The First Men in the Moon Read online

  XVI POINTS OF VIEW

  The light grew stronger as we advanced. In a little time it was nearlyas strong as the phosphorescence on Cavor’s legs. Our tunnel wasexpanding into a cavern, and this new light was at the farther end ofit. I perceived something that set my hopes leaping and bounding.

  “Cavor,” I said, “it comes from above! I am certain it comes fromabove!”

  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 chinkin the walls of the cavern, and as I stared up, drip, came a drop ofwater upon my face. I started and stood aside--drip, fell another dropquite audibly on the rocky floor.

  “Cavor,” I said, “if one of us lifts the other, he can reach thatcrack!”

  “I’ll lift you,” he said, and incontinently hoisted me as though I wasa baby.

  I thrust an arm into the crack, and just at my finger tips found alittle ledge by which I could hold. I could see the white light wasvery much brighter now. I pulled myself up by two fingers with scarcelyan effort, though on earth I weigh twelve stone, reached to a stillhigher corner of rock, and so got my feet on the narrow ledge. I stoodup and searched up the rocks with my fingers; the cleft broadened outupwardly. “It’s climbable,” I said to Cavor. “Can you jump up to myhand if I hold it down to you?”

  I wedged myself between the sides of the cleft, rested knee and foot onthe ledge, and extended a hand. I could not see Cavor, but I could hearthe rustle of his movements as he crouched to spring. Then whack and hewas hanging to my arm--and no heavier than a kitten! I lugged him upuntil 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 Iclambered steadily, and then I looked up again. The cleft opened outsteadily, 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 couldhave beaten my head against the rocks with disappointment. For Ibeheld simply an irregularly sloping open space, and all over itsslanting floor stood a forest of little club-shaped fungi, each shininggloriously with that pinkish silvery light. For a moment I stared attheir soft radiance, then sprang forward and upward among them. Iplucked up half-a-dozen and flung them against the rocks, and then satdown, laughing bitterly, as Cavor’s ruddy face came into view.

  “It’s phosphorescence again!” I said. “No need to hurry. Sit down andmake yourself at home.” And as he spluttered over our disappointment, Ibegan 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! Shallwe 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 Italianpicture. “The sky that changes, and the sea that changes, and the hillsand the green trees and the towns and cities shining in the sun. Thinkof a wet roof at sunset, Cavor! Think of the windows of a westwardhouse!”

  He made no answer.

  “Here we are burrowing in this beastly world that isn’t a world, withits inky ocean hidden in some abominable blackness below, and outsidethat torrid day and that death stillness of night. And all those thingsthat are chasing us now, beastly men of leather--insect men, that comeout of a nightmare! After all, they’re right! What business have wehere smashing them and disturbing their world? For all we know thewhole planet is up and after us already. In a minute we may hear themwhimpering, and their gongs going. What are we to do? Where are we togo? Here we are as comfortable as snakes from Jamrach’s loose in aSurbiton 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 somethingthat struck me even then.

  “Cavor,” I said, “these chains are of gold!”

  He was thinking intently, with his hands gripping his cheeks. He turnedhis head slowly and stared at me, and when I had repeated my words, atthe twisted chain about his right hand. “So they are,” he said, “sothey are.” His face lost its transitory interest even as he looked. Hehesitated for a moment, then went on with his interrupted meditation.I sat for a space puzzling over the fact that I had only just observedthis, until I considered the blue light in which we had been, and whichhad taken all the colour out of the metal. And from that discovery Ialso started upon a train of thought that carried me wide and far. Iforgot 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 twocourses open to us.”

  “Well?”

  “Either we can attempt to make our way--fight our way ifnecessary--out to the exterior again, and then hunt for our sphereuntil we find it, or the cold of the night comes to kill us, orelse----”

  He paused. “Yes?” I said, though I knew what was coming.

  “We might attempt once more to establish some sort of understandingwith 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 bywhat we have seen of them. Their central world, their civilised worldwill be far below in the profounder caverns about their sea. Thisregion of the crust in which we are is an outlying district, a pastoralregion. At any rate, that is my interpretation. These Selenites wehave seen may be only the equivalent of cowboys and engine tenders.Their use of goads--in all probability mooncalf goads--the lack ofimagination they show in expecting us to be able to do just what theycan do, their indisputable brutality, all seem to point to something ofthat sort. But if we endured----”

  “Neither of us could endure a six-inch plank across the bottomless pitfor very long.”

  “No,” said Cavor; “but then----”

  “I _won’t_,” I said.

