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THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON

H. G. WELLS, the third son of a small shopkeeper, was born in Bromley in 1866. After two years' apprenticeship in a draper's shop, he became a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School and won a scholarship to study under T. H. Huxley at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington. He taught biology before becoming a professional writer and journalist. He wrote more than a hundred books, including novels, essays, histories and programmes for world regeneration.

Wells, who rose from obscurity to world fame, had an emotionally and intellectually turbulent life. His prophetic imagination was first displayed in pioneering works of science fiction such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Later he became an apostle of socialism, science and progress, whose anticipations of a future world state include The Shape of Things to Come (1933). His controversial views on sexual equality and women's rights were expressed in the novels Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911). He was, in Bertrand Russell's words, ‘an important liberator of thought and action’.

Wells drew on his own early struggles in many of his best novels, including Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). His educational works, some written in collaboration, include The Outline of History (1920) and The Science of Life (1930). His Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., 1934) reviews his world. He died in London in 1946.

PATRIC PARRINDER took his MA and Ph.D. at Cambridge University, where he held a Fellowship at King's College and published his first two books on Wells, H. G. Wells (1970) and H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage (1972). He has been Chairman of the H. G. Wells Society and editor of the Wellsian, and has also written on James Joyce, science fiction, literary criticism and the history of the English novel. His book Shadows of the Future (1995) brings together his interests in Wells, science fiction and literary prophecy. Since 1986 he has been Professor of English at the University of Reading.

CHINA MIÉVILLE's novels, for which he has won the Arthur C Clarke and British Fantasy Awards, include Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002) and Iron Council (2004). A collection of his short fiction is forthcoming. His non-fiction includes Between Equal Rights (2004), a study of international law. He lives and works in London.

STEVEN MCLEAN has recently completed his Ph.D. in the Department of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. His thesis investigates the relationship between H. G. Wells's scientific romances and the discourses of science in the 1890s and early 1900s. Steve has published on Wells's early fiction. He is the current Secretary of the H. G. Wells Society.

H. G. WELLS

The First Men in the Moon

Edited by PATRICK PARRINDER
With an Introduction by CHINA MIÉVILLE
and Notes by STEVEN MCLEAN

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First published 1901

This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2005

3

Text copyright © the Literary Executors of the Estate of H. G. Wells

Biographical Note, Further Reading, Note on the Text copyright © Patrick Parrinder, 2005

Introduction copyright © China Miéville, 2005

Notes copyright © Steven McLean, 2005

All rights reserved

The moral right of the editors has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101492253

CONTENTS

Biographical Note

Introduction

Further Reading

Note on the Text

THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON

Notes

Biographical Note

Herbert George Wells was born on 21 September 1866 at Bromley, Kent, a small market town soon to be swallowed up by the suburban growth of outer London. His father, formerly a professional gardener and a county cricketer renowned for his fast bowling, owned a small business in Bromley High Street selling china goods and cricket bats. The house was grandly known as Atlas House, but the centre of family life was a cramped basement kitchen underneath the shop. Soon Joseph Wells's cricketing days were cut short by a broken leg, and the family fortunes looked bleak.

Young ‘Bertie’ Wells had already shown great academic promise, but when he was thirteen, his family broke up and he was forced to earn his own living. His father was bankrupt, and his mother left home to become resident housekeeper at Uppark, the great Sussex country house where she had worked as a lady's maid before her marriage. Wells was taken out of school to follow his two elder brothers into the drapery trade. After serving briefly as a pupil-teacher and a pharmacist's assistant, in 1881 he was apprenticed to a department store in Southsea, working a thirteen-hour day and sleeping in a dormitory with his fellow-apprentices. This was the unhappiest period of his life, though he would later revisit it in comic romances such as Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). Kipps and Polly both manage to escape from their servitude as drapers, and in 1883, helped by his long-suffering mother, Wells cancelled his indentures and obtained a post as teaching assistant at Midhurst Grammar School near Uppark. His intellectual development, long held back, now progressed astonishingly. He passed a series of examinations in science subjects and, in September 1884, entered the Normal School of Science, South Kensington (later to become part of Imperial College of Science and Technology) on a government scholarhip.

Wells was a born teacher, as many of his books would show, and at first he was an enthusiastic student. He had the good fortune to be taught biology and zoology by one of the most influential scientific thinkers of the Victorian age, Darwin's friend and supporter T. H. Huxley. Wells never forgot Huxley's teaching, but the other professors were more humdrum, and his interest in their courses rapidly waned. He scraped through second-year physics, but failed his third-year geology exam and left South Kensington in 1887 without taking a degree. He was thrilled by the theoretical framework and imaginative horizons of natural science, but impatient of practical detail and the grinding, routine tasks of laboratory work. He cut his classes and spent his time reading literature and history, satisfying the curiosity he had earlier felt while exploring the long-neglected library at Uppark. He started a college magazine, the Science Schools Journal, and argued for socialism in student debates.

In the summer of 1887 Wells became science master at a small private school in North Wales, but a few weeks later he was knocked down and injured by one of his pupils on the football field. Sickly and undernourished as a result of three years of student poverty, he suffered severe kidney and lung damage. After months of convalescence at Uppark he was able to return to science teaching at Henley House School, Kilburn. In 1890 he passed his University of London B.Sc. (Hons.) with a first class in zoology and obtained a post as a biology tutor for the University Correspondence College. In 1891 he married his cousin Isabel Wells, but they had little in common and soon Wells fell in love with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (usually known as ‘Jane’). They started living together in 1893, and married two years later when his divorce came through.

During his years as a biology tutor Wells slowly began making his way as a writer and journalist. He wrote for the Educational Times, edited the University Correspondent, and in 1891 published a philosophical essay, ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’, in the prestigious Fortnightly Review. His first book was a Textbook of Biology (1893). But no sooner was it published than his health again collapsed, forcing him to give up teaching and rely entirely on his literary earnings. His future seemed highly precarious, yet soon he was in regular demand as a writer of short stories and humorous essays for the burgeoning newspapers and magazines of the period. He became a fiction reviewer and, for a short period in 1895, a theatre critic.

Ever since his student days Wells had worked intermittently on a story about time-travelling and the possible future of the human race. An early version was published in the Science Schools Journal as ‘The Chronic Argonauts’, but now, after numerous redrafts and much encouragement from the poet and editor W. E. Henley, it finally took shape as The Time Machine (1895). Its success was instantaneous, and while it was running as a magazine serial Wells was already being spoken of as a ‘man of genius’. He was celebrated as the inventor of the ‘scientific romance’, a combination of adventure novel and philosophical tale in which the hero becomes involved in a life-and-death struggle resulting from some unforeseen scientific development. There was now a ready market for his fiction, and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; later revised as The Sleeper Awakes, 1910), The First Men in the Moon (1901) and several other volumes followed quickly from his pen.

By the turn of the twentieth century Wells was established as a popular author in England and America, and his books were rapidly being translated into French, German, Spanish, Russian and other European languages. Already his fame had begun to eclipse that of his predecessor in scientific romance, the French author Jules Verne, who had dominated the field since the 1860s. But Wells, an increasingly self-conscious artist, had larger ambitions than to go down in history as a boys' adventure novelist like Jules Verne. Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) was his first attempt at realistic fiction, comic in spirit and manifestly reflecting his own experiences as a student and teacher. By the end of the Edwardian decade, when he wrote his ‘Condition of England’ novels Tono-Bungay (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911), Wells had become one of the leading novelists of his day, the friend and rival of such literary figures as Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and Henry James.

But Wells was never a devotee of art for art's sake; he was a prophetic writer with a social and political message. His first major non-fictional work was Anticipations (1902), a book of futurological essays setting out the possible effects of scientific and technological progress in the twentieth century. Anticipations brought him into contact with the Fabian Society and launched his career as a political journalist and an influential voice of the British left. During his Fabian period Wells wrote A Modern Utopia (1905), but failed in his attempt to challenge the bureaucratic, reformist outlook of the Society's leaders such as Bernard Shaw (a lifelong friend and rival) and Beatrice Webb. Well's Edwardian scientific romances such as The Food of the Gods (1904) and The War in the Air (1908), though full of humorous touches, are propagandist in intent. In other ‘future war’ stories of this period he predicted the tank and the atomic bomb.

Success as an author brought about great changes in his personal life. Ill-health had forced him to leave London for the Kent coast in 1898, but in the long run the only legacy of his footballing injury was the diabetes that affected him in old age. He commissioned a house, Spade House, overlooking the English Channel at Sandgate, from the architect C. F. A. Voysey, and here his and Jane's two sons were born – George Philip or ‘Gip’, who became a zoology professor and collaborated with his father and Julian Huxley on the biology encyclopedia The Science of Life (1930), and Frank, who worked in the film industry. Wells gave generous support to his parents and to his eldest brother, who was a fellow-fugitive from the drapery trade. Increasingly, however, he looked for emotional fulfilment outside the family, and his sexual affairs became notorious. He had a daughter in 1909 with Amber Reeves, a leading young Fabian economist, and in 1914 the novelist and critic Rebecca West gave birth to his son Anthony West, whose troubled childhood would later be reflected in his own novel Heritage (1955) and in his biography of his father.

As Wells's personal life became the gossip of literary London, his roles as imaginative writer and political journalist or prophet came increasingly into conflict. Ann Veronica (1909) was an example of topical, controversial fiction, dramatizing and commenting on such issues as women's rights, sexual equality and contemporary morals. It was the first of Wells's ‘discussion novels’ in which his personal relationships were often very thinly disguised. His later fiction takes a great variety of forms, but it all belongs to the broad category of the novel of ideas. At one extreme is the realistic reporting of Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) – still valuable and unique as a portrayal of the English ‘home front’ in the First World War – while at the other extreme are brief fables such as The Undying Fire (1919) and The Croquet Player (1936), political allegories about world events each cast in the form of a prophetic dialogue.

Wells was by no means an experimental novelist like his younger contemporaries James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but he was often technically innovative, and in some of his books the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction begin to break down. Sometimes he would take a classic from an earlier, pre-modern epoch as his literary model: A Modern Utopia (1905), for example, refers back to Sir Thomas More's Utopia and Plato's Republic. His bestselling historical works The Outline of History (1920) and A Short History of the World (1922) break with historical conventions by looking forward to the next stage in history. These works were written in order to draw the lessons of the First World War and to ensure that, if possible, its carnage would never be repeated; Wells saw history as a ‘race between education and catastrophe’. The same concerns led to his future-history novel The Shape of Things to Come (1933), later rewritten for the cinema as Things to Come, an epic science-fiction film produced in 1936 by Alexander Korda. Both novel and film contain dire warnings about the inevitable outbreak and disastrous consequences of the Second World War.

By the 1920s, Wells was not only a famous author but a public figure whose name was rarely out of the newspapers. He briefly worked for the Ministry of Propaganda in 1918, producing a memorandum on war aims which anticipated the setting-up of the League of Nations. In 1922 and 1923 he stood for Parliament as a Labour candidate. He sought to influence world leaders, including two US presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. His meeting with Lenin in the Kremlin in 1920 and his interview in 1934 with Lenin's successor Josef Stalin were publicized all over the world. His high-pitched, piping voice was often heard on BBC radio. In 1933 he was elected president of International PEN, the writers' organization campaigning for intellectual freedom. In the same year his books were publicly burnt by the Nazis in Berlin, and he was banned from visiting Fascist Italy. His ideas strongly influenced the Pan-European Union, the pressure group advocating European unity between the wars.

