I fought stiffly with it. I was on the manhole lip, a stupefied,
half-dead being. The snow was all about me. I pulled myself in. There
lurked within a little warmer air.
The snowflakes—the airflakes—danced in about me, as I tried with
chilling hands to thrust the valve in and spun it tight and hard. I
sobbed. “I will,” I chattered in my teeth. And then, with fingers that
quivered and felt brittle, I turned to the shutter studs.
As I fumbled with the switches—for I had never controlled them before—I
could see dimly through the steaming glass the blazing red streamers of
the sinking sun, dancing and flickering through the snowstorm, and the
black forms of the scrub thickening and bending and breaking beneath
the accumulating snow. Thicker whirled the snow and thicker, black
against the light. What if even now the switches overcame me? Then
something clicked under my hands, and in an instant that last vision of
the moon world was hidden from my eyes. I was in the silence and
darkness of the inter-planetary sphere.
XX.
Mr. Bedford in Infinite Space
It was almost as though I had been killed. Indeed, I could imagine a
man suddenly and violently killed would feel very much as I did. One
moment, a passion of agonising existence and fear; the next, darkness
and stillness, neither light nor life nor sun, moon nor stars, the
blank infinite. Although the thing was done by my own act, although I
had already tasted this very of effect in Cavor’s company, I felt
astonished, dumbfounded, and overwhelmed. I seemed to be borne upward
into an enormous darkness. My fingers floated off the studs, I hung as
if I were annihilated, and at last very softly and gently I came
against the bale and the golden chain, and the crowbars that had
drifted to the middle of the sphere.
I do not know how long that drifting took. In the sphere of course,
even more than on the moon, one’s earthly time sense was ineffectual.
At the touch of the bale it was as if I had awakened from a dreamless
sleep. I immediately perceived that if I wanted to keep awake and alive
I must get a light or open a window, so as to get a grip of something
with my eyes. And besides, I was cold. I kicked off from the bale,
therefore, clawed on to the thin cords within the glass, crawled along
until I got to the manhole rim, and so got my bearings for the light
and blind studs, took a shove off, and flying once round the bale, and
getting a scare from something big and flimsy that was drifting loose,
I got my hand on the cord quite close to the studs, and reached them. I
lit the little lamp first of all to see what it was I had collided
with, and discovered that old copy of _Lloyd’s News_ had slipped its
moorings, and was adrift in the void. That brought me out of the
infinite to my own proper dimensions again. It made me laugh and pant
for a time, and suggested the idea of a little oxygen from one of the
cylinders. After that I lit the heater until I felt warm, and then I
took food. Then I set to work in a very gingerly fashion on the
Cavorite blinds, to see if I could guess by any means how the sphere
was travelling.
The first blind I opened I shut at once, and hung for a time flattened
and blinded by the sunlight that had hit me. After thinking a little I
started upon the windows at right angles to this one, and got the huge
crescent moon and the little crescent earth behind it, the second time.
I was amazed to find how far I was from the moon. I had reckoned that
not only should I have little or none of the “kick-off” that the
earth’s atmosphere had given us at our start, but that the tangential
“fly off” of the moon’s spin would be at least twenty-eight times less
than the earth’s. I had expected to discover myself hanging over our
crater, and on the edge of the night, but all that was now only a part
of the outline of the white crescent that filled the sky. And Cavor—?
He was already infinitesimal.
I tried to imagine what could have happened to him. But at that time I
could think of nothing but death. I seemed to see him, bent and smashed
at the foot of some interminably high cascade of blue. And all about
him the stupid insects stared...
Under the inspiring touch of the drifting newspaper I became practical
again for a while. It was quite clear to me that what I had to do was
to get back to earth, but as far as I could see I was drifting away
from it. Whatever had happened to Cavor, even if he was still alive,
which seemed to me incredible after that blood-stained scrap, I was
powerless to help him. There he was, living or dead behind the mantle
of that rayless night, and there he must remain at least until I could
summon our fellow men to his assistance. Should I do that? Something of
the sort I had in my mind; to come back to earth if it were possible,
and then as maturer consideration might determine, either to show and
explain the sphere to a few discreet persons, and act with them, or
else to keep my secret, sell my gold, obtain weapons, provisions, and
an assistant, and return with these advantages to deal on equal terms
with the flimsy people of the moon, to rescue Cavor, if that were still
possible, and at any rate to procure a sufficient supply of gold to
place my subsequent proceedings on a firmer basis. But that was hoping
far; I had first to get back.
I set myself to decide just exactly how the return to earth could be
contrived. As I struggled with that problem I ceased to worry about
what I should do when I got there. At last my only care was to get
back.
