XX MR. BEDFORD IN INFINITE SPACE
It was almost as though I had been killed. Indeed, I could imagine aman suddenly and violently killed would feel very much as I did. Onemoment, a passion of agonising existence and fear; the next, darknessand stillness, neither light nor life nor sun, moon nor stars, theblank infinite. Although the thing was done by my own act, althoughI had already tasted this very effect in Cavor’s company, I feltastonished, dumbfounded, and overwhelmed. I seemed to be borne upwardinto an enormous darkness. My fingers floated off the studs, I hungas if I were annihilated, and at last very softly and gently I cameagainst the bale and the golden chain, and the crowbars that haddrifted to the middle of the sphere.
I do not know how long that drifting took. In the sphere of course,even more than on the moon, one’s earthly time sense was ineffectual.At the touch of the bale it was as if I had awakened from a dreamlesssleep. I immediately perceived that if I wanted to keep awake andalive I must get a light or open a window, so as to get a grip ofsomething with my eyes. And besides I was cold. I kicked off fromthe bale, therefore, clawed on to the thin cords within the glass,crawled along until I got to the manhole rim, and so got my bearingsfor the light and blind studs, took a shove off, and flying once roundthe bale, and getting a scare from something big and flimsy that wasdrifting loose, I got my hand on the cord quite close to the studs, andreached them. I lit the little lamp first of all to see what it was Ihad collided with, and discovered that old copy of _Lloyd’s News_ hadslipped its moorings, and was adrift in the void. That brought me outof the infinite to my own proper dimensions again. It made me laugh andpant for a time, and suggested the idea of a little oxygen from oneof the cylinders. After that I lit the heater until I felt warm, andthen I took food. Then I set to work in a very gingerly fashion on theCavorite blinds, to see if I could guess by any means how the spherewas travelling.
The first blind I opened I shut at once, and hung for a time flattenedand blinded by the sunlight that had hit me. After thinking a littleI started upon the windows at right angles to this one, and got thehuge crescent moon and the little crescent earth behind it, the secondtime. I was amazed to find how far I was from the moon. I had reckonedthat not only should I have little or none of the “kick-off” that theearth’s atmosphere had given us at our start, but that the tangential“fly off” of the moon’s spin would be at least twenty-eight times lessthan the earth’s. I had expected to discover myself hanging over ourcrater, and on the edge of the night, but all that was now only a partof the outline of the white crescent that filled the sky. And Cavor----?
He was already infinitesimal.
I tried to imagine what could have happened to him. But at that time Icould think of nothing but death. I seemed to see him, bent and smashedat the foot of some interminably high cascade of blue. And all abouthim the stupid insects stared....
Under the inspiring touch of the drifting newspaper I became practicalagain for a while. It was quite clear to me that what I had to do wasto get back to earth, but as far as I could see I was drifting awayfrom it. Whatever had happened to Cavor, even if he was still alive,which seemed to me incredible after that blood-stained scrap, I waspowerless to help him. There he was, living or dead behind the mantleof that rayless night, and there he must remain at least until I couldsummon our fellow-men to his assistance. Should I do that? Something ofthe sort I had in my mind; to come back to earth if it were possible,and then as maturer consideration might determine, either to show andexplain the sphere to a few discreet persons, and act with them, orelse to keep my secret, sell my gold, obtain weapons, provisions, andan assistant, and return with these advantages to deal on equal termswith the flimsy people of the moon, to rescue Cavor, if that were stillpossible, and at any rate to procure a sufficient supply of gold toplace my subsequent proceedings on a firmer basis. But that was hopingfar, I had first to get back.
I set myself to decide just exactly how the return to earth could becontrived. As I struggled with that problem I ceased to worry aboutwhat I should do when I got there. At last my only care was to get back.
I puzzled out at last that my best chance would be to drop back towardsthe moon as near as I dared in order to gather velocity, then to shutmy windows and fly behind it, and when I was past to open my earthwardwindows, and so get off at a good pace homeward. But whether I shouldever reach the earth by that device, or whether I might not simplyfind myself spinning about it in some hyperbolic or parabolic curveor other, I could not tell. Later I had a happy inspiration, and byopening certain windows to the moon, which had appeared in the sky infront of the earth, I turned my course aside so as to head off theearth, which it had become evident to me I must pass behind withoutsome such expedient. I did a very great deal of complicated thinkingover these problems--for I am no mathematician--and in the end I amcertain it was much more my good luck than my reasoning that enabledme to hit the earth. Had I known then, as I know now, the mathematicalchances there were against me, I doubt if I should have troubled evento touch the studs to make any attempt. And having puzzled out what Iconsidered to be the thing to do, I opened all my moonward windows, andsquatted down--the effort lifted me for a time some feet or so into theair, and I hung there in the oddest way--and waited for the crescent toget bigger and bigger until I felt I was near enough for safety. Then Iwould shut the windows, fly past the moon with the velocity I had gotfrom it--if I did not smash upon it--and so go on towards the earth.
And that is what I did.