But Wells became convinced that nothing less than global unity was needed if humanity was not to destroy itself. In The Open Conspiracy (1928) and other books he outlined his theories of world citizenship and world government. As the Second World War drew nearer he felt that his mission had been a failure and his warnings had gone unheeded. His last great campaign, for which he tried to obtain international support, was for human rights. The proposal set out in his Penguin Special The Rights of Man (1940) helped to bring about the United Nations declaration of 1948. He spent the war years at his house in Hanover Terrace, Regent's Park, and was awarded a D.Sc. by London University in 1943. His last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), was a despairing, pessimistic work, even bleaker in its prospects for mankind than The Time Machine fifty years earlier. He died at Hanover Terrace on 13 August 1946. He was restless and tireless to the end, a prophet eternally dissatisfied with himself and with humanity. ‘Some day’, he had written in a whimsical ‘Auto-Obituary’ three years earlier, ‘I shall write a book, a real book.’ He had published over fifty works of fiction and, in total, some 150 books and pamphlets.

Patrick Parrinder

Introduction

(New readers are advised that this Introduction makes the details of the plot explicit.)

THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON?

For The First Men in the Moon, a book deep-structured with irony and satire, not even the title is innocent. As readers we have to double-take from the first moment – surely that ‘in’ should be ‘on’? A brief search online shows how many people, even those flogging merchandise based on the novel, still ‘correct’ the title to the more intuitive, and wrong, ‘The First Men on the Moon’.

With that counterintuitive preposition ‘in’, Wells propagates the sense that there is something really new about his story, however many people may have been on the moon before. What makes this so cheeky is that his was far from the first book to propose men voyaging to the interior of the moon, as even his own characters point out. ‘Kepler, with his subvolvani, was right after all,’ says Cavor, the scientist whose invention transports him and the narrator Bedford (who almost certainly has no idea what his companion is talking about). As long ago as 1634, the astronomer Johannes Kepler had posited, in his posthumous Somnium (dream), a human visitor to the ‘subvolvani’ – the moon-dwellers – who live in caves.

Before Wells, nineteenth-century writers had revived this notion of troglodytic moon-dwellers. It is impossible to say whether Wells was familiar with these particular works, but there is no doubt that he was conscious of the tradition of lunar literature (a tradition invaluably examined in Marjorie Hope Nicolson's 1949 book Voyages to the Moon).

A chronology of moon-voyage stories stretches back nearly two thousand years, to the second century AD, when Lucian of Samosata's facetiously entitled True Story got his hero to the moon by waterspout. But it was in the seventeenth century, as astronomy changed lunar speculation to lunar observation, that works set on earth's now-observable neighbour began to proliferate. This was when Kepler dreamed, and other dreams followed.

For the next two hundred years, these stories were of course informed by their predecessor texts, and by the science of their times. Even a playful farce like Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon (1687) explicitly refers to Lucian and other early moon stories, features Kepler himself as a lunar emissary, and is predicated on cutting-edge inductive astronomy. ‘Wonders!’ Behn's Scaramouche says at sight of the moon-dwellers. ‘[H]aste to the old Gallery, whence, with the help of your Telescope, you may discover all.’

With the advances of the nineteenth century, though, it was these very telescopes that showed the moon's airless, waterless state, and denuded it of imagined inhabitants. While there were works depicting this lifeless moonrock, some writers ignored the proven barrenness. But whether they populated the moon of their imaginings or not, with the burgeoning of early modern science the nineteenth-century writers were increasingly concerned with methodology, with the specifics of how a lunar journey might be effected. History of a Voyage to the Moon (1864), for example, by the pseudonymous ‘Chrysostom Trueman’, is of interest less for its unimaginative extraterrestrials than for the ‘repellante’, the anti-gravity substance that propels its spacecraft.

In fact, gravophobic materia, that appealing bit of scientific nonsense that Wells appropriates, was used by several writers in the nineteenth century. This even led one, Eric Cromie, author of A Plunge into Space (1880), to engage in a brief spat with Wells over the similarities of their spherical, gravity-repelling spacecraft. Wells dismissed the charge with brevity and scorn, saying: ‘I have never heard of Mr Cromie nor of the book he attempts to advertise by insinuations of plagiarism on my part.’¹ Whether or not Wells knew Cromie's work, though, it is clear that the particularities of Wells's moon voyage were not new. The hollow moon, its low gravity (which features as far back as Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638)), even the propulsion and shape of his craft, had all been used before.

The question of tradition, of course, is not merely one of the story's furniture, but of the social, satirical resonances for which the setting is used. Wells triangulates between, on the one hand, the nineteenth-century moon stories with their more-or-less scientific treatment of astronomy, geography and transportation, and, on the other, an earlier tradition that used the moon as a setting for societies utopian, dystopian, satirical, comedic or polemical to make points about our own.

SCIENCE, FICTION AND SCIENCE FICTION

Extraterrestrial contes philosophiques (philosophical tales) were not by any means all moon-bound (arguably the locus classicus of the genre, Voltaire's Micromégas (1752), features travellers from Sirius and Saturn), but plenty were. The later focus on putatively scientific vehicles and journeys had rendered this tradition somewhat less fashionable, but Wells's genius was to invigorate it – The First Men in the Moon is satire, in which the lunar setting is ground for social speculation and investigation, or it is nothing – while staying true to the rationalist spirit of late-1800s science fiction. It was perhaps this tendency to temper the scientific with the philosophic and narrative that set Wells so apart from that other giant of the genre, to whom he is often compared, Jules Verne.

Verne and Wells are generally considered the founding fathers of science fiction, but their differences are more marked than their similarities. Very distinct methods and philosophies are clear in the ways Wells and Verne told their moon stories. Born forty years before Wells and not so directly touched by fin-de-siècle angst, of a more secure middle-class social background, Verne tends to write with a simpler moral compass. Though by no means so crassly bourgeois in outlook that he is incapable of conceptualizing social or philosophical conflict (his extraordinary character Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), an Indian prince and self-made exile from the iniquities of British rule, proves that), Verne's ultimately conservative/optimistic view of the march of history can lead him to a plodding focus on supposedly ‘real’ science.

For Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865), the rigorous ‘scientific rationality’ of his extrapolations is key, as in the extended – and dull – technical descriptions. For Wells, it was the adventures on the moon itself that were important. The science perhaps had to be plausible, but was subordinated to that narrative end.

This exercised Verne. ‘He invents’ the Frenchman announced disapprovingly about Wells. ‘I make use of physics…. I go to the moon in a cannonball, discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to Mars [sic] in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. Ça c'est très jolie, but show me this metal. Let him produce it.’²

Verne is quite right, though literarily purblind. Wells is not so concerned with the close examination and representation of engineering and physics, because for him it was more important as a writer to create something très jolie – after all, that dismissed ‘prettiness’ is affect, satire and vision. Wells himself claimed that, with the exception of the anti-gravity metal Cavorite, there is no impossibility in the book, but one senses in that special pleading; not that it is necessarily untrue, but that it was not the point. Wells even seems to teasingly remind Verne that what they both create is not science: when Bedford vaguely remembers ‘Jules Verne's apparatus in A Trip to the Moon’, he is not understood, because ‘Cavor was not a reader of fiction’.

Wells had a tendency to posit one big impossibility, which he would argue with specious pseudo-scientific (an adjective he dismissed as ‘imbecile’) seriousness, and then to get on with the job of telling stories, and more. Defending himself against Verne, he argued that through his method had emerged something ‘one might regard as a new system of ideas – “thought”’.³ Not only narrative, but – to quote a popular definition of science fiction – the literature of ideas.

In comparison to the sometimes lumpen ‘realism’ of Verne, Wells developed a theory of how the writer of ‘scientific romances’ should not subordinate his or her imaginings to the actually possible. ‘For the writer of fantastic stories to help the reader to play the game properly, he must help him in every possible unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis. He must trick him into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds.’⁴ Verne clearly could not domesticate Cavorite, and the fault was his. Had Wells obeyed Verne's strictures about the possible, not only would we have no First Men, we would likely have no Invisible Man, no Time Machine, and we would be incomparably poorer.

Wells's theory of plausible, rather than narrowly possible, extrapolation is what makes him such a seminal figure of science fiction. Science fiction is not, whatever its advocates may sometimes claim, ‘about’ science any more than it is ‘about’ the future. It is, like any worthwhile literature, ‘about’ now, using a technique of rationalized (rather than free-for-all) alienation from the everyday to structure its narratives and investigate the world. Science and futurology are invaluable modes for it to do this, but if they become the end, rather than the means, the result is often pedestrian fiction that, ironically, is far more likely to date. Verne's moon-journey science is wrong: so is Wells's. But nobody cares when reading the Wells, because that is not what the book is for. Wells knew that what would later be called science fiction requires not informed belief, but a trusting suspension-of-disbelief – an integration of plausibility and narrative, as well as, at its best, a sense of the marvellous.

In breaking the straitjacket of ‘real’ science to write First Men as science fiction, Wells has the aesthetic space to develop functions of the genre that are harder for Verne. One is the freedom to enjoy the weird of his creations. Most of the hitherto-imagined inhabitants of the moon were broadly human, perhaps a little shrunk or differently dressed. By contrast Wells envisaged a dominant race of vastly various insectoid shapes, all described with gusto and precision, and a succulent ecosystem of alien plants, fat behemoth mooncalves (Wells's literalizing of ‘mooncalf’, the antique term for a misshapen, freakish thing, is a lovely touch), and hydra-like coiling monstrosities of the sea (prefiguring those two idiot-savant poets of the tentacular, H. P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson).

The sheer vividness bespeaks not only extraordinary invention, but Wells's revelling in that invention. The literature of the fantastic is a sprawling field, which encompasses generic science fiction, fantasy and horror, as well as utopian/dystopian speculations and philosophical ruminations by writers not associated with genre at all: a key divider between these various fuzzy sets is their relationship to the fantastic they all use. The unabashed indulgence of the unreal of science fiction, so clear in Wells's gusto, distinguishes the fluency and facility of the best of the genre and its antecedents from the ‘fabulations’ sometimes attempted by those constrained by higher brows. When ‘mainstream’ writers dip their toes into the fantastic, they often do so with the anxiety of seriousness, keen to stress that their inventions are really ‘about’ other, meaningful things (this can lead to the rather stilted, arch fairy-tale register of some second- and third-generation ‘magic realism’, for example).

By contrast, those firmly within the fantastic tradition know that the unreal will always be read metaphorically – what is the human mind but an engine to metaphorize and process metaphors intended and found? – but that there is also pleasure in its literalism. In Swift, for example, Gulliver's journey to Brobdingnag (a major influence on Cavor's discussions with the Grand Lunar) clearly casts a remorseless light on Swift's own society; it also, however, features a sword fight with a giant wasp, a passage the enjoyment of which depends on the specific uncanny/estranging impact of literalizing the impossible: simply, it is a great, weird idea. Weirdness is good to think with, and is also its own end.

For his part, Wells does not so carefully delineate the insectan morphology of the Selenites only for the purposes of satire, but because – as in his other books his Martians, his vivisected beast-men, his Morlocks show – Wells the biologist was, like many excellent science-fiction writers, a grotesquophile. The pleasure he took in his oddities, his unpretentious relationship to (serial) fiction, his unerring sense of the importance of the pace of an adventure story combine to make The First Men in the Moon something one could call proto-pulp, which prefigures the verve of the (occasionally viscerally histrionic) literature later associated with pulp journals such as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. Nowhere is this more evident than in the unsurpassed pulp poetry of Chapter 17's title: ‘The Fight in the Cave of the Moon Butchers’.

