الفصل الفصل 13 · Mr. Cavor Makes Some Suggestions

. Mr. Cavor Makes Some Suggestions

For a time neither of us spoke. To focus together all the things we had

brought 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 time we

hated one another in silence. I drummed with my fingers on the floor

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 do things.

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 human

than we had a right to expect. I suppose—”

He stopped irritatingly.

“Yes?”

“I suppose, anyhow—on any planet where there is an intelligent

animal—it will carry its brain case upward, and have hands, and walk

erect.”

Presently he broke away in another direction.

“We are some way in,” he said. “I mean—perhaps a couple of thousand

feet or more.”

“Why?”

“It’s cooler. And our voices are so much louder. That faded quality—it

has 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 depths—a mile even, we may

be—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 atmosphere

within, 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, that

it was sister planet to the earth, and that it was unaccountable that

it should be different in composition. The inference that it was

hollowed 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 discerned a pretty

sequence 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,” I

said.

He answered nothing, buzzing to himself softly, as he pursued his

thoughts. My temper was going.

“What do you think has become of the sphere, 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 look

bright for my Company...”

He made no answer.

“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “Just think of all the trouble we took to get

into this pickle! What did we come for? What are we after? What was the

moon to us or we to the moon? We wanted too much, we tried too much. We

ought to have started the little things first. It was you proposed the

moon! Those Cavorite spring blinds! I am certain we could have worked

them for terrestrial purposes. Certain! Did you really understand what

I 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 do

with it? Well, that’s a question. It may be that’s _the_ question. They

won’t understand it, anyhow. If they understood that sort of thing they

would have come long since to the earth. Would they? Why shouldn’t

they? But they would have sent something—they couldn’t keep their hands

off such a possibility. No! But they will examine it. Clearly they are

intelligent and inquisitive. They will examine it—get inside it—trifle

with the studs. Off! ... That would mean the moon for us for all 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 your

own 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 every

possibility.”

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

us away.”

“Rushed on _me_, you mean.”

“Rushed on me just as much. How was I to know when I set to work on

molecular physics that the business would bring me here—of all places?”

“It’s this accursed science,” I cried. “It’s the very Devil. The

mediæval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all

wrong. You tamper with it—and it offers you gifts. And directly you

take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions

and new weapons—now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social

ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!”

“Anyhow, it’s no use your quarrelling with me _now_. These

creatures—these Selenites, or whatever we choose to call them—have got

us tied hand and foot. Whatever temper you choose to go through with it

in, you will have to go through with it.... We have experiences before

us that will need all our coolness.”

He paused as if he required my assent. But I sat sulking. “Confound

your 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,” I

cried, “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 they

make, a sort of fluting and piping. I don’t see how we are to imitate

that. Is it their speech, that sort of thing? They may have different

senses, different means of communication. Of course they are minds and

we are minds; there must be something in common. Who knows how far we

may not get to an understanding?”

“The things are outside us,” I said. “They’re more different from us

than the strangest animals on earth. They are a different clay. What is

the good of talking like this?”

Cavor thought. “I don’t see that. Where there are minds they will have

something _similar_—even though they have been evolved on different

planets. Of course if it was a question of instincts, if we or they are

no more than animals—”

“Well, _are_ they? They’re much more like ants on their hind legs than

human 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 the

late Professor Galton on the possibility of communication between the

planets. Unhappily, at that time it did not seem probable that that

would be of any material benefit to me, and I fear I did not give it

the 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 all

conceivable mental existences and establish a basis on those. The great

principles of geometry, to begin with. He proposed to take some leading

proposition of Euclid’s, and show by construction that its truth was

known to us, to demonstrate, for example, that the angles at the base

of an isosceles triangle are equal, and that if the equal sides be

produced the angles on the other side of the base are equal also, or

that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal

to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstrating our

knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possession of a

reasonable intelligence.... Now, suppose I ... I might draw the

geometrical 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 hope of

communication, of interpretation, with these weird beings held me. Then

that angry despair that was a part of my exhaustion and physical misery

resumed its sway. I perceived with a sudden novel vividness the

extraordinary folly of everything I had ever done. “Ass!” I said; “oh,

ass, unutterable ass.... I seem to exist only to go about doing

preposterous things. Why did we ever leave the thing? ... Hopping about

looking for patents and concessions in the craters of the moon!... If

only we had had the sense to fasten a handkerchief to a stick to show

where we had left the sphere!”

I subsided, fuming.

“It is clear,” meditated Cavor, “they are intelligent. One can

hypothecate certain things. As they have not killed us at once, they

must have ideas of mercy. Mercy! at any rate of restraint. Possibly of

intercourse. They may meet us. And this apartment and the glimpses we

had of its guardian. These fetters! A high degree of intelligence...”

“I wish to heaven,” cried I, “I’d thought even twice! Plunge after

plunge. First one fluky start and then another. It was my confidence in

you! _Why_ didn’t I stick to my play? That was what I was equal to.

That was my world and the life I was made for. I could have finished

that play. I’m certain ... it was a good play. I had the scenario as

good as done. Then.... Conceive it! leaping to the moon!

Practically—I’ve thrown my life away! That old woman in the inn near

Canterbury had better sense.”

I looked up, and stopped in mid-sentence. The darkness had given place

to that bluish light again. The door was opening, and several noiseless

Selenites were coming into the chamber. I became quite still, staring

at their grotesque faces.

Then suddenly my sense of disagreeable strangeness changed to interest.

I perceived that the foremost and second carried bowls. One elemental

need at least our minds could understand in common. They were bowls of

some metal that, like our fetters, looked dark in that bluish light;

and each contained a number of whitish fragments. All the cloudy pain

and misery that oppressed me rushed together and took the shape of

hunger. I eyed these bowls wolfishly, and, though it returned to me in

dreams, at that time it seemed a small matter that at the end of the

arms that lowered one towards me were not hands, but a sort of flap and

thumb, like the end of an elephant’s trunk. The stuff in the bowl was

loose in texture, and whitish brown in colour—rather like lumps of some

cold souffle, and it smelt faintly like mushrooms. From a partially

divided carcass of a mooncalf that we presently saw, I am inclined to

believe it must have been mooncalf flesh.

My hands were so tightly chained that I could barely contrive to reach

the bowl; but when they saw the effort I made, two of them dexterously

released one of the turns about my wrist. Their tentacle hands were

soft 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 to

have 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 ate

and presently drank like tramps in a soup kitchen. Never before nor

since have I been hungry to the ravenous pitch, and save that I have

had this very experience I could never have believed that, a quarter of

a million of miles out of our proper world, in utter perplexity of

soul, surrounded, watched, touched by beings more grotesque and inhuman

than the worst creations of a nightmare, it would be possible for me to

eat in utter forgetfulness of all these things. They stood about us

watching us, and ever and again making a slight elusive twittering that

stood, I suppose, in the stead of speech. I did not even shiver at

their touch. And when the first zeal of my feeding was over, I could

note that Cavor, too, had been eating with the same shameless abandon.