Out Of The Silent Planet (2 page)

'By jove,' said the slender man, 'not Ransom who used to be at Wedenshaw?'

'I was at school at Wedenshaw,' said Ransom.

'I thought I knew you as soon as you spoke,' said the slender man. 'I'm Devine. Don't you
remember me?'

'Of course. I should think I do!' said Ransom as the two men shook hands with the rather
laboured cordiality which is traditional in such meetings. In actual fact Ransom had disliked
Devine at school as much as anyone he could remember.

'Touching, isn't it?' said Devine. 'The far-flung line even in the wilds of Sterk and Nadderby.
This is where we get a lump - in our throats and remember Sunday evening Chapel in the DOP.
You don't know Weston, perhaps?' Devine indicated his massive and loud-voiced companion. 'The Weston,'
he added. 'You know. The great physicist. Has Einstein on toast and drinks a pint of Schrodinger's
blood for breakfast. Weston, allow me to introduce my old schoolfellow, Ransom. Dr Elwin Ransom.
The Ransom, you know. The great philologist. Has Jespersen on toast and drinks a pint -'

'I know nothing about it,' said Weston, who was still holding the unfortunate Harry by the collar.
'And if you expect me to say that I am pleased to see this person who has just broken into my garden,
you will be disappointed. I don't care twopence what school he was at nor on what unscientific
foolery he is at present wasting money that ought to go to research. I want to know what he's doing
here: and after that I want to see the last of him.'

'Don't be an ass, Weston,' said Devine in a more serious voice. 'His dropping in is delightfully
apropos. You mustn't mind Weston's little way, Ransom. Conceals a generous heart beneath a grim
exterior, you know. You'll come in and have a drink and something to eat, of course?'

'That's very kind of you,' said Ransom. 'But about the boy -'

Devine drew Ransom aside. 'Balmy,' he said in a low voice. 'Works like a beaver as a rule but gets
these fits. We are only trying to get him into the wash-house and keep him quiet for an hour or so
till he's normal again. Can't let him go home in his present state. All done by kindness. You can
take him home yourself presently if you like and come back and sleep here.'

Ransom was very much perplexed. There was something about the whole scene suspicious enough and
disagreeable enough to convince him that he had blundered on something criminal, while on the other
hand he had all the deep, irrational conviction of his age and class that such things could never
cross the path of an ordinary person except in fiction and could least of all be associated with
professors and old schoolfellows. Even if they had been ill-treating the boy, Ransom did not see
much chance of getting him from them by force.

While these thoughts were passing through his head, Devine had been speaking to Weston, in a low
voice, but no lower than was to be expected of a man discussing hospitable arrangements in the
presence of a guest. It ended with a grunt of assent from Weston. Ransom, to whose other
difficulties a merely social embarrassment was now being added, turned with the idea of making
some remark. But Weston was now speaking to the boy.

'You have given enough trouble for one night, Harry,' he said. 'And in a properly governed country
I'd know how to deal with you. Hold your tongue and stop snivelling. You needn't go into the
wash-house if you don't want -'

It weren't the wash-house,' sobbed the halfwit, 'you know it weren't. I don't want to go in
that thing again.'

'He means the laboratory,' interrupted Devine. 'He got in there and was shut, in by accident for
a few hours once. It put the wind up him for some reason. Lo, the poor Indian, you know.' He turned
to the boy. 'Listen, Harry,' he said 'This kind gentleman is going to take you home as soon as he's
had a rest. If you'll come in and sit down quietly in the hall. I'll give you something you like.'
He imitated the noise of a cork being drawn from a bottle. Ransom remembered it had been one of
Devine's tricks at school and a guffaw of infantile knowingness broke from Harry's lips.

'Bring him in,' said Weston as he turned away and disappeared into the house. Ransom hesitated
to follow, but Devine assured him that Weston would be very glad to see him. The lie was
barefaced, but Ransom's desire for a rest and a drink were rapidly overcoming his social scruples.
Preceded by Devine and Harry, he entered the house and found himself a moment later seated in an
armchair and awaiting the return of Devine, who had gone to fetch refreshments.