The surrender to the weird can be part of what is sometimes called science fiction's ‘sense of wonder’. This abused and controversial, but not entirely useless, term expresses, however elusively, a groping for the numinous that is characteristic of the field, and makes even some otherwise pedestrian science fiction an heir to visionary traditions. In First Men the numinous is found in the very corporeal weird itself.

Its first intrusion is the lunar dawn, with its uncanny ‘landslip in the thawing air’, and irruption of fabulous life. Bedford and Cavor are suddenly prelapsarian, in a garden so fantastic even Bedford's wizened soul is moved to lush description of ‘bristling spikes that swayed with the vigour of their growing’. ‘It was like a miracle,’ Bedford uncharacteristically observes, and demands that we ‘Imagine it! Imagine that dawn!’ How can we not, when it has been so vividly and beautifully rendered? This is the oneiric and mystical in the literal fantastic: a numinous of the weird that Verne could never achieve.

The other, more fully developed moment of mysticism occurs when the execrable Bedford, having abandoned his companion, travels back through space alone towards the earth. As the title to Chapter 20, ‘Mr Bedford in Infinite Space’, makes clear, the vision is here an effect of Bedford's loneliness in eternity. For modern science fiction to locate its wonder in ‘the vastness of space’ or some other overdetermined pornography of the infinite would be at best gauche. However, Wells predates such cliché: and, what is more, this is a polemical enlightenment.

Some commentators have unconvincingly described Bedford as a ‘lovable rogue’. In fact, he is bereft of redeeming qualities, and in the clichéd distinction such laughter as he provokes is entirely at, not with, him. Wells writes Bedford without any of the humanity or sympathy with which he depicts other ‘middling sorts’, even sometimes risible or pathetic figures such as Mr Polly. Wells underlines his critique of Bedford with this, the character's one moment of perspicacity.

Bedford is a miserable, unwilling Bodhisattva. ‘I looked down on Bedford as a trivial incidental thing…. I saw him not only as an ass, but as the son of many generations of asses.’ The use of ‘ass’ ensures that the comedy is not lost, but this is a true and bitter realization for our protagonist. After a long epistemological battle, Bedford is able to some extent to anchor himself back in crassness by reading ‘convincingly realistic’ advertisements from his magazine; he eschews knowledge of self, chooses to define himself instead through the comfort of banal and two-bit commerce. ‘I regret that something of that period of lucidity still hangs about me,’ he says: his abiding sadness is not what he is, but that he knows what he is.

Here, there is no awkward negotiation between the science fiction and the satire – it is the one that allows the other. Bedford's lonely illumination is a link that joins Wells's numinous, itself adjoined to his science-fictional grotesquerie, to his social satire and critique. Human society is not left looking very good in the cold light of the moon.

CAPITALISM, IMPERIALISM AND GOLD

Both First Men and Verne's From the Earth to the Moon are texts that make satirical and polemical points, but it is telling how differently the two writers' strategies allow them to develop this social comment. In Verne's novel, the Gun Club of Baltimore – an absurd gathering of gung-ho war amputees and the maimed – lament the onset of peace, hoping for the ‘joyous incident’ of battle. The satire is crucial to the story: it is, though, heavy-handed, and not entirely comfortable. Verne's ‘realism’ means that his gunshot astronauts cannot land on the moon itself, but can only circle it and catch tantalizing glances before returning to earth. There is, then, no comparative setting to defamiliarize and make strange our everyday, so Verne's satirical points can only be made by pantomime exaggeration.

By contrast (and despite Wells's later claims that the seed of the story was Cavorite, with the moon and Selenites later additions), in First Men the characters seem always to have been going to walk on the moon's surface, precisely because our own world can be counterposed to what is found there. The social commentary, though not always subtle, is effected by comparison, rather than Verne's exaggeration. The moon as a setting, for Wells, is foil to earth's follies, though it is swiftly clear that Wells is too sophisticated a writer to fall into the simplicities of ‘moon good, earth bad’. First Men is a satire and a comedy that is in places broad, but it is a complex and troubled one.

Wells was a socialist, of a peculiar, elitist kind, and unsurprisingly capitalism and imperialism are the novel's particular targets. Bedford is a money-grubbing vulgarian, not so much a representative of ‘big capital’ as of the venal petty bourgeoisie, constantly and crassly on the make, unconcerned by any considerations other than the narrowly financial, and possessing an (almost) unshakeable self-righteousness. When first we meet him he is bankrupt, but still convinced of his business acumen, and is fleeing a creditor whose entirely reasonable desire to regain his or her money Bedford recasts as ‘malignant’. He is writing a play not out of any artistic desire, but merely because it beats being a clerk.

We are given to understand early on how Bedford's crude money-driven instrumentalism makes him prone, like capitalism itself, to treat people as things. When first he meets Cavor, he bullies him and talks to him with the sole intention of turning him into a character in the play we know is only intended to make a fortune. For Bedford, people are instantly subordinate to his profit motive. When the trip to the moon is mooted, he simply does not see the point, until he conceives of it as a commercial opportunity.

Concomitant with the single-mindedness of the capitalist-venal comes his philistinism and his aggression. For Wells, this kind of capitalism is not only a social, but a psychic disease. When Bedford sees Cavor's Works of Shakespeare, he allows that the playwright ‘knew a little’; for himself, he has forgotten to bring any reading materials, so, rather than Shakespeare, he settles into the magazines andTit-Bits and Lloyds' News (these were not dissimilar to the Cosmopolitan magazine in which First Men was serialized: Wells was not averse to biting hands that feed).

The constraint of money is stressed in one of the most cheerfully unsubtle pieces of symbolism in the book. Shackled by the Selenites, it takes Bedford some time to realize that he is wearing chains of gold. Bedford has nothing to lose but his chains, but what chains they are.

What convinces Bedford to support the moonshot is his recollection of ‘the old Spanish monopoly in American gold’. Almost at the metal's first mention, then, it renders his petty capitalist dreams grandiose and imperial. This is spelt out. ‘This is tremendous!’ he shouts. ‘This is Imperial!’ Later, not only is Bedford literally weighed down and hobbled by gold, but it is gold ‘ttwisted around [his] fist’ which takes the book's first Selenite life, in a shocking act, and starts Bedford's murderous imperialist rampage.

By 1901, when The First Men in the Moon appeared, the realities of imperial conquest were more and more widely known. In 1899 there had been bloody wars in Rhodesia; in 1900–1901 a savage guerrilla war was continuing between the US and Filipino nationalists; the Boer War had commenced in 1899, with the interventions of, among others, Cecil Rhodes; most famously, perhaps, Belgium's bestial depredations in the Congo were the cause of increasing concern. This awareness is reflected in the appearance of more and more fictions of colonial anxiety.

Perhaps the ne plus ultra of the genre, Conrad's Heart of Darkness was published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899, and a plethora of other works was published in the decade or so either side of the turn of the twentieth century that, to more or less conscious extents, articulated imperialism as a neurosis, a guilt of the times, or, like Kipling's ‘Gunga Din’ (1890), protested too much and overcompensated with their loyal punka-wallahs and native scouts. The literature of the fantastic often expressed this anxiety in particularly lurid form, ranging from the (rare) rugged anti-imperialism of George Griffith's The Angel of the Revolution (1892), through M. P. Shiels's Sinophobic The Yellow Danger (1889), to the macho angstlaying of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and H. Rider Haggard's touchingly white-hunter-loyal Zulu Umslopogaas (whose first appearance was in a novel of 1887).

Wells's critique of imperialism recurs throughout his work. Most obviously, in War of the Worlds, which explicitly refers to the genocide of the native Tasmanians by European immigrants, he writes Britain as the victim of a savage and unstoppable outside invader – a cosmic ‘How would you like it?’ In The First Men in the Moon, imperialism is recast with cruel humour as a cack-handed farrago of greed, idiocy and violence.

Not only is Bedford's aureate motivation for the voyage continually stressed, his lack of interest in Selenite society and the speed with which he tips over into extraordinarily bloody and ill-planned escapades make the book a comedy of terrors. Intoxicated on lunar fungus, Bedford declaims, ‘We must annex this moon… There must be no shilly-shally. This is part of the White Man's Burden,’ (that last phrase deliberately recalling Kipling's poetic exhortation to American colonialism and the US atrocities that followed) and promptly hiccups. This is imperialism as drunken, rolling stupidity: but stupidity, Wells stresses, drenched in blood.

Bedford's first idea for how to make Cavor's lunar voyage worthwhile is telling: ‘One might make a book of it perhaps.’ This he does, and it is this book – in all its self-justifying disingenuousness – that we read. In a brilliant strategy, Wells ensures that the book is the gripping story of besieged Englishmen effecting a dangerous and spectacular escape from a community of savages hunting them, and is simultaneously – as are all such violent lullabies, from Zulu to John Carter of Mars to Black Hawk Down – an imperialist lie. In critiquing imperialism with a ripping yarn, Wells also critiques such yarns through the optic of imperialism.

THE LIMITS OF FABIANISM

Despite the stress on Bedford's many and symbolic flaws, it would be too easy and pat to have Cavor himself represent a human(e) alternative. He is less obviously objectionable: he is a man driven by scientific curiosity, the desire to expand intellectual horizons, which is a welcome contrast to Bedford's obsessive greed. However, that very intellectualism is itself the source of an attitude that is ultimately equally dehumanizing.

When Cavor believes that his three assistants have been killed as a result of his researches, he briefly calls them ‘three martyrs’, but is quite unconcerned. Where Bedford is capitalism (of an unsuccessful and petty, then later an imperialist) stripe, Cavor is rationalism of an abstract and abstracting stripe. It is precisely the fact that his search is ‘for knowledge’ rather than ‘for knowledge for society’ that makes him just as instrumentalist towards others as Bedford. It is not only commerce but science, Wells implies, which untethered from social reality reifies human beings with incidental cruelty.

At the end of the book, Bedford recounts the messages that Cavor has sent from the moon (interrupting them to plead his own case when he does not like his erstwhile companion's tone). The story emerges of Cavor's discussions with the Selen-ites Phi-oo and Tsi-puff (a slip on Wells's part, these names are clearly intended to suggest an emissary in the court of an ‘Oriental’ Emperor, but are Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque, more reminiscent of The Mikado's Pooh-Bah and Pish-Tush than of anything more dignified or alien). When at last Cavor is ushered into the presence of the extraordinary distended-brained Grand Lunar, his descriptions of earth clearly mimic Gulliver's to the King of Brobdingnag: in what he intends to be generous depictions of humanity's actions, our society's politics and war are laid bare as the savageries they are.

They are unfavourably counterposed to the Selenites' rational, ordered system, in a clear piece of finger-wagging by Wells, whose statist, rationalist and ordering socialism finds a partial expression in the lunar system. However, there is something discomforting about this utopia of order. It is as oppressive as Cavor's own earlier ‘rationality’. Nowhere is this more vividly expressed than in his visit to a Selenite nursery. Having admired the variety of physical forms the Selenites take to perform their allotted task with precision, Cavor sees the process by which such distinctions are achieved.

‘… I came upon a number of young Selenites, confined in jars from which only the forelimbs 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…’ Cavor is loath to admit it, but such ‘glimpses of the educational methods’ affect him ‘disagreeably’.

The repetition of the term ‘education’ for this brutal stunting drives the satire home. Brilliantly, this satire is aimed at Wells's own society and simultaneously at a supposed ‘rational’ alternative. It is both socialist critique and socialist soul-searching, operating at once to problematize instrumentalism and class-engineering such as underpins much so-called education under capitalism, and also to raise the question, is this the apotheosis of the planned alternative? This latter is more troubling for Wells, as his own political theory, expressed in essays such as Mankind in the Making (1903) and novels like The World Set Free (1914), tended towards what he described as ‘outright world socialism, scientifically planned and directed’. If this is the end result of the tendencies in his project, then the ‘rational planning’ he espouses is by no means a straightforward good.

