The First Men in the Moon

ding of

of it before, but at the time it seemed to come to him in a rush. We were returning to the bungalow for tea

s what?"

ywhere! T

do you

t be a sphere! Th

is own fashion. I hadn't the ghost of an idea then of his

ly it had cooled and the manufacture was completed all that uproar happened, nothing above it weighed anything, the air went squirting up, the house squirt

go up a

ore disturbance tha

good wil

ing up

teacup and s

made of steel lined with thick glass; it will contain a proper store of solidified air, concentra

vor

es

ill you ge

milar problem a

know.

course, will have to be a little complicated; there will have to be a valve

e's thing in A T

s not a read

yourself up while the Cavorite was warm, and as soon as it cooled

tang

event the thing travelling in a straight line into space for ever?" I ask

prings, and released and checked by electricity conveyed by platinum wires fused through the glass. All that is merely a question of detail. So you see, that except for the thickness of the blind rollers, the Cavorite exterior of the sphere will consist of windows or blinds, whichever you like to call them. Well, when all thes

taking

ee?" h

I s

ack about in space just as we wish

at's clear e

el

do it for! It's really only jumpi

mple, one might

ot there? What

Oh! consider th

re air

e may

e as a large order all the same. The moon! I'

question, because of

g blinds-Cavorite blinds in stron

into outer space is not so much worse, if at all, t

itions. And if anything goes wrong there are relief parties.

t prosp

at.... One might make a bo

there will be min

exa

gold perhaps, poss

you're not a practical man. The moon

uch to cart any weight anywhere if

at. "Delivered free on

ugh we were conf

u m

urroundings, exhilarating sense of ligh

re air

, y

run it as a sanatorium. B

present," said Cavor airily;

ain. "After all," I said, "there's some

re-emption," came floating into my head-planetary rights of pre-emption. I recalled the old Spanish monopoly in American gold. It wasn't as though it was just this planet or

from doubt to enthusiasm seemed to take scarcely any time at all. "But this is trem

citement had play. He too got up and paced. He too gesticulated

al difficulty that had pulled me up. "We'll soon settle tha

and we hurried off to the laborator

ry line, but wonderfully correct. We got out the orders for the steel blinds and frames we needed from that night's work, and the glass sphere was designed within a week. We gave up our afternoon conversations and our old routine altogether. We worked, and we slept an

nds of the steel shell-it was not really a spherical shell, but polyhedral, with a roller blind to each facet-had arrived by February, and the lower half was bolted together. The Cavorite was half made by March, the metallic paste had gone through two of the stages in its manufacture, and we had plastered quite half of it on to the steel bars and blinds. It was astonishing how closely we kept to the

ng reserve oxygen, an arrangement for removing carbonic acid and waste from the air and restoring oxygen by means of sodium peroxide, w

g near the end, an odd mood came over me. I had been bricking up the furnace all the morn

," I said. "After all

The thing no

what do you expect? I though

ged his

going t

aid, and star

rked. "You'd better take

ely; "I'm going to fi

e bad times before my business collapse, but the very worst of those was sweet slumber compared to this

me. The strangeness of what we were about to do, the unearthliness of it, overwhelmed me. I was like a man awakened out of pleasant dreams to the most horrible surroundin

to recall the fragmentary knowledge of astronomy I had gained in my irregular reading, but it was all too vague to furnish any idea of the things we might expect.

. I told him shortly, "I'm not

ith a sullen persistence

on't come. The t

to be a glorious morning: a warm wind and deep blue sky, the first green of spring abroad, and multitudes of birds singing. I lunched on beef and beer in a littl

that for one poor soul at least this world had proved excessive, and the

, and the landlady was a clean old woman and took my eye. I found I had just enough money to pay for my lodging with her. I decided to stop the night there. She was a t

ike a trip to th

ently under the impression that this was a common excu

gossiped with two labourers about brickmaking, and motor cars, and the cricket of last year. A

"I am coming," I said. "I've been

fter that I worked a little more carefully, and took a trudge for an hour every