The First Men in the Moon Page 10

  IX PROSPECTING BEGINS

  We ceased to gaze. We turned to each other, the same thought, the samequestion in our eyes. For these plants to grow, there must be some air,however attenuated, air that we also should be able to breathe.

  “The manhole?” I said.

  “Yes!” said Cavor, “if it is air we see!”

  “In a little while,” I said, “these plants will be as high as we are.Suppose--suppose after all--Is it certain? How do you know that stuffis air? It may be nitrogen--it may be carbonic acid even!”

  “That is easy,” he said, and set about proving it. He produced a bigpiece of crumpled paper from the bale, lit it, and thrust it hastilythrough the manhole valve. I bent forward and peered down through thethick glass for its appearance outside, that little flame on whoseevidence depended so much!

  I saw the paper drop out and lie lightly upon the snow. The pink flameof its burning vanished. For an instant it seemed to be extinguished.And then I saw a little blue tongue upon the edge of it that trembled,and crept, and spread!

  Quietly the whole sheet, save where it lay in immediate contact withthe snow, charred and shrivelled and sent up a quivering thread ofsmoke. There was no doubt left to me; the atmosphere of the moon waseither pure oxygen or air, and capable therefore--unless its tenuitywas excessive--of supporting our alien life. We might emerge--and live!

  I sat down with my legs on either side of the manhole and prepared tounscrew it, but Cavor stopped me. “There is first a little precaution,”he said. He pointed out that although it was certainly an oxygenatedatmosphere outside, it might still be so rarified as to cause us graveinjury. He reminded me of mountain sickness, and of the bleedingthat often afflicts aeronauts who have ascended too swiftly, and hespent some time in the preparation of a sickly-tasting drink which heinsisted on my sharing. It made me feel a little numb, but otherwisehad no effect on me. Then he permitted me to begin unscrewing.

  Presently the glass stopper of the manhole was so far undone that thedenser air within our sphere began to escape along the thread of thescrew, singing as a kettle sings before it boils. Thereupon he made medesist. It speedily became evident that the pressure outside was verymuch less than it was within. How much less it was we had no means oftelling.

  I sat grasping the stopper with both hands, ready to close it again if,in spite of our intense hope, the lunar atmosphere should after allprove too rarified for us, and Cavor sat with a cylinder of compressedoxygen at hand to restore our pressure. We looked at one another insilence, and then at the fantastic vegetation that swayed and grewvisibly and noiselessly without. And ever that shrill piping continued.

  My blood-vessels began to throb in my ears, and the sound of Cavor’smovements diminished. I noted how still everything had become, becauseof the thinning of the air.

  As our air sizzled out from the screw the moisture of it condensed inlittle puffs.

  Presently I experienced a peculiar shortness of breath, that lastedindeed during the whole of the time of our exposure to the moon’sexterior atmosphere, and a rather unpleasant sensation about the earsand finger-nails and the back of the throat grew upon my attention, andpresently passed off again.

  But then came vertigo and nausea that abruptly changed the quality ofmy courage. I gave the lid of the manhole half a turn and made a hastyexplanation to Cavor; but now he was the more sanguine. He answered mein a voice that seemed extraordinarily small and remote, because of thethinness of the air that carried the sound. He recommended a nip ofbrandy, and set me the example, and presently I felt better. I turnedthe manhole stopper back again. The throbbing in my ears grew louder,and then I remarked that the piping note of the outrush had ceased. Fora time I could not be sure that it had ceased.

  “Well?” said Cavor in the ghost of a voice.

  “Well?” said I.

  “Shall we go on?”

  I thought. “Is this all?”

  “If you can stand it.”

  By way of answer I went on unscrewing. I lifted the circular operculumfrom its place and laid it carefully on the bale. A flake or so of snowwhirled and vanished as that thin and unfamiliar air took possessionof our sphere. I knelt, and then seated myself at the edge of themanhole, peering over it. Beneath, within a yard of my face, lay theuntrodden snow of the moon.

  There came a little pause. Our eyes met.

  “It doesn’t distress your lungs too much?” said Cavor.

  “No,” I said. “I can stand this.”

  He stretched out his hand for his blanket, thrust his head through itscentral hole and wrapped it about him. He sat down on the edge of themanhole, he let his feet drop until they were within six inches of thelunar ground. He hesitated for a moment, then thrust himself forward,dropped these intervening inches, and stood upon the untrodden soil ofthe moon.

  As he stepped forward he was refracted grotesquely by the edge of theglass. He stood for a moment looking this way and that. Then he drewhimself together and leapt.

  The glass distorted everything, but it seemed to me even then to bean extremely big leap. He had at one bound become remote. He seemedtwenty or thirty feet off. He was standing high upon a rocky mass andgesticulating back to me. Perhaps he was shouting--but the sound didnot reach me. But how the deuce had he done this? I felt like a man whohas just seen a new conjuring trick.

