The First Men in the Moon, H. Wells [latest books to read .TXT] 📗

‘It seems to me it wouldn’t cost much to cart any weight anywhere if you packed it in a Cavorite case.’

I had not thought of that. ‘Delivered free on head of purchaser, eh?’

‘It isn’t as though we were confined to the moon.’

‘You mean——?’

‘There’s Mars — clear atmosphere, novel surroundings, exhilarating sense of lightness. It might be pleasant to go there.’

‘Is there air on Mars?’

‘Oh yes!’

‘Seems as though you might run it as a sanatorium.* By the way, how far is Mars?’

‘Two hundred million miles at present,’ said Cavor airily; ‘and you go close by the sun.’

My imagination was picking itself up again. ‘After all,’ I said, ‘there’s something in these things. There’s travel——’

An extraordinary possibility came rushing into my mind. Suddenly I saw, as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavorite liners and spheres de luxe. ‘Rights of pre-emption,’ came floating into my head — planetary rights of pre-emption. I recalled the old Spanish monopoly in American gold.* It wasn’t as though it was just this planet or that — it was all of them. I stared at Cavor’s rubicund face, and suddenly my imagination was leaping and dancing. I stood up, I walked up and down; my tongue was unloosened.

‘I’m beginning to take it in,’ I said; ‘I’m beginning to take it in.’ The transition from doubt to enthusiasm seemed to take scarcely any time at all. ‘But this is tremendous!’ I cried. ‘This is Imperial! I haven’t been dreaming of this sort of thing.’

Once the chill of my opposition was removed, his own pent-up excitement had play. He too got up and paced. He too gesticulated and shouted. We behaved like men inspired. We were men inspired.

‘We’ll settle all that!’ he said in answer to some incidental difficulty that had pulled me up. ‘We’ll soon settle all that! We’ll start the drawings for mouldings this very night.’

‘We’ll start them now,’ I responded, and we hurried off to the laboratory to begin upon this work forthwith.

I was like a child in Wonderland all that night. The dawn found us both still at work — we kept our electric light* going heedless of the day. I remember now exactly how those drawings looked. I shaded and tinted, while Cavor drew — smudged and haste-marked they were in every line, but wonderfully correct. We got out the orders for the steel blinds and frames we needed from that night’s work, and the glass sphere was designed within a week. We gave up our afternoon conversations and our old routine altogether. We worked, and we slept and ate when we could work no longer for hunger and fatigue. Our enthusiasm infected even our three men, though they had no idea what the sphere was for. Through those days the man Gibbs gave up walking, and went everywhere, even across the room, at a sort of fussy run.

And it grew — the sphere. December passed, January — I spent a day with a broom sweeping a path through the snow from bungalow to laboratory — February, March. By the end of March the completion was in sight. In January had come a team of horses, a huge packing-case; we had our thick glass sphere now ready, and in position under the crane we had rigged to sling it into the steel shell. All the bars and blinds of the steel shell — it was not really a spherical shell, but polyhedral,* with a roller blind to each facet — had arrived by February, and the lower half was bolted together. The Cavorite was half made by March, the metallic paste had gone through two of the stages in its manufacture, and we had plastered quite half of it on to the steel bars and blinds. It was astonishing how closely we kept to the lines of Cavor’s first inspiration in working out the scheme. When the bolting together of the sphere was finished, he proposed to remove the rough roof of the temporary laboratory in which the work was done, and build a furnace about it. So the last stage of Cavorite making, in which the paste is heated to a dull red glow in a stream of helium, would be accomplished when it was already on the sphere.

And then we had to discuss and decide what provisions we were to take — compressed foods, concentrated essences, steel cylinders containing reserve oxygen, an arrangement for removing carbonic acid* and waste from the air and restoring oxygen by means of sodium peroxide, water condensers, and so forth. I remember the little heap they made in the corner — tins, and rolls, and boxes — convincingly matter-of-fact.

It was a strenuous time, with little chance of thinking. But one day, when we were drawing near the end, an odd mood came over me. I had been bricking up the furnace all the morning, and I sat down by these possessions dead beat. Everything seemed dull and incredible.

‘But look here, Cavor,’ I said. ‘After all! What’s it all for?’

He smiled. ‘The thing now is to go.’

‘The moon,’ I reflected. ‘But what do you expect? I thought the moon was a dead world.’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘What do you expect?’

‘We’re going to see.’

‘Are we?’ I said, and stared before me.

‘You are tired,’ he remarked. ‘You’d better take a walk this afternoon.’

‘No,’ I said obstinately; ‘I’m going to finish this brickwork.’

And I did, and insured myself a night of insomnia.

I don’t think I have ever had such a night. I had some bad times before my business collapse, but the very worst of those was sweet slumber compared to this infinity of aching wakefulness. I was suddenly in the most enormous funk* at the thing we were going to do.

I do not remember before that night thinking at all of the risks we were running. Now they came like that array of spectres that once beleaguered Prague,* and camped around me. The strangeness of what we were about to do, the unearthliness of it, overwhelmed me. I was like a man awakened out of pleasant dreams to the most horrible surroundings. I lay, eyes wide open, and the sphere