The H.G. Wells Reader (27 page)

“It's dark,” he said.

“Your legs and feet will light us. You're wet with luminous stuff.”

“But—”

A tumult of sounds, and in particular a sound like a clanging gong became audible advancing up the main tunnel. It was horribly suggestive of a tumultuous pursuit. We made a bolt for the unlit cavern forthwith. As we ran our way was lit by the irradiation of Cavor's legs. “It's lucky,” I panted, “they took off our boots, or we should fill this place with clatter.” On we rushed, taking the smallest steps we could to avoid striking the roof of the cavern. After a time we seemed to be gaining on the uproar. It became muffled, it dwindled, it died away.

I stopped and looked back and I heard the pad, pad of Cavor's feet receding. Then he stopped also. “Bedford,” he whispered, “there's a sort of light in front of us.”

I looked, and at first could see nothing. Then I perceived his head and shoulders dimly outline against a fainter darkness. I saw also that this mitigation of the darkness was not blue as all the other light within the moon had been, but a pallid gray, a very vague faint white, the daylight color. Cavor noted this difference as soon or sooner than I did, and I think, too, that it filled him with much the same wild hope.

“Bedford,” he whispered, and his voice trembled, “that light—it is possible—”

He did not dare to say the thing he hoped. There came a pause. Suddenly I knew by the sound of his feet that he was striding towards that pallor. I followed him with a beating heart.

The light grew stronger as we advanced. In a little time it was nearly as strong as the phosphorescence on Cavor's legs. Our tunnel was expanding into a cavern and this new light was at the farther end of it. I perceived something that set my hopes leaping and bounding.

“Cavor,” I said, “it comes from above! I am certain it comes from above!”

He made no answer, but hurried on.

Indisputably it was a grey light, a silvery light.

In another moment we were beneath it. It filtered down through a chink in the walls of the cavern, and as I stared up, drip, came a huge drop of water upon my face. I started, and stood aside; drip, fell another drop quite audibly on the rocky floor.

“Cavor,” I said, “if one of us lifts the other, he can reach that crack!”

“I'll lift you,” he said, and incontinently hoisted me as though I were a baby.

I thrust an arm into the crack, and just at my finger-tips found a little ledge by which I could hold. The white light was very much brighter now. I pulled myself up by two fingers with scarcely an effort, though on earth I weigh twelve stone, reached to a still higher corner of rock, and so got my feet on the narrow ledge. I stood up and searched up the rocks with my fingers; the cleft broadened out upwardly. “It's climbable,” I said to Cavor. “Can you jump up to my hand if I hold it down to you?”

I wedged myself between the sides of the cleft, rested knee and foot on the ledge, and extended a hand. I could not see Cavor, but I could hear the rustle of his movements as he crouched to spring. Then whack, and he was hanging to my arm—and no heavier than a kitten! I lugged him up until he had a hand on my ledge and could release me.

“Confound it!” I said, “anyone could be a mountaineer on the moon,” and so set myself in earnest to climbing. For a few minutes I clambered steadily, and then I looked up again. The cleft opened out gradually, and the light was bright. Only—

It was not daylight after all!

In another moment I could see what it was, and at the sight I could have beaten my head against the rocks with disappointment. For I beheld simply an irregularly sloping open space, and all over its slanting floor stood a forest of little club-shaped fungi, each shining gloriously with that pinkish, silver light. For a moment I stared at their soft radiance, then sprang forward and upward among them. I plucked up half a dozen and flung them against the rocks, and then sat down, laughing bitterly, as Cavor's ruddy face came into view.

“It's phosphorescence again,” I said. “No need to hurry. Sit down and make yourself at home.” And as he spluttered over our disappointment I began to fling more of these growths into the cleft.

“I thought it was daylight,” he said.

“Daylight!” cried I. “Daybreak, sunset, clouds, and windy skies! Shall we ever see such things again?”

As I spoke a little picture of our world seemed to rise before me, bright and dainty and clear, like the background of some old Italian picture. “The sky that changes, and the sea that changes, and the hills and the green trees, and the towns and cities shining in the sun. Think of a wet roof at sunset, Cavor! Think of the windows of a westward house!”

He made no answer.

“Here we are burrowing in this beastly world that isn't a world, with its inky ocean hidden in some abominable blackness below, and outside that torrid day and that death stillness of night. And all those things that are chasing us now, beastly men
of leather—insect men, that come out of a nightmare! After all, they're right! What business have we here, smashing them and disturbing their world? For all we know the whole planet is up and after us already. In a minute we may hear them whimpering and their gongs going. What are we to do? Where are we to go? Here we are as comfortable as snakes from Jamrach's loose in a Surbiton villa!”

“It was your fault,” said Cavor.

“My fault!” I shouted. “Good Lord!”

“I had an idea.”

“Curse your ideas!”

“If we had refused to budge—”

“Under those goads?”

“Yes. They would have carried us.”

“Over that bridge?”

“Yes. They must have carried us from outside.”

“I'd rather be carried by a fly across a ceiling. Good Heavens!”

I resumed my destruction of the fungi. Then suddenly I saw something that struck me even then.

“Cavor,” I said, “these chains are of gold!”

He was thinking intently, with his hands gripping his cheeks. He turned his head slowly and stared at me and, when I had repeated my words, at the twisted chain about his right hand. “So they are,” he said, “so they are.” His face lost its transitory interest even as he looked. He hesitated for a moment, then went on with his interrupted meditation. I sat for a space puzzling over the fact that I had only just observed this, until I considered the blue light in which we had been and which had taken all the color out of the metal. And from that discovery I started upon a train of thought that carried me wide and far. I forgot that I had just been asking what business we had in the moon. Gold. . . .

