The H.G. Wells Reader (39 page)

“ 'And does not your atmosphere freeze?'

“I told him no; that it was never cold enough for that, because our nights were so short.

“Not even liquefy?'

“I was about to say ‘No,' but then it occurred to me that one part at least of our atmosphere, the water vapor of it, does sometimes liquefy and form dew and sometimes freeze and form frost—a process perfectly analogous to the freezing of all the external atmosphere of the moon during its longer night. I made myself clear on this point, and from there Grand Lunar went on to speak with me of sleep. For the need of sleep that comes so regularly every twenty-four hours to all things is part also of our earthly inheritance. On the moon they rest only at rare intervals and after exceptional exertions. Then I tried to describe to him the soft splendors of a summer night, and from that I passed to a description of those animals that prowl by night and sleep by day. I told him of lions and tigers, and here it seemed that we had come to a deadlock. For, save in their waters, there are no creatures in the moon not absolutely domestic and subject to his will, and so it has been for immemorial years. They have monstrous water creatures, but no evil beasts, and the idea of anything strong and large existing ‘outside' in the night is very difficult for them.”

[The record is here too broken to transcribe for the space of perhaps twenty words or more.]

“He talked with his attendants, as I suppose, upon the strange superficiality and unreasonableness of (man), who lives on the mere surface of a world, a creature of waves and winds and all the chances of space, who cannot even unite to overcome the beasts that prey upon his kind, and yet who dares to invade another planet. During this aside I sat thinking, and then at his desire I told him of the different sorts of men. He searched me with questions. ‘And for all sorts of work you have the same sort of men. But who thinks? Who governs?'

“I gave him an outline of the democratic method.

“When I had done he ordered cooling sprays upon his brow and then requested me to repeat my explanation, conceiving something had miscarried.

“Do they not do different things then?' said Phi-oo.

“Some I admitted were thinkers and some officials; some hunted, some were mechanics, some artists, some toilers. ‘But
all
rule,' I said.

“ 'And have they not different shapes to fit them to their different duties?'

“ 'None that you can see,' I said, ‘except perhaps their clothes. Their minds perhaps differ a little,' I reflected.

“ 'Their minds must differ a great deal,' said the Grand Lunar, ‘or they would all want to do the same things.'

“In order to bring myself into a closer harmony with his preconceptions, I said that his surmise was right. ‘It was all hidden in the brain,' I said; ‘but the difference was there. Perhaps if one could see the minds and souls of men they would be as varied and unequal as the Selenites. There were great men and small men, men who
could reach out far and wide, and men who could go swiftly; noisy, trumpet-minded men, and men who could remember without thinking. . . .' ”

[The record is indistinct for three words.]

“He interrupted me to recall me to my previous statement. ‘But you said all men rule?' he pressed.

“He reached out to a salient fact. ‘Do you mean,' he asked, ‘that there is no Grand Earthly?'

“I thought of several people, but assured him finally there was none. I explained that such autocrats and emperors as we had tried upon earth had usually ended in drink, or vice, or violence, and that the large and influential section of the people of the earth to which I belonged, the Anglo-Saxons, did not mean to try that sort of thing again. At which the Grand Lunar was even more amazed.

“ 'But how do you keep even such wisdom as you have?' he asked; and I explained to him the way we helped our limited . . .”

[A word omitted here, probably “brains.”]

“with libraries of books. I explained to him how our science was growing by the united labours of innumerable little men, and on that he made no comment save that it was evident we had mastered much in spite of our social savagery, or we could not have come to the moon. Yet the contrast was very marked. With knowledge the Selemites grew and changed; mankind stored their knowledge about them and remained brutes—equipped. He said this . . .”

[Here there is a short piece of the record indistinct.]

“He then caused me to describe how we went about this earth of ours, and I described to him our railways and ships. For a time he could not understand that we had the use of steam only one hundred years, but when he did he was clearly amazed. I may mention as a singular thing that the Selenites use years to count by, just as we do on earth, though I can make nothing of their numeral system. That, however, does not matter, because Phi-oo understands ours. From that I went on to tell him that mankind had dwelt in cities only for nine or ten thousand years, and that we were still not united in one brotherhood, but under many different forms of government. This astonished the Grand Lunar very much, when it was made clear to him. At first he thought we referred merely to administrative areas.

