When I had finished my account of my return to the earth at Littlestone
I wrote, “The End,” made a flourish, and threw my pen aside, fully
believing that the whole story of the First Men in the Moon was done.
Not only had I done this, but I had placed my manuscript in the hands
of a literary agent, had permitted it to be sold, had seen the greater
portion of it appear in the _Strand Magazine_, and was setting to work
again upon the scenario of the play I had commenced at Lympne before I
realised that the end was not yet. And then, following me from Amalfi
to Algiers, there reached me (it is now about six months ago) one of
the most astounding communications I have ever been fated to receive.
Briefly, it informed me that Mr. Julius Wendigee, a Dutch electrician,
who has been experimenting with certain apparatus akin to the apparatus
used by Mr. Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering some method
of communication with Mars, was receiving day by day a curiously
fragmentary message in English, which was indisputably emanating from
Mr. Cavor in the moon.
At first I thought the thing was an elaborate practical joke by some
one who had seen the manuscript of my narrative. I answered Mr.
Wendigee jestingly, but he replied in a manner that put such suspicion
altogether aside, and in a state of inconceivable excitement I hurried
from Algiers to the little observatory upon the St. Gothard in which
he was working. In the presence of his record and his appliances--and
above all of the messages from Cavor that were coming to hand--my
lingering doubts vanished. I decided at once to accept a proposal he
made me to remain with him, assisting him to take down the record from
day to day, and endeavouring with him to send a message back to the
moon. Cavor, we learnt, was not only alive but free, in the midst of an
almost inconceivable community of these ant-like beings, these ant-men,
in the blue darkness of the lunar caves. He was lamed, it seemed, but
otherwise in quite good health--in better health, he distinctly said,
than he usually enjoyed on earth. He had had a fever, but it had left
no bad effects. But curiously enough he seemed to be labouring under
a conviction that I was either dead in the moon crater or lost in the
deep of space.
His message began to be received by Mr. Wendigee when that gentleman
was engaged in quite a different investigation. The reader will no
doubt recall the little excitement that began the century, arising
out of an announcement by Mr. Nikola Tesla, the American electrical
celebrity, that he had received a message from Mars. His announcement
renewed attention to a fact that had long been familiar to scientific
people, namely: that from some unknown source in space, waves of
electro-magnetic disturbance, entirely similar to those used by Signor
Marconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the earth.
Besides Mr. Tesla quite a number of other observers have been engaged
in perfecting apparatus for receiving and recording these vibrations,
though few would go so far as to consider them actual messages from
some extra-terrestrial sender. Among that few, however, we must
certainly count Mr. Wendigee. Ever since 1898 he had devoted himself
almost entirely to this subject, and being a man of ample means he had
erected an observatory on the flanks of Monte Rosa, in a position
singularly adapted in every way for such observations.
My scientific attainments, I must admit, are not great, but so far as
they enable me to judge, Mr. Wendigee’s contrivances for detecting and
recording any disturbances in the electro-magnetic conditions of space
are singularly original and ingenious. And by a happy combination of
circumstances they were set up and in operation about two months before
Cavor made his first attempt to call up the earth. Consequently we have
fragments of his communication even from the beginning. Unhappily,
they are only fragments, and the most momentous of all the things that
he had to tell humanity--the instructions, that is, for the making
of Cavorite, if, indeed, he ever transmitted them--have throbbed
themselves away unrecorded into space. We never succeeded in getting a
response back to Cavor. He was unable to tell, therefore, what we had
received or what we had missed; nor, indeed, did he certainly know that
any one on earth was really aware of his efforts to reach us. And the
persistence he displayed in sending eighteen long descriptions of lunar
affairs--as they would be if we had them complete--shows how much his
mind must have turned back towards his native planet since he left it
two years ago.
You can imagine how amazed Mr. Wendigee must have been when he
discovered his record of electro-magnetic disturbances interlaced by
Cavor’s straightforward English. Mr. Wendigee knew nothing of our wild
journey moonward, and suddenly--this English out of the void!
It is well the reader should understand the conditions under which it
would seem these messages were sent. Somewhere within the moon Cavor
certainly had access for a time to a considerable amount of electrical
apparatus, and it would seem he rigged up--perhaps furtively--a
transmitting arrangement of the Marconi type. This he was able to
operate at irregular intervals: sometimes for only half-an-hour or
so, sometimes for three or four hours at a stretch. At these times he
transmitted his earthward message, regardless of the fact that the
relative position of the moon and points upon the earth’s surface is
constantly altering. As a consequence of this and of the necessary
imperfections of our recording instruments his communication comes and
goes in our records in an extremely fitful manner; it becomes blurred;
it “fades out” in a mysterious and altogether exasperating way. And
added to this is the fact that he was not an expert operator; he had
partly forgotten, or never completely mastered, the code in general
use, and as he became fatigued he dropped words and misspelt in a
curious manner.
Altogether we have probably lost quite half of the communications
he made, and much we have is damaged, broken, and partly effaced.
In the abstract that follows the reader must be prepared therefore
for a considerable amount of break, hiatus, and change of topic. Mr.
Wendigee and I are collaborating in a complete and annotated edition of
the Cavor record, which we hope to publish, together with a detailed
account of the instruments employed, beginning with the first volume
in January next. That will be the full and scientific report, of which
this is only the popular first transcript. But here we give at least
sufficient to complete the story I have told, and to give the broad
outlines of the state of that other world so near, so akin, and yet so
dissimilar to our own.