Out Of The Silent Planet (21 page)

It got less. There came a time when they lay exhausted and shivering in what seemed the cold,
though it was still hotter than any terrestrial climate. Weston had so far succeeded; he had
risked the highest temperature at which human life could theoretically survive, and they had
lived through it. But they were not the same men. Hitherto Weston had slept very little even
in his watches off; always, after an hour or so of uneasy rest, he had returned to his charts
and to his endless, almost despairing, calculations. You could see him fighting the despair -
pinning his terrified brain down, and again down, to the figures. Now he never looked at them.
He even seemed careless in the control room. Devine moved and looked like a somnambulist.
Ransom lived increasingly on the dark side and for long hours he thought of nothing. Although
the first great danger was past, none of them, at this time, had any serious hope of a successful
issue to their journey. They had now been fifty days, without speech, in their steel shell,
and the air was already very bad.

Weston was so unlike his old self that he even allowed Ransom to take his share in the
navigation. Mainly by signs, but with the help of a few whispered words, he taught him
all that was necessary at this stage of the journey. Apparently they were racing home - but
with little chance of reaching it in time - before some sort of cosmic 'trade-wind'.
A few rules of thumb enabled Ransom to keep the star which Weston pointed out to him in
its position at the centre of the skylight, but always with his left hand on the bell
to Weston's cabin.

This star was not the Earth. The days - the purely theoretical 'days' which bore such a
desperately practical meaning for the travellers - mounted to fifty-eight before Weston
changed course, and a different luminary was in the centre. Sixty days, and it was visibly
a planet. Sixty-six, and it was like a planet seen through field-glasses. Seventy, and it
was like nothing that Ransom had ever seen - a little dazzling disk too large for a planet
and far too small for the Moon. Now that he was navigating, his celestial mood was shattered.
Wild, animal thirst for life, mixed with homesick longing for the free airs and the sights
and smells of earth - for grass and meat and beer and tea and the human voice - awoke in him.
At first his chief difficulty on watch had been to resist drowsiness; now, though the air
was worse, feverish excitement kept him vigilant. Often when he came off duty he found his
right arm stiff and sore; for hours he had been pressing it unconsciously against the control
board as if his puny thrust could spur the space-ship to yet greater speed.

Now they had twenty days to go. Nineteen - eighteen - and on the white terrestrial disk,
now a little larger than a sixpence, he thought he could make out Australia and the south-east
corner of Asia. Hour after hour, though the markings moved slowly across the disk with the
Earth's diurnal revolution, the disk itself refused to grow larger. 'Get on! Get on! Ransom
muttered to the ship. Now ten days were left and it was like the Moon and so bright that
they could not look steadily at it. The air in their little sphere was ominously bad, but
Ransom and Devine risked a whisper as they changed watches.

'We'll do it,' they said. 'We'll do it yet.'

On the eighty-seventh day, when Ransom relieved Devine, he thought there was something wrong
with the Earth. Before his watch was done, he was sure. It was no longer a true circle, but
bulging a little on one side; it was almost pear-shaped. When Weston came on duty he gave
one glance at the skylight, rang furiously on the bell for Devine, thrust Ransom aside, and
took the navigating seat. His face was the colour of putty. He seemed to be about to do
something to the controls, but as Devine entered the room he looked up and shrugged his
shoulders with a gesture of despair. Then he buried his face in his hands and laid his head
down on the control-board.

Ransom and Devine exchanged glances. They bundled Weston out of the seat - he was crying
like a child - and Devine took his place. And now at last Ransom understood the mystery
of the bulging Earth. What had appeared as a bulge on one side of her disk was becoming
increasingly distinct as a second disk, a disk almost as large in appearance as her own.
It was covering more than half of the Earth. It was the Moon between them and the Earth,
and two hundred and forty thousand miles nearer. Ransom did not know what fate this might
mean for the space-ship. Devine obviously did, and never had he appeared so admirable. His
face was as pale as Weston's, but his eyes were clear and preternaturally bright; he sat
crouched over the controls like an animal, about to spring and he was whistling very
softly between his teeth.

