“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—”