C. Lewis - Out of the Silent Planet

An airship, some kind of flying machine … but why did the moon look so big? It was larger than he had thought at first. No moon could really be that size; and he realised now that he had known this from the first but had repressed the knowledge through terror. At the same moment a thought came into his head which stopped his breath - there could be no full moon at all that night. He remembered distinctly that he had walked from Nadderby on a moonless night. Even if the thin crescent of a new moon had escaped his notice, it could not have grown to this in a few hours. It could not have grown to this at all - this megalomaniac disc, far larger than the football he had at first compared it to, larger than a child’s hoop, filling almost half the sky. And where was the old ‘man in the moon’ - the familiar face that had looked down on all the generations of men? The thing wasn’t the Moon at all; and he felt his hair move on his scalp.

At that moment the sound of an opening door made him turn his head. An oblong of dazzling light appeared behind him and instantly vanished as the door closed again, having admitted the bulky form of a naked man whom Ransom recognised as Weston. No reproach, no demand for an explanation, rose to Ransom’s lips or even to his mind; not with that monstrous orb above them. The mere presence of a human being, with its offer of at least some companionship, broke down the tension in which his nerves had long been resisting a bottomless dismay. He found, when he spoke, that he was sobbing.

‘Weston! Weston!’ he gasped. ‘What is it? It’s not the Moon, not that size. It can’t be, can it?’

‘No,’ replied Weston, ‘it’s the Earth.’

Ransom’s legs failed him, and he must have sunk back upon the bed, but he only became aware of this many minutes later. At the moment he was unconscious of everything except his fear. He did not even know what he was afraid of: the fear itself possessed his whole mind, a formless, infinite misgiving. He did not lose consciousness, though he greatly wished that he might do so. Any change - death or sleep, or, best of all, a waking which should show all this for a dream - would have been inexpressibly welcome. None came. Instead, the lifelong self-control of social man, the virtues which are half hypocrisy or the hypocrisy which is half a virtue, came back to him and soon he found himself answering Weston in a voice not shamefully tremulous.

‘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.’