened to Cavor, even if he was still alive,
which seemed to me incredible after that blood-stained scrap, I was
powerless to help him. There he was, living or dead behind the mantle
of that rayless night, and there he must remain at least until I could
summon our fellow-men to his assistance. Should I do that? Something of
the sort I had in my mind; to come back to earth if it were possible,
and then as maturer consideration might determine, either to show and
explain the sphere to a few discreet persons, and act with them, or
else to keep my secret, sell my gold, obtain weapons, provisions, and
an assistant, and return with these advantages to deal on equal terms
with the flimsy people of the moon, to rescue Cavor, if that were still
possible, and at any rate to procure a sufficient supply of gold to
place my subsequent proceedings on a firmer basis. But that was hoping
far, I had first to get back.
I set myself to decide just exactly how the return to earth could be
contrived. As I struggled with that problem I ceased to worry about
what I should do when I got there. At last my only care was to get back.
I puzzled out at last that my best chance would be to drop back towards
the moon as near as I dared in order to gather velocity, then to shut
my windows and fly behind it, and when I was past to open my earthward
windows, and so get off at a good pace homeward. But whether I should
ever reach the earth by that device, or whether I might not simply
find myself spinning about it in some hyperbolic or parabolic curve
or other, I could not tell. Later I had a happy inspiration, and by
opening certain windows to the moon, which had appeared in the sky in
front of the earth, I turned my course aside so as to head off the
earth, which it had become evident to me I must pass behind without
some such expedient. I did a very great deal of complicated thinking
over these problems--for I am no mathematician--and in the end I am
certain it was much more my good luck than my reasoning that enabled
me to hit the earth. Had I known then, as I know now, the mathematical
chances there were against me, I doubt if I should have troubled even
to touch the studs to make any attempt. And having puzzled out what I
considered to be the thing to do, I opened all my moonward windows, and
squatted down--the effort lifted me for a time some feet or so into the
air, and I hung there in the oddest way--and waited for the crescent to
get bigger and bigger until I felt I was near enough for safety. Then I
would shut the windows, fly past the moon with the velocity I had got
from it--if I did not smash upon it--and so go on towards the earth.
And that is what I did.
At last I felt my moonward start was sufficient. I shut out the sight
of the moon from my eyes, and in a state of mind that was, I now
recall, incredibly free from anxiety or any distressful quality, I sat
down to begin a vigil in that little speck of matter in infinite space
that would last until I should strike the earth. The heater had made
the sphere tolerably warm, the air had been refreshed by the oxygen,
and except for that faint congestion of the head that was always with
me while I was away from earth, I felt entire physical comfort. I had
extinguished the light again, lest it should fail me in the end; I was
in darkness, save for the earthshine and the glitter of the stars below
me. Everything was so absolutely silent and still that I might indeed
have been the only being in the universe, and yet, strangely enough, I
had no more feeling of loneliness or fear than if I had been lying in
bed on earth. Now, this seems all the stranger to me, since during my
last hours in that crater of the moon, the sense of my utter loneliness
had been an agony....
Incredible as it will seem, this interval of time that I spent in
space has no sort of proportion to any other interval of time in
my life. Sometimes it seemed as though I sat through immeasurable
eternities like some god upon a lotus leaf, and again as though there
was a momentary pause as I leapt from moon to earth. In truth, it was
altogether some weeks of earthly time. But I had done with care and
anxiety, hunger or fear, for that space. I floated, thinking with a
strange breadth and freedom of all that we had undergone, and of all my
life and motives, and the secret issues of my being. I seemed to myself
to have grown greater and greater, to have lost all sense of movement;
to be floating amidst the stars, and always the sense of earth’s
littleness and the infinite littleness of my life upon it, was implicit
in my thoughts.
I can’t profess to explain the things that happened in my mind. No
doubt they could all be traced directly or indirectly to the curious
physical conditions under which I was living. I set them down here just
for what they are worth, and without any comment. The most prominent
quality of it was a pervading doubt of my own identity. I became, if I
may so express it, dissociate from Bedford; I looked down on Bedford
as a trivial, incidental thing with which I chanced to be connected.
I saw Bedford in many relations--as an ass or as a poor beast, where I
had hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a very
spirited or rather forcible person. I saw him not only as an ass, but
as the son of many generations of asses. I reviewed his school-days
and his early manhood, and his first encounter with love, very much as
one might review the proceedings of an ant in the sand.... Something
of that period of lucidity I regret still hangs about me, and I doubt
if I shall ever recover the full-bodied self-satisfaction of my early
days. But at the time the thing was not in the least painful, because I
had that extraordinary persuasion that, as a matter of fact, I was no
more Bedford than I was any one else, but only a mind floating in the
still serenity of space. Why should I be disturbed about this Bedford’s
shortcomings? I was not responsible for him or them.
For a time I struggled against this really very grotesque delusion.
I tried to summon the memory of vivid moments, of tender or intense
emotions to my assistance; I felt that if I could recall one genuine
twinge of feeling the growing severance would be stopped. But I could
not do it. I saw Bedford rushing down Chancery Lane, hat on the
back of his head, coat tails flying out, _en route_ for his public
examination. I saw him dodging and bumping against, and even saluting,
other similar little creatures in that swarming gutter of people. Me?
I saw Bedford that same evening in the sitting-room of a certain lady,
and his hat was on the table beside him, and it wanted brushing badly,
and he was in tears. Me? I saw him with that lady in various attitudes
and emotions--I never felt so detached before.... I saw him hurrying
off to Lympne to write a play, and accosting Cavor, and in his shirt
sleeves working at the sphere, and walking out to Canterbury because he
was afraid to come! Me? I did not believe it.
I still reasoned that all this was hallucination due to my solitude,
and the fact that I had lost all weight and sense of resistance. I
endeavoured to recover that sense by banging myself about the sphere,
by pinching my hands and clasping them together. Among other things I
lit the light, captured that torn copy of _Lloyd’s_, and read those
convincingly realistic advertisements again about the Cutaway bicycle,
and the gentleman of private means, and the lady in distress who was
selling those “forks and spoons.” There was no doubt they existed
surely enough, and, said I, “This is your world, and you are Bedford,
and you are going back to live among things like that for all the rest
of your life.” But the doubts within me could still argue: “It is not
you that is reading, it is Bedford, but you are not Bedford, you know.
That’s just where the mistake comes in.”
“Confound it!” I cried; “and if I am not Bedford, what am I?”
But in that direction no light was forthcoming, though the strangest
fancies came drifting into my brain, queer remote suspicions, like
shadows seen from far away.... Do you know, I had a sort of idea that
really I was something quite outside not only the world, but all
worlds, and out of space and time, and that this poor Bedford was just
a peephole through which I looked at life?...
Bedford! However I disavowed him, there I was most certainly bound up
with him, and I knew that wherever or whatever I might be, I must needs
feel the stress of his desires, and sympathise with all his joys and
sorrows until his life should end. And with the dying of Bedford--what
then?...
Enough of this remarkable phase of my experiences! I tell it here
simply to show how one’s isolation and departure from this planet
touched not only the functions and feeling of every organ of the
body, but indeed also the very fabric of the mind, with strange and
unanticipated disturbances. All through the major portion of that vast
space journey I hung thinking of such immaterial things as these, hung
dissociated and apathetic, a cloudy megalo-maniac, as it were, amidst
the stars and planets in the void of space; and not only the world to
which I was returning, but the blue-lit caverns of the Selenites, their
helmet faces, their gigantic and wonderful machines, and the fate of
Cavor, dragged helpless into that world, seemed infinitely minute and
altogether trivial things to me.
Until at last I began to feel the pull of the earth upon my being,
drawing me back again to the life that is real for men. And then,
indeed, it grew clearer and clearer to me that I was quite certainly
Bedford after all, and returning after amazing adventures to this world
of ours, and with a life that I was very likely to lose in this return.
I set myself to puzzle out the conditions under which I must fall to
earth.
XXI MR. BEDFORD AT LITTLESTONE
My line of flight was about parallel with the surface as I came into
the upper air. The temperature of the sphere began to rise forthwith.
I knew it behoved me to drop at once. Far below me, in a darkling
twilight, stretched a great expanse of sea. I opened every window I
could, and fell--out of sunshine into evening, and out of evening into
night. Vaster grew the earth and vaster, swallowing up the stars, and
the silvery translucent starlit veil of cloud it wore spread out to
catch me. At last the world seemed no longer a sphere but flat, and
then concave. It was no longer a planet in the sky, but the world of
Man. I shut all but an inch or so of earthward window, and dropped with
a slackening velocity. The broadening water, now so near that I could
see the dark glitter of the waves, rushed up to meet me. The sphere
became very hot. I snapped the last strip of window, and sat scowling
and biting my knuckles, waiting for the impact....
The sphere hit the water with a huge splash: it must have sent it
fathoms high. At the splash I flung the Cavorite shutters open. Down
I went, but slower and slower, and then I felt the sphere pressing
against my feet, and so drove up again as a bubble drives. And at the
last I was floating and rocking upon the surface of the sea, and my
journey in space was at an end.
The night was dark and overcast. Two yellow pin-points far away showed
the passing of a ship, and nearer was a red glare that came and went.
Had not the electricity of my glow-lamp exhausted itself, I could have
got picked up that night. In spite of the inordinate fatigue I was
beginning to feel, I was excited now, and for a time hopeful, in a
feverish, impatient way, that so my travelling might end.
But at last I ceased to move about, and sat, wrists on knees, staring
at a distant red light. It swayed up and down, rocking, rocking. My
excitement passed. I realised I had yet to spend another night at least
in the sphere. I perceived myself infinitely heavy and fatigued. And so
I fell asleep.
A change in my rhythmic motion awakened me. I peered through the
refracting glass, and saw that I had come aground upon a huge shallow
of sand. Far away I seemed to see houses and trees, and seaward a
curved, vague distortion of a ship hung between sea and sky.
I stood up and staggered. My one desire was to emerge. The manhole was
upward, and I wrestled with the screw. Slowly I opened the manhole. At
last the air was singing in again as once it had sung out. But this
time I did not wait until the pressure was adjusted. In another moment
I had the weight of the window on my hands, and I was open, wide open,
to the old familiar sky of earth.
The air hit me on the chest so that I gasped. I dropped the glass
screw. I cried out, put my hands to my chest, and sat down. For a time
I was in pain. Then I took deep breaths. At last I could rise and move
about again.
I tried to thrust my head through the manhole, and the sphere rolled
over. It was as though something had lugged my head down directly it
emerged. I ducked back sharply, or I should have been pinned face under
water. After some wriggling and shoving I managed to crawl out upon
sand, over which the retreating waves still came and went.
I did not attempt to stand up. It seemed to me that my body must be
suddenly changed to lead. Mother Earth had her grip on me now--no
Cavorite intervening. I sat down heedless of the water that came over
my feet.
It was dawn, a grey dawn, rather overcast, but showing here and there a
long patch of greenish grey. Some way out a ship was lying at anchor,
a pale silhouette of a ship with one yellow light. The water came
rippling in in long shallow waves. Away to the right curved the land,
a shingle bank with little hovels, and at last a lighthouse, a sailing
mark and a point. Inland stretched a space of level sand, broken here
and there by pools of water, and ending a mile away perhaps in a low
shore of scrub. To the north-east some isolated watering-place was
visible, a row of gaunt lodging-houses, the tallest things that I could
see on earth, dull dabs against the brightening sky. What strange men
can have reared these vertical piles in such an amplitude of space I do
not know. There they are, like pieces of Brighton lost in the waste.
For a long time I sat there, yawning and rubbing my face. At last I
struggled to rise. It made me feel that I was lifting a weight. I stood
up.
I stared at the distant houses. For the first time since our
starvation in the crater I thought of earthly food. “Bacon,” I
whispered, “eggs. Good toast and good coffee.... And how the devil am I
going to get all this stuff to Lympne?” I wondered where I was. It was
an east shore anyhow, and I had seen Europe before I dropped.
I heard footsteps scrunching in the sand, and a little round-faced,
friendly-looking man in flannels, with a bathing towel wrapped about
his shoulders, and his bathing dress over his arm, appeared up the
beach. I knew instantly that I must be in England. He was staring
almost intently at the sphere and me. He advanced staring. I daresay I
looked a ferocious savage enough--dirty, unkempt, to an indescribable
degree; but it did not occur to me at the time. He stopped at a
distance of twenty yards. “Hul-lo, my man!” he said doubtfully.
