Gods, Men and Ghosts

by Lord Dunsany

  “ ‘England,’ I said; and watched how the answer went down.

  “ ‘Who gave you your orders?’ asked the judge.

  “ ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury,’ I said, and saw that I had said the right thing. I didn’t expect to get off scot-free, but if I could get the blame on to English capitalists I felt sure they would spare my life.

  “ ‘Where did he give you your orders?’ said the judge.

  “ ‘At the back of his cathedral,’ I answered.

  “It was just right. They’d never have heard of Lambeth, and they’d have known that a secular conversation of that sort would not have gone on within the cathedral; but the shadow of its huge walls, at the back, out of the way, would have been the perfect scene for it. And they believed me too. I could see that.

  “ ‘What were his exact words?’ said the judge.

  “And that was where I crashed. I had nothing prepared, and with the judge’s eyes on my face I had no time to prepare it now.

  “ ‘Those accursed Russians have a machine,’ I began; but I saw from a change in their faces that it was no good. And one watches men’s faces pretty closely when one’s life hangs on what they are thinking about. You see, I hadn’t like to blackguard them too much to their faces; but my silly politeness ruined me. I should have given them the talk that they would have expected from a prominent personage of a capitalist country, instead of mincing my words as I did. Look what they had done to religion. They would have expected the archbishop to talk pretty stiffly about them, and I was altogether too mild. So all I got for trying to spare their feelings was a death sentence. I saw they had stopped believing me; and somehow, after that, my answers were merely silly. And in a minute or two the judge took a pull at his cigarette and leaned back and looked at me, then shot the smoke out of his lungs and said two words in Russian.

  “ ‘Tell him it’s death,’ I heard one of them say. And the sentry standing beside me, with a very nasty-looking bayonet fixed, took out his cigarette and said: ‘It’s death,’ and went on with his smoking.

  “They hadn’t got my real name yet, and now they asked for it, just when it seemed not to matter any longer. I gave them the name of Bourk.”

  “And what name do you give us?” asked Jorkens.

  The man thought for a moment, and then said: “Ryan.”

  “This is where the tale gets a little unusual,” said Jorkens to us. And the man went on.

  “When they took me back to the prison, I knew I hadn’t got very long. The English idea on these occasions is to give a man a little time to look after his soul; but in Russia, where you don’t have one, they weren’t likely to keep me waiting.

  “I’d looked at the stones in my prison wall pretty thoughtfully; square grey blocks that had once had plaster over them; and now I decided to work the mortar away and get one out, after which some of the others should come more easily, and see where the hole led to. I had ten buttons on my trousers; metal ones; and by bending one of them double I got some sort of a point, and I started to scrape away the mortar at once, so as not to waste time, which was precious. The mortar came easily, being old and full of damp, and presently I began to hope. I had a chair in the cell, and I kept it handy: whenever I heard the lock in my door beginning to move I slewed the chair round and sat on it, with my back to the stone I was working on. The lock didn’t move often; a man came twice a day with my food, and sometimes loafed in at an odd hour, making three times in all; but on this day he came in once oftener, attracted, I suppose, by the interesting news that they had condemned me to death. I always had my chair in place by the time the key had turned, and was sitting on it before the door began to open. By nightfall I had the stone loose, and had only used two buttons, and even they were by no means finished. That night I got it out, and worked till dawn on one of the stones behind it; then I tidied up the dust, eating some of it, and put the stone back, and had some sleep for an hour or two. But I didn’t want to waste much time on sleep, as I didn’t know how long I’d got; and early that morning I was at work again, this time on the next stone. And I was getting along splendidly.

  “They are devils. They know how to make you despair. I had never despaired in all my life before. I had held back from despair as you keep from the brink of a precipice. But those Russians brought me to it. They must have been watching me through some spy-hole they had; for the lock turned and one of them came in, and there was I sitting comfortably in my chair with my back to the loose stones, and the bent bit of button in my pocket. And he never said a word. Just threw a hammer and a good sharp chisel down on the floor in front of me, and walked out of the cell. Then I knew that those walls must be about ten feet thick, and that nothing was any good, and I left the hammer and chisel where they had fallen and gave myself up to despair. If he had put me into a lower dungeon, or manacled me, or flogged me, I could have held out against it, but that hammer and chisel somehow or other seemed the very last notes of doom.