It was Cavor who spoke first. “It seems to me that there are two courses open to us.”

“Well?”

“Either we can attempt to make our way—fight our way if necessary—out to the exterior and then hunt for our sphere until either we find it or the cold of the night comes to kill us, or else—”

He paused. “Yes,” I said, though I knew what was coming.

“We might attempt once more to establish some sort of understanding with the minds of the people in the moon.”

“So far as I'm concerned—it's first.”

“I doubt.”

“I don't.”

“You see,” said Cavor, “I do not think we can judge the Selenites by what we have seen of them. Their central world, their civilized world, will be far below in the profounder caverns about their sea. This region of the crust in which we are is an outlying
district, a pastoral region. At least, that is my interpretation. These Selenites we have seen may be only the equivalent of cowboys and engine-tenders. Their use of goads—in all probability mooncalf goads—the lack of imagination they show in expecting us to be able to do just what they can do, their indisputable brutality, all seem to point to something of that sort. But if we endured—”

“Neither of us could endure a six-inch plank across the bottomless pit for very long.”

“No,” said Cavor, “but then—”

“I
won't
,” I said.

He discovered a new line of possibilities. “Well,” suppose we got ourselves into some corner, where we could defend ourselves against these hinds and laborers. If, for example, we could hold out for a week or so, it is probable that the news of our appearance would filter down to the more intelligent and populous parts—”

“If they exist.”

“They must exist, or whence come those tremendous machines?”

“That's possible, but it's the worst of the two chances.”

“We might write up inscriptions on walls—”

“How do we know their eyes could see the marks we made?”

“If we cut them—”

“That's possible of course.”

I took up a new thread of thought. “After all,” I said, “I suppose you don't think these Selenites so infinitely wiser than men?”

“They must know a lot more—or at least a lot of different things.”

“Yes, but—” I hesitated. “I think you'll admit, Cavor, that you're rather an exceptional man.”

“How?”

“Well, you—you're a rather lonely man; have been, that is. You haven't married.”

“Never wanted to. But why?”

“And you never grew richer than you happened to be?”

“Never wanted that either.”

“You've just rooted after knowledge.”

“Well, a certain curiosity is nartural—”

“You think so. That's just it. You think every other mind wants to know. I remember once, when I asked you why you conducted all these researches, you said you wanted yours F.R.S., and to have the stuff called Cavorite, and things like that. You know perfectly well you didn't do it for that; but at the time my question took you by surprise, and you felt you ought to have something to look like a motive. Really, you conducted researches because you had to. It's your twist.”

“Perhaps it is—”

“It isn't one man in a million has that twist. Most men want—well, various things, but very few want knowledge for its own sake. I don't. I know perfectly well. Now these Selenites seem to be a driving, busy sort of people, but how do you know that
even the most intelligent will take an interest in us or our world? I don't believe they'll even know we have a world. They never come out at night—they'd freeze if they did. They've probably never seen any heavenly body at all except blazing sun. How are they to know there is another world? What does it matter to them if they do? Well, even if they have had a glimpse of a few stars or even of the earth crescent, what of that? Why should people living inside a planet trouble to observe that sort of thing? Men wouldn't have done it except for the seasons and sailing; why should the moon people? . . .

“Well, suppose there a few philosophers like yourself. They are just the very Selenites who'll never hear of our existence. Suppose a Selenite had dropped on the earth when you were at Lympne; you'd have been the last man in the world to hear he had come. You never read a newspaper. You see the chances against you. Well, it's for these chances we're sitting here doing nothing while precious time is flying. I tell you we've got into a fix. We've come unarmed, we've lost our sphere, we've got no food, we've shown ourselves to the Selenites and made them think we're strange, strong, dangerous animals, and unless these Selenites are perfect fools they'll take us if they can and kill us if they can't, and that's the end of the matter. After they take us they'll probably kill us through some misunderstanding. After we're done for they may discuss us, perhaps, but we shan't get much fun out of that.”

“Go on.”

“On the other hand, here's gold knocking about like cast-iron at home. If only we can get some of it back, if only we can find our sphere again before they do and get back, then—”

“Yes?”

“We might put the thing on a sounder footing. Come back in a bigger sphere with us.”

“Good Lord!” cried Cavor, as though the idea was horrible.

I shied another luminous fungus down the cleft.

“Look here, Cavor,” I said, “I've half the voting power anyhow in this affair, and this is a case for a practical man. I'm a practical man, and you are not. I'm not going to trust to Selenites and geometrical diagrams again if I can help it. . . . That's all. Get back. Drop all this secrecy—or most of it. And come again.”

He reflected. “When I came to the moon,” he said, “I ought to have come alone.”

“The question before the meeting,” I said, “is how to get back to the sphere.”

For a time we nursed our knees in silence. Then he seemed to decide to accept my reasons.

“I think,” he said, “one can get data. It is clear that, while the sun is on this side of the moon, the air will be blowing through this planet sponge from the dark side hither. On this side, at any rate, the air will be expanding and flowing out of the moon caverns into the crater. . . . Very well, there's a draught here.”

“So there is.”

“And that means that this is not a dead end, somewhere behind us this cleft goes on and up. The draught is blowing up, and that is the way we have to go. If we try
to get up any sort of chimney or gully there is, we shall not only get out of these passages where they are hunting for us—”

“But suppose the gully is too narrow.”

“We'll come down again.”

“Ssh!” I said, suddenly; “what's that?”

We listened. At first it was an indistinct murmur, and then one picked out the clang of a gong. “They must think we are mooncalves,” said I, “to be frightened at that.”

“They're coming along that passage,” said Cavor. “They must be.”

“They'll not think of the cleft. They'll go past.”