LITMIR.BIZ

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light of the huge moon – if it was a moon – had by now illuminated his surroundings almost as clearly as if it were day. It was a very strange room. The floor was so small that the bed and a table beside it occupied the whole width of it: the ceiling seemed to be nearly twice as wide and the walls sloped outward as they rose, so that Ransom had the impression of lying at the bottom of a deep and narrow wheelbarrow. This confirmed his belief that his sight was either temporarily or permanently injured. In other respects, however, he was recovering rapidly and even beginning to feel an unnatural lightness of heart and a not disagreeable excitement. The heat was still oppressive, and he stripped off everything but his shirt and trousers before rising to explore. His rising was disastrous and raised graver apprehensions in his mind about the effects of being drugged. Although he had been conscious of no unusual muscular effort, he found himself leaping from the bed with an energy which brought his head into sharp contact with the skylight and flung him down again in a heap on the floor. He found himself on the other side against the wall – the wall that ought to have sloped outwards like the side of a wheelbarrow, according to his previous reconnaissance. But it didn’t. He felt it and looked at it; it was unmistakably at right angles to the floor. More cautiously this time, he rose again to his feet. He felt an extraordinary lightness of body: it was with difficulty that he kept his feet on the floor. For the first time a suspicion that he might be dead and already in the ghost-life crossed his mind. He was trembling, but a hundred mental habits forbade him to consider this possibility. Instead, he explored his prison. The result was beyond doubt: all the walls looked as if they sloped outwards so as to make the room wider at the ceiling than it was at the floor, but each wall as you stood beside it turned out to be perfectly perpendicular – not only to sight but to touch also if one stooped down and examined with one’s fingers the angle between it and the floor. The same examination revealed two other curious facts. The room was walled and floored with metal, and was in a state of continuous faint vibration – a silent vibration with a strangely lifelike and unmechanical quality about it. But if the vibration was silent, there was plenty of noise going on – a series of musical raps or percussions at quite irregular intervals which seemed to come from the ceiling. It was as if the metal chamber in which he found himself was being bombarded with small, tinkling missiles. Ransom was by now thoroughly frightened – not with the prosaic fright that a man suffers in a war, but with a heady, bounding kind of fear that was hardly distinguishable from his general excitement: he was poised on a sort of emotional watershed from which, he felt, he might at any moment pass either into delirious terror or into an ecstasy of joy. He knew now that he was not in a submarine: and the infinitesimal quivering of the metal did not suggest the motion of any wheeled vehicle. A ship, then, he supposed, or some kind of airship … but there was an oddity in all his sensations for which neither supposition accounted. Puzzled, he sat down again on the bed, and stared at the portentous moon.

      An airship, some kind of flying machine … but why did the moon look so big? It was larger than he had thought at first. No moon could really be that size; and he realised now that he had known this from the first but had repressed the knowledge through terror. At the same moment a thought came into his head which stopped his breath – there could be no full moon at all that night. He remembered distinctly that he had walked from Nadderby on a moonless night. Even if the thin crescent of a new moon had escaped his notice, it could not have grown to this in a few hours. It could not have grown to this at all – this megalomaniac disk, far larger than the football he had at first compared it to, larger than a child’s hoop, filling almost half the sky. And where was the old ‘man in the moon’ – the familiar face that had looked down on all the generations of men? The thing wasn’t the Moon at all; and he felt his hair move on his scalp.

      At that moment the sound of an opening door made him turn his head. An oblong of dazzling light appeared behind him and instantly vanished as the door closed again, having admitted the bulky form of a naked man whom Ransom recognised as Weston. No reproach, no demand for an explanation, rose to Ransom’s lips or even to his mind; not with that monstrous orb above them. The mere presence of a human being, with its offer of at least some companionship, broke down the tension in which his nerves had long been resisting a bottomless dismay. He found, when he spoke, that he was sobbing.

      ‘Weston! Weston!’ he gasped. ‘What is it? It’s not the Moon, not that size. It can’t be, can it?’

      ‘No,’ replied Weston, ‘it’s the Earth.’

       4

      Ransom’s legs failed him, and he must have sunk back upon the bed, but he only became aware of this many minutes later. At the moment he was unconscious of everything except his fear. He did not even know what he was afraid of: the fear itself possessed his whole mind, a formless, infinite misgiving. He did not lose consciousness, though he greatly wished that he might do so. Any change – death or sleep, or, best of all, a waking which should show all this for a dream – would have been inexpressibly welcome. None came. Instead, the lifelong self-control of social man, the virtues which are half hypocrisy or the hypocrisy which is half a virtue, came back to him and soon he found himself answering Weston in a voice not shamefully tremulous.

      ‘Do you mean that?’ he asked.

      ‘Certainly.’

      ‘Then where are we?’

      ‘Standing out from Earth about eighty-five thousand miles.’

      ‘You mean we’re – in space,’ Ransom uttered the word with difficulty as a frightened child speaks of ghosts or a frightened man of cancer.

      Weston nodded.

      ‘What for?’ said Ransom. ‘And what on earth have you kidnapped me for? And how have you done it?’

      For a moment Weston seemed disposed to give no answer; then, as if on a second thought, he sat down on the bed beside Ransom and spoke as follows:

      ‘I suppose it will save trouble if I deal with these questions at once, instead of leaving you to pester us with them every hour for the next month. As to how we do it – I suppose you mean how the space-ship works – there’s no good your asking that. Unless you were one of the four or five real physicists now living you couldn’t understand: and if there were any chance of your understanding you certainly wouldn’t be told. If it makes you happy to repeat words that don’t mean anything – which is, in fact, what unscientific people want when they ask for an explanation – you may say we work by exploiting the less observed properties of solar radiation. As to why we are here, we are on our way to Malacandra …’

      ‘Do you mean a star called Malacandra?’

      ‘Even you can hardly suppose we are going out of the solar system. Malacandra is much nearer than that: we shall make it in about twenty-eight days.’

      ‘There isn’t a planet called Malacandra,’ objected Ransom.

      ‘I am giving it its real name, not the name invented by terrestrial astronomers,’ said Weston.

      ‘But surely this is nonsense,’ said Ransom. ‘How the deuce did you find out its real name, as you call it?’

      ‘From the inhabitants.’

      It took Ransom some time to digest this statement. ‘Do you mean to tell me you claim to have been to this star before, or this planet, or whatever it is?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘You can’t really ask me to believe that,’ said Ransom. ‘Damn it all, it’s not an everyday affair. Why has no one heard of it? Why has it not been in all the papers?’

      ‘Because we are not perfect idiots,’ said Weston gruffly.

      After a few moments’ silence Ransom began again. ‘Which planet is it in our terminology?’ he asked.

      ‘Once and for all,’ said Weston, ‘I am not going to tell you. If you know how to find out when we get there, you are welcome to do so: I don’t think we have much to fear from your scientific attainments. In the meantime, there is no reason for you to

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