THE ROOM into which he had been shown revealed a strange mixture of luxury and squalor. The
windows were shuttered and curtainless, the floor was uncarpeted and strewn with packing cases,
shavings, newspapers and books, and the wallpaper showed the stains left by the pictures and
furniture of the previous occupants. On the other hand, the only two armchairs were of the
costliest type, and in the litter which covered the tables, cigars, oyster shells and empty
champagne bottles jostled with tins of condensed milk and opened sardine tins, with cheap
crockery, broken bread, teacups a quarter full of tea and cigarette ends.

His hosts seemed to be a long time away, and Ransom fell to thinking of Devine. He felt for him
that sort of distaste we feel for someone whom we have admired in boyhood for a very brief period
and then outgrown. Devine had learned just half a term earlier than anyone else that kind of humour
which consists in a perpetual parody of the sentimental or idealistic cliches of one's elders.
For a few weeks his references to the Dear old Place and to Playing the Game, to the White Man's
Burden and a Straight Bat, had swept everyone, Ransom included, off their feet. But before he
left Wedenshaw Ransom had already begun to find Devine a bore, and at Cambridge he had avoided
him, wondering from afar how anyone so flashy and, as it were, ready-made could be so successful.
Then had come the mystery of Devine's election. to the Leicester fellowship, and the further
mystery of his increasing wealth. He had long since abandoned Cambridge for London, and was
presumably something 'in the city'. One heard of him occasionally and one's informant usually ended
either by saying, 'A damn clever chap, Devine, in his own way', or else by observing plaintively,
'It's a mystery to me how that man has got where he is.' As far as Ransom could gather from the
brief conversation in the yard, his old schoolfellow had altered very little.

He was interrupted by the opening of the door Devine entered alone, carrying a bottle of whiskey
on a tray with glass, and a syphon.

'Weston is looking out something to eat,' he said as he placed the tray on the floor beside Ransom's
chair, and addressed himself to opening the bottle. Ransom, who was very thirsty indeed by now,
observed that his host was one of those irritating people who forget to use their hands when they
begin talking. Devine started to prise up the silver paper which covered the cork with the point
of a corkscrew, and then stopped to ask:

'How do you come to be in this - benighted part of the country?"

'I'm on a walking tour,' said Ransom; 'slept at Stoke Underwood last night and had hoped to end
at Nadderby tonight. They wouldn't put me up, so I was going on to Sterk.'

'God!' exclaimed Devine, his corkscrew still idle. 'Do you do it for money, or is it sheer masochism?'

'Pleasure; of course,' said Ransom, keeping his eye immovably on the still unopened bottle.

'Can the attraction of it be explained to the uninitiate?' asked Devine, remembering himself
sufficiently to rip up a small portion of the silver paper.

'I hardly know. To begin with, I like the actual walking -'

'God! You must have enjoyed the army. Jogging along to Thingummy, eh?'

'No, no. It's just the opposite of the army. The whole point about the army is that you are never
alone for a moment and can never choose where you're going or even what part of the road you're
walking on. On a walking tour you are absolutely detached. You stop where you like and go on when
you like. As long as it lasts you need consider no one and consult no one but yourself.'

'Until one night you find a wire waiting at your hotel saying, "Come back at once"',
replied Devine, at last removing the silver paper.

'Only if you were fool enough to leave a list of addresses and go to them! The worst that could
happen to me would be that man on the wireless saying, "Will Dr Elwin Ransom, believed to be
walking somewhere in the Midlands- "'

'I begin to see the idea,' said Devine, pausing in the very act of drawing the cork. 'It wouldn't
do if you were in business. You are a lucky devil! But can even you just disappear like that? No
wife, no young, no aged but honest parent or anything of that sort?'

'Only a married sister in India. And then, you see, I'm a don. And a don in the middle of long
vacation is almost a non-existent creature, as you ought to remember. College neither knows nor
cares where he is, and certainly no one else does.'

The cork at last came out of the bottle with a heart-cheering noise.

