The First Men in the Moon Read online

  III THE BUILDING OF THE SPHERE

  I remember the occasion very distinctly when Cavor told me of his ideaof the sphere. He had had intimations of it before, but at the time itseemed to come to him in a rush. We were returning to the bungalow fortea, and on the way he fell humming. Suddenly he shouted, “That’s it!That finishes it! A sort of roller blind!”

  “Finishes what?” I asked.

  “Space--anywhere! The moon!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mean? Why--it must be a sphere! That’s what I mean!”

  I saw I was out of it, and for a time I let him talk in his ownfashion. I hadn’t the ghost of an idea then of his drift. But after hehad taken tea he made it clear to me.

  “It’s like this,” he said. “Last time I ran this stuff that cuts thingsoff from gravitation into a flat tank with an overlap that held itdown. And directly it had cooled and the manufacture was completed allthat uproar happened, nothing above it weighed anything, the air wentsquirting up, the house squirted up, and if the stuff itself hadn’tsquirted up too, I don’t know what would have happened! But suppose thesubstance is loose, and quite free to go up?”

  “It will go up at once!”

  “Exactly. With no more disturbance than firing a big gun.”

  “But what good will that do?”

  “I’m going up with it!”

  I put down my teacup and stared at him.

  “Imagine a sphere,” he explained, “large enough to hold two peopleand their luggage. It will be made of steel lined with thick glass;it will contain a proper store of solidified air, concentrated food,water-distilling apparatus, and so forth. And enamelled, as it were, onthe outer steel----”

  “Cavorite?”

  “Yes.”

  “But how will you get inside?”

  “There was a similar problem about a dumpling.”

  “Yes, I know. But how?”

  “That’s perfectly easy. An air-tight manhole is all that is needed.That, of course, will have to be a little complicated; there will haveto be a valve, so that things may be thrown out, if necessary, withoutmuch loss of air.”

  “Like Jules Verne’s thing in ‘A Trip to the Moon’?”

  But Cavor was not a reader of fiction.

  “I begin to see,” I said slowly. “And you could get in and screwyourself up while the Cavorite was warm, and as soon as it cooled itwould become impervious to gravitation, and off you would fly----”

  “At a tangent.”

  “You would go off in a straight line--” I stopped abruptly. “What is toprevent the thing travelling in a straight line into space for ever?”I asked. “You’re not safe to get anywhere, and if you do--how will youget back?”

  “I’ve just thought of that,” said Cavor. “That’s what I meant when Isaid the thing is finished. The inner glass sphere can be air-tightand, except for the manhole, continuous, and the steel sphere can bemade in sections, each section capable of rolling up after the fashionof a roller blind. These can easily be worked by springs, and releasedand checked by electricity conveyed by platinum wires fused throughthe glass. All that is merely a question of detail. So you see, thatexcept for the thickness of the blind rollers, the Cavorite exteriorof the sphere will consist of windows or blinds, whichever you like tocall them. Well, when all these windows or blinds are shut, no light,no heat, no gravitation, no radiant energy of any sort will get at theinside of the sphere, it will fly on through space in a straight line,as you say. But open a window, imagine one of the windows open! Then atonce any heavy body that chances to be in that direction will attractus----”

  I sat taking it in.

  “You see?” he said.

  “Oh, I _see_.”

  “Practically we shall be able to tack about in space just as we wish.Get attracted by this and that.”

  “Oh yes. _That’s_ clear enough. Only----”

  “Well?”

  “I don’t quite see what we shall do it for! It’s really only jumpingoff the world and back again.”

  “Surely! For example, one might go to the moon.”

  “And when one got there! What would you find?”

  “We should see--Oh! consider the new knowledge.”

  “Is there air there?”

  “There may be.”

  “It’s a fine idea,” I said, “but it strikes me as a large order all thesame. The moon! I’d much rather try some smaller things first.”

  “They’re out of the question, because of the air difficulty.”

  “Why not apply that idea of spring blinds--Cavorite blinds in strongsteel cases--to lifting weights?”

  “It wouldn’t work,” he insisted. “After all, to go into outer space isnot so much worse, if at all, than a polar expedition. Men go on polarexpeditions.”

  “Not business men. And besides, they get paid for polar expeditions.And if anything goes wrong there are relief parties. But this--it’sjust firing ourselves off the world for nothing.”

  “Call it prospecting.”

  “You’ll have to call it that.... One might make a book of it perhaps,”I said.

  “I have no doubt there will be minerals,” said Cavor.

  “For example?”

  “Oh! sulphur, ores, gold perhaps, possibly new elements.”

  “Cost of carriage,” I said. “You know you’re _not_ a practical man. Themoon’s a quarter of a million miles away.”

  “It seems to me it wouldn’t cost much to cart any weight anywhere ifyou packed it in a Cavorite case.”

  I had not thought of that. “Delivered free on head of purchaser, eh?”

  “It isn’t as though we were confined to the moon.”

  “You mean----?”

  “There’s Mars--clear atmosphere, novel surroundings, exhilarating senseof 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 faris Mars?”