  “The man that came in with my food just looked at the chisel, as you might take a look at a snake, just to see that I wasn’t near enough to use it on him; then he left it and the hammer lying there.

  “Next day I was sitting there hopeless, when in walked another fellow, a good deal neater than the rest. I looked up.

  “ ‘Do you want a reprieve?’ he said.

  “But I had seen the look on his face. I don’t know what I thought he was going to ask for; to betray all those people in Paris, I suppose. But the look on his face was enough, and I said: ‘No thank you.’

  “ ‘Not want a reprieve?’ he asked.

  “ ‘No, not today, thank you,’ I answered.

  “ ‘If it’s not today, you’ll not want it at all,’ he said. ‘You’re for the cellar tomorrow morning.’

  “And he hung about near the door, to see if I’d change my mind. But I wouldn’t. I felt sure that there must be some crab in it, from the look I had seen on his face.

  “Well, a little while later another man came in, as though the first hadn’t come in at all.

  “ ‘I’ve got a reprieve for you,’ he said.

  “ ‘What have I got to do for it?’ I asked him.

  “ ‘We want to explore a distant place; perhaps to colonize it,’ he said. ‘We want you to go there first, and light a fire as a sign when you get there.’

  “ ‘What else?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Nothing else,’ he said.

  “ ‘How do I get there?’ said I.

  “ ‘We send you,’ he said.

  “ ‘Where is it?’ I asked.

  “ ‘The moon,’ he replied.

  “ ‘Nonsense,’ I said.

  “ ‘Yes, to capitalists,’ he answered. ‘They’re all two hundred years behind Russia; and imperialism is as far as they can think. But the moon is well within the scope of our scientists.’

  “ ‘How would you get me there?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Shoot you out of a gun,’ he said.

  “ ‘Well, there’s two reasons why you couldn’t do that,’ I told him.

  “ ‘Well?’ he said with a superior smile.

  “ ‘Firstly,’ I said, ‘the thing would smash to fragments on landing; or more likely melt.’

  “ ‘There’s a parachute that you can release from a spring inside,’ he said, ‘as soon as you see you’re close. The head of the shell is crystal.’

  “ ‘Well, there’s another reason,’ I said. ‘Starting off at a thousand feet per second would merely finish one. Why, even a railway train. . .’

  “ ‘You don’t,’ he said. ‘You’re moving at three to four hundred miles an hour when you enter the gun.’

  “ ‘How do you manage that?’ I asked.

  “Always the slow superior smile, as though their scientists were all grown up and the people in other countries only children.

  “ ‘We’ve rails,’ he said, ‘and the shell is on very low wheels. It runs on those rails over what is almost a precipice, four or five hundred feet of it, and t
hat’s how it gets its pace. The moment it enters the tunnel a steel door falls behind it. The tunnel’s the gun. As in any gun, the near end, the chamber, is larger, and the powder is stacked there all round you; but when you get to the barrel it exactly fits the shell, even to a groove for the wheels. The powder is ignited behind you the moment you pass, slow-burning big blocks of black powder, slow-burning I mean when compared with modern explosives, and by the time you leave the muzzle you have your maximum speed. Is that simple enough for you?’

  “ ‘Is the gun rifled?’ I asked.

  “Again the smile, as though he spoke to a child. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘The grooves for the wheels are twisted round the barre.’

  “ ‘Then the spin will addle my brains,’ I said, ‘and I shan’t unloose any parachute.’

  “ ‘There’s a gyroscope in your cabin,’ he answered.

  “ ‘What? The outside spins, while the gyroscope holds the cabin?’

  “ ‘Of course,’ he said.

  “ ‘And what will I breathe?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Oxygen,’ he replied.

  “ ‘And eat and drink?’

  “ ‘We give you supplies,’ said he.

  “ ‘And how long will they last on the moon?’ I asked.

  “ ‘We’ll send over more shells,’ he said.

  “ ‘Supposing one of them hits me,’ I said.

