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The First Men in the Moon

by H. G. Wells · English · Gutenberg #1013 · 398,776 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The First Men in the Moon

Author: H. G. Wells


        
Release date: October 20, 2004 [eBook #1013]
                Most recently updated: February 25, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1013

Credits: Barry Haworth


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON ***

[Illustration]




The First Men In The Moon

by H. G. Wells


Contents

 I. Mr. Bedford Meets Mr. Cavor at Lympne
 II. The First Making of Cavorite
 III. The Building of the sphere
 IV. Inside the Sphere
 V. The Journey to the Moon
 VI. The Landing on the Moon
 VII. Sunrise on the Moon
 VIII. A Lunar Morning
 IX. Prospecting Begins
 X. Lost Men in the Moon
 XI. The Mooncalf Pastures
 XII. The Selenite’s Face
 XIII. Mr. Cavor Makes Some Suggestions
 XIV. Experiments in intercourse
 XV. The Giddy Bridge
 XVI. Points of View
 XVII. The Fight in the Cave of the Moon Butchers
 XVIII. In the Sunlight
 XIX. Mr. Bedford Alone
 XX. Mr. Bedford in Infinite Space
 XXI. Mr. Bedford at Littlestone
 XXII. The Astonishing Communication of Mr. Julius Wendigee
 XXIII. An Abstract of the Six Messages First Received from Mr. Cavor
 XXIV. The Natural History of the Selenites
 XXV. The Grand Lunar
 XXVI. The Last Message Cavor sent to the Earth




I.
Mr. Bedford Meets Mr. Cavor at Lympne


As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the
blue sky of southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of
astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr.
Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident. It might have
been any one. I fell into these things at a time when I thought myself
removed from the slightest possibility of disturbing experiences. I had
gone to Lympne because I had imagined it the most uneventful place in
the world. “Here, at any rate,” said I, “I shall find peace and a
chance to work!”

And this book is the sequel. So utterly at variance is destiny with all
the little plans of men. I may perhaps mention here that very recently
I had come an ugly cropper in certain business enterprises. Sitting now
surrounded by all the circumstances of wealth, there is a luxury in
admitting my extremity. I can admit, even, that to a certain extent my
disasters were conceivably of my own making. It may be there are
directions in which I have some capacity, but the conduct of business
operations is not among these. But in those days I was young, and my
youth among other objectionable forms took that of a pride in my
capacity for affairs. I am young still in years, but the things that
have happened to me have rubbed something of the youth from my mind.
Whether they have brought any wisdom to light below it is a more
doubtful matter.

It is scarcely necessary to go into the details of the speculations
that landed me at Lympne, in Kent. Nowadays even about business
transactions there is a strong spice of adventure. I took risks. In
these things there is invariably a certain amount of give and take, and
it fell to me finally to do the giving reluctantly enough. Even when I
had got out of everything, one cantankerous creditor saw fit to be
malignant. Perhaps you have met that flaming sense of outraged virtue,
or perhaps you have only felt it. He ran me hard. It seemed to me, at
last, that there was nothing for it but to write a play, unless I
wanted to drudge for my living as a clerk. I have a certain
imagination, and luxurious tastes, and I meant to make a vigorous fight
for it before that fate overtook me. In addition to my belief in my
powers as a business man, I had always in those days had an idea that I
was equal to writing a very good play. It is not, I believe, a very
uncommon persuasion. I knew there is nothing a man can do outside
legitimate business transactions that has such opulent possibilities,
and very probably that biased my opinion. I had, indeed, got into the
habit of regarding this unwritten drama as a convenient little reserve
put by for a rainy day. That rainy day had come, and I set to work.

I soon discovered that writing a play was a longer business than I had
supposed; at first I had reckoned ten days for it, and it was to have a
_pied-à-terre_ while it was in hand that I came to Lympne. I reckoned
myself lucky in getting that little bungalow. I got it on a three
years’ agreement. I put in a few sticks of furniture, and while the
play was in hand I did my own cooking. My cooking would have shocked
Mrs. Bond. And yet, you know, it had flavour. I had a coffee-pot, a
sauce-pan for eggs, and one for potatoes, and a frying-pan for sausages
and bacon—such was the simple apparatus of my comfort. One cannot
always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.
For the rest I laid in an eighteen-gallon cask of beer on credit, and a
trustful baker came each day. It was not, perhaps, in the style of
Sybaris, but I have had worse times. I was a little sorry for the
baker, who was a very decent man indeed, but even for him I hoped.

Certainly if any one wants solitude, the place is Lympne. It is in the
clay part of Kent, and my bungalow stood on the edge of an old sea
cliff and stared across the flats of Romney Marsh at the sea. In very
wet weather the place is almost inaccessible, and I have heard that at
times the postman used to traverse the more succulent portions of his
route with boards upon his feet. I never saw him doing so, but I can
quite imagine it. Outside the doors of the few cottages and houses that
make up the present village big birch besoms are stuck, to wipe off the
worst of the clay, which will give some idea of the texture of the
district. I doubt if the place would be there at all, if it were not a
fading memory of things gone for ever. It was the big port of England
in Roman times, Portus 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 Dungeness, and dotted here and there with tree clumps and the
church towers of old mediæval 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 farther westward were the hills by Hastings under
the setting sun. Sometimes they hung close and clear, sometimes they
were faded and low, and often the drift of the weather took them clean
out of sight. And all the nearer parts of the marsh were laced and lit
by ditches and canals.

The window at which I worked looked over the skyline of this crest, and
it was from this window that I first set eyes on Cavor. It was just as
I was struggling with my scenario, holding down my mind to the sheer
hard work of it, and naturally enough he arrested my attention.

The sun had set, the sky was a vivid tranquillity of green and yellow,
and against that he came out black—the oddest little figure.

He was a short, round-bodied, thin-legged little man, with a jerky
quality in his motions; he had seen fit to clothe his extraordinary
mind in a cricket cap, an overcoat, and cycling knickerbockers and
stockings. Why he did so I do not know, for he never cycled and he
never played cricket. It was a fortuitous concurrence of garments,
arising I know not how. He gesticulated with his hands and arms, and
jerked his head about and buzzed. He buzzed like something electric.
You never heard such buzzing. And ever and again he cleared his throat
with a most extraordinary noise.

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,” I said, “one would
think he was learning to be a marionette!” and for several evenings I
cursed him pretty heartily. Then my annoyance gave way to amazement and
curiosity. Why on earth should a man do this thing? On the fourteenth
evening I could stand it no longer, and so soon as he appeared I opened
the french window, crossed the verandah, and directed myself to the
point where he invariably stopped.

He had his watch out as I came up to him. He had a chubby, rubicund
face with reddish brown eyes—previously I had seen him only against the
light. “One moment, sir,” said I as he turned. He stared. “One moment,”
he said, “certainly. Or if you wish to speak to me for longer, and it
is not asking too much—your moment is up—would it trouble you to
accompany me?”

“Not in the least,” said I, placing myself beside him.

“My habits are regular. My time for intercourse—limited.”

“This, I presume, is your time for exercise?”

“It is. I come here to enjoy the sunset.”

“You don’t.”

“Sir?”

“You never look at it.”

“Never look at it?”

“No. I’ve watched you thirteen nights, and not once have you looked at
the sunset—not once.”

He knitted his brows like one who encounters a problem.

“Well, I enjoy the sunlight—the atmosphere—I go along this path,
through that gate”—he jerked his head over his shoulder—“and round—”

“You don’t. You never have been. It’s all nonsense. There isn’t a way.
To-night for instance—”

“Oh! to-night! Let me see. Ah! I just glanced at my watch, saw that I
had already been out just three minutes over the precise half-hour,
decided there was not time to go round, turned—”

“You always do.”

He looked at me—reflected. “Perhaps I do, now I come to think of it.
But what was it you wanted to speak to me about?”

“Why, this!”

“This?”

“Yes. Why do you do it? Every night you come making a noise—”

“Making a noise?”

“Like this.” I imitated his buzzing noise. He looked at me, and it was
evident the buzzing awakened distaste. “Do I do _that?_” he asked.

“Every blessed evening.”

“I had no idea.”

He stopped dead. He regarded me gravely. “Can it be,” he said, “that I
have formed a Habit?”

“Well, it looks like it. Doesn’t it?”

He pulled down his lower lip between finger and thumb. He regarded a
puddle at his feet.

“My mind is much occupied,” he said. “And you want to know _why!_ Well,
sir, I can assure you that not only do I not know why I do these
things, but I did not even know I did them. Come to think, it is just
as you say; I never _have_ been beyond that field.... And these things
annoy you?”

For some reason I was beginning to relent towards him. “Not _annoy_,” I
said. “But—imagine yourself writing a play!”

“I couldn’t.”

“Well, anything that needs concentration.”

“Ah!” he said, “of course,” and meditated. His expression became so
eloquent of distress, that I relented still more. After all, there is a
touch of aggression in demanding of a man you don’t know why he hums on
a public footpath.

“You see,” he said weakly, “it’s a habit.”

“Oh, I recognise that.”

“I must stop it.”

“But not if it puts you out. After all, I had no business—it’s
something of a liberty.”

“Not at all, sir,” he said, “not at all. I am greatly indebted to you.
I should guard myself against these things. In future I will. Could I
trouble you—once again? That noise?”

“Something like this,” I said. “Zuzzoo, zuzzoo. But really, you know—”

“I am greatly obliged to you. In fact, I know I am getting absurdly
absent-minded. You are quite justified, sir—perfectly justified.
Indeed, I am indebted to you. The thing shall end. And now, sir, I have
already brought you farther than I should have done.”

“I do hope my impertinence—”

“Not at all, sir, not at all.”

We regarded each other for a moment. I raised my hat and wished him a
good evening. He responded convulsively, and so we went our ways.

At the stile I looked back at his receding figure. His bearing had
changed remarkably, he seemed limp, shrunken. The contrast with his
former gesticulating, zuzzoing self took me in some absurd way as
pathetic. I watched him out of sight. Then wishing very heartily I had
kept to my own business, I returned to my bungalow and my play.

The next evening I saw nothing of him, nor the next. But he was very
much in my mind, and it had occurred to me that as a sentimental comic
character he might serve a useful purpose in the development of my
plot. The third day he called upon me.

For a time I was puzzled to think what had brought him. He made
indifferent conversation in the most formal way, then abruptly he came
to business. He wanted to buy me out of my bungalow.

“You see,” he said, “I don’t blame you in the least, but you’ve
destroyed a habit, and it disorganises my day. I’ve walked past here
for years—years. No doubt I’ve hummed.... You’ve made all that
impossible!”

I suggested he might try some other direction.

“No. There is no other direction. This is the only one. I’ve inquired.
And now—every afternoon at four—I come to a dead wall.”

“But, my dear sir, if the thing is so important to you—”

“It’s vital. You see, I’m—I’m an investigator—I am engaged in a
scientific research. I live—” he paused and seemed to think. “Just over
there,” he said, and pointed suddenly dangerously near my eye. “The
house with white chimneys you see just over the trees. And my
circumstances are abnormal—abnormal. I am on the point of completing
one of the most important—demonstrations—I can assure you one of _the
most important_ demonstrations that have ever been made. It requires
constant thought, constant mental ease and activity. And the afternoon
was my brightest time!—effervescing with new ideas—new points of view.”

“But why not come by still?”

“It would be all different. I should be self-conscious. I should think
of you at your play—watching me irritated—instead of thinking of my
work. No! I must have the bungalow.”

I meditated. Naturally, I wanted to think the matter over thoroughly
before anything decisive was said. I was generally ready enough for
business in those days, and selling always attracted me; but in the
first place it was not my bungalow, and even if I sold it to him at a
good price I might get inconvenienced in the delivery of goods if the
current owner got wind of the transaction, and in the second I was,
well—undischarged. It was clearly a business that required delicate
handling. Moreover, the possibility of his being in pursuit of some
valuable invention also interested me. It occurred to me that I would
like to know more of this research, not with any dishonest intention,
but simply with an idea that to know what it was would be a relief from
play-writing. I threw out feelers.

He was quite willing to supply information. Indeed, once he was fairly
under way the conversation became a monologue. He talked like a man
long pent up, who has had it over with himself again and again. He
talked for nearly an hour, and I must confess I found it a pretty stiff
bit of listening. But through it all there was the undertone of
satisfaction one feels when one is neglecting work one has set oneself.
During that first interview I gathered very little of the drift of his
work. Half his words were technicalities entirely strange to me, and he
illustrated one or two points with what he was pleased to call
elementary mathematics, computing on an envelope with a copying-ink
pencil, in a manner that made it hard even to seem to understand.
“Yes,” I said, “yes. Go on!” Nevertheless I made out enough to convince
me that he was no mere crank playing at discoveries. In spite of his
crank-like appearance there was a force about him that made that
impossible. Whatever it was, it was a thing with mechanical
possibilities. He told me of a work-shed he had, and of three
assistants—originally jobbing carpenters—whom he had trained. Now, from
the work-shed to the patent office is clearly only one step. He invited
me to see those things. I accepted readily, and took care, by a remark
or so, to underline that. The proposed transfer of the bungalow
remained very conveniently in suspense.

At last he rose to depart, with an apology for the length of his call.
Talking over his work was, he said, a pleasure enjoyed only too rarely.
It was not often he found such an intelligent listener as myself, he
mingled very little with professional scientific men.

“So much pettiness,” he explained; “so much intrigue! And really, when
one has an idea—a novel, fertilising idea—I don’t want to be
uncharitable, but—”

I am a man who believes in impulses. I made what was perhaps a rash
proposition. But you must remember, that I had been alone, play-writing
in Lympne, for fourteen days, and my compunction for his ruined walk
still hung about me. “Why not,” said I, “make this your new habit? In
the place of the one I spoilt? At least, until we can settle about the
bungalow. What you want is to turn over your work in your mind. That
you have always done during your afternoon walk. Unfortunately that’s
over—you can’t get things back as they were. But why not come and talk
about your work to me; use me as a sort of wall against which you may
throw your thoughts and catch them again? It’s certain I don’t know
enough to steal your ideas myself—and I know no scientific men—”

I stopped. He was considering. Evidently the thing attracted him. “But
I’m afraid I should bore you,” he said.

“You think I’m too dull?”

“Oh, no; but technicalities—”

“Anyhow, you’ve interested me immensely this afternoon.”

“Of course it _would_ be a great help to me. Nothing clears up one’s
ideas so much as explaining them. Hitherto—”

“My dear sir, say no more.”

“But really can you spare the time?”

“There is no rest like change of occupation,” I said, with profound
conviction.

The affair was over. On my verandah steps he turned. “I am already
greatly indebted to you,” he said.

I made an interrogative noise.

“You have completely cured me of that ridiculous habit of humming,” he
explained.

I think I said I was glad to be of any service to him, and he turned
away.

Immediately the train of thought that our conversation had suggested
must have resumed its sway. His arms began to wave in their former
fashion. The faint echo of “zuzzoo” came back to me on the breeze....

Well, after all, that was not my affair....

He came the next day, and again the next day after that, and delivered
two lectures on physics to our mutual satisfaction. He talked with an
air of being extremely lucid about the “ether” and “tubes of force,”
and “gravitational potential,” and things like that, and I sat in my
other folding-chair and said, “Yes,” “Go on,” “I follow you,” to keep
him going. It was tremendously difficult stuff, but I do not think he
ever suspected how much I did not understand him. There were moments
when I doubted whether I was well employed, but at any rate I was
resting from that confounded play. Now and then things gleamed on me
clearly for a space, only to vanish just when I thought I had hold of
them. Sometimes my attention failed altogether, and I would give it up
and sit and stare at him, wondering whether, after all, it would not be
better to use him as a central figure in a good farce and let all this
other stuff slide. And then, perhaps, I would catch on again for a bit.

At the earliest opportunity I went to see his house. It was large and
carelessly furnished; there were no servants other than his three
assistants, and his dietary and private life were characterised by a
philosophical simplicity. He was a water-drinker, a vegetarian, and all
those logical disciplinary things. But the sight of his equipment
settled many doubts. It looked like business from cellar to attic—an
amazing little place to find in an out-of-the-way village. The
ground-floor rooms contained benches and apparatus, the bakehouse and
scullery boiler had developed into respectable furnaces, dynamos
occupied the cellar, and there was a gasometer in the garden. He showed
it to me with all the confiding zest of a man who has been living too
much alone. His seclusion was overflowing now in an excess of
confidence, and I had the good luck to be the recipient.

The three assistants were creditable specimens of the class of
“handy-men” from which they came. Conscientious if unintelligent,
strong, civil, and willing. One, Spargus, who did the cooking and all
the metal work, had been a sailor; a second, Gibbs, was a joiner; and
the third was an ex-jobbing gardener, and now general assistant. They
were the merest labourers. All the intelligent work was done by Cavor.
Theirs was the darkest ignorance compared even with my muddled
impression.

And now, as to the nature of these inquiries. Here, unhappily, comes a
grave difficulty. I am no scientific expert, and if I were to attempt
to set forth in the highly scientific language of Mr. Cavor the aim to
which his experiments tended, I am afraid I should confuse not only the
reader but myself, and almost certainly I should make some blunder that
would bring upon me the mockery of every up-to-date student of
mathematical physics in the country. The best thing I can do therefore
is, I think to give my impressions in my own inexact language, without
any attempt to wear a garment of knowledge to which I have no claim.

The object of Mr. Cavor’s search was a substance that should be
“opaque”—he used some other word I have forgotten, but “opaque” conveys
the idea—to “all forms of radiant energy.” “Radiant energy,” he made me
understand, was anything like light or heat, or those Röntgen Rays
there was so much talk about a year or so ago, or the electric waves of
Marconi, or gravitation. All these things, he said, _radiate_ out from
centres, and act on bodies at a distance, whence comes the term
“radiant energy.” Now almost all substances are opaque to some form or
other of radiant energy. Glass, for example, is transparent to light,
but much less so to heat, so that it is useful as a fire-screen; and
alum is transparent to light, but blocks heat completely. A solution of
iodine in carbon bisulphide, on the other hand, completely blocks
light, but is quite transparent to heat. It will hide a fire from you,
but permit all its warmth to reach you. Metals are not only opaque to
light and heat, but also to electrical energy, which passes through
both iodine solution and glass almost as though they were not
interposed. And so on.

Now all known substances are “transparent” to gravitation. You can use
screens of various sorts to cut off the light or heat, or electrical
influence of the sun, or the warmth of the earth from anything; you can
screen things by sheets of metal from Marconi’s rays, but nothing will
cut off the gravitational attraction of the sun or the gravitational
attraction of the earth. Yet why there should be nothing is hard to
say. Cavor did not see why such a substance should not exist, and
certainly I could not tell him. I had never thought of such a
possibility before. He showed me by calculations on paper, which Lord
Kelvin, no doubt, or Professor Lodge, or Professor Karl Pearson, or any
of those great scientific people might have understood, but which
simply reduced me to a hopeless muddle, that not only was such a
substance possible, but that it must satisfy certain conditions. It was
an amazing piece of reasoning. Much as it amazed and exercised me at
the time, it would be impossible to reproduce it here. “Yes,” I said to
it all, “yes; go on!” Suffice it for this story that he believed he
might be able to manufacture this possible substance opaque to
gravitation out of a complicated alloy of metals and something new—a
new element, I fancy—called, I believe, _helium_, which was sent to him
from London in sealed stone jars. Doubt has been thrown upon this
detail, but I am almost certain it was _helium_ he had sent him in
sealed stone jars. It was certainly something very gaseous and thin. If
only I had taken notes...

But then, how was I to foresee the necessity of taking notes?

Any one with the merest germ of an imagination will understand the
extraordinary possibilities of such a substance, and will sympathise a
little with the emotion I felt as this understanding emerged from the
haze of abstruse phrases in which Cavor expressed himself. Comic relief
in a play indeed! It was some time before I would believe that I had
interpreted him aright, and I was very careful not to ask questions
that would have enabled him to gauge the profundity of misunderstanding
into which he dropped his daily exposition. But no one reading the
story of it here will sympathise fully, because from my barren
narrative it will be impossible to gather the strength of my conviction
that this astonishing substance was positively going to be made.

