The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 01

by Anthology

  My next clear recollection is that we were prisoners at we knew not what depths beneath the moon's surface; we were in darkness amidst strange distracting noises; our bodies were covered with scratches and bruises, and our heads racked with pain.

  Chapter 12

  The Selenite's Face

  I found myself sitting crouched together in a tumultuous darkness. For a long time I could not understand where I was, nor how I had come to this perplexity. I thought of the cupboard into which I had been thrust at times when I was a child, and then of a very dark and noisy bedroom in which I had slept during an illness. But these sounds about me were not the noises I had known, and there was a thin flavour in the air like the wind of a stable. Then I supposed we must still be at work upon the sphere, and that somehow I had got into the cellar of Cavor's house. I remembered we had finished the sphere, and fancied I must still be in it and travelling through space.

  "Cavor," I said, "cannot we have some light?"

  There came no answer.

  "Cavor!" I insisted.

  I was answered by a groan. "My head!" I heard him say; "my head!"

  I attempted to press my hands to my brow, which ached, and discovered they were tied together. This startled me very much. I brought them up to my mouth and felt the cold smoothness of metal. They were chained together. I tried to separate my legs and made out they were similarly fastened, and also that I was fastened to the ground by a much thicker chain about the middle of my body.

  I was more frightened than I had yet been by anything in all our strange experiences. For a time I tugged silently at my bonds. "Cavor!" I cried out sharply. "Why am I tied? Why have you tied me hand and foot?"

  "I haven't tied you," he answered. "It's the Selenites."

  The Selenites! My mind hung on that for a space. Then my memories came back to me: the snowy desolation, the thawing of the air, the growth of the plants, our strange hopping and crawling among the rocks and vegetation of the crater. All the distress of our frantic search for the sphere returned to me.... Finally the opening of the great lid that covered the pit!

  Then as I strained to trace our later movements down to our present plight, the pain in my head became intolerable. I came to an insurmountable barrier, an obstinate blank.

  "Cavor!"

  "Yes?"

  "Where are we?"

  "How should I know?"

  "Are we dead?"

  "What nonsense!"

  "They've got us, then!"

  He made no answer but a grunt. The lingering traces of the poison seemed to make him oddly irritable.

  "What do you mean to do?"

  "How should I know what to do?"

  "Oh, very well!" said I, and became silent. Presently, I was roused from a stupor. "O Lord!" I cried; "I wish you'd stop that buzzing!"

  We lapsed into silence again, listening to the dull confusion of noises like the muffled sounds of a street or factory that filled our ears. I could make nothing of it, my mind pursued first one rhythm and then another, and questioned it in vain. But after a long time I became aware of a new and sharper element, not mingling with the rest but standing out, as it were, against that cloudy background of sound. It was a series of relatively very little definite sounds, tappings and rubbings, like a loose spray of ivy against a window or a bird moving about upon a box. We listened and peered about us, but the darkness was a velvet pall. There followed a noise like the subtle movement of the wards of a well-oiled lock. And then there appeared before me, hanging as it seemed in an immensity of black, a thin bright line.

  "Look!" whispered Cavor very softly.

  "What is it?"

  "I don't know."

  We stared.

  The thin bright line became a band, and broader and paler. It took upon itself the quality of a bluish light falling upon a white-washed wall. It ceased to be parallel-sided; it developed a deep indentation on one side. I turned to remark this to Cavor, and was amazed to see his ear in a brilliant illumination--all the rest of him in shadow. I twisted my head round as well as my bonds would permit. "Cavor," I said, "it's behind!"

  His ear vanished--gave place to an eye!

  Suddenly the crack that had been admitting the light broadened out, and revealed itself as the space of an opening door. Beyond was a sapphire vista, and in the doorway stood a grotesque outline silhouetted against the glare.

