The light grew stronger as we advanced. In a little time it was nearly
as strong as the phosphorescence on Cavor’s legs. Our tunnel was
expanding into a cavern, and this new light was at the farther end of
it. I perceived something that set my hopes leaping and bounding.
“Cavor,” I said, “it comes from above! I am certain it comes from
above!”
He made no answer, but hurried on.
Indisputably it was a grey light; a silvery light.
In another moment we were beneath it. It filtered down through a chink
in the walls of the cavern, and as I stared up, drip, came a drop of
water upon my face. I started and stood aside--drip, fell another drop
quite audibly on the rocky floor.
“Cavor,” I said, “if one of us lifts the other, he can reach that
crack!”
“I’ll lift you,” he said, and incontinently hoisted me as though I was
a baby.
I thrust an arm into the crack, and just at my finger tips found a
little ledge by which I could hold. I could see the white light was
very much brighter now. I pulled myself up by two fingers with scarcely
an effort, though on earth I weigh twelve stone, reached to a still
higher corner of rock, and so got my feet on the narrow ledge. I stood
up and searched up the rocks with my fingers; the cleft broadened out
upwardly. “It’s climbable,” I said to Cavor. “Can you jump up to my
hand if I hold it down to you?”
I wedged myself between the sides of the cleft, rested knee and foot on
the ledge, and extended a hand. I could not see Cavor, but I could hear
the rustle of his movements as he crouched to spring. Then whack and he
was hanging to my arm--and no heavier than a kitten! I lugged him up
until he had a hand on my ledge, and could release me.
“Confound it!” I said, “any one could be a mountaineer on the moon;”
and so set myself in earnest to the climbing. For a few minutes I
clambered steadily, and then I looked up again. The cleft opened out
steadily, and the light was brighter. Only----
It was not daylight after all!
In another moment I could see what it was, and at the sight I could
have beaten my head against the rocks with disappointment. For I
beheld simply an irregularly sloping open space, and all over its
slanting floor stood a forest of little club-shaped fungi, each shining
gloriously with that pinkish silvery light. For a moment I stared at
their soft radiance, then sprang forward and upward among them. I
plucked up half-a-dozen and flung them against the rocks, and then sat
down, laughing bitterly, as Cavor’s ruddy face came into view.
“It’s phosphorescence again!” I said. “No need to hurry. Sit down and
make yourself at home.” And as he spluttered over our disappointment, I
began to lob more of these growths into the cleft.
“I thought it was daylight,” he said.
“Daylight!” cried I. “Daybreak, sunset, clouds, and windy skies! Shall
we ever see such things again?”
As I spoke, a little picture of our world seemed to rise before me,
bright and little and clear, like the background of some old Italian
picture. “The sky that changes, and the sea that changes, and the hills
and the green trees and the towns and cities shining in the sun. Think
of a wet roof at sunset, Cavor! Think of the windows of a westward
house!”
He made no answer.
“Here we are burrowing in this beastly world that isn’t a world, with
its inky ocean hidden in some abominable blackness below, and outside
that torrid day and that death stillness of night. And all those things
that are chasing us now, beastly men of leather--insect men, that come
out of a nightmare! After all, they’re right! What business have we
here smashing them and disturbing their world? For all we know the
whole planet is up and after us already. In a minute we may hear them
whimpering, and their gongs going. What are we to do? Where are we to
go? Here we are as comfortable as snakes from Jamrach’s loose in a
Surbiton villa!”
“It was your fault,” said Cavor.
“My fault!” I shouted. “Good Lord!”
“I had an idea!”
“Curse your ideas!”
“If we had refused to budge----”
“Under these goads?”
“Yes. They would have carried us!”
“Over that bridge?”
“Yes. They must have carried us from outside.”
“I’d rather be carried by a fly across a ceiling.”
“Good Heavens!”
I resumed my destruction of the fungi. Then suddenly I saw something
that struck me even then.
“Cavor,” I said, “these chains are of gold!”
He was thinking intently, with his hands gripping his cheeks. He turned
his head slowly and stared at me, and when I had repeated my words, at
the twisted chain about his right hand. “So they are,” he said, “so
they are.” His face lost its transitory interest even as he looked. He
hesitated for a moment, then went on with his interrupted meditation.
I sat for a space puzzling over the fact that I had only just observed
this, until I considered the blue light in which we had been, and which
had taken all the colour out of the metal. And from that discovery I
also started upon a train of thought that carried me wide and far. I
forgot that I had just been asking what business we had in the moon.
Gold----
It was Cavor who spoke first. “It seems to me that there are two
courses open to us.”