I do not recall that I gave my play an hour’s consecutive work at any
time after my visit to his house. My imagination had other things to
do. There seemed no limit to the possibilities of the stuff; whichever
way I tried I came on miracles and revolutions. For example, if one
wanted to lift a weight, however enormous, one had only to get a sheet
of this substance beneath it, and one might lift it with a straw. My
first natural impulse was to apply this principle to guns and
ironclads, and all the material and methods of war, and from that to
shipping, locomotion, building, every conceivable form of human
industry. The chance that had brought me into the very birth-chamber of
this new time—it was an epoch, no less—was one of those chances that
come once in a thousand years. The thing unrolled, it expanded and
expanded. Among other things I saw in it my redemption as a business
man. I saw a parent company, and daughter companies, applications to
right of us, applications to left, rings and trusts, privileges, and
concessions spreading and spreading, until one vast, stupendous
Cavorite company ran and ruled the world.

And I was in it!

I took my line straight away. I knew I was staking everything, but I
jumped there and then.

“We’re on absolutely the biggest thing that has ever been invented,” I
said, and put the accent on “we.” “If you want to keep me out of this,
you’ll have to do it with a gun. I’m coming down to be your fourth
labourer to-morrow.”

He seemed surprised at my enthusiasm, but not a bit suspicious or
hostile. Rather, he was self-depreciatory. He looked at me doubtfully.
“But do you really think—?” he said. “And your play! How about that
play?”

“It’s vanished!” I cried. “My dear sir, don’t you see what you’ve got?
Don’t you see what you’re going to do?”

That was merely a rhetorical turn, but positively, he didn’t. At first
I could not believe it. He had not had the beginning of the inkling of
an idea. This astonishing little man had been working on purely
theoretical grounds the whole time! When he said it was “the most
important” research the world had ever seen, he simply meant it squared
up so many theories, settled so much that was in doubt; he had troubled
no more about the application of the stuff he was going to turn out
than if he had been a machine that makes guns. This was a possible
substance, and he was going to make it! _V’la tout_, as the Frenchman
says.

Beyond that, he was childish! If he made it, it would go down to
posterity as Cavorite or Cavorine, and he would be made an F.R.S., and
his portrait given away as a scientific worthy with _Nature_, and
things like that. And that was all he saw! He would have dropped this
bombshell into the world as though he had discovered a new species of
gnat, if it had not happened that I had come along. And there it would
have lain and fizzled, like one or two other little things these
scientific people have lit and dropped about us.

When I realised this, it was I did the talking, and Cavor who said, “Go
on!” I jumped up. I paced the room, gesticulating like a boy of twenty.
I tried to make him understand his duties and responsibilities in the
matter—_our_ duties and responsibilities in the matter. I assured him
we might make wealth enough to work any sort of social revolution we
fancied, we might own and order the whole world. I told him of
companies and patents, and the case for secret processes. All these
things seemed to take him much as his mathematics had taken me. A look
of perplexity came into his ruddy little face. He stammered something
about indifference to wealth, but I brushed all that aside. He had got
to be rich, and it was no good his stammering. I gave him to understand
the sort of man I was, and that I had had very considerable business
experience. I did not tell him I was an undischarged bankrupt at the
time, because that was temporary, but I think I reconciled my evident
poverty with my financial claims. And quite insensibly, in the way such
projects grow, the understanding of a Cavorite monopoly grew up between
us. He was to make the stuff, and I was to make the boom.

I stuck like a leech to the “we”—“you” and “I” didn’t exist for me.

His idea was that the profits I spoke of might go to endow research,
but that, of course, was a matter we had to settle later. “That’s all
right,” I shouted, “that’s all right.” The great point, as I insisted,
was to get the thing done.

“Here is a substance,” I cried, “no home, no factory, no fortress, no
ship can dare to be without—more universally applicable even than a
patent medicine. There isn’t a solitary aspect of it, not one of its
ten thousand possible uses that will not make us rich, Cavor, beyond
the dreams of avarice!”

“No!” he said. “I begin to see. It’s extraordinary how one gets new
points of view by talking over things!”

“And as it happens you have just talked to the right man!”

“I suppose no one,” he said, “is absolutely _averse_ to enormous
wealth. Of course there is one thing—”

He paused. I stood still.

“It is just possible, you know, that we may not be able to make it
after all! It may be one of those things that are a theoretical
possibility, but a practical absurdity. Or when we make it, there may
be some little hitch!”

“We’ll tackle the hitch when it comes,” said I.




II.
The First Making of Cavorite


But Cavor’s fears were groundless, so far as the actual making was
concerned. On the 14th of October, 1899, this incredible substance was
made!

Oddly enough, it was made at last by accident, when Mr. Cavor least
expected it. He had fused together a number of metals and certain other
things—I wish I knew the particulars now!—and he intended to leave the
mixture a week and then allow it to cool slowly. Unless he had
miscalculated, the last stage in the combination would occur when the
stuff sank to a temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But it chanced
that, unknown to Cavor, dissension had arisen about the furnace
tending. Gibbs, who had previously seen to this, had suddenly attempted
to shift it to the man who had been a gardener, on the score that coal
was soil, being dug, and therefore could not possibly fall within the
province of a joiner; the man who had been a jobbing gardener alleged,
however, that coal was a metallic or ore-like substance, let alone that
he was cook. But Spargus insisted on Gibbs doing the coaling, seeing
that he was a joiner and that coal is notoriously fossil wood.
Consequently Gibbs ceased to replenish the furnace, and no one else did
so, and Cavor was too much immersed in certain interesting problems
concerning a Cavorite flying machine (neglecting the resistance of the
air and one or two other points) to perceive that anything was wrong.
And the premature birth of his invention took place just as he was
coming across the field to my bungalow for our afternoon talk and tea.

I remember the occasion with extreme vividness. The water was boiling,
and everything was prepared, and the sound of his “zuzzoo” had brought
me out upon the verandah. His active little figure was black against
the autumnal sunset, and to the right the chimneys of his house just
rose above a gloriously tinted group of trees. Remoter rose the Wealden
Hills, faint and blue, while to the left the hazy marsh spread out
spacious and serene. And then—

The chimneys jerked heavenward, smashing into a string of bricks as
they rose, and the roof and a miscellany of furniture followed. Then
overtaking them came a huge white flame. The trees about the building
swayed and whirled and tore themselves to pieces, that sprang towards
the flare. My ears were smitten with a clap of thunder that left me
deaf on one side for life, and all about me windows smashed, unheeded.

I took three steps from the verandah towards Cavor’s house, and even as
I did so came the wind.

Instantly my coat tails were over my head, and I was progressing in
great leaps and bounds, and quite against my will, towards him. In the
same moment the discoverer was seized, whirled about, and flew through
the screaming air. I saw one of my chimney pots hit the ground within
six yards of me, leap a score of feet, and so hurry in great strides
towards the focus of the disturbance. Cavor, kicking and flapping, came
down again, rolled over and over on the ground for a space, struggled
up and was lifted and borne forward at an enormous velocity, vanishing
at last among the labouring, lashing trees that writhed about his
house.

A mass of smoke and ashes, and a square of bluish shining substance
rushed up towards the zenith. A large fragment of fencing came sailing
past me, dropped edgeways, hit the ground and fell flat, and then the
worst was over. The aerial commotion fell swiftly until it was a mere
strong gale, and I became once more aware that I had breath and feet.
By leaning back against the wind I managed to stop, and could collect
such wits as still remained to me.

In that instant the whole face of the world had changed. The tranquil
sunset had vanished, the sky was dark with scurrying clouds, everything
was flattened and swaying with the gale. I glanced back to see if my
bungalow was still in a general way standing, then staggered forwards
towards the trees amongst which Cavor had vanished, and through whose
tall and leaf-denuded branches shone the flames of his burning house.

I entered the copse, dashing from one tree to another and clinging to
them, and for a space I sought him in vain. Then amidst a heap of
smashed branches and fencing that had banked itself against a portion
of his garden wall I perceived something stir. I made a run for this,
but before I reached it a brown object separated itself, rose on two
muddy legs, and protruded two drooping, bleeding hands. Some tattered
ends of garment fluttered out from its middle portion and streamed
before the wind.

For a moment I did not recognise this earthy lump, and then I saw that
it was Cavor, caked in the mud in which he had rolled. He leant forward
against the wind, rubbing the dirt from his eyes and mouth.

He extended a muddy lump of hand, and staggered a pace towards me. His
face worked with emotion, little lumps of mud kept falling from it. He
looked as damaged and pitiful as any living creature I have ever seen,
and his remark therefore amazed me exceedingly.

“Gratulate me,” he gasped; “gratulate me!”

“Congratulate you!” said I. “Good heavens! What for?”

“I’ve done it.”

“You _have_. What on earth caused that explosion?”

A gust of wind blew his words away. I understood him to say that it
wasn’t an explosion at all. The wind hurled me into collision with him,
and we stood clinging to one another.

“Try and get back—to my bungalow,” I bawled in his ear. He did not hear
me, and shouted something about “three martyrs—science,” and also
something about “not much good.” At the time he laboured under the
impression that his three attendants had perished in the whirlwind.
Happily this was incorrect. Directly he had left for my bungalow they
had gone off to the public-house in Lympne to discuss the question of
the furnaces over some trivial refreshment.

I repeated my suggestion of getting back to my bungalow, and this time
he understood. We clung arm-in-arm and started, and managed at last to
reach the shelter of as much roof as was left to me. For a space we sat
in arm-chairs and panted. All the windows were broken, and the lighter
articles of furniture were in great disorder, but no irrevocable damage
was done. Happily the kitchen door had stood the pressure upon it, so
that all my crockery and cooking materials had survived. The oil stove
was still burning, and I put on the water to boil again for tea. And
that prepared, I could turn on Cavor for his explanation.

“Quite correct,” he insisted; “quite correct. I’ve done it, and it’s
all right.”

“But,” I protested. “All right! Why, there can’t be a rick standing, or
a fence or a thatched roof undamaged for twenty miles round....”

“It’s all right—_really_. I didn’t, of course, foresee this little
upset. My mind was preoccupied with another problem, and I’m apt to
disregard these practical side issues. But it’s all right—”

“My dear sir,” I cried, “don’t you see you’ve done thousands of pounds’
worth of damage?”

“There, I throw myself on your discretion. I’m not a practical man, of
course, but don’t you think they will regard it as a cyclone?”

“But the explosion—”

“It was _not_ an explosion. It’s perfectly simple. Only, as I say, I’m
apt to overlook these little things. It’s that zuzzoo business on a
larger scale. Inadvertently I made this substance of mine, this
Cavorite, in a thin, wide sheet....”

He paused. “You are quite clear that the stuff is opaque to
gravitation, that it cuts off things from gravitating towards each
other?”

“Yes,” said I. “Yes.”

“Well, so soon as it reached a temperature of 60 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 upward violently, the air that rushed in to
replace it immediately lost weight, ceased to exert any pressure,
followed suit, blew the ceiling through and the roof off....

“You perceive,” he said, “it formed a sort of atmospheric fountain, a
kind of chimney in the atmosphere. And if the Cavorite itself hadn’t
been loose and so got sucked up the chimney, does it occur to you what
would have happened?”

I thought. “I suppose,” I said, “the air would be rushing up and up
over that infernal piece of stuff now.”

“Precisely,” he said. “A huge fountain—”

“Spouting into space! Good heavens! Why, it would have squirted all the
atmosphere of the earth away! It would have robbed the world of air! It
would have been the death of all mankind! That little lump of stuff!”

“Not exactly into space,” said Cavor, “but as bad—practically. It would
have whipped the air off the world as one peels a banana, and flung it
thousands of miles. It would have dropped back again, of course—but on
an asphyxiated world! From our point of view very little better than if
it never came back!”

I stared. As yet I was too amazed to realise how all my expectations
had been upset. “What do you mean to do now?” I asked.

“In the first place if I may borrow a garden trowel I will remove some
of this earth with which I am encased, and then if I may avail myself
of your domestic conveniences I will have a bath. This done, we will
converse more at leisure. It will be wise, I think”—he laid a muddy
hand on my arm—“if nothing were said of this affair beyond ourselves. I
know I have caused great damage—probably even dwelling-houses may be
ruined here and there upon the country-side. But on the other hand, I
cannot possibly pay for the damage I have done, and if the real cause
of this is published, it will lead only to heartburning and the
obstruction of my work. One cannot foresee _everything_, you know, and
I cannot consent for one moment to add the burthen of practical
considerations to my theorising. Later on, when you have come in with
your practical mind, and Cavorite is floated—floated _is_ the word,
isn’t it?—and it has realised all you anticipate for it, we may set
matters right with these persons. But not now—not now. If no other
explanation is offered, people, in the present unsatisfactory state of
meteorological science, will ascribe all this to a cyclone; there might
be a public subscription, and as my house has collapsed and been burnt,
I should in that case receive a considerable share in the compensation,
which would be extremely helpful to the prosecution of our researches.
But if it is known that _I_ caused this, there will be no public
subscription, and everybody will be put out. Practically I should never
get a chance of working in peace again. My three assistants may or may
not have perished. That is a detail. If they have, it is no great loss;
they were more zealous than able, and this premature event must be
largely due to their joint neglect of the furnace. If they have not
perished, I doubt if they have the intelligence to explain the affair.
They will accept the cyclone story. And if during the temporary
unfitness of my house for occupation, I may lodge in one of the
untenanted rooms of this bungalow of yours—”

He paused and regarded me.

A man of such possibilities, I reflected, is no ordinary guest to
entertain.

“Perhaps,” said I, rising to my feet, “we had better begin by looking
for a trowel,” and I led the way to the scattered vestiges of the
greenhouse.

And while he was having his bath I considered the entire question
alone. It was clear there were drawbacks to Mr. Cavor’s society I had
not foreseen. The absentmindedness that had just escaped depopulating
the terrestrial globe, might at any moment result in some other grave
inconvenience. On the other hand I was young, my affairs were in a
mess, and I was in just the mood for reckless adventure—with a chance
of something good at the end of it. I had quite settled in my mind that
I was to have half at least in that aspect of the affair. Fortunately I
held my bungalow, as I have already explained, on a three-year
agreement, without being responsible for repairs; and my furniture,
such as there was of it, had been hastily purchased, was unpaid for,
insured, and altogether devoid of associations. In the end I decided to
keep on with him, and see the business through.

Certainly the aspect of things had changed very greatly. I no longer
doubted at all the enormous possibilities of the substance, but I began
to have doubts about the gun-carriage and the patent boots. We set to
work at once to reconstruct his laboratory and proceed with our
experiments. Cavor talked more on my level than he had ever done
before, when it came to the question of how we should make the stuff
next.

“Of course we must make it again,” he said, with a sort of glee I had
not expected in him, “of course we must make it again. We have caught a
Tartar, perhaps, but we have left the theoretical behind us for good
and all. If we can possibly avoid wrecking this little planet of ours,
we will. But—there _must_ be risks! There must be. In experimental work
there always are. And here, as a practical man, _you_ must come in. For
my own part it seems to me we might make it edgeways, perhaps, and very
thin. Yet I don’t know. I have a certain dim perception of another
method. I can hardly explain it yet. But curiously enough it came into
my mind, while I was rolling over and over in the mud before the wind,
and very doubtful how the whole adventure was to end, as being
absolutely the thing I ought to have done.”

Even with my aid we found some little difficulty, and meanwhile we kept
at work restoring the laboratory. There was plenty to do before it
became absolutely necessary to decide upon the precise form and method
of our second attempt. Our only hitch was the strike of the three
labourers, who objected to my activity as a foreman. But that matter we
compromised after two days’ delay.




III.
The Building of the sphere


I remember the occasion very distinctly when Cavor told me of his idea
of the sphere. He had had intimations of it before, but at the time it
seemed to come to him in a rush. We were returning to the bungalow for
tea, and on the way he fell humming. Suddenly he shouted, “That’s it!
That finishes it! A sort of roller blind!”

“Finishes what?” I asked.

“Space—anywhere! The moon.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mean? Why—it must be a sphere! That’s what I mean!”

I saw I was out of it, and for a time I let him talk in his own
fashion. I hadn’t the ghost of an idea then of his drift. But after he
had taken tea he made it clear to me.

“It’s like this,” he said. “Last time I ran this stuff that cuts things
off from gravitation into a flat tank with an overlap that held it
down. And directly it had cooled and the manufacture was completed all
that uproar happened, nothing above it weighed anything, the air went
squirting up, the house squirted up, and if the stuff itself hadn’t
squirted up too, I don’t know what would have happened! But suppose the
substance is loose, and quite free to go up?”

“It will go up at once!”

“Exactly. With no more disturbance than firing a big gun.”

“But what good will that do?”

“I’m going up with it!”

I put down my teacup and stared at him.

“Imagine a sphere,” he explained, “large enough to hold two people and
their luggage. It will be made of steel lined with thick glass; it will
contain a proper store of solidified air, concentrated food, water
distilling apparatus, and so forth. And enamelled, as it were, on the
outer steel—”

“Cavorite?”

“Yes.”

“But how will you get inside?”

“There was a similar problem about a dumpling.”

“Yes, I know. But how?”

“That’s perfectly easy. An air-tight manhole is all that is needed.
That, of course, will have to be a little complicated; there will have
to be a valve, so that things may be thrown out, if necessary, without
much loss of air.”

“Like Jules Verne’s thing in _A Trip to the Moon_.”

But Cavor was not a reader of fiction.

“I begin to see,” I said slowly. “And you could get in and screw
yourself up while the Cavorite was warm, and as soon as it cooled it
would become impervious to gravitation, and off you would fly—”

“At a tangent.”

“You would go off in a straight line—” I stopped abruptly. “What is to
prevent the thing travelling in a straight line into space for ever?” I
asked. “You’re not safe to get anywhere, and if you do—how will you get
back?”

“I’ve just thought of that,” said Cavor. “That’s what I meant when I
said the thing is finished. The inner glass sphere can be air-tight,
and, except for the manhole, continuous, and the steel sphere can be
made in sections, each section capable of rolling up after the fashion
of a roller blind. These can easily be worked by springs, and released
and checked by electricity conveyed by platinum wires fused through the
glass. All that is merely a question of detail. So you see, that except
for the thickness of the blind rollers, the Cavorite exterior of the
sphere will consist of windows or blinds, whichever you like to call
them. Well, when all these windows or blinds are shut, no light, no
heat, no gravitation, no radiant energy of any sort will get at the
inside of the sphere, it will fly on through space in a straight line,
as you say. But open a window, imagine one of the windows open. Then at
once any heavy body that chances to be in that direction will attract
us—”

I sat taking it in.

“You see?” he said.

“Oh, I _see_.”

“Practically we shall be able to tack about in space just as we wish.
Get attracted by this and that.”

“Oh, yes. _That’s_ clear enough. Only—”

“Well?”

“I don’t quite see what we shall do it for! It’s really only jumping
off the world and back again.”

“Surely! For example, one might go to the moon.”

“And when one got there? What would you find?”

“We should see—Oh! consider the new knowledge.”

“Is there air there?”

“There may be.”

“It’s a fine idea,” I said, “but it strikes me as a large order all the
same. The moon! I’d much rather try some smaller things first.”

“They’re out of the question, because of the air difficulty.”

“Why not apply that idea of spring blinds—Cavorite blinds in strong
steel cases—to lifting weights?”

“It wouldn’t work,” he insisted. “After all, to go into outer space is
not so much worse, if at all, than a polar expedition. Men go on polar
expeditions.”

“Not business men. And besides, they get paid for polar expeditions.
And if anything goes wrong there are relief parties. But this—it’s just
firing ourselves off the world for nothing.”

“Call it prospecting.”

“You’ll have to call it that.... One might make a book of it perhaps,”
I said.

“I have no doubt there will be minerals,” said Cavor.

“For example?”

“Oh! sulphur, ores, gold perhaps, possibly new elements.”

“Cost of carriage,” I said. “You know you’re _not_ a practical man. The
moon’s a quarter of a million miles away.”

“It seems to me it wouldn’t cost much to cart any weight anywhere if
you packed it in a Cavorite case.”