“Hullo yourself!” said I.
He advanced, reassured by that. “What on earth is that thing?” he asked.
“Can you tell me where I am?” I asked.
“That’s Littlestone,” he said, pointing to the houses; “and that’s
Dungeness! Have you just landed? What’s that thing you’ve got? Some
sort of machine?”
“Yes.”
“Have you floated ashore? Have you been wrecked or something? What is
it?”
I meditated swiftly. I made an estimate of the little man’s appearance
as he drew nearer. “By Jove!” he said, “you’ve had a time of it! I
thought you--Well--Where were you cast away? Is that thing a sort of
floating thing for saving life?”
I decided to take that line for the present. I made a few vague
affirmatives. “I want help,” I said hoarsely. “I want to get some stuff
up the beach--stuff I can’t very well leave about.” I became aware of
three other pleasant-looking young men with towels, blazers, and straw
hats, coming down the sands towards me. Evidently the early bathing
section of this Littlestone!
“Help!” said the young man; “rather!” He became vaguely active. “What
particularly do you want done?” He turned round and gesticulated. The
three young men accelerated their pace. In a minute they were about me,
plying me with questions I was indisposed to answer. “I’ll tell all
that later,” I said. “I’m dead beat. I’m a rag.”
“Come up to the hotel,” said the foremost little man. “We’ll look after
that thing there.”
I hesitated. “I can’t,” I said. “In that sphere there’s two big bars of
gold.”
They looked incredulously at one another, then at me with a new
inquiry. I went to the sphere, stooped, crept in, and presently they
had the Selenites’ crowbars and the broken chain before them. If I had
not been so horribly fagged I could have laughed at them. It was like
kittens round a beetle. They didn’t know what to do with the stuff. The
fat little man stooped and lifted the end of one of the bars, and then
dropped it with a grunt. Then they all did.
“It’s lead, or gold!” said one.
“Oh, it’s _gold_!” said another.
“Gold, right enough,” said the third.
Then they all stared at me, and then they all stared at the ship lying
at anchor.
“I say!” cried the little man. “But where did you get that?”
I was too tired to keep up a lie. “I got it in the moon.”
I saw them stare at one another.
“Look here!” said I, “I’m not going to argue now. Help me carry these
lumps of gold up to the hotel--I guess, with rests, two of you can
manage one, and I’ll trail this chain thing--and I’ll tell you more
when I’ve had some food.”
“And how about that thing?”
“It won’t hurt there,” I said. “Anyhow--confound it!--it must stop
there now. If the tide comes up, it will float all right.”
And in a state of enormous wonderment, these young men most obediently
hoisted my treasures on their shoulders, and with limbs that felt like
lead I headed a sort of procession towards that distant fragment of
“sea-front.” Half-way there we were reinforced by two awe-stricken
little girls with spades, and later a lean little boy, with a
penetrating sniff, appeared. He was, I remember, wheeling a bicycle,
and he accompanied us at a distance of about a hundred yards on our
right flank, and then, I suppose, gave us up as uninteresting, mounted
his bicycle, and rode off over the level sands in the direction of the
sphere.
I glanced back after him.
“_He_ won’t touch it,” said the stout young man reassuringly, and I was
only too willing to be reassured.
At first something of the grey of the morning was in my mind, but
presently the sun disengaged itself from the level clouds of the
horizon and lit the world, and turned the leaden sea to glittering
waters. My spirits rose. A sense of the vast importance of the things
I had done and had yet to do came with the sunlight into my mind. I
laughed aloud as the foremost man staggered under my gold. When indeed
I took my place in the world, how amazed the world would be!
If it had not been for my inordinate fatigue, the landlord of the
Littlestone hotel would have been amusing, as he hesitated between
my gold and my respectable company on the one hand, and my filthy
appearance on the other. But at last I found myself in a terrestrial
bathroom once more with warm water to wash myself with, and a change of
raiment, preposterously small indeed, but anyhow clean, that the genial
little man had lent me. He lent me a razor too, but I could not screw
up my resolution to attack even the outposts of the bristling beard
that covered my face.
I sat down to an English breakfast and ate with a sort of languid
appetite--an appetite many weeks old, and very decrepit--and stirred
myself to answer the questions of the four young men. And I told them
the truth.
“Well,” said I, “as you press me--I got it in the moon.”
“The moon?”
“Yes, the moon in the sky.”
“But how do you mean?”
“What I say, confound it!”
“That you have just come from the moon?”
“Exactly! through space--in that ball.” And I took a delicious mouthful
of egg. I made a private note that when I went back to the moon I would
take a box of eggs.
I could see clearly that they did not believe one word of what I told
them, but evidently they considered me the most respectable liar they
had ever met. They glanced at one another, and then concentrated the
fire of their eyes on me. I fancy they expected a clue to me in the
way I helped myself to salt. They seemed to find something significant
in my peppering my egg. These strangely shaped masses of gold they
had staggered under held their minds. There the lumps lay in front of
me, each worth thousands of pounds, and as impossible for any one to
steal as a house or a piece of land. As I looked at their curious faces
over my coffee-cup, I realised something of the enormous wilderness
of explanations into which I should have to wander to render myself
comprehensible again.
“You don’t _really_ mean--” began the youngest young man, in the tone
of one who speaks to an obstinate child.
“Just pass me that toast-rack,” I said, and shut him up completely.
“But look here, I say,” began one of the others. “We’re not going to
believe that, you know.”
“Ah, well,” said I, and shrugged my shoulders.
“He doesn’t want to tell us,” said the youngest young man in a stage
aside; and then, with an appearance of great _sang-froid_, “You don’t
mind if I take a cigarette?”
I waved him a cordial assent, and proceeded with my breakfast. Two
of the others went and looked out of the farther window and talked
inaudibly. I was struck by a thought. “The tide,” I said, “is running
out?”
There was a pause, a doubt who should answer me. “It’s near the ebb,”
said the fat little man.
“Well, anyhow,” I said, “it won’t float far.”
I decapitated my third egg, and began a little speech. “Look here,”
I said. “Please don’t imagine I’m surly or telling you uncivil lies,
or anything of that sort. I’m forced almost, to be a little short and
mysterious. I can quite understand this is as queer as it can be, and
that your imaginations must be going it. I can assure you, you’re
in at a memorable time. But I can’t make it clear to you now--it’s
impossible. I give you my word of honour I’ve come from the moon, and
that’s all I can tell you.... All the same I’m tremendously obliged to
you, you know, tremendously. I hope that my manner hasn’t in any way
given you offence.”
“Oh, not in the least!” said the youngest young man affably. “We can
quite understand,” and staring hard at me all the time, he heeled
his chair back until it very nearly upset, and recovered with some
exertion. “Not a bit of it,” said the fat young man. “Don’t you imagine
_that_!” and they all got up and dispersed, and walked about and lit
cigarettes, and generally tried to show they were perfectly amiable and
disengaged, and entirely free from the slightest curiosity about me
and the sphere. “I’m going to keep an eye on that ship out there all
the same,” I heard one of them remarking in an undertone. If only they
could have forced themselves to it, they would, I believe, even have
gone out and left me. I went on with my third egg.
“The weather,” the fat little man remarked presently, “has been
immense, has it not? I don’t know _when_ we have had such a summer....”
Phoo--whizz! Like a tremendous rocket!
And somewhere a window was broken....
“What’s that?” said I.
“It isn’t--?” cried the little man, and rushed to the corner window.
All the others rushed to the window likewise. I sat staring at them.
Suddenly I leapt up, knocked over my third egg, and rushed for the
window also. I had just thought of something. “Nothing to be seen
there,” cried the little man, rushing for the door.
“It’s that boy!” I cried, bawling in hoarse fury; “it’s that accursed
boy!” and turning about I pushed the waiter aside--he was just bringing
me some more toast--and rushed violently out of the room and down and
out upon the queer little esplanade in front of the hotel.
The sea, which had been smooth, was rough now with hurrying cat’s-paws,
and all about where the sphere had been was tumbled water like the
wake of a ship. Above, a little puff of cloud whirled like dispersing
smoke, and the three or four people on the beach were staring up with
interrogative faces towards the point of that unexpected report. And
that was all! Boots and waiter and the four young men in blazers came
rushing out behind me. Shouts came from windows and doors, and all
sorts of worrying people came into sight--agape.
For a time I stood there, too overwhelmed by this new development to
think of the people.
At first I was too stunned to see the thing as any definite disaster--I
was just stunned, as a man is by some accidental violent blow. It is
only afterwards he begins to appreciate his specific injury.
“Good Lord!”
I felt as though somebody was pouring funk out of a can down the back
of my neck. My legs became feeble. I had got the first intimation of
what the disaster meant for me. There was that confounded boy--sky
high! I was utterly “left.” There was the gold in the coffee-room--my
only possession on earth. How would it all work out? The general effect
was of a gigantic unmanageable confusion.
“I say,” said the voice of the little man behind. “I _say_, you know.”
I wheeled about, and there were twenty or thirty people, a sort
of irregular investment of people, all bombarding me with dumb
interrogation, with infinite doubt and suspicion. I felt the compulsion
of their eyes intolerably. I groaned aloud.
“I _can’t_!” I shouted. “I tell you I can’t! I’m not equal to it! You
must puzzle and--and be damned to you!”
I gesticulated convulsively. He receded a step as though I had
threatened him. I made a bolt through them into the hotel. I charged
back into the coffee-room, rang the bell furiously. I gripped the
waiter as he entered. “D’ye hear?” I shouted. “Get help and carry these
bars up to my room right away.”
He failed to understand me, and I shouted and raved at him. A
scared-looking little old man in a green apron appeared, and
further two of the young men in flannels. I made a dash at them and
commandeered their services. As soon as the gold was in my room I felt
free to quarrel. “Now get out,” I shouted; “all of you get out if you
don’t want to see a man go mad before your eyes!” And I helped the
waiter by the shoulder as he hesitated in the doorway. And then, as
soon as I had the door locked on them all, I tore off the little man’s
clothes again, shied them right and left, and got into bed forthwith.
And there I lay swearing and panting and cooling for a very long time.
At last I was calm enough to get out of bed and ring up the round-eyed
waiter for a flannel nightshirt, a soda and whisky, and some good
cigars. And these things being procured me, after an exasperating delay
that drove me several times to the bell, I locked the door again and
proceeded very deliberately to look the entire situation in the face.
The net result of the great experiment presented itself as an absolute
failure. It was a rout, and I was the sole survivor. It was an
absolute collapse, and this was the final disaster. There was nothing
for it but to save myself, and as much as I could in the way of
prospects from our _débâcle_. At one fatal crowning blow all my vague
resolutions of return and recovery had vanished. My intention of going
back to the moon, of getting a sphereful of gold, and afterwards of
having a fragment of Cavorite analysed and so recovering the great
secret--perhaps, finally, even of recovering Cavor’s body--all these
ideas vanished altogether.
I was the sole survivor, and that was all.
* * * * *
I think that going to bed was one of the luckiest ideas I have ever had
in an emergency. I really believe I should either have got loose-headed
or done some fatal, indiscreet thing. But there, locked in and secure
from all interruption, I could think out the position in all its
bearings and make my arrangements at leisure.
Of course it was quite clear to me what had happened to the boy. He
had crawled into the sphere, meddled with the studs, shut the Cavorite
windows, and gone up. It was highly improbable he had screwed in the
manhole stopper, and, even if he had, the chances were a thousand to
one against his getting back. It was fairly evident that he would
gravitate with my bales to somewhere near the middle of the sphere and
remain there, and so cease to be a legitimate terrestrial interest,
however remarkable he might seem to the inhabitants of some remote
quarter of space. I very speedily convinced myself on that point.
And as for any responsibility I might have in the matter, the more I
reflected upon that, the clearer it became that if only I kept quiet
about things, I need not trouble myself about that. If I was faced by
sorrowing parents demanding their lost boy, I had merely to demand my
lost sphere--or ask them what they meant. At first I had had a vision
of weeping parents and guardians, and all sorts of complications; but
now I saw that I simply had to keep my mouth shut, and nothing in that
way could arise. And, indeed, the more I lay and smoked and thought,
the more evident became the wisdom of impenetrability.
