Out of the Silent Planet Read online

  “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 know.”

  “And you say this place is inhabited?” said Ransom.

  Weston gave him a peculiar look and then nodded. The uneasiness which this produced in

  Ransom rapidly merged in an anger which he had almost lost sight of amidst the conflicting emotions that beset him.

  “And what has all this to do with me?” he broke out. “You have assaulted me, drugged me, and are apparently carrying me off as a prisoner in this infernal thing. What have I done to you? What do you say for yourself?”

  “I might reply by asking you why you crept into my backyard like a thief. If you had minded your own business you would not be here. As it is, I admit that we have had to infringe your rights. My only defence is that small claims must give way to great. As far as we know, we are doing what has never been done in the history of man, perhaps never in the history of the universe. We have learned how to jump off the speck of matter on which our species began; infinity, and therefore perhaps eternity, is being put into the hands of the human race. You cannot be so small-minded as to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million individuals are of the slightest importance in comparison with this.”

  “I happen to disagree,” said Ransom, “and I always have disagreed, even about vivisection. But you haven’t answered my question. What do you want me for? What good am I to do you on this-on Malacandra?”

  “That I don’t know,” said Weston. “It was no idea of ours. We are only obeying orders.”

  “Whose?”

  There was another pause. “Come,” said Weston at last. “There is really no use in continuing this cross-examination. You keep on asking me questions I can’t answer: in some cases because I don’t know the answers, in others because you wouldn’t understand them. It will make things very much pleasanter during the voyage if you can only resign your mind to your fate and stop bothering yourself and us. It would be easier if your philosophy of life were not so insufferably narrow and individualistic. I had thought no one could fail to be inspired by the role you are being asked to play: that even a worm, if it could understand, would rise to the sacrifice. I mean, of course, the sacrifice of time and liberty, and some little risk. Don’t misunderstand me.”

  “Well,” said Ransom, “you hold all the cards, and I must make the best of it. I consider your philosophy of life raving lunacy. I suppose all that stuff about infinity and eternity means that you think you are justified in doing anything-absolutely anything-here and now, on the off chance that some creatures or other descended from man as we know him may crawl about a few centuries longer in some part of the universe.”

  “Yes-anything whatever,” returned the scientist sternly, “and all educated opinion-for I do not call classics and history and such trash education-is entirely on my side. I am glad you raised the point, and I advise you to remember my answer. In the meantime, if you will follow me into the next room, we will have breakfast. Be careful how you get up: your weight here is hardly appreciable compared with your weight on Earth.”

  Ransom rose and his captor opened the door. Instantly the room was flooded with a dazzling golden light which completely eclipsed the pale earthlight behind him.

  “I will give you darkened glasses in a moment,” said Weston as he preceded him into the chamber whence the radiance was pouring. It seemed to Ransom that Weston went up a hill towards the doorway and disappeared suddenly downwards when he had passed it. When he followed-which he did with caution-he had the curious impression that he was walking up to the edge of a precipice: the new room beyond the doorway seemed to be built on its side so that its farther wall lay almost in the same plane as the floor of the room he was leaving. When, however, he ventured to put forward his foot, he found that the floor continued flush and as he entered the second room the walls suddenly righted themselves and the rounded ceiling was over his head. Looking back, he perceived that the bedroom in its turn was now keeling over-its roof a wall and one of its walls a roof.

  “You will soon get used to it,” said Weston, following his gaze. “The ship is roughly spherical, and now that we are outside the gravitational field of the Earth ‘down’ means-and feels-towards the centre of our own little metal world. This, of course, was foreseen and we built her accordingly. The core of the ship is a hollow globe-we keep our stores inside it-and the surface of that globe is the floor we are walking on. The cabins are arranged all round this, their walls supporting an outer globe which from our point of view is the roof. As the centre is always ‘down,’ the piece of floor you are standing on always feels flat or horizontal and the wall you are standing against always seems vertical. On the other hand, the globe of floor is so small that you can always see over the edge of it-over what would be the horizon if you were a flea-and then you see the floor and walls of the next cabin in a different plane. It is just the same on Earth, of course, only we are not big enough to see it.”