I had not thought of that. “Delivered free on head of purchaser, eh?”

“It isn’t as though we were confined to the moon.”

“You mean?”

“There’s Mars—clear atmosphere, novel surroundings, exhilarating sense
of lightness. It might be pleasant to go there.”

“Is there air on Mars?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Seems as though you might run it as a sanatorium. By the way, how far
is Mars?”

“Two hundred million miles at present,” said Cavor airily; “and you go
close by the sun.”

My imagination was picking itself up again. “After all,” I said,
“there’s something in these things. There’s travel—”

An extraordinary possibility came rushing into my mind. Suddenly I saw,
as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavorite liners
and spheres _de luxe_. “Rights of pre-emption,” came floating into my
head—planetary rights of pre-emption. I recalled the old Spanish
monopoly in American gold. It wasn’t as though it was just this planet
or that—it was all of them. I stared at Cavor’s rubicund face, and
suddenly my imagination was leaping and dancing. I stood up, I walked
up and down; my tongue was unloosened.

“I’m beginning to take it in,” I said; “I’m beginning to take it in.”
The transition from doubt to enthusiasm seemed to take scarcely any
time at all. “But this is tremendous!” I cried. “This is Imperial! I
haven’t been dreaming of this sort of thing.”

Once the chill of my opposition was removed, his own pent-up excitement
had play. He too got up and paced. He too gesticulated and shouted. We
behaved like men inspired. We _were_ men inspired.

“We’ll settle all that!” he said in answer to some incidental
difficulty that had pulled me up. “We’ll soon settle 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 these drawings looked. I shaded and tinted
while Cavor drew—smudged and haste-marked they were in every line, but
wonderfully correct. We got out the orders for the steel blinds and
frames we needed from that night’s work, and the glass sphere was
designed within a week. We gave up our afternoon conversations and our
old routine altogether. We worked, and we slept and ate when we could
work no longer for hunger and fatigue. Our enthusiasm infected even our
three men, though they had no idea what the sphere was for. Through
those days the man Gibbs gave up walking, and went everywhere, even
across the room, at a sort of fussy run.

And it grew—the sphere. December passed, January—I spent a day with a
broom sweeping a path through the snow from bungalow to
laboratory—February, March. By the end of March the completion was in
sight. In January had come a team of horses, a huge packing-case; we
had our thick glass sphere now ready, and in position under the crane
we had rigged to sling it into the steel shell. All the bars and blinds
of the steel shell—it was not really a spherical shell, but polyhedral,
with a roller blind to each facet—had arrived by February, and the
lower half was bolted together. The Cavorite was half made by March,
the metallic paste had gone through two of the stages in its
manufacture, and we had plastered quite half of it on to the steel bars
and blinds. It was astonishing how closely we kept to the lines of
Cavor’s first inspiration in working out the scheme. When the bolting
together of the sphere was finished, he proposed to remove the rough
roof of the temporary laboratory in which the work was done, and build
a furnace about it. So the last stage of Cavorite making, in which the
paste is heated to a dull red glow in a stream of helium, would be
accomplished when it was already on the sphere.

And then we had to discuss and decide what provisions we were to
take—compressed foods, concentrated essences, steel cylinders
containing reserve oxygen, an arrangement for removing carbonic acid
and waste from the air and restoring oxygen by means of sodium
peroxide, water condensers, and so forth. I remember the little heap
they made in the corner—tins, and rolls, and boxes—convincingly
matter-of-fact.

It was a strenuous time, with little chance of thinking. But one day,
when we were drawing near the end, an odd mood came over me. I had been
bricking up the furnace all the morning, and I sat down by these
possessions dead beat. Everything seemed dull and incredible.

“But look here, Cavor,” I said. “After all! What’s it all for?”

He smiled. “The thing now is to go.”

“The moon,” I reflected. “But what do you expect? I thought the moon
was a dead world.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“We’re going to see.”

“_Are_ we?” I said, and stared before me.

“You are tired,” he remarked. “You’d better take a walk this
afternoon.”

“No,” I said obstinately; “I’m going to finish this brickwork.”

And I did, and insured myself a night of insomnia. I don’t think I have
ever had such a night. I had some bad times before my business
collapse, but the very worst of those was sweet slumber compared to
this infinity of aching wakefulness. I was suddenly in the most
enormous funk at the thing we were going to do.

I do not remember before that night thinking at all of the risks we
were running. Now they came like that array of spectres that once
beleaguered Prague, and camped around me. The strangeness of what we
were about to do, the unearthliness of it, overwhelmed me. I was like a
man awakened out of pleasant dreams to the most horrible surroundings.
I lay, eyes wide open, and the sphere seemed to get more flimsy and
feeble, and Cavor more unreal and fantastic, and the whole enterprise
madder and madder every moment.

I got out of bed and wandered about. I sat at the window and stared at
the immensity of space. Between the stars was the void, the
unfathomable darkness! I tried to recall the fragmentary knowledge of
astronomy I had gained in my irregular reading, but it was all too
vague to furnish any idea of the things we might expect. At last I got
back to bed and snatched some moments of sleep—moments of nightmare
rather—in which I fell and fell and fell for evermore into the abyss of
the sky.

I astonished Cavor at breakfast. I told him shortly, “I’m not coming
with you in the sphere.”

I met all his protests with a sullen persistence. “The thing’s too
mad,” I said, “and I won’t come. The thing’s too mad.”

I would not go with him to the laboratory. I fretted about my bungalow
for a time, and then took hat and stick and set out alone, I knew not
whither. It chanced to be a glorious morning: a warm wind and deep blue
sky, the first green of spring abroad, and multitudes of birds singing.
I lunched on beef and beer in a little public-house near Elham, and
startled the landlord by remarking _apropos_ of the weather, “A man who
leaves the world when days of this sort are about is a fool!”

“That’s what I says when I heerd on it!” said the landlord, and I found
that for one poor soul at least this world had proved excessive, and
there had been a throat-cutting. I went on with a new twist to my
thoughts.

In the afternoon I had a pleasant sleep in a sunny place, and went on
my way refreshed.

I came to a comfortable-looking inn near Canterbury. It was bright with
creepers, and the landlady was a clean old woman and took my eye. I
found I had just enough money to pay for my lodging with her. I decided
to stop the night there. She was a talkative body, and among many other
particulars I learnt she had never been to London. “Canterbury’s as far
as ever I been,” she said. “I’m not one of your gad-about sort.”

“How would you like a trip to the moon?” I cried.

“I never did hold with them ballooneys,” she said evidently under the
impression that this was a common excursion enough. “I wouldn’t go up
in one—not for ever so.”

This struck me as being funny. After I had supped I sat on a bench by
the door of the inn and gossiped with two labourers about 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 our enterprise. Nerves
purely! After that I worked a little more carefully, and took a trudge
for an hour every day. And at last, save for the heating in the
furnace, our labours were at an end.




IV.
Inside the Sphere


“Go on,” said Cavor, as I sat across the edge of the manhole, and
looked down into the black interior of the sphere. We two were alone.
It was evening, the sun had set, and the stillness of the twilight was
upon everything.

I drew my other leg inside and slid down the smooth glass to the bottom
of the sphere, then turned to take the cans of food and other
impedimenta from Cavor. The interior was warm, the thermometer stood at
eighty, and as we should lose little or none of this by radiation, we
were dressed in shoes and thin flannels. We had, however, a bundle of
thick woollen clothing and several thick blankets to guard against
mischance.

By Cavor’s direction I placed the packages, the cylinders of oxygen,
and so forth, loosely about my feet, and soon we had everything in. He
walked about the roofless shed for a time seeking anything we had
overlooked, and then crawled in after me. I noted something in his
hand.

“What have you got there?” I asked.

“Haven’t you brought anything to read?”

“Good Lord! No.”

“I forgot to tell you. There are uncertainties— The voyage may last— We
may be weeks!”

“But—”

“We shall be floating in this sphere with absolutely no occupation.”

“I wish I’d known—”

He peered out of the manhole. “Look!” he said. “There’s something
there!”

“Is there time?”

“We shall be an hour.”

I looked out. It was an old number of _Tit-Bits_ that one of the men
must have brought. Farther away in the corner I saw a torn _Lloyd’s
News_. I scrambled back into the sphere with these things. “What have
you got?” I said.

I took the book from his hand and read, “The Works of William
Shakespeare”.

He coloured slightly. “My education has been so purely scientific—” he
said apologetically.

“Never read him?”

“Never.”

“He knew a little, you know—in an irregular sort of way.”

“Precisely what I am told,” said Cavor.

I assisted him to screw in the glass cover of the manhole, and then he
pressed a stud to close the corresponding blind in the outer case. The
little oblong of twilight vanished. We were in darkness. For a time
neither of us spoke. Although our case would not be impervious to
sound, everything was very still. I perceived there was nothing to grip
when the shock of our start should come, and I realised that I should
be uncomfortable for want of a chair.

“Why have we no chairs?” I asked.

“I’ve settled all that,” said Cavor. “We won’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 to too
late to withdraw? The world outside the sphere, I knew, would be cold
and inhospitable enough for me—for weeks I had been living on subsidies
from Cavor—but after all, would it be as cold as the infinite zero, as
inhospitable as empty space? If it had not been for the appearance of
cowardice, I believe that even then I should have made him let me out.
But I hesitated on that score, and hesitated, and grew fretful and
angry, and the time passed.

There came a little jerk, a noise like champagne being uncorked in
another room, and a faint whistling sound. For just one instant I had a
sense of enormous tension, a transient conviction that my feet were
pressing downward with a force of countless tons. It lasted for an
infinitesimal time.

But it stirred me to action. “Cavor!” I said into the darkness, “my
nerve’s in rags. I don’t think—”

I stopped. He made no answer.

“Confound it!” I cried; “I’m a fool! What business have I here? I’m not
coming, Cavor. The thing’s too risky. I’m getting out.”

“You can’t,” he said.

“Can’t! We’ll soon see about that!”

He made no answer for ten seconds. “It’s too late for us to quarrel
now, Bedford,” he said. “That little jerk was the start. Already we are
flying as swiftly as a bullet up into the gulf of space.”

“I—” I said, and then it didn’t seem to matter what happened. For a
time I was, as it were, stunned; I had nothing to say. It was just as
if I had never heard of this idea of leaving the world before. Then I
perceived an unaccountable change in my bodily sensations. It was a
feeling of lightness, of unreality. Coupled with that was a queer
sensation in the head, an apoplectic effect almost, and a thumping of
blood vessels at the ears. Neither of these feelings diminished as time
went on, but at last I got so used to them that I experienced no
inconvenience.

I heard a click, and a little glow lamp came into being.

I saw Cavor’s face, as white as I felt my own to be. We regarded one
another in silence. The transparent blackness of the glass behind him
made him seem as though he floated in a void.

“Well, we’re committed,” I said at last.

“Yes,” he said, “we’re committed.”

“Don’t move,” he exclaimed, at some suggestion of a gesture. “Let your
muscles keep quite lax—as if you were in bed. We are in a little
universe of our own. Look at those things!”

He pointed to the loose cases and bundles that had been lying on the
blankets in the bottom of the sphere. I was astonished to see that they
were floating now nearly a foot from the spherical wall. Then I saw
from his shadow that Cavor was no longer leaning against the glass. I
thrust out my hand behind me, and found that I too was suspended in
space, clear of the glass.

I did not cry out nor gesticulate, but fear came upon me. It was like
being held and lifted by something—you know not what. The mere touch of
my hand against the glass moved me rapidly. I understood what had
happened, but that did not prevent my being afraid. We were cut off
from all exterior gravitation, only the attraction of objects within
our sphere had effect. Consequently everything that was not fixed to
the glass was falling—slowly because of the slightness of our
masses—towards the centre of gravity of our little world, which seemed
to be somewhere about the middle of the sphere, but rather nearer to
myself than Cavor, on account of my greater weight.

“We must turn round,” said Cavor, “and float back to back, with the
things between us.”

It was the strangest sensation conceivable, floating thus loosely in
space, at first indeed horribly strange, and when the horror passed,
not disagreeable at all, exceeding restful; indeed, the nearest thing
in earthly experience to it that I know is lying on a very thick, soft
feather bed. But the quality of utter detachment and independence! I
had not reckoned on things like this. I had expected a violent jerk at
starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt—as if I were
disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like
the beginning of a dream.




V.
The Journey to the Moon


Presently Cavor extinguished the light. He said we had not overmuch
energy stored, and that what we had we must economise for reading. For
a time, whether it was long or short I do not know, there was nothing
but blank darkness.

A question floated up out of the void. “How are we pointing?” I said.
“What is our direction?”

“We are flying away from the earth at a tangent, and as the moon is
near her third quarter we are going somewhere towards her. I will open
a blind—”

Came a click, and then a window in the outer case yawned open. The sky
outside was as black as the darkness within the sphere, but the shape
of the open window was marked by an infinite number of stars.

Those who have only seen the starry sky from the earth cannot imagine
its appearance when the vague, half luminous veil of our air has been
withdrawn. The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered survivors
that penetrate our misty atmosphere. But now at last I could realise
the meaning of the hosts of heaven!

Stranger things we were presently to see, but that airless, star-dusted
sky! Of all things, I think that will be one of the last I shall
forget.

The little window vanished with a click, another beside it snapped open
and instantly closed, and then a third, and for a moment I had to close
my eyes because of the blinding splendour of the waning moon.

For a space I had to stare at Cavor and the white-lit things about me
to season my eyes to light again, before I could turn them towards that
pallid glare.

Four windows were open in order that the gravitation of the moon might
act upon all the substances in our sphere. I found I was no longer
floating freely in space, but that my feet were resting on the glass in
the direction of the moon. The blankets and cases of provisions were
also creeping slowly down the glass, and presently came to rest so as
to block out a portion of the view. It seemed to me, of course, that I
looked “down” when I looked at the moon. On earth “down” means
earthward, the way things fall, and “up” the reverse direction. Now the
pull of gravitation was towards the moon, and for all I knew to the
contrary our earth was overhead. And, of course, when all the Cavorite
blinds were closed, “down” was towards the centre of our sphere, and
“up” towards its outer wall.

It was curiously unlike earthly experience, too, to have the light
coming _up_ to one. On earth light falls from above, or comes slanting
down sideways, but here it came from beneath our feet, and to see our
shadows we had to look up.

At first it gave me a sort of vertigo to stand only on thick glass and
look down upon the moon through hundreds of thousands of miles of
vacant space; but this sickness passed very speedily. And then—the
splendour of the sight!

The reader may imagine it best if he will lie on the ground some warm
summer’s night and look between his upraised feet at the moon, but for
some reason, probably because the absence of air made it so much more
luminous, the moon seemed already considerably larger than it does from
earth. The minutest details of its surface were acutely clear. And
since we did not see it through air, its outline was bright and sharp,
there was no glow or halo about it, and the star-dust that covered the
sky came right to its very margin, and marked the outline of its
unilluminated part. And as I stood and stared at the moon between my
feet, that perception of the impossible that had been with me off and
on ever since our start, returned again with tenfold conviction.

“Cavor,” I said, “this takes me queerly. Those companies we were going
to run, and all that about minerals?”

“Well?”

“I don’t see ‘em here.”

“No,” said Cavor; “but you’ll get over all that.”

“I suppose I’m made to turn right side up again. Still, _this_— For a
moment I could half believe there never was a world.”

“That copy of _Lloyd’s News_ might help you.”

I stared at the paper for a moment, then held it above the level of my
face, and found I could read it quite easily. I struck a column of mean
little advertisements. “A gentleman of private means is willing to lend
money,” I read. I knew that gentleman. Then somebody eccentric wanted
to sell a Cutaway bicycle, “quite new and cost £15,” for five pounds;
and a lady in distress wished to dispose of some fish knives and forks,
“a wedding present,” at a great sacrifice. No doubt some simple soul
was sagely examining these knives and forks, and another triumphantly
riding off on that bicycle, and a third trustfully consulting that
benevolent gentleman of means even as I read. I laughed, and let the
paper drift from my hand.

“Are we visible from the earth?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I knew some one who was rather interested in astronomy. It occurred to
me that it would be rather odd if—my friend—chanced to be looking
through some telescope.”

“It would need the most powerful telescope on earth even now to see us
as the minutest speck.”

For a time I stared in silence at the moon.

“It’s a world,” I said; “one feels that infinitely more than one ever
did on earth. People perhaps—”

“People!” he exclaimed. “_No!_ Banish all that! Think yourself a sort
of ultra-arctic voyager exploring the desolate places of space. Look at
it!”

He waved his hand at the shining whiteness below. “It’s dead—dead! Vast
extinct volcanoes, lava wildernesses, tumbled wastes of snow, or frozen
carbonic acid, or frozen air, and everywhere landslip seams and cracks
and gulfs. Nothing happens. Men have watched this planet systematically
with telescopes for over two hundred years. How much change do you
think they have seen?”

“None.”

“They have traced two indisputable landslips, a doubtful crack, and one
slight periodic change of colour, and that’s all.”

“I didn’t know they’d traced even that.”

“Oh, yes. But as for people—!”

“By the way,” I asked, “how small a thing will the biggest telescopes
show upon the moon?”

“One could see a fair-sized church. One could certainly see any towns
or buildings, or anything like the handiwork of men. There might
perhaps be insects, something in the way of ants, for example, so that
they could hide in deep burrows from the lunar light, or some new sort
of creatures having no earthly parallel. That is the most probable
thing, if we are to find life there at all. Think of the difference in
conditions! Life must fit itself to a day as long as fourteen earthly
days, a cloudless sun-blaze of fourteen days, and then a night of equal
length, growing ever colder and colder under these cold, sharp stars.
In that night there must be cold, the ultimate cold, absolute zero,
273° C. below the earthly freezing point. Whatever life there is must
hibernate through _that_, and rise again each day.”

He mused. “One can imagine something worm-like,” he said, “taking its
air solid as an earth-worm swallows earth, or thick-skinned monsters—”

“By the bye,” I said, “why didn’t we bring a gun?”

He did not answer that question. “No,” he concluded, “we just have to
go. We shall see when we get there.”

I remembered something. “Of course, there’s my minerals, anyhow,” I
said; “whatever the conditions may be.”

Presently he told me he wished to alter our course a little by letting
the earth tug at us for a moment. He was going to open one earthward
blind for thirty seconds. He warned me that it would make my head swim,
and advised me to extend my hands against the glass to break my fall. I
did as he directed, and thrust my feet against the bales of food cases
and air cylinders to prevent their falling upon me. Then with a click
the window flew open. I fell clumsily upon hands and face, and saw for
a moment between my black extended fingers our mother earth—a planet in
a downward sky.

We were still very near—Cavor told me the distance was perhaps eight
hundred miles and the huge terrestrial 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
recognised the cloud-dimmed coast-lines of France and Spain and the
south of England, and then, with a click, the shutter closed again, and
I found myself in a state of extraordinary confusion sliding slowly
over the smooth glass.

When at last things settled themselves in my mind again, it seemed
quite beyond question that the moon was “down” and under my feet, and
that the earth was somewhere away on the level of the horizon—the earth
that had been “down” to me and my kindred since the beginning of
things.

So slight were the exertions required of us, so easy did the practical
annihilation of our weight make all we had to do, that the necessity
for taking refreshment did not occur to us for nearly six hours (by
Cavor’s chronometer) after our start. I was amazed at that lapse of
time. Even then I was satisfied with very little. Cavor examined the
apparatus for absorbing carbonic acid and water, and pronounced it to
be in satisfactory order, our consumption of oxygen having been
extraordinarily slight. And our talk being exhausted for the time, and
there being nothing further for us to do, we gave way to a curious
drowsiness that had come upon us, and spreading our blankets on the
bottom of the sphere in such a manner as to shut out most of the
moonlight, wished each other good-night, and almost immediately fell
asleep.

And so, sleeping, and sometimes talking and reading a little, and at
times eating, although without any keenness of appetite,[1] but for the
most part in a sort of quiescence that was neither waking nor slumber,
we fell through a space of time that had neither night nor day in it,
silently, softly, and swiftly down towards the moon.