“Well?”
“Either we can attempt to make our way--fight our way if
necessary--out to the exterior again, and then hunt for our sphere
until we find it, or the cold of the night comes to kill us, or
else----”
He paused. “Yes?” I said, though I knew what was coming.
“We might attempt once more to establish some sort of understanding
with the minds of the people in the moon.”
“So far as I’m concerned--it’s the first.”
“I doubt.”
“I don’t.”
“You see,” said Cavor, “I do not think we can judge the Selenites by
what we have seen of them. Their central world, their civilised world
will be far below in the profounder caverns about their sea. This
region of the crust in which we are is an outlying district, a pastoral
region. At any rate, that is my interpretation. These Selenites we
have seen may be only the equivalent of cowboys and engine tenders.
Their use of goads--in all probability mooncalf goads--the lack of
imagination they show in expecting us to be able to do just what they
can do, their indisputable brutality, all seem to point to something of
that sort. But if we endured----”
“Neither of us could endure a six-inch plank across the bottomless pit
for very long.”
“No,” said Cavor; “but then----”
“I _won’t_,” I said.
He discovered a new line of possibilities. “Well, suppose we got
ourselves into some corner, where we could defend ourselves against
these hinds and labourers. If, for example, we could hold out for a
week or so, it is probable that the news of our appearance would filter
down to the more intelligent and populous parts----”
“If they exist.”
“They must exist, or whence came those tremendous machines?”
“That’s possible, but it’s the worst of the two chances.”
“We might write up inscriptions on walls----”
“How do we know their eyes would see the sort of marks we made?”
“If we cut them----”
“That’s possible, of course.”
I took up a new thread of thought. “After all,” I said, “I suppose you
don’t think these Selenites so infinitely wiser than men.”
“They must know a lot more--or at least a lot of different things.”
“Yes, but--” I hesitated.
“I think you’ll quite admit, Cavor, that you’re rather an exceptional
man.”
“How?”
“Well, you--you’re a rather lonely man--have been, that is. You haven’t
married.”
“Never wanted to. But why----?”
“And you never grew richer than you happened to be?”
“Never wanted that either.”
“You’ve just rooted after knowledge?”
“Well, a certain curiosity is natural----”
“You think so. That’s just it. You think every other mind wants to
_know_. I remember once, when I asked you why you conducted all
these researches, you said you wanted your F.R.S., and to have the
stuff called Cavorite, and things like that. You know perfectly well
you didn’t do it for that; but at the time my question took you by
surprise, and you felt you ought to have something to look like a
motive. Really you conducted researches because you _had_ to. It’s your
twist.”
“Perhaps it is----”
“It isn’t one man in a million has that twist. Most men want--well,
various things, but very few want knowledge for its own sake. _I_
don’t, I know perfectly well. Now, these Selenites seem to be a
driving, busy sort of being, but how do you know that even the most
intelligent will take an interest in us or our world? I don’t believe
they’ll even know we have a world. They never come out at night--they’d
freeze if they did. They’ve probably never seen any heavenly body at
all except the blazing sun. How are they to know there _is_ another
world? What does it matter to them if they do? Well, even if they
_have_ had a glimpse of a few stars, or even of the earth crescent,
what of that? Why should people living _inside_ a planet trouble to
observe that sort of thing? Men wouldn’t have done it except for the
seasons and sailing; why should the moon people?...
“Well, suppose there are a few philosophers like yourself. They are
just the very Selenites who’ll never hear of our existence. Suppose a
Selenite had dropped on the earth when you were at Lympne, you’d have
been the last man in the world to hear he had come. You never read
a newspaper! You see the chances against you. Well, it’s for these
chances we’re sitting here doing nothing while precious time is flying.
I tell you we’ve got into a fix. We’ve come unarmed, we’ve lost our
sphere, we’ve got no food, we’ve shown ourselves to the Selenites,
and made them think we’re strange, strong, dangerous animals; and
unless these Selenites are perfect fools, they’ll set about now and
hunt us till they find us, and when they find us they’ll try and take
us if they can, and kill us if they can’t, and that’s the end of
the matter. If they take us, they’ll probably kill us, through some
misunderstanding. After we’re done for, they may discuss us perhaps,
but we shan’t get much fun out of that.”
“Go on.”
“On the other hand, here’s gold knocking about like cast iron at home.
If only we can get some of it back, if only we can find our sphere
again before they do, and get back, then----”
“Yes?”
“We might put the thing on a sounder footing. Come back in a bigger
sphere with guns.”
“Good Lord!” cried Cavor, as though that was horrible.