Wells spent five years in the Fabian Society, the influential moderate socialist group founded in 1884 to campaign for sedate and gradual change, and committed to progressive ideas such as the very ‘rational planning’ that attracted Wells. Though he left in 1908 and was always a more interesting political thinker than many of the snobbish, pedestrian evolutionary socialists in that organization, Wells's own political schemes always retained something of the Fabian notion of state-socialism. Evident in The First Men in the Moon is the extent to which Wells's vision was shot through with a tremendous anxiety about its own predicates. He is agonized by an understanding that Fabianoid thinking, supposedly built on rationality itself, was in fact constructed only on a narrow, psychically parochial form of instrumental rationality. This limited and limiting ‘rationality’ is indelibly stained by the irrationalities of the very capitalism which Fabianism tells off, but ultimately presumes.

For a thinker of any rigour, that capitalism as a system and the stunted forms of ‘rationality’ that inform it lead to war, starvation and exploitation as inevitably as to advances and enlightenment could not ultimately be explained away as pathologies. This fundamentally undermined a politics predicated on the ineluctable march of reason, as Wells uneasily saw. Wells suffers the crisis of too-intelligent Fabianism.

The greatest expression of this anxiety came in 1896 in Wells's masterpiece, The Island of Doctor Moreau, an immanent critique of this very ‘rationality’ and its claims to emanci-patory teleology that Wells espoused. In First Men, Wells plays the same anxiety to wrongfoot the reader. The welling up of that ambivalence to ‘rational planning’ makes the satire switchback dizzyingly. Without ever changing its substance, the Selenite society goes from being the utopian foil to our absurdities to being our horizon, the threat of where we are heading. This superb manoeuvre is a testimony not only to Wells's skill, but to the nightmare he could not shake: the doubling-back is not a cheat, but an expression of the contradictions in the very categories of Wells's thought.

The complexities of the satire that makes First Men more than a simplistic utopia or a heavy-handed ‘warning’ are, then, the product of Wells's inability to solve his political conundrum. The terrible consciousness of that failure casts a darkness over the book's ending. The last lines are suddenly and frighteningly violent: like the return of the repressed, the Selenites come for Cavor, we must assume to kill him, as he scrabbles desperately to send a last message. Learning the truth about us has made the Selenites what Bedford had wrongly held them to be. We create our own bad consciences, our own ‘murderous savage’. ‘Rationality’, in its mooncalf modern form, not only cannot be a force for emancipation, but always contains its own opposite, the opposite that comes for Cavor.

In Moreau, the collapse of ‘rationality’ is expressed most powerfully in the collapse of language, first into rote-learned chanted hymns and then into the grunts of beasts. That same collapse occurs in First Men, though in a subtler way. Cavor's messages continually break down into snatches through the limits of the transmission mechanism: the rational science is no match for the unknowable – the a-rational – of space, and language struggles to retain integrity. The last words Cavor sends are an attempt to impart the secret knowledge of Cavorite itself. And as the door (we imagine) is broken down and the monsters of the dream of our reason come for him, he types finally ‘Cavorite made as follows: take’, then ‘uless’, then is silent. Bedford muses hopelessly on the meaning of that last, presumably mistyped word – though we know it is probably a contraction of ‘useless’, it remains ultimately opaque.

‘Uless’, seemingly the secret of Cavorite itself, the key to knowledge, is collapsed language. At the moment language, the conduit for rationality, should be transmitting the most rational thing of all, it degrades. For Wells there is no worse horror than this, and it is not surprising that the comedy of the book evaporates in those last pages.

We don't see the death of Cavor. The death of language, though – of rationality itself – occurs before us, on the very page, as we read ‘uless’. Ultimately, all the concrete horrors of politics and economics that Wells scourges in the novel – venality, philistinism, capitalism and imperialism – are manifestations of the terrible autocannibalizing rationality that Wells cannot stop hoping in, but that he knows will fail, that always-already fails.

China Miéville

NOTES

1. Arthur C. Clarke's Introduction to The First Men in the Moon in ‘SF Masterworks’ (London: Gollancz, 2001), p. ix.

2. Robert H. Sherard, ‘Jules Verne Re-visited’, T. P.'s Weekly, 9 October 1903.

3. James Gunn, The Science of Science-Fiction Writing (London: Scarecrow, 2000.

4. Gunn, The Science of Science-Fiction Writing.

Further Reading

The most vivid and memorable account of Wells's life and times is his own Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., London: Gollancz and Cresset Press, 1934). It has been reprinted several times. A ‘postscript’ containing the previously suppressed narrative of his sexual liaisons was published as H. G. Wells in Love, edited by his son G. P. Wells (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). His more recent biographers draw on this material, as well as on the large body of letters and personal papers archived at the University of Illinois and elsewhere. The fullest and most scholarly biographies are The Time Traveller by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie (2nd edn, London: Hogarth Press, 1987) and H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal by David C. Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). Smith has also edited a generous selection of Wells's Correspondence (4 vols., London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998). Another highly readable, if controversial and idiosyncratic, biography is H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life (London: Hutchinson, 1984) by Wells's son Anthony West. Michael Foot's H. G.: The History of Mr Wells (London and New York: Doubleday, 1995) is enlivened by its author's personal knowledge of Wells and his circle.

Two illuminating general interpretations of Wells and his writings are Michael Draper's H. G. Wells (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987) and Brian Murray's H. G. Wells (New York: Continuum, 1990). Both are introductory in scope, but Draper's approach is critical and philosophical, while Murray packs a remarkable amount of biographical and historical detail into a short space. John Hammond's An H. G. Wells Companion (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979) and H. G. Wells (Harlow and London: Longman, 2001) combine criticism with useful contextual material. H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, edited by Patrick Parrinder (London: Routledge, 1972), is a collection of reviews and essays of Wells published during his lifetime. A number of specialized critical and scholarly studies of Wells concentrate on his scientific romances. These include Bernard Bergonzi's pioneering study of The Early H. G. Wells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); John Huntington, The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); and Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995). Peter Kemp's H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982) offers a lively and, at times, lurid tracing of Wells's ‘biological themes and imaginative obsessions’, while Roslynn D. Haynes's H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980) surveys his use of scientific ideas. W. Warren Wagar, H. G. Wells and the World State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961) and John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) are studies of his political thought and his schemes for world government. John S. Partington has also edited The Wellsian (The Netherlands: Equilibris, 2003), a selection of essays from the H. G. Wells Society's annual critical journal of the same name. The American branch of the Wells Society maintains a highly informative website at http://hgwellsusa. 5 omegs.com

P.P.

Note on the Text

H. G. Wells began writing The First Men in the Moon in late 1898 or early 1899. In August 1898 he spent a month convalescing at New Romney in Kent after being taken ill during a cycling holiday, and a month later he moved a few miles away to Sandgate, where he would live for the next eleven years. Lympne, where the opening chapters of The First Men in the Moon are set, is between New Romney and Sandgate. The germ of Wells's new scientific romance was apparently the character of Cavor, the eccentric scientist. Two completed ‘Cavor stories’ were finished by March 1899, and Wells started to look for publishers for an illustrated serial based on five linked stories. In June he sought scientific advice about the effects of lunar gravity from his friend Richard Gregory, later the editor of Nature. The concluding part of the serial (Chapters 19 to 26 in the final version) was greatly revised and expanded in the summer of 1900. Serial publication began in the Strand Magazine, owned by Sir George Newnes, and in the New York Cosmopolitan Magazine in November. The shorter Cosmopolitan version concluded in June 1901, while the Strand serial ran until August.

Wells added new material to several chapters for the book versions published in November 1901 by Newnes (London) and Bowen-Merrill (Indianapolis). There are numerous discrepancies between the Newnes edition, which Wells had further revised in page proof, and Bowen-Merrill. Nevertheless, the Bowen-Merrill edition, corrected and slightly revised, became the copy-text for Volume VI of the Atlantic Edition of The Works of H. G. Wells (London: T. Fisher Unwin, and New York: Scribner's, 1924). The Newnes text was frequently reissued under different imprints during Wells's lifetime and beyond.

The Atlantic Edition, printed in the United States and published simultaneously in London and New York, was intended to provide definitive texts of Wells's works. In the case of The First Men in the Moon there are numerous stylistic improvements; many of these, however, are inherited from Bowen-Merrill and seem to be the products of scrupulous American copy-editing rather than of Wells's own hand. At the same time, Wells's last-minute revisions to the Newnes text do not appear in the Atlantic version.

The present edition uses the Atlantic edition as copy-text (subject to the modifications set out below); but frequently I have preferred readings from the Newnes line of texts. A whole page of the Strand serial version, including the beginning of Chapter 7(‘Sunrise on the Moon’) was dropped from Bowen-Merrill and subsequently from the Atlantic text, apparently due to an oversight, and I have restored this material and renumbered the subsequent chapters. There are also significant divergences between the Newnes and Atlantic texts in the descriptive passages of Chapter 24 (‘The Natural History of the Selenites’). Here I have generally followed the Atlantic edition or its successor the Essex edition (London: Ernest Benn, 1927). The figure for the moon's mass in proportion to the earth's in Chapter 9 (one-eightieth, not one-eighth as in all previous editions) is taken from a handwritten correction in Wells's own copy of the Atlantic text.

The Atlantic texts were supposedly printed in accordance with British spelling conventions, but in practice many examples of American usage inherited from the US copy-texts were left unaltered. In the present edition, using the Newnes line of text as a guide, I have sought to remove all features that do not reflect Wells's own habitual style: thus ‘dumfounded’ has been changed to ‘dumbfounded’, ‘farther’ to ‘further’, ‘leaped’ to ‘leapt’, ‘veranda’ to ‘verandah’, ‘whiskey’ to ‘whisky’, etc., in accordance with Newnes. The hyphenation of some 40 words has been anglicized and modernized (e.g. ‘countryside’ for ‘country-side’, ‘cast iron’ for ‘cast-iron’), and the words ‘any one’ and ‘some one’have been joined together to reflect modern practice. Changes in punctuation to achieve greater clarity include the restoration of some 65 commas found in the Newnes line of texts, and the capitalization of ‘New’ in ‘New Romney’ (p. 159). The other substantive changes are listed below.

Housestyling of punctuation and spelling has also been implemented to make the text more accessible to the reader: single quotation marks (for doubles) with doubles inside singles as needed; end punctuation placed outside end quotation marks when appropriate; spaced N-dashes (for the heavier, longer M-dash) and M-dashes (for the double-length 2M-dash); ‘ize’ spellings (e.g. recognize, not recognise), and acknowledgements and judgement, not acknowledgments and judgment; no full stop after personal titles (Dr, Mr, Mrs) or chapter titles, which may not follow the capitalization of the copy-text.

SOURCES OF SUBSTANTIVE EMENDATIONS

(i) The following readings from the Newnes line of texts have been adopted:

[Since the above emendation includes the beginning of Newnes Chapter 7, ‘Sunrise on the Moon’, subsequent chapters have been renumbered.]

(ii) ‘Eighth’ (p. 61) has been emended to ‘eightieth’ following a handwritten correction in Wells's copy of the Atlantic text.

(iii) The Atlantic text of the third paragraph of Chapter 24 was further emended by Wells in the Essex edition, which in other respects is an inferior copy of the Atlantic.

