V THE JOURNEY TO THE MOON
Presently Cavor extinguished the light. He said we had not overmuchenergy stored, and that what we had we must economise for reading. Fora time, whether it was long or short I do not know, there was nothingbut blank darkness.
A question floated up out of the void. “How are we pointing?” I said.“What is our direction?”
“We are flying away from the earth at a tangent, and as the moon isnear her third quarter we are going somewhere towards her. I will opena blind----”
Came a click, and then a window in the outer case yawned open. The skyoutside was as black as the darkness within the sphere, but the shapeof the open window was marked by an infinite number of stars.
Those who have only seen the starry sky from the earth cannot imagineits appearance when the vague half-luminous veil of our air has beenwithdrawn. The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered survivorsthat penetrate our misty atmosphere. But now at last I could realisethe meaning of the hosts of heaven!
Stranger things we were presently to see, but that airless, star-dustedsky! Of all things, I think that will be one of the last I shall forget.
The little window vanished with a click, another beside it snapped openand instantly closed, and then a third, and for a moment I had to closemy eyes because of the blinding splendour of the waning moon.
For a space I had to stare at Cavor and the white-lit things about meto season my eyes to light again, before I could turn them towards thatpallid glare.
Four windows were open in order that the gravitation of the moon mightact upon all the substances in our sphere. I found I was no longerfloating freely in space, but that my feet were resting on the glassin the direction of the moon. The blankets and cases of provisionswere also creeping slowly down the glass, and presently came to restso as to block out a portion of the view. It seemed to me, of course,that I looked “down” when I looked at the moon. On earth “down” meansearthward, the way things fall, and “up” the reverse direction. Nowthe pull of gravitation was towards the moon, and for all I knew to thecontrary our earth was overhead. And, of course, when all the Cavoriteblinds were closed, “down” was towards the centre of our sphere, and“up” towards its outer wall.
It was curiously unlike earthly experience, too, to have the lightcoming _up_ to one. On earth light falls from above, or comes slantingdown sideways, but here it came from beneath our feet, and to see ourshadows we had to look up.
At first it gave me a sort of vertigo to stand only on thick glassand look down upon the moon through hundreds of thousands of miles ofvacant space; but this sickness passed very speedily. And then--thesplendour of the sight!
The reader may imagine it best if he will lie on the ground some warmsummer’s night and look between his upraised feet at the moon, but forsome reason, probably because the absence of air made it so much moreluminous, the moon seemed already considerably larger than it does fromearth. The minutest details of its surface were acutely clear. Andsince we did not see it through air, its outline was bright and sharp,there was no glow or halo about it, and the star-dust that coveredthe sky came right to its very margin, and marked the outline of itsunilluminated part. And as I stood and stared at the moon between myfeet, that perception of the impossible that had been with me off andon ever since our start, returned again with tenfold conviction.
“Cavor,” I said, “this takes me queerly. Those companies we were goingto run, and all that about minerals?”
“Well?”
“I don’t see ’em here.”
“No,” said Cavor; “but you’ll get over all that.”
“I suppose I’m made to turn right side up again. Still, _this_--For amoment I could half believe there never was a world.”
“That copy of _Lloyds’ News_ might help you.”
I stared at the paper for a moment, then held it above the level of myface, and found I could read it quite easily. I struck a column of meanlittle advertisements. “A gentleman of private means is willing to lendmoney,” I read. I knew that gentleman. Then somebody eccentric wantedto sell a Cutaway bicycle, “quite new and cost £15,” for five pounds;and a lady in distress wished to dispose of some fish knives and forks,“a wedding present,” at a great sacrifice. No doubt some simple soulwas sagely examining these knives and forks, and another triumphantlyriding off on that bicycle, and a third trustfully consulting thatbenevolent gentleman of means even as I read. I laughed, and let thepaper drift from my hand.
“Are we visible from the earth?” I asked.
“Why?”
“I knew some one who was rather interested in astronomy. It occurredto me that it would be rather odd if--my friend--chanced to be lookingthrough some telescope.”
“It would need the most powerful telescope on earth even now to see usas the minutest speck.”
For a time I stared in silence at the moon.
“It’s a world,” I said; “one feels that infinitely more than one everdid on earth. People perhaps----”
“People!” he exclaimed. “_No!_ Banish all that! Think yourself a sortof ultra-arctic voyager exploring the desolate places of space. Look atit!”