  “ ‘Very unlikely,’ he answered. ‘Whereas our man in the cellar was working hard all through the busy time, perhaps fifty thousand cases, and he’s never missed yet.’

  “I could see they were pretty keen for me to go, from that tactful reference to the swine in the cellar. Well, I wasn’t keen on the cellar, and I accepted. A bit longer to live, and that was to the good, and any way I would get out of Russia.

  “They released me from the prison and housed me decently; as a matter of fact there was tapestry all over the walls; but it wasn’t any easier to escape; they saw to that all right. There was a court-yard all round the palace in which they kept me, and a thirty-foot wall beyond, and plenty of soldiers walking about between.

  “What they were keenest on was my lighting a fire when I got there: they gave me a packet of powder to spread over a hundred yards square, and they were going to watch with their telescopes. They were keen on Russia being the first to do it, and keen on proving they had. Any Russians that they could spare they had probably killed already, so they had to send people like me. If I lit the fire they would send other men after me; if I didn’t, they would send over no more provisions. They fed me well, very well indeed; in fact they seemed as fond of me as a farmer is of a good fat turkey when it is getting near Christmas. They took me out and showed me their apparatus; a huge high iron scaffold on a hill, with a lift running up it, and the rails running airily down over a flimsy viaduct, and their long steel tunnel lying along the fields, slanting very slightly upwards, just enough for the shell to clear the low hills in the West on its way to the new moon. New, you see, so that it would most of it be in darkness and they would be able to see my fire. And there was the shell all ready, waiting at the end of its rail. And they opened it and showed me my bunk inside, like the smallest berth on a boat you ever saw; barely room to turn round; a nasty place to spend ten days or a fortnight. And the gadgets they showed me too, the oxygen gas-mask for use on the moon, and the switch for releasing the parachute that was to steady the shell before landing. When it came to the switch for the parachute I pointed out that there wasn’t much air on the moon. ‘Not much,’ said one of them, the same man that first offered me the reprieve; ‘but we have evidence that there is some. Four or five hundred feet would be all you’d want for the parachute,’ brushing aside lightly enough what was probably the principal drawback. I bet he’d have worried more about that air if he’d been the one that was going.

  “Then we went down and had a look at the tunnel, with its steel door up in the air like a guillotine, the door that was to fall behind me the moment the shell ran in, and would close the breech of the gun. We walked in and saw the big blocks of black powder lying beside the rails and stacked round the walls, and then the sudden narrowing of the tunnel.

  “ ‘The bigger the blocks of powder the slower they burn,’ said my friend, if one can use such a word of the man who had sneeringly offered reprieve. ‘The explosion gradually increases in force all the time you are in the gun.’

  “I may say that that moon-shooting tunnel was over two hundred yards long.

  “There seemed sense in what they told me about the gun, but I couldn’t get over my fear that the lunar atmosphere would be too thin for the parachute, and that I should crash through it and melt on landing. I watched them talking among themselves in the tunnel and knew what they were saying, though I didn’t know Russian: they were boasting that the U.S.S.R would do it.

  “ ‘It’s a thousand to one against getting there,’ I blurted out to the man who talked English.

  “ ‘Russia will do it,’ he answered. ‘Our scientists don’t leave things to prayer or chance, like the people in capitalist countries. If it’s a thousand to one we’ll send a thousand men, and get one there, and then a thousand more, and as many thousands as we need to get enough there to colonize it.’

  “So that was the sort of men they were.

  “Well, there seemed nothing for it but to try to live as long as I could. ‘Will you give me a fortnight’s holiday before I start?’ I said.

  “And to my surprise they said Yes. Well, next day Eisen called for me rather early; that’s what the sneering man called himself, the man whose reprieve I’d refused; and he said that he wanted to show me all over the shell again, so that I should know all about it, and that after that we’d go to a theatre, and to a dance with some girls he knew. He talked of the girls all the way to the high gaunt tower, and they really seemed very nice. One in particular, he said, would be very glad to meet me: he knew her tastes. He said this just as I got inside the shell; he had been describing her all the way up in the lift. The moon, a little past full, was high in the sky behind us as I got in, the long gun pointing away from it. Eisen put his hand in and began showing me things; then he questioned me about everything in the shell, because he said that I had to know all about it before I went on my holiday, and he kept on explaining about spreading the powder on a hundred yards square on the moon. ‘She’s a very pretty one, that girl,’ he said all of a sudden. Then he showed me how the door shut.