It is within the right of every British citizen, provided he does not
commit damage nor indecorum, to appear suddenly wherever he pleases,
and as ragged and filthy as he pleases, and with whatever amount of
virgin gold he sees fit to encumber himself, and no one has any right
at all to hinder and detain him in this procedure. I formulated that at
last to myself, and repeated it over as a sort of private Magna Charta
of my liberty.
Once I had put that issue on one side, I could take up and consider
in an equable manner certain considerations I had scarcely dared to
think of before, namely, those arising out of the circumstances of my
bankruptcy. But now, looking at this matter calmly and at leisure,
I could see that if only I suppressed my identity by a temporary
assumption of some less well-known name, and if I retained the two
months’ beard that had grown upon me, the risks of any annoyance from
the spiteful creditor to whom I have already alluded became very small
indeed. From that to a definite course of rational worldly action was
plain sailing. It was all amazingly petty, no doubt, but what was
there remaining for me to do?
Whatever I did I was resolved that I would keep myself level and right
side up.
I ordered up writing materials, and addressed a letter to the New
Romney Bank--the nearest, the waiter informed me--telling the manager
I wished to open an account with him, and requesting him to send
two trustworthy persons properly authenticated in a cab with a good
horse to fetch some hundredweight of gold with which I happened to
be encumbered. I signed the letter “Blake,” which seemed to me to be
a thoroughly respectable sort of name. This done, I got a Folkestone
Blue Book, picked out an outfitter, and asked him to send a cutter to
measure me for a drab tweed suit, ordering at the same time a valise,
dressing bag, brown boots, shirts, hats (to fit), and so forth; and
from a watchmaker I also ordered a watch. And these letters being
despatched, I had up as good a lunch as the hotel could give, and
then lay smoking a cigar, as calm and ordinary as possible, until in
accordance with my instructions two duly authenticated clerks came from
the bank and weighed and took away my gold. After which I pulled the
clothes over my ears in order to drown any knocking, and went very
comfortably to sleep.
I went to sleep. No doubt it was a prosaic thing for the first man back
from the moon to do, and I can imagine that the young and imaginative
reader will find my behaviour disappointing. But I was horribly
fatigued and bothered, and, confound it! what else was there to do?
There certainly was not the remotest chance of my being believed, if
I had told my story then, and it would certainly have subjected me to
intolerable annoyances. I went to sleep. When at last I woke up again I
was ready to face the world, as I have always been accustomed to face
it since I came to years of discretion. And so I got away to Italy, and
there it is I am writing this story. If the world will not have it as
fact, then the world may take it as fiction. It is no concern of mine.
And now that the account is finished, I am amazed to think how
completely this adventure is gone and done with. Everybody believes
that Cavor was a not very brilliant scientific experimenter who blew
up his house and himself at Lympne, and they explain the bang that
followed my arrival at Littlestone by a reference to the experiments
with explosives that are going on continually at the government
establishment of Lydd, two miles away. I must confess that hitherto I
have not acknowledged my share in the disappearance of Master Tommy
Simmons, which was that little boy’s name. That, perhaps, may prove
a difficult item of corroboration to explain away. They account for
my appearance in rags with two bars of indisputable gold upon the
Littlestone beach in various ingenious ways--it doesn’t worry me what
they think of me. They say I have strung all these things together
to avoid being questioned too closely as to the source of my wealth.
I would like to see the man who could invent a story that would hold
together like this one. Well, they must take it as fiction--there it is.
I have told my story--and now I suppose I have to take up the worries
of this terrestrial life again. Even if one has been to the moon, one
has still to earn a living. So I am working here at Amalfi, on the
scenario of that play I sketched before Cavor came walking into my
world, and I am trying to piece my life together as it was before ever
I saw him. I must confess that I find it hard to keep my mind on the
play when the moonshine comes into my room. It is full moon here, and
last night I was out on the pergola for hours, staring away at that
shining blankness that hides so much. Imagine it! tables and chairs,
and trestles and bars of gold! Confound it!--if only one could hit on
that Cavorite again! But a thing like that doesn’t come twice in a
life. Here I am, a little better off than I was at Lympne, and that
is all. And Cavor has committed suicide in a more elaborate way than
any human being ever did before. So the story closes as finally and
completely as a dream. It fits in so little with all the other things
of life, so much of it is so utterly remote from all human experience,
the leaping, the eating, the breathing, and these weightless times,
that indeed there are moments when, in spite of my moon gold, I do more
than half believe myself that the whole thing was a dream....
XXII THE ASTONISHING COMMUNICATION OF MR. JULIUS WENDIGEE
When I had finished my account of my return to the earth at Littlestone
I wrote, “The End,” made a flourish, and threw my pen aside, fully
believing that the whole story of the First Men in the Moon was done.
Not only had I done this, but I had placed my manuscript in the hands
of a literary agent, had permitted it to be sold, had seen the greater
portion of it appear in the _Strand Magazine_, and was setting to work
again upon the scenario of the play I had commenced at Lympne before I
realised that the end was not yet. And then, following me from Amalfi
to Algiers, there reached me (it is now about six months ago) one of
the most astounding communications I have ever been fated to receive.
Briefly, it informed me that Mr. Julius Wendigee, a Dutch electrician,
who has been experimenting with certain apparatus akin to the apparatus
used by Mr. Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering some method
of communication with Mars, was receiving day by day a curiously
fragmentary message in English, which was indisputably emanating from
Mr. Cavor in the moon.
At first I thought the thing was an elaborate practical joke by some
one who had seen the manuscript of my narrative. I answered Mr.
Wendigee jestingly, but he replied in a manner that put such suspicion
altogether aside, and in a state of inconceivable excitement I hurried
from Algiers to the little observatory upon the St. Gothard in which
he was working. In the presence of his record and his appliances--and
above all of the messages from Cavor that were coming to hand--my
lingering doubts vanished. I decided at once to accept a proposal he
made me to remain with him, assisting him to take down the record from
day to day, and endeavouring with him to send a message back to the
moon. Cavor, we learnt, was not only alive but free, in the midst of an
almost inconceivable community of these ant-like beings, these ant-men,
in the blue darkness of the lunar caves. He was lamed, it seemed, but
otherwise in quite good health--in better health, he distinctly said,
than he usually enjoyed on earth. He had had a fever, but it had left
no bad effects. But curiously enough he seemed to be labouring under
a conviction that I was either dead in the moon crater or lost in the
deep of space.
His message began to be received by Mr. Wendigee when that gentleman
was engaged in quite a different investigation. The reader will no
doubt recall the little excitement that began the century, arising
out of an announcement by Mr. Nikola Tesla, the American electrical
celebrity, that he had received a message from Mars. His announcement
renewed attention to a fact that had long been familiar to scientific
people, namely: that from some unknown source in space, waves of
electro-magnetic disturbance, entirely similar to those used by Signor
Marconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the earth.
Besides Mr. Tesla quite a number of other observers have been engaged
in perfecting apparatus for receiving and recording these vibrations,
though few would go so far as to consider them actual messages from
some extra-terrestrial sender. Among that few, however, we must
certainly count Mr. Wendigee. Ever since 1898 he had devoted himself
almost entirely to this subject, and being a man of ample means he had
erected an observatory on the flanks of Monte Rosa, in a position
singularly adapted in every way for such observations.
My scientific attainments, I must admit, are not great, but so far as
they enable me to judge, Mr. Wendigee’s contrivances for detecting and
recording any disturbances in the electro-magnetic conditions of space
are singularly original and ingenious. And by a happy combination of
circumstances they were set up and in operation about two months before
Cavor made his first attempt to call up the earth. Consequently we have
fragments of his communication even from the beginning. Unhappily,
they are only fragments, and the most momentous of all the things that
he had to tell humanity--the instructions, that is, for the making
of Cavorite, if, indeed, he ever transmitted them--have throbbed
themselves away unrecorded into space. We never succeeded in getting a
response back to Cavor. He was unable to tell, therefore, what we had
received or what we had missed; nor, indeed, did he certainly know that
any one on earth was really aware of his efforts to reach us. And the
persistence he displayed in sending eighteen long descriptions of lunar
affairs--as they would be if we had them complete--shows how much his
mind must have turned back towards his native planet since he left it
two years ago.
You can imagine how amazed Mr. Wendigee must have been when he
discovered his record of electro-magnetic disturbances interlaced by
Cavor’s straightforward English. Mr. Wendigee knew nothing of our wild
journey moonward, and suddenly--this English out of the void!
It is well the reader should understand the conditions under which it
would seem these messages were sent. Somewhere within the moon Cavor
certainly had access for a time to a considerable amount of electrical
apparatus, and it would seem he rigged up--perhaps furtively--a
transmitting arrangement of the Marconi type. This he was able to
operate at irregular intervals: sometimes for only half-an-hour or
so, sometimes for three or four hours at a stretch. At these times he
transmitted his earthward message, regardless of the fact that the
relative position of the moon and points upon the earth’s surface is
constantly altering. As a consequence of this and of the necessary
imperfections of our recording instruments his communication comes and
goes in our records in an extremely fitful manner; it becomes blurred;
it “fades out” in a mysterious and altogether exasperating way. And
added to this is the fact that he was not an expert operator; he had
partly forgotten, or never completely mastered, the code in general
use, and as he became fatigued he dropped words and misspelt in a
curious manner.
Altogether we have probably lost quite half of the communications
he made, and much we have is damaged, broken, and partly effaced.
In the abstract that follows the reader must be prepared therefore
for a considerable amount of break, hiatus, and change of topic. Mr.
Wendigee and I are collaborating in a complete and annotated edition of
the Cavor record, which we hope to publish, together with a detailed
account of the instruments employed, beginning with the first volume
in January next. That will be the full and scientific report, of which
this is only the popular first transcript. But here we give at least
sufficient to complete the story I have told, and to give the broad
outlines of the state of that other world so near, so akin, and yet so
dissimilar to our own.
XXIII AN ABSTRACT OF THE SIX MESSAGES FIRST RECEIVED FROM MR. CAVOR
The two earlier messages of Mr. Cavor may very well be reserved for
that larger volume. They simply tell, with greater brevity and with
a difference in several details that is interesting, but not of any
vital importance, the bare facts of the making of the sphere and our
departure from the world. Throughout, Cavor speaks of me as a man who
is dead, but with a curious change of temper as he approaches our
landing on the moon. “Poor Bedford,” he says of me, and “this poor
young man”; and he blames himself for inducing a young man, “by no
means well equipped for such adventures,” to leave a planet “on which
he was indisputably fitted to succeed” on so precarious a mission. I
think he underrates the part my energy and practical capacity played in
bringing about the realisation of his theoretical sphere. “We arrived,”
he says, with no more account of our passage through space than if we
had made a journey of common occurrence in a railway train.
And then he becomes increasingly unfair to me. Unfair, indeed, to an
extent I should not have expected in a man trained in the search for
truth. Looking back over my previously written account of these things,
I must insist that I have been altogether juster to Cavor than he has
been to me. I have extenuated little and suppressed nothing. But his
account is:--
“It speedily became apparent that the entire strangeness of our
circumstances and surroundings--great loss of weight, attenuated but
highly oxygenated air, consequent exaggeration of the results of
muscular effort, rapid development of weird plants from obscure spores,
lurid sky--was exciting my companion unduly. On the moon his character
seemed to deteriorate. He became impulsive, rash, and quarrelsome. In
a little while his folly in devouring some gigantic vesicles and his
consequent intoxication led to our capture by the Selenites--before we
had had the slightest opportunity of properly observing their ways....”
(He says, you observe, nothing of his own concession to these same
“vesicles.”)
And he goes on from that point to say that “We came to a difficult
passage with them, and Bedford mistaking certain gestures of
theirs”--pretty gestures they were!--“gave way to a panic violence. He
ran amuck, killed three, and perforce I had to flee with him after the
outrage. Subsequently we fought with a number who endeavoured to bar
our way, and slew seven or eight more. It says much for the tolerance
of these beings that on my recapture I was not instantly slain. We made
our way to the exterior and separated in the crater of our arrival, to
increase our chances of recovering our sphere. But presently I came
upon a body of Selenites, led by two who were curiously different, even
in form, from any of those we had seen hitherto, with larger heads and
smaller bodies, and much more elaborately wrapped about. And after
evading them for some time I fell into a crevasse, cut my head rather
badly and displaced my patella, and, finding crawling very painful,
decided to surrender--if they would still permit me to do so. This they
did, and, perceiving my helpless condition, carried me with them again
into the moon. And of Bedford I have heard or seen nothing more, nor,
so far as I can gather, has any Selenite. Either the night overtook
him in the crater, or else, which is more probable, he found the
sphere, and, desiring to steal a march upon me, made off with it--only,
I fear, to find it uncontrollable, and to meet a more lingering fate in
outer space.”