 [1] It is a curious thing, that while we were in the sphere we felt
 not the slightest desire for food, nor did we feel the want of it when
 we abstained. At first we forced our appetites, but afterwards we
 fasted completely. Altogether we did not consume one-hundredth part of
 the compressed provisions we had brought with us. The amount of
 carbonic acid we breathed was also unnaturally low, but why this was,
 I am quite unable to explain.




VI.
The Landing on the Moon


I remember how one day Cavor suddenly opened six of our shutters and
blinded me so that I cried aloud at him. The whole area was moon, a
stupendous scimitar of white dawn with its edge hacked out by notches
of darkness, the crescent shore of an ebbing tide of darkness, out of
which peaks and pinnacles came glittering into the blaze of the sun. I
take it the reader has seen pictures or photographs of the moon and
that I need not describe the broader features of that landscape, those
spacious ring-like ranges vaster than any terrestrial mountains, their
summits shining in the day, their shadows harsh and deep, the grey
disordered plains, the ridges, hills, and craterlets, all passing at
last from a blazing illumination into a common mystery of black.
Athwart this world we were flying scarcely a hundred miles above its
crests and pinnacles. And now we could see, what no eye on earth will
ever see, that under the blaze of the day the harsh outlines of the
rocks and ravines of the plains and crater floor grew grey and
indistinct under a thickening haze, that the white of their lit
surfaces broke into lumps and patches, and broke again and shrank and
vanished, and that here and there strange tints of brown and olive grew
and spread.

But little time we had for watching then. For now we had come to the
real danger of our journey. We had to drop ever closer to the moon as
we spun about it, to slacken our pace and watch our chance, until at
last we could dare to drop upon its surface.

For Cavor that was a time of intense exertion; for me it was an anxious
inactivity. I seemed perpetually to be getting out of his way. He leapt
about the sphere from point to point with an agility that would have
been impossible on earth. He was perpetually opening and closing the
Cavorite windows, making calculations, consulting his chronometer by
means of the glow lamp during those last eventful hours. For a long
time we had all our windows closed and hung silently in darkness
hurling through space.

Then he was feeling for the shutter studs, and suddenly four windows
were open. I staggered and covered my eyes, drenched and scorched and
blinded by the unaccustomed splendour of the sun beneath my feet. Then
again the shutters snapped, leaving my brain spinning in a darkness
that pressed against the eyes. And after that I floated in another
vast, black silence.

Then Cavor switched on the electric light, and told me he proposed to
bind all our luggage together with the blankets about it, against the
concussion of our descent. We did this with our windows closed, because
in that way our goods arranged themselves naturally at the centre of
the sphere. That too was a strange business; we two men floating loose
in that spherical space, and packing and pulling ropes. Imagine it if
you can! No up nor down, and every effort resulting in unexpected
movements. Now I would be pressed against the glass with the full force
of Cavor’s thrust, now I would be kicking helplessly in a void. Now the
star of the electric light would be overhead, now under foot. Now
Cavor’s feet would float up before my eyes, and now we would be
crossways to each other. But at last our goods were safely bound
together in a big soft bale, all except two blankets with head holes
that we were to wrap about ourselves.

Then for a flash Cavor opened a window moonward, and we saw that we
were dropping towards a huge central crater with a number of minor
craters grouped in a sort of cross about it. And then again Cavor flung
our little sphere open to the scorching, blinding sun. I think he was
using the sun’s attraction as a brake. “Cover yourself with a blanket,”
he cried, thrusting himself from me, and for a moment I did not
understand.

Then I hauled the blanket from beneath my feet and got it about me and
over my head and eyes. Abruptly he closed the shutters again, snapped
one open again and closed it, then suddenly began snapping them all
open, each safely into its steel roller. There came a jar, and then we
were rolling over and over, bumping against the glass and against the
big bale of our luggage, and clutching at each other, and outside some
white substance splashed as if we were rolling down a slope of snow....

Over, clutch, bump, clutch, bump, over....

Came a thud, and I was half buried under the bale of our possessions,
and for a space everything was still. Then I could hear Cavor puffing
and grunting, and the snapping of a shutter in its sash. I made an
effort, thrust back our blanket-wrapped luggage, and emerged from
beneath it. Our open windows were just visible as a deeper black set
with stars.

We were still alive, and we were lying in the darkness of the shadow of
the wall of the great crater into which we had fallen.

We sat getting our breath again, and feeling the bruises on our limbs.
I don’t think either of us had had a very clear expectation of such
rough handling as we had received. I struggled painfully to my feet.
“And now,” said I, “to look at the landscape of the moon! But—! It’s
tremendously dark, Cavor!”

The glass was dewy, and as I spoke I wiped at it with my blanket.
“We’re half an hour or so beyond the day,” he said. “We must wait.”

It was impossible to distinguish anything. We might have been in a
sphere of steel for all that we could see. My rubbing with the blanket
simply smeared the glass, and as fast as I wiped it, it became opaque
again with freshly condensed moisture mixed with an increasing quantity
of blanket hairs. Of course I ought not to have used the blanket. In my
efforts to clear the glass I slipped upon the damp surface, and hurt my
shin against one of the oxygen cylinders that protruded from our bale.

The thing was exasperating—it was absurd. Here we were just arrived
upon the moon, amidst we knew not what wonders, and all we could see
was the grey and streaming wall of the bubble in which we had come.

“Confound it!” I said, “but at this rate we might have stopped at
home;” and I squatted on the bale and shivered, and drew my blanket
closer about me.

Abruptly the moisture turned to spangles and fronds of frost. “Can you
reach the electric heater,” said Cavor. “Yes—that black knob. Or we
shall freeze.”

I did not wait to be told twice. “And now,” said I, “what are we to
do?”

“Wait,” he said.

“Wait?”

“Of course. We shall have to wait until our air gets warm again, and
then this glass will clear. We can’t do anything till then. It’s night
here yet; we must wait for the day to overtake us. Meanwhile, don’t you
feel hungry?”

For a space I did not answer him, but sat fretting. I turned
reluctantly from the smeared puzzle of the glass and stared at his
face. “Yes,” I said, “I am hungry. I feel somehow enormously
disappointed. I had expected—I don’t know what I had expected, but not
this.”

I summoned my philosophy, and rearranging my blanket about me sat down
on the bale again and began my first meal on the moon. I don’t think I
finished it—I forget. Presently, first in patches, then running rapidly
together into wider spaces, came the clearing of the glass, came the
drawing of the misty veil that hid the moon world from our eyes.

We peered out upon the landscape of the moon.




VII.
Sunrise on the Moon


As we saw it first it was the wildest and most desolate of scenes. We
were in an enormous amphitheatre, a vast circular plain, the floor of
the giant crater. Its cliff-like walls closed us in on every side. From
the westward the light of the unseen sun fell upon them, reaching to
the very foot of the cliff, and showed a disordered escarpment of drab
and greyish rock, lined here and there with banks and crevices of snow.
This was perhaps a dozen miles away, but at first no intervening
atmosphere diminished in the slightest the minutely detailed brilliancy
with which these things glared at us. They stood out clear and dazzling
against a background of starry blackness that seemed to our earthly
eyes rather a gloriously spangled velvet curtain than the spaciousness
of the sky.

The eastward cliff was at first merely a starless selvedge to the
starry dome. No rosy flush, no creeping pallor, announced the
commencing day. Only the Corona, the Zodiacal light, a huge
cone-shaped, luminous haze, pointing up towards the splendour of the
morning star, warned us of the imminent nearness of the sun.

Whatever light was about us was reflected by the westward cliffs. It
showed a huge undulating plain, cold and grey, a grey that deepened
eastward into the absolute raven darkness of the cliff shadow.
Innumerable rounded grey summits, ghostly hummocks, billows of snowy
substance, stretching crest beyond crest into the remote obscurity,
gave us our first inkling of the distance of the crater wall. These
hummocks looked like snow. At the time I thought they were snow. But
they were not—they were mounds and masses of frozen air.

So it was at first; and then, sudden, swift, and amazing, came the
lunar day.

The sunlight had crept down the cliff, it touched the drifted masses at
its base and incontinently came striding with seven-leagued boots
towards us. The distant cliff seemed to shift and quiver, and at the
touch of the dawn a reek of grey vapour poured upward from the crater
floor, whirls and puffs and drifting wraiths of grey, thicker and
broader and denser, until at last the whole westward plain was steaming
like a wet handkerchief held before the fire, and the westward cliffs
were no more than 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 sun-beam. And at this pace....”

He peered upwards. “Look!” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“In the sky. Already. On the blackness—a little touch of blue. See! The
stars seem larger. And the little ones and all those dim nebulosities
we saw in empty space—they are hidden!”

Swiftly, steadily, the day approached us. Grey summit after grey summit
was overtaken by the blaze, and turned to a smoking white intensity. At
last there was nothing to the west of us but a bank of surging fog, the
tumultuous advance and ascent of cloudy haze. The distant cliff had
receded farther and farther, had loomed and changed through the whirl,
and foundered and vanished at last in its confusion.

Nearer came that steaming advance, nearer and nearer, coming as fast as
the shadow of a cloud before the south-west wind. About us rose a thin
anticipatory haze.

Cavor gripped my arm. “What?” I said.

“Look! The sunrise! The sun!”

He turned me about and pointed to the brow of the eastward cliff,
looming above the haze about us, scarce lighter than the darkness of
the sky. But now its line was marked by strange reddish shapes, tongues
of vermilion flame that writhed and danced. I fancied it must be
spirals of vapour that had caught the light and made this crest of
fiery tongues against the sky, but indeed it was the solar prominences
I saw, a crown of fire about the sun that is forever hidden from
earthly eyes by our atmospheric veil.

And then—the sun!

Steadily, inevitably came a brilliant line, came a thin edge of
intolerable effulgence that took a circular shape, became a bow, became
a blazing sceptre, and hurled a shaft of heat at us as though it was a
spear.

It seemed verily to stab my eyes! I cried aloud and turned about
blinded, groping for my blanket beneath the bale.

And with that incandescence came a sound, the first sound that had
reached us from without since we left the earth, a hissing and
rustling, the stormy trailing of the aerial garment of the advancing
day. And with the coming of the sound and the light the sphere lurched,
and blinded and dazzled we staggered helplessly against each other. It
lurched again, and the hissing grew louder. I had shut my eyes
perforce, I was making clumsy efforts to cover my head with my blanket,
and this second lurch sent me helplessly off my feet. I fell against
the bale, and opening my eyes had a momentary glimpse of the air just
outside our glass. It was running—it was boiling—like snow into which a
white-hot rod is thrust. What had been solid air had suddenly at the
touch of the sun become a paste, a mud, a slushy liquefaction, that
hissed and bubbled into gas.

There came a still more violent whirl of the sphere and we had clutched
one another. In another moment we were spun about again. Round we went
and over, and then I was on all fours. The lunar dawn had hold of us.
It meant to show us little men what the moon could do with us.

I caught a second glimpse of things without, puffs of vapour, half
liquid slush, excavated, sliding, falling, sliding. We dropped into
darkness. I went down with Cavor’s knees in my chest. Then he seemed to
fly away from me, and for a moment I lay with all the breath out of my
body staring upward. A toppling crag of the melting stuff had splashed
over us, buried us, and now it thinned and boiled off us. I saw the
bubbles dancing on the glass above. I heard Cavor exclaiming feebly.

Then some huge landslip in the thawing air had caught us, and
spluttering expostulation, we began to roll down a slope, rolling
faster and faster, leaping crevasses and rebounding from banks, faster
and faster, westward into the white-hot boiling tumult of the lunar
day.

Clutching at one another we spun about, pitched this way and that, our
bale of packages leaping at us, pounding at us. We collided, we
gripped, we were torn asunder—our heads met, and the whole universe
burst into fiery darts and stars! On the earth we should have smashed
one another a dozen times, but on the moon, luckily for us, our weight
was only one-sixth of what it is terrestrially, and we fell very
mercifully. I recall a sensation of utter sickness, a feeling as if my
brain were upside down within my skull, and then—

Something was at work upon my face, some thin feelers worried my ears.
Then I discovered the brilliance of the landscape around was mitigated
by blue spectacles. Cavor bent over me, and I saw his face upside down,
his eyes also protected by tinted goggles. His breath came irregularly,
and his lip was bleeding from a bruise. “Better?” he said, wiping the
blood with the back of his hand.

Everything seemed swaying for a space, but that was simply my
giddiness. I perceived that he had closed some of the shutters in the
outer sphere to save me—from the direct blaze of the sun. I was aware
that everything about us was very brilliant.

“Lord!” I gasped. “But this—”

I craned my neck to see. I perceived there was a blinding glare
outside, an utter change from the gloomy darkness of our first
impressions. “Have I been insensible long?” I asked.

“I don’t know—the chronometer is broken. Some little time.... My dear
chap! I have been afraid...”

I lay for a space taking this in. I saw his face still bore evidences
of emotion. For a while I said nothing. I passed an inquisitive hand
over my contusions, and surveyed his face for similar damages. The back
of my right hand had suffered most, and was skinless and raw. My
forehead was bruised and had bled. He handed me a little measure with
some of the restorative—I forget the name of it—he had brought with us.
After a time I felt a little better. I began to stretch my limbs
carefully. Soon I could talk.

“It wouldn’t have done,” I said, as though there had been no interval.

“No! it _wouldn’t_.”

He thought, his hands hanging over his knees. He peered through the
glass and then stared at me. “Good Lord!” he said. “_No!_”

“What has happened?” I asked after a pause. “Have we jumped to the
tropics?”

“It was as I expected. This air has evaporated—if it is air. At any
rate, it has evaporated, and the surface of the moon is showing. We are
lying on a bank of earthy rock. Here and there bare soil is exposed. A
queer sort of soil!”

It occurred to him that it was unnecessary to explain. He assisted me
into a sitting position, and I could see with my own eyes.




VIII.
A Lunar Morning


The harsh emphasis, the pitiless black and white of scenery had
altogether disappeared. The glare of the sun had taken upon itself a
faint tinge of amber; the shadows upon the cliff of the crater wall
were deeply purple. To the eastward a dark bank of fog still crouched
and sheltered from the sunrise, but to the westward the sky was blue
and clear. I began to realise the length of my insensibility.

We were no longer in a void. An atmosphere had arisen about us. The
outline of things had gained in character, had grown acute and varied;
save for a shadowed space of white substance here and there, white
substance that was no longer air but snow, the arctic appearance had
gone altogether. Everywhere broad rusty brown spaces of bare and
tumbled earth spread to the blaze of the sun. Here and there at the
edge of the snowdrifts were transient little pools and eddies of water,
the only things stirring in that expanse of barrenness. The sunlight
inundated the upper two blinds of our sphere and turned our climate to
high summer, but our feet were still in shadow, and the sphere was
lying upon a drift of snow.

And scattered here and there upon the slope, and emphasised by little
white threads of unthawed snow upon their shady sides, were shapes like
sticks, dry twisted sticks of the same rusty hue as the rock upon which
they lay. That caught one’s thoughts sharply. Sticks! On a lifeless
world? Then as my eye grew more accustomed to the texture of their
substance, I perceived that almost all this surface had a fibrous
texture, like the carpet of brown needles one finds beneath the shade
of pine trees.

“Cavor!” I said.

“Yes.”

“It may be a dead world now—but once—”

Something arrested my attention. I had discovered among these needles a
number of little round objects. And it seemed to me that one of these
had moved. “Cavor,” I whispered.

“What?”

But I did not answer at once. I stared incredulous. For an instant I
could not believe my eyes. I gave an inarticulate cry. I gripped his
arm. I pointed. “Look!” I cried, finding my tongue. “There! Yes! And
there!”

His eyes followed my pointing finger. “Eh?” he said.

How can I describe the thing I saw? It is so petty a thing to state,
and yet it seemed so wonderful, so pregnant with emotion. I have said
that amidst the stick-like litter were these rounded bodies, these
little oval bodies that might have passed as very small pebbles. And
now first one and then another had stirred, had rolled over and
cracked, and down the crack of each of them showed a minute line of
yellowish green, thrusting outward to meet the hot encouragement of the
newly-risen sun. For a moment that was all, and then there stirred, and
burst a third!

“It is a seed,” said Cavor. And then I heard him whisper very softly,
“_Life!_”

“Life!” And immediately it poured upon us that our vast journey had not
been made in vain, that we had come to no arid waste of minerals, but
to a world that lived and moved! We watched intensely. I remember I
kept rubbing the glass before me with my sleeve, jealous of the
faintest suspicion of mist.

The picture was clear and vivid only in the middle of the field. All
about that centre the dead fibres and seeds were magnified and
distorted by the curvature of the glass. But we could see enough! One
after another all down the sunlit slope these miraculous little brown
bodies burst and gaped apart, like seed-pods, like the husks of fruits;
opened eager mouths that drank in the heat and light pouring in a
cascade from the newly-risen sun.

Every moment more of these seed coats ruptured, and even as they did so
the swelling pioneers overflowed their rent-distended seed-cases, and
passed into the second stage of growth. With a steady assurance, a
swift deliberation, these amazing seeds thrust a rootlet downward to
the earth and a queer little bundle-like bud into the air. In a little
while the whole slope was dotted with minute plantlets standing at
attention in the blaze of the sun.

They did not stand for long. The bundle-like buds swelled and strained
and opened with a jerk, thrusting out a coronet of little sharp tips,
spreading a whorl of tiny, spiky, brownish leaves, that lengthened
rapidly, lengthened visibly even as we watched. The movement was slower
than any animal’s, swifter than any plant’s I have ever seen before.
How can I suggest it to you—the way that growth went on? The leaf tips
grew so that they moved onward even while we looked at them. The brown
seed-case shrivelled and was absorbed with an equal rapidity. Have you
ever on a cold day taken a thermometer into your warm hand and watched
the little thread of mercury creep up the tube? These moon plants grew
like that.

In a few minutes, as it seemed, the buds of the more forward of these
plants had lengthened into a stem and were even putting forth a second
whorl of leaves, and all the slope that had seemed so recently a
lifeless stretch of litter was now dark with the stunted olive-green
herbage of bristling spikes that swayed with the vigour of their
growing.

I turned about, and behold! along the upper edge of a rock to the
eastward a similar fringe in a scarcely less forward condition swayed
and bent, dark against the blinding glare of the sun. And beyond this
fringe was the silhouette of a plant mass, branching clumsily like a
cactus, and swelling visibly, swelling like a bladder that fills with
air.

Then to the westward also I discovered that another such distended form
was rising over the scrub. But here the light fell upon its sleek
sides, and I could see that its colour was a vivid orange hue. It rose
as one watched it; if one looked away from it for a minute and then
back, its outline had changed; it thrust out blunt congested branches
until in a little time it rose a coralline shape of many feet in
height. Compared with such a growth the terrestrial puff-ball, which
will sometimes swell a foot in diameter in a single night, would be a
hopeless laggard. But then the puff-ball grows against a gravitational
pull six times that of the moon. Beyond, out of gullies and flats that
had been hidden from us, but not from the quickening sun, over reefs
and banks of shining rock, a bristling beard of spiky and fleshy
vegetation was straining into view, hurrying tumultuously to take
advantage of the brief day in which it must flower and fruit and seed
again and die. It was like a miracle, that growth. So, one must
imagine, the trees and plants arose at the Creation and covered the
desolation of the new-made earth.

Imagine it! Imagine that dawn! The resurrection of the frozen air, the
stirring and quickening of the soil, and then this silent uprising of
vegetation, this unearthly ascent of fleshiness and spikes. Conceive it
all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earth seem
watery and weak. And still around this stirring jungle, wherever there
was shadow, lingered banks of bluish snow. And to have the picture of
our impression complete, you must bear in mind that we saw it all
through a thick bent glass, distorting it as things are distorted by a
lens, acute only in the centre of the picture, and very bright there,
and towards the edges magnified and unreal.




IX.
Prospecting Begins


We ceased to gaze. We turned to each other, the same thought, the same
question in our eyes. For these plants to grow, there must be some air,
however attenuated, air that we also should be able to breathe.

“The manhole?” I said.

“Yes!” said Cavor, “if it is air we see!”