  We both made convulsive efforts to turn, and failing, sat staring over our shoulders at this. My first impression was of some clumsy quadruped with lowered head. Then I perceived it was the slender pinched body and short and extremely attenuated bandy legs of a Selenite, with his head depressed between his shoulders. He was without the helmet and body covering they wear upon the exterior.

  He was a blank, black figure to us, but instinctively our imaginations supplied features to his very human outline. I, at least, took it instantly that he was somewhat hunchbacked, with a high forehead and long features.

  He came forward three steps and paused for a time. His movements seemed absolutely noiseless. Then he came forward again. He walked like a bird, his feet fell one in front of the other. He stepped out of the ray of light that came through the doorway, and it seemed as though he vanished altogether in the shadow.

  For a moment my eyes sought him in the wrong place, and then I perceived him standing facing us both in the full light. Only the human features I had attributed to him were not there at all!

  Of course I ought to have expected that, only I didn't. It came to me as an absolute, for a moment an overwhelming shock. It seemed as though it wasn't a face, as though it must needs be a mask, a horror, a deformity, that would presently be disavowed or explained. There was no nose, and the thing had dull bulging eyes at the side--in the silhouette I had supposed they were ears. There were no ears.... I have tried to draw one of these heads, but I cannot. There was a mouth, downwardly curved, like a human mouth in a face that stares ferociously....

  The neck on which the head was poised was jointed in three places, almost like the short joints in the leg of a crab. The joints of the limbs I could not see, because of the puttee-like straps in which they were swathed, and which formed the only clothing the being wore.

  There the thing was, looking at us!

  At the time my mind was taken up by the mad impossibility of the creature. I suppose he also was amazed, and with more reason, perhaps, for amazement than we. Only, confound him! he did not show it. We did at least know what had brought about this meeting of incompatible creatures. But conceive how it would seem to decent Londoners, for example, to come upon a couple of living things, as big as men and absolutely unlike any other earthly animals, careering about among the sheep in Hyde Park! It must have taken him like that.

  Figure us! We were bound hand and foot, fagged and filthy; our beards two inches long, our faces scratched and bloody. Cavor you must imagine in his knickerbockers (torn in several places by the bayonet scrub) his Jaegar shirt and old cricket cap, his wiry hair wildly disordered, a tail to every quarter of the heavens. In that blue light his face did not look red but very dark, his lips and the drying blood upon my hands seemed black. If possible I was in a worse plight than he, on account of the yellow fungus into which I had jumped. Our jackets were unbuttoned, and our shoes had been taken off and lay at our feet. And we were sitting with our backs to this queer bluish light, peering at such a monster as Durer might have invented.

  Cavor broke the silence; started to speak, went hoarse, and cleared his throat. Outside began a terrific bellowing, as if a mooncalf were in trouble. It ended in a shriek, and everything was still again.

  Presently the Selenite turned about, flickered into the shadow, stood for a moment retrospective at the door, and then closed it on us; and once more we were in that murmurous mystery of darkness into which we had awakened.

  Chapter 13

  Mr. Cavor Makes Some Suggestions

  For a time neither of us spoke. To focus together all the things we had brought upon ou
rselves seemed beyond my mental powers.

  "They've got us," I said at last.

  "It was that fungus."

  "Well--if I hadn't taken it we should have fainted and starved."

  "We might have found the sphere."

  I lost my temper at his persistence, and swore to myself. For a time we hated one another in silence. I drummed with my fingers on the floor between my knees, and gritted the links of my fetters together. Presently I was forced to talk again.

  "What do you make of it, anyhow?" I asked humbly.

  "They are reasonable creatures--they can make things and do things. Those lights we saw..."

  He stopped. It was clear he could make nothing of it.

  When he spoke again it was to confess, "After all, they are more human than we had a right to expect. I suppose--"

  He stopped irritatingly.

  "Yes?"

  "I suppose, anyhow--on any planet where there is an intelligent animal--it will carry its brain case upward, and have hands, and walk erect."

