The First Men in the Moon Page 14

  XIII MR. CAVOR MAKES SOME SUGGESTIONS

  For a time neither of us spoke. To focus together all the things we hadbrought upon ourselves, seemed beyond my mental powers.

  “They’ve got us,” I said at last.

  “It was that fungus.”

  “Well--if I hadn’t taken it we should have fainted and starved.”

  “We might have found the sphere.”

  I lost my temper at his persistence, and swore to myself. For a timewe hated one another in silence. I drummed with my fingers on thefloor between my knees, and gritted the links of my fetters together.Presently I was forced to talk again.

  “What do you make of it, anyhow?” I asked humbly.

  “They are reasonable creatures--they can make things and dothings--Those lights we saw....”

  He stopped. It was clear he could make nothing of it.

  When he spoke again it was to confess, “After all, they are more humanthan we had a right to expect. I suppose----”

  He stopped irritatingly.

  “Yes?”

  “I suppose, anyhow--on any planet where there is an intelligentanimal--it will carry its brain case upward, and have hands, and walkerect....”

  Presently he broke away in another direction.

  “We are some way in,” he said. “I mean--perhaps a couple of thousandfeet or more.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s cooler. And our voices are so much louder. That faded quality--ithas altogether gone. And the feeling in one’s ears and throat.”

  I had not noted that, but I did now.

  “The air is denser. We must be some depth--a mile even, we maybe--inside the moon.”

  “We never thought of a world inside the moon.”

  “No.”

  “How could we?”

  “We might have done. Only--One gets into habits of mind.”

  He thought for a time.

  “_Now_,” he said, “it seems such an obvious thing.

  “Of course! The moon must be enormously cavernous, with an atmospherewithin, and at the centre of its caverns a sea.

  “One knew that the moon had a lower specific gravity than the earth,one knew that it had little air or water outside, one knew, too, thatit was sister planet to the earth, and that it was unaccountable thatit should be different in composition. The inference that it washollowed out was as clear as day. And yet one never saw it as a fact.Kepler, of course----”

  His voice had the interest now of a man who has discovered a prettysequence of reasoning.

  “Yes,” he said, “Kepler with his _sub-volvani_ was right after all.”

  “I wish you had taken the trouble to find that out before we came,” Isaid.

  He answered nothing, buzzing to himself softly as he pursued histhoughts. My temper was going. “What do you think has become of thesphere, anyhow?” I asked.

  “Lost,” he said, like a man who answers an uninteresting question.

  “Among those plants?”

  “Unless they find it.”

  “And then?”

  “How can I tell?”

  “Cavor,” I said, with a sort of hysterical bitterness, “things lookbright for my Company....”

  He made no answer.

  “Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “Just think of all the trouble we took to getinto this pickle! What did we come for? What are we after? What was themoon to us or we to the moon? We wanted too much, we tried too much. Weought to have started the little things first. It was you proposed themoon! Those Cavorite spring blinds! I am certain we could have workedthem for terrestrial purposes. Certain! Did you really understand whatI proposed? A steel cylinder----”

  “Rubbish!” said Cavor.

  We ceased to converse.

  For a time Cavor kept up a broken monologue without much help from me.

  “If they find it,” he began, “if they find it ... what will they dowith it? Well, that’s a question. It may be that’s _the_ question. Theywon’t understand it, anyhow. If they understood that sort of thing theywould have come long since to the earth. Would they? Why shouldn’tthey? But they would have sent something--They couldn’t keep theirhands off such a possibility. No! But they will examine it. Clearlythey are intelligent and inquisitive. They will examine it--get insideit--trifle with the studs. Off!... That would mean the moon for us forall the rest of our lives. Strange creatures, strange knowledge....”

  “As for strange knowledge--” said I, and language failed me.

  “Look here, Bedford,” said Cavor, “you came on this expedition of yourown free will.”

  “You said to me, ‘Call it prospecting.’”

  “There’s always risks in prospecting.”

  “Especially when you do it unarmed and without thinking out everypossibility.”

  “I was so taken up with the sphere. The thing rushed on us, and carriedus away.”

  “Rushed on _me_, you mean.”

  “Rushed on me just as much. How was _I_ to know when I set to work onmolecular physics that the business would bring me here--of all places?”

  “It’s this accursed science,” I cried. “It’s the very Devil. Themediæval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are allwrong. You tamper with it--and it offers you gifts. And directly youtake them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passionsand new weapons--now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your socialideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!”

  “Anyhow, it’s no use your quarrelling with me _now_. Thesecreatures--these Selenites, or whatever we choose to call them--havegot us tied hand and foot. Whatever temper you choose to go throughwith it in, you will have to go through with it.... We have experiencesbefore us that will need all our coolness.”

  He paused as if he required my assent. But I sat sulking. “Confoundyour science!” I said.

  “The problem is communication. Gestures, I fear, will be different.Pointing, for example. No creatures but men and monkeys point.”

  That was too obviously wrong for me. “Pretty nearly every animal,” Icried, “points with its eyes or nose.”

  Cavor meditated over that. “Yes,” he said at last, “and we don’t.There’s such differences--such differences!