“In a little while,” I said, “these plants will be as high as we are.
Suppose—suppose after all— Is it certain? How do you know that stuff
_is_ air? It may be nitrogen—it may be carbonic acid even!”

“That’s 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 man-hole valve. I bent forward and peered down through the
thick glass for its appearance outside, that little flame on whose
evidence depended so much!

I saw the paper drop out and lie lightly upon the snow. The pink flame
of its burning vanished. For an instant it seemed to be extinguished.
And then I saw a little blue tongue upon the edge of it that trembled,
and crept, and spread!

Quietly the whole sheet, save where it lay in immediate contact with
the snow, charred and shrivelled and sent up a quivering thread of
smoke. There was no doubt left to me; the atmosphere of the moon was
either pure oxygen or air, and capable therefore—unless its tenuity was
excessive—of supporting our alien life. We might emerge—and live!

I sat down with my legs on either side of the manhole and prepared to
unscrew it, but Cavor stopped me. “There is first a little precaution,”
he said. He pointed out that although it was certainly an oxygenated
atmosphere outside, it might still be so rarefied as to cause us grave
injury. He reminded me of mountain sickness, and of the bleeding that
often afflicts aeronauts who have ascended too swiftly, and he spent
some time in the preparation of a sickly-tasting drink which he
insisted on my sharing. It made me feel a little numb, but otherwise
had no effect on me. Then he permitted me to begin unscrewing.

Presently the glass stopper of the manhole was so far undone that the
denser air within our sphere began to escape along the thread of the
screw, singing as a kettle sings before it boils. Thereupon he made me
desist. It speedily became evident that the pressure outside was very
much less than it was within. How much less it was we had no means of
telling.

I sat grasping the stopper with both hands, ready to close it again if,
in spite of our intense hope, the lunar atmosphere should after all
prove too rarefied for us, and Cavor sat with a cylinder of compressed
oxygen at hand to restore our pressure. We looked at one another in
silence, and then at the fantastic vegetation that swayed and grew
visibly and noiselessly without. And ever that shrill piping continued.

My blood-vessels began to throb in my ears, and the sound of Cavor’s
movements diminished. I noted how still everything had become, because
of the thinning of the air.

As our air sizzled out from the screw the moisture of it condensed in
little puffs.

Presently I experienced a peculiar shortness of breath that lasted
indeed during the whole of the time of our exposure to the moon’s
exterior atmosphere, and a rather unpleasant sensation about the ears
and finger-nails and the back of the throat grew upon my attention, and
presently passed off again.

But then came vertigo and nausea that abruptly changed the quality of
my courage. I gave the lid of the manhole half a turn and made a hasty
explanation to Cavor; but now he was the more sanguine. He answered me
in a voice that seemed extraordinarily small and remote, because of the
thinness of the air that carried the sound. He recommended a nip of
brandy, and set me the example, and presently I felt better. I turned
the manhole stopper back again. The throbbing in my ears grew louder,
and then I remarked that the piping note of the outrush had ceased. For
a time I could not be sure that it had ceased.

“Well?” said Cavor, in the ghost of a voice.

“Well?” said I.

“Shall we go on?”

I thought. “Is this all?”

“If you can stand it.”

By way of answer I went on unscrewing. I lifted the circular operculum
from its place and laid it carefully on the bale. A flake or so of snow
whirled and vanished as that thin and unfamiliar air took possession of
our sphere. I knelt, and then seated myself at the edge of the manhole,
peering over it. Beneath, within a yard of my face, lay the untrodden
snow of the moon.

There came a little pause. Our eyes met.

“It doesn’t distress your lungs too much?” said Cavor.

“No,” I said. “I can stand this.”

He stretched out his hand for his blanket, thrust his head through its
central hole, and wrapped it about him. He sat down on the edge of the
manhole, he let his feet drop until they were within six inches of the
lunar ground. He hesitated for a moment, then thrust himself forward,
dropped these intervening inches, and stood upon the untrodden soil of
the moon.

As he stepped forward he was refracted grotesquely by the edge of the
glass. He stood for a moment looking this way and that. Then he drew
himself together and leapt.

The glass distorted everything, but it seemed to me even then to be an
extremely big leap. He had at one bound become remote. He seemed twenty
or thirty feet off. He was standing high upon a rocky mass and
gesticulating back to me. Perhaps he was shouting—but the sound did not
reach me. But how the deuce had he done this? I felt like a man who has
just seen a new conjuring trick.

In a puzzled state of mind I too dropped through the manhole. I stood
up. Just in front of me the snowdrift had fallen away and made a sort
of ditch. I made a step and jumped.

I found myself flying through the air, saw the rock on which he stood
coming to meet me, clutched it and clung in a state of infinite
amazement.

I gasped a painful laugh. I was tremendously confused. Cavor bent down
and shouted in piping tones for me to be careful.

I had forgotten that on the moon, with only an eighth part of the
earth’s mass and a quarter of its diameter, my weight was barely a
sixth what it was on earth. But now that fact insisted on being
remembered.

“We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now,” he said.

With a guarded effort I raised myself to the top, and moving as
cautiously as a rheumatic patient, stood up beside him under the blaze
of the sun. The sphere lay behind us on its dwindling snowdrift thirty
feet away.

As far as the eye could see over the enormous disorder of rocks that
formed the crater floor, the same bristling scrub that surrounded us
was starting into life, diversified here and there by bulging masses of
a cactus form, and scarlet and purple lichens that grew so fast they
seemed to crawl over the rocks. The whole area of the crater seemed to
me then to be one similar wilderness up to the very foot of the
surrounding cliff.

This cliff was apparently bare of vegetation save at its base, and with
buttresses and terraces and platforms that did not very greatly attract
our attention at the time. It was many miles away from us in every
direction; we seemed to be almost at the centre of the crater, and we
saw it through a certain haziness that drove before the wind. For there
was even a wind now in the thin air, a swift yet weak wind that chilled
exceedingly but exerted little pressure. It was blowing round the
crater, as it seemed, to the hot illuminated side from the foggy
darkness under the sunward wall. It was difficult to look into this
eastward fog; we had to peer with half-closed eyes beneath the shade of
our hands, because of the fierce intensity of the motionless sun.

“It seems to be deserted,” said Cavor, “absolutely desolate.”

I looked about me again. I retained even then a clinging hope of some
quasi-human evidence, some pinnacle of building, some house or engine,
but everywhere one looked spread the tumbled rocks in peaks and crests,
and the darting scrub and those bulging cacti that swelled and swelled,
a flat negation as it seemed of all such hope.

“It looks as though these plants had it to themselves,” I said. “I see
no trace of any other creature.”

“No insects—no birds, no! Not a trace, not a scrap nor particle of
animal life. If there was—what would they do in the night? ... No;
there’s just these plants alone.”

I shaded my eyes with my hand. “It’s like the landscape of a dream.
These things are less like earthly land plants than the things one
imagines among the rocks at the bottom of the sea. Look at that yonder!
One might imagine it a lizard changed into a plant. And the glare!”

“This is only the fresh morning,” said Cavor.

He sighed and looked about him. “This is no world for men,” he said.
“And yet in a way—it appeals.”

He became silent for a time, then commenced his meditative humming.

I started at a gentle touch, and found a thin sheet of livid lichen
lapping over my shoe. I kicked at it and it fell to powder, and each
speck began to grow.

I heard Cavor exclaim sharply, and perceived that one of the fixed
bayonets of the scrub had pricked him. He hesitated, his eyes sought
among the rocks about us. A sudden blaze of pink had crept up a ragged
pillar of crag. It was a most extraordinary pink, a livid magenta.

“Look!” said I, turning, and behold Cavor had vanished.

For an instant I stood transfixed. Then I made a hasty step to look
over the verge of the rock. But in my surprise at his disappearance I
forgot once more that we were on the moon. The thrust of my foot that I
made in striding would have carried me a yard on earth; on the moon it
carried me six—a good five yards over the edge. For the moment the
thing had something of the effect of those nightmares when one falls
and falls. For while one falls sixteen feet in the first second of a
fall on earth, on the moon one falls two, and with only a sixth of
one’s weight. I fell, or rather I jumped down, about ten yards I
suppose. It seemed to take quite a long time, five or six seconds, I
should think. I floated through the air and fell like a feather,
knee-deep in a snow-drift in the bottom of a gully of blue-grey,
white-veined rock.

I looked about me. “Cavor!” I cried; but no Cavor was visible.

“Cavor!” I cried louder, and the rocks echoed me.

I turned fiercely to the rocks and clambered to the summit of them.
“Cavor!” I cried. My voice sounded like the voice of a lost lamb.

The sphere, too, was not in sight, and for a moment a horrible feeling
of desolation pinched my heart.

Then I saw him. He was laughing and gesticulating to attract my
attention. He was on a bare patch of rock twenty or thirty yards away.
I could not hear his voice, but “jump” said his gestures. I hesitated,
the distance seemed enormous. Yet I reflected that surely I must be
able to clear a greater distance than Cavor.

I made a step back, gathered myself together, and leapt with all my
might. I seemed to shoot right up in the air as though I should never
come down.

It was horrible and delightful, and as wild as a nightmare, to go
flying off in this fashion. I realised my leap had been altogether too
violent. I flew clean over Cavor’s head and beheld a spiky confusion in
a gully spreading to meet my fall. I gave a yelp of alarm. I put out my
hands and straightened my legs.

I hit a huge fungoid bulk that burst all about me, scattering a mass of
orange spores in every direction, and covering me with orange powder. I
rolled over spluttering, and came to rest convulsed with breathless
laughter.

I became aware of Cavor’s little round face peering over a bristling
hedge. He shouted some faded inquiry. “Eh?” I tried to shout, but could
not do so for want of breath. He made his way towards me, coming
gingerly among the bushes.

“We’ve got to be careful,” he said. “This moon has no discipline.
She’ll let us smash ourselves.”

He helped me to my feet. “You exerted yourself too much,” he said,
dabbing at the yellow stuff with his hand to remove it from my
garments.

I stood passive and panting, allowing him to beat off the jelly from my
knees and elbows and lecture me upon my misfortunes. “We don’t quite
allow for the gravitation. Our muscles are scarcely educated yet. We
must practise a little, when you have got your breath.”

I pulled two or three little thorns out of my hand, and sat for a time
on a boulder of rock. My muscles were quivering, and I had that feeling
of personal disillusionment that comes at the first fall to the learner
of cycling on earth.

It suddenly occurred to Cavor that the cold air in the gully, after the
brightness of the sun, might give me a fever. So we clambered back into
the sunlight. We found that beyond a few abrasions I had received no
serious injuries from my tumble, and at Cavor’s suggestion we were
presently looking round for some safe and easy landing-place for my
next leap. We chose a rocky slab some ten yards off, separated from us
by a little thicket of olive-green spikes.

“Imagine it there!” said Cavor, who was assuming the airs of a trainer,
and he pointed to a spot about four feet from my toes. This leap I
managed without difficulty, and I must confess I found a certain
satisfaction in Cavor’s falling short by a foot or so and tasting the
spikes of the scrub. “One has to be careful, you see,” he said, pulling
out his thorns, and with that he ceased to be my mentor and became my
fellow-learner in the art of lunar locomotion.

We chose a still easier jump and did it without difficulty, and then
leapt back again, and to and fro several times, accustoming our muscles
to the new standard. I could never have believed had I not experienced
it, how rapid that adaptation would be. In a very little time indeed,
certainly after fewer than thirty leaps, we could judge the effort
necessary for a distance with almost terrestrial assurance.

And all this time the lunar plants were growing around us, higher and
denser and more entangled, every moment thicker and taller, spiked
plants, green cactus masses, fungi, fleshy and lichenous things,
strangest radiate and sinuous shapes. But we were so intent upon our
leaping, that for a time we gave no heed to their unfaltering
expansion.

An extraordinary elation had taken possession of us. Partly, I think,
it was our sense of release from the confinement of the sphere. Mainly,
however, the thin sweetness of the air, which I am certain contained a
much larger proportion of oxygen than our terrestrial atmosphere. In
spite of the strange quality of all about us, I felt as adventurous and
experimental as a cockney would do placed for the first time among
mountains and I do not think it occurred to either of us, face to face
though we were with the unknown, to be very greatly afraid.

We were bitten by a spirit of enterprise. We selected a lichenous kopje
perhaps fifteen yards away, and landed neatly on its summit one after
the other. “Good!” we cried to each other; “good!” and Cavor made three
steps and went off to a tempting slope of snow a good twenty yards and
more beyond. I stood for a moment struck by the grotesque effect of his
soaring figure—his dirty cricket cap, and spiky hair, his little round
body, his arms and his knicker-bockered legs tucked up tightly—against
the weird spaciousness of the lunar scene. A gust of laughter seized
me, and then I stepped off to follow. Plump! I dropped beside him.

We made a few gargantuan strides, leapt three or four times more, and
sat down at last in a lichenous hollow. Our lungs were painful. We sat
holding our sides and recovering our breath, looking appreciation to
one another. Cavor panted something about “amazing sensations.” And
then came a thought into my head. For the moment it did not seem a
particularly appalling thought, simply a natural question arising out
of the situation.

“By the way,” I said, “where exactly is the sphere?”

Cavor looked at me. “Eh?”

The full meaning of what we were saying struck me sharply.

“Cavor!” I cried, laying a hand on his arm, “where is the sphere?”




X.
Lost Men in the Moon


His face caught something of my dismay. He stood up and stared about
him at the scrub that fenced us in and rose about us, straining upward
in a passion of growth. He put a dubious hand to his lips. He spoke
with a sudden lack of assurance. “I think,” he said slowly, “we left it
... somewhere ... about _there_.”

He pointed a hesitating finger that wavered in an arc.

“I’m not sure.” His look of consternation deepened. “Anyhow,” he said,
with his eyes on me, “it can’t be far.”

We had both stood up. We made unmeaning ejaculations, our eyes sought
in the twining, thickening jungle round about us.

All about us on the sunlit slopes frothed and swayed the darting
shrubs, the swelling cactus, the creeping lichens, and wherever the
shade remained the snow-drifts lingered. North, south, east, and west
spread an identical monotony of unfamiliar forms. And somewhere, buried
already among this tangled confusion, was our sphere, our home, our
only provision, our only hope of escape from this fantastic wilderness
of ephemeral growths into which we had come.

“I think after all,” he said, pointing suddenly, “it might be over
there.”

“No,” I said. “We have turned in a curve. See! here is the mark of my
heels. It’s clear the thing must be more to the eastward, much more.
No—the sphere must be over there.”

“I _think_,” said Cavor, “I kept the sun upon my right all the time.”

“Every leap, it seems to _me_,” I said, “my shadow flew before me.”

We stared into one another’s eyes. The area of the crater had become
enormously vast to our imaginations, the growing thickets already
impenetrably dense.

“Good heavens! What fools we have been!”

“It’s evident that we must find it again,” said Cavor, “and that soon.
The sun grows stronger. We should be fainting with the heat already if
it wasn’t so dry. And ... I’m hungry.”

I stared at him. I had not suspected this aspect of the matter before.
But it came to me at once—a positive craving. “Yes,” I said with
emphasis. “I am hungry too.”

He stood up with a look of active resolution. “Certainly we must find
the sphere.”

As calmly as possible we surveyed the interminable reefs and thickets
that formed the floor of the crater, each of us weighing in silence the
chances of our finding the sphere before we were overtaken by heat and
hunger.

“It can’t be fifty yards from here,” said Cavor, with indecisive
gestures. “The only thing is to beat round about until we come upon
it.”

“That is all we can do,” I said, without any alacrity to begin our
hunt. “I wish this confounded spike bush did not grow so fast!”

“That’s just it,” said Cavor. “But it was lying on a bank of snow.”

I stared about me in the vain hope of recognising some knoll or shrub
that had been near the sphere. But everywhere was a confusing sameness,
everywhere the aspiring bushes, the distending fungi, the dwindling
snow banks, steadily and inevitably changed. The sun scorched and
stung, the faintness of an unaccountable hunger mingled with our
infinite perplexity. And even as we stood there, confused and lost
amidst unprecedented things, we became aware for the first time of a
sound upon the moon other than the air of the growing plants, the faint
sighing of the wind, or those that we ourselves had made.

Boom.... Boom.... Boom.

It came from beneath our feet, a sound in the earth. We seemed to hear
it with our feet as much as with our ears. Its dull resonance was
muffled by distance, thick with the quality of intervening substance.
No sound that I can imagine could have astonished us more, or have
changed more completely the quality of things about us. For this sound,
rich, slow, and deliberate, seemed to us as though it could be nothing
but the striking of some gigantic buried clock.

Boom.... Boom.... Boom.

Sound suggestive of still cloisters, of sleepless nights in crowded
cities, of vigils and the awaited hour, of all that is orderly and
methodical in life, booming out pregnant and mysterious in this
fantastic desert! To the eye everything was unchanged: the desolation
of bushes and cacti waving silently in the wind, stretched unbroken to
the distant cliffs, the still dark sky was empty overhead, and the hot
sun hung and burned. And through it all, a warning, a threat, throbbed
this enigma of sound.

Boom.... Boom.... Boom....

We questioned one another in faint and faded voices.

“A clock?”

“Like a clock!”

“What is it?”

“What can it be?”

“Count,” was Cavor’s belated suggestion, and at that word the striking
ceased.

The silence, the rhythmic disappointment of the silence, came as a
fresh shock. For a moment one could doubt whether one had ever heard a
sound. Or whether it might not still be going on. Had I indeed heard a
sound?

I felt the pressure of Cavor’s hand upon my arm. He spoke in an
undertone, as though he feared to wake some sleeping thing. “Let us
keep together,” he whispered, “and look for the sphere. We must get
back to the sphere. This is beyond our understanding.”

“Which way shall we go?”

He hesitated. An intense persuasion of presences, of unseen things
about us and near us, dominated our minds. What could they be? Where
could they be? Was this arid desolation, alternately frozen and
scorched, only the outer rind and mask of some subterranean world? And
if so, what sort of world? What sort of inhabitants might it not
presently disgorge upon us?

And then, stabbing the aching stillness as vivid and sudden as an
unexpected thunderclap, came a clang and rattle as though great gates
of metal had suddenly been flung apart.

It arrested our steps. We stood gaping helplessly. Then Cavor stole
towards me.

“I do not understand!” he whispered close to my face. He waved his hand
vaguely skyward, the vague suggestion of still vaguer thoughts.

“A hiding-place! If anything came...”

I looked about us. I nodded my head in assent to him.

We started off, moving stealthily with the most exaggerated precautions
against noise. We went towards a thicket of scrub. A clangour like
hammers flung about a boiler hastened our steps. “We must crawl,”
whispered Cavor.

The lower leaves of the bayonet plants, already overshadowed by the
newer ones above, were beginning to wilt and shrivel so that we could
thrust our way in among the thickening stems without serious injury. A
stab in the face or arm we did not heed. At the heart of the thicket I
stopped, and stared panting into Cavor’s face.

“Subterranean,” he whispered. “Below.”

“They may come out.”

“We must find the sphere!”

“Yes,” I said; “but how?”

“Crawl till we come to it.”

“But if we don’t?”

“Keep hidden. See what they are like.”

“We will keep together,” said I.

He thought. “Which way shall we go?”

“We must take our chance.”

We peered this way and that. Then very circumspectly, we began to crawl
through the lower jungle, making, so far as we could judge, a circuit,
halting now at every waving fungus, at every sound, intent only on the
sphere from which we had so foolishly emerged. Ever and again from out
of the earth beneath us came concussions, beatings, strange,
inexplicable, mechanical sounds; and once, and then again, we thought
we heard something, a faint rattle and tumult, borne to us through the
air. But fearful as we were we dared essay no vantage-point to survey
the crater. For long we saw nothing of the beings whose sounds were so
abundant and insistent. But for the faintness of our hunger and the
drying of our throats that crawling would have had the quality of a
very vivid dream. It was so absolutely unreal. The only element with
any touch of reality was these sounds.