SELECTED VARIANT READINGS

For the detail of the moon's mass and for his unfailing guidance through the intricacies of Wells's textual revisions, I am greatly indebted to David Lake, editor of the ‘World's Classics’ edition of The First Men in the Moon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). The account of the novel's genesis given above draws on J. R. Hammond, An H. G. Wells Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 34–5, and David C. Smith, ed., The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, 4 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), i, pp. 342–3, 361. The surviving manuscripts and proofs of The First Men in the Moon, together with Wells's own copy of the Atlantic edition, are in the Wells Collection at the Rare Book and Special Collections Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

P. P.

‘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.’¹

Contents

1 Mr Bedford Meets Mr Cavor at Lympne

2 The First Making of Cavorite

3 The Building of the Sphere

4 Inside the Sphere

5 The Journey to the Moon

6 The Landing on the Moon

7 Sunrise on the Moon

8 A Lunar Morning

9 Prospecting Begins

10 Lost Men in the Moon

11 The Mooncalf Pastures

12 The Selenite's Face

13 Mr Cavor Makes Some Suggestions

14 Experiments in Intercourse

15 The Giddy Bridge

16 Points of View

17 The Fight in the Cave of the Moon Butchers

18 In the Sunlight

19 Mr Bedford Alone

20 Mr Bedford in Infinite Space

21 Mr Bedford at Littlestone

22 The Astonishing Communication of Mr Julius Wendigee

23 An Abstract of the Six Messages First Received from Mr Cavor

24 The Natural History of the Selenites

25 The Grand Lunar

26 The Last Message Cavor Sent to the Earth

1

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 anyone. I fell into these things at a time when I thought myself removed from the slightest possibility of disturbing experiences. I had gone to Lympne¹ 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 cropper² in certain business enterprises. At the present moment, surrounded by all the circumstances of wealth, there is a luxury in admitting my extremity. I can even admit 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; 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 to 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 businessman I had always in those days had an idea that I was equal to writing a very good play. It is not, I believe, an uncommon persuasion. I knew there was 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-terre³ 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 Beeton⁴. And yet, you know, it had a flavour. I had a coffee-pot, a saucepan for eggs and one for potatoes, and a frying-pan for sausages and bacon. Such was the simple apparatus of my comfort. One can't 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 Sybaris⁵, but I have had worse times. I was a little sorry for the baker, who was a very decent man; but even for him I hoped.

Certainly if anyone 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 forever. It was the big port of England in Roman times, Portus Lemanis, 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 I! And where the port had been were the levels of the marsh, sweeping round in a broad curve to distant Dungeness⁶ and dotted here and there with tree clumps and the church towers of old mediaeval towns that are following Lemanis 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 Hastings⁷ 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.

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 as 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. Tonight for instance—’

‘Oh! tonight! 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. 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 recognize 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, zuzzooing 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.

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 disorganizes 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 of all the 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 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 playwriting. 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 workshed he had and of three assistants, originally jobbing carpenters whom he had trained. Now from the workshed to the patent office is clearly only one step. He invited me to see these 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, fertilizing idea – I don't wish 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, playwriting 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 such things, 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 comprehend 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 characterized 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 metalwork, 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 Röntgen⁸ rays there was so much talk about a year or so ago, or the electric waves of Marconi⁹, or gravitation. All these things, he said, radiate 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 Pearson¹⁰, 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, helium¹¹, 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?

Anyone with the merest germ of imagination will understand the extraordinary possibilities of such a substance, and will sympathize 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 sympathize 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 work at any one time after my visit to his house. My imagination had other things to do. There seemed no limit to the possibilities of the scheme; 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 businessman. 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 tomorrow.’

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 ‘tthe 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'là tout¹², 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 FRS¹³ and his portrait as a scientific worthy given away with Nature¹⁴, 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.

When I realized 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 impress him much as his mathematics had impressed 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 use 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 talked to just 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.

2

THE FIRST MAKING OF CAVORITE

But Cavor's fears were groundless so far as the actual making was concerned. On the fourteenth 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 sixty degrees Fahrenheit. But it chanced that, unknown to Cavor, dissension had arisen among the men 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 Hills¹, 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 blown 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 bluish shining substance rushed up towards the zenith. A large fragment of fencing came sailing past me, dropped edgewise, hit the ground and fell flat, and then the worst was over. The aerial commotion fell swiftly until it was merely a 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 recognize 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 exceedingly. ‘Gratulate me²,’ 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 each other.

‘Try to 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 this whirlwind. Happily this was incorrect. As soon as 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, managing at last to reach the shelter of as much roof as was left to me. For a space we sat in armchairs 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 escaped damage. The oil stove was still burning and I put on the water to boil again for tea. That prepared, I could turn to 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 objects from gravitating towards each other?’

‘Yes,’ said I. ‘Yes?’

‘Well, so soon as it reached a temperature of sixty degrees Fahrenheit 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 upwards 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 realize 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 countryside. 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 burden of practical considerations to my theorizing. 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 realized all you anticipate for it, we may set matters right with these people. 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 shall 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.

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 bunglow, as I have already explained, on a three years' 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 to 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 tartar³, 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 edgewise, 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.

3

THE BUILDING OF THE SPHERE

I remember very distinctly the occasion 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 into a flat tank with an overlap that held it down. When 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 dumpling¹.’

‘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 apparatus in A Trip to the Moon?’²

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 sure 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 was 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.’

I shook my head. ‘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 businessmen. 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 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 you 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 sanitorium. 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 preemption,’ came floating into my head – planetary rights of pre-emption. I recalled the old Spanish monopoly in American gold.³ It wasn't as if 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 acid⁴ 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, tired out. 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 Prague⁵, 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, à propos 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 Canterbury⁶. It was bright with creepers, and the landlady was a clean old woman who took my eye. I found I had just enough money to pay for my lodging with her. I decided to spend 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-about⁷ 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 brickmaking 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.

4

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 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 slippers 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.

‘What have you 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.¹ 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 realized 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 downwards with a force of countless tons. It lasted for an infinitesimal time.

But it stirred me to action. ‘Cavor!’ I said in 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 did not 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 earth 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 in 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 each other in silence. The transparent blackness of the glass behind him made him seem to be floating 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 lifted and held 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 to 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, exceedingly 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 anything 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.

5

THE JOURNEY TO THE MOON

Presently Cavor extinguished the light. He said we had not overmuch energy stored and what we had we must economize 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—’

There 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 seen the starry sky only 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 realize 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. On earth light falls from above or comes slanting down sidewise, 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 those 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 someone – who was interested in astronomy. It occurred to me that it would be odd if – my friend – chanced to be looking through a telescope and should chance to see us.’

‘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 landslips, 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, something able to 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° Centigrade, below the earthly freezing point. Whatever life there is must hibernate through that – and rise again each day.’

He mused. ‘One can imagine something wormlike,’ he said, ‘taking its air solid as an earthworm 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 disc 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 recognized the cloud-dimmed coastlines 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 matters settled themselves in my mind again, it seemed quite beyond question that the moon was ‘down’ 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; 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, at times eating, though without any keenness of appetite,* 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.

6

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 human eye had ever seen before, 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, hurtling 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 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; again 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 crosswise 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 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, 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 think neither 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.

7

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 upwards 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; 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, had 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, scarcely 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 for ever 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 were 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 each other. 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 upwards. A toppling crag of the melting stuff had splashed over us, buried us, and now it thinned and boiled away from 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 each other 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 each other 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 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.

8

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 realize the length of my insensibility.

We were no longer in a void. An atmosphere had risen 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-thirds 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 emphasized 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. 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 round 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.

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 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 red 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 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. 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 of 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 fleshliness and spikes. Conceive it all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earth seem watery and weak. And still amidst 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.

9

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 were 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 rarefied as to cause us grave injury. He reminded me of mountain sickness¹ 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 rarefied for us, and Cavor sat with a cylinder of compressed oxygen at hand to restore our pressure. We looked at each other in silence, and then at the fantastic vegetation that swayed and grew visibly and noiselessly without. And ever that shrill piping continued.

The 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 fingernails and the back of the throat grew on 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 operculum² 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 snow. He hesitated for a moment, then thrust himself forwards, dropped these intervening inches, and stood upon the untrodden soil of the moon.

As he stepped forwards 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.

Still 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 eightieth 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 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 or 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; 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 one 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 supposed. It seemed to take 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 up in the air as if I should never come down.

It was horrible and delightful, and as wild as a nightmare to go flying off in this fashion. I realized 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.

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 to the learner of cycling on earth at his first fall.

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 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, strange 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 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 kopje³, 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 Gargantuan⁴ 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 each other. 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?’

10

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 upwards 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 each other'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 recognizing 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 ground. 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, nor have changed more completely the quality of things about us. For this sound, rich, slow, and deliberate, seemed to us like 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 each other 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 if 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 skywards, the vague suggestions 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 as of 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 among the thickening stems without any 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 ground 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 attempt 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.

Picture 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 in vivid colour some novel shape 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!

11

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 Selenite¹ 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, 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. Turning about, we saw indistinctly through a crowd of swaying stems the mooncalf's shining sides and the long line of its back looming 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 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 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 his 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 driving these animated lumps of provender to their pasture, a Selenite came momentarily into view. 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 reached.

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 sloping surfaces of the rocks were thick with a speckled green plant, growing in dense, mossy clumps, upon which these creatures were browsing. At the sight of them we stopped on the margin of the reeds amidst which we were crawling, peering through 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 Smithfield² ox seem a model of agility. Their busy, writhing, chewing mouths, their closed eyes, together with the appetizing 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 similar in 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 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. My hand met nothing! I 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 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, illusive shapes moving about among those needle-point illuminations. We peered, amazed and incredulous, understanding so little that we could find no words to speak. 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,’ 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 of 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 the eighteen-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.

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.

‘Oh, 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!³ 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 as 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?’⁴

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 creashurso’ what we eat and drink.’⁵

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 coralline⁶ 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 colonization. ‘We must annex this moon,’ I said. ‘There must be no shilly-shally. This is part of the White Man's Burden⁷ Cavor – we are – hic – Satap – mean Satraps⁸! Nempire Cæsar⁹ never dreamt. B'in all the newspapers.¹⁰ 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 upon the moon. I involved myself in a rather difficult proof that the arrival of Columbus was, after all, beneficial to America. I found I had forgotten the line of argument I had intended to pursue, and continued to repeat ‘sim'lar 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 fungi – whether for missile purposes or not I do not know – and, heedless of the stabs of the bayonet shrub, 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.

Then suddenly, with a sort 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 covered with scratches and bruises, and our heads racked with pain.

12

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 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 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 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. ‘Oh, 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 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, 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 gro-tesque 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 that 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 did not. 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 bulging eyes at the side – in the silhouette I had supposed they were 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 stared 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!

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 Park¹!

It must have taken him like that.

Imagine 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 his 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. We were sitting with our backs to the queer, bluish light, peering at such a monster as Dürer² might have invented.

Cavor broke the silence, started to speak, went hoarse, and cleared his throat. Outside began a terrific bellowing, as of a mooncalf 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.

13

MR CAVOR MAKES SOME SUGGESTIONS

For a time neither of us spoke. To focus 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 each other in silence. I drummed with my fingers on the floor between my knees and ground 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 subvolvani, ¹ 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 are 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 mediaeval 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 are 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 were 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.² Unhappily, at that time it did not seem probable that it 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 sphere?… 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 hypothecate³ 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. It seemed 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 partly 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 gauffre⁴, 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 creatures 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.

14

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 do not 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 each 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 sides 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 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 Selenite's 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 I cannot explain, because we neither of us learned 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 realized 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 each other.

‘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 à propos 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!

15

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 arms' length again. I winced like a spurred 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 each 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. 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 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 scintillated like gems, ever and again the passage 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 observe 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 realized 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 forgot, 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 disappeared 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. 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 Cavor and I stood as near the edge as we dared, peering into a blue-tinged profundity. And then our guide was pulling at my arm.