Hours later Ransom understood what was happening. The Moon's disk was now larger than the
Earth's, and very gradually it became apparent to him that both disks were diminishing in
size. 'The space-ship was no longer approaching either the Earth or the Moon; it was farther
away from them than it had been half an hour ago, and that was the meaning of Devine's
feverish activity with the controls. It was not merely that the Moon was crossing their
path and cutting them off from the Earth; apparently for some reason probably gravitational -
it was dangerous to get too close to the Moon, and Devine was standing off into space.
In sight of harbour they were being forced to turn back to the open sea. He glanced up at
the chronometer. It was the morning of the eighty-eighth day. Two days to make the Earth,
and they were moving away from her.

'I suppose this finishes us?' he whispered.

'Expect so,' whispered Devine, without looking round. Weston presently recovered sufficiently
to come back and stand beside Devine. There was nothing for Ransom to do. He was sure, now,
that they were soon to die. With this realization, the agony of his suspense suddenly disappeared.
Death, whether it came now or some thirty years later on earth, rose up and claimed his
attention. There are preparations a man likes to make. He left the control room and returned
into one of the sunward chambers, into the indifference of the moveless light, the warmth,
the silence and the sharp-cut shadows. Nothing was farther from his mind than sleep. It must
have been the exhausted atmosphere which made him drowsy. He slept.

He awoke in almost complete darkness in the midst of a loud continuous noise, which he could
not at first identify. It reminded him of something - something he seemed to have heard in a
previous existence. It was a prolonged drumming noise close above his head. Suddenly his
heart gave a great leap.

'Oh God,' he sobbed. 'Oh God! It's rain.'

He was on Earth. The air was heavy and stale about him, but the choking sensations he had been
suffering were gone. He realized that he was still in the space-ship. The others, in fear of
its threatened 'unbodying', had characteristically abandoned it the moment it touched Earth
and left him to his fate. It was difficult in the dark, and under the crushing weight of
terrestrial gravity, to find his way out. But he managed it. He found the manhole and slithered,
drinking great draughts of air, down the outside of the sphere; slipped in mud, blessed the
smell of it, and at last raised the unaccustomed weight of his body to its feet. He stood in
pitch-black night under torrential rain. With every pore of his body he drank it in; with
every desire of his heart he embraced the smell of the field about him - a patch of his
native planet where grass grew, where cows moved, where presently he would come to
hedges and a gate.

He had walked about half an hour when a vivid light behind him and a strong, momentary wind
informed him that the space-ship was no more. He felt very little interest. He had seen dim
lights, the lights of men, ahead. He contrived to get into a lane, then into a road, then
into a village street. A lighted door was open. There were voices from within and they were
speaking English. There was a familiar smell. He pushed his way in, regardless of the
surprise he was creating, and walked to the bar.

'A pint of bitter, please,' said Ransom.

AT THIS point, if I were guided by purely literary considerations, my story would end, but
it is time to remove the mask and to acquaint the reader with the real and practical purpose
for which this book has been written. At the same time he will learn how the writing of it
became possible at all.

Dr Ransom - and at this stage it will become obvious that this is not his real name - soon
abandoned the idea of his Malacandrian dictionary and indeed all idea of communicating his
story to the world. He was ill for several months, and when he recovered he found himself
in considerable doubt as to whether what he remembered had really occurred. It looked very
like a delusion produced by his illness, and most of his apparent adventures could, he saw,
be explained psycho-analytically. He did not lean very heavily on this fact himself, for he
had long since observed that a good many 'real' things in the fauna and flora of our own world
could be accounted for in the same way if you started with the assumption that they were
illusions. But he felt that if he himself half doubted his own story, the rest of the world
would disbelieve it completely. He decided to hold his tongue, and there the matter would
have rested but for a very curious comcidence.

This is where I come into the story. I had known Dr Ransom slightly for several years and
corresponded with him on literary and philological subjects, though we very seldom met.
It was, therefore, quite in the usual order of things that I should write a letter some
months ago, of which I will quote the relevant paragraph. It ran like this:

'I am now working at the Platonists of the twelfth century and incidentally discovering that
they wrote damnably difficult Latin. In one of them, Bernardus Silvestris, there is a word
I should particularly like your views on - the word Oyarses. It occurs in the description of
a voyage through the heavens, and an Oyarses seems to be the 'intelligence' or tutelary
spirit of a heavenly sphere, i.e. in our language, of a planet. I asked C. J. about it and
he says it ought to be Ousiarches. That, of course, would make sense, but I do not feel quite
satisfied. Have you by any chance ever come across a word like Oyarses, or can you hazard
any guess as to what language it may be?'