  Presently he broke away in another direction.

  "We are some way in," he said. "I mean--perhaps a couple of thousand feet or more."

  "Why?"

  "It's cooler. And our voices are so much louder. That faded quality--it has altogether gone. And the feeling in one's ears and throat."

  I had not noted that, but I did now.

  "The air is denser. We must be some depths--a mile even, we may be--inside the moon."

  "We never thought of a world inside the moon."

  "No."

  "How could we?"

  "We might have done. Only one gets into habits of mind."

  He thought for a time.

  "Now," he said, "it seems such an obvious thing."

  "Of course! The moon must be enormously cavernous, with an atmosphere within, and at the centre of its caverns a sea.

  "One knew that the moon had a lower specific gravity than the earth, one knew that it had little air or water outside, one knew, too, that it was sister planet to the earth, and that it was unaccountable that it should be different in composition. The inference that it was hollowed out was as clear as day. And yet one never saw it as a fact. Kepler, of course--"

  His voice had the interest now of a man who has discerned a pretty sequence of reasoning.

  "Yes," he said, "Kepler with his sub-volvani was right after all."

  "I wish you had taken the trouble to find that out before we came," I said.

  He answered nothing, buzzing to himself softly, as he pursued his thoughts. My temper was going.

  "What do you think has become of the sphere, anyhow?" I asked.

  "Lost," he said, like a man who answers an uninteresting question.

  "Among those plants?"

  "Unless they find it."

  "And then?"

  "How can I tell?"

  "Cavor," I said, with a sort of hysterical bitterness, "things look bright for my Company..."

  He made no answer.

  "Good Lord!" I exclaimed. "Just think of all the trouble we took to get into this pickle! What did we come for? What are we after? What was the moon to us or we to the moon? We wanted too much, we tried too much. We ought to have started the little things first. It was you proposed the moon! Those Cavorite spring blinds! I am certain we could have worked them for terrestrial purposes. Certain! Did you really understand what I proposed? A steel cylinder--"

  "Rubbish!" said Cavor.

  We ceased to converse.

  For a time Cavor kept up a broken monologue without much help from me.

  "If they find it," he began, "if they find it ... what will they do with it? Well, that's a question. It may be that's _the_ question. They won't understand it, anyhow. If they understood that sort of thing they would have come long since to the earth. Would they? Why shouldn't they? But they would have sent something--they couldn't keep their hands off such a possibility. No! But they will examine it. Clearly they are intelligent and inquisitive. They will examine it--get inside it--trifle with the studs. Off! ... That would mean the moon for us for all the rest of our lives. Strange creatures, strange knowledge...."

  "As for strange knowledge--" said I, and language failed me.

  "Look here, Bedford," said Cavor, "you came on this expedition of your own free will."

  "You said to me, 'Call it prospecting'."

  "There's always risks in prospecting."

  "Especially when you do it unarmed and without thinking out every possibility."

  "I was so taken up with the sphere. The thing rushed on us, and carried us away."

  "Rushed on _me_, you mean."

  "Rushed on me just as much. How was I to know when I set to work on molecular physics that the business would bring me here--of all places?"

  "It's this accursed science," I cried. "It's the very Devil. The medieval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it--and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions and new weapons--now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!"

  "Anyhow, it's no use your quarrelling with me now. These creatures--these Selenites, or whatever we choose to call them--have got us tied hand and foot. Whatever temper you choose to go through with it in, you will have to go through with it.... We have experiences before us that will need all our coolness."

  He paused as if he required my assent. But I sat sulking. "Confound your science!" I said.

  "The problem is communication. Gestures, I fear, will be different. Pointing, for example. No creatures but men and monkeys point."

  That was too obviously wrong for me. "Pretty nearly every animal," I cried, "points with its eyes or nose."

  Cavor meditated over that. "Yes," he said at last, "and we don't. There's such differences--such differences!"