He left me and walked to the end of that plank and stepped upon it, looking back. When he perceived we watched him, he turned about and went on over 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 vanished into the obscurity. I was 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 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 realized 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 one wrist very quickly out of the coil of chain that was loose, and then began to twist both 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 swung 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 wrist 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 a 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 those beastly surprises of which the moon world is full.

My mailed hand seemed to go clean through him. He smashed like some sort of sweetmeat 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. Everyone stood back from us two, everyone alert. That arrest seemed to last at least a second after the Selenite was down. Everyone 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 everyone 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 leapt 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 feet.

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, realizing 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 feeling that these things could jump out of the darkness on to my back. I heard the impact of Cavor's 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 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 became audible advancing up the main tunnel. It was horribly suggestive of a tumultuous pursuit. We made a bolt for the unlit cavern forthwith. As we ran 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 the smallest steps 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.’

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. There 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.

16

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 huge 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 were a baby.

I thrust an arm into the crack, and just at my fingertips found a little ledge by which I could hold. 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, ‘anyone could be a mountaineer on the moon,’ and so set myself in earnest to climbing. For a few minutes I clambered steadily, and then I looked up again. The cleft opened out gradually, 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 dainty 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 villa¹!’

‘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 those 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 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 and then hunt for our sphere until either 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 civilized 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 least, 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 come 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 could see the 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 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 FRS, 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 people, 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 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 take us if they can and kill us if they can't, and that's the end of the matter. After 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 the idea 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 Selen-ites 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 to accept 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 to 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 upwards 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 that was the gift of our birth on another planet. The next moment I was clambering with gigantic vigour after Cavor's blue-lit heels.

17

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 if they had not traced us up the crack after all, in spite of the telltale heap of broken fungi that must have lain beneath it. At times the cleft narrowed so much that we could scarce squeeze into 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 each other 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 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 each other.

‘There might be a chance to parley,’ said Cavor.

‘No,’ I said, ‘not as we are.’

For a space we remained, each occupied with his own thoughts.

Chid, chid, chid went the chipping, 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. 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, chid. Some distance 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 busy 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,* and then I saw that the planks and supports and the 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 quick 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 realized the situation with incredible swiftness. I stared at them for a moment, spear in hand. ‘Guard the grating, Cavor,’ I cried, and howling to intimidate them, I 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 useless 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 comfortably 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 least. I looked up the cavern again. What on earth were we going to do now?

We were cornered 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 herders – 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 be 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 halfway 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 realized 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 more like a cross-bow, 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 – 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 visible Selenites 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 sidewise 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 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 realized 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 among them. Once we were on them they would be hardly 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 these 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 flying 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 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 exultation. It did not seem to me that 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.

18

IN THE SUNLIGHT

Presently we saw that the cavern before us opened on a hazy void. In another moment we had emerged upon a 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.¹ 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, 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 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 we strode up easily. We saw only two Selenites during all that portion of our flight, and as soon as 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 blindly brilliant, appeared its opening on the exterior, a slope of Alpine steepness surmounted by a crest of bayonet shrub, tall but 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 homecoming 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 it had been. 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, 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 not a sign of 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 it 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 halfway from the zenith to the western edge. ‘Four days!… Cavor, we mustn't sit here and dream. How do you think we can begin?’

I stood up. ‘We must get a fixed point which we can recognize. 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 for 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 suggestions, 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 through all that speech sounded like the voice of someone 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 battleground 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 trouble is brewing for us. 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 fasten up a handkerchief on these tall spikes here and stick it firmly, and from this as a centre we must work over the crater. You must go westward, moving out in semicircles to and from 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 was how I felt just then – when he put his feet together and leapt away from me towards the north. He drifted 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 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 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.

19

MR BEDFORD ALONE

In a little while it seemed to me as if 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 stay for only a little while. I put down my clubs beside me and sat resting my chin on my hands. I saw with a 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, even to risk 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. 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 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 speculation.

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, 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 sprang forward to the next convenient viewpoint.

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 in to 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 as to our course. We had failed to find the sphere, we no longer had time to seek it. 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 halfway 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 farther 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 sides, and in 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 up 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 still be time for us to get more of the magic stone that gives one mastery over men. There 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 scrutinized 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 this time 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, 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 could know of the full import of that 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. 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. 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 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. My eyes searched the crater again.

It had an effect of emptiness that chilled me. All sound of the Selenites in the world beneath 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, no 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 manni-kin 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 realized 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 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 appear to be directing the –’ The writing became a mere hasty confusion again.

‘They have larger brain-cases – much larger, and slender bodies and very short legs. They make gentle noises and move with organized 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 dumb-founding relic in my hand, something very, 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 went about the crater; it seemed to throb with the throbbing of the greater stars; the blood-red crescent of the sun's disc 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, about 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 faint 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 sector 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 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? Oh 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 impossibly remote it seemed. I was numb, I stumbled, I bruised and cut myself and did not bleed.

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 and beard, 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 spin 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 interplanetary sphere.

20

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 agonizing existence and fear; the next, darkness and stillness, neither light nor life nor sun, moon nor stars, the black 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 upwards 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 Lloyds' 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. Finally 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 second time the little crescent earth behind it. 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 very 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 bloodstained 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. 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 simply find myself spinning about it in some hyperbolic or parabolic¹ 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, behind which, without some such expedient, it had become evident to me I must pass. 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 that 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 the thing to do, I opened all my moonward windows, and squatted down – the effort lifted me for a time some foot 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 the 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 journeyed 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 in my thoughts.

I can't profess to explain what happened in my mind. No doubt it could all be traced directly or indirectly to the curious physical conditions under which I was living. I set it down here just for what it is 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 and 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…. I regret that something of that period of lucidity 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 anyone 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 rupture would be stopped. But I could not do it. I saw Bedford rushing down Chancery Lane², 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 badly wanted brushing 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 had 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 Lloyds' 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 an 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 and whatever I might be I must needs feel the stress of his desires and sympathize 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, hung dissociated and apathetic, a cloudy megalomaniac 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, were facts infinitely minute and altogether trivial.

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.

21

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 realized I had yet to spend at least another night 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 saw 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 it 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 as 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 objects 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 Brighton¹ 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 crunching 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 most intently at the sphere and me. He advanced, staring. I dare say 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 Littlestone²,’ 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 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 disinclined 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 procession towards that distant fragment of ‘sea-front’. Halfway there we were reinforced by two awe-stricken little girls with spades, and later appeared a lean little boy with a penetrating sniff. 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 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. Those 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 anyone to steal as a house or a piece of land. As I looked at their curious faces over my coffee cup I realized 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 voice aside, and then with an appearance of great sang-froid: ³ ‘You don't mind if I have 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 as to who should answer me. ‘It's near the ebb,’ said the little fat 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 no, 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 cats‘-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! Boots⁴ 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 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 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 o' 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 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 looseheaded 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 what had happened to the boy was quite clear to me. 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 the clearer it became that if only I kept quiet, 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 Carta of my liberty.⁵

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 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 retained my two months' beard, the risks of any annoyance from the spiteful creditors 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 Romney⁶ 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 hundredweight⁷ of gold with which I happened to be encumbered. I signed the letter ‘Wells’, which seemed to me to be a thoroughly respectable sort of name. This done, I got a Folkestone⁸ blue book⁹, chose 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 as possible, until in accordance with my instructions two duly authenticated clerks came from the bank and weighed and took away my gold. After that 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 awoke 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 Lydd¹⁰, two miles away. I must confess that hitherto I have not acknowledged my share in the disappearance of Master Tommy Sim-mons¹¹, which was that little boy's name. That perhaps may prove a difficult bit 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 such a thing as 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 sought death 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 queer eating, the hard breathing of those 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.

22

THE ASTONISHING COMMUNICATION OF MR JULIUS WENDIGEE

When I had finished the 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 told. 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 Magazine¹, and was setting to work again upon the scenario of the play I had commenced at Lympne before I realized that the end was not yet. Following me from Amalfi to Algiers², 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 Tesla³ 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 someone 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 Monte Rosa⁴ in which he was working. In the presence of his record and his appliances – and above all of the messages from Mr Cavor that were coming to hand – my lingering doubts vanished. I decided at once to accept his proposal 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. And naturally 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.

Mr Wendigee was engaged in quite a different investigation when he received the first message from the moon. 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 recalled attention to a fact that had long been familiar to scientific people, namely: that from some unknown source in space, waves of electromagnetic disturbance, entirely similar to those used by Signor Marconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the earth. Besides Mr Tesla several 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 extraterrestrial sender. Among those 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 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 electromagnetic conditions of space are eminently 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 did not know therefore what we had received or what we had missed; nor indeed did he certainly know that anyone 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 electromagnetic 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 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 use⁵, and as he became fatigued he dropped words and misspelt in a curious manner.

Altogether we have probably missed 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 kindred world so near, and yet so dissimilar to our own.

23

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 realization of his theoretical sphere. ‘We arrived,’ he says, with no more account of our passage through space than if we had made a journey 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: ‘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, to increase our chances of recovering our sphere, separated in the crater of our arrival. 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. 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 bloodstained 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 that the Selenites who came 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 great circular mounds of the excavated rock and earth that form these great circles about the tunnels are known to earthly astronomers (misled by a false analogy) as volcanoes¹.’

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, for a scientific man, curiously regardless of detail, 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 about to 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 anthill 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 so terrible and dangerous that all the science of the moon has been unable to exterminate them. 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 Caves²; if only I 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 varied, 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 was anchored. 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, the 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 they hacked to pieces with quick, nervous movements. 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 Bedford and I 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 will 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 upwards that corresponded with my fever. For at the end of about three weeks I fell ill of an indefinable 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 palace 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.’ Nevertheless 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 earthsick 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, FRS³, 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 Gruyère⁴; 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 had left. There is, therefore, a constant eastward breeze in the air of the outer galleries, and an upflow 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… .

24

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 so abounding 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 six inches in length; ‘but here, against the lesser gravitation of the moon, a creature certainly as much insect as vertebrate seems to have been able to attain to human and ultra-human dimensions.’

He does not mention the ant, but throughout his allusions the ant is continually brought before my mind¹, in its sleepless activity, its intelligence, its social organization and, more particularly, the fact that it displays, in addition to the two forms, the male and the female, produced by almost all other animals, a great variety of 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. And these Selenites are of course, if only by reason of this widely extended adaptation, incomparably greater than ants. And in place of the four or five different forms of ant 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, hue, and shape were certainly as wide as the difference 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 of one colour and occupation – mooncalf herds, butchers, fleshers, and the like. But within the moon, practically unsuspected by me, there are, it seems, a host of variations. The moon is indeed a kind of super-anthill. But in place of the five distinctive types – the worker, soldier, winged male, queen, and slave of the ant-world – there are amongst the moon-folk not only hundreds of differentiations, but, within each, and linking one to the other, a whole series of fine gradations. And these Selenites are not merely colossally superior to ants, but, according to Cavor, colossally, in intelligence, morality and social wisdom, higher than man.

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 very 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 strata 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.

‘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 bright, with big platforms twisting down its sides in a spiral that vanishes at last below in a blue profundity; and lit ever 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 insects, regarding our appearance or busied on unknown errands.

