“The air is denser. We must be some depths—a mile even, we may
be—inside the moon.”
“We never thought of a world inside the moon.”
“No.”
“How could we?”
“We might have done. Only one gets into habits of mind.”
He thought for a time.
“_Now_,” he said, “it seems such an obvious thing.”
“Of course! The moon must be enormously cavernous, with an atmosphere
within, and at the centre of its caverns a sea.
“One knew that the moon had a lower specific gravity than the earth,
one knew that it had little air or water outside, one knew, too, that
it was sister planet to the earth, and that it was unaccountable that
it should be different in composition. The inference that it was
hollowed out was as clear as day. And yet one never saw it as a fact.
Kepler, of course—”
His voice had the interest now of a man who has discerned a pretty
sequence of reasoning.
“Yes,” he said, “Kepler with his _sub-volvani_ was right after all.”
“I wish you had taken the trouble to find that out before we came,” I
said.
He answered nothing, buzzing to himself softly, as he pursued his
thoughts. My temper was going.
“What do you think has become of the sphere, anyhow?” I asked.
“Lost,” he said, like a man who answers an uninteresting question.
“Among those plants?”
“Unless they find it.”
“And then?”
“How can I tell?”
“Cavor,” I said, with a sort of hysterical bitterness, “things look
bright for my Company...”
He made no answer.
“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “Just think of all the trouble we took to get
into this pickle! What did we come for? What are we after? What was the
moon to us or we to the moon? We wanted too much, we tried too much. We
ought to have started the little things first. It was you proposed the
moon! Those Cavorite spring blinds! I am certain we could have worked
them for terrestrial purposes. Certain! Did you really understand what
I proposed? A steel cylinder—”
“Rubbish!” said Cavor.
We ceased to converse.
For a time Cavor kept up a broken monologue without much help from me.
“If they find it,” he began, “if they find it ... what will they do
with it? Well, that’s a question. It may be that’s _the_ question. They
won’t understand it, anyhow. If they understood that sort of thing they
would have come long since to the earth. Would they? Why shouldn’t
they? But they would have sent something—they couldn’t keep their hands
off such a possibility. No! But they will examine it. Clearly they are
intelligent and inquisitive. They will examine it—get inside it—trifle
with the studs. Off! ... That would mean the moon for us for all the
rest of our lives. Strange creatures, strange knowledge....”
“As for strange knowledge—” said I, and language failed me.
“Look here, Bedford,” said Cavor, “you came on this expedition of your
own free will.”
“You said to me, ‘Call it prospecting’.”
“There’s always risks in prospecting.”
“Especially when you do it unarmed and without thinking out every
possibility.”
“I was so taken up with the sphere. The thing rushed on us, and carried
us away.”
“Rushed on _me_, you mean.”
“Rushed on me just as much. How was I to know when I set to work on
molecular physics that the business would bring me here—of all places?”
“It’s this accursed science,” I cried. “It’s the very Devil. The
mediæval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all
wrong. You tamper with it—and it offers you gifts. And directly you
take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions
and new weapons—now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social
ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!”
“Anyhow, it’s no use your quarrelling with me _now_. These
creatures—these Selenites, or whatever we choose to call them—have got
us tied hand and foot. Whatever temper you choose to go through with it
in, you will have to go through with it.... We have experiences before
us that will need all our coolness.”
He paused as if he required my assent. But I sat sulking. “Confound
your science!” I said.
“The problem is communication. Gestures, I fear, will be different.
Pointing, for example. No creatures but men and monkeys point.”
That was too obviously wrong for me. “Pretty nearly every animal,” I
cried, “points with its eyes or nose.”
Cavor meditated over that. “Yes,” he said at last, “and we don’t.
There’s such differences—such differences!”
“One might.... But how can I tell? There is speech. The sounds they
make, a sort of fluting and piping. I don’t see how we are to imitate
that. Is it their speech, that sort of thing? They may have different
senses, different means of communication. Of course they are minds and
we are minds; there must be something in common. Who knows how far we
may not get to an understanding?”
“The things are outside us,” I said. “They’re more different from us
than the strangest animals on earth. They are a different clay. What is
the good of talking like this?”
Cavor thought. “I don’t see that. Where there are minds they will have
something _similar_—even though they have been evolved on different
planets. Of course if it was a question of instincts, if we or they are
no more than animals—”
“Well, _are_ they? They’re much more like ants on their hind legs than
human beings, and who ever got to any sort of understanding with ants?”
“But these machines and clothing! No, I don’t hold with you, Bedford.
The difference is wide—”
“It’s insurmountable.”
“The resemblance must bridge it. I remember reading once a paper by the
late Professor Galton on the possibility of communication between the
planets. Unhappily, at that time it did not seem probable that that
would be of any material benefit to me, and I fear I did not give it
the attention I should have done—in view of this state of affairs.
Yet.... Now, let me see!
“His idea was to begin with those broad truths that must underlie all
conceivable mental existences and establish a basis on those. The great
principles of geometry, to begin with. He proposed to take some leading
proposition of Euclid’s, and show by construction that its truth was
known to us, to demonstrate, for example, that the angles at the base
of an isosceles triangle are equal, and that if the equal sides be
produced the angles on the other side of the base are equal also, or
that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal
to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstrating our
knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possession of a
reasonable intelligence.... Now, suppose I ... I might draw the
geometrical figure with a wet finger, or even trace it in the air....”
He fell silent. I sat meditating his words. For a time his wild hope of
communication, of interpretation, with these weird beings held me. Then
that angry despair that was a part of my exhaustion and physical misery
resumed its sway. I perceived with a sudden novel vividness the
extraordinary folly of everything I had ever done. “Ass!” I said; “oh,
ass, unutterable ass.... I seem to exist only to go about doing
preposterous things. Why did we ever leave the thing? ... Hopping about
looking for patents and concessions in the craters of the moon!... If
only we had had the sense to fasten a handkerchief to a stick to show
where we had left the sphere!”