I puzzled out at last that my best chance would be to drop back towards
the moon as near as I dared in order to gather velocity, then to shut
my windows, and fly behind it, and when I was past to open my earthward
windows, and so get off at a good pace homeward. But whether I should
ever reach the earth by that device, or whether I might not simply find
myself spinning about it in some hyperbolic or parabolic curve or
other, I could not tell. Later I had a happy inspiration, and by
opening certain windows to the moon, which had appeared in the sky in
front of the earth, I turned my course aside so as to head off the
earth, which it had become evident to me I must pass behind without
some such expedient. I did a very great deal of complicated thinking
over these problems—for I am no mathematician—and in the end I am
certain it was much more my good luck than my reasoning that enabled me
to hit the earth. Had I known then, as I know now, the mathematical
chances there were against me, I doubt if I should have troubled even
to touch the studs to make any attempt. And having puzzled out what I
considered to be the thing to do, I opened all my moonward windows, and
squatted down—the effort lifted me for a time some feet or so into the
air, and I hung there in the oddest way—and waited for the crescent to
get bigger and bigger until I felt I was near enough for safety. Then I
would shut the windows, fly past the moon with the velocity I had got
from it—if I did not smash upon it—and so go on towards the earth.
And that is what I did.
At last I felt my moonward start was sufficient. I shut out the sight
of the moon from my eyes, and in a state of mind that was, I now
recall, incredibly free from anxiety or any distressful quality, I sat
down to begin a vigil in that little speck of matter in infinite space
that would last until I should strike the earth. The heater had made
the sphere tolerably warm, the air had been refreshed by the oxygen,
and except for that faint congestion of the head that was always with
me while I was away from earth, I felt entire physical comfort. I had
extinguished the light again, lest it should fail me in the end; I was
in darkness, save for the earthshine and the glitter of the stars below
me. Everything was so absolutely silent and still that I might indeed
have been the only being in the universe, and yet, strangely enough, I
had no more feeling of loneliness or fear than if I had been lying in
bed on earth. Now, this seems all the stranger to me, since during my
last hours in that crater of the moon, the sense of my utter loneliness
had been an agony....
Incredible as it will seem, this interval of time that I spent in space
has no sort of proportion to any other interval of time in my life.
Sometimes it seemed as though I sat through immeasurable eternities
like some god upon a lotus leaf, and again as though there was a
momentary pause as I leapt from moon to earth. In truth, it was
altogether some weeks of earthly time. But I had done with care and
anxiety, hunger or fear, for that space. I floated, thinking with a
strange breadth and freedom of all that we had undergone, and of all my
life and motives, and the secret issues of my being. I seemed to myself
to have grown greater and greater, to have lost all sense of movement;
to be floating amidst the stars, and always the sense of earth’s
littleness and the infinite littleness of my life upon it, was implicit
in my thoughts.
I can’t profess to explain the things that happened in my mind. No
doubt they could all be traced directly or indirectly to the curious
physical conditions under which I was living. I set them down here just
for what they are worth, and without any comment. The most prominent
quality of it was a pervading doubt of my own identity. I became, if I
may so express it, dissociate from Bedford; I looked down on Bedford as
a trivial, incidental thing with which I chanced to be connected. I saw
Bedford in many relations—as an ass or as a poor beast, where I had
hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a very
spirited or rather forcible person. I saw him not only as an ass, but
as the son of many generations of asses. I reviewed his school-days and
his early manhood, and his first encounter with love, very much as one
might review the proceedings of an ant in the sand. Something of that
period of lucidity I regret still hangs about me, and I doubt if I
shall ever recover the full-bodied self satisfaction of my early days.
But at the time the thing was not in the least painful, because I had
that extraordinary persuasion that, as a matter of fact, I was no more
Bedford than I was any one else, but only a mind floating in the still
serenity of space. Why should I be disturbed about this Bedford’s
shortcomings? I was not responsible for him or them.
For a time I struggled against this really very grotesque delusion. I
tried to summon the memory of vivid moments, of tender or intense
emotions to my assistance; I felt that if I could recall one genuine
twinge of feeling the growing severance would be stopped. But I could
not do it. I saw Bedford rushing down Chancery Lane, hat on the back of
his head, coat tails flying out, _en route_ for his public examination.
I saw him dodging and bumping against, and even saluting, other similar
little creatures in that swarming gutter of people. Me? I saw Bedford
that same evening in the sitting-room of a certain lady, and his hat
was on the table beside him, and it wanted brushing badly, and he was
in tears. Me? I saw him with that lady in various attitudes and
emotions—I never felt so detached before.... I saw him hurrying off to
Lympne to write a play, and accosting Cavor, and in his shirt sleeves
working at the sphere, and walking out to Canterbury because he was
afraid to come! Me? I did not believe it.