“Our States and Empires are still the rawest sketches of what order will some day be,' I said, and so I came to tell him . . .”

[At this point a length of record that probably represents thirty or forty words is totally illegible.]

“The Grand Lunar was greatly impressed by the folly of men in clinging to the inconvenience of diverse tongues. ‘They want to communicate and yet not to communicate,' he said, and then for a long time he questioned me closely concerning war.

“He was at first perplexed and incredulous. ‘You mean to say,' he asked, seeking confirmation, ‘that you run above over the surface of your world—this world, whose riches you have scarcely begun to scrape—killing one another for beasts to eat?'

“I told him that was perfectly correct.

“He asked for particulars to assist his imagination. ‘But do not your ships and your poor little cities get injured?' he asked and I found the waste of property and conveniences seemed to impress upon him almost as much as the killing. ‘Tell me more,' said the Grand Lunar; ‘make me see pictures. I cannot conceive these things.'

“And so, for a space, though something loth, I told him the story of earthly War.

“I told him of the first orders and ceremonies of war, of warnings and ultimatums, and the marshalling and marching of troops. I gave him an idea of maneuvers and positions and battle joined. It told him of sieges and assaults, of starvation and hardship in trenches, and of sentinels freezing in the snow. I told him of routs and surprises, and desperate last stands and faint hopes, and the pitiless pursuit of fugitives and the dead upon the field. I told, too, of the past, of invasions and massacres, of the Huns and Tartars, and the wars of Mahomet and the Caliphs and of the Crusades. And as I went on, and Phi-oo translated, the Selenites cooed and murmured in a steadily intensified emotion.

“I told them an ironclad could fire a shot of a ton twelve miles, and go through twenty feet of iron—and how we could steer torpedoes under water. I went on to describe a Maxim gun in action and what I could imagine of the Battle of Colenso. The Grand Lunar was so incredulous that he interrupted the translation of what I had said in order to have my verification of my account. They particularly doubted my description of the men cheering and rejoicing as they went into battle.

“ 'But surely they do not like it!' translated Phi-oo.

“I assured them men of my race considered battle the most glorious experience of life, at which the whole assembly was stricken with amazement.

“ 'But what good is this war?' asked the Grand Lunar, sticking to his theme.

“ 'Oh! as for
good
!' said I, ‘it thins the population!'

“ 'But why should there be a need—?'

“There came a pause, the cooling sprays impinged upon his brow, and then he spoke again.”

At this point there suddenly becomes predominant in the record a series of undulations that have been apparent as a perplexing complication as far back as Cavor's description of the silence that fell before the first speaking of the Grand Lunar. These undulations are evidently the result of radiations proceeding from the lunar source, and their persistent approximation to the alternating signals of Cavor is curiously suggestive of some operator deliberately seeking to mix them in with his message and render it illegible. At first they are small and regular, so that with a little care and the loss of very few words we have been able to disentangle Cavor's message; then they become broad and larger, then suddenly they are irregular, with an irregularity that gives the effect at last of someone scribbling through a line of writing. For a long time nothing can be made of this madly zigzagging trace; then quite abruptly the interruption ceases, leaves a few words clear, and then resumes and continues for all the rest of the message, completely obliterating whatever Cavor was attempting to transmit. Why, if this is indeed a deliberate intervention, the Selenites should have preferred to let Cavor go on transmitting his message in happy
ignorance of their obliteration of its record, when it was clearly quite in their power and much more easy and convenient for them to stop his proceedings at any time, is a problem to which I can contribute nothing. The thing seems to have happened so, and that is all I can say. This last rag of his description of the Grand Lunar begins in mid-sentence:

“Interrogated me very closely upon my secret. I was able in a little while to get to an understanding with them, and at last to elucidate what has been a puzzle to me ever since I realized the vastness of their science, namely, how it is they themselves have never discovered ‘Cavorite.' I find they know of it as a theoretical substance, but they have always regarded it as a practical impossibility, because for some reason there is no helium in the moon, and helium—”

[Across the last letters of helium slashes the resumption of that obliterating trace. Note the word “secret,” for on that, and that alone, I base my interpretation of the last message, as both Mr. Wendigee and myself now believe it to be, that he is ever likely to send us.]