‘Either I fancied it or a flake of snow came drifting swiftly 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! Some bulged and overhung, some ran about among the feet of their fellows, some twined and interlaced like snakes. All of them had the grotesque and disquieting suggestion of an insect that has somehow contrived to mock humanity; all seemed to present an incredible exaggeration of some particular feature; one had a vast right forelimb, an enormous antennal arm, as it were; one seemed all leg, poised, as it were, on stilts; another protruded an enormous nose-like organ beside a sharply speculative eye that made him startlingly human until one saw his expressionless mouth. One has seen punchinellos made of lobster claws – he was like that. The strange and (except for the want of mandibles and palps) most insectlike head of the mooncalf-minders underwent astounding transformations; here it was broad and low, here high and narrow, here its vacuous brow was drawn out into horns and strange features, here it was whiskered and divided, and there with a grotesquely human profile. There were several brain-cases distended like bladders to a huge size. The eyes, too, were strangely varied, some quite elephantine in their small alertness, some huge pits of darkness. There were 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, white-rimmed, glaring eyes. And oddest of all, 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.

‘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 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 over this seething nightmare towards the apartments that were provided for me in the moon. All about me were eyes, faces, masks, tentacles, a leathery noise like the rustling of beetle wings, and a great bleating and 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 civilized 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. 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 five feet high; he had small, slender legs about eighteen inches 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 downwards, and the mask is reduced to the size of a large flat nose-flap. On either side are the little hen-like 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 Atlas² supporting the world. Tsi-puff, it seems, was a 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 in Cavor's retinue litter-carriers, lop-sided beings with enormous shoulders, very spidery ushers, and a squat foot-attendant.

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 adorns 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 the most wonderful dream to hear 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 was being, he says, ‘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 some 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 the 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 squeak for the stating of formula; 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 to 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 in the lunar anatomy of the bony skull, 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. These 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 thinkers who are trained to perform certain special operations; and the erudite, who are 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, nor 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 Library³ are collections of living brains….

The less specialized administrators, I note, do for the most part take a very lively interest in me whenever they encounter me. They will come out of their 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 with very few exceptions 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 kind 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 accompanied 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 fact – it is no figure of speech; the single tentacle of the mooncalf herd is replaced by huge single or paired bunches of three, or five, or seven digits for clawing, lifting, guiding, the rest of them no more than subordinate appendages to these important parts. Some, who I suppose deal with bell-striking mechanism, have enormous rabbit-like ears just behind the eyes; 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 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 finest 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 much in the dark about it, but quite recently I came upon a number of young Selenites, confined in jars from which only the forelimbs 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 these glimpses of the educational methods of these beings have affected me disagreeably. I hope, however, that may pass off and I may be able to see more of this aspect of this wonderful social order. That wretched-looking hand 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 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 downwards. 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 some of them over, and examine them more precisely than I had been able to do previously. When disturbed they breathed noisily, 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 forelimbs 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 thought and 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 in the occupation of all specialized 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 its 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 acephalic dainty-fingered 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 in this community a large majority of the members 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 a variety 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 tantalizing 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 must now prepare to reckon sooner or later. This intermittent trickle of messages, this whispering of a record needle in the darkness 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….

25

THE GRAND LUNAR

The penultimate message describes, occasionally even with 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 even 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, big eyes peering over tremendous nose tentacles, and little eyes beneath monstrous forehead plates; below, an undergrowth of smaller creatures dodged and yelped; and grotesque heads poised on sinuous, swan-like, 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 flea-like artist with the little brain joined us also, and a thick bunch of lean porter-ants 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. It 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, almost beetle-like ushers before and behind, and on either hand a galaxy of learned heads, a sort of animated ency-clopaedia, 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 fungi and curious symbols, completed the procession. The way was lined by ushers and officers in caparisons that gleamed like steel, and beyond their line the heads and tentacles of that enormous crowd surged on either hand.

‘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 like the “horrors”. It had come to me before in these lunar caverns, when on occasion I had 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 stifling 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 gloriously decorated. The approach to the Grand Lunar was certainly contrived to give one a vivid impression of his greatness. The halls – all happily sufficiently luminous for my terrestrial eye – were a cunning and elaborate crescendo of space and decoration. The effect of their progressive size was enhanced by the steady diminution in the lighting, and by a thin haze of incense that thickened as one advanced. In the earlier ones the vivid, clear light made everything finite and concrete to me. I seemed to advance continually to something larger, dimmer, and less material.

‘I must confess that all this splendour 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 would 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 knicker-bocker 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, elaborately decorated with blue and whitish-blue majolica, lit by blue light, you know not how, and surging with metallic or livid-white 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 a flight of steps, like the steps of Ara Cœli¹ at Rome, ascends 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 a blaze of incandescent blue. A hazy atmosphere filled the place so that its walls seemed invisibly remote. This gave him an effect of floating in a blue-black void. He seemed at first a small, self-luminous cloud, brooding on his glaucous throne; his brain-case must have measured many yards in diameter. For some reason that I cannot fathom a number of blue searchlights coming from behind the throne gave a star-like radiance to the halo immediately surrounding him. 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, his flatterers 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, 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 news-bearers died away….

‘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 waste 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 eyes, my attention was directed to the enhaloed supreme intelligence that hovered above us.

‘At first as I peered into the radiating blaze, this quintessential brain looked very much like a thin, 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 blaze. 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 the purple-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 glare. I saw that the 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 scrutinizing 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 encyclopaedic 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 white brain placed itself about halfway 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 sidewise 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 those filmy 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 recognizable English – at first a little nervously, so that he was not very clear.

‘“‘M'm – the Grand Lunar – wished 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 on such magnificence as I had seen that day. The Grand Lunar, in token of recognition, caused his blue searchlight 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 have been evolved. Three times had I to repeat that of all the 4,000 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 I had 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 that 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 their 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 your ships and your poor little cities get injured?” he asked, and I found the waste of property and conveniences seemed to impress upon 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 loath, 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 manoeuvres 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 Huns² and Tartars, and the wars of Mahomet and the Caliphs³ and of the Crusades⁴. 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 twenty feet of iron – and how we could steer torpedoes under water. I went on to describe a Maxim gun⁵ in action and what I could imagine of the Battle of Colenso⁶. 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 there suddenly becomes predominant in the record 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. 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 someone 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 realized 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 last message, as both Mr Wendigee and myself now believe it to be, that he is ever likely to send us.]

26

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 amidst his blue-lit 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 he admitted that upon himself alone hung the possibility – at least for a long time – of any other 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 realization 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 most assuredly the Grand Lunar was deliberating the new situation, and for all that time Cavor went as free as ever he had gone. We imagine that obstacles of some sort prevented his getting to his electromagnetic apparatus again after that last message I have 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 dishevelled Cavor struggling in the grip of a great multitude of those insect Selenites, struggling ever more desperately and hopelessly as they swarm 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.

Notes

EPIGRAPH

1. Three thousand stadia… Icaromenippus: A loose translation (‘order’ should actually be ‘total distance’) of the first words and third speech of Lucian's dialogue Icaromenippus. The speaker is Menippus, a Cynic philosopher who claims to have just returned from the moon and the heaven of the gods. The dialogue is mainly a satire on human beliefs. Interestingly, at one point Menippus compares human cities to anthills.

CHAPTER 1

MR BEDFORD MEETS MR CAVOR AT LYMPNE

1. Lympne: A village in the English county of Kent. As Bedford later points out (p. 7), Lympne was the site of Portus Lemanis in Roman times. The village is situated six miles west of Sandgate, where Wells was living when he wrote the novel. The entire area of the sections on earth, including Littlestone, the splashdown point of the sphere, is within fifteen miles of Sandgate.

2. come an ugly cropper: Suffered sudden misfortune.

3. pied-à-terre: A small town house, flat, or room used for short periods of residence.

4. Mrs Beeton: Mrs Bond in the first edition. In the children's ballad ‘Dilly Dilly’, Mrs Bond had ‘beef in the larder, and ducks in the pond’. Although some editions continue to print Mrs Bond, Wells substituted Mrs Beeton (1836–65) in the Atlantic Edition (1925). Isabella Beeton's famous book on Household Management (1861) covered cookery and other branches of domestic science. It was frequently republished, sometimes in varying titles.

5. Sybaris: An ancient Greek city of southern Italy, traditionally noted for the indulgence and luxury of its way of life.

6. Romney Marsh… Dungeness: The marshy area on the south coast of England, in Kent, between New Romney and Rye includes Dungeness, a low shingle headland.

7. Hastings: A port in East Sussex, on the English Channel.

8. Röntgen rays: X-rays, which were discovered by the German physicist Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen (1845–1923) in 1895.

9. the electric waves of Marconi: Radio waves, which were used by the Italian physicist and inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) to develop the first radio transmitting system between 1895 and 1897. In 1898, he successfully transmitted signals across the English Channel.

10. Lord Kelvin… or Professor Lodge or Professor Karl Pearson: Three eminent contemporary scientists. William Thomas Kelvin (1824–1907) was a Belfast-born physicist, who was particularly noted for his studies of thermodynamics. Professor, later Sir, Oliver Joseph Lodge (1851–1940) was a physicist who took up a chair in physics at Liverpool in 1881. Karl Pearson (1857-1936) was a mathematician and scientist born in London. He became the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College, London (1911).

11. helium: Was indeed a novel and mysterious element around 1900. First identified as an element in 1868 by Pierre Jules César Janssen during an expedition to India to study a solar eclipse, it was named helium in 1871.

12. V'là tout: Properly, voilà tout, ‘that's all’ (French).

13. FRS: Fellow of the Royal Society, an exclusive society of distinguished scientists in Britain.

14. his portrait as a scientific worthy given away with Nature: Nature is the most prestigious science journal in Britain. The journal published a series of ‘Scientific Worthies’, each of which celebrated the achievements of a particular scientist. Wells contributed a number of articles on scientific and educational themes to Nature in 1894. Subsequently, Nature continued to review Wells's fiction and occasionally published transcripts of his work, such as his lecture on ‘The Discovery of the Future’ (1902).

CHAPTER 2

THE FIRST MAKING OF CAVORITE

1. Wealden Hills: Hills of the Kentish Weald.

2. Gratulate me: Congratulate me.

3. caught a tartar: Encountered or got hold of a thing that can be neither controlled nor got rid of. The original Tartars were the combined forces of Central Asian peoples, including Mongols and Turks, who, under the leadership of Ghengis Khan (1202–27) overran much of Asia and Eastern Europe.

CHAPTER 3

THE BUILDING OF THE SPHERE

1. problem about a dumpling: A dumpling is a pudding containing fruit. The ‘problem’ is how the fruit got inside; the solution is that the dough is put round the fruit before the pudding is boiled.

2. Like Jules Verne's apparatus in A Trip to the Moon: In Jules Verne's novel Autour de la lune (Round the Moon), 1870, the astronauts have to dispose of the body of a dead dog. They open one of the glass portholes of their spacecraft, throw the dog out and quickly shut the porthole again. Very little air is lost.

3. old Spanish monopoly in American gold: In the sixteenth century, Spain imported large deposits of gold and other precious metals from its colonies on the American continent. Bedford clearly associates the potential rewards of the Cavorite Empire of his cosmic vision with the benefits imperial powers derive from importing precious goods from their colonies.

4. carbonic acid: Carbon dioxide gas.

5. that array of spectres that once beleaguered Prague: An allusion to ‘The Beleaguered City’ (1839), a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82). At the beginning of the poem, the spectres besiege Prague (capital of the then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic) all night, but flee at the morning prayer-bell. The second half of the poem deals with the story as a metaphor for nightmares – in exactly the way Bedford does.

6. Elham… Canterbury: A village seven miles northeast of Lympne, and approximately eleven miles from Canterbury, a city in east Kent, seat of the archbishop and primate of England.

7. gad-about: Get about. Wells is imitating local Kent dialect.