At last I felt my moonward start was sufficient. I shut out the sightof the moon from my eyes, and in a state of mind that was, I nowrecall, incredibly free from anxiety or any distressful quality, I satdown to begin a vigil in that little speck of matter in infinite spacethat would last until I should strike the earth. The heater had madethe sphere tolerably warm, the air had been refreshed by the oxygen,and except for that faint congestion of the head that was always withme while I was away from earth, I felt entire physical comfort. I hadextinguished the light again, lest it should fail me in the end; I wasin darkness, save for the earthshine and the glitter of the stars belowme. Everything was so absolutely silent and still that I might indeedhave been the only being in the universe, and yet, strangely enough, Ihad no more feeling of loneliness or fear than if I had been lying inbed on earth. Now, this seems all the stranger to me, since during mylast hours in that crater of the moon, the sense of my utter lonelinesshad been an agony....
Incredible as it will seem, this interval of time that I spent inspace has no sort of proportion to any other interval of time inmy life. Sometimes it seemed as though I sat through immeasurableeternities like some god upon a lotus leaf, and again as though therewas a momentary pause as I leapt from moon to earth. In truth, it wasaltogether some weeks of earthly time. But I had done with care andanxiety, hunger or fear, for that space. I floated, thinking with astrange breadth and freedom of all that we had undergone, and of all mylife and motives, and the secret issues of my being. I seemed to myselfto have grown greater and greater, to have lost all sense of movement;to be floating amidst the stars, and always the sense of earth’slittleness and the infinite littleness of my life upon it, was implicitin my thoughts.
I can’t profess to explain the things that happened in my mind. Nodoubt they could all be traced directly or indirectly to the curiousphysical conditions under which I was living. I set them down here justfor what they are worth, and without any comment. The most prominentquality of it was a pervading doubt of my own identity. I became, if Imay so express it, dissociate from Bedford; I looked down on Bedfordas a trivial, incidental thing with which I chanced to be connected.I saw Bedford in many relations--as an ass or as a poor beast, where Ihad hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a veryspirited or rather forcible person. I saw him not only as an ass, butas the son of many generations of asses. I reviewed his school-daysand his early manhood, and his first encounter with love, very much asone might review the proceedings of an ant in the san
d.... Somethingof that period of lucidity I regret still hangs about me, and I doubtif I shall ever recover the full-bodied self-satisfaction of my earlydays. But at the time the thing was not in the least painful, because Ihad that extraordinary persuasion that, as a matter of fact, I was nomore Bedford than I was any one else, but only a mind floating in thestill serenity of space. Why should I be disturbed about this Bedford’sshortcomings? I was not responsible for him or them.
For a time I struggled against this really very grotesque delusion.I tried to summon the memory of vivid moments, of tender or intenseemotions to my assistance; I felt that if I could recall one genuinetwinge of feeling the growing severance would be stopped. But I couldnot do it. I saw Bedford rushing down Chancery Lane, hat on theback of his head, coat tails flying out, _en route_ for his publicexamination. I saw him dodging and bumping against, and even saluting,other similar little creatures in that swarming gutter of people. Me?I saw Bedford that same evening in the sitting-room of a certain lady,and his hat was on the table beside him, and it wanted brushing badly,and he was in tears. Me? I saw him with that lady in various attitudesand emotions--I never felt so detached before.... I saw him hurryingoff to Lympne to write a play, and accosting Cavor, and in his shirtsleeves working at the sphere, and walking out to Canterbury because hewas afraid to come! Me? I did not believe it.
I still reasoned that all this was hallucination due to my solitude,and the fact that I had lost all weight and sense of resistance. Iendeavoured to recover that sense by banging myself about the sphere,by pinching my hands and clasping them together. Among other things Ilit the light, captured that torn copy of _Lloyd’s_, and read thoseconvincingly realistic advertisements again about the Cutaway bicycle,and the gentleman of private means, and the lady in distress who wasselling those “forks and spoons.” There was no doubt they existedsurely enough, and, said I, “This is your world, and you are Bedford,and you are going back to live among things like that for all the restof your life.” But the doubts within me could still argue: “It is notyou that is reading, it is Bedford, but you are not Bedford, you know.That’s just where the mistake comes in.”
“Confound it!” I cried; “and if I am not Bedford, what am I?”
But in that direction no light was forthcoming, though the strangestfancies came drifting into my brain, queer remote suspicions, likeshadows seen from far away.... Do you know, I had a sort of idea thatreally I was something quite outside not only the world, but allworlds, and out of space and time, and that this poor Bedford was justa peephole through which I looked at life?...
Bedford! However I disavowed him, there I was most certainly bound upwith him, and I knew that wherever or whatever I might be, I must needsfeel the stress of his desires, and sympathise with all his joys andsorrows until his life should end. And with the dying of Bedford--whatthen?...
Enough of this remarkable phase of my experiences! I tell it heresimply to show how one’s isolation and departure from this planettouched not only the functions and feeling of every organ of thebody, but indeed also the very fabric of the mind, with strange andunanticipated disturbances. All through the major portion of that vastspace journey I hung thinking of such immaterial things as these, hungdissociated and apathetic, a cloudy megalo-maniac, as it were, amidstthe stars and planets in the void of space; and not only the world towhich I was returning, but the blue-lit caverns of the Selenites, theirhelmet faces, their gigantic and wonderful machines, and the fate ofCavor, dragged helpless into that world, seemed infinitely minute andaltogether trivial things to me.
Until at last I began to feel the pull of the earth upon my being,drawing me back again to the life that is real for men. And then,indeed, it grew clearer and clearer to me that I was quite certainlyBedford after all, and returning after amazing adventures to this worldof ours, and with a life that I was very likely to lose in this return.I set myself to puzzle out the conditions under which I must fall toearth.