Chương Chương 22 · The Astonishing Communication of Mr. Julius Wendigee

. The Astonishing Communication of Mr. Julius Wendigee

When I had finished my account of my return to the earth at

Littlestone, I wrote, “The End,” made a flourish, and threw my pen

aside, fully believing 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 hands of a literary agent, had permitted it to be sold, had seen

the greater portion of it appear in the _Strand Magazine_, and was

setting to work again upon the scenario of the play I had commenced at

Lympne before I realised that the end was not yet. And then, following

me from Amalfi to Algiers, there reached me (it is now about six months

ago) one of the 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 apparatus used by Mr. Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering

some method of communication with Mars, was receiving day by day a

curiously fragmentary message in English, which was indisputably

emanating from Mr. Cavor in the moon.

At first I thought the thing was an elaborate practical joke by some

one who had seen the manuscript of my narrative. I answered Mr.

Wendigee jestingly, but he replied in a manner that put such suspicion

altogether aside, and in a state of inconceivable excitement I hurried

from Algiers to the little observatory upon the Monte Rosa in which he

was working. In the presence of his record and his appliances—and above

all of the messages from Cavor that were coming to hand—my lingering

doubts vanished. I decided at once to accept a proposal he made to me

to remain with him, assisting him to take down the record from day to

day, and endeavouring with him to send a message back to the moon.

Cavor, we learnt, was not only alive, but free, in the midst of an

almost inconceivable community of these ant-like beings, these ant-men,

in the blue darkness of the lunar caves. He was lamed, it seemed, but

otherwise in quite good health—in better health, he distinctly said,

than he usually enjoyed on earth. He had had a fever, but it had left

no bad effects. But curiously enough he seemed to be labouring under a

conviction that I was either dead in the moon crater or lost in the

deep of space.

His message began to be received by Mr. Wendigee when that gentleman

was engaged in quite a different investigation. The reader will no

doubt recall the little excitement that began the century, arising out

of an announcement by Mr. Nikola Tesla, the American electrical

celebrity, that he had received a message from Mars. His announcement

renewed attention to a fact that had long been familiar to scientific

people, namely: that from some unknown source in space, waves of

electromagnetic disturbance, entirely similar to those used by Signor

Marconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the earth.

Besides Tesla quite a number of other observers have been engaged in

perfecting apparatus for receiving and recording these vibrations,

though few would go so far as to consider them actual messages from

some extraterrestrial sender. Among that few, however, we must

certainly count Mr. Wendigee. Ever since 1898 he had devoted himself

almost entirely to this subject, and being a man of ample means he had

erected an observatory on the flanks of Monte Rosa, in a position

singularly adapted in every way for such observations.

My scientific attainments, I must admit, are not great, but so far as

they enable me to judge, Mr. Wendigee’s contrivances for detecting and

recording any disturbances in the electromagnetic conditions of space

are singularly original and ingenious. And by a happy combination of

circumstances they were set up and in operation about two months before

Cavor made his first attempt to call up the earth. Consequently we have

fragments of his communication even from the beginning. Unhappily, they

are only fragments, and the most momentous of all the things that he

had to tell humanity—the instructions, that is, for the making of

Cavorite, if, indeed, he ever transmitted them—have throbbed themselves

away unrecorded into space. We never succeeded in getting a response

back to Cavor. He was unable to tell, therefore, what we had received

or what we had missed; nor, indeed, did he certainly know that any one

on earth was really aware of his efforts to reach us. And the

persistence he displayed in sending eighteen long descriptions of lunar

affairs—as they would be if we had them complete—shows how much his

mind must have turned back towards his native planet since he left it

two years ago.

You can imagine how amazed Mr. Wendigee must have been when he

discovered his record of electromagnetic disturbances interlaced by

Cavor’s straightforward English. Mr. Wendigee knew nothing of our wild

journey moonward, and suddenly—this English out of the void!

It is well the reader should understand the conditions under which it

would seem these messages were sent. Somewhere within the moon Cavor

certainly had access for a time to a considerable amount of electrical

apparatus, and it would seem he rigged up—perhaps furtively—a

transmitting arrangement of the Marconi type. This he was able to

operate at irregular intervals: sometimes for only half an hour or so,

sometimes for three or four hours at a stretch. At these times he

transmitted his earthward message, regardless of the fact that the

relative position of the moon and points upon the earth’s surface is

constantly altering. As a consequence of this and of the necessary

imperfections of our recording instruments his communication comes and

goes in our records in an extremely fitful manner; it becomes blurred;

it “fades out” in a mysterious and altogether exasperating way. And

added to this is the fact that he was not an expert operator; he had

partly forgotten, or never completely mastered, the code in general

use, and as he became fatigued he dropped words and misspelt in a

curious manner.

Altogether we have probably lost quite half of the communications he

made, and much we have is damaged, broken, and partly effaced. In the

abstract that follows the reader must be prepared therefore for a

considerable amount of break, hiatus, and change of topic. Mr. Wendigee

and I are collaborating in a complete and annotated edition of the

Cavor record, which we hope to publish, together with a detailed

account of the instruments employed, beginning with the first volume in

January next. That will be the full and scientific report, of which

this is only the popular transcript. But here we give at least

sufficient to complete the story I have told, and to give the broad

outlines of the state of that other world so near, so akin, and yet so

dissimilar to our own.