Out Of The Silent Planet (4 page)

'I happen to disagree,' said Ransom, 'and I always have disagreed, even about vivisection. But
you haven't answered my question. What do you want me for? What good am I to do you on this -
on Malacandra?'

'That I don't know,' said Weston. 'It was no idea of ours. We are only obeying orders.'

'Whose?'

There was another pause. 'Come,' said Weston at last. 'There is really no use in continuing this
cross-exammation. You keep on asking me questions I can't answer: in some cases because I don't
know the answers, in others because you wouldn't understand them. It will make things very much
pleasanter during the voyage if you can only resign your mind to your fate and stop bothering
yourself and us. It would be easier if your philosophy of life were not so insufferably narrow
and individualistic. I had thought no one could fail to be inspired by the role you are being asked
to play: that even a worm, if it could understand, would rise to the sacrifice. I mean, of course,
the sacrifice of time and liberty, and some little risk. Don't misunderstand me.

'Well,' said Ransom, 'you hold all the cards, and I must make the best of it. I consider your
philosophy of life raving lunacy. I suppose all that stuff about inanity and eternity means that
you think you are justified in doing anything - absolutely anything - here and now, on the off
chance that some creatures or other descended from man as we know, him may crawl about a few
centuries longer in some part of the universe.'

'Yes - anything whatever,' returned the scientist sternly, 'and all educated opinion - for I do
not call classics and history and such trash education - is entirely on my side. I am glad you
raised the point, and I advise you to remember my answer. In the meantime, if you will follow me
into the next room, we will have breakfast. Be careful how you get up: your weight here is hardly
appreciable compared with your weight on Earth.'

Ransom rose and his captor opened the door. Instantly the room was flooded with a dazzling golden
light which completely eclipsed the pale earthlight behind him.

'I will give you darkened glasses in a moment,' said Weston as he preceded him into the chamber
whence the radiance was pouring. It seemed to Ransom that Weston went up a hill towards the
doorway and disappeared suddenly downwards when he had passed it. When he followed - which he did
with caution - he had the curious impression that he was walking up to the edge of a precipice:
the new room beyond the doorway seemed to be built on its side so that its farther wall lay almost
in the same plane as the floor of the room he was leaving. When, however, he ventured to put
forward his foot, he found that the floor continued flush and as he entered the second room the
walls suddenly righted themselves and the rounded ceiling was over his head. Looking back, he
perceived that the bedroom in its turn was now heeling over - its roof a wall and one of its
walls a roof.

'You will soon get used to it,' said Weston, following his gaze. 'The ship is roughly spherical,
and now that we are outside the gravitational field of the Earth "down" means - and feels - towards
the centre of our own little metal world. This, of course, was foreseen and we built her accordingly.
The core of the ship is a hollow globe - we keep our stores inside it - and the surface of that
globe is the floor we are walking on. The cabins are arranged all round this, their walls supporting
an outer globe which from our point of view is the roof. As the centre is always "down", the piece
of floor you are standing on always feels flat or horizontal and the wall you are standing against
always seems vertical. On the other hand, the globe of floor is so small that you can always see
over the edge of it - over what would be the horizon if you were a flea - and then you see the floor
and walls of the next cabin in a different plane. It is just the same; on Earth, of course, only we
are not big enough to see it.'

After this explanation he made arrangements in his precise, ungracious way for the comfort of his
guest or prisoner. Ransom, at his advice, removed all his clothes and substituted a little metal
girdle hung with enormous weights to reduce, as far as possible, the unmanageable lightness of
his body. He also assumed tinted glasses, and soon found himself seated opposite Weston at a
small table laid for breakfast. He was both hungry and thirsty and eagerly attacked the meal
which consisted of tinned meat, biscuit, butter and coffee.

But all these actions he had performed mechanically. Stripping, eating and drinking passed almost
unnoticed, and all he ever remembered of his first meal in the space-ship was the tyranny of heat
and light. Both were present in a degree which would have been intolerable on Earth, but each had
a new quality. The light was paler than any light of comparable intensity that he had ever seen;
it was not pure white but the palest of all imaginable golds, and it cast shadows as sharp as a
floodlight. The heat, utterly free from moisture, seemed to knead and stroke the skin like a
gigantic masseur: it produced no tendency to drowiness: rather, intense alacrity. His headache
was gone: he felt vigilant, courageous and magnanimous as he had seldom felt on Earth. Gradually
he dared to raise his eyes to the skylight. Steel shutters were drawn across all but a chink of
the glass, and that chink was covered with blinds of some heavy and dark material; but still it
was too bright to look at.

I always thought space was dark and cold,' he marked vaguely.

'Forgotten the sun?' said Weston contemptuously.

Ransom went on eating for some time. Then he began, 'It it's like this in the early morning,' and
stopped, warned by the expression on Weston's face. Awe fell upon him: there were no mornings
here, no evenings, and no night - nothing but the changeless noon which had filled for centuries
beyond history so many millions of cubic miles. He glanced at Weston again, but the latter held
up his hand.

'Don't talk,' he said. 'We have discussed all 'that is necessary. The ship does not carry oxygen
enough for any unnecessary exertion; not even for talking.'

Shortly afterwards he rose, without inviting the other to follow him, and left the room by one
of the many doors which Ransom had not yet seen opened.

THE PERIOD spent in the space-ship ought to have been one of terror and anxiety for Ransom. He was
separated by an astronomical distance from every member of the human race except two whom he had
excellent reasons for distrusting. He was heading for an unknown destination, and was being brought
thither for a purpose which his captors steadily refused to disclose. Devine and Weston relieved
each other regularly in a room which Ransom was never allowed to enter and where he supposed the
controls of their machine must be. Weston, during his watches on, was almost entirely silent.
Devine was more loquacious and would often talk and guffaw with the prisoner until Weston rapped
on the wall of the control room and warned them not to waste air. But Devine was secretive after
a certain point. He was quite ready to laugh at Weston's solemn scientific idealism. He didn't
give a damn, he said, for the future of the species or the meeting of two worlds.

