H. G. Wells

by The First Men in the Moon

‘Two earthly days, perhaps.’

  ‘More nearly ten. Do you know, the sun is past its zenith, and sinking in the west? In four days' time or less it will be night.’

  ‘But – we've only eaten once!’

  ‘I know that. And – but there are the stars!’

  ‘But why should time seem different because we are on a smaller planet?’

  ‘I don't know. There it is!’

  ‘How does one tell time?’

  ‘Hunger – fatigue – all those things are different. Everything is different. Everything. To me it seems that since first we came out of the sphere it has been only a question of hours – long hours. At most.’

  ‘Ten days,’ I said; ‘that leaves –’ I looked up at the sun for a moment and then saw that it was halfway from the zenith to the western edge. ‘Four days!… Cavor, we mustn't sit here and dream. How do you think we can begin?’

  I stood up. ‘We must get a fixed point which we can recognize. We might hoist a flag, or a handkerchief or something – and quarter the ground and work round that.’

  He stood up beside me.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is nothing for it but to hunt for the sphere. Nothing. We may find it – certainly we may find it. And if not—’

  ‘We must keep on looking.’

  He looked this way and that, glanced up at the sky and down at the tunnel and astonished me by a sudden gesture of impatience. ‘Oh! but we have done foolishly! To have come to this pass! Think how it might have been, and the things we might have done!’

  ‘We may do something yet.’

  ‘Never the thing we might have done. Here below our feet is a world. Think of what that world must be! Think of that machine we saw, and the lid and the shaft! They were just remote outlying suggestions, and those creatures we have seen and fought with, no more than ignorant peasants, dwellers in the outskirts, yokels and labourers half akin to brutes. Down below! Caverns beneath caverns, tunnels, structures, ways… It must open out and be greater and wider and more populous as one descends. Assuredly. Right down at last to the central sea that washes round the core of the moon. Think of its inky waters under the spare lights! If indeed their eyes need lights. Think of the cascading tributaries pouring down their channels to feed it. Think of the tides upon its surface and the rush and swirl of its ebb and flow. Perhaps they have ships that go upon it, perhaps down there are mighty cities and swarming ways, and wisdom and order passing the wit of man. And we may die here upon it, and never see the masters who must be – ruling over these things! We may freeze and die here, and the air will freeze and thaw upon us, and then –! Then they will come upon us, come on our stiff and silent bodies, and find the sphere we cannot find, and they will understand at last, too late, all the thought and effort that ended here in vain!’ His voice through all that speech sounded like the voice of someone heard in a telephone, weak and far away.

  ‘But the darkness,’ I said.

  ‘One might get over that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don't know. How am I to know? One might carry a torch, one might have a lamp – The others – might understand.’

  He stood for a moment with his hands held down and a rueful face, staring out over the waste that defied him. Then with a gesture of renunciation he turned towards me with proposals for the systematic hunting of the sphere.

  ‘We can return,’ I said.

  He looked about him. ‘First of all we shall have to get to earth.’

  ‘We could bring back lamps to carry and climbing irons and a hundred necessary things.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘We can take back an earnest of success in this gold.’

  He looked at my golden crowbars and said nothing for a space. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back staring across the crater. At last he sighed and spoke. ‘It was I found the way here, but to find a way isn't always to be master of a way. If I take my secret back to earth what will happen? I do not see how I can keep my secret for a year, for even a part of a year. Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it. And then… Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another and against these moon people. It will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while if I tell my secret, this planet to its deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead. Other things are doubtful, but that is certain…. It is not as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battleground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for himself again – in a thousand years' time.’

  ‘There are methods of secrecy,’ I said.

  He looked up at me and smiled. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘why should one worry? There is little chance of our finding the sphere and down below trouble is brewing for us. It's simply the human habit of hoping till we die, that makes us think of return. Our troubles are only beginning. We have shown these moon-folk violence, we have given them a taste of our quality, and our chances are about as good as a tiger's that has got loose and killed a man in Hyde Park. The news of us must be running down from gallery to gallery, down towards the central parts…. No sane beings will ever let us take that sphere back to earth, after so much as they have seen of us.’

  ‘We aren't improving our chances,’ said I, ‘by sitting here.’

  We stood up side by side.

  ‘After all,’ he said, ‘we must separate. We must fasten up a handkerchief on these tall spikes here and stick it firmly, and from this as a centre we must work over the crater. You must go westward, moving out in semicircles to and from the setting sun. You must move first with your shadow on your right until it is at right angles with the direction of your handkerchief, and then with your shadow on your left. And I will do the same to the east. We will look into every gully, examine every skerry of rocks, we will do all we can to find my sphere. If we see Selenites we will hide from them as well as we can. For drink we must take snow, and if we feel the need of food we must kill a mooncalf, if we can, and eat such flesh as it has, – raw, and so each will go his own way.’

  ‘And if one of us comes upon the sphere?’