CHAPTER 4

INSIDE THE SPHERE

1. Tit-Bits… Lloyds' News: Tit-Bits was a popular weekly magazine, founded in 1881. A typical issue included jokes, quizzes, correspondence, short stories and serialized fiction. The magazine ceased publication in 1984. Lloyds' News was another popular weekly, whose exact title, 1849–1902, was Lloyds' Weekly Newspaper.

CHAPTER 9

PROSPECTING BEGINS

1. mountain sickness: Sickness caused by breathing the rarefied air at great heights.

2. operculum: Lid (a term used mostly in biology, for lid-like structures).

3. kopje: A small hill.

4. Gargantuan: Gigantic. The word comes from the name of a giant in Francois Rabelais' Gargantua (1534).

CHAPTER 11

THE MOONCALF PASTURES

1. Selenite: A supposed inhabitant of the moon. The word appears to have first been used by James Howell (? 1593–1666) in c.1645. In a letter taken from the collection of correspondence for which he is now chiefly remembered (Epistolae Hoelianae or Familiar Letters, 1657), Howell wrote that, ‘The sphear of the moon is peopled with Selenites, or Lunary men.’

2. Smithfield: A district in London famous for its meat market.

3. surplus population: In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Thomas Malthus wrote that while population increased geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, 16), food supply increased only arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). This, warned Malthus, creates a surplus population that the food supply is unable to sustain. The potentially disastrous consequences of overpopulation for the human species were seriously debated in the nineteenth century. However, Bedford's intoxicated proclamation that the moon would provide an ideal home for ‘Our poor surplus population’ suggests that Wells is satirizing Malthusian logic.

4. Ess'lent discov'ry, yours, Cavor…’ ‘Scovery of the moon – se’nd on’y to the ‘tato: Excellent discovery of yours, Cavor… Second only to the potato… What do you mean?… Discovery of the moon – second only to the potato.

5. the creashurs o' what we eat and drink: The creatures of what we eat and drink.

6. coralline: Coral-like.

7. White Man's Burden: ‘The White Man's Burden' was the title of a poem by Rudyard Kipling published in The Times on 1 February 1899. The phrase ‘White Man's Burden' refers more generally to the supposed duty of the white race to bring education and western culture to the non-white inhabitants of their colonies.

8. Satraps: Protectors of the country, provincial governors.

9. Nempire Caesar: Emperor Caesar. Julius Caesar ruled the Roman Empire between 100 and 44 BC.

10. B‘in all the newspapers: [We Will] be in all the newspapers.

CHAPTER 12

THE SELENITE'S FACE

1. Hyde Park: A park in central London.

2. Dürer: Albrecht Dürer was a German painter and engraver (1471–1528). While there are occasionally touches of horror in Dürer's work, he is not really famous for inventing monsters.

CHAPTER 13

MR CAVOR MAKES SOME SUGGESTIONS

1. Kepler, with his subvolvani: The subvolvani are the lunar inhabitants of Subvolva, the hemisphere ‘under the Earth' in the Somnium… de astronomia lunari (Dream… of Lunar Astronomy, 1634) of Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). The Dream was only available in Kepler's original Latin text. It is doubtful whether Wells's Latin was good enough to allow him to master the whole of Kepler's text. However, it is possible that one of his friends informed Wells of Kepler's posthumous work.

2…. a paper by the late Professor Galton on the possibility of communication between the planets: This is a reference to an article written by Francis Galton entitled ‘Intelligible Signals Between Neighbouring Stars’, Fortnightly Review n.s. 60 (1896), pp. 657–64. In that article, Galton endeavoured to demonstrate that it was possible to devise signals ‘that are intrinsically intelligible, so that the messages may be deciphered by any intelligent man, or other creature, who has made nearly as much advance in pure and applied science as ourselves' (p. 657). It is precisely by demonstrating his knowledge of such intrinsically intelligible signals that Cavor hopes to ‘demonstrate our possession of a reasonable intelligence' (in the following paragraph) to the Selen-ites. There is a degree of anachronism in this instance, since Galton (b. 1822) lived until 1911.

3. Hypothecate: Hypothesize. The word ‘hypothecate' does not appear in dictionaries in the appropriate sense.

4. gauffre: French for ‘waffle’.

CHAPTER 16

POINTS OF VIEW

1. snakes from Jamrach's loose in a Surbiton villa: Charles Jamrach (1815–91) was a London importer of wild animals who also supplied zoos. Surbiton is a suburb in southwest London.

CHAPTER 18

IN THE SUNLIGHT

1. Saint Gothard: An Alpine pass in Switzerland, with a railway tunnel.

CHAPTER 20

MR BEDFORD IN INFINITE SPACE

1. hyperbolic or parabolic: Open curves, receding to infinity, implying a miss.

2. Chancery Lane: A street in central London.

CHAPTER 21

MR BEDFORD AT LITTLESTONE

1. Brighton: A seaside resort in east Sussex.

2. Littlestone: A small seaside resort on the Kent coast, seven miles south of Lympne.

3. sang-froid: Coolness, self-possession, especially in the face of danger or disturbing circumstances.

4. Boots: A hotel servant who cleans boots and shoes.

5. private Magna Carta of my liberty: A document granting certain rights and privileges to his subjects given in June 1215 by King John of England. Bedford hopes that the gold he has brought back from the moon might similarly guarantee him certain rights.

6. New Romney: A town two miles inland from Littlestone.

7. hundredweight: 112 pounds (50.8 kilograms).

8. Folkestone: A town in Kent, of which Sandgate is a suburb.

9. blue book: A commercial directory.

10. government establishment of Lydd: The Lydd Ranges, where the British army tests explosives.

11. Master Tommy Simmons: A light-hearted reference to A. T. Simmons (1865–1921), a friend of Wells's from his time as a student at the Normal School of Science (1884–7). The joke is seemingly completed when Bedford signs his letter to the bank manager with the ‘thoroughly respectable’ name ‘Wells’ (on the previous page).

CHAPTER 22

THE ASTONISHING COMMUNICATION OF MR JULIUS WENDIGEE

1. The Strand Magazine: The First Men in the Moon was indeed serialized, complete with illustrations, in the popular Strand Magazine between November 1900 and August 1901.

2. Amalfi… Algiers: The former is a town on the Bay of Salerno, south Italy, the latter is the capital of Algeria.

3. Mr Tesla: Nikola Tesla was a Serbo-American electrical engineer, 1856–1943. By 1899 he had built a laboratory on a high plateau at Colorado Springs, Colorado. There he became convinced that he had received a radio signal from Mars. This news had certainly leaked out by March 1901, if not before. It is even possible that reports of Tesla's ‘Mars message’ reached Wells by January 1901, inspiring him to write Chapters 22–6.

4. Monte Rosa: An Alpine site on the Italian–Swiss border. At 15,217 feet (4,633 metres), Monte Rosa is one of the highest peaks in Europe.

5. the code in general use: Probably Morse code.

CHAPTER 23

AN ABSTRACT OF THE SIX MESSAGES FIRST RECEIVED FROM MR CAVOR

1. volcanoes: The lunar craters, which are now known to have been caused by impacting meteors, were thought to be of volcanic origin in about 1900. Wells himself makes this assumption in ‘The Visibility of Change in the Moon’, Knowledge 18 (October 1895), pp. 230–31.

2. Mammoth Caves: An extensive system of limestone caverns in Kentucky, USA.

3. Sir Jabez Flap, FRS: A fictitious scientist. It has been suggested that Flap is a covert reference to Sir Robert Ball (1840–1913), a famous popularizer of astronomy in the 1890s.

4. the pun… Gruyère: Wells is mistaken here, since no pun is involved in the saying that ‘the moon is made of green cheese’. ‘Gruyère’ cheese is mentioned here because its holes resemble the cavities in Wells's moon.

CHAPTER 24

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SELENITES

1. the ant is continually brought before my mind: Bedford here makes explicit the analogy between the Selenities and a community of ants. The characterization of the Selenites, and their subterranean habitat, was probably informed by John Lubbock's book Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A Record of Observations on the Habits of the Social Hymenoptera (1885).

2. Atlas: The Titan supposed to hold up the pillars of the universe, and a mountain range in western North Africa also regarded mythically as supporting the heavens.

3. Somerset House… British Museum Library: The former is a building in the Strand, London, once used to maintain a national registration of births, marriages and deaths, and the latter has now been incorporated into the British Library.

CHAPTER 25

THE GRAND LUNAR

1. Ara Coeli: Latin for ‘Altar of Heaven’. The church of Santa Maria d‘Aracoeli, situated on the highest point of Capitol Hill in Rome, is reached by 124 steps.

2. Huns: One of an Asiatic race of nomads, who invaded Europe in the middle of the fifth century and, under their famous king Attila, overran and ravaged a great part of this continent.

3. Mahomet and the Caliphs: The prophet believed by Muslims to be the channel for the final unfolding of God's revelation to mankind, Mahomet (AD? 570–632) is regarded as the founder of Islam. He began to teach in Mecca in 610, but persecution forced him to flee with his followers to Medina in 622. After several battles, he conquered Mecca (630), establishing principles of Islam all over Arabia.Caliph is the title given in Muslim countries to the principal civil and religious ruler, as successor to Mahomet. Following the death of Mahomet, the Caliphs began to move north. By AD 641, they had defeated the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires and had conquered Syria and Egypt.

4. Crusades: Several Christian military expeditions made in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries to recover Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Muslims.

5. Maxim gun: A single-barrelled quick-firing machine gun with a barrel surrounded by an outer casing filled with water to keep the parts cool. It was invented in 1883 by the American inventor Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim (1840–1916).

6. Battle of Colenso: A battle that occurred during the Boer War (1899–1902). On 15 December 1899, British forces under the command of Sir Redvers Buller were heavily defeated at Colenso in Natal, suffering some 1,100 casualties.

* 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-twentieth part of the compressed provisions we had brought with us. The amount of carbonic acid we exhaled was also unnaturally low, but why this was so I am quite unable to explain.

* 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.

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Biographical Note

Introduction

Further Reading

Note on the Text

Contents

THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON

I: MR BEDFORD MEETS MR CAVOR AT LYMPNE

2: THE FIRST MAKING OF CAVORITE

3: THE BUILDING OF THE SPHERE

4: INSIDE THE SPHERE

5: THE JOURNEY TO THE MOON

6: THE LANDING ON THE MOON

7: SUNRISE ON THE MOON

8: A LUNAR MORNING

9: PROSPECTING BEGINS

10: LOST MEN IN THE MOON

11: THE MOONCALF PASTURES

12: THE SELENITE'S FACE

13: MR CAVOR MAKES SOME SUGGESTIONS

14: EXPERIMENTS IN INTERCOURSE

15: THE GIDDY BRIDGE

16: POINTS OF VIEW

17: THE FIGHT IN THE CAVE OF THE MOON BUTCHERS

18: IN THE SUNLIGHT

19: MR BEDFORD ALONE

20: MR BEDFORD IN INFINITE SPACE

21: MR BEDFORD AT LITTLESTONE

22: THE ASTONISHING COMMUNICATION OF MR JULIUS WENDIGEE

23: AN ABSTRACT OF THE SIX MESSAGES FIRST RECEIVED FROM MR CAVOR

24: THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SELENITES

25: THE GRAND LUNAR

26: THE LAST MESSAGE CAVOR SENT TO THE EARTH

Notes

Footnotes

5: THE JOURNEY TO THE MOON

5: THE JOURNEY TO THE MOON

17: THE FIGHT IN THE CAVE OF THE MOON BUTCHERS

17: THE FIGHT IN THE CAVE OF THE MOON BUTCHERS