“It isn’t as though we were confined to the moon.”
“You mean----?”
“There’s Mars--clear atmosphere, novel surroundings, exhilarating sense
of lightness. It might be pleasant to go there.”
“Is there air on Mars?”
“Oh yes!”
“Seems as though you might run it as a sanatorium. By the way, how far
is Mars?”
“Two hundred million miles at present,” said Cavor airily; “and you go
close by the sun.”
My imagination was picking itself up again. “After all,” I said,
“there’s something in these things. There’s travel----”
An extraordinary possibility came rushing into my mind. Suddenly I
saw, as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavorite
liners and spheres _de luxe_. “Rights of pre-emption,” came floating
into my head--planetary rights of pre-emption. I recalled the old
Spanish monopoly in American gold. It wasn’t as though it was just this
planet or that--it was all of them. I stared at Cavor’s rubicund face,
and suddenly my imagination was leaping and dancing. I stood up, I
walked up and down; my tongue was unloosened.
“I’m beginning to take it in,” I said; “I’m beginning to take it in.”
The transition from doubt to enthusiasm seemed to take scarcely any
time at all. “But this is tremendous!” I cried. “This is Imperial! I
haven’t been dreaming of this sort of thing.”
Once the chill of my opposition was removed, his own pent-up excitement
had play. He too got up and paced. He too gesticulated and shouted. We
behaved like men inspired. We _were_ men inspired.
“We’ll settle all that!” he said in answer to some incidental
difficulty that had pulled me up. “We’ll soon settle all that! We’ll
start the drawings for mouldings this very night.”
“We’ll start them now,” I responded, and we hurried off to the
laboratory to begin upon this work forthwith.
I was like a child in Wonderland all that night. The dawn found us both
still at work--we kept our electric light going heedless of the day. I
remember now exactly how those drawings looked. I shaded and tinted,
while Cavor drew--smudged and haste-marked they were in every line,
but wonderfully correct. We got out the orders for the steel blinds
and frames we needed from that night’s work, and the glass sphere was
designed within a week. We gave up our afternoon conversations and our
old routine altogether. We worked, and we slept and ate when we could
work no longer for hunger and fatigue. Our enthusiasm infected even our
three men, though they had no idea what the sphere was for. Through
those days the man Gibbs gave up walking, and went everywhere, even
across the room, at a sort of fussy run.
And it grew--the sphere. December passed, January--I spent a day
with a broom sweeping a path through the snow from bungalow to
laboratory--February, March. By the end of March the completion was
in sight. In January had come a team of horses, a huge packing-case;
we had our thick glass sphere now ready, and in position under the
crane we had rigged to sling it into the steel shell. All the bars and
blinds of the steel shell--it was not really a spherical shell, but
polyhedral, with a roller blind to each facet--had arrived by February,
and the lower half was bolted together. The Cavorite was half made by
March, the metallic paste had gone through two of the stages in its
manufacture, and we had plastered quite half of it on to the steel bars
and blinds. It was astonishing how closely we kept to the lines of
Cavor’s first inspiration in working out the scheme. When the bolting
together of the sphere was finished, he proposed to remove the rough
roof of the temporary laboratory in which the work was done, and build
a furnace about it. So the last stage of Cavorite making, in which the
paste is heated to a dull red glow in a stream of helium, would be
accomplished when it was already on the sphere.
And then we had to discuss and decide what provisions we were to
take--compressed foods, concentrated essences, steel cylinders
containing reserve oxygen, an arrangement for removing carbonic acid
and waste from the air and restoring oxygen by means of sodium
peroxide, water condensers, and so forth. I remember the little heap
they made in the corner--tins, and rolls, and boxes--convincingly
matter-of-fact.
It was a strenuous time, with little chance of thinking. But one day,
when we were drawing near the end, an odd mood came over me. I had
been bricking up the furnace all the morning, and I sat down by these
possessions dead beat. Everything seemed dull and incredible.
“But look here, Cavor,” I said. “After all! What’s it all for?”
He smiled. “The thing now is to go.”
“The moon,” I reflected. “But what do you expect? I thought the moon
was a dead world.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“What do you expect?”
“We’re going to see.”
“_Are_ we?” I said, and stared before me.
“You are tired,” he remarked. “You’d better take a walk this afternoon.”
“No,” I said obstinately; “I’m going to finish this brickwork.”
And I did, and insured myself a night of insomnia.
I don’t think I have ever had such a night. I had some bad times
before my business collapse, but the very worst of those was sweet
slumber compared to this infinity of aching wakefulness. I was suddenly
in the most enormous funk at the thing we were going to do.
I do not remember before that night thinking at all of the risks we
were running. Now they came like that array of spectres that once
beleaguered Prague, and camped around me. The strangeness of what we
were about to do, the unearthliness of it, overwhelmed me. I was like a
man awakened out of pleasant dreams to the most horrible surroundings.
I lay, eyes wide open, and the sphere seemed to get more flimsy and
feeble, and Cavor more unreal and fantastic, and the whole enterprise
madder and madder every moment.
I got out of bed and wandered about. I sat at the window and stared
at the immensity of space. Between the stars was the void, the
unfathomable darkness! I tried to recall the fragmentary knowledge of
astronomy I had gained in my irregular reading, but it was all too
vague to furnish any idea of the things we might expect. At last I got
back to bed and snatched some moments of sleep--moments of nightmare
rather--in which I fell and fell and fell for evermore into the abyss
of the sky.
I astonished Cavor at breakfast. I told him shortly, “I’m not coming
with you in the sphere.”
I met all his protests with a sullen persistence. “The thing’s too
mad,” I said, “and I won’t come. The thing’s too mad.”
I would not go with him to the laboratory. I fretted about my bungalow
for a time, and then took hat and stick and set off alone, I knew not
whither. It chanced to be a glorious morning: a warm wind and deep blue
sky, the first green of spring abroad, and multitudes of birds singing.
I lunched on beef and beer in a little public-house near Elham, and
startled the landlord by remarking _apropos_ of the weather, “A man who
leaves the world when days of this sort are about is a fool!”
“That’s what I says when I heerd on it!” said the landlord, and I
found that for one poor soul at least this world had proved excessive,
and there had been a throat-cutting. I went on with a new twist to my
thoughts.
In the afternoon I had a pleasant sleep in a sunny place, and went my
way refreshed.
I came to a comfortable-looking inn near Canterbury. It was bright
with creepers, and the landlady was a clean old woman and took my
eye. I found I had just enough money to pay for my lodging with her.
I decided to stop the night there. She was a talkative body, and
among many other particulars I learnt she had never been to London.
“Canterbury’s as far as ever I been,” she said. “I’m not one of your
gad-about sort.”
“How would you like a trip to the moon?” I cried.
“I never did hold with them ballooneys,” she said, evidently under the
impression that this was a common excursion enough. “I wouldn’t go up
in one--not for ever so.”
This struck me as being funny. After I had supped I sat on a bench by
the door of the inn and gossiped with two labourers about brick-making,
and motor cars, and the cricket of last year. And in the sky a faint
new crescent, blue and vague as a distant Alp, sank westward over the
sun.
The next day I returned to Cavor. “I am coming,” I said. “I’ve been a
little out of order, that’s all.”
That was the only time I felt any serious doubt of our enterprise.
Nerves purely! After that I worked a little more carefully, and took a
trudge for an hour every day. And at last, save for the heating in the
furnace, our labours were at an end.