  ‘He must come back to the white handkerchief and stand by it and signal to the other.’

  ‘And if neither—?’

  Cavor glanced up at the sun. ‘We go on seeking until the night and cold overtake us.’

  ‘Suppose the Selenites have found the sphere and hidden it?’

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Or if presently they come hunting us?’

  He made no answer.

  ‘You had better take a club,’ I said.

  He shook his head and stared away from me across the waste.

  But for a moment he did not start. He looked round at me shyly, hesitated. ‘Au revoir,’ he said.

  I felt an odd stab of emotion. A sense of how we had galled each other and particularly how I must have galled him came to me. ‘Confound it!’ thought I, ‘we might have done better!’ I was on the point of asking him to shake hands – for that was how I felt just then – when he put his feet together and leapt away from me towards the north. He drifted through the air as a dead leaf would do, fell lightly and leapt again. I stood for a moment watching him, then faced westward reluctantly, pulled myself together, and, with something of the feeling of a man who leaps into icy water, selected a point and plunged forward to explore my solitary half of the moon world. I dropped rather clumsily among rocks, stood up and looked about me, clambered to a rocky slab and leapt again…. When presently I looked for Cavor he was hidden from my eyes, but the handkerchief showed out bravely on its headland, white in the blaze of the sun.

  I determined not to lose sight of that handkerchief wh
atever might betide.

  19

  MR BEDFORD ALONE

  In a little while it seemed to me as if I had always been alone on the moon. I hunted for a time with a certain intentness, but the heat was still very great and the thinness of the air felt like a hoop about one's chest. I came presently into a hollow basin bristling with tall brown dry fronds about its edge and I sat down under these to rest and cool. I intended to stay for only a little while. I put down my clubs beside me and sat resting my chin on my hands. I saw with a colourless interest that the rocks of the basin, where here and there the crackling dry lichens had shrunk away to show them, were all veined and splattered with gold, that here and there bosses of rounded and wrinkled gold projected from among the litter. What did that matter now? A sort of languor had possession of my limbs and mind, I did not believe for a moment that we should ever find the sphere in that vast desiccated wilderness. I seemed to lack a motive for effort until the Selenites should come. Then I supposed I should exert myself, obeying that unreasonable imperative that urges a man before all things to preserve and defend his life, albeit he may preserve it only to die more painfully in a little while.

  Why had we come to the moon?

  The thing presented itself to me as a perplexing problem. What is this spirit in man that urges him for ever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, even to risk a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Against his interest, against his happiness he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things. Some force not himself impels him and go he must. But why? Why? Sitting there in the midst of that useless moon gold, amidst the things of another world, I took count of all my life. Assuming I was to die a castaway upon the moon, I failed altogether to see what purpose I had served; I got no light on that point, but it was clearer to me than it had ever been in my life before that I was not serving my own purpose; that all my life I had in truth never served the purposes of my private life. Whose purposes, what purposes, was I serving?… I ceased to speculate on why we had come to the moon and took a wider sweep. Why had I come to the earth? Why had I a private life at all?… I lost myself at last in bottomless speculation.

  My thoughts became vague and cloudy, no longer leading in definite directions. I had not felt heavy or weary – I cannot imagine one doing so upon the moon – but I suppose I was greatly fatigued. At any rate I slept.

  Slumbering there rested me greatly, and the sun was setting and the violence of the heat abating through all the time I slumbered. When at last I was roused from my slumbers by a remote clamour, I felt active and capable again. I rubbed my eyes and stretched my arms. I rose to my feet – I was a little stiff – and at once prepared to resume my search. I shouldered my golden clubs, one on each shoulder, and went on out of the ravine of the gold-veined rocks.

  The sun was certainly lower, much lower than it had been, the air was very much cooler. I perceived I must have slept some time. It seemed to me that a faint touch of misty blueness hung about the western cliff. I leapt to a little boss of rock, and surveyed the crater. I could see no signs of mooncalves or Selenites, nor could I see Cavor, but I could see my handkerchief afar off spread out on its thicket of thorns. I looked about me, and then sprang forward to the next convenient viewpoint.

  I beat my way round in a semicircle and back again in a still remoter crescent. It was very fatiguing and hopeless. The air was really very much cooler and it seemed to me that the shadow under the westward cliff was growing broad. Ever and again I stopped and reconnoitred, but there was no sign of Cavor, no sign of Selenites, and it seemed to me the mooncalves must have been driven in to the interior again – I could see none of them. I became more and more desirous of seeing Cavor. The winged outline of the sun had sunk now until it was scarcely the distance of its diameter from the rim of the sky. I was oppressed by the idea that the Selenites would presently close their lids and valves and shut us out under the inexorable onrush of the lunar night. It seemed to me high time that he abandoned his search and that we took counsel together. I felt how urgent it was that we should decide soon as to our course. We had failed to find the sphere, we no longer had time to seek it. Once these valves were closed, with us outside, we were lost men. The great night of space would descend upon us, that blackness of the void which is the only absolute death. All my being shrank from that approach. We must get into the moon again, though we were slain in doing it. I was haunted by a vision of our freezing to death, of our hammering with our last strength on the valve of the great pit.