Picture it to yourself! About us the dream-like jungle, with the silent
bayonet leaves darting overhead, and the silent, vivid, sun-splashed
lichens under our hands and knees, waving with the vigour of their
growth as a carpet waves when the wind gets beneath it. Ever and again
one of the bladder fungi, bulging and distending under the sun, loomed
upon us. Ever and again some novel shape in vivid colour obtruded. The
very cells that built up these plants were as large as my thumb, like
beads of coloured glass. And all these things were saturated in the
unmitigated glare of the sun, were seen against a sky that was bluish
black and spangled still, in spite of the sunlight, with a few
surviving stars. Strange! the very forms and texture of the stones were
strange. It was all strange, the feeling of one’s body was
unprecedented, every other movement ended in a surprise. The breath
sucked thin in one’s throat, the blood flowed through one’s ears in a
throbbing tide—thud, thud, thud, thud....

And ever and again came gusts of turmoil, hammering, the clanging and
throb of machinery, and presently—the bellowing of great beasts!




XI.
The Mooncalf Pastures


So we two poor terrestrial castaways, lost in that wild-growing moon
jungle, crawled in terror before the sounds that had come upon us. We
crawled, as it seemed, a long time before we saw either Selenite or
mooncalf, though we heard the bellowing and gruntulous noises of these
latter continually drawing nearer to us. We crawled through stony
ravines, over snow slopes, amidst fungi that ripped like thin bladders
at our thrust, emitting a watery humour, over a perfect pavement of
things like puff-balls, and beneath interminable thickets of scrub. And
ever more helplessly our eyes sought for our abandoned sphere. The
noise of the mooncalves would at times be a vast flat calf-like sound,
at times it rose to an amazed and wrathy bellowing, and again it would
become a clogged bestial sound, as though these unseen creatures had
sought to eat and bellow at the same time.

Our first view was but an inadequate transitory glimpse, yet none the
less disturbing because it was incomplete. Cavor was crawling in front
at the time, and he first was aware of their proximity. He stopped
dead, arresting me with a single gesture.

A crackling and smashing of the scrub appeared to be advancing directly
upon us, and then, as we squatted close and endeavoured to judge of the
nearness and direction of this noise, there came a terrific bellow
behind us, so close and vehement that the tops of the bayonet scrub
bent before it, and one felt the breath of it hot and moist. And,
turning about, we saw indistinctly through a crowd of swaying stems the
mooncalf’s shining sides, and the long line of its back loomed out
against the sky.

Of course it is hard for me now to say how much I saw at that time,
because my impressions were corrected by subsequent observation. First
of all impressions was its enormous size; the girth of its body was
some fourscore feet, its length perhaps two hundred. Its sides rose and
fell with its laboured breathing. I perceived that its gigantic, flabby
body lay along the ground, and that its skin was of a corrugated white,
dappling into blackness along the backbone. But of its feet we saw
nothing. I think also that we saw then the profile at least of the
almost brainless head, with its fat-encumbered neck, its slobbering
omnivorous mouth, its little nostrils, and tight shut eyes. (For the
mooncalf invariably shuts its eyes in the presence of the sun.) We had
a glimpse of a vast red pit as it opened its mouth to bleat and bellow
again; we had a breath from the pit, and then the monster heeled over
like a ship, dragged forward along the ground, creasing all its
leathery skin, rolled again, and so wallowed past us, smashing a path
amidst the scrub, and was speedily hidden from our eyes by the dense
interlacings beyond. Another appeared more distantly, and then another,
and then, as though he was guiding these animated lumps of provender to
their pasture, a Selenite came momentarily into ken. My grip upon
Cavor’s foot became convulsive at the sight of him, and we remained
motionless and peering long after he had passed out of our range.

By contrast with the mooncalves he seemed a trivial being, a mere ant,
scarcely five feet high. He was wearing garments of some leathery
substance, so that no portion of his actual body appeared, but of this,
of course, we were entirely ignorant. He presented himself, therefore,
as a compact, bristling creature, having much of the quality of a
complicated insect, with whip-like tentacles and a clanging arm
projecting from his shining cylindrical body case. The form of his head
was hidden by his enormous many-spiked helmet—we discovered afterwards
that he used the spikes for prodding refractory mooncalves—and a pair
of goggles of darkened glass, set very much at the side, gave a
bird-like quality to the metallic apparatus that covered his face. His
arms did not project beyond his body case, and he carried himself upon
short legs that, wrapped though they were in warm coverings, seemed to
our terrestrial eyes inordinately flimsy. They had very short thighs,
very long shanks, and little feet.

In spite of his heavy-looking clothing, he was progressing with what
would be, from the terrestrial point of view, very considerable
strides, and his clanging arm was busy. The quality of his motion
during the instant of his passing suggested haste and a certain anger,
and soon after we had lost sight of him we heard the bellow of a
mooncalf change abruptly into a short, sharp squeal followed by the
scuffle of its acceleration. And gradually that bellowing receded, and
then came to an end, as if the pastures sought had been attained.

We listened. For a space the moon world was still. But it was some time
before we resumed our crawling search for the vanished sphere.

When next we saw mooncalves they were some little distance away from us
in a place of tumbled rocks. The less vertical surfaces of the rocks
were thick with a speckled green plant growing in dense mossy clumps,
upon which these creatures were browsing. We stopped at the edge of the
reeds amidst which we were crawling at the sight of them, peering out
at them and looking round for a second glimpse of a Selenite. They lay
against their food like stupendous slugs, huge, greasy hulls, eating
greedily and noisily, with a sort of sobbing avidity. They seemed
monsters of mere fatness, clumsy and overwhelmed to a degree that would
make a Smithfield ox seem a model of agility. Their busy, writhing,
chewing mouths, and eyes closed, together with the appetising sound of
their munching, made up an effect of animal enjoyment that was
singularly stimulating to our empty frames.

“Hogs!” said Cavor, with unusual passion. “Disgusting hogs!” and after
one glare of angry envy crawled off through the bushes to our right. I
stayed long enough to see that the speckled plant was quite hopeless
for human nourishment, then crawled after him, nibbling a quill of it
between my teeth.

Presently we were arrested again by the proximity of a Selenite, and
this time we were able to observe him more exactly. Now we could see
that the Selenite covering was indeed clothing, and not a sort of
crustacean integument. He was quite similar in his costume to the
former one we had glimpsed, except that ends of something like wadding
were protruding from his neck, and he stood on a promontory of rock and
moved his head this way and that, as though he was surveying the
crater. We lay quite still, fearing to attract his attention if we
moved, and after a time he turned about and disappeared.

We came upon another drove of mooncalves bellowing up a ravine, and
then we passed over a place of sounds, sounds of beating machinery as
if some huge hall of industry came near the surface there. And while
these sounds were still about us we came to the edge of a great open
space, perhaps two hundred yards in diameter, and perfectly level. Save
for a few lichens that advanced from its margin this space was bare,
and presented a powdery surface of a dusty yellow colour. We were
afraid to strike out across this space, but as it presented less
obstruction to our crawling than the scrub, we went down upon it and
began very circumspectly to skirt its edge.

For a little while the noises from below ceased and everything, save
for the faint stir of the growing vegetation, was very still. Then
abruptly there began an uproar, louder, more vehement, and nearer than
any we had so far heard. Of a certainty it came from below.
Instinctively we crouched as flat as we could, ready for a prompt
plunge into the thicket beside us. Each knock and throb seemed to
vibrate through our bodies. Louder grew this throbbing and beating, and
that irregular vibration increased until the whole moon world seemed to
be jerking and pulsing.

“Cover,” whispered Cavor, and I turned towards the bushes.

At that instant came a thud like the thud of a gun, and then a thing
happened—it still haunts me in my dreams. I had turned my head to look
at Cavor’s face, and thrust out my hand in front of me as I did so. And
my hand met nothing! 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 very gradually we became aware of
a number of very faint and little lights going to and fro.

For a time that stupendous gulf of mystery held us so that we forgot
even our sphere. In time, as we grew more accustomed to the darkness,
we could make out very small, dim, elusive shapes moving about among
those needle-point illuminations. We peered amazed and incredulous,
understanding so little that we could find no words to say. We could
distinguish nothing that would give us a clue to the meaning of the
faint shapes we saw.

“What can it be?” I asked; “what can it be?”

“The engineering!... They must live in these caverns during the night,
and come out during the day.”

“Cavor!” I said. “Can they be—_that_—it was something like—men?”

“_That_ was not a man.”

“We dare risk nothing!”

“We dare do nothing until we find the sphere!”

“We _can_ do nothing until we find the sphere.”

He assented with a groan and stirred himself to move. He stared about
him for a space, sighed, and indicated a direction. We struck out
through the jungle. For a time we crawled resolutely, then with
diminishing vigour. Presently among great shapes of flabby purple there
came a noise of trampling and cries about us. We lay close, and for a
long time the sounds went to and fro and very near. But this time we
saw nothing. I tried to whisper to Cavor that I could hardly go without
food much longer, but my mouth had become too dry for whispering.

“Cavor,” I said, “I must have food.”

He turned a face full of dismay towards me. “It’s a case for holding
out,” he said.

“But I _must_,” I said, “and look at my lips!”

“I’ve been thirsty some time.”

“If only some of that snow had remained!”

“It’s clean gone! We’re driving from arctic to tropical at the rate of
a degree a minute....”

I gnawed my hand.

“The sphere!” he said. “There is nothing for it but the sphere.”

We roused ourselves to another spurt of crawling. My mind ran entirely
on edible things, on the hissing profundity of summer drinks, more
particularly I craved for beer. I was haunted by the memory of a
sixteen gallon cask that had swaggered in my Lympne cellar. I thought
of the adjacent larder, and especially of steak and kidney pie—tender
steak and plenty of kidney, and rich, thick gravy between. Ever and
again I was seized with fits of hungry yawning. We came to flat places
overgrown with fleshy red things, monstrous coralline growths; as we
pushed against them they snapped and broke. I noted the quality of the
broken surfaces. The confounded stuff certainly looked of a biteable
texture. Then it seemed to me that it smelt rather well.

I picked up a fragment and sniffed at it.

“Cavor,” I said in a hoarse undertone.

He glanced at me with his face screwed up. “Don’t,” he said. I put down
the fragment, and we crawled on through this tempting fleshiness for a
space.

“Cavor,” I asked, “why _not?_”

“Poison,” I heard him say, but he did not look round.

We crawled some way before I decided.

“I’ll chance it,” said I.

He made a belated gesture to prevent me. I stuffed my mouth full. He
crouched watching my face, his own twisted into the oddest expression.
“It’s good,” I said.

“O Lord!” he cried.

He watched me munch, his face wrinkled between desire and disapproval,
then suddenly succumbed to appetite and began to tear off huge
mouthfuls. For a time we did nothing but eat.

The stuff was not unlike a terrestrial mushroom, only it was much laxer
in texture, and, as one swallowed it, it warmed the throat. At first we
experienced a mere mechanical satisfaction in eating; then our blood
began to run warmer, and we tingled at the lips and fingers, and then
new and slightly irrelevant ideas came bubbling up in our minds.

“It’s good,” said I. “Infernally good! What a home for our surplus
population! Our poor surplus population,” and I broke off another large
portion. It filled me with a curiously benevolent satisfaction that
there was such good food in the moon. The depression of my hunger gave
way to an irrational exhilaration. The dread and discomfort in which I
had been living vanished entirely. I perceived the moon no longer as a
planet from which I most earnestly desired the means of escape, but as
a possible refuge from human destitution. I think I forgot the
Selenites, the mooncalves, the lid, and the noises completely so soon
as I had eaten that fungus.

Cavor replied to my third repetition of my “surplus population” remark
with similar words of approval. I felt that my head swam, but I put
this down to the stimulating effect of food after a long fast.
“Ess’lent discov’ry yours, Cavor,” said I. “Se’nd on’y to the ‘tato.”

“Whajer mean?” asked Cavor. “‘Scovery of the moon—se’nd on’y to the
tato?”

I looked at him, shocked at his suddenly hoarse voice, and by the
badness of his articulation. It occurred to me in a flash that he was
intoxicated, possibly by the fungus. It also occurred to me that he
erred in imagining that he had discovered the moon; he had not
discovered it, he had only reached it. I tried to lay my hand on his
arm and explain this to him, but the issue was too subtle for his
brain. It was also unexpectedly difficult to express. After a momentary
attempt to understand me—I remember wondering if the fungus had made my
eyes as fishy as his—he set off upon some observations on his own
account.

“We are,” he announced with a solemn hiccup, “the creashurs o’ what we
eat and drink.”

He repeated this, and as I was now in one of my subtle moods, I
determined to dispute it. Possibly I wandered a little from the point.
But Cavor certainly did not attend at all properly. He stood up as well
as he could, putting a hand on my head to steady himself, which was
disrespectful, and stood staring about him, quite devoid now of any
fear of the moon beings.

I tried to point out that this was dangerous for some reason that was
not perfectly clear to me, but the word “dangerous” had somehow got
mixed with “indiscreet,” and came out rather more like “injurious” than
either; and after an attempt to disentangle them, I resumed my
argument, addressing myself principally to the unfamiliar but attentive
coralline growths on either side. I felt that it was necessary to clear
up this confusion between the moon and a potato at once—I wandered into
a long parenthesis on the importance of precision of definition in
argument. I did my best to ignore the fact that my bodily sensations
were no longer agreeable.

In some way that I have now forgotten, my mind was led back to projects
of colonisation. “We must annex this moon,” I said. “There must be no
shilly-shally. This is part of the White Man’s Burthen. Cavor—we
are—_hic_—Satap—mean Satraps! Nempire Cæsar never dreamt. B’in all the
newspapers. Cavorecia. Bedfordecia. Bedfordecia—hic—Limited.
Mean—unlimited! Practically.”

Certainly I was intoxicated.

I embarked upon an argument to show the infinite benefits our arrival
would confer on the moon. I involved myself in a rather difficult proof
that the arrival of Columbus was, on the whole, beneficial to America.
I found I had forgotten the line of argument I had intended to pursue,
and continued to repeat “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 fungus—whether for missile
purposes or not I do not know—and, heedless of the stabs of the bayonet
scrub, we started forth into the sunshine.

Almost immediately we must have come upon the Selenites. There were six
of them, and they were marching in single file over a rocky place,
making the most remarkable piping and whining sounds. They all seemed
to become aware of us at once, all instantly became silent and
motionless, like animals, with their faces turned towards us.

For a moment I was sobered.

“Insects,” murmured Cavor, “insects! And they think I’m going to crawl
about on my stomach—on my vertebrated stomach!

“Stomach,” he repeated slowly, as though he chewed the indignity.

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 depths beneath the moon’s surface; we were in darkness amidst
strange distracting noises; our bodies were covered with scratches and
bruises, and our heads racked with pain.




XII.
The Selenite’s Face


I found myself sitting crouched together in a tumultuous darkness. For
a long time I could not understand where I was, nor how I had come to
this perplexity. I thought of the cupboard into which I had been thrust
at times when I was a child, and then of a very dark and noisy bedroom
in which I had slept during an illness. But these sounds about me were
not the noises I had known, and there was a thin flavour in the air
like the wind of a stable. Then I supposed we must still be at work
upon the sphere, and that somehow I had got into the cellar of Cavor’s
house. I remembered we had finished the sphere, and fancied I must
still be in it and travelling through space.

“Cavor,” I said, “cannot we have some light?”

There came no answer.

“Cavor!” I insisted.

I was answered by a groan. “My head!” I heard him say; “my head!”

I attempted to press my hands to my brow, which ached, and discovered
they were tied together. This startled me very much. I brought them up
to my mouth and felt the cold smoothness of metal. They were chained
together. I tried to separate my legs and made out they were similarly
fastened, and also that I was fastened to the ground by a much thicker
chain about the middle of my body.

I was more frightened than I had yet been by anything in all our
strange experiences. For a time I tugged silently at my bonds. “Cavor!”
I cried out sharply. “Why am I tied? Why have you tied me hand and
foot?”

“I haven’t tied you,” he answered. “It’s the Selenites.”

The Selenites! My mind hung on that for a space. Then my memories came
back to me: the snowy desolation, the thawing of the air, the growth of
the plants, our strange hopping and crawling among the rocks and
vegetation of the crater. All the distress of our frantic search for
the sphere returned to me.... Finally the opening of the great lid that
covered the pit!

Then as I strained to trace our later movements down to our present
plight, the pain in my head became intolerable. I came to an
insurmountable barrier, an obstinate blank.

“Cavor!”

“Yes?”

“Where are we?”

“How should I know?”

“Are we dead?”

“What nonsense!”

“They’ve got us, then!”

He made no answer but a grunt. The lingering traces of the poison
seemed to make him oddly irritable.

“What do you mean to do?”

“How should I know what to do?”

“Oh, very well!” said I, and became silent. Presently, I was roused
from a stupor. “O _Lord!_” I cried; “I wish you’d stop that buzzing!”

We lapsed into silence again, listening to the dull confusion of noises
like the muffled sounds of a street or factory that filled our ears. I
could make nothing of it, my mind pursued first one rhythm and then
another, and questioned it in vain. But after a long time I became
aware of a new and sharper element, not mingling with the rest but
standing out, as it were, against that cloudy background of sound. It
was a series of relatively very little definite sounds, tappings and
rubbings, like a loose spray of ivy against a window or a bird moving
about upon a box. We listened and peered about us, but the darkness was
a velvet pall. There followed a noise like the subtle movement of the
wards of a well-oiled lock. And then there appeared before me, hanging
as it seemed in an immensity of black, a thin bright line.

“Look!” whispered Cavor very softly.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

We stared.

The thin bright line became a band, and broader and paler. It took upon
itself the quality of a bluish light falling upon a white-washed wall.
It ceased to be parallel-sided; it developed a deep indentation on one
side. I turned to remark this to Cavor, and was amazed to see his ear
in a brilliant illumination—all the rest of him in shadow. I twisted my
head round as well as my bonds would permit. “Cavor,” I said, “it’s
behind!”

His ear vanished—gave place to an eye!

Suddenly the crack that had been admitting the light broadened out, and
revealed itself as the space of an opening door. Beyond was a sapphire
vista, and in the doorway stood a grotesque outline silhouetted against
the glare.

We both made convulsive efforts to turn, and failing, sat staring over
our shoulders at this. My first impression was of some clumsy quadruped
with lowered head. Then I perceived it was the slender pinched body and
short and extremely attenuated bandy legs of a Selenite, with his head
depressed between his shoulders. He was without the helmet and body
covering they wear upon the exterior.

He was a blank, black figure to us, but instinctively our imaginations
supplied features to his very human outline. I, at least, took it
instantly that he was somewhat hunchbacked, with a high forehead and
long features.

He came forward three steps and paused for a time. His movements seemed
absolutely noiseless. Then he came forward again. He walked like a
bird, his feet fell one in front of the other. He stepped out of the
ray of light that came through the doorway, and it seemed as though he
vanished altogether in the shadow.

For a moment my eyes sought him in the wrong place, and then I
perceived him standing facing us both in the full light. Only the human
features I had attributed to him were not there at all!

Of course I ought to have expected that, only I didn’t. It came to me
as an absolute, for a moment an overwhelming shock. It seemed as though
it wasn’t a face, as though it must needs be a mask, a horror, a
deformity, that would presently be disavowed or explained. There was no
nose, and the thing had dull bulging eyes at the side—in the silhouette
I had supposed they were ears. There were no ears.... I have tried to
draw one of these heads, but I cannot. There was a mouth, downwardly
curved, like a human mouth in a face that stares ferociously....

The neck on which the head was poised was jointed in three places,
almost like the short joints in the leg of a crab. The joints of the
limbs I could not see, because of the puttee-like straps in which they
were swathed, and which formed the only clothing the being wore.

There the thing was, looking at us!

At the time my mind was taken up by the mad impossibility of the
creature. I suppose he also was amazed, and with more reason, perhaps,
for amazement than we. Only, confound him! he did not show it. We did
at least know what had brought about this meeting of incompatible
creatures. But conceive how it would seem to decent Londoners, for
example, to come upon a couple of living things, as big as men and
absolutely unlike any other earthly animals, careering about among the
sheep in Hyde Park! It must have taken him like that.