  “One might.... But how can I tell? There is speech. The sounds theymake, a sort of fluting and piping. I don’t see how we are to imitatethat. Is it their speech, that sort of thing? They may have differentsenses, different means of communication. Of course they are minds andwe are minds; there must be something in common. Who knows how far wemay not get to an understanding?”

  “The things are outside us,” I said. “They’re more different from usthan the strangest animals on earth. They are a different clay. What isthe good of talking like this?”

  Cavor thought. “I don’t see that. Where there are minds they will havesomething _similar_--even though they have been evolved on differentplanets. Of course if it was a question of instincts, if we or they areno more than animals----”

  “Well, _are_ they? They’re much more like ants on their hind legs thanhuman beings, and who ever got to any sort of understanding with ants?”

  “But these machines and clothing! No, I don’t hold with you, Bedford.The difference is wide----”

  “It’s insurmountable.”

  “The resemblance must bridge it. I remember reading once a paper by thelate Professor Galton on the possibility of communication between theplanets. Unhappily, at that time it did not seem probable that thatwould be of any material benefit to me, and I fear I did not give itthe attention I should have done--in view of this state of affairs.Yet.... Now, let me see!

  “His idea was to begin with those broad truths that must underlie allconceivable mental existences and establish a basis on those. The greatprinciples of geometry, to begin with. He proposed to take some leadingproposition of Euclid’s, and show by construction that its truth wasknown to us, to demonstrate, for example, that the angles at the baseof an isosceles triangle are equ
al, and that if the equal sides beproduced the angles on the other side of the base are equal also, orthat the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equalto the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstratingour knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possessionof a reasonable intelligence.... Now, suppose I ... I might draw thegeometrical figure with a wet finger, or even trace it in the air....”

  He fell silent. I sat meditating his words. For a time his wild hopeof communication, of interpretation, with these weird beings held me.Then that angry despair that was a part of my exhaustion and physicalmisery resumed its sway. I perceived with a sudden novel vividnessthe extraordinary folly of everything I had ever done. “Ass!” I said;“oh, ass, unutterable ass.... I seem to exist only to go about doingpreposterous things.... Why did we ever leave the thing?... Hoppingabout looking for patents and concessions in the craters of themoon!... If only we had had the sense to fasten a handkerchief to astick to show where we had left the sphere!”

  I subsided, fuming.

  “It is clear,” meditated Cavor, “they are intelligent. One canhypotheticate certain things. As they have not killed us at once, theymust have ideas of mercy. Mercy! at any rate of restraint. Possibly ofintercourse. They may meet us. And this apartment and the glimpses wehad of its guardian. These fetters! A high degree of intelligence....”

  “I wish to heaven,” cried I, “I’d thought even twice! Plunge afterplunge. First one fluky start and then another. It was my confidencein you! _Why_ didn’t I stick to my play? That was what I was equalto. That was my world and the life I was made for. I could havefinished that play. I’m certain ... it was a good play. I had thescenario as good as done. Then.... Conceive it! leaping to the moon!Practically--I’ve thrown my life away! That old woman in the inn nearCanterbury had better sense.”

  I looked up, and stopped in mid-sentence. The darkness had given placeto that bluish light again. The door was opening, and several noiselessSelenites were coming into the chamber. I became quite still, staringat their grotesque faces.

  Then suddenly my sense of disagreeable strangeness changed to interest.I perceived that the foremost and second carried bowls. One elementalneed at least our minds could understand in common. They were bowls ofsome metal that, like our fetters, looked dark in that bluish light;and each contained a number of whitish fragments. All the cloudy painand misery that oppressed me rushed together and took the shape ofhunger. I eyed these bowls wolfishly, and, though it returned to me indreams, at that time it seemed a small matter that at the end of thearms that lowered one towards me were not hands, but a sort of flap andthumb, like the end of an elephant’s trunk.

  The stuff in the bowl was loose in texture, and whitish brown incolour--rather like lumps of some cold soufflé, and it smelt faintlylike mushrooms. From a partially divided carcass of a mooncalf thatwe presently saw, I am inclined to believe it must have been mooncalfflesh.

  My hands were so tightly chained that I could barely contrive to reachthe bowl; but when they saw the effort I made, two of them dexterouslyreleased one of the turns about my wrist. Their tentacle hands weresoft and cold to my skin. I immediately seized a mouthful of the food.It had the same laxness in texture that all organic structures seem tohave upon the moon; it tasted rather like a gauffre or a damp meringue,but in no way was it disagreeable. I took two other mouthfuls. “I_wanted_--foo’!” said I, tearing off a still larger piece....

  For a time we ate with an utter absence of self-consciousness. We ateand presently drank like tramps in a soup kitchen. Never before norsince have I been hungry to the ravenous pitch, and save that I havehad this very experience I could never have believed that, a quarterof a million of miles out of our proper world, in utter perplexity ofsoul, surrounded, watched, touched by beings more grotesque and inhumanthan the worst creations of a nightmare, it would be possible for me toeat in utter forgetfulness of all these things. They stood about uswatching us, and ever and again making a slight elusive twittering thatstood them, I suppose, in the stead of speech. I did not even shiver attheir touch. And when the first zeal of my feeding was over, I couldnote that Cavor, too, had been eating with the same shameless abandon.