Out Of The Silent Planet (3 page)

'I dare say. But in England he is the sort of boy in whom Scotland Yard might cqnceivably feel
an interest. This busy-body, on the other hand, will not be missed. for months, and even then no
one will know where he was when he disappeared. He came alone. He left no address. He has no
family. And finally he has poked his nose into the whole affair of his own accord.'

'Well, I confess I don't like it. He is, after all, human. The boy was really almost a - a
preparation. Still, he's only an individual, and probably a quite useless one. We're risking
our own lives, too. In a great cause - For the Lord's sake. don't start all that stuff now.
We haven't time.'

'I dare say,' replied Weston, 'he would consent if he could be made to understand.'

'Take his feet and I'll take his head,' said Devine.

'If you really think he's coming round,' said Weston, 'you'd better give him another dose. We
can't start till we get the sunlight. It wouldn't be pleasant to have him struggling in there
for three hours or so. It would be better if he didn't wake up till we were under way.

'True enough. Just keep an eye on him while I run upstairs and get another.'

Devine left the room. Ransom saw through his halfclosed eyes that Weston was standing over
him. He had no means of foretelling how his own body would respond, if it responded at all,
to a sudden attempt at movement, but he saw at once that he must take his chance. Almost before
Devine had closed the door he flung himself with all his force at Weston's feet. The scientist
fell forward across the chair, and Ransom, flinging him off with an agonizing effort, rose and
dashed out into the hall. He was very weak and fell as he entered it but terror was behind him
and in a couple of seconds he had found the hall door and was working desperately to master the
bolts. Darkness and his trembling hands were against him. Before he had drawn one bolt, booted
feet were clattering over the carpetless floor behind him. He was gripped by the shoulders and
the knees. Kicking, writhing, dripping with sweat, and bellowing as loud as he could in the faint
hope of rescue, he prolonged the struggle with a violence of which he would have believed himself
incapable. For one glorious moment the door was open, the fresh night air was in his face, he
saw the reassuring stars and even his own pack lying in the porch. Then a heavy blow fell on his
head. Consciousness faded, and the last thing of which he was aware was the grip of strong hands
pulling him back into the dark passage, and the sound of a closing door.

WHEN RANSOM came to his senses he seemed to be in bed in a dark room. He had a pretty severe headache,
and this, combined with a general lassitude, discouraged him at first from attempting to rise or
to take stock of his surroundings. He noticed, drawing his hand across his forehead, that he was
sweating freely, and this directed his attention to the fact that the room (if it was a room)
was remarkably warm. Moving his arms to fling off the bedclothes, he touched a wall at the right
side of the bed: it was not only warm, but hot. He moved his left hand to and fro in the emptiness
on the other side and noticed that there the air was cooler - apparently the heat was coming
from the wall. He felt his face and found a bruise over the left eye. This recalled to his mind
the struggle with Weston and Devine, and he instantly concluded that they had put him in an
outhouse behind their furnace. At the same time he looked up and recognized the source of the
dim light in which, without noticing it, he had all along been able to see the movements of his
own hands. There was some kind of skylight immediately over his head - a square of night sky filled
with stars.' It seemed to Ransom that he had never looked out on such a frosty night. Pulsing with
brightness as with some unbearable pain or pleasure, clustered in pathless and countless multitudes,
dreamlike in clarity, blazing in perfect blackness, the stars seized all his attention, troubled
him, excited him, and drew him up to a sitting position. At the same time they quickened the
throb of his headache, and this reminded him that he had been drugged. He was just formulating
to himself the theory that the stuff they had given him might have some effect on the pupil and
that this would explain the unnatural splendour and fuliness of the sky, When a disturbance of
silver light, almost a pale and miniature sunrise, at one corner of the skylight, drew his eyes
upward again. Some minutes later the orb of the full moon was pushing its way into the field of
vision. Ransom sat still and watched. He had never seen such a moon - so white, so blinding and
so large. 'Like' a great' football just outside the glass,' he thought, and then, a moment later;
'No - it's bigger than that.' By this time he was quite certain that something was seriously
wrong with his eyes: no moon could possibly be the size of the thing he was seeing.