And with that Cavor dismisses me and goes on to more interesting
topics. I dislike the idea of seeming to use my position as his editor
to deflect his story in my own interest, but I am obliged to protest
here against the turn he gives these occurrences. He says nothing about
that gasping message on the blood-stained paper in which he told, or
attempted to tell, a very different story. The dignified self-surrender
is an altogether new view of the affair that has come to him, I must
insist, since he began to feel secure among the lunar people; and as
for the “stealing a march” conception, I am quite willing to let the
reader decide between us on what he has before him. I know I am not a
model man--I have made no pretence to be. But am I _that_?
However, that is the sum of my wrongs. From this point I can edit Cavor
with an untroubled mind, for he mentions me no more.
It would seem the Selenites who had come upon him carried him to
some point in the interior down “a great shaft” by means of what he
describes as “a sort of balloon.” We gather from the rather confused
passage in which he describes this, and from a number of chance
allusions and hints in other and subsequent messages, that this “great
shaft” is one of an enormous system of artificial shafts that run,
each from what is called a lunar “crater,” downwards for very nearly
a hundred miles towards the central portion of our satellite. These
shafts communicate by transverse tunnels, they throw out abysmal
caverns and expand into great globular places; the whole of the moon’s
substance for a hundred miles inward, indeed, is a mere sponge of rock.
“Partly,” says Cavor, “this sponginess is natural, but very largely
it is due to the enormous industry of the Selenites in the past. The
enormous circular mounds of the excavated rock and earth it is that
form these great circles about the tunnels known to earthly astronomers
(misled by a false analogy) as volcanoes.”
It was down this shaft they took him, in this “sort of balloon” he
speaks of, at first into an inky blackness and then into a region of
continually increasing phosphorescence. Cavor’s despatches show him to
be curiously regardless of detail for a scientific man, but we gather
that this light was due to the streams and cascades of water--“no
doubt containing some phosphorescent organism”--that flowed ever more
abundantly downward towards the Central Sea. And as he descended, he
says, “The Selenites also became luminous.” And at last far below him
he saw, as it were, a lake of heatless fire, the waters of the Central
Sea, glowing and eddying in strange perturbation, “like luminous blue
milk that is just on the boil.”
“This Lunar Sea,” says Cavor, in a later passage, “is not a stagnant
ocean; a solar tide sends it in a perpetual flow around the lunar axis,
and strange storms and boilings and rushings of its waters occur, and
at times cold winds and thunderings that ascend out of it into the
busy ways of the great ant-hill above. It is only when the water is
in motion that it gives out light; in its rare seasons of calm it is
black. Commonly, when one sees it, its waters rise and fall in an oily
swell, and flakes and big rafts of shining, bubbly foam drift with the
sluggish, faintly glowing current. The Selenites navigate its cavernous
straits and lagoons in little shallow boats of a canoe-like shape; and
even before my journey to the galleries about the Grand Lunar, who is
Master of the Moon, I was permitted to make a brief excursion on its
waters.
“The caverns and passages are naturally very tortuous. A large
proportion of these ways are known only to expert pilots among the
fishermen, and not infrequently Selenites are lost for ever in
their labyrinths. In their remoter recesses, I am told, strange
creatures lurk, some of them terrible and dangerous creatures that
all the science of the moon has been unable to exterminate. There is
particularly the Rapha, an inextricable mass of clutching tentacles
that one hacks to pieces only to multiply; and the Tzee, a darting
creature that is never seen, so subtly and suddenly does it slay....”
He gives us a gleam of description.
“I was reminded on this excursion of what I have read of the Mammoth
Caves; if only I had had a yellow flambeau instead of the pervading
blue light, and a solid-looking boatman with an oar instead of a
scuttle-faced Selenite working an engine at the back of the canoe,
I could have imagined I had suddenly got back to earth. The rocks
about us were very various, sometimes black, sometimes pale blue and
veined, and once they flashed and glittered as though we had come into
a mine of sapphires. And below one saw the ghostly phosphorescent
fishes flash and vanish in the hardly less phosphorescent deep. Then,
presently, a long ultramarine vista down the turgid stream of one of
the channels of traffic, and a landing-stage, and then, perhaps, a
glimpse up the enormous crowded shaft of one of the vertical ways.
“In one great place heavy with glistening stalactites a number of boats
were fishing. We went alongside one of these and watched the long-armed
fishing Selenites winding in a net. They were little, hunchbacked
insects, with very strong arms, short, bandy legs, and crinkled
face-masks. As they pulled at it that net seemed the heaviest thing
I had come upon in the moon; it was loaded with weights--no doubt of
gold--and it took a long time to draw, for in those waters the larger
and more edible fish lurk deep. The fish in the net came up like a blue
moonrise--a blaze of darting, tossing blue.
“Among their catch was a many-tentaculate, evil-eyed black thing,
ferociously active, whose appearance they greeted with shrieks and
twitters, and which with quick, nervous movements they hacked to pieces
by means of little hatchets. All its dissevered limbs continued to lash
and writhe in a vicious manner. Afterwards, when fever had hold of
me, I dreamt again and again of that bitter, furious creature rising
so vigorous and active out of the unknown sea. It was the most active
and malignant thing of all the living creatures I have yet seen in this
world inside the moon....
* * * * *
“The surface of this sea must be very nearly two hundred miles (if
not more) below the level of the moon’s exterior; all the cities of
the moon lie, I learnt, immediately above this Central Sea, in such
cavernous spaces and artificial galleries as I have described, and they
communicate with the exterior by enormous vertical shafts which open
invariably in what are called by earthly astronomers the ‘craters’ of
the moon. The lid covering one such aperture I had already seen during
the wanderings that had preceded my capture.
“Upon the condition of the less central portion of the moon I have not
yet arrived at very precise knowledge. There is an enormous system of
caverns in which the mooncalves shelter during the night; and there
are abattoirs and the like--in one of these it was that I and Bedford
fought with the Selenite butchers--and I have since seen balloons laden
with meat descending out of the upper dark. I have as yet scarcely
learnt as much of these things as a Zulu in London would learn about
the British corn supplies in the same time. It is clear, however, that
these vertical shafts and the vegetation of the surface must play an
essential rôle in ventilating and keeping fresh the atmosphere of the
moon. At one time, and particularly on my first emergence from my
prison, there was certainly a cold wind blowing _down_ the shaft, and
later there was a kind of sirocco upward that corresponded with my
fever. For at the end of about three weeks I fell ill of an indefinable
sort of fever, and in spite of sleep and the quinine tabloids that very
fortunately I had brought in my pocket, I remained ill and fretting
miserably, almost to the time when I was taken into the presence of the
Grand Lunar, who is Master of the Moon.
“I will not dilate on the wretchedness of my condition,” he remarks,
“during those days of ill-health.” And he goes on with great amplitude
with details I omit here. “My temperature,” he concludes, “kept
abnormally high for a long time, and I lost all desire for food. I
had stagnant waking intervals, and sleep tormented by dreams, and at
one phase I was, I remember, so weak as to be earth-sick and almost
hysterical. I longed almost intolerably for colour to break the
everlasting blue....”
He reverts again presently to the topic of this sponge caught lunar
atmosphere. I am told by astronomers and physicists that all he tells
is in absolute accordance with what was already known of the moon’s
condition. Had earthly astronomers had the courage and imagination to
push home a bold induction, says Mr. Wendigee, they might have foretold
almost everything that Cavor has to say of the general structure of
the moon. They know now pretty certainly that moon and earth are not
so much satellite and primary as smaller and greater sisters, made out
of one mass, and consequently made of the same material. And since
the density of the moon is only three-fifths that of the earth, there
can be nothing for it but that she is hollowed out by a great system
of caverns. There was no necessity, said Sir Jabez Flap, F.R.S., that
most entertaining exponent of the facetious side of the stars, that we
should ever have gone to the moon to find out such easy inferences,
and points the pun with an allusion to Gruyère, but he certainly might
have announced his knowledge of the hollowness of the moon before.
And if the moon is hollow, then the apparent absence of air and water
is, of course, quite easily explained. The sea lies within at the
bottom of the caverns, and the air travels through the great sponge of
galleries, in accordance with simple physical laws. The caverns of the
moon, on the whole, are very windy places. As the sunlight comes round
the moon the air in the outer galleries on that side is heated, its
pressure increases, some flows out on the exterior and mingles with the
evaporating air of the craters (where the plants remove its carbonic
acid), while the greater portion flows round through the galleries to
replace the shrinking air of the cooling side that the sunlight has
left. There is, therefore, a constant eastward breeze in the air of the
outer galleries, and an up-flow during the lunar day up the shafts,
complicated, of course, very greatly by the varying shape of the
galleries, and the ingenious contrivances of the Selenite mind....
XXIV THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SELENITES
The messages of Cavor from the sixth up to the sixteenth are for the
most part so much broken, and they abound so in repetitions, that they
scarcely form a consecutive narrative. They will be given in full,
of course, in the scientific report, but here it will be far more
convenient to continue simply to abstract and quote as in the former
chapter. We have subjected every word to a keen critical scrutiny,
and my own brief memories and impressions of lunar things have been
of inestimable help in interpreting what would otherwise have been
impenetrably dark. And, naturally, as living beings our interest
centres far more upon the strange community of lunar insects in which
he was living, it would seem, as an honoured guest than upon the mere
physical condition of their world.
I have already made it clear, I think, that the Selenites I saw
resembled man in maintaining the erect attitude, and in having four
limbs, and I have compared the general appearance of their heads and
the jointing of their limbs to that of insects. I have mentioned, too,
the peculiar consequence of the smaller gravitation of the moon on
their fragile slightness. Cavor confirms me upon all these points. He
calls them “animals,” though of course they fall under no division of
the classification of earthly creatures, and he points out “the insect
type of anatomy had, fortunately for men, never exceeded a relatively
very small size on earth.” The largest terrestrial insects, living or
extinct, do not, as a matter of fact, measure 6 in. in length; “but
here, against the lesser gravitation of the moon, a creature certainly
as much an insect as vertebrate seems to have been able to attain to
human and ultrahuman dimensions.”
He does not mention the ant, but throughout his allusions the ant is
continually being brought before my mind, in its sleepless activity,
in its intelligence and social organisation, in its structure, and
more particularly in the fact that it displays, in addition to the two
forms, the male and the female form, that almost all other animals
possess, a number of other sexless creatures, workers, soldiers,
and the like, differing from one another in structure, character,
power, and use, and yet all members of the same species. For these
Selenites, also, have a great variety of forms. Of course they are
not only colossally greater in size than ants, but also, in Cavor’s
opinion at least, in intelligence, morality, and social wisdom are
they colossally greater than men. And instead of the four or five
different forms of ant that are found, there are almost innumerably
different forms of Selenite. I have endeavoured to indicate the very
considerable difference observable in such Selenites of the outer crust
as I happened to encounter; the differences in size and proportions
were certainly as wide as the differences between the most widely
separated races of men. But such differences as I saw fade absolutely
to nothing in comparison with the huge distinctions of which Cavor
tells. It would seem the exterior Selenites I saw were, indeed, mostly
engaged in kindred occupations--mooncalf herds, butchers, fleshers,
and the like. But within the moon, practically unsuspected by me,
there are, it seems, a number of other sorts of Selenite, differing
in size, differing in the relative size of part to part, differing in
power and appearance, and yet not different species of creatures, but
only different forms of one species, and retaining through all their
variations a certain common likeness that marks their specific unity.
The moon is, indeed, a sort of vast ant-hill, only, instead of there
being only four or five sorts of ant, there are many hundred different
sorts of Selenite, and almost every gradation between one sort and
another.