  In a puzzled state of mind I too dropped through the manhole. I stoodup. Just in front of me the snowdrift had fallen away and made a sortof ditch. I made a step and jumped.

  I found myself flying through the air, saw the rock on which he stoodcoming to meet me, clutched it and clung in a state of infiniteamazement.

  I gasped a painful laugh. I was tremendously confused. Cavor bent downand shouted in piping tones for me to be careful.

  I had forgotten that on the moon, with only an eighth part of theearth’s mass and a quarter of its diameter, my weight was barelya sixth what it was on earth. But now that fact insisted on beingremembered.

  “We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now,” he said.

  With a guarded effort I raised myself to the top, and moving ascautiously as a rheumatic patient, stood up beside him under the blazeof the sun. The sphere lay behind us on its dwindling snowdrift thirtyfeet away.

  As far as the eye could see over the enormous disorder of rocks thatformed the crater floor, the same bristling scrub that surrounded uswas starting into life, diversified here and there by bulging massesof a cactus form, and scarlet and purple lichens that grew so fast theyseemed to crawl over the rocks. The whole area of the crater seemedto me then to be one similar wilderness up to the very foot of thesurrounding cliff.

  This cliff was apparently bare of vegetation save at its base, and withbuttresses and terraces and platforms that did not very greatly attractour attention at the time. It was many miles away from us in everydirection, we seemed to be almost at the centre of the crater, andwe saw it through a certain haziness that drove before the wind. Forthere was even a wind now in the thin air, a swift yet weak wind thatchilled exceedingly but exerted little pressure. It was blowing roundthe crater, as it seemed, to the hot illuminated side from the foggydarkness under the sunward wall. It was difficult to look into thiseastward fog; we had to peer with half-closed eyes beneath the shade ofour hands, because of the fierce intensity of the motionless sun.

  “It seems to be deserted,” said Cavor, “absolutely desolate.”

  I looked about me again. I retained even then a clinging hope of somequasi-human evidence, some pinnacle of building, some house or engine,but everywhere one looked spread the tumbled rocks in peaks and crests,and the darting scrub and those bulging cacti that swelled and swelled,a flat negation as it seemed of all such hope.

  “It looks as though these plants had it to themselves,” I said. “I seeno trace of any other creature.”

  “No insects--no birds--no! Not a trace, not a scrap nor particle ofanimal life. If there was--what would they do in the night?... No;there’s just these plan
ts alone.”

  I shaded my eyes with my hand. “It’s like the landscape of a dream.These things are less like earthly land plants than the things oneimagines among the rocks at the bottom of the sea. Look at that yonder!One might imagine it a lizard changed into a plant. And the glare!”

  “This is only the fresh morning,” said Cavor.

  He sighed and looked about him. “This is no world for men,” he said.“And yet in a way--it appeals.”

  He became silent for a time, then commenced his meditative humming.

  I started at a gentle touch, and found a thin sheet of livid lichenlapping over my shoe. I kicked at it and it fell to powder, and eachspeck began to grow.

  I heard Cavor exclaim sharply, and perceived that one of the fixedbayonets of the scrub had pricked him.

  He hesitated, his eyes sought among the rocks about us. A suddenblaze of pink had crept up a ragged pillar of crag. It was a mostextraordinary pink, a livid magenta.

  “Look!” said I, turning, and behold Cavor had vanished!

  For an instant I stood transfixed. Then I made a hasty step to lookover the verge of the rock. But in my surprise at his disappearance Iforgot once more that we were on the moon. The thrust of my foot thatI made in striding would have carried me a yard on earth; on the moonit carried me six--a good five yards over the edge. For the momentthe thing had something of the effect of those nightmares when onefalls and falls. For while one falls sixteen feet in the first secondof a fall on earth, on the moon one falls two, and with only a sixthof one’s weight. I fell, or rather I jumped down, about ten yards Isuppose. It seemed to take quite a long time, five or six seconds,I should think. I floated through the air and fell like a feather,knee-deep in a snowdrift in the bottom of a gully of blue-grey,white-veined rock.

  I looked about me. “Cavor!” I cried; but no Cavor was visible.

  “Cavor!” I cried louder, and the rocks echoed me.

  I turned fiercely to the rocks and clambered to the summit of them.“Cavor!” I cried. My voice sounded like the voice of a lost lamb.

  The sphere, too, was not in sight, and for a moment a horrible feelingof desolation pinched my heart.

  Then I saw him. He was laughing and gesticulating to attract myattention. He was on a bare patch of rock twenty or thirty yards away.I could not hear his voice, but “jump” said his gestures. I hesitated,the distance seemed enormous. Yet I reflected that surely I must beable to clear a greater distance than Cavor.