  I took no thought any more of the sphere. I thought only of finding Cavor again. I was half inclined to go back into the moon without him rather than seek him until it was too late. I was already halfway back towards our handkerchief, when suddenly—

  I saw the sphere!

  I did not find it so much as it found me. It was lying much farther to the westward than I had gone, and the sloping rays of the sinking sun reflected from its glass had suddenly proclaimed its presence in a dazzling beam. For an instant I thought this was some new device of the Selenites against us, and then I understood.

  I threw up my arms, shouted a ghostly shout and set off in vast leaps towards it. I missed one of my leaps and dropped into a deep ravine and twisted my ankle, and after that I stumbled at almost every leap. I was in a state of hysterical agitation, trembling violently and quite breathless long before I got to it. Three times at least I had to stop with my hands resting on my sides, and in spite of the thin dryness of the air the perspiration was wet upon my face.

  I thought of nothing but the sphere until I reached it, I forgot even my trouble of Cavor's whereabouts. My last leap flung me with my hands hard against its glass; then I lay against it panting and trying vainly to shout ‘Cavor! Here is the sphere!’ When I had recovered a little I peered through the thick glass, and the things inside seemed tumbled. I stooped to peer closer. Then I attempted to get in. I had to hoist it over a little to get my head through the manhole. The screw stopper was inside and I could see now that nothing had been touched, nothing had suffered. It lay there as we had left it when we had dropped out amidst the snow. For a time I was wholly occupied in making and remaking this inventory. I found I was trembling violently. It was good to see that familiar dark interior again! I cannot tell you how good. Presently I crept inside and sat down among the things. I looked through the glass at the moon world and shivered. I placed up my gold clubs upon the bale and sought out and took a little food, not so much because I wanted it but because it was there. Then it occurred to me that it was time to go out and signal for Cavor. But I did not go out and signal for Cavor forthwith. Something held me to the sphere.

  After all, everything was coming right. There would still be time for us to get more of the magic stone that gives one mastery over men. There was gold for the picking up, and the sphere would travel as well half full of gold as though it were empty. We could go back now, masters of ourselves and our world, and then—

  I roused myself at last and with an effort got myself out of the sphere. I shivered as I emerged, for the evening air was growing very cold. I stood in the hollow, staring about me. I scrutinized the bushes round me very carefully before I leapt to the rocky shelf hard by and took once more what had been my first leap in the moon. But this time I made it with no effort whatever.

  The growth and decay of the vegetation had gone on apace and the whole aspect of the rocks had changed, but still it was possible to make out the slope on which the seeds had germinated and the rocky mass from which we had taken our first view of the crater. But the spiky shrub on the slope stood brown and sere now and thirty feet high, and cast long shadows that stretched out of sight; and the little seeds that clustered in its upper branches were brown and ripe. Its work was done, it was brittle and ready to fall and crumple under the freezing air, so
soon as the nightfall came. And the huge cacti that had swollen as we watched them had long since burst and scattered their spores to the four quarters of the moon. Amazing little corner in the universe – the landing-place of men!

  Some day, thought I, I will have an inscription standing there right in the midst of the hollow. It came to me, if only this teeming world within could know of the full import of that moment, how furious its tumult would become!

  But as yet it could scarcely be dreaming of the significance of our coming. For if it did the crater would surely be an uproar of pursuit. I looked about for some place from which I might signal to Cavor, and saw that same patch of rock to which he had leapt from my present standpoint, still bare and barren in the sun. For a moment I hesitated at going so far from the sphere. Then with a pang of shame at that hesitation I leapt… .

  From this vantage point I surveyed the crater again. Far away at the top of the enormous shadow I cast was the little white handkerchief fluttering on the bushes. It was very little and very far. Cavor was not in sight. It seemed to me that by this time he ought to be looking for me. That was the agreement. But he was nowhere to be seen.

  I stood waiting and watching, hands shading my eyes, expecting every moment to distinguish him. Very probably I stood there for a long time. I tried to shout and was reminded of the thinness of the air. I made an undecided step back towards the sphere. But a lurking dread of the Selenites made me hesitate to signal my whereabouts by hoisting one of our sleeping-blankets on to the adjacent scrub. My eyes searched the crater again.

  It had an effect of emptiness that chilled me. All sound of the Selenites in the world beneath had died away. It was as still as death. Save for the faint stir of the shrub about me in the little breeze that was rising, there was no sound, no shadow of a sound. And the breeze blew chill.

  Confound Cavor!

  I took a deep breath. I put my hands to the sides of my mouth: ‘Cavor!’ I bawled and the sound was like some manni-kin shouting far away.