It would seem the discovery came upon Cavor very speedily. I infer
rather than learn from his narrative that he was captured by the
mooncalf herds under the direction of those other Selenites who “have
larger brain cases (heads?) and very much shorter legs.” Finding he
would not walk even under the goad, they carried him into darkness,
crossed a narrow, plank-like bridge that may have been the identical
bridge I had refused, and put him down in something that must have
seemed at first to be some sort of lift. This was the balloon--it
had certainly been absolutely invisible to us in the darkness--and
what had seemed to me a mere plank-walking into the void was really,
no doubt, the passage of the gangway. In this he descended towards
constantly more luminous caverns of the moon. At first they descended
in silence--save for the twitterings of the Selenites--and then into
a stir of windy movement. In a little while the profound blackness had
made his eyes so sensitive that he began to see more and more of the
things about him, and at last the vague took shape.
[Illustration: “They carried him into darkness”]
“Conceive an enormous cylindrical space,” says Cavor in his seventh
message, “a quarter of a mile across, perhaps; very dimly lit at first
and then brighter, with big platforms twisting down its sides in a
spiral that vanishes at last below in a blue profundity; and lit even
more brightly--one could not tell how or why. Think of the well of
the very largest spiral staircase or lift-shaft that you have ever
looked down, and magnify that by a hundred. Imagine it at twilight seen
through blue glass. Imagine yourself looking down that; only imagine
also that you feel extraordinarily light, and have got rid of any giddy
feeling you might have on earth, and you will have the first conditions
of my impression. Round this enormous shaft imagine a broad gallery
running in a much steeper spiral than would be credible on earth, and
forming a steep road protected from the gulf only by a little parapet
that vanishes at last in perspective a couple of miles below.
“Looking up, I saw the very fellow of the downward vision; it had,
of course, the effect of looking into a very steep cone. A wind was
blowing down the shaft, and far above I fancy I heard, growing fainter
and fainter, the bellowing of the mooncalves that were being driven
down again from their evening pasturage on the exterior. And up and
down the spiral galleries were scattered numerous moon people, pallid,
faintly self-luminous beings, regarding our appearance or busied on
unknown errands.
“Either I fancied it or a flake of snow came drifting down on the icy
breeze. And then, falling like a snowflake, a little figure, a little
man-insect clinging to a parachute, drove down very swiftly towards the
central places of the moon.
“The big-headed Selenite sitting beside me, seeing me move my head
with the gesture of one who saw, pointed with his trunk-like ‘hand’
and indicated a sort of jetty coming into sight very far below: a
little landing-stage, as it were, hanging into the void. As it swept up
towards us our pace diminished very rapidly, and in a few moments, as
it seemed, we were abreast of it and at rest. A mooring-rope was flung
and grasped, and I found myself pulled down to a level with a great
crowd of Selenites, who jostled to see me.
“It was an incredible crowd. Suddenly and violently there was forced
upon my attention the vast amount of difference there is amongst these
beings of the moon.
“Indeed, there seemed not two alike in all that jostling multitude.
They differed in shape, they differed in size, they rang all the
horrible changes on the theme of Selenite form! Some bulged and
overhung, some ran about among the feet of their fellows. All of
them had a grotesque and disquieting suggestion of an insect that
has somehow contrived to mock humanity; but all seemed to present an
incredible exaggeration of some particular feature: one had a vast
right fore-limb, an enormous antennal arm, as it were; one seemed
all leg, poised, as it were, on stilts; another protruded the edge
of his face mask into a nose-like organ that made him startlingly
human until one saw his expressionless gaping mouth. The strange
and (except for the want of mandibles and palps) most insect-like
head of the mooncalf-minders underwent, indeed, the most incredible
transformations: here it was broad and low, here high and narrow;
here its leathery brow was drawn out into horns and strange features;
here it was whiskered and divided, and there with a grotesquely human
profile. One distortion was particularly conspicuous. There were
several brain cases distended like bladders to a huge size, with the
face mask reduced to quite small proportions. There were several
amazing forms, with heads reduced to microscopic proportions and blobby
bodies; and fantastic, flimsy things that existed, it would seem, only
as a basis for vast, trumpet-like protrusions of the lower part of
the mask. And oddest of all, as it seemed to me for the moment, two
or three of these weird inhabitants of a subterranean world, a world
sheltered by innumerable miles of rock from sun or rain, _carried
umbrellas_ in their tentaculate hands!--real terrestrial-looking
umbrellas! And then I thought of the parachutist I had watched descend.
“These moon people behaved exactly as a human crowd might have done
in similar circumstances: they jostled and thrust one another, they
shoved one another aside, they even clambered upon one another to get a
glimpse of me. Every moment they increased in numbers, and pressed more
urgently upon the discs of my ushers”--Cavor does not explain what
he means by this--“every moment fresh shapes emerged from the shadows
and forced themselves upon my astounded attention. And presently I was
signed and helped into a sort of litter, and lifted up on the shoulders
of strong-armed bearers, and so borne through the twilight over this
seething multitude towards the apartments that were provided for me in
the moon. All about me were eyes, faces, masks, a leathery noise like
the rustling of beetle wings, and a great bleating and cricket-like
twittering of Selenite voices....”
* * * * *
We gather he was taken to a “hexagonal apartment,” and there for a
space he was confined. Afterwards he was given a much more considerable
liberty; indeed, almost as much freedom as one has in a civilised town
on earth. And it would appear that the mysterious being who is the
ruler and master of the moon appointed two Selenites “with large heads”
to guard and study him, and to establish whatever mental communications
were possible with him. And, amazing and incredible as it may seem,
these two creatures, these fantastic men-insects, these beings of
another world, were presently communicating with Cavor by means of
terrestrial speech.
Cavor speaks of them as Phi-oo and Tsi-puff. Phi-oo, he says, was
about 5 ft. high; he had small, slender legs about 18 in. long, and
slight feet of the common lunar pattern. On these balanced a little
body, throbbing with the pulsations of his heart. He had long, soft,
many-jointed arms ending in a tentacled grip, and his neck was
many-jointed in the usual way, but exceptionally short and thick. His
head, says Cavor--apparently alluding to some previous description that
has gone astray in space--“is of the common lunar type, but strangely
modified. The mouth has the usual expressionless gape, but it is
unusually small and pointing downward, and the mask is reduced to the
size of a large flat nose-flap. On either side are the little eyes.
“The rest of the head is distended into a huge globe, and the chitinous
leathery cuticle of the mooncalf herds thins out to a mere membrane,
through which the pulsating brain movements are distinctly visible. He
is a creature, indeed, with a tremendously hypertrophied brain, and
with the rest of his organism both relatively and absolutely dwarfed.”
In another passage Cavor compares the back view of him to Atlas
supporting the world. Tsi-puff, it seems, was a very similar insect,
but his “face” was drawn out to a considerable length, and the brain
hypertrophy being in different regions, his head was not round but
pear-shaped, with the stalk downward. There were also litter-carriers,
lop-sided beings with enormous shoulders, very spidery ushers, and a
squat foot attendant in Cavor’s retinue.
The manner in which Phi-oo and Tsi-puff attacked the problem of speech
was fairly obvious. They came into this “hexagonal cell” in which Cavor
was confined, and began imitating every sound he made, beginning with a
cough. He seems to have grasped their intention with great quickness,
and to have begun repeating words to them and pointing to indicate the
application. The procedure was probably always the same. Phi-oo would
attend to Cavor for a space, then point also and say the word he had
heard.
The first word he mastered was “man,” and the second “Mooney”--which
Cavor on the spur of the moment seems to have used instead of
“Selenite” for the moon race. As soon as Phi-oo was assured of the
meaning of a word he repeated it to Tsi-puff, who remembered it
infallibly. They mastered over one hundred English nouns at their first
session.
Subsequently it seems they brought an artist with them to assist the
work of explanation with sketches and diagrams--Cavor’s drawings being
rather crude. He was, says Cavor, “a being with an active arm and an
arresting eye,” and he seemed to draw with incredible swiftness.
The eleventh message is undoubtedly only a fragment of a longer
communication. After some broken sentences, the record of which is
unintelligible, it goes on:--
“But it will interest only linguists, and delay me too long, to give
the details of the series of intent parleys of which these were
the beginning, and, indeed, I very much doubt if I could give in
anything like the proper order all the twistings and turnings that
we made in our pursuit of mutual comprehension. Verbs were soon
plain sailing--at least, such active verbs as I could express by
drawings; some adjectives were easy, but when it came to abstract
nouns, to prepositions, and the sort of hackneyed figures of speech
by means of which so much is expressed on earth, it was like diving
in cork-jackets. Indeed, these difficulties were insurmountable
until to the sixth lesson came a fourth assistant, a being with a
huge, football-shaped head, whose _forte_ was clearly the pursuit
of intricate analogy. He entered in a preoccupied manner, stumbling
against a stool, and the difficulties that arose had to be presented to
him with a certain amount of clamour and hitting and pricking before
they reached his apprehension. But once he was involved his penetration
was amazing. Whenever there came a need of thinking beyond Phi-oo’s
by no means limited scope, this prolate-headed person was in request,
but he invariably told the conclusion to Tsi-puff, in order that it
might be remembered; Tsi-puff was ever the arsenal for facts. And so we
advanced again.
“It seemed long and yet brief--a matter of days before I was positively
talking with these insects of the moon. Of course, at first it was an
intercourse infinitely tedious and exasperating, but imperceptibly
it has grown to comprehension. And my patience has grown to meet its
limitations. Phi-oo it is who does all the talking. He does it with a
vast amount of meditative provisional ‘M’m--M’m,’ and he has caught up
one or two phrases, ‘If I may say,’ ‘If you understand,’ and beads all
his speech with them.
“Thus he would discourse. Imagine him explaining his artist.
“‘M’m--M’m--he--if I may say--draw. Eat little--drink little--draw.
Love draw. No other thing. Hate all who not draw like him. Angry.
Hate all who draw like him better. Hate most people. Hate all who not
think all world for to draw. Angry. M’m. All things mean nothing to
him--only draw. He like you ... if you understand.... New thing to
draw. Ugly--striking. Eh?
“‘He’--turning to Tsi-puff--‘love remember words. Remember wonderful
more than any. Think no, draw no--remember. Say’--here he referred
to his gifted assistant for a word--‘histories--all things. He hear
once--say ever.’
“It is more wonderful to me than I dreamt that anything ever could
be again, to hear, in this perpetual obscurity, these extraordinary
creatures--for even familiarity fails to weaken the inhuman effect of
their appearance--continually piping a nearer approach to coherent
earthly speech,--asking questions, giving answers. I feel that I am
casting back to the fable-hearing period of childhood again, when the
ant and the grasshopper talked together and the bee judged between
them....”
* * * * *
And while these linguistic exercises were going on Cavor seems to have
experienced a considerable relaxation of his confinement. “The first
dread and distrust our unfortunate conflict aroused is being,” he said,
“continually effaced by the deliberate rationality of all I do.” ...
“I am now able to come and go as I please, or I am restricted only for
my own good. So it is I have been able to get at this apparatus, and,
assisted by a happy find among the material that is littered in this
enormous store-cave, I have contrived to despatch these messages. So
far not the slightest attempt has been made to interfere with me in
this, though I have made it quite clear to Phi-oo that I am signalling
to the earth.
“‘You talk to other?’ he asked, watching me.
“‘Others,’ said I.
“‘Others,’ he said. ‘Oh yes. Men?’
“And I went on transmitting.”
* * * * *
Cavor was continually making corrections in his previous accounts
of the Selenites as fresh facts flowed in upon him to modify his
conclusions, and accordingly one gives the quotations that follow
with a certain amount of reservation. They are quoted from the
ninth, thirteenth, and sixteenth messages, and, altogether vague and
fragmentary as they are, they probably give as complete a picture of
the social life of this strange community as mankind can now hope to
have for many generations.
“In the moon,” says Cavor, “every citizen knows his place. He is born
to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education
and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he
has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it. ‘Why should
he?’ Phi-oo would ask. If, for example, a Selenite is destined to be
a mathematician, his teachers and trainers set out at once to that
end. They check any incipient disposition to other pursuits, they
encourage his mathematical bias with a perfect psychological skill.