The immediate result of this letter was an invitation to spend a weekend with Dr Ransom. He
told me his whole story, and since then he and I have been almost continuously at work on
the mystery. A good many facts, which I have no intention of publishing at present; have
fallen into our hands; facts about planets in general and about Mars in particular, facts
about medieval Platonists, and (not least in importance) facts about the Professor to whom
I am giving the fictitious name of Weston: A systematic report of these facts might, of course,
be given to the civilized world: but that would almost certainly result in universal incredulity
and in a libel action from 'Weston'. At the same time, we both feel that we cannot be silent.
We are being daily confirmed in our belief that the oyarses of Mars was right when it said
that the present 'celestial year' was to be a revolutionary one, that the long isolation of
our own planet is nearing its end, and that great doings are on foot. We have found reason to
believe that the medieval Platonists were living in the same celestial year as ourselves -
in fact, that it began in the twelfth century of our era - and that the occurrence of the
name Oyarsa (Latinized as oyarses) in Bernardus Silvestris is not an accident. And we have
also evidence -increasing almost daily - that 'Weston', or the force or forces behind 'Weston',
will play a very important part in the events of the next few centuries, and, unless we prevent
them, a very disastrous one. We do not mean that they are likely to invade Mars - our cry is
not merely 'Hands off Malacandra.' The dangers to be feared are not planetary but cosmic, or at
least solar, and they are not temporal but eternal. More than this it would be unwise to say.

It was Dr Ransom who first saw that our only chance was to publish in the form of fiction
what would certainly not be listened to as fact. He even thought - greatly overrating my
literary powers - that this might have the incidental advantage of reaching a wider public,
and that, certainly, it would reach a great many people sooner than 'Weston'. To my
objection that if accepted as fiction, it would for that very reason be regarded as false,
he replied that there would be indications enough in the narrative for the few readers -
the very few - who at present were prepared to go farther into the matter.

'And they,' he said, 'will easily find out you, or me, and will easily identify Weston.
Anyway,' he continued, 'what we need for the moment is not so much a body of belief as a
body of people familiarized with certain ideas. If we could even effect in one per cent
of our readers a change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we
should have made a beginning.'

What neither of us foresaw was the rapid march of events which was to render the book out
of date before it was published. These events have already made it rather a prologue to
our story than the story itself. But we must let it go as it stands. For the later stages
of the adventure - well, it was Aristotle, long before Kipling, who taught us the formula,
'That is another story.'

(Being extracts from a letter written by the original of 'Dr Ransom' to the author)

... I think you are right, and after the two or three corrections (marked in red) the
MS will have to stand. I won't deny that I am disappointed, but then any attempt to tell
such a story is bound to disappoint the man who has really been there. I am not now
referring to the ruthless way in which you have cut down all the philological part, though,
as it now stands, we are giving our readers a mere caricature of the Malacandrian language.
I mean something more difficult - something which I couldn't possibly express. How can one
'get across' the Malacandrian smells? Nothing comes back to me more vividly in my dreams ...
especially the early morning smell in those purple woods, where the very mention of 'early
morning' and 'woods' is misleading because it must set you thinking of earth and moss and
cobwebs and the smell of our own planet, but I'm thinking of something totally different.
More 'aromatic' ... yes, but then it is not hot or luxurious or exotic as that word suggests.
Something aromatic, spicy, yet very cold, very thin, tingling at the back of the nose -
something that did to the sense of smell what high, sharp violin notes do to the ear. And
mixed with that I always hear the sound of the singing - great hollow hound-like music from
enormous throats, deeper than Chaliapin, a 'warm, dark noise'. I am homesick for my old
Malacandrian valley when I think of it; yet God knows when I heard it there I was homesick
enough for the Earth.