The Greatest Sci-Fi Works of H. G. Wells. H. G. Wells

at the edge of the manhole, peering over it. Beneath, within a yard of my face, lay the untrodden snow of the moon.

      There came a little pause. Our eyes met.

      “It doesn’t distress your lungs too much?” said Cavor.

      “No,” I said. “I can stand this.”

      He stretched out his hand for his blanket, thrust his head through its central hole, and wrapped it about him. He sat down on the edge of the manhole, he let his feet drop until they were within six inches of the lunar ground. He hesitated for a moment, then thrust himself forward, dropped these intervening inches, and stood upon the untrodden soil of the moon.

      As he stepped forward he was refracted grotesquely by the edge of the glass. He stood for a moment looking this way and that. Then he drew himself together and leapt.

      The glass distorted everything, but it seemed to me even then to be an extremely big leap. He had at one bound become remote. He seemed twenty or thirty feet off. He was standing high upon a rocky mass and gesticulating back to me. Perhaps he was shouting — but the sound did not reach me. But how the deuce had he done this? I felt like a man who has just seen a new conjuring trick.

      In a puzzled state of mind I too dropped through the manhole. I stood up. Just in front of me the snowdrift had fallen away and made a sort of ditch. I made a step and jumped.

      I found myself flying through the air, saw the rock on which he stood coming to meet me, clutched it and clung in a state of infinite amazement.

      I gasped a painful laugh. I was tremendously confused. Cavor bent down and shouted in piping tones for me to be careful.

      I had forgotten that on the moon, with only an eighth part of the earth’s mass and a quarter of its diameter, my weight was barely a sixth what it was on earth. But now that fact insisted on being remembered.

      “We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now,” he said.

      With a guarded effort I raised myself to the top, and moving as cautiously as a rheumatic patient, stood up beside him under the blaze of the sun. The sphere lay behind us on its dwindling snowdrift thirty feet away.

      As far as the eye could see over the enormous disorder of rocks that formed the crater floor, the same bristling scrub that surrounded us was starting into life, diversified here and there by bulging masses of a cactus form, and scarlet and purple lichens that grew so fast they seemed to crawl over the rocks. The whole area of the crater seemed to me then to be one similar wilderness up to the very foot of the surrounding cliff.

      This cliff was apparently bare of vegetation save at its base, and with buttresses and terraces and platforms that did not very greatly attract our attention at the time. It was many miles away from us in every direction; we seemed to be almost at the centre of the crater, and we saw it through a certain haziness that drove before the wind. For there was even a wind now in the thin air, a swift yet weak wind that chilled exceedingly but exerted little pressure. It was blowing round the crater, as it seemed, to the hot illuminated side from the foggy darkness under the sunward wall. It was difficult to look into this eastward fog; we had to peer with half-closed eyes beneath the shade of our hands, because of the fierce intensity of the motionless sun.

      “It seems to be deserted,” said Cavor, “absolutely desolate.”

      I looked about me again. I retained even then a clinging hope of some quasi-human evidence, some pinnacle of building, some house or engine, but everywhere one looked spread the tumbled rocks in peaks and crests, and the darting scrub and those bulging cacti that swelled and swelled, a flat negation as it seemed of all such hope.

      “It looks as though these plants had it to themselves,” I said. “I see no trace of any other creature.”

      “No insects — no birds, no! Not a trace, not a scrap nor particle of animal life. If there was — what would they do in the night? … No; there’s just these plants alone.”

      I shaded my eyes with my hand. “It’s like the landscape of a dream. These things are less like earthly land plants than the things one imagines among the rocks at the bottom of the sea. Look at that yonder! One might imagine it a lizard changed into a plant. And the glare!”

      “This is only the fresh morning,” said Cavor.

      He sighed and looked about him. “This is no world for men,” he said. “And yet in a way — it appeals.”

      He became silent for a time, then commenced his meditative humming.

      I started at a gentle touch, and found a thin sheet of livid lichen lapping over my shoe. I kicked at it and it fell to powder, and each speck began to grow.

      I heard Cavor exclaim sharply, and perceived that one of the fixed bayonets of the scrub had pricked him. He hesitated, his eyes sought among the rocks about us. A sudden blaze of pink had crept up a ragged pillar of crag. It was a most extraordinary pink, a livid magenta.

      “Look!” said I, turning, and behold Cavor had vanished.

      For an instant I stood transfixed. Then I made a hasty step to look over the verge of the rock. But in my surprise at his disappearance I forgot once more that we were on the moon. The thrust of my foot that I made in striding would have carried me a yard on earth; on the moon it carried me six — a good five yards over the edge. For the moment the thing had something of the effect of those nightmares when one falls and falls. For while one falls sixteen feet in the first second of a fall on earth, on the moon one falls two, and with only a sixth of one’s weight. I fell, or rather I jumped down, about ten yards I suppose. It seemed to take quite a long time, five or six seconds, I should think. I floated through the air and fell like a feather, knee-deep in a snowdrift in the bottom of a gully of blue-gray, white-veined rock.

      I looked about me. “Cavor!” I cried; but no Cavor was visible.

      “Cavor!” I cried louder, and the rocks echoed me.

      I turned fiercely to the rocks and clambered to the summit of them. “Cavor!” I cried. My voice sounded like the voice of a lost lamb.

      The sphere, too, was not in sight, and for a moment a horrible feeling of desolation pinched my heart.

      Then I saw him. He was laughing and gesticulating to attract my attention. He was on a bare patch of rock twenty or thirty yards away. I could not hear his voice, but “jump” said his gestures. I hesitated, the distance seemed enormous. Yet I reflected that surely I must be able to clear a greater distance than Cavor.

      I made a step back, gathered myself together, and leapt with all my might. I seemed to shoot right up in the air as though I should never come down.

      It was horrible and delightful, and as wild as a nightmare, to go flying off in this fashion. I realised my leap had been altogether too violent. I flew clean over Cavor’s head and beheld a spiky confusion in a gully spreading to meet my fall. I gave a yelp of alarm. I put out my hands and straightened my legs.

      I hit a huge fungoid bulk that burst all about me, scattering a mass of orange spores in every direction, and covering me with orange powder. I rolled over spluttering, and came to rest convulsed with breathless laughter.

      I became aware of Cavor’s little round face peering over a bristling hedge. He shouted some faded inquiry. “Eh?” I tried to shout, but could not do so for want of breath. He made his way towards me, coming gingerly among the bushes.

      “We’ve got to be careful,” he said. “This moon has no discipline. She’ll let us smash ourselves.”

      He helped me to my feet. “You exerted yourself too much,” he said, dabbing at the yellow stuff with his hand to remove it from my garments.

      I stood passive and panting, allowing him to beat off the jelly from my knees and elbows and lecture me upon my misfortunes. “We don’t quite allow for the gravitation. Our muscles are scarcely educated yet. We must practise a little, when you have got your breath.”

      I pulled two or three little thorns out of my hand,