  After this explanation he made arrangements in his precise, ungracious way for the comfort of his guest or prisoner. Ransom, at his advice, removed all his clothes and substituted a little metal girdle hung with enormous weights to reduce, as far as possible, the unmanageable lightness of his body. He also assumed tinted glasses, and soon found himself seated opposite Weston at a small table laid for breakfast. He was both hungry and thirsty and eagerly attacked the meal which consisted of tinned meat, biscuit, butter and coffee.

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p; But all these actions he had performed mechanically. Stripping, eating and drinking passed almost unnoticed, and all he ever remembered of his first meal in the spaceship was the tyranny of heat and light. Both were present in a degree which would have been intolerable on Earth, but each had a new quality. The light was paler than any light of comparable intensity that he had ever seen; it was not pure white but the palest of all imaginable golds, and it cast shadows as sharp as a floodlight. The heat, utterly free from moisture, seemed to knead and stroke the skin like a gigantic masseur: it produced no tendency to drowsiness: rather, intense alacrity. His headache was gone: he felt vigilant, courageous and magnanimous as he had seldom felt on Earth. Gradually he dared to raise his eyes to the skylight. Steel shutters were drawn across all but a chink of the glass, and that chink was covered with blinds of some heavy and dark material; but still it was too bright to look at.

  “I always thought space was dark and cold,” he remarked vaguely. “Forgotten the sun?” said Weston contemptuously.

  Ransom went on eating for some time. Then he began, “If it’s like this in the early morning,” and stopped, warned by the expression on Weston’s face. Awe fell upon him: there were no mornings here, no evenings, and no night-nothing but the changeless noon which had filled for centuries beyond history so many millions of cubic miles. He glanced at Weston again, but the latter held up his hand.

  “Don’t talk,” he said. “We have discussed all that is necessary. The ship does not carry oxygen enough for any unnecessary exertion; not even for talking.”

  Shortly afterwards he rose, without inviting the other to follow him, and left the room by one of the many doors which Ransom had not yet seen opened.

  V

  THE PERIOD spent in the space-ship ought to have been one of terror and anxiety for Ransom. He was separated by an astronomical distance from every member of the human race except two whom he had excellent reasons for distrusting. He was heading for an unknown destination, and was being brought thither for a purpose which his captors steadily refused to disclose. Devine and Weston relieved each other regularly in a room which Ransom was never allowed to enter and where he supposed the controls of their machine must be. Weston, during his watches off, was almost entirely silent. Devine was more loquacious and would often talk and guffaw with the prisoner until Weston rapped on the wall of the control room and warned them not to waste air. But Devine was secretive after a certain point. He was quite ready to laugh at Weston’s solemn scientific idealism. He didn’t give a damn, he said, for the future of the species or the meeting of two worlds.

  “There’s more to Malacandra than that,” he would add with a wink. But when Ransom asked him what more, he would lapse into satire and make ironical remarks about the white man’s burden and the blessings of civilization.

  “It is inhabited, then?” Ransom would press.

  “Ah-there’s always a native question in these things,” Devine would answer. For the most part his conversation ran on the things he would do when he got back to Earth: oceangoing yachts, the most expensive women and a big place on the Riviera figured largely in his plans. “I’m not running all these risks for fun.”

  Direct questions about Ransom’s own role were usually met with silence. Only once, in reply to such a question, Devine, who was then in Ransom’s opinion very far from sober, admitted that they were rather “handing him the baby.”

  “But I’m sure,” he added, “you’ll live up to the old school tie.”