  "One might.... But how can I tell? There is speech. The sounds they make, a sort of fluting and piping. I don't see how we are to imitate that. Is it their speech, that sort of thing? They may have different senses, different means of communication. Of course they are minds and we are minds; there must be something in common. Who knows how far we may not get to an understanding?"

  "The things are outside us," I said. "They're more different from us than the strangest animals on earth. They are a different clay. What is the good of talking like this?"

  Cavor thought. "I don't see that. Where there are minds they will have something similar--even though they have been evolved on different planets. Of course if it was a question of instincts, if we or they are no more than animals--"

  "Well, are they? They're much more like ants on their hind legs than human beings, and who ever got to any sort of understanding with ants?"

  "But these machines and clothing! No, I don't hold with you, Bedford. The difference is wide--"

  "It's insurmountable."

  "The resemblance must bridge it. I remember reading once a paper by the late Professor Galton on the possibility of communication between the planets. Unhappily, at that time it did not seem probable that that would be of any material benefit to me, and I fear I did not give it the attention I should have done--in view of this state of affairs. Yet.... Now, let me see!

  "His idea was to begin with those broad truths that must underlie all conceivable mental existences and establish a basis on those. The great principles of geometry, to begin with. He proposed to take some leading proposition of Euclid's, and show by construction that its truth was known to us, to demonstrate, for example, that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal, and that if the equal sides be produced the angles on the other side of the base are equal also, or that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstrating our knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possession of a reasonable intelligence.... Now, suppose I ... I might draw the geometrical figur
e with a wet finger, or even trace it in the air...."

  He fell silent. I sat meditating his words. For a time his wild hope of communication, of interpretation, with these weird beings held me. Then that angry despair that was a part of my exhaustion and physical misery resumed its sway. I perceived with a sudden novel vividness the extraordinary folly of everything I had ever done. "Ass!" I said; "oh, ass, unutterable ass.... I seem to exist only to go about doing preposterous things. Why did we ever leave the thing? ... Hopping about looking for patents and concessions in the craters of the moon!... If only we had had the sense to fasten a handkerchief to a stick to show where we had left the sphere!"

  I subsided, fuming.

  "It is clear," meditated Cavor, "they are intelligent. One can hypothecate certain things. As they have not killed us at once, they must have ideas of mercy. Mercy! at any rate of restraint. Possibly of intercourse. They may meet us. And this apartment and the glimpses we had of its guardian. These fetters! A high degree of intelligence..."

  "I wish to heaven," cried I, "I'd thought even twice! Plunge after plunge. First one fluky start and then another. It was my confidence in you! Why didn't I stick to my play? That was what I was equal to. That was my world and the life I was made for. I could have finished that play. I'm certain ... it was a good play. I had the scenario as good as done. Then.... Conceive it! leaping to the moon! Practically--I've thrown my life away! That old woman in the inn near Canterbury had better sense."

  I looked up, and stopped in mid-sentence. The darkness had given place to that bluish light again. The door was opening, and several noiseless Selenites were coming into the chamber. I became quite still, staring at their grotesque faces.

  Then suddenly my sense of disagreeable strangeness changed to interest. I perceived that the foremost and second carried bowls. One elemental need at least our minds could understand in common. They were bowls of some metal that, like our fetters, looked dark in that bluish light; and each contained a number of whitish fragments. All the cloudy pain and misery that oppressed me rushed together and took the shape of hunger. I eyed these bowls wolfishly, and, though it returned to me in dreams, at that time it seemed a small matter that at the end of the arms that lowered one towards me were not hands, but a sort of flap and thumb, like the end of an elephant's trunk. The stuff in the bowl was loose in texture, and whitish brown in colour--rather like lumps of some cold souffle, and it smelt faintly like mushrooms. From a partially divided carcass of a mooncalf that we presently saw, I am inclined to believe it must have been mooncalf flesh.