The First Men in the Moon Read online

  XXII THE ASTONISHING COMMUNICATION OF MR. JULIUS WENDIGEE

  When I had finished my account of my return to the earth at LittlestoneI wrote, “The End,” made a flourish, and threw my pen aside, fullybelieving 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 handsof a literary agent, had permitted it to be sold, had seen the greaterportion of it appear in the _Strand Magazine_, and was setting to workagain upon the scenario of the play I had commenced at Lympne before Irealised that the end was not yet. And then, following me from Amalfito Algiers, there reached me (it is now about six months ago) one ofthe 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 apparatusused by Mr. Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering some methodof communication with Mars, was receiving day by day a curiouslyfragmentary message in English, which was indisputably emanating fromMr. Cavor in the moon.

  At first I thought the thing was an elaborate practical joke by someone who had seen the manuscript of my narrative. I answered Mr.Wendigee jestingly, but he replied in a manner that put such suspicionaltogether aside, and in a state of inconceivable excitement I hurriedfrom Algiers to the little observatory upon the St. Gothard in whichhe was working. In the presence of his record and his appliances--andabove all of the messages from Cavor that were coming to hand--mylingering doubts vanished. I decided at once to accept a proposal hemade me to remain with him, assisting him to take down the record fromday to day, and endeavouring with him to send a message back to themoon. Cavor, we learnt, was not only alive but free, in the midst of analmost inconceivable community of these ant-like beings, these ant-men,in the blue darkness of the lunar caves. He was lamed, it seemed, butotherwise in quite good health--in better health, he distinctly said,than he usually enjoyed on earth. He had had a fever, but it had leftno bad effects. But curiously enough he seemed to be labouring undera conviction that I was either dead in the moon crater or lost in thedeep of space.

  His message began to be received by Mr. Wendigee when that gentlemanwas engaged in quite a different investigation. The reader will nodoubt recall the little excitement that began the century, arisingout of an announcement by Mr. Nikola Tesla, the American electricalcelebrity, that he had received a message from Mars. His announcementrenewed attention to a fact that had long been familiar to scientificpeople, namely: that from some unknown source in space, waves ofelectro-magnetic disturbance, entirely similar to those used by SignorMarconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the earth.Besides Mr. Tesla quite a number of other observers have been engagedin perfecting apparatus for receiving and recording these vibrations,though few would go so far as to consider them actual messages fromsome extra-terrestrial sender. Among that few, however, we mustcertainly count Mr. Wendigee. Ever since 1898 he had devoted himselfalmost entirely to this subject, and being a man of ample means he haderected an observatory on the flanks of Monte Rosa, in a positionsingularly adapted in every way for such observations.

  My scientific attainments, I must admit, are not great, but so far asthey enable me to judge, Mr. Wendigee’s contrivances for detecting andrecording any disturbances in the electro-magnetic conditions of spaceare singularly original and ingenious. And by a happy combination ofcircumstances they were set up and in operation about two months beforeCavor made his first attempt to call up the earth. Consequently we havefragments of his communication even from the beginning. Unhappily,they are only fragments, and the most momentous of all the things thathe had to tell humanity--the instructions, that is, for the makingof Cavorite, if, indeed, he ever transmitted them--have throbbedthemselves away unrecorded into space. We never succeeded in getting aresponse back to Cavor. He was unable to tell, therefore, what we hadreceived or what we had missed; nor, indeed, did he certainly know thatany one on earth was really aware of his efforts to reach us. And thepersistence he displayed in sending eighteen long descriptions of lunaraffairs--as they would be if we had them complete--shows how much hismind must have turned back towards his native planet since he left ittwo years ago.

  You can imagine how amazed Mr. Wendigee must have been when hediscovered his record of electro-magnetic disturbances interlaced byCavor’s straightforward English. Mr. Wendigee knew nothing of our wildjourney moonward, and suddenly--this English out of the void!

  It is well the reader should understand the conditions under which itwould seem these messages were sent. Somewhere within the moon Cavorcertainly had access for a time to a considerable amount of electricalapparatus, and it would seem he rigged up--perhaps furtively--atransmitting arrangement of the Marconi type. This he was able tooperate at irregular intervals: sometimes for only half-an-hour orso, sometimes for three or four hours at a stretch. At these times hetransmitted his earthward message, regardless of the fact that therelative position of the moon and points upon the earth’s surface isconstantly altering. As a consequence of this and of the necessaryimperfections of our recording instruments his communication comes andgoes in our records in an extremely fitful manner; it becomes blurred;it “fades out” in a mysterious and altogether exasperating way. Andadded to this is the fact that he was not an expert operator; he hadpartly forgotten, or never completely mastered, the code in generaluse, and as he became fatigued he dropped words and misspelt in acurious manner.

  Altogether we have probably lost quite half of the communicationshe made, and much we have is damaged, broken, and partly effaced.In the abstract that follows the reader must be prepared thereforefor a considerable amount of break, hiatus, and change of topic. Mr.Wendigee and I are collaborating in a complete and annotated edition ofthe Cavor record, which we hope to publish, together with a detailedaccount of the instruments employed, beginning with the first volumein January next. That will be the full and scientific report, of whichthis is only the popular first transcript. But here we give at leastsufficient to complete the story I have told, and to give the broadoutlines of the state of that other world so near, so akin, and yet sodissimilar to our own.