  “There was a grinding of wheels at once. Lord! we were off! I thought at first that it was an accident, but I’ve found that, however easily people fool you, you find it out when you think it over, sometimes long afterwards. Having the moon behind me was one thing that helped to fool me. It never occurred to me that the gun might be aiming at just where the moon would be ten days to a fortnight later, when the shell would be due to arrive. Well, it was a sickening feeling, dropping down the rails from that tower. I lay there on the sort of bed, wondering when we’d come to the tunnel. As a matter of fact I remember nothing of that. It was all very well for them to talk of the increase of speed being gradual, but somewhere or other in that tunnel I must have had a jolt that was a bit too much for my brains; for I opened my eyes feeling very sleepy indeed, and when I remembered what had been happening and looked out through the crystal window, there was nothing but sky in sight.

  “That damned Russian had turned on the oxygen, or I wouldn’t have been alive. How many hours or days had passed since leaving earth I had no idea, nor any idea how far we were away from it. Nor could I see the moon. All I knew was that I was rushing through space at the pace of a bullet, and all I felt was the most absolute stillness, the most absolute stillness that I have ever known; and no sound but the purr of my gyroscope that was keeping my cabin steady while the shell rotated. No sound of any wind or the passage of air; so I knew I was outside Earth’s atmosphere. An intolerable glitter oppressed me, a glare still and unflickering, sunlight rushing through space unhindered by clouds or air. I
shut my eyes to escape it, but could not sleep; and so hours went by. And then a shadow came over us that I felt through my closed eyes, and I looked through the crystal again, and at once the stars came out. This blessed shadow wrapped us for half an hour, and passed away again and the glare returned.”

  “What made the shadow?” I asked.

  And Ryan looked up wearily from his absinthe, weary still, it seemed, from the memory of that long journey, unsheltered in sunlight: “Sunset,” he said, “and then in half an hour it came up on the other side. We were as far as that from Earth.”

  “How awful,” I couldn’t help saying.

  “But I was out of Russia,” he said. “Still I couldn’t see the moon. I didn’t know where I was, or how long we’d been going. I ate some food: I didn’t know how many hours or days I had been without it; and I drank some water, and it tasted good. And then a curious thing happened. I’d been lying back in my bunk, facing the way we were going, with my feet a lot higher than my head.”

  “You should never sleep like that,” said Jorkens.

  “No,” replied Ryan, “and it probably helped to keep me unconscious much longer than I should have been otherwise. But I don’t know. But now I was sliding down more and more to the other end, and pressing against my feet. The head of the shell had been higher than its base, and was now evidently lower. I drank a lot more water during the next few hours, which I seemed to want more than food; and nothing else changed. And then my bed seemed to be a little steeper, and I was pressing a little harder against my feet. And suddenly through the crystal head of the shell the weary steely glitter disappeared, and a soft grey took its place. The relief to the eye, and the brain itself, was immense. But I had no idea where I was, or what was happening. And then sound came again, the sound of what could only be air. And the soft grey darkened. It came to me with extraordinary suddenness, and nearly too late, that it was time to use the parachute. It worked, and there was a bump that broke the end of my bed. We had landed. The first thing I did was to slip on the oxygen gas-mask, that they had given me to wear when walking about on the moon. I could see nothing at all, for most of the crystal nose of the shell was buried, and the rest of it was all blurred, with some atmospheric disturbance that looked like rain. Then I opened the door that Eisen had shut in Russia, and walked out wearing my gas-mask; and sure enough it was rain, and it splashed on my eye-pieces and dimmed them at once, and it seemed to be evening. From a soft patch of soil in which we had luckily landed I stepped at once on an expanse that I could feel rather than see to be utterly devoid of all vegetation. In fact it was exactly the sandy or gravelly waste that I had expected to find by the shore of some dried-up lunar sea. But our anticipations do not always guide us aright; for suddenly just behind me I heard the words: ‘Are you aware you are trespassing?’