Figure us! We were bound hand and foot, fagged and filthy; our beards
two inches long, our faces scratched and bloody. Cavor you must imagine
in his knickerbockers (torn in several places by the bayonet scrub) his
Jaegar shirt and old cricket cap, his wiry hair wildly disordered, a
tail to every quarter of the heavens. In that blue light his face did
not look red but very dark, his lips and the drying blood upon my hands
seemed black. If possible I was in a worse plight than he, on account
of the yellow fungus into which I had jumped. Our jackets were
unbuttoned, and our shoes had been taken off and lay at our feet. And
we were sitting with our backs to this queer bluish light, peering at
such a monster as Durer might have invented.

Cavor broke the silence; started to speak, went hoarse, and cleared his
throat. Outside began a terrific bellowing, as if a mooncalf were in
trouble. It ended in a shriek, and everything was still again.

Presently the Selenite turned about, flickered into the shadow, stood
for a moment retrospective at the door, and then closed it on us; and
once more we were in that murmurous mystery of darkness into which we
had awakened.




XIII.
Mr. Cavor Makes Some Suggestions


For a time neither of us spoke. To focus together all the things we had
brought upon ourselves seemed beyond my mental powers.

“They’ve got us,” I said at last.

“It was that fungus.”

“Well—if I hadn’t taken it we should have fainted and starved.”

“We might have found the sphere.”

I lost my temper at his persistence, and swore to myself. For a time we
hated one another in silence. I drummed with my fingers on the floor
between my knees, and gritted the links of my fetters together.
Presently I was forced to talk again.

“What do you make of it, anyhow?” I asked humbly.

“They are reasonable creatures—they can make things and do things.
Those lights we saw...”

He stopped. It was clear he could make nothing of it.

When he spoke again it was to confess, “After all, they are more human
than we had a right to expect. I suppose—”

He stopped irritatingly.

“Yes?”

“I suppose, anyhow—on any planet where there is an intelligent
animal—it will carry its brain case upward, and have hands, and walk
erect.”

Presently he broke away in another direction.

“We are some way in,” he said. “I mean—perhaps a couple of thousand
feet or more.”

“Why?”

“It’s cooler. And our voices are so much louder. That faded quality—it
has altogether gone. And the feeling in one’s ears and throat.”

I had not noted that, but I did now.

“The air is denser. We must be some depths—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 discerned a pretty
sequence of reasoning.

“Yes,” he said, “Kepler with his _sub-volvani_ was right after all.”

“I wish you had taken the trouble to find that out before we came,” I
said.

He answered nothing, buzzing to himself softly, as he pursued his
thoughts. My temper was going.

“What do you think has become of the sphere, anyhow?” I asked.

“Lost,” he said, like a man who answers an uninteresting question.

“Among those plants?”

“Unless they find it.”

“And then?”

“How can I tell?”

“Cavor,” I said, with a sort of hysterical bitterness, “things look
bright for my Company...”

He made no answer.

“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “Just think of all the trouble we took to get
into this pickle! What did we come for? What are we after? What was the
moon to us or we to the moon? We wanted too much, we tried too much. We
ought to have started the little things first. It was you proposed the
moon! Those Cavorite spring blinds! I am certain we could have worked
them for terrestrial purposes. Certain! Did you really understand what
I proposed? A steel cylinder—”

“Rubbish!” said Cavor.

We ceased to converse.

For a time Cavor kept up a broken monologue without much help from me.

“If they find it,” he began, “if they find it ... what will they do
with it? Well, that’s a question. It may be that’s _the_ question. They
won’t understand it, anyhow. If they understood that sort of thing they
would have come long since to the earth. Would they? Why shouldn’t
they? But they would have sent something—they couldn’t keep their hands
off such a possibility. No! But they will examine it. Clearly they are
intelligent and inquisitive. They will examine it—get inside it—trifle
with the studs. Off! ... That would mean the moon for us for all the
rest of our lives. Strange creatures, strange knowledge....”

“As for strange knowledge—” said I, and language failed me.

“Look here, Bedford,” said Cavor, “you came on this expedition of your
own free will.”

“You said to me, ‘Call it prospecting’.”

“There’s always risks in prospecting.”

“Especially when you do it unarmed and without thinking out every
possibility.”

“I was so taken up with the sphere. The thing rushed on us, and carried
us away.”

“Rushed on _me_, you mean.”

“Rushed on me just as much. How was I to know when I set to work on
molecular physics that the business would bring me here—of all places?”

“It’s this accursed science,” I cried. “It’s the very Devil. The
mediæval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all
wrong. You tamper with it—and it offers you gifts. And directly you
take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions
and new weapons—now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social
ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!”

“Anyhow, it’s no use your quarrelling with me _now_. These
creatures—these Selenites, or whatever we choose to call them—have got
us tied hand and foot. Whatever temper you choose to go through with it
in, you will have to go through with it.... We have experiences before
us that will need all our coolness.”

He paused as if he required my assent. But I sat sulking. “Confound
your science!” I said.

“The problem is communication. Gestures, I fear, will be different.
Pointing, for example. No creatures but men and monkeys point.”

That was too obviously wrong for me. “Pretty nearly every animal,” I
cried, “points with its eyes or nose.”

Cavor meditated over that. “Yes,” he said at last, “and we don’t.
There’s such differences—such differences!”

“One might.... But how can I tell? There is speech. The sounds they
make, a sort of fluting and piping. I don’t see how we are to imitate
that. Is it their speech, that sort of thing? They may have different
senses, different means of communication. Of course they are minds and
we are minds; there must be something in common. Who knows how far we
may not get to an understanding?”

“The things are outside us,” I said. “They’re more different from us
than the strangest animals on earth. They are a different clay. What is
the good of talking like this?”

Cavor thought. “I don’t see that. Where there are minds they will have
something _similar_—even though they have been evolved on different
planets. Of course if it was a question of instincts, if we or they are
no more than animals—”

“Well, _are_ they? They’re much more like ants on their hind legs than
human beings, and who ever got to any sort of understanding with ants?”

“But these machines and clothing! No, I don’t hold with you, Bedford.
The difference is wide—”

“It’s insurmountable.”

“The resemblance must bridge it. I remember reading once a paper by the
late Professor Galton on the possibility of communication between the
planets. Unhappily, at that time it did not seem probable that that
would be of any material benefit to me, and I fear I did not give it
the attention I should have done—in view of this state of affairs.
Yet.... Now, let me see!

“His idea was to begin with those broad truths that must underlie all
conceivable mental existences and establish a basis on those. The great
principles of geometry, to begin with. He proposed to take some leading
proposition of Euclid’s, and show by construction that its truth was
known to us, to demonstrate, for example, that the angles at the base
of an isosceles triangle are equal, and that if the equal sides be
produced the angles on the other side of the base are equal also, or
that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal
to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstrating our
knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possession of a
reasonable intelligence.... Now, suppose I ... I might draw the
geometrical figure with a wet finger, or even trace it in the air....”

He fell silent. I sat meditating his words. For a time his wild hope of
communication, of interpretation, with these weird beings held me. Then
that angry despair that was a part of my exhaustion and physical misery
resumed its sway. I perceived with a sudden novel vividness the
extraordinary folly of everything I had ever done. “Ass!” I said; “oh,
ass, unutterable ass.... I seem to exist only to go about doing
preposterous things. Why did we ever leave the thing? ... Hopping about
looking for patents and concessions in the craters of the moon!... If
only we had had the sense to fasten a handkerchief to a stick to show
where we had left the sphere!”

I subsided, fuming.

“It is clear,” meditated Cavor, “they are intelligent. One can
hypothecate certain things. As they have not killed us at once, they
must have ideas of mercy. Mercy! at any rate of restraint. Possibly of
intercourse. They may meet us. And this apartment and the glimpses we
had of its guardian. These fetters! A high degree of intelligence...”

“I wish to heaven,” cried I, “I’d thought even twice! Plunge after
plunge. First one fluky start and then another. It was my confidence in
you! _Why_ didn’t I stick to my play? That was what I was equal to.
That was my world and the life I was made for. I could have finished
that play. I’m certain ... it was a good play. I had the scenario as
good as done. Then.... Conceive it! leaping to the moon!
Practically—I’ve thrown my life away! That old woman in the inn near
Canterbury had better sense.”

I looked up, and stopped in mid-sentence. The darkness had given place
to that bluish light again. The door was opening, and several noiseless
Selenites were coming into the chamber. I became quite still, staring
at their grotesque faces.

Then suddenly my sense of disagreeable strangeness changed to interest.
I perceived that the foremost and second carried bowls. One elemental
need at least our minds could understand in common. They were bowls of
some metal that, like our fetters, looked dark in that bluish light;
and each contained a number of whitish fragments. All the cloudy pain
and misery that oppressed me rushed together and took the shape of
hunger. I eyed these bowls wolfishly, and, though it returned to me in
dreams, at that time it seemed a small matter that at the end of the
arms that lowered one towards me were not hands, but a sort of flap and
thumb, like the end of an elephant’s trunk. The stuff in the bowl was
loose in texture, and whitish brown in colour—rather like lumps of some
cold souffle, and it smelt faintly like mushrooms. From a partially
divided carcass of a mooncalf that we presently saw, I am inclined to
believe it must have been mooncalf flesh.

My hands were so tightly chained that I could barely contrive to reach
the bowl; but when they saw the effort I made, two of them dexterously
released one of the turns about my wrist. Their tentacle hands were
soft and cold to my skin. I immediately seized a mouthful of the food.
It had the same laxness in texture that all organic structures seem to
have upon the moon; it tasted rather like a gauffre or a damp meringue,
but in no way was it disagreeable. I took two other mouthfuls. “I
_wanted_—foo’!” said I, tearing off a still larger piece....

For a time we ate with an utter absence of self-consciousness. We ate
and presently drank like tramps in a soup kitchen. Never before nor
since have I been hungry to the ravenous pitch, and save that I have
had this very experience I could never have believed that, a quarter of
a million of miles out of our proper world, in utter perplexity of
soul, surrounded, watched, touched by beings more grotesque and inhuman
than the worst creations of a nightmare, it would be possible for me to
eat in utter forgetfulness of all these things. They stood about us
watching us, and ever and again making a slight elusive twittering that
stood, I suppose, in the stead of speech. I did not even shiver at
their touch. And when the first zeal of my feeding was over, I could
note that Cavor, too, had been eating with the same shameless abandon.




XIV.
Experiments in intercourse


When at last we had made an end of eating, the Selenites linked our
hands closely together again, and then untwisted the chains about our
feet and rebound them, so as to give us a limited freedom of movement.
Then they unfastened the chains about our waists. To do all this they
had to handle us freely, and ever and again one of their queer heads
came down close to my face, or a soft tentacle-hand touched my head or
neck. I don’t remember that I was afraid then or repelled by their
proximity. I think that our incurable anthropomorphism made us imagine
there were human heads inside their masks. The skin, like everything
else, looked bluish, but that was on account of the light; and it was
hard and shiny, quite in the beetle-wing fashion, not soft, or moist,
or hairy, as a vertebrated animal’s would be. Along the crest of the
head was a low ridge of whitish spines running from back to front, and
a much larger ridge curved on either side over the eyes. The Selenite
who untied me used his mouth to help his hands.

“They seem to be releasing us,” said Cavor. “Remember we are on the
moon! Make no sudden movements!”

“Are you going to try that geometry?”

“If I get a chance. But, of course, they may make an advance first.”

We remained passive, and the Selenites, having finished their
arrangements, stood back from us, and seemed to be looking at us. I say
seemed to be, because as their eyes were at the side and not in front,
one had the same difficulty in determining the direction in which they
were looking as one has in the case of a hen or a fish. They conversed
with one another in their reedy tones, that seemed to me impossible to
imitate or define. The door behind us opened wider, and, glancing over
my shoulder, I saw a vague large space beyond, in which quite a little
crowd of Selenites were standing. They seemed a curiously miscellaneous
rabble.

“Do they want us to imitate those sounds?” I asked Cavor.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“It seems to me that they are trying to make us understand something.”

“I can’t make anything of their gestures. Do you notice this one, who
is worrying with his head like a man with an uncomfortable collar?”

“Let us shake our heads at him.”

We did that, and finding it ineffectual, attempted an imitation of the
Selenites’ movements. That seemed to interest them. At any rate they
all set up the same movement. But as that seemed to lead to nothing, we
desisted at last and so did they, and fell into a piping argument among
themselves. Then one of them, shorter and very much thicker than the
others, and with a particularly wide mouth, squatted down suddenly
beside Cavor, and put his hands and feet in the same posture as Cavor’s
were bound, and then by a dexterous movement stood up.

“Cavor,” I shouted, “they want us to get up!”

He stared open-mouthed. “That’s it!” he said.

And with much heaving and grunting, because our hands were tied
together, we contrived to struggle to our feet. The Selenites made way
for our elephantine heavings, and seemed to twitter more volubly. As
soon as we were on our feet the thick-set Selenite came and patted each
of our faces with his tentacles, and walked towards the open doorway.
That also was plain enough, and we followed him. We saw that four of
the Selenites standing in the doorway were much taller than the others,
and clothed in the same manner as those we had seen in the crater,
namely, with spiked round helmets and cylindrical body-cases, and that
each of the four carried a goad with spike and guard made of that same
dull-looking metal as the bowls. These four closed about us, one on
either side of each of us, as we emerged from our chamber into the
cavern from which the light had come.

We did not get our impression of that cavern all at once. Our attention
was taken up by the movements and attitudes of the Selenites
immediately about us, and by the necessity of controlling our motion,
lest we should startle and alarm them and ourselves by some excessive
stride. In front of us was the short, thick-set being who had solved
the problem of asking us to get up, moving with gestures that seemed,
almost all of them, intelligible to us, inviting us to follow him. His
spout-like face turned from one of us to the other with a quickness
that was clearly interrogative. For a time, I say, we were taken up
with these things.

But at last the great place that formed a background to our movements
asserted itself. It became apparent that the source of much, at least,
of the tumult of sounds which had filled our ears ever since we had
recovered from the stupefaction of the fungus was a vast mass of
machinery in active movement, whose flying and whirling parts were
visible indistinctly over the heads and between the bodies of the
Selenites who walked about us. And not only did the web of sounds that
filled the air proceed from this mechanism, but also the peculiar blue
light that irradiated the whole place. We had taken it as a natural
thing that a subterranean cavern should be artificially lit, and even
now, though the fact was patent to my eyes, I did not really grasp its
import until presently the darkness came. The meaning and structure of
this huge apparatus we saw I cannot explain, because we neither of us
learnt what it was for or how it worked. One after another, big shafts
of metal flung out and up from its centre, their heads travelling in
what seemed to me to be a parabolic path; each dropped a sort of
dangling arm as it rose towards the apex of its flight and plunged down
into a vertical cylinder, forcing this down before it. About it moved
the shapes of tenders, little figures that seemed vaguely different
from the beings about us. As each of the three dangling arms of the
machine plunged down, there was a clank and then a roaring, and out of
the top of the vertical cylinder came pouring this incandescent
substance that lit the place, and ran over as milk runs over a boiling
pot, and dripped luminously into a tank of light below. It was a cold
blue light, a sort of phosphorescent glow but infinitely brighter, and
from the tanks into which it fell it ran in conduits athwart the
cavern.

Thud, thud, thud, thud, came the sweeping arms of this unintelligible
apparatus, and the light substance hissed and poured. At first the
thing seemed only reasonably large and near to us, and then I saw how
exceedingly little the Selenites upon it seemed, and I realised the
full immensity of cavern and machine. I looked from this tremendous
affair to the faces of the Selenites with a new respect. I stopped, and
Cavor stopped, and stared at this thunderous engine.

“But this is stupendous!” I said. “What can it be for?”

Cavor’s blue-lit face was full of an intelligent respect. “I can’t
dream! Surely these beings— Men could not make a thing like that! Look
at those arms, are they on connecting rods?”

The thick-set Selenite had gone some paces unheeded. He came back and
stood between us and the great machine. I avoided seeing him, because I
guessed somehow that his idea was to beckon us onward. He walked away
in the direction he wished us to go, and turned and came back, and
flicked our faces to attract our attention.

Cavor and I looked at one another.

“Cannot we show him we are interested in the machine?” I said.

“Yes,” said Cavor. “We’ll try that.” He turned to our guide and smiled,
and pointed to the machine, and pointed again, and then to his head,
and then to the machine. By some defect of reasoning he seemed to
imagine that broken English might help these gestures. “Me look ‘im,”
he said, “me think ‘im very much. Yes.”

His behaviour seemed to check the Selenites in their desire for our
progress for a moment. They faced one another, their queer heads moved,
the twittering voices came quick and liquid. Then one of them, a lean,
tall creature, with a sort of mantle added to the puttee in which the
others were dressed, twisted his elephant trunk of a hand about Cavor’s
waist, and pulled him gently to follow our guide, who again went on
ahead. Cavor resisted. “We may just as well begin explaining ourselves
now. They may think we are new animals, a new sort of mooncalf perhaps!
It is most important that we should show an intelligent interest from
the outset.”

He began to shake his head violently. “No, no,” he said, “me not come
on one minute. Me look at ‘im.”

“Isn’t there some geometrical point you might bring in _apropos_ of
that affair?” I suggested, as the Selenites conferred again.

“Possibly a parabolic—” he began.

He yelled loudly, and leaped six feet or more!

One of the four armed moon-men had pricked him with a goad!

I turned on the goad-bearer behind me with a swift threatening gesture,
and he started back. This and Cavor’s sudden shout and leap clearly
astonished all the Selenites. They receded hastily, facing us. For one
of those moments that seem to last for ever, we stood in angry protest,
with a scattered semicircle of these inhuman beings about us.

“He pricked me!” said Cavor, with a catching of the voice.

“I saw him,” I answered.

“Confound it!” I said to the Selenites; “we’re not going to stand that!
What on earth do you take us for?”

I glanced quickly right and left. Far away across the blue wilderness
of cavern I saw a number of other Selenites running towards us; broad
and slender they were, and one with a larger head than the others. The
cavern spread wide and low, and receded in every direction into
darkness. Its roof, I remember, seemed to bulge down as if with the
weight of the vast thickness of rocks that prisoned us. There was no
way out of it—no way out of it. Above, below, in every direction, was
the unknown, and these inhuman creatures, with goads and gestures,
confronting us, and we two unsupported men!




XV.
The Giddy Bridge


Just for a moment that hostile pause endured. I suppose that both we
and the Selenites did some very rapid thinking. My clearest impression
was that there was nothing to put my back against, and that we were
bound to be surrounded and killed. The overwhelming folly of our
presence there loomed over me in black, enormous reproach. Why had I
ever launched myself on this mad, inhuman expedition?

Cavor came to my side and laid his hand on my arm. His pale and
terrified face was ghastly in the blue light.

“We can’t do anything,” he said. “It’s a mistake. They don’t
understand. We must go. As they want us to go.”

I looked down at him, and then at the fresh Selenites who were coming
to help their fellows. “If I had my hands free—”

“It’s no use,” he panted.

“No.”

“We’ll go.”

And he turned about and led the way in the direction that had been
indicated for us.

I followed, trying to look as subdued as possible, and feeling at the
chains about my wrists. My blood was boiling. I noted nothing more of
that cavern, though it seemed to take a long time before we had marched
across it, or if I noted anything I forgot it as I saw it. My thoughts
were concentrated, I think, upon my chains and the Selenites, and
particularly upon the helmeted ones with the goads. At first they
marched parallel with us, and at a respectful distance, but presently
they were overtaken by three others, and then they drew nearer, until
they were within arms length again. I winced like a beaten horse as
they came near to us. The shorter, thicker Selenite marched at first on
our right flank, but presently came in front of us again.

How well the picture of that grouping has bitten into my brain; the
back of Cavor’s downcast head just in front of me, and the dejected
droop of his shoulders, and our guide’s gaping visage, perpetually
jerking about him, and the goad-bearers on either side, watchful, yet
open-mouthed—a blue monochrome. And after all, I _do_ remember one
other thing besides the purely personal affair, which is, that a sort
of gutter came presently across the floor of the cavern, and then ran
along by the side of the path of rock we followed. And it was full of
that same bright blue luminous stuff that flowed out of the great
machine. I walked close beside it, and I can testify it radiated not a
particle of heat. It was brightly shining, and yet it was neither
warmer nor colder than anything else in the cavern.