His brain grows, or at least the mathematical faculties of his brain
grow, and the rest of him only so much as is necessary to sustain this
essential part of him. At last, save for rest and food, his one delight
lies in the exercise and display of his faculty, his one interest
in its application, his sole society with other specialists in his
own line. His brain grows continually larger, at least so far as the
portions engaging in mathematics are concerned; they bulge ever larger
and seem to suck all life and vigour from the rest of his frame. His
limbs shrivel, his heart and digestive organs diminish, his insect
face is hidden under its bulging contours. His voice becomes a mere
stridulation for the stating of formulæ; he seems deaf to all but
properly enunciated problems. The faculty of laughter, save for the
sudden discovery of some paradox, is lost to him; his deepest emotion
is the evolution of a novel computation. And so he attains his end.
“Or, again, a Selenite appointed to be a minder of mooncalves is from
his earliest years induced to think and live mooncalf, to find his
pleasure in mooncalf lore, his exercise in their tending and pursuit.
He is trained to become wiry and active, his eye is indurated to
the tight wrappings, the angular contours that constitute a ‘smart
mooncalfishness.’ He takes at last no interest in the deeper part of
the moon; he regards all Selenites not equally versed in mooncalves
with indifference, derision, or hostility. His thoughts are of mooncalf
pastures, and his dialect an accomplished mooncalf technique. So also
he loves his work, and discharges in perfect happiness the duty that
justifies his being. And so it is with all sorts and conditions of
Selenites--each is a perfect unit in a world machine....
“These beings with big heads, on whom the intellectual labours fall,
form a sort of aristocracy in this strange society, and at the head
of them, quintessential of the moon, is that marvellous gigantic
ganglion the Grand Lunar, into whose presence I am finally to come.
The unlimited development of the minds of the intellectual class
is rendered possible by the absence of any bony skull in the lunar
anatomy, that strange box of bone that clamps about the developing
brain of man, imperiously insisting ‘thus far and no farther’ to all
his possibilities. They fall into three main classes differing greatly
in influence and respect. There are the administrators, of whom
Phi-oo is one, Selenites of considerable initiative and versatility,
responsible each for a certain cubic content of the moon’s bulk; the
experts like the football-headed thinker, who are trained to perform
certain special operations; and the erudite, who are the repositories
of all knowledge. To this latter class belongs Tsi-puff, the first
lunar professor of terrestrial languages. With regard to these latter,
it is a curious little thing to note that the unlimited growth of
the lunar brain has rendered unnecessary the invention of all those
mechanical aids to brain work which have distinguished the career
of man. There are no books, no records of any sort, no libraries or
inscriptions. All knowledge is stored in distended brains much as the
honey-ants of Texas store honey in their distended abdomens. The lunar
Somerset House and the lunar British Museum Library are collections of
living brains....
“The less specialised administrators, I note, do for the most part take
a very lively interest in me whenever they encounter me. They will
come out of the way and stare at me and ask questions to which Phi-oo
will reply. I see them going hither and thither with a retinue of
bearers, attendants, shouters, parachute-carriers, and so forth--queer
groups to see. The experts for the most part ignore me completely,
even as they ignore each other, or notice me only to begin a clamorous
exhibition of their distinctive skill. The erudite for the most part
are rapt in an impervious and apoplectic complacency, from which only
a denial of their erudition can rouse them. Usually they are led about
by little watchers and attendants, and often there are small and
active-looking creatures, small females usually, that I am inclined to
think are a sort of wife to them; but some of the profounder scholars
are altogether too great for locomotion, and are carried from place
to place in a sort of sedan tub, wabbling jellies of knowledge that
enlist my respectful astonishment. I have just passed one in coming to
this place where I am permitted to amuse myself with these electrical
toys, a vast, shaven, shaky head, bald and thin-skinned, carried on his
grotesque stretcher. In front and behind came his bearers, and curious,
almost trumpet-faced, news disseminators shrieked his fame.
“I have already mentioned the retinues that accompany most of the
intellectuals: ushers, bearers, valets, extraneous tentacles and
muscles, as it were, to replace the abortive physical powers of these
hypertrophied minds. Porters almost invariably accompany them. There
are also extremely swift messengers with spider-like legs, and ‘hands’
for grasping parachutes, and attendants with vocal organs that could
well-nigh wake the dead. Apart from their controlling intelligence
these subordinates are as inert and helpless as umbrellas in a stand.
They exist only in relation to the orders they have to obey, the duties
they have to perform.
“The bulk of these insects, however, who go to and fro upon the spiral
ways, who fill the ascending balloons and drop past me clinging to
flimsy parachutes, are, I gather, of the operative class. ‘Machine
hands,’ indeed, some of these are in actual nature--it is no figure
of speech, the single tentacle of the mooncalf herd is profoundly
modified for clawing, lifting, guiding, the rest of them no more than
necessary subordinate appendages to these important parts. Some, who I
suppose deal with bell-striking mechanisms, have enormously developed
auditory organs; some whose work lies in delicate chemical operations
project a vast olfactory organ; others again have flat feet for
treadles with anchylosed joints; and others--who I have been told are
glass-blowers--seem mere lung-bellows. But every one of these common
Selenites I have seen at work is exquisitely adapted to the social need
it meets. Fine work is done by fined-down workers, amazingly dwarfed
and neat. Some I could hold on the palm of my hand. There is even a
sort of turnspit Selenite, very common, whose duty and only delight it
is to supply the motive power for various small appliances. And to rule
over these things and order any erring tendency there might be in some
aberrant natures are the most muscular beings I have seen in the moon,
a sort of lunar police, who must have been trained from their earliest
years to give a perfect respect and obedience to the swollen heads.
“The making of these various sorts of operative must be a very curious
and interesting process. I am still very much in the dark about it, but
quite recently I came upon a number of young Selenites confined in jars
from which only the fore-limbs protruded, who were being compressed
to become machine-minders of a special sort. The extended ‘hand’ in
this highly developed system of technical education is stimulated by
irritants and nourished by injection, while the rest of the body is
starved. Phi-oo, unless I misunderstood him, explained that in the
earlier stages these queer little creatures are apt to display signs
of suffering in their various cramped situations, but they easily
become indurated to their lot; and he took me on to where a number
of flexible-limbed messengers were being drawn out and broken in. It
is quite unreasonable, I know, but such glimpses of the educational
methods of these beings affect me disagreeably. I hope, however,
that may pass off, and I may be able to see more of this aspect of
their wonderful social order. That wretched-looking hand-tentacle
sticking out of its jar seemed to have a sort of limp appeal for lost
possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of course, it is really
in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of
leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of
them.
“Quite recently, too--I think it was on the eleventh or twelfth visit I
made to this apparatus--I had a curious light upon the lives of these
operatives. I was being guided through a short cut hither, instead
of going down the spiral and by the quays of the Central Sea. From
the devious windings of a long, dark gallery we emerged into a vast,
low cavern, pervaded by an earthy smell, and, as things go in this
darkness, rather brightly lit. The light came from a tumultuous growth
of livid fungoid shapes--some indeed singularly like our terrestrial
mushrooms, but standing as high or higher than a man.
“‘Mooneys eat these?” said I to Phi-oo.
“‘Yes, food.’
“‘Goodness me!’ I cried; ‘what’s that?’
“My eye had just caught the figure of an exceptionally big and ungainly
Selenite lying motionless among the stems, face downward. We stopped.
“‘Dead?’ I asked. (For as yet I have seen no dead in the moon, and I
have grown curious.)
“‘_No!_’ exclaimed Phi-oo. ‘Him--worker--no work to do. Get little
drink then--make sleep--till we him want. What good him wake, eh? No
want him walking about.’
“‘There’s another!’ cried I.
“And indeed all that huge extent of mushroom ground was, I found,
peppered with these prostrate figures sleeping under an opiate until
the moon had need of them. There were scores of them of all sorts,
and we were able to turn over some of them, and examine them more
precisely than I had been able to do previously. They breathed noisily
at my doing so, but did not wake. One I remember very distinctly: he
left a strong impression, I think, because some trick of the light and
of his attitude was strongly suggestive of a drawn-up human figure.
His fore-limbs were long, delicate tentacles--he was some kind of
refined manipulator--and the pose of his slumber suggested a submissive
suffering. No doubt it was quite a mistake for me to interpret his
expression in that way, but I did. And as Phi-oo rolled him over into
the darkness among the livid fleshiness again I felt a distinctly
unpleasant sensation, although as he rolled the insect in him was
confessed.
“It simply illustrates the unthinking way in which one acquires
habits of feeling. To drug the worker one does not want and toss him
aside is surely far better than to expel him from his factory to
wander starving in the streets. In every complicated social community
there is necessarily a certain intermittency of employment for all
specialised labour, and in this way the trouble of an ‘unemployed’
problem is altogether anticipated. And yet, so unreasonable are even
scientifically trained minds, I still do not like the memory of those
prostrate forms amidst those quiet, luminous arcades of fleshy growth,
and I avoid that short cut in spite of the inconveniences of the
longer, more noisy, and more crowded alternative.
* * * * *
“My alternative route takes me round by a huge, shadowy cavern,
very crowded and clamorous, and here it is I see peering out of the
hexagonal openings of a sort of honeycomb wall, or parading a large
open space behind, or selecting the toys and amulets made to please
them by the dainty-tentacled jewellers who work in kennels below, the
mothers of the moon-world--the queen bees, as it were, of the hive.
They are noble-looking beings, fantastically and sometimes quite
beautifully adorned, with a proud carriage, and, save for their
mouths, almost microscopic heads.
“Of the condition of the moon sexes, marrying and giving in marriage,
and of birth and so forth among the Selenites, I have as yet been able
to learn very little. With the steady progress of Phi-oo in English,
however, my ignorance will no doubt as steadily disappear. I am of
opinion that, as with the ants and bees, there is a large majority
of the members in this community of the neuter sex. Of course on
earth in our cities there are now many who never live that life of
parentage which is the natural life of man. Here, as with the ants,
this thing has become a normal condition of the race, and the whole
of such replacement as is necessary falls upon this special and by no
means numerous class of matrons, the mothers of the moon-world, large
and stately beings beautifully fitted to bear the larval Selenite.
Unless I misunderstand an explanation of Phi-oo’s, they are absolutely
incapable of cherishing the young they bring into the moon; periods of
foolish indulgence alternate with moods of aggressive violence, and as
soon as possible the little creatures, who are quite soft and flabby
and pale coloured, are transferred to the charge of celibate females,
women ‘workers’ as it were, who in some cases possess brains of almost
masculine dimensions.”
* * * * *
Just at this point, unhappily, this message broke off. Fragmentary
and tantalising as the matter constituting this chapter is, it does
nevertheless give a vague, broad impression of an altogether strange
and wonderful world--a world with which our own may have to reckon we
know not how speedily. This intermittent trickle of messages, this
whispering of a record needle in the stillness of the mountain slopes,
is the first warning of such a change in human conditions as mankind
has scarcely imagined heretofore. In that satellite of ours there are
new elements, new appliances, new traditions, an overwhelming avalanche
of new ideas, a strange race with whom we must inevitably struggle for
mastery--gold as common as iron or wood....
XXV THE GRAND LUNAR
The penultimate message describes, with occasionally even elaborate
detail, the encounter between Cavor and the Grand Lunar, who is the
ruler or master of the moon. Cavor seems to have sent most of it
without interference, but to have been interrupted in the concluding
portion. The second came after an interval of a week.
The first message begins: “At last I am able to resume this--” it then
becomes illegible for a space, and after a time resumes in mid-sentence.
The missing words of the following sentence are probably “the crowd.”
There follows quite clearly: “grew ever denser as we drew near the
palace of the Grand Lunar--if I may call a series of excavations a
palace. Everywhere faces stared at me--blank, chitinous gapes and
masks, eyes peering over tremendous olfactory developments, eyes
beneath monstrous forehead plates; an undergrowth of smaller creatures
dodged and yelped, and helmet faces poised on sinuous, long-jointed
necks appeared craning over shoulders and beneath armpits. Keeping
a welcome space about me marched a cordon of stolid, scuttle-headed
guards, who had joined us on our leaving the boat in which we had come
along the channels of the Central Sea. The quick-eyed artist with the
little brain joined us also, and a thick bunch of lean porter-insects
swayed and struggled under the multitude of conveniences that were
considered essential to my state. I was carried in a litter during the
final stage of our journey. This litter was made of some very ductile
metal that looked dark to me, meshed and woven, and with bars of paler
metal, and about me as I advanced there grouped itself a long and
complicated procession.