  “Two hundred million miles at present,” said Cavor airily; “and you goclose 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 Isaw, as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavoriteliners and spheres _de luxe_. “Rights of pre-emption,” came floatinginto my head--planetary rights of pre-emption. I recalled the oldSpanish monopoly in American gold. It wasn’t as though it was just thisplanet 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, Iwalked 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 anytime at all. “But this is tremendous!” I cried. “This is Imperial! Ihaven’t been dreaming of this sort of thing.”

  Once the chill of my opposition was removed, his own pent-up excitementhad play. He too got up and paced. He too gesticulated and shouted. Webehaved like men inspired. We _were_ men inspired.

  “We’ll settle all that!” he said in answer to some incidentaldifficulty that had pulled me up. “We’ll soon settle all that! We’llstart the drawings for mouldings this very night.”

  “We’ll start them now,” I responded, and we hurried off to thelaboratory to begin upon this work forthwith.

  I was like a child in Wonderland all that night. The dawn found us bothstill at work--we kept our electric light going heedless of the day. Iremember now exactly how those 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 blindsand frames we needed from that night’s work, and the glass sphere wasdesigned within a week. We gave up our afternoon conversations and ourold routine altogether. We worked, and we slept and ate when we couldwork no l
onger for hunger and fatigue. Our enthusiasm infected even ourthree men, though they had no idea what the sphere was for. Throughthose days the man Gibbs gave up walking, and went everywhere, evenacross the room, at a sort of fussy run.

  And it grew--the sphere. December passed, January--I spent a daywith a broom sweeping a path through the snow from bungalow tolaboratory--February, March. By the end of March the completion wasin 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 thecrane we had rigged to sling it into the steel shell. All the bars andblinds of the steel shell--it was not really a spherical shell, butpolyhedral, with a roller blind to each facet--had arrived by February,and the lower half was bolted together. The Cavorite was half made byMarch, the metallic paste had gone through two of the stages in itsmanufacture, and we had plastered quite half of it on to the steel barsand blinds. It was astonishing how closely we kept to the lines ofCavor’s first inspiration in working out the scheme. When the boltingtogether of the sphere was finished, he proposed to remove the roughroof of the temporary laboratory in which the work was done, and builda furnace about it. So the last stage of Cavorite making, in which thepaste is heated to a dull red glow in a stream of helium, would beaccomplished when it was already on the sphere.

  And then we had to discuss and decide what provisions we were totake--compressed foods, concentrated essences, steel cylinderscontaining reserve oxygen, an arrangement for removing carbonic acidand waste from the air and restoring oxygen by means of sodiumperoxide, water condensers, and so forth. I remember the little heapthey made in the corner--tins, and rolls, and boxes--convincinglymatter-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 hadbeen bricking up the furnace all the morning, and I sat down by thesepossessions 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 moonwas a dead world.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “What do you expect?”

  “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 timesbefore my business collapse, but the very worst of those was sweetslumber compared to this infinity of aching wakefulness. I was suddenlyin 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 wewere running. Now they came like that array of spectres that oncebeleaguered Prague, and camped around me. The strangeness of what wewere about to do, the unearthliness of it, overwhelmed me. I was like aman awakened out of pleasant dreams to the most horrible surroundings.I lay, eyes wide open, and the sphere seemed to get more flimsy andfeeble, and Cavor more unreal and fantastic, and the whole enterprisemadder and madder every moment.

  I got out of bed and wandered about. I sat at the window and staredat the immensity of space. Between the stars was the void, theunfathomable darkness! I tried to recall the fragmentary knowledge ofastronomy I had gained in my irregular reading, but it was all toovague to furnish any idea of the things we might expect. At last I gotback to bed and snatched some moments of sleep--moments of nightmarerather--in which I fell and fell and fell for evermore into the abyssof the sky.

  I astonished Cavor at breakfast. I told him shortly, “I’m not comingwith you in the sphere.”

  I met all his protests with a sullen persistence. “The thing’s toomad,” 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 bungalowfor a time, and then took hat and stick and set off alone, I knew notwhither. It chanced to be a glorious morning: a warm wind and deep bluesky, the first green of spring abroad, and multitudes of birds singing.I lunched on beef and beer in a little public-house near Elham, andstartled the landlord by remarking _apropos_ of the weather, “A man wholeaves 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 Ifound 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 mythoughts.

  In the afternoon I had a pleasant sleep in a sunny place, and went myway refreshed.

  I came to a comfortable-looking inn near Canterbury. It was brightwith creepers, and the landlady was a clean old woman and took myeye. 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, andamong 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 yourgad-about sort.”

  “How would you like a trip to the moon?” I cried.

  “I never did hold with them ballooneys,” she said, evidently under theimpression that this was a common excursion enough. “I wouldn’t go upin one--not for ever so.”

  This struck me as being funny. After I had supped I sat on a bench bythe door of the inn and gossiped with two labourers about brick-making,and motor cars, and the cricket of last year. And in the sky a faintnew crescent, blue and vague as a distant Alp, sank westward over thesun.

  The next day I returned to Cavor. “I am coming,” I said. “I’ve been alittle out of order, that’s all.”

  That was the only time I felt any serious doubt of our enterprise.Nerves purely! After that I worked a little more carefully, and took atrudge for an hour every day. And at last, save for the heating in thefurnace, our labours were at an end.