Clang, clang, clang, we passed right under the thumping levers of
another vast machine, and so came at last to a wide tunnel, in which we
could even hear the pad, pad, of our shoeless feet, and which, save for
the trickling thread of blue to the right of us, was quite unlit. The
shadows made gigantic travesties of our shapes and those of the
Selenites on the irregular wall and roof of the tunnel. Ever and again
crystals in the walls of the tunnel scintillated like gems, ever and
again the tunnel expanded into a stalactitic cavern, or gave off
branches that vanished into darkness.

We seemed to be marching down that tunnel for a long time. “Trickle,
trickle,” went the flowing light very softly, and our footfalls and
their echoes made an irregular paddle, paddle. My mind settled down to
the question of my chains. If I were to slip off one turn _so_, and
then to twist it _so_ ...

If I tried to do it very gradually, would they see I was slipping my
wrist out of the looser turn? If they did, what would they do?

“Bedford,” said Cavor, “it goes down. It keeps on going down.”

His remark roused me from my sullen pre-occupation.

“If they wanted to kill us,” he said, dropping back to come level with
me, “there is no reason why they should not have done it.”

“No,” I admitted, “that’s true.”

“They don’t understand us,” he said, “they think we are merely strange
animals, some wild sort of mooncalf birth, perhaps. It will be only
when they have observed us better that they will begin to think we have
minds—”

“When you trace those geometrical problems,” said I.

“It may be that.”

We tramped on for a space.

“You see,” said Cavor, “these may be Selenites of a lower class.”

“The infernal fools!” said I viciously, glancing at their exasperating
faces.

“If we endure what they do to us—”

“We’ve got to endure it,” said I.

“There may be others less stupid. This is the mere outer fringe of
their world. It must go down and down, cavern, passage, tunnel, down at
last to the sea—hundreds of miles below.”

His words made me think of the mile or so of rock and tunnel that might
be over our heads already. It was like a weight dropping on my
shoulders. “Away from the sun and air,” I said. “Even a mine half a
mile deep is stuffy.”

“This is not, anyhow. It’s probable—Ventilation! The air would blow
from the dark side of the moon to the sunlit, and all the carbonic acid
would well out there and feed those plants. Up this tunnel, for
example, there is quite a breeze. And what a world it must be. The
earnest we have in that shaft, and those machines—”

“And the goad,” I said. “Don’t forget the goad!”

He walked a little in front of me for a time.

“Even that goad—” he said.

“Well?”

“I was angry at the time. But—it was perhaps necessary we should get
on. They have different skins, and probably different nerves. They may
not understand our objection—just as a being from Mars might not like
our earthly habit of nudging.”

“They’d better be careful how they nudge _me_.”

“And about that geometry. After all, their way is a way of
understanding, too. They begin with the elements of life and not of
thought. Food. Compulsion. Pain. They strike at fundamentals.”

“There’s no doubt about _that_,” I said.

He went on to talk of the enormous and wonderful world into which we
were being taken. I realised slowly from his tone, that even now he was
not absolutely in despair at the prospect of going ever deeper into
this inhuman planet-burrow. His mind ran on machines and invention, to
the exclusion of a thousand dark things that beset me. It wasn’t that
he intended to make any use of these things, he simply wanted to know
them.

“After all,” he said, “this is a tremendous occasion. It is the meeting
of two worlds! What are we going to see? Think of what is below us
here.”

“We shan’t see much if the light isn’t better,” I remarked.

“This is only the outer crust. Down below— On this scale— There will be
everything. Do you notice how different they seem one from another? The
story we shall take back!”

“Some rare sort of animal,” I said, “might comfort himself in that way
while they were bringing him to the Zoo.... It doesn’t follow that we
are going to be shown all these things.”

“When they find we have reasonable minds,” said Cavor, “they will want
to learn about the earth. Even if they have no generous emotions, they
will teach in order to learn.... And the things they must know! The
unanticipated things!”

He went on to speculate on the possibility of their knowing things he
had never hoped to learn on earth, speculating in that way, with a raw
wound from that goad already in his skin! Much that he said I forget,
for my attention was drawn to the fact that the tunnel along which we
had been marching was opening out wider and wider. We seemed, from the
feeling of the air, to be going out into a huge space. But how big the
space might really be we could not tell, because it was unlit. Our
little stream of light ran in a dwindling thread and vanished far
ahead. Presently the rocky walls had vanished altogether on either
hand. There was nothing to be seen but the path in front of us and the
trickling hurrying rivulet of blue phosphorescence. The figures of
Cavor and the guiding Selenite marched before me, the sides of their
legs and heads that were towards the rivulet were clear and bright
blue, their darkened sides, now that the reflection of the tunnel wall
no longer lit them, merged indistinguishably in the darkness beyond.

And soon I perceived that we were approaching a declivity of some sort,
because the little blue stream dipped suddenly out of sight.

In another moment, as it seemed, we had reached the edge. The shining
stream gave one meander of hesitation and then rushed over. It fell to
a depth at which the sound of its descent was absolutely lost to us.
Far below was a bluish glow, a sort of blue mist—at an infinite
distance below. And the darkness the stream dropped out of became
utterly void and black, save that a thing like a plank projected from
the edge of the cliff and stretched out and faded and vanished
altogether. There was a warm air blowing up out of the gulf.

For a moment I and Cavor stood as near the edge as we dared, peering
into a blue-tinged profundity. And then our guide was pulling at my
arm.

Then he left me, and walked to the end of that plank and stepped upon
it, looking back. Then when he perceived we watched him, he turned
about and went on along it, walking as surely as though he was on firm
earth. For a moment his form was distinct, then he became a blue blur,
and then vanished into the obscurity. I became aware of some vague
shape looming darkly out of the black.

There was a pause. “Surely!—” said Cavor.

One of the other Selenites walked a few paces out upon the plank, and
turned and looked back at us unconcernedly. The others stood ready to
follow after us. Our guide’s expectant figure reappeared. He was
returning to see why we had not advanced.

“What is that beyond there?” I asked.

“I can’t see.”

“We can’t cross this at any price,” said I.

“I could not go three steps on it,” said Cavor, “even with my hands
free.”

We looked at each other’s drawn faces in blank consternation.

“They can’t know what it is to be giddy!” said Cavor.

“It’s quite impossible for us to walk that plank.”

“I don’t believe they see as we do. I’ve been watching them. I wonder
if they know this is simply blackness for us. How can we make them
understand?”

“Anyhow, we must make them understand.”

I think we said these things with a vague half hope the Selenites might
somehow understand. I knew quite clearly that all that was needed was
an explanation. Then as I saw their faces, I realised that an
explanation was impossible. Just here it was that our resemblances were
not going to bridge our differences. Well, I wasn’t going to walk the
plank, anyhow. I slipped my wrist very quickly out of the coil of chain
that was loose, and then began to twist my wrists in opposite
directions. I was standing nearest to the bridge, and as I did this two
of the Selenites laid hold of me, and pulled me gently towards it.

I shook my head violently. “No go,” I said, “no use. You don’t
understand.”

Another Selenite added his compulsion. I was forced to step forward.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Cavor; but I knew his ideas.

“Look here!” I exclaimed to the Selenites. “Steady on! It’s all very
well for you—”

I sprang round upon my heel. I burst out into curses. For one of the
armed Selenites had stabbed me behind with his goad.

I wrenched my wrists free from the little tentacles that held them. I
turned on the goad-bearer. “Confound you!” I cried. “I’ve warned you of
that. What on earth do you think I’m made of, to stick that into me? If
you touch me again—”

By way of answer he pricked me forthwith.

I heard Cavor’s voice in alarm and entreaty. Even then I think he
wanted to compromise with these creatures. “I say, Bedford,” he cried,
“I know a way!” But the sting of that second stab seemed to set free
some pent-up reserve of energy in my being. Instantly the link of the
wrist-chain snapped, and with it snapped all considerations that had
held us unresisting in the hands of these moon creatures. For that
second, at least, I was mad with fear and anger. I took no thought of
consequences. I hit straight out at the face of the thing with the
goad. The chain was twisted round my fist.

There came another of these beastly surprises of which the moon world
is full.

My mailed hand seemed to go clean through him. He smashed like—like
some softish sort of sweet with liquid in it! He broke right in! He
squelched and splashed. It was like hitting a damp toadstool. The
flimsy body went spinning a dozen yards, and fell with a flabby impact.
I was astonished. I was incredulous that any living thing could be so
flimsy. For an instant I could have believed the whole thing a dream.

Then it had become real and imminent again. Neither Cavor nor the other
Selenites seemed to have done anything from the time when I had turned
about to the time when the dead Selenite hit the ground. Every one
stood back from us two, every one alert. That arrest seemed to last at
least a second after the Selenite was down. Every one must have been
taking the thing in. I seem to remember myself standing with my arm
half retracted, trying also to take it in. “What next?” clamoured my
brain; “what next?” Then in a moment every one was moving!

I perceived we must get our chains loose, and that before we could do
this these Selenites had to be beaten off. I faced towards the group of
the three goad-bearers. Instantly one threw his goad at me. It swished
over my head, and I suppose went flying into the abyss behind.

I leaped right at him with all my might as the goad flew over me. He
turned to run as I jumped, and I bore him to the ground, came down
right upon him, and slipped upon his smashed body and fell. He seemed
to wriggle under my foot.

I came into a sitting position, and on every hand the blue backs of the
Selenites were receding into the darkness. I bent a link by main force
and untwisted the chain that had hampered me about the ankles, and
sprang to my feet, with the chain in my hand. Another goad, flung
javelin-wise, whistled by me, and I made a rush towards the darkness
out of which it had come. Then I turned back towards Cavor, who was
still standing in the light of the rivulet near the gulf convulsively
busy with his wrists, and at the same time jabbering nonsense about his
idea.

“Come on!” I cried.

“My hands!” he answered.

Then, realising that I dared not run back to him, because my
ill-calculated steps might carry me over the edge, he came shuffling
towards me, with his hands held out before him.

I gripped his chains at once to unfasten them.

“Where are they?” he panted.

“Run away. They’ll come back. They’re throwing things! Which way shall
we go?”

“By the light. To that tunnel. Eh?”

“Yes,” said I, and his hands were free.

I dropped on my knees and fell to work on his ankle bonds. Whack came
something—I know not what—and splashed the livid streamlet into drops
about us. Far away on our right a piping and whistling began.

I whipped the chain off his feet, and put it in his hand. “Hit with
that!” I said, and without waiting for an answer, set off in big bounds
along the path by which we had come. I had a nasty sort of feeling that
these things could jump out of the darkness on to my back. I heard the
impact of his leaps come following after me.

We ran in vast strides. But that running, you must understand, was an
altogether different thing from any running on earth. On earth one
leaps and almost instantly hits the ground again, but on the moon,
because of its weaker pull, one shot through the air for several
seconds before one came to earth. In spite of our violent hurry this
gave an effect of long pauses, pauses in which one might have counted
seven or eight. “Step,” and one soared off! All sorts of questions ran
through my mind: “Where are the Selenites? What will they do? Shall we
ever get to that tunnel? Is Cavor far behind? Are they likely to cut
him off?” Then whack, stride, and off again for another step.

I saw a Selenite running in front of me, his legs going exactly as a
man’s would go on earth, saw him glance over his shoulder, and heard
him shriek as he ran aside out of my way into the darkness. He was, I
think, our guide, but I am not sure. Then in another vast stride the
walls of rock had come into view on either hand, and in two more
strides I was in the tunnel, and tempering my pace to its low roof. I
went on to a bend, then stopped and turned back, and plug, plug, plug,
Cavor came into view, splashing into the stream of blue light at every
stride, and grew larger and blundered into me. We stood clutching each
other. For a moment, at least, we had shaken off our captors and were
alone.

We were both very much out of breath. We spoke in panting, broken
sentences.

“You’ve spoilt it all!” panted Cavor. “Nonsense,” I cried. “It was that
or death!”

“What are we to do?”

“Hide.”

“How can we?”

“It’s dark enough.”

“But where?”

“Up one of these side caverns.”

“And then?”

“Think.”

“Right—come on.”

We strode on, and presently came to a radiating dark cavern. Cavor was
in front. He hesitated, and chose a black mouth that seemed to promise
good hiding. He went towards it and turned.

“It’s dark,” he said.

“Your legs and feet will light us. You’re wet with that luminous
stuff.”

“But—”

A tumult of sounds, and in particular a sound like a clanging gong,
advancing up the main tunnel, became audible. It was horribly
suggestive of a tumultuous pursuit. We made a bolt for the unlit side
cavern forthwith. As we ran along it our way was lit by the irradiation
of Cavor’s legs. “It’s lucky,” I panted, “they took off our boots, or
we should fill this place with clatter.” On we rushed, taking as small
steps as we could to avoid striking the roof of the cavern. After a
time we seemed to be gaining on the uproar. It became muffled, it
dwindled, it died away.

I stopped and looked back, and I heard the pad, pad of Cavor’s feet
receding. Then he stopped also. “Bedford,” he whispered; “there’s a
sort of light in front of us.”

I looked, and at first could see nothing. Then I perceived his head and
shoulders dimly outlined against a fainter darkness. I saw, also, that
this mitigation of the darkness was not blue, as all the other light
within the moon had been, but a pallid grey, a very vague, faint white,
the daylight colour. Cavor noted this difference as soon, or sooner,
than I did, and I think, too, that it filled him with much the same
wild hope.

“Bedford,” he whispered, and his voice trembled. “That light—it is
possible—”

He did not dare to say the thing he hoped. Then came a pause. Suddenly
I knew by the sound of his feet that he was striding towards that
pallor. I followed him with a beating heart.




XVI.
Points of View


The light grew stronger as we advanced. In a little time it was nearly
as strong as the phosphorescence on Cavor’s legs. Our tunnel was
expanding into a cavern, and this new light was at the farther end of
it. I perceived something that set my hopes leaping and bounding.

“Cavor,” I said, “it comes from above! I am certain it comes from
above!”

He made no answer, but hurried on.

Indisputably it was a grey light, a silvery light.

In another moment we were beneath it. It filtered down through a chink
in the walls of the cavern, and as I stared up, drip, came a drop of
water upon my face. I started and stood aside—drip, fell another drop
quite audibly on the rocky floor.

“Cavor,” I said, “if one of us lifts the other, he can reach that
crack!”

“I’ll lift you,” he said, and incontinently hoisted me as though I was
a baby.

I thrust an arm into the crack, and just at my finger tips found a
little ledge by which I could hold. I could see the white light was
very much brighter now. I pulled myself up by two fingers with scarcely
an effort, though on earth I weigh twelve stone, reached to a still
higher corner of rock, and so got my feet on the narrow ledge. I stood
up and searched up the rocks with my fingers; the cleft broadened out
upwardly. “It’s climbable,” I said to Cavor. “Can you jump up to my
hand if I hold it down to you?”

I wedged myself between the sides of the cleft, rested knee and foot on
the ledge, and extended a hand. I could not see Cavor, but I could hear
the rustle of his movements as he crouched to spring. Then whack and he
was hanging to my arm—and no heavier than a kitten! I lugged him up
until he had a hand on my ledge, and could release me.

“Confound it!” I said, “any one could be a mountaineer on the moon;”
and so set myself in earnest to the climbing. For a few minutes I
clambered steadily, and then I looked up again. The cleft opened out
steadily, and the light was brighter. Only—

It was not daylight after all.

In another moment I could see what it was, and at the sight I could
have beaten my head against the rocks with disappointment. For I beheld
simply an irregularly sloping open space, and all over its slanting
floor stood a forest of little club-shaped fungi, each shining
gloriously with that pinkish silvery light. For a moment I stared at
their soft radiance, then sprang forward and upward among them. I
plucked up half a dozen and flung them against the rocks, and then sat
down, laughing bitterly, as Cavor’s ruddy face came into view.

“It’s phosphorescence again!” I said. “No need to hurry. Sit down and
make yourself at home.” And as he spluttered over our disappointment, I
began to lob more of these growths into the cleft.

“I thought it was daylight,” he said.

“Daylight!” cried I. “Daybreak, sunset, clouds, and windy skies! Shall
we ever see such things again?”

As I spoke, a little picture of our world seemed to rise before me,
bright and little and clear, like the background of some old Italian
picture. “The sky that changes, and the sea that changes, and the hills
and the green trees and the towns and cities shining in the sun. Think
of a wet roof at sunset, Cavor! Think of the windows of a westward
house!” He made no answer.

“Here we are burrowing in this beastly world that isn’t a world, with
its inky ocean hidden in some abominable blackness below, and outside
that torrid day and that death stillness of night. And all these things
that are chasing us now, beastly men of leather—insect men, that come
out of a nightmare! After all, they’re right! What business have we
here smashing them and disturbing their world! For all we know the
whole planet is up and after us already. In a minute we may hear them
whimpering, and their gongs going. What are we to do? Where are we to
go? Here we are as comfortable as snakes from Jamrach’s loose in a
Surbiton villa!”

“It was your fault,” said Cavor.

“My fault!” I shouted. “Good Lord!”

“I had an idea!”

“Curse your ideas!”

“If we had refused to budge—”

“Under 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
also started upon a train of thought that carried me wide and far. I
forgot that I had just been asking what business we had in the moon.
Gold....

It was Cavor who spoke first. “It seems to me that there are two
courses open to us.”

“Well?”

“Either we can attempt to make our way—fight our way if necessary—out
to the exterior again, and then hunt for our sphere until we find it,
or the cold of the night comes to kill us, or else—”

He paused. “Yes?” I said, though I knew what was coming.

“We might attempt once more to establish some sort of understanding
with the minds of the people in the moon.”

“So far as I’m concerned—it’s the first.”

“I doubt.”

“I don’t.”

“You see,” said Cavor, “I do not think we can judge the Selenites by
what we have seen of them. Their central world, their civilised world
will be far below in the profounder caverns about their sea. This
region of the crust in which we are is an outlying district, a pastoral
region. At any rate, that is my interpretation. These Selenites we have
seen may be only the equivalent of cowboys and engine-tenders. Their
use of goads—in all probability mooncalf goads—the lack of imagination
they show in expecting us to be able to do just what they can do, their
indisputable brutality, all seem to point to something of that sort.
But if we endured—”

“Neither of us could endure a six-inch plank across the bottomless pit
for very long.”

“No,” said Cavor; “but then—”

“I _won’t_,” I said.

He discovered a new line of possibilities. “Well, suppose we got
ourselves into some corner, where we could defend ourselves against
these hinds and labourers. If, for example, we could hold out for a
week or so, it is probable that the news of our appearance would filter
down to the more intelligent and populous parts—”

“If they exist.”

“They must exist, or whence came those tremendous machines?”

“That’s possible, but it’s the worst of the two chances.”

“We might write up inscriptions on walls—”

“How do we know their eyes would see the sort of marks we made?”

“If we cut them—”

“That’s possible, of course.”

I took up a new thread of thought. “After all,” I said, “I suppose you
don’t think these Selenites so infinitely wiser than men.”

“They must know a lot more—or at least a lot of different things.”

“Yes, but—” I hesitated.

“I think you’ll quite admit, Cavor, that you’re rather an exceptional
man.”

“How?”

“Well, you—you’re a rather lonely man—have been, that is. You haven’t
married.”

“Never wanted to. But why—”

“And you never grew richer than you happened to be?”

“Never wanted that either.”

“You’ve just rooted after knowledge?”

“Well, a certain curiosity is natural—”

“You think so. That’s just it. You think every other mind wants to
_know_. I remember once, when I asked you why you conducted all these
researches, you said you wanted your F.R.S., and to have the stuff
called Cavorite, and things like that. You know perfectly well you
didn’t do it for that; but at the time my question took you by
surprise, and you felt you ought to have something to look like a
motive. Really you conducted researches because you _had_ to. It’s your
twist.”

“Perhaps it is—”

“It isn’t one man in a million has that twist. Most men want—well,
various things, but very few want knowledge for its own sake. _I_
don’t, I know perfectly well. Now, these Selenites seem to be a
driving, busy sort of being, but how do you know that even the

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