A Honeymoon in Space
the way Englishmen start marriage in England? If it is, I don't wonder
at Englishmen coming across the Atlantic in liners and air-ships and so
on to get American wives. I guess you can't understand your own
womenfolk."
"Or perhaps they don't understand us; but anyhow, I don't think I've
made any great mistake."
"No, I don't think you have. Of course if I thought so I wouldn't be
here now. But this is very well for a breakfast talk; all the same, I
should like to know how we are going to take the promenade you promised
me on the surface of the moon?"
"Your Ladyship has only to finish her breakfast, and then everything
shall be made plain to her, even the deepest craters of the mountains of
the moon."
"Very well, then, I will eat swiftly and in obedience; and meanwhile, as
your Lordship seems to have finished, perhaps----"
"Yes, I will go and see to the mechanical necessities," said Redgrave,
swallowing his last cup of coffee, and getting up. "If you'll come down
to the lower deck when you've finished, I'll have your breathing-suit
ready for you, and then we'll go into the air-chamber."
"Thanks, dear, yes," she said, putting out her hand to him as he left
the table, "the ante-chamber to other worlds. Isn't it just lovely?
Fancy me being able to leave one world and land on another, and have you
to say just those few words which make it all possible. I wonder what
all the girls of all the civilised countries of earth would give just to
be me right now."
"They could none of them give what you gave me, Zaidie, because you see
from my point of view there's only one Zaidie in the world--or as
perhaps I ought to say just now, in the Solar System."
"Very prettily said, sir!" she laughed, when she had given him his due
reward for his courtly speech. "I am too dazed with all these wonders
about me to----"
"To reply to it? You've given me the most convincing reply possible. Now
finish your breakfast, and I'll tell you when the breathing-dresses and
the air-chamber are ready. By the way, don't forget your cameras. It's
quite possible we may find something worth taking pictures of, and you
needn't trouble much about the weight. You know, you and I and all that
we carry will only weigh about a sixth of what we did on the earth."
"Very well, then, I'll take the whole-plate apparatus as well as the
kodak and the panorama camera. When I'm ready, Murgatroyd will tell you
to come down."
"But isn't he coming with us too?"
"My dear girl, if I were to ask Murgatroyd to leave the _Astronef_
there'd be a mutiny on board--a mutiny of one against one. No, he's left
his native world; but he says he's done it in a ship that's made with
British steel out of English iron mines, smelted, forged and fashioned
in English works, and so to him it's a bit of England, however far away
from Mother Earth it may be; and if you ever see Andrew Murgatroyd's big
head and good, ungainly body outside the _Astronef_ in any of the
worlds, dead or alive, that we're going to visit--well, when we get back
to Mother Earth you may ask me----"
"I don't think I'll have to ask you for anything, Lenox. I believe if I
wanted anything you'd know before I did, so go away and get those
breathing-dresses ready. I didn't come to the moon to talk commonplaces
with a husband I've been married to for nearly three days."
"Is it really as long as that?"
"Oh, don't be ridiculous, even if you are beyond the limits of earthly
conventionalities. Anyhow, I've been married long enough to want my own
way, and just now I want a promenade on the moon."
"The will of her Ladyship is a law unto her servant, and that which she
hath said shall be done! If you come down on to the lower deck in ten
minutes everything shall be ready."
With this he disappeared down the companion-way.
About five minutes afterwards Andrew Murgatroyd showed his grizzled,
long-bearded face with its high forehead, heavy brows, and broad-set
eyes, long nose and shaven upper lip, just above the stairway and said,
for all the world as though he might have been giving out the number of
the hymn in his beloved Ebenezer at Smeaton:
"If it pleases yer Ladyship, his Lordship is ready, and if you'll please
come down I'll show you the way."
"Oh, thank you, Mr. Murgatroyd!" said Zaidie, getting up and going
towards the companion-way; "but I'm afraid you don't think that--I mean
you don't seem to take very much interest----"
"If your Ladyship will pardon me," said the old man, standing aside to
let her go down, "it is not my business to think on board his Lordship's
vessel. I am his servant, and my fathers have been his fathers' servants
for more years than I'd like to count. If it wasn't that