'Say when,' said Devine, as Ransom held out his glass. 'But I feel sure there's a catch somewhere.
Do you really mean to say that no one knows where you are or when you ought to get back, and no
one can get hold of you?'

Ransom was nodding in reply when Devine, who had picked up the syphon, suddenly swore. 'I'm afraid
this is empty,' he said. 'Do you mind having water? I'll have to get some from the scullery. How
much do you like?'

'Fill it up, please,' said Ransom.

A few minutes later Devine returned and handed Ransom his long delayed drink. The latter remarked,
as he put down the half-emptied tumbler with a sigh of satisfaction that Devine's choice of residence
was at least as odd as his own choice of a holiday.

'Quite,' said Devine. 'But if you knew Weston you'd realize that it's much less trouble to go where
he wants than to argue the matter. What you call a strong colleague.'

'Colleague?' said Ransom inquiringly.

'In a sense.' Devine glanced at the door, drew his chair closer to Ransom's, and continued in
a more confidential tone. 'He's the goods all right, though. Between ourselves, I am putting a
little money into some experiments he has on hand. It's all straight stuff - the march of progress
and the good of humanity and all that, but it has an industrial side.'

While Devine was speaking something odd began to happen to Ransom. At first it merely seemed
to him that Devine's words were no longer making sense. He appeared to be saying that he was
industrial all down both sides but could never get an experiment to fit him in London. Then he
realized that Devine was not so much unintelligible as inaudible, which was not surprising, since
he was now so far away - about a mile away, though perfectly clear like something seen through
the wrong end of a telescope. From that bright distance where he sat in his tiny chair he was
gazing at Ransom with a new expression on his face. The gaze became disconcerting. Ransom tried
to move in his chair but found that he had lost all power over his own body. He felt quite
comfortable, but it was as if his legs and arms had been bandaged to the chair and his head
gripped in a vice; a beautifully padded, but quite immovable, vice. He did not feel afraid, though
he knew that he ought to be afraid and soon would be. Then, very gradually, the room faded
from his sight.

Ransom could never be sure whether what followed had any bearing on the events recorded in
this book or whether it was merely an irresponsible dream. It seemed to him that he and Weston
and Devine were all standing in a little garden surrounded by a wall. The garden was bright
and sunlit, but over the top of the wall you could see nothing but darkness. They were trying
to climb over the wall and Weston asked them to give him a hoist up. Ransom kept on telling him
not to go over the wall because it was so dark on the other side, but Weston insisted, and all
three of them set about doing so. Ransom was the last. He got astride on the top of the wall,
sitting on his coat because of the broken bottles. The other two had already dropped down on the
outside into the darkness, but before he followed them a door in the wall which none of them
had noticed was opened from without and the queerest people he had ever seen came into the
garden bringing Weston and Devine back with them. They left them in the garden and retired into
the darkness themselves, locking the door behind them. Ransom found it impossible to get down
from the wall. He remained sitting there, not frightened but rather uncomfortable because his
right leg, which was on the outside, felt so dark and his left leg felt so light. 'My leg will
drop off if it gets much darker,' he said. Then he looked down into the darkness and asked,
'Who are you?' and the Queer People must still have been there for they all replied, 'Hoo
Hoo - Hoo?' just like owls.

He began to realize that his leg was not so much dark as cold and stiff; because he had been
resting the other on it for so long: and also that he was in an armchair in a lighted room.
A conversation was going on near him and had, he now realized, being going on for some time.
His head was comparatively clear. He realized that he had been drugged or hypnotized, or both,
and he felt that some control over his own body was returning to him though he was still very
weak. He listened intently without trying to move.

'I'm getting a little tired of this, Weston,' Devine was saying, 'and specially as it's my money
that is being risked. I tell you he'll do quite as well as the boy, and in some ways better. Only,
he'll be coming round very soon now and we must get him on board at once. We ought to have done
it an hour ago.

'The boy was ideal,' said Weston sulkily. 'Incapable of serving humanity and only too likely to
propagate idiocy. He was the sort of boy who in a civilized community would be automatically
handed over to a state laboratory for experimental purposes.