'There's more to Malacandra than that,' he would add with a wink. But when Ransom asked him what
more, he would lapse into satire and make ironical remarks about the white man's burden and the
blessings of civilization.

'It is inhabited, then?' Ransom would press.

'Ah - there's always a native question in these things, Devine would answer. For the most part his
conversation ran on the things he would do when he got back to Earth: ocean going yachts, the most
expensive women and a big place on the Riviera figured largely in his plans. 'I'm not running all
these risks for fun.'

Direct questions about Ransom's own role were usually met with silence. Only once, in reply to such
a question, Devine, who was then in Ransom's opinion very far from sober, admitted that they
were rather 'handing' him the baby.

'But I'm sure,' he added, 'you'll live up to the old school tie.'

All this, as I have said, was sufficiently disquieting. The odd thing was that it did not very
greatly disquiet him. It is hard for a man to brood on the future when he is feeling so extremely
well as Ransom now felt. There was an endless night on one side of the ship and an endless day on
the other: each was marvellous and he moved from the one to the other at his will, delighted. In
the nights; which he could create by turning the handle of a door, he lay for hours in contemplation
of the skylight. The Earth's disk was nowhere to be seen, the stars, thick as daisies on an uncut
lawn, reigned perpetually with no cloud, no moon, no sunrise, to dispute their sway. There were
planets of unbelievable majesty, and constellations to dreamed of: there were celestial sapphires,
rubies, emeralds and pin-pricks of burning gold; far out on the left of the picture hung a comet,
tiny and remote: and between all and behind all, far more emphatic and palpable than it showed
on Earth, the undimensioned, enigmatic blackness. The lights trembled: they seemed to grow
brighter as he looked. Stretched naked on his bed, a second Dana, he found it night by night more
difficult to disbelieve in old astrology: almost he felt, wholly he imagined, 'sweet influence'
pouring or even stabbing into his surrendered body. All was silence but for the irregular tinkling
noises. He knew now that these were made by meteorite's, small, drifting particles of the
world-stuff that smote continually on their hollow drum of steel; and he guessed that at any
moment they might meet something large enough to make meteorites of ship and all. But he could not
fear. He now felt that Weston had justly called him little-minded in the moment of his first panic.
The adventure was too high, its circumstance too 'solemn', for any emotion, save a severe delight.
But the days - that is, the hours spent in the sunward hemisphere of their microcosm - were the
best of all. Often he rose after only a few hours sleep to return, drawn by an irresistible
attraction, to the regions of light; he could not cease to wonder at the noon which always awaited
you however early you were to seek it. There, totally immersed in a bath of pure ethereal
colour and of unrelenting though unwounding brightness, stretched his full length and with eyes
half closed in the strange chariot that bore them, faintly quivering, through depth after depth
of tranquillity far above the reach of night, he felt his body and mind daily rubbed and scoured
and filled with new vitality. Weston, in one of his brief, reluctant answers, admitted a
scientific basis for these sensations: they were receiving, he said, many rays that never
penetrated the terrestrial atmosphere.

But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his
progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind
by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of
'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold
vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how
much it affected him till now - now that the very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for
this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life
pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this
ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren; he saw now that it was
the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the
Earth with so many eyes - and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older
thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens - the heavens which declared
the glory - the

'happy climes that ly
Where day never shuts his eye
Up in the broad fields of the sky.'

He quoted Milton's words to himself lovingly, at this time and often.

He did not, of course, spend all his time in basking. He explored the ship (so far as he was allowed),
passing from room to room with those slow movements which Weston enjoined upon them lest exertion
should over-tax their supply of air. Ftom the necessity of its shape, the space-ship contained a
good many more chambers than were in regular use; but Ransom was also inclined to think that its
owners - or at least Devine - intended these to be filled with cargo of some kind on the return
voyage. He also became, by an insensible process, the steward and cook of the company; partly because
he felt it natural to share the only labours he could share - he was never allowed into the
control room - and partly in order to anticipate a tendency which Weston showed to make him a
servant whether he would or not. He preferred to work as a volunteer rather than in admitted
slavery: and he liked his own cooking a good deal more than that of his companions.

It was these duties that made him at first the unwilling, and then the alarmed, hearer of a
conversation which occurred about a fortnight (he judged) after the beginning of their voyage.
He had washed up the remains of their evening meal, basked in the sunlight, chatted with Devine -
better company than Weston, though in Ransom's opinion much the more odious of the two - and
retired to bed at his usual time. He was a little restless, and after an hour or so it occurred
to him that he had forgotten one or two small arrangements in the galley which would facilitate
his work in the morning. The galley opened off the saloon or day room, and its door was close to
that of the control room. He rose and went there at once. His feet, like the rest of him, were bare.

The galley skylight was on the dark side of the ship, but Ransom did not turn on the light. To
leave the door ajar was sufficient, as this admitted a stream of brilliant sunlight. As everyone
who has 'kept house' will understand, he found that his preparations for the morning had been even
more incomplete than he supposed. He did his work well, from practice, and therefore quietly. He
had just finished and was drying his hands on the roller towel behind the galley door when he heard
the door of the control room open and saw the silhouette of a man outside the galley - Devine's,
he gathered. Devine did not come forward into the saloon, but remained standing and talking -
apparently into the control room. It thus came about that while Ransom could hear distinctly
what Devine said, he could not make out Weston's answers.