The light of the huge moon - if it was a moon - had by now illuminated his surroundings almost as
clearly as if it were day. It was a very strange room. The floor was so small that the bed and a
table beside it occupied the whole width of it: the ceiling seemed to be nearly twice as wide and
the walls sloped outward as they rose, so that Ransom had the impression of lying at the bottom
of a deep and narrow wheelbarrow. This confirmed his belief that his sight was either temporarily
or permanently injured. In other respects, however, he was recovering rapidly and even beginning
to feel an unnatural lightness of heart and a not disagreeable excitement. The heat was still
oppressive, and he stripped off everything but his shirt and trousers before rising to explore.
His rising was disastrous and raised graver apprehensions in his mind about the effects of being
drugged. Although he had been conscious of no unusual muscular effort, he found himself leaping
from the bed with an energy which brought his head into sharp contact with the skylight and flung
him down again in a heap on the floor. He found himself on the other side against the wall the wall
that ought to have sloped outwards like the side of a wheelbarrow, according to his previous
recounaissance. But it didn't. He felt it and looked at it; it was unmistakably at right angles
to the floor. More cautiously this time, he rose again to his feet. He felt an extraordinary
lightness of body: it was, with difficulty, that he kept his feet on the floor. For the first
time a suspicion that he might be dead and already in the ghost-life crossed his mind. He was
trembling, but a hundred mental habits forbade him to consider this possibility. Instead, he
explored his prison. The result was beyond doubt: all the walls looked as if they sloped outwards
so as to make the room wider at the ceiling than it was at the floor, but each wall as you stood
beside it turned out to be perfectly perpendicular - not only to sight but to touch also if one
stooped down and examined with one's fingers the angle between it and the floor. The same
examination revealed two other curious facts. The room was walled and floored with metal, and
was in a state of continuous faint vibration - a silent vibration with a strangely lifelike and
unmechanical quality about it. But if the vibration was silent, there was plenty of noise going
on a series of musical raps or percussions at quite irregular intervals which seemed to come from
the ceiling. It was as if the metal chamber in which he found himself was being bombarded with
small, tinkling missles. Ransom was by now thoroughly frightened - not with the prosaic fright
that a man suffers in a war, but with a heady, bounding kind of fear that was hardly distinguishable
from his general excitement: he was poised on a sort of emotional watershed from which, he felt,
he might at any moment pass either into delirious terror or into an ecstasy of joy. He knew now
that he was not in a submarine: and the infintesimal quivering of the metal did not suggest the
motion of any wheeled vehicle. A ship, then, he supposed, or some kind of airship... but there was
an oddity in all his sensations for which neither supposition accounted. Puzzled, he sat down
again on the bed, and stared at the portentous moon.

An airship, some kind of flying machine... but why did the moon look so big? It was larger than he
had thought at first. No moon could really be that size; and he realized now that he had known
this from the first but had repressed the knowledge through terror. At the same moment a thought
came into his head which stopped his breath - there could be no full moon at all that night.
He remembered distinctly that he had walked from Nadderby on a moonless night. Even if the thin
crescent of a new moon had escaped his notice, it could, not have grown to this in a few hours.
It could not have grown to this at all - this megalomaniac disc, far larger than the football he
had at first compared it to, larger than a child's hoop, filling almost half the sky. And where
was the old 'man in the moon' - the familiar face that had looked down on all the generations
of men? The thing wasn't the Moon at all; and he felt his hair move on his scalp.

At that moment the sound of an opening door made him turn his head. An oblong of dazzling light
appeared behind him. and instantly vanished as the door closed again, having admitted the bulky
form of a naked man whom Ransom recognized as Weston. No, reproach, no demand for an explanation,
rose to Ransom's lips or even to his mind; not with that monstrous orb above them.