  I made a step back, gathered myself together, and leapt with all mymight. I seemed to shoot right up in the air as though I should nevercome down....

  It was horrible and delightful, and as wild as a nightmare, to goflying off in this fashion. I realised my leap had been altogether tooviolent. I flew clean over Cavor’s head and beheld a spiky confusionin a gully spreading to meet my fall. I gave a yelp of alarm. I put outmy hands and straightened my legs.

  “I realised my leap had been too violent”]

  I hit a huge fungoid bulk that burst all about me, scattering a mass oforange spores in every direction, and covering me with orange powder.I rolled over spluttering, and came to rest convulsed with breathlesslaughter.

  I became aware of Cavor’s little round face peering over a bristlinghedge. He shouted some faded inquiry. “Eh?” I tried to shout, butcould not do so for want of breath. He made his way towards me, cominggingerly among the bushes.

  “We’ve got to be careful,” he said. “This moon has no discipline.She’ll let us smash ourselves.”

  He helped me to my feet. “You exerted yourself too much,” he said,dabbing at the yellow stuff with his hand to remove it from my garments.

  I stood passive and panting, allowing him to beat off the jelly from myknees and elbows and lecture me upon my misfortunes. “We don’t quiteallow for the gravitation. Our muscles are scarcely educated yet. Wemust practise a little, when you have got your breath.”

  I pulled two or three little thorns out of my hand, and sat for a timeon a boulder of rock. My muscles were quivering, and I had that feelingof personal disillusionment that comes at the first fall to the learnerof cycling on earth.

  It suddenly occurred to Cavor that the cold air in the gully, afterthe brightness of the sun, might give me a fever. So we clambered backinto the sunlight. We found that beyond a few abrasions I had receivedno serious injuries from my tumble, and at Cavor’s suggestion we werepresently looking round for some safe and easy landing-place for mynext leap. We chose a rocky slab some ten yards off, separated from usby a little thicket of olive-green spikes.

  “Imagine it there!” said Cavor, who was assuming the airs of a trainer,and he pointed to a spot about four feet from my toes. This leap Imanaged without difficulty, and I must confess I found a certainsatisfaction in Cavor’s falling short by a foot or so and tasting thespikes of the scrub. “One has to be careful, you see,” he said, pullingout his thorns, and with that he ceased to be my Mentor, and became myfellow learner in the art of lunar locomotion.

  We chose a still easier jump and did it without difficulty, and thenleapt back again, and to and fro several times, accustoming our musclesto the new standard. I could never have believed had I not experiencedit, how rapid that adaptation would be. In a very little time indeed,certainly after fewer than thirty leaps, we could judge the effortnecessary for a distance with almost terrestrial assurance.

  And all this time the lunar plants were growing around us, higher anddenser and more entangled, every moment thicker and taller, spikedplants, green cactus masses, fungi, fleshy and lichenous things,strangest radiate and sinuous shapes. But we were so intent upon ourleaping, that for a time we gave no heed to their unfaltering expansion.

  An extraordinary elation had taken possession of us. Partly, I think,it was our sense of release from the confinement of the sphere. Mainly,however, the thin sweetness of the air, which I am certain contained amuch larger proportion of oxygen than our terrestrial atmosphere. Inspite of the strange quality of all about us, I felt as adventurousand experimental as a cockney would do placed for the first time amongmountains; and I do not think it occurred to either of us, face toface though we were with the Unknown, to be very greatly afraid.

  We were bitten by a spirit of enterprise. We selected a lichenous kopjeperhaps fifteen yards away, and landed neatly on its summit one afterthe other. “Good!” we cried to each other; “good!” and Cavor made threesteps and went off to a tempting slope of snow a good twenty yards andmore beyond. I stood for a moment struck by the grotesque effect of hissoaring figure--his dirty cricket cap, and spiky hair, his little roundbody, his arms and his knickerbockered legs tucked up tightly--againstthe weird spaciousness of the lunar scene. A gust of laughter seizedme, and then I stepped off to follow. Plump! I dropped beside him.

  We made a few gargantuan strides, leapt three or four times more, andsat down at last in a lichenous hollow. Our lungs were painful. We satholding our sides and recovering our breath, looking appreciation atone another. Cavor panted something about “amazing sensations.” Andthen came a thought into my head. For the moment it did not seem aparticularly appalling thought, simply a natural question arising outof the situation.

  “By the way,” I said, “where exactly is the sphere?”

  Cavor looked at me. “Eh?”

  The full meaning of what we were saying struck me sharply.

  “Cavor!” I cried, laying a hand on his arm, “where is the sphere?”