  He discovered a new line of possibilities. “Well, suppose we gotourselves into some corner, where we could defend ourselves againstthese hinds and labourers. If, for example, we could hold out for aweek or so, it is probable that the news of our appearance would filterdown 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 youdon’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 exceptionalman.”

  “How?”

  “Well, you--you’re a rather lonely man--have been, that is. You haven’tmarried.”

  “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 certai
n 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 allthese researches, you said you wanted your F.R.S., and to have thestuff called Cavorite, and things like that. You know perfectly wellyou didn’t do it for that; but at the time my question took you bysurprise, and you felt you ought to have something to look like amotive. Really you conducted researches because you _had_ to. It’s yourtwist.”

  “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 adriving, busy sort of being, but how do you know that even the mostintelligent will take an interest in us or our world? I don’t believethey’ll even know we have a world. They never come out at night--they’dfreeze if they did. They’ve probably never seen any heavenly body atall except the blazing sun. How are they to know there _is_ anotherworld? 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 toobserve that sort of thing? Men wouldn’t have done it except for theseasons and sailing; why should the moon people?...

  “Well, suppose there are a few philosophers like yourself. They arejust the very Selenites who’ll never hear of our existence. Suppose aSelenite had dropped on the earth when you were at Lympne, you’d havebeen the last man in the world to hear he had come. You never reada newspaper! You see the chances against you. Well, it’s for thesechances 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 oursphere, we’ve got no food, we’ve shown ourselves to the Selenites,and made them think we’re strange, strong, dangerous animals; andunless these Selenites are perfect fools, they’ll set about now andhunt us till they find us, and when they find us they’ll try and takeus if they can, and kill us if they can’t, and that’s the end ofthe matter. If they take us, they’ll probably kill us, through somemisunderstanding. 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 sphereagain before they do, and get back, then----”

  “Yes?”

  “We might put the thing on a sounder footing. Come back in a biggersphere with guns.”

  “Good Lord!” cried Cavor, as though that was horrible.

  I shied another luminous fungus down the cleft.

  “Look here, Cavor,” I said, “I’ve half the voting power anyhow in thisaffair, and this is a case for a practical man. I’m a practical man,and you are not. I’m not going to trust to Selenites and geometricaldiagrams again, if I can help it.... That’s all. Get back. Drop allthis secrecy--or most of it. And come again.”

  He reflected. “When I came to the moon,” he said, “I ought to have comealone.”

  “The question before the meeting,” I said, “is how to get back to thesphere.”

  For a time we nursed our knees in silence. Then he seemed to decide formy reasons.

  “I think,” he said, “one can get data. It is clear that while thesun is on this side of the moon the air will be blowing through thisplanet sponge from the dark side hither. On this side, at any rate,the air will be expanding and flowing out of the moon caverns into thecraters.... Very well, there’s a draught here.”

  “So there is.”

  “And that means that this is not a dead end; somewhere behind us thiscleft goes on and up. The draught is blowing up, and that is the way wehave to go. If we try and get up any sort of chimney or gully there is,we shall not only get out of these passages where they are hunting forus----”

  “But suppose the gully is too narrow?”

  “We’ll come down again.”

  “Ssh!” I said suddenly; “what’s that?”

  We listened. At first it was an indistinct murmur, and then one pickedout the clang of a gong. “They must think we are mooncalves,” said I,“to be frightened at that.”

  “They’re coming along that passage,” said Cavor.

  “They must be.”

  “They’ll not think of the cleft. They’ll go past.”

  I listened again for a space. “This time,” I whispered, “they’re likelyto have some sort of weapon.”

  Then suddenly I sprang to my feet. “Good heavens, Cavor!” I cried.“But they _will_! They’ll see the fungi I have been pitching down.They’ll----!”

  I didn’t finish my sentence. I turned about and made a leap overthe fungus tops towards the upper end of the cavity. I saw that thespace turned upward and became a draughty cleft again, ascending toimpenetrable darkness. I was about to clamber up into this, and thenwith a happy inspiration turned back.

  “What are you doing?” asked Cavor.

  “Go on!” said I, and went back and got two of the shining fungi, andputting one into the breast pocket of my flannel jacket, so that itstuck out to light our climbing, went back with the other for Cavor.The noise of the Selenites was now so loud that it seemed they must bealready beneath the cleft. But it might be they would have difficultyin clambering into it, or might hesitate to ascend it against ourpossible resistance. At any rate, we had now the comforting knowledgeof the enormous muscular superiority our birth in another planet gaveus. In another minute I was clambering with gigantic vigour afterCavor’s blue-lit heels.