“Go on,” said Cavor, as I sat across the edge of the manhole and looked
down into the black interior of the sphere. We two were alone. It was
evening, the sun had set, and the stillness of the twilight was upon
everything.
I drew my other leg inside and slid down the smooth glass to the
bottom of the sphere, then turned to take the cans of food and other
impedimenta from Cavor. The interior was warm, the thermometer stood
at eighty, and as we should lose little or none of this by radiation,
we were dressed in shoes and thin flannels. We had, however, a bundle
of thick woollen clothing and several thick blankets to guard against
mischance. By Cavor’s direction I placed the packages, the cylinders of
oxygen, and so forth, loosely about my feet, and soon we had everything
in. He walked about the roofless shed for a time seeking anything we
had overlooked, and then crawled in after me. I noted something in his
hand.
[Illustration: “I sat across the edge of the manhole and looked down
into the black interior”]
“What have you got there?” I asked.
“Haven’t you brought anything to read?”
“Good Lord! No.”
“I forgot to tell you. There are uncertainties--The voyage may last--We
may be weeks!”
“But----”
“We shall be floating in this sphere with absolutely no occupation.”
“I wish I’d known----”
He peered out of the manhole. “Look!” he said. “There’s something
there!”
“Is there time?”
“We shall be an hour.”
I looked out. It was an old number of _Tit-Bits_ that one of the men
must have brought. Further away in the corner I saw a torn _Lloyds’
News_. I scrambled back into the sphere with these things. “What have
you got?” I said.
I took the book from his hand and read, “The Works of William
Shakespeare.”
He coloured slightly. “My education has been so purely scientific--” he
said apologetically.
“Never read him?”
“Never.”
“He knew a little you know--in an irregular sort of way.”
“Precisely what I am told,” said Cavor.
I assisted him to screw in the glass cover of the manhole, and then he
pressed a stud to close the corresponding blind in the outer case. The
little oblong of twilight vanished. We were in darkness.
For a time neither of us spoke. Although our case would not be
impervious to sound, everything was very still. I perceived there was
nothing to grip when the shock of our start should come, and I realised
that I should be uncomfortable for want of a chair.
“Why have we no chairs?” I asked.
“I’ve settled all that,” said Cavor. “We shan’t need them.”
“Why not?”
“You will see,” he said, in the tone of a man who refuses to talk.
I became silent. Suddenly it had come to me clear and vivid that I
was a fool to be inside that sphere. Even now, I asked myself, is it
too late to withdraw? The world outside the sphere, I knew, would
be cold and inhospitable enough to me--for weeks I had been living
on subsidies from Cavor--but after all, would it be as cold as the
infinite zero, as inhospitable as empty space? If it had not been for
the appearance of cowardice, I believe that even then I should have
made him let me out. But I hesitated on that score, and hesitated, and
grew fretful and angry, and the time passed.
There came a little jerk, a noise like champagne being uncorked in
another room, and a faint whistling sound. For just one instant I had
a sense of enormous tension, a transient conviction that my feet were
pressing downward with a force of countless tons. It lasted for an
infinitesimal time.
But it stirred me to action. “Cavor!” I said into the darkness, “my
nerve’s in rags.... I don’t think----”