I still reasoned that all this was hallucination due to my solitude,
and the fact that I had lost all weight and sense of resistance. I
endeavoured to recover that sense by banging myself about the sphere,
by pinching my hands and clasping them together. Among other things, I
lit the light, captured that torn copy of _Lloyd’s_, and read those
convincingly realistic advertisements about the Cutaway bicycle, and
the gentleman of private means, and the lady in distress who was
selling those “forks and spoons.” There was no doubt they existed
surely enough, and, said I, “This is your world, and you are Bedford,
and you are going back to live among things like that for all the rest
of your life.” But the doubts within me could still argue: “It is not
you that is reading, it is Bedford, but you are not Bedford, you know.
That’s just where the mistake comes in.”
“Confound it!” I cried; “and if I am not Bedford, what am I?”
But in that direction no light was forthcoming, though the strangest
fancies came drifting into my brain, queer remote suspicions, like
shadows seen from away. Do you know, I had a sort of idea that really I
was something quite outside not only the world, but all worlds, and out
of space and time, and that this poor Bedford was just a peephole
through which I looked at life? ...
Bedford! However I disavowed him, there I was most certainly bound up
with him, and I knew that wherever or whatever I might be, I must needs
feel the stress of his desires, and sympathise with all his joys and
sorrows until his life should end. And with the dying of Bedford—what
then? ...
Enough of this remarkable phase of my experiences! I tell it here
simply to show how one’s isolation and departure from this planet
touched not only the functions and feeling of every organ of the body,
but indeed also the very fabric of the mind, with strange and
unanticipated disturbances. All through the major portion of that vast
space journey I hung thinking of such immaterial things as these, hung
dissociated and apathetic, a cloudy megalomaniac, as it were, amidst
the stars and planets in the void of space; and not only the world to
which I was returning, but the blue-lit caverns of the Selenites, their
helmet faces, their gigantic and wonderful machines, and the fate of
Cavor, dragged helpless into that world, seemed infinitely minute and
altogether trivial things to me.
Until at last I began to feel the pull of the earth upon my being,
drawing me back again to the life that is real for men. And then,
indeed, it grew clearer and clearer to me that I was quite certainly
Bedford after all, and returning after amazing adventures to this world
of ours, and with a life that I was very likely to lose in this return.
I set myself to puzzle out the conditions under which I must fall to
earth.
XXI.
Mr. Bedford at Littlestone
My line of flight was about parallel with the surface as I came into
the upper air. The temperature of the sphere began to rise forthwith. I
knew it behoved me to drop at once. Far below me, in a darkling
twilight, stretched a great expanse of sea. I opened every window I
could, and fell—out of sunshine into evening, and out of evening into
night. Vaster grew the earth and vaster, swallowing up the stars, and
the silvery translucent starlit veil of cloud it wore spread out to
catch me. At last the world seemed no longer a sphere but flat, and
then concave. It was no longer a planet in the sky, but the world of
Man. I shut all but an inch or so of earthward window, and dropped with
a slackening velocity. The broadening water, now so near that I could
see the dark glitter of the waves, rushed up to meet me. The sphere
became very hot. I snapped the last strip of window, and sat scowling
and biting my knuckles, waiting for the impact....
The sphere hit the water with a huge splash: it must have sent it
fathoms high. At the splash I flung the Cavorite shutters open. Down I
went, but slower and slower, and then I felt the sphere pressing
against my feet, and so drove up again as a bubble drives. And at the
last I was floating and rocking upon the surface of the sea, and my
journey in space was at an end.
The night was dark and overcast. Two yellow pinpoints far away showed
the passing of a ship, and nearer was a red glare that came and went.
Had not the electricity of my glow-lamp exhausted itself, I could have
got picked up that night. In spite of the inordinate fatigue I was
beginning to feel, I was excited now, and for a time hopeful, in a
feverish, impatient way, that so my travelling might end.
But at last I ceased to move about, and sat, wrists on knees, staring
at a distant red light. It swayed up and down, rocking, rocking. My
excitement passed. I realised I had yet to spend another night at least
in the sphere. I perceived myself infinitely heavy and fatigued. And so
I fell asleep.
A change in my rhythmic motion awakened me. I peered through the
refracting glass, and saw that I had come aground upon a huge shallow
of sand. Far away I seemed to see houses and trees, and seaward a
curved, vague distortion of a ship hung between sea and sky.
