The First Men in the Moon by H. Wells (the alpha prince and his bride full story free TXT) 📕

‘i wish you had taken the trouble to find that out before we came,’ i said.

He answered nothing, buzzing to himself softly as he pursued his thoughts. My temper was going. ‘What do you think has become of the sphere, anyhow?’ i asked.

‘Lost,’ he said, like a man who answers an uninteresting question.

‘Among those plants?’

‘Unless they find it.’

‘And then?’

‘How can I tell?’

‘Cavor,’ I said, with a sort of hysterical bitterness, ‘things look bright for my Company. . . .’

He made no answer.

‘Good Lord!’ I exclaimed. ‘Just think of all the trouble we took to get into this pickle! What did we come for? What are we after? What was the moon to us or we to the moon? We wanted too much, we tried too much. We ought to have started the little things first. It was you proposed the moon! Those Cavorite spring blinds! I am certain we could have worked them for terrestrial purposes. Certain! Did you really understand what I proposed? A steel cylinder——’

‘Rubbish!’ said Cavor.

We ceased to converse.

For a time Cavor kept up a broken monologue without much help from me.

‘If they find it,’ he began, ‘if they find it . . . what will they do with it? Well, that’s a question. It may be that’s the question. They won’t understand it, anyhow. If they understood that sort of thing they would have come long since to the earth. Would they? Why shouldn’t they? But they would have sent something — They couldn’t keep their hands off such a possibility. No! But they will examine it. Clearly they are intelligent and inquisitive. They will examine it — get inside it — trifle with the studs. Off! . . . That would mean the moon for us for all the rest of our lives. Strange creatures, strange knowledge . . .’

‘As for strange knowledge — ’ said I, and language failed me.

‘Look here, Bedford,’ said Cavor, ‘you came on this expedition of your own free will.’

‘You said to me, “Call it prospecting.” ’

‘There’s always risks in prospecting.’

‘Especially when you do it unarmed and without thinking out every possibility.’

‘I was so taken up with the sphere. The thing rushed on us, and carried us away.’

‘Rushed on me, you mean.’

‘Rushed on me just as much. How was I to know when I set to work on molecular physics that the business would bring me here — of all places?’

‘It’s this accursed science,’ I cried. ‘It’s the very Devil. The mediæval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it — and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions and new weapons — now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!’

‘Anyhow, it’s no use your quarrelling with me now. These creatures — these Selenites, or whatever we choose to call them — have got us tied hand and foot. Whatever temper you choose to go through with it in, you will have to go through with it. . . . We have experiences before us that will need all our coolness.’

He paused as if he required my assent. But I sat sulking. ‘Confound your science!’ I said.

‘The problem is communication. Gestures, I fear, will be different. Pointing, for example. No creatures but men and monkeys point.’

That was too obviously wrong for me. ‘Pretty nearly every animal,’ I cried, ‘points with its eyes or nose.’

Cavor meditated over that. ‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘and we don’t. There’s such differences — such differences!

‘One might . . . But how can I tell? There is speech. The sounds they make, a sort of fluting and piping. I don’t see how we are to imitate that. Is it their speech, that sort of thing? They may have different senses, different means of communication. Of course they are minds and we are minds; there must be something in common. Who knows how far we may not get to an understanding?’

‘The things are outside us,’ I said. ‘They’re more different from us than the strangest animals on earth. They are a different clay. What is the good of talking like this?’

Cavor thought. ‘i don’t see that. Where there are minds they will have something similar — even though they have been evolved on different planets. Of course if it was a question of instincts, if we or they are no more than animals——’

‘Well, are they? They’re much more like ants on their hind legs than human beings, and who ever got to any sort of understanding with ants?’

‘But these machines and clothing! No, i don’t hold with you, Bedford. The difference is wide——’

‘It’s insurmountable.’

‘The resemblance must bridge it. i remember reading once a paper by the late Professor Galton on the possibility of communication between the planets.* Unhappily, at that time it did not seem probable that that would be of any material benefit to me, and i fear I did not give it the attention I should have done — in view of this state of affairs. Yet . . . Now, let me see!

‘His idea was to begin with those broad truths that must underlie all conceivable mental existences and establish a basis on those. The great principles of geometry, to begin with. He proposed to take some leading proposition of Euclid’s,* and show by construction that its truth was known to us, to demonstrate, for example, that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal, and that if the equal sides be produced the angles on the other side of the base are equal also, or that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstrating our knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possession of a reasonable intelligence. . . . Now, suppose I . . . I might draw the geometrical figure with a wet finger, or even trace it in the air . . .’

He fell silent. I sat meditating his words. For a time his wild hope of communication, of interpretation, with these weird beings held me. Then that angry despair that was a part of my exhaustion and