Chương Chương 26 · The Last Message Cavor sent to the Earth

. The Last Message Cavor sent to the Earth

On this unsatisfactory manner the penultimate message of Cavor dies

out. One seems to see him away there in the blue obscurity amidst his

apparatus intently signalling us to the last, all unaware of the

curtain of confusion that drops between us; all unaware, too, of the

final dangers that even then must have been creeping upon him. His

disastrous want of vulgar common sense had utterly betrayed him. He had

talked of war, he had talked of all the strength and irrational

violence of men, of their insatiable aggressions, their tireless

futility of conflict. He had filled the whole moon world with this

impression of our race, and then I think it is plain that he made the

most fatal admission that upon himself alone hung the possibility—at

least for a long time—of any further men reaching the moon. The line

the cold, inhuman reason of the moon would take seems plain enough to

me, and a suspicion of it, and then perhaps some sudden sharp

realisation of it, must have come to him. One imagines him about the

moon with the remorse of this fatal indiscretion growing in his mind.

During a certain time I am inclined to guess the Grand Lunar was

deliberating the new situation, and for all that time Cavor may have

gone as free as ever he had gone. But obstacles of some sort prevented

his getting to his electromagnetic apparatus again after that message I

have just given. For some days we received nothing. Perhaps he was

having fresh audiences, and trying to evade his previous admissions.

Who can hope to guess?

And then suddenly, like a cry in the night, like a cry that is followed

by a stillness, came the last message. It is the briefest fragment, the

broken beginnings of two sentences.

The first was: “I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know—”

There was an interval of perhaps a minute. One imagines some

interruption from without. A departure from the instrument—a dreadful

hesitation among the looming masses of apparatus in that dim, blue-lit

cavern—a sudden rush back to it, full of a resolve that came too late.

Then, as if it were hastily transmitted came: “Cavorite made as

follows: take—”

There followed one word, a quite unmeaning word as it stands: “uless.”

And that is all.

It may be he made a hasty attempt to spell “useless” when his fate was

close upon him. Whatever it was that was happening about that apparatus

we cannot tell. Whatever it was we shall never, I know, receive another

message from the moon. For my own part a vivid dream has come to my

help, and I see, almost as plainly as though I had seen it in actual

fact, a blue-lit shadowy dishevelled Cavor struggling in the grip of

these insect Selenites, struggling ever more desperately and hopelessly

as they press upon him, shouting, expostulating, perhaps even at last

fighting, and being forced backwards step by step out of all speech or

sign of his fellows, for evermore into the Unknown—into the dark, into

that silence that has no end....