He waved his hand at the shining whiteness below. “It’s dead--dead!Vast extinct volcanoes, lava wildernesses, tumbled wastes of snow,or frozen carbonic acid, or frozen air, and everywhere landslip seamsand cracks and gulfs. Nothing happens. Men have watched this planetsystematically with telescopes for over two hundred years. How muchchange do you think they have seen?”
“None.”
“They have traced two indisputable landslips, a doubtful crack, and oneslight periodic change of colour, and that’s all.”
“I didn’t know they’d traced even that.”
“Oh yes. But as for people!”
“By the way,” I asked, “how small a thing will the biggest telescopesshow upon the moon?”
“One could see a fair-sized church. One could certainly see any townsor buildings, or anything like the handiwork of men. There mightperhaps be insects, something in the way of ants, for example, so thatthey could hide in deep burrows from the lunar night, or some new sortof creatures having no earthly parallel. That is the most probablething, if we are to find life there at all. Think of the difference inconditions! Life must fit itself to a day as long as fourteen earthlydays, a cloudless sun-blaze of fourteen days, and then a night of equallength, growing ever colder and colder under these cold, sharp stars.In that night there must be cold, the ultimate cold, absolute zero,273° C. below the earthly freezing point. Whatever life there is musthibernate through _that_, and rise again each day.”
He mused. “One can imagine something worm-like,” he said, “takingits air solid as an earth-worm swallows earth, or thick-skinnedmonsters----”
“By-the-bye,” I said, “why didn’t we bring a gun?”
He did not answer that question. “No,” he concluded, “we just have togo. We shall see when we get there.”
I remembered something. “Of course, there’s my minerals, anyhow,” Isaid; “whatever the conditions may be.”
Presently he told me he wished to alter our course a little by lettingthe earth tug at us for a moment. He was going to open one earthwardblind for thirty seconds. He warned me that it would make my head swim,and advised me to extend my hands against the glass to break my fall. Idid as he directed, and thrust my feet against the bales of food casesand air cylinders to prevent their falling upon me. Then with a clickthe window flew open. I fell clumsily upon hands and face, and saw fora moment between my black extended fingers our mother earth--a planetin a downward sky.
We were still very near--Cavor told me the distance was perhaps eighthundred miles--and the huge terrestrial disk filled all heaven. Butalready it was plain to see that the world was a globe. The land belowus was in twilight and vague, but westward the vast grey stretches ofthe Atlantic shone like molten silver under the receding day. I thinkI recognised the cloud-dimmed coast-lines of France and Spain and the
south of England, and then, with a click, the shutter closed again, andI found myself in a state of extraordinary confusion sliding slowlyover the smooth glass.
When at last things settled themselves in my mind again, it seemedquite beyond question that the moon was “down” and under my feet, andthat the earth was somewhere away on the level of the horizon--theearth that had been “down” to me and my kindred since the beginning ofthings.
So slight were the exertions required of us, so easy did the practicalannihilation of our weight make all we had to do, that the necessityfor taking refreshment did not occur to us for nearly six hours (byCavor’s chronometer) after our start. I was amazed at that lapse oftime. Even then I was satisfied with very little. Cavor examined theapparatus for absorbing carbonic acid and water, and pronounced itto be in satisfactory order, our consumption of oxygen having beenextraordinarily slight. And our talk being exhausted for the time, andthere being nothing further for us to do, we gave way to a curiousdrowsiness that had come upon us, and spreading our blankets on thebottom of the sphere in such a manner as to shut out most of themoonlight, wished each other good-night, and almost immediately fellasleep.
And so, sleeping, and sometimes talking and reading a little, and attimes eating, although without any keenness of appetite,[1] but for themost part in a sort of quiescence that was neither waking nor slumber,we fell through a space of time that had neither night nor day in it,silently, softly, and swiftly down towards the moon.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] It is a curious thing, that while we were in the sphere we felt notthe slightest desire for food, nor did we feel the want of it when weabstained. At first we forced our appetites, but afterwards we fastedcompletely. Altogether we did not consume one-hundredth part of thecompressed provisions we had brought with us. The amount of carbonicacid we breathed was also unnaturally low, but why this was so I amquite unable to explain.