I stood up and staggered. My one desire was to emerge. The manhole was
upward, and I wrestled with the screw. Slowly I opened the manhole. At
last the air was singing in again as once it had sung out. But this
time I did not wait until the pressure was adjusted. In another moment
I had the weight of the window on my hands, and I was open, wide open,
to the old familiar sky of earth.
The air hit me on the chest so that I gasped. I dropped the glass
screw. I cried out, put my hands to my chest, and sat down. For a time
I was in pain. Then I took deep breaths. At last I could rise and move
about again.
I tried to thrust my head through the manhole, and the sphere rolled
over. It was as though something had lugged my head down directly it
emerged. I ducked back sharply, or I should have been pinned face under
water. After some wriggling and shoving I managed to crawl out upon
sand, over which the retreating waves still came and went.
I did not attempt to stand up. It seemed to me that my body must be
suddenly changed to lead. Mother Earth had her grip on me now—no
Cavorite intervening. I sat down heedless of the water that came over
my feet.
It was dawn, a grey dawn, rather overcast but showing here and there a
long patch of greenish grey. Some way out a ship was lying at anchor, a
pale silhouette of a ship with one yellow light. The water came
rippling in in long shallow waves. Away to the right curved the land, a
shingle bank with little hovels, and at last a lighthouse, a sailing
mark and a point. Inland stretched a space of level sand, broken here
and there by pools of water, and ending a mile away perhaps in a low
shore of scrub. To the north-east some isolated watering-place was
visible, a row of gaunt lodging-houses, the tallest things that I could
see on earth, dull dabs against the brightening sky. What strange men
can have reared these vertical piles in such an amplitude of space I do
not know. There they are, like pieces of Brighton lost in the waste.
For a long time I sat there, yawning and rubbing my face. At last I
struggled to rise. It made me feel that I was lifting a weight. I stood
up.
I stared at the distant houses. For the first time since our starvation
in the crater I thought of earthly food. “Bacon,” I whispered, “eggs.
Good toast and good coffee.... And how the devil am I going to get all
this stuff to Lympne?” I wondered where I was. It was an east shore
anyhow, and I had seen Europe before I dropped.
I heard footsteps crunching in the sand, and a little round-faced,
friendly-looking man in flannels, with a bathing towel wrapped about
his shoulders, and his bathing dress over his arm, appeared up the
beach. I knew instantly that I must be in England. He was staring most
intently at the sphere and me. He advanced staring. I dare say I looked
a ferocious savage enough—dirty, unkempt, to an indescribable degree;
but it did not occur to me at the time. He stopped at a distance of
twenty yards. “Hul-lo, my man!” he said doubtfully.
“Hullo yourself!” said I.
He advanced, reassured by that. “What on earth is that thing?” he
asked.
“Can you tell me where I am?” I asked.
“That’s Littlestone,” he said, pointing to the houses; “and that’s
Dungeness! Have you just landed? What’s that thing you’ve got? Some
sort of machine?”
“Yes.”
“Have you floated ashore? Have you been wrecked or something? What is
it?”
I meditated swiftly. I made an estimate of the little man’s appearance
as he drew nearer. “By Jove!” he said, “you’ve had a time of it! I
thought you— Well— Where were you cast away? Is that thing a sort of
floating thing for saving life?”
I decided to take that line for the present. I made a few vague
affirmatives. “I want help,” I said hoarsely. “I want to get some stuff
up the beach—stuff I can’t very well leave about.” I became aware of
three other pleasant-looking young men with towels, blazers, and straw
hats, coming down the sands towards me. Evidently the early bathing
section of this Littlestone.
“Help!” said the young man: “rather!” He became vaguely active. “What
particularly do you want done?” He turned round and gesticulated. The
three young men accelerated their pace. In a minute they were about me,
plying me with questions I was indisposed to answer. “I’ll tell all
that later,” I said. “I’m dead beat. I’m a rag.”
“Come up to the hotel,” said the foremost little man. “We’ll look after
that thing there.”
I hesitated. “I can’t,” I said. “In that sphere there’s two big bars of
gold.”
They looked incredulously at one another, then at me with a new
inquiry. I went to the sphere, stooped, crept in, and presently they
had the Selenites’ crowbars and the broken chain before them. If I had
not been so horribly fagged I could have laughed at them. It was like
kittens round a beetle. They didn’t know what to do with the stuff. The
fat little man stooped and lifted the end of one of the bars, and then
dropped it with a grunt. Then they all did.
“It’s lead, or gold!” said one.
“Oh, it’s _gold!_” said another.
“Gold, right enough,” said the third.
Then they all stared at me, and then they all stared at the ship lying
at anchor.
“I say!” cried the little man. “But where did you get that?”