In this unsatisfactory manner the penultimate message of Cavor dies out. One seems to see him there amidst his blue-lit apparatus intently signaling us to the last, all unaware of the curtain of confusion that drops between us; all unaware, too, of the final dangers that even then must have been creeping upon him. His disastrous want of vulgar common sense had utterly betrayed him. He had talked of war, he had talked of all the strength and irrational violence of men, of their insatiable aggressions, their tireless futility of conflict. He had filled the whole moon-world with this impression of our race, and then I think it plain he admitted that upon himself alone hung the possibility—at least for a long time—of any other men reaching the moon. The line the cold, inhuman reason of the moon would take seems plain enough to me, and a suspicion of it, and then perhaps some sudden sharp realization of it, must have come to him. One imagines him going about the moon with the remorse of this fatal indiscretion growing in his mind. During a certain time most assuredly the Grand Lunar was deliberating the new situation, and for all that time Cavor went as free as ever he had gone. We imagine that obstacles of some sort prevented his getting to his electro-magnetic apparatus again after that last message I have given. For some days we received nothing. Perhaps he was having fresh audiences, and trying to evade his previous admissions. Who can hope to guess?

And then suddenly, like a cry in the night, like a cry that is followed by a stillness, came the last message. It is the briefest fragment, the broken beginnings of two sentences.

The first was:

“I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know—”

There was an interval of perhaps a minute. One imagines some interruption from without. A departure from the instrument—a dreadful hesitation among the looming masses of apparatus in that dim, blue-lit cavern—a sudden rush back to it, full of resolve that came too late. Then, as if it were hastily transmitted came:

“Cavorite made as follows: take—”

There followed one word, a quite unmeaning word as it stands—

“uless.”

And that is all.

It may be he made a hasty attempt to spell “useless” when his fate was close upon him. Whatever it was that was happening about that apparatus, we cannot tell. Whatever it was we shall never, I know, receive another message from the moon. For my own part a vivid dream has come to my help, and I see, almost as plainly as though I had seen it in actual fact, a blue-lit disheveled Cavor struggling in the grip of a great multitude of those insect Selenites, struggling ever more desperately and hopelessly as they swarm upon him, shouting, expostulating, perhaps even at last fighting, and being forced backward step by step out of all speech or sign of his fellows, for evermore into the Unknown—into the dark, into that silence that has no end.

*
I do not remember seeing any wooden things on the moon; doors, tables, everything corresponding to our terrestrial journey was made of metal, and I believe for the most part of gold, which as a metal would, of course, naturally recommend itself—other things being equal—on account of the ease in working it and its toughness and durability.

The Food of the Gods
appears a few years after the half-decade that produced the great scientific romances, but it begins with a situation that comes straight out of that tradition: the invention of “Boomfood,” or what its inventors name “Herakleophorbia,” a chemical that causes continuous and extraordinary growth. At first Boomfood causes disaster. Unlike the usual scientific romance, however, before it is half through
The Food of the Gods
has begun to realize a second possibility for such stupendous growth, and it takes increasingly seriously the mental and moral enlargement that takes place in the few children fed Boomfood. In the last section, when some sixty humans have achieved an adult height of about forty feet and strife is beginning between the two “species” of humans, the novel ends abruptly with the utopian possibilities the giants represent alive and full of potential. The comedy of the beginning becomes not just a satire on scientific overreaching but a rendering of the very limitations that the Giants will supposedly overcome. The selection describes those early horrific events. The inventors of Boomfood, Mr. Bensington and Professor Redwood, establish an “Experimental Farm” run by two incompetents, Mr. and Mrs. Skinner. Mr. Skinner speaks with a severe lisp. The scenes show Wells at his comic peak
.