“In front, after the manner of heralds, marched four trumpet-faced
creatures making a devastating bray; and then came squat,
resolute-moving ushers before and behind, and on either hand a galaxy
of learned heads, a sort of animated encyclopædia, who were, Phi-oo
explained, to stand about the Grand Lunar for purposes of reference.
(Not a thing in lunar science, not a point of view or method of
thinking, that these wonderful beings did not carry in their heads!)
Followed guards and porters, and then Phi-oo’s shivering brain borne
also on a litter. Then came Tsi-puff in a slightly less important
litter; then myself on a litter of greater elegance than any other, and
surrounded by my food and drink attendants. More trumpeters came next,
splitting the ear with vehement outcries, and then several big brains,
special correspondents one might well call them, or historiographers,
charged with the task of observing and remembering every detail of this
epoch-making interview. A company of attendants, bearing and dragging
banners and masses of scented fungus and curious symbols, vanished
in the darkness behind. The way was lined by ushers and officers in
caparisons that gleamed like steel, and beyond their line, so far as my
eyes could pierce the gloom, the heads of that enormous crowd extended.
“I will own that I am still by no means indurated to the peculiar
effect of the Selenite appearance, and to find myself, as it were,
adrift on this broad sea of excited entomology was by no means
agreeable. Just for a space I had something very like what I should
imagine people mean when they speak of the ‘horrors.’ It had come
to me before in these lunar caverns, when on occasion I have found
myself weaponless and with an undefended back, amidst a crowd of these
Selenites, but never quite so vividly. It is, of course, as absolutely
irrational a feeling as one could well have, and I hope gradually to
subdue it. But just for a moment, as I swept forward into the welter of
the vast crowd, it was only by gripping my litter tightly and summoning
all my will-power that I succeeded in avoiding an outcry or some such
manifestation. It lasted perhaps three minutes; then I had myself in
hand again.
“We ascended the spiral of a vertical way for some time and then passed
through a series of huge halls, dome-roofed and elaborately decorated.
The approach to the Grand Lunar was certainly contrived to give one
a vivid impression of his greatness. Each cavern one entered seemed
greater and more boldly arched than its predecessor. This effect of
progressive size was enhanced by a thin haze of faintly phosphorescent
blue incense that thickened as one advanced, and robbed even the nearer
figures of clearness. I seemed to advance continually to something
larger, dimmer, and less material.
“I must confess that all this multitude made me feel extremely shabby
and unworthy. I was unshaven and unkempt; I had brought no razor;
I had a coarse beard over my mouth. On earth I have always been
inclined to despise any attention to my person beyond a proper care
for cleanliness; but under the exceptional circumstances in which
I found myself, representing, as I did, my planet and my kind, and
depending very largely upon the attractiveness of my appearance for
a proper reception, I could have given much for something a little
more artistic and dignified than the husks I wore. I had been so
serene in the belief that the moon was uninhabited as to overlook such
precautions altogether. As it was I was dressed in a flannel jacket,
knickerbockers, and golfing stockings, stained with every sort of dirt
the moon offered; slippers (of which the left heel was wanting), and
a blanket, through a hole in which I thrust my head. (These clothes,
indeed, I still wear.) Sharp bristles are anything but an improvement
to my cast of features, and there was an unmended tear at the knee of
my knickerbockers that showed conspicuously as I squatted in my litter;
my right stocking, too, persisted in getting about my ankle. I am
fully alive to the injustice my appearance did humanity, and if by any
expedient I could have improvised something a little out of the way
and imposing I would have done so. But I could hit upon nothing. I did
what I could with my blanket--folding it somewhat after the fashion of
a toga, and for the rest I sat as upright as the swaying of my litter
permitted.
“Imagine the largest hall you have ever been in, imperfectly lit with
blue light and obscured by a grey-blue fog, surging with metallic or
livid-grey creatures of such a mad diversity as I have hinted. Imagine
this hall to end in an open archway beyond which is a still larger
hall, and beyond this yet another and still larger one, and so on. At
the end of the vista, dimly seen, a flight of steps, like the steps of
Ara Cœli at Rome, ascend out of sight. Higher and higher these steps
appear to go as one draws nearer their base. But at last I came under
a huge archway and beheld the summit of these steps, and upon it the
Grand Lunar exalted on his throne.
“He was seated in what was relatively a blaze of incandescent blue.
This, and the darkness about him, gave him an effect of floating in
a blue-black void. He seemed a small, self-luminous cloud at first,
brooding on his sombre throne; his brain case must have measured many
yards in diameter. For some reason that I cannot fathom a number of
blue search-lights radiated from behind the throne on which he sat,
and immediately encircling him was a halo. About him, and little and
indistinct in this glow, a number of body-servants sustained and
supported him, and overshadowed and standing in a huge semicircle
beneath him were his intellectual subordinates, his remembrancers and
computators and searchers and servants, and all the distinguished
insects of the court of the moon. Still lower stood ushers and
messengers, and then all down the countless steps of the throne were
guards, and at the base, enormous, various, indistinct, vanishing at
last into an absolute black, a vast swaying multitude of the minor
dignitaries of the moon. Their feet made a perpetual scraping whisper
on the rocky floor, their limbs moved with a rustling murmur.
“As I entered the penultimate hall the music rose and expanded into an
imperial magnificence of sound, and the shrieks of the newsbearers died
away....
[Illustration: THE GRAND LUNAR]
“I entered the last and greatest hall....
“My procession opened out like a fan. My ushers and guards went right
and left, and the three litters bearing myself and Phi-oo and Tsi-puff
marched across a shiny darkness of floor to the foot of the giant
stairs. Then began a vast throbbing hum, that mingled with the music.
The two Selenites dismounted, but I was bidden remain seated--I imagine
as a special honour. The music ceased, but not that humming, and by a
simultaneous movement of ten thousand respectful heads my attention was
directed to the enhaloed supreme intelligence that hovered above me.
“At first as I peered into the radiating glow this quintessential
brain looked very much like an opaque, featureless bladder with dim,
undulating ghosts of convolutions writhing visibly within. Then beneath
its enormity and just above the edge of the throne one saw with a start
minute elfin eyes peering out of the glow. No face, but eyes, as if
they peered through holes. At first I could see no more than these two
staring little eyes, and then below I distinguished the little dwarfed
body and its insect-jointed limbs shrivelled and white. The eyes stared
down at me with a strange intensity, and the lower part of the swollen
globe was wrinkled. Ineffectual-looking little hand-tentacles steadied
this shape on the throne....
“It was great. It was pitiful. One forgot the hall and the crowd.
“I ascended the staircase by jerks. It seemed to me that this darkly
glowing brain case above us spread over me, and took more and more of
the whole effect into itself as I drew nearer. The tiers of attendants
and helpers grouped about their master seemed to dwindle and fade
into the night. I saw that shadowy attendants were busy spraying that
great brain with a cooling spray, and patting and sustaining it. For
my own part, I sat gripping my swaying litter and staring at the Grand
Lunar, unable to turn my gaze aside. And at last, as I reached a little
landing that was separated only by ten steps or so from the supreme
seat, the woven splendour of the music reached a climax and ceased,
and I was left naked, as it were, in that vastness, beneath the still
scrutiny of the Grand Lunar’s eyes.
“He was scrutinising the first man he had ever seen....
“My eyes dropped at last from his greatness to the faint figures in the
blue mist about him, and then down the steps to the massed Selenites,
still and expectant in their thousands, packed on the floor below. Once
again an unreasonable horror reached out towards me.... And passed.
“After the pause came the salutation. I was assisted from my litter,
and stood awkwardly while a number of curious and no doubt deeply
symbolical gestures were vicariously performed for me by two slender
officials. The encyclopædic galaxy of the learned that had accompanied
me to the entrance of the last hall appeared two steps above me and
left and right of me, in readiness for the Grand Lunar’s need, and
Phi-oo’s pale brain placed itself about half-way up to the throne in
such a position as to communicate easily between us without turning his
back on either the Grand Lunar or myself. Tsi-puff took up a position
behind him. Dexterous ushers sidled sideways towards me, keeping a full
face to the Presence. I seated myself Turkish fashion, and Phi-oo and
Tsi-puff also knelt down above me. There came a pause. The eyes of the
nearer court went from me to the Grand Lunar and came back to me, and a
hissing and piping of expectation passed across the hidden multitudes
below and ceased.
“That humming ceased.
“For the first and last time in my experience the moon was silent.
“I became aware of a faint wheezy noise. The Grand Lunar was addressing
me. It was like the rubbing of a finger upon a pane of glass.
“I watched him attentively for a time, and then glanced at the alert
Phi-oo. I felt amidst these slender beings ridiculously thick and
fleshy and solid; my head all jaw and black hair. My eyes went back
to the Grand Lunar. He had ceased; his attendants were busy, and his
shining superficies was glistening and running with cooling spray.
“Phi-oo meditated through an interval. He consulted Tsi-puff. Then he
began piping his recognisable English--at first a little nervously, so
that he was not very clear.
“‘M’m--the Grand Lunar--wishes to say--wishes to say--he gathers you
are--m’m--men--that you are a man from the planet earth. He wishes to
say that he welcomes you--welcomes you--and wishes to learn--learn, if
I may use the word--the state of your world, and the reason why you
came to this.’
“He paused. I was about to reply when he resumed. He proceeded to
remarks of which the drift was not very clear, though I am inclined to
think they were intended to be complimentary. He told me that the earth
was to the moon what the sun is to the earth, and that the Selenites
desired very greatly to learn about the earth and men. He then told
me, no doubt in compliment also, the relative magnitude and diameter
of earth and moon, and the perpetual wonder and speculation with which
the Selenites had regarded our planet. I meditated with downcast eyes,
and decided to reply that men too had wondered what might lie in the
moon, and had judged it dead, little recking of such magnificence as I
had seen that day. The Grand Lunar, in token of recognition, caused his
long blue rays to rotate in a very confusing manner, and all about the
great hall ran the pipings and whisperings and rustlings of the report
of what I had said. He then proceeded to put to Phi-oo a number of
inquiries which were easier to answer.
“He understood, he explained, that we lived on the surface of the
earth, that our air and sea were outside the globe; the latter part,
indeed, he already knew from his astronomical specialists. He was
very anxious to have more detailed information of what he called this
extraordinary state of affairs, for from the solidity of the earth
there had always been a disposition to regard it as uninhabitable. He
endeavoured first to ascertain the extremes of temperature to which
we earth beings were exposed, and he was deeply interested by my
descriptive treatment of clouds and rain. His imagination was assisted
by the fact that the lunar atmosphere in the outer galleries of the
night side is not infrequently very foggy. He seemed inclined to marvel
that we did not find the sunlight too intense for our eyes, and was
interested in my attempt to explain that the sky was tempered to a
bluish colour through the refraction of the air, though I doubt if he
clearly understood that. I explained how the iris of the human eyes can
contract the pupil and save the delicate internal structure from the
excess of sunlight, and was allowed to approach within a few feet of
the Presence in order that this structure might be seen. This led to a
comparison of the lunar and terrestrial eyes. The former is not only
excessively sensitive to such light as men can see, but it can also
_see_ heat, and every difference in temperature within the moon renders
objects visible to it.
“The iris was quite a new organ to the Grand Lunar. For a time he
amused himself by flashing his rays into my face and watching my
pupils contract. As a consequence, I was dazzled and blinded for some
little time....
“But in spite of that discomfort I found something reassuring by
insensible degrees in the rationality of this business of question and
answer. I could shut my eyes, think of my answer, and almost forget
that the Grand Lunar has no face....
“When I had descended again to my proper place the Grand Lunar asked
how we sheltered ourselves from heat and storms, and I expounded
to him the arts of building and furnishing. Here we wandered into
misunderstandings and cross-purposes, due largely, I must admit, to the
looseness of my expressions. For a long time I had great difficulty in
making him understand the nature of a house. To him and his attendant
Selenites it seemed, no doubt, the most whimsical thing in the world
that men should build houses when they might descend into excavations,
and an additional complication was introduced by the attempt I made to
explain that men had originally begun their homes in caves, and that
they were now taking their railways and many establishments beneath the
surface. Here I think a desire for intellectual completeness betrayed
me. There was also a considerable tangle due to an equally unwise
attempt on my part to explain about mines. Dismissing this topic at
last in an incomplete state, the Grand Lunar inquired what we did with
the interior of our globe.