The mere presence of a human' being, with its offer of at least some companionship, broke down
the tension in which his nerves had long been resisting a bottomless dismay. He found, when he
spoke, that he was sobbing.

'Weston! Weston!' he gasped. 'What is it? It's not the Moon, not that size. It can't be, can it?'

'No,' replied Weston, 'it's the Earth.'

RANSOM'S LEGS failed him, and he must have sunk back upon the bed, but he only became aware of
this many minutes later. At the moment he was unconscious of everything except his fear. He did
not even know what he was afraid of, the fear itself possessed his whole mind, a formless,
infinite misgiving. He did not lose consciousness, though he greatly wished that he might do so.
Any change - death or sleep, or, best of all, a waking which should show all this for a dream -
would have been inexpressibly welcome. None came. Instead, the lifelong self-control of social man,
the virtues which are half hypocrisy or the hypocrisy which is half a virtue, came back to him and
soon he found himself answering Weston in a voice not shamefully tremulous.

'Do you mean that?' he asked. 'Certainly.'

'Then where are we?'

'Standing out from Earth about eighty-five thousand miles.'

'You mean we're in space,' Ransom uttered the word with difficulty as a frightened child speaks of
ghosts or a frightened man of cancer.

Weston nodded.

'What for?' said Ransom. 'And what on earth have you kidnapped me for? And how have you done it?'

For a moment Weston seemed disposed to give no answer; then, as if on a second thought, he sat
down on the bed beside Ransom and spoke as follows:

'I suppose it will save trouble if I deal with these questions at once, instead of leaving you
to pester us with them every hour for the next month. As to how we do it - I suppose you mean
how the spaceship works there's no good your asking that. Unless you were one of the four or five
real physicists now living you couldn't understand: and if there were any chance of your
understanding you certainly wouldn't be told. If it makes you happy to repeat words that don't mean
anything - which is, in fact, what unscientific people want when they ask for an explanation -
you may say we work by exploiting the less observed properties of solar radiation. As to why we are
here, we are on our way to Malacandra. . .

'Do you mean a star called Malacandra?'

'Even you can hardly suppose we are going out of the solar system. Malacandra is much nearer than
that: we shall make it in about twenty light days.'

'There isn't a planet called Malacandra,' objected Ransom.

'I am giving it its real name, not the name invented by terrestrial astronomers,' said Weston.

'But surely this is nonsense,' said Ransom. 'How the deuce did you find out its real name,
as you call it?'

'From the inhabitants.'

It took Ransom some time to digest this statement.

'Do you mean to tell me you claim to have been to this star before, or this planet, or whatever it is?'

'Yes.'

'You can't really ask me to believe that,' said Ransom. 'Damn it, all, it's not an everyday affair.
Why has no one heard of it? Why has it not been in all the papers?'

'Because we are not perfect idiots,' said Weston gruffly.

After a few moments silence Ransom began again. 'Which planet is it in our terminology?' he asked.

'Once and for all,' said Weston, 'I am not going to tell you. If you know how to find out when
we get there, you are welcome to do so: I don't think we have much to fear from your scientific
attainments. In the meantime, there is no reason for you to know.'

'And you say this place is inhabited?' said Ransom.

Weston gave him a peculiar look and then nodded. The uneasiness which this produced in Ransom
rapidly merged in an anger which he had almost lost sight of amidst the conflicting emotions
that beset him.

"And what has all this to do with me?' he broke out. 'You have assaulted me, drugged me, and
are apparently carrying me off as a prisoner in this infernal thing. What have I done to you?
What do you say for yourself?'

'I might reply by asking you why you crept into my backyard like a thief. If you had minded your
own business you would not be here. As it is, I admit that we have had to infringe your rights.
My only defence is that small claims must give way to great. As far as we know, we are doing what
has never been done in the history of man, perhaps never in the history of the universe. We have
learned how to jump off the speck of matter on which our species began; infinity, and therefore
perhaps eternity, is being put into the hands of the human race. You cannot be so small-minded as
to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million individuals are of the
slightest importance in comparison with this.'