  All this, as I have said, was sufficiently disquieting. The odd thing was that it did not very greatly disquiet him. It is hard for a man to brood on the future when he is feeling so extremely well as Ransom now felt. There was an endless night on one side of the ship and an endless day on the other: each was marvellous and he moved from the one to the other at his will delighted. In the nights, which he could create by turning the handle of a door, he lay for hours in contemplation of the skylight. The Earth’s disc was nowhere to be seen; the stars, thick as daisies on an uncut lawn, reigned perpetually with no cloud, no moon, no sunrise to dispute their sway. There were planets of unbelievable majesty, and constellations undreamed of: there were celestial sapphires, rubies, emeralds and pin-pricks of burning gold; far out on the left of the picture hung a comet, tiny and remote: and between all and behind all, far more emphatic and palpable than it showed on Earth, the undimensioned, enigmatic blackness. The lights trembled: they seemed to grow brighter as he looked. Stretched naked on his bed, a second Dana, he found it night by night more difficult to disbelieve in old astrology: almost he felt, wholly he imagined, “sweet influence” pouring or even stabbing into his surrendered body. All was silence but for the irregular tinkling noises. He knew now that these were made by meteorites, small, drifting particles of the worldstuff that smote continually on their hollow drum of steel; and he guessed that at any moment they might meet something large enough to make meteorites of ship and all. But he could not fear. He now felt that Weston had justly called him little-minded in the moment of his first panic. The adventure was too high, its circumstance too solemn, for any emotion save a severe delight. But the days-that is, the hours spent in the sunward hemisphere of their microcosm-were the best of all. Often he rose after only a few hours’ sleep to return, drawn by an irresistible attraction, to the regions of light; he could not cease to wonder at the noon which always awaited you however early you were to seek it. There, totally immersed in a bath of pure ethereal colour and of unrelenting though unwounding brightness, stretched his full length and with eyes half closed in the strange chariot that bore them, faintly quivering, through depth after depth of tranquillity far above the reach of night, he felt his body and mind daily rubbed and scoured and filled with new vitality. Weston, in one of his brief, reluctant answers, admitted a scientific basis for these sensations: they were receiving, he said, many rays that never penetrated the terrestrial atmosphere.

  But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of “space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now-now that the very name “space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it “dead”; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the Earth with so many eyes-and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens-the heavens which declared the glory-the “happy climes that ly Where day never shuts his eye Up in the broad fields of the sky.”

  He quoted Milton’s words to himself lovingly, at this time and often.

  He did not, of course, spend all his time in basking. He explored the ship (so far as he was allowed), passing from room to room with those slow movements which Weston enjoined upon them lest exertion should overtax their supply of air. From the necessity of its shape, the spaceship contained a good many more chambers than were in regular use: but Ransom was also inclined to think that its owners-or at least Devine-intended these to be filled with cargo of some kind on the return voyage. He also became, by an insensible process, the steward and cook of the company; partly because he felt it natural to share the only labours he could share-he was never allowed into the control room-and partly in order to anticipate a tendency which Weston showed to make him a servant whether he would or not. He preferred to work as a volunteer rather than in admitted slavery: and he liked his own cooking a good deal more than that of his companions.

  It was these du
ties that made him at first the unwilling, and then the alarmed, hearer of a conversation which occurred about a fortnight (he judged) after the beginning of their voyage. He had washed up the remains of their evening meal, basked in the sunlight, chatted with Devine-better company than Weston, though in Ransom’s opinion much the more odious of the two-and retired to bed at his usual time. He was a little restless, and after an hour or so it occurred to him that he had forgotten one or two small arrangements in the galley which would facilitate his work in the morning. The galley opened off the saloon or day room, and its door was close to that of the control room. He rose and went there at once. His feet, like the rest of him, were bare.

  The galley skylight was on the dark side of the ship, but Ransom did not turn on the light.

  To leave the door ajar was sufficient, as this admitted a stream of brilliant sunlight. As everyone who has “kept house” will understand, he found that his preparations for the morning had been even more incomplete than he supposed. He did his work well, from practice, and therefore quietly. He had just finished and was drying his hands on the roller towel behind the galley door when he heard the door of the control room open and saw the silhouette of a man outside the galley-Devine’s, he gathered. Devine did not come forward into the saloon, but remained standing and talking-apparently into the control room. It thus came about that while Ransom could hear distinctly what Devine said, he could not make out Weston’s answers.