“A tide of twittering and piping swept into the remotest corners
of that great assembly when it was at last made clear that we men
know absolutely nothing of the contents of the world upon which the
immemorial generations of our ancestors had been evolved. Three times
had I to repeat that of all the 4000 miles of substance between the
earth and its centre men knew only to the depth of a mile, and that
very vaguely. I understood the Grand Lunar to ask why had I come to the
moon seeing we had scarcely touched our own planet yet, but he did not
trouble me at that time to proceed to an explanation, being too anxious
to pursue the details of this mad inversion of all his ideas.
“He reverted to the question of weather, and I tried to describe the
perpetually changing sky, and snow, and frost, and hurricanes. ‘But
when the night comes,’ he asked, ‘is it not cold?’
“I told him it was colder than by day.
“‘And does not your atmosphere freeze?’
“I told him not; that it was never cold enough for that, because our
nights were so short.
“‘Not even liquefy?’
“I was about to say ‘No,’ but then it occurred to me that one part at
least of our atmosphere, the water vapour of it, does sometimes liquefy
and form dew, and sometimes freeze and form frost--a process perfectly
analogous to the freezing of all the external atmosphere of the moon
during its longer night. I made myself clear on this point, and from
that the Grand Lunar went on to speak with me of sleep. For the need
of sleep that comes so regularly every twenty-four hours to all things
is part also of our earthly inheritance. On the moon they rest only
at rare intervals, and after exceptional exertions. Then I tried to
describe to him the soft splendours of a summer night, and from that I
passed to a description of those animals that prowl by night and sleep
by day. I told him of lions and tigers, and here it seemed as though
we had come to a deadlock. For, save in their waters, there are no
creatures in the moon not absolutely domestic and subject to his will,
and so it has been for immemorial years. They have monstrous water
creatures, but no evil beasts, and the idea of anything strong and
large existing ‘outside’ in the night is very difficult for them....
[The record is here too broken to transcribe for the space of perhaps
twenty words or more.]
“He talked with his attendants, as I suppose, upon the strange
superficiality and unreasonableness of (man), who lives on the mere
surface of a world, a creature of waves and winds, and all the chances
of space, who cannot even unite to overcome the beasts that prey upon
his kind, and yet who dares to invade another planet. During this aside
I sat thinking, and then at his desire I told him of the different
sorts of men. He searched me with questions. ‘And for all sorts of work
you have the same sort of men. But who thinks? Who governs?’
“I gave him an outline of the democratic method.
“When I had done he ordered cooling sprays upon his brow, and then
requested me to repeat my explanation, conceiving something had
miscarried.
“‘Do they not do different things, then?’ said Phi-oo.
“Some I admitted were thinkers and some officials; some hunted, some
were mechanics, some artists, some toilers. ‘But _all_ rule,’ I said.
“‘And have they not different shapes to fit them to their different
duties?’
“‘None that you can see,’ I said, ‘except, perhaps, for clothes. Their
minds perhaps differ a little,’ I reflected.
“‘Their minds must differ a great deal,’ said the Grand Lunar, ‘or they
would all want to do the same things.’
“In order to bring myself into a closer harmony with his preconceptions
I said that his surmise was right. ‘It was all hidden in the brain,’ I
said; ‘but the difference was there. Perhaps if one could see the minds
and souls of men they would be as varied and unequal as the Selenites.
There were great men and small men, men who could reach out far and
wide, and men who could go swiftly; noisy, trumpet-minded men, and men
who could remember without thinking.... [The record is indistinct for
three words.]
“He interrupted me to recall me to my previous statement. ‘But you said
all men rule?’ he pressed.
“‘To a certain extent,’ I said, and made, I fear, a denser fog with my
explanation.
“He reached out to a salient fact. ‘Do you mean,’ he asked, ‘that
there is no Grand Earthly?’
“I thought of several people, but assured him finally there was none. I
explained that such autocrats and emperors as we had tried upon earth
had usually ended in drink, or vice, or violence, and that the large
and influential section of the people of the earth to which I belonged,
the Anglo-Saxons, did not mean to try that sort of thing again. At
which the Grand Lunar was even more amazed.
“‘But how do you keep even such wisdom as you have?’ he asked; and I
explained to him the way we helped our limited [a word omitted here,
probably “brains”] with libraries of books. I explained to him how
our science was growing by the united labours of innumerable little
men, and on that he made no comment save that it was evident we had
mastered much in spite of our social savagery, or we could not have
come to the moon. Yet the contrast was very marked. With knowledge the
Selenites grew and changed; mankind stored their knowledge about them
and remained brutes--equipped. He said this ... [Here there is a short
piece of the record indistinct.]
“He then caused me to describe how we went about this earth of ours,
and I described to him our railways and ships. For a time he could not
understand that we had had the use of steam only one hundred years,
but when he did he was clearly amazed. (I may mention as a singular
thing that the Selenites use years to count by, just as we do on earth,
though I can make nothing of their numeral system. That, however,
does not matter, because Phi-oo understands ours.) From that I went
on to tell him that mankind had dwelt in cities only for nine or ten
thousand years, and that we were still not united in one brotherhood,
but under many different forms of government. This astonished the Grand
Lunar very much, when it was made clear to him. At first he thought we
referred merely to administrative areas.
“‘Our States and Empires are still the rawest sketches of what order
will some day be,’ I said, and so I came to tell him.... [At this point
a length of record that probably represents thirty or forty words is
totally illegible.]
“The Grand Lunar was greatly impressed by the folly of men in clinging
to the inconvenience of diverse tongues. ‘They want to communicate,
and yet not to communicate,’ he said, and then for a long time he
questioned me closely concerning war.
“He was at first perplexed and incredulous. ‘You mean to say,’ he
asked, seeking confirmation, ‘that you run about over the surface
of your world--this world, whose riches you have scarcely begun to
scrape--killing one another for beasts to eat?’
“I told him that was perfectly correct.
“He asked for particulars to assist his imagination. ‘But do not ships
and your poor little cities get injured?’ he asked, and I found the
waste of property and conveniences seemed to impress him almost as much
as the killing. ‘Tell me more,’ said the Grand Lunar; ‘make me see
pictures. I cannot conceive these things.’
“And so, for a space, though something loth, I told him the story of
earthly War.
“I told him of the first orders and ceremonies of war, of warnings and
ultimatums, and the marshalling and marching of troops. I gave him an
idea of manœuvres and positions and battle joined. I told him of sieges
and assaults, of starvation and hardship in trenches, and of sentinels
freezing in the snow. I told him of routs and surprises, and desperate
last stands and faint hopes, and the pitiless pursuit of fugitives and
the dead upon the field. I told, too, of the past, of invasions and
massacres, of the Huns and Tartars, and the wars of Mahomet and the
Caliphs, and of the Crusades. And as I went on, and Phi-oo translated,
the Selenites cooed and murmured in a steadily intensified emotion.
“I told them an ironclad could fire a shot of a ton twelve miles, and
go through 20 ft. of iron--and how we could steer torpedoes under
water. I went on to describe a Maxim gun in action, and what I could
imagine of the Battle of Colenso. The Grand Lunar was so incredulous
that he interrupted the translation of what I had said in order to have
my verification of my account. They particularly doubted my description
of the men cheering and rejoicing as they went into (? battle).
“‘But surely they do not like it!’ translated Phi-oo.
“I assured them men of my race considered battle the most glorious
experience of life, at which the whole assembly was stricken with
amazement.
“‘But what good is this war?’ asked the Grand Lunar, sticking to his
theme.
“‘Oh! as for _good_!’ said I; ‘it thins the population!’
“‘But why should there be a need----?’ ...
“There came a pause, the cooling sprays impinged upon his brow, and
then he spoke again.”
At this point a series of undulations that have been apparent as
a perplexing complication as far back as Cavor’s description of
the silence that fell before the first speaking of the Grand Lunar
become confusingly predominant in the record. These undulations are
evidently the result of radiations proceeding from a lunar source,
and their persistent approximation to the alternating signals of
Cavor is curiously suggestive of some operator deliberately seeking
to mix them in with his message and render it illegible. At first
they are small and regular, so that with a little care and the loss
of very few words we have been able to disentangle Cavor’s message;
then they become broad and larger, then suddenly they are irregular,
with an irregularity that gives the effect at last of some one
scribbling through a line of writing. For a long time nothing can
be made of this madly zigzagging trace; then quite abruptly the
interruption ceases, leaves a few words clear, and then resumes and
continues for all the rest of the message, completely obliterating
whatever Cavor was attempting to transmit. Why, if this is indeed a
deliberate intervention, the Selenites should have preferred to let
Cavor go on transmitting his message in happy ignorance of their
obliteration of its record, when it was clearly quite in their power
and much more easy and convenient for them to stop his proceedings at
any time, is a problem to which I can contribute nothing. The thing
seems to have happened so, and that is all I can say. This last rag
of his description of the Grand Lunar begins in mid-sentence:--
“interrogated me very closely upon my secret. I was able in a little
while to get to an understanding with them, and at last to elucidate
what has been a puzzle to me ever since I realised the vastness of
their science, namely, how it is they themselves have never discovered
‘Cavorite.’ I find they know of it as a theoretical substance, but they
have always regarded it as a practical impossibility, because for some
reason there is no helium in the moon, and helium----”
Across the last letters of helium slashes the resumption of that
obliterating trace. Note that word “secret,” for on that, and that
alone, I base my interpretation of the message that follows, the last
message, as both Mr. Wendigee and myself now believe it to be, that
he is ever likely to send us.
XXVI THE LAST MESSAGE CAVOR SENT TO THE EARTH
In this unsatisfactory manner the penultimate message of Cavor dies
out. One seems to see him away there in the blue obscurity amidst
his apparatus intently signalling us to the last, all unaware of the
curtain of confusion that drops between us; all unaware, too, of the
final dangers that even then must have been creeping upon him. His
disastrous want of vulgar common sense had utterly betrayed him. He
had talked of war, he had talked of all the strength and irrational
violence of men, of their insatiable aggressions, their tireless
futility of conflict. He had filled the whole moon world with this
impression of our race, and then I think it is plain that he made the
most fatal admission that upon himself alone hung the possibility--at
least for a long time--of any further men reaching the moon. The line
the cold, inhuman reason of the moon would take seems plain enough
to me, and a suspicion of it, and then perhaps some sudden sharp
realisation of it, must have come to him. One imagines him going about
the moon with the remorse of this fatal indiscretion growing in his
mind. During a certain time I am inclined to guess the Grand Lunar was
deliberating the new situation, and for all that time Cavor may have
gone as free as ever he had gone. But obstacles of some sort prevented
his getting to his electro-magnetic apparatus again after that message
I have just given. For some days we received nothing. Perhaps he was
having fresh audiences, and trying to evade his previous admissions.
Who can hope to guess?
And then suddenly, like a cry in the night, like a cry that is followed
by a stillness, came the last message. It is the briefest fragment, the
broken beginnings of two sentences.
The first was: “I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know----”
There was an interval of perhaps a minute. One imagines some
interruption from without. A departure from the instrument--a dreadful
hesitation among the looming masses of apparatus in that dim, blue-lit
cavern--a sudden rush back to it, full of a resolve that came too late.
Then, as if it were hastily transmitted, came: “Cavorite made as
follows: take----”
There followed one word, a quite unmeaning word as it stands: “uless.”
And that is all.
It may be he made a hasty attempt to spell “useless” when his fate was
close upon him. Whatever it was that was happening about that apparatus
we cannot tell. Whatever it was we shall never, I know, receive another
message from the moon. For my own part a vivid dream has come to my
help, and I see, almost as plainly as though I had seen it in actual
fact, a blue-lit shadowy dishevelled Cavor struggling in the grip of
these insect Selenites, struggling ever more desperately and hopelessly
as they press upon him, shouting, expostulating, perhaps even at last
fighting, and being forced backward step by step out of all speech or
sign of his fellows, for evermore into the Unknown--into the dark, into
that silence that has no end....
GEORGE NEWNES, LIMITED, LONDON.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Footnotes have been moved to the end of each chapter and relabeled
consecutively through the document.
Illustrations have been moved to paragraph breaks near where they are
mentioned.
Punctuation has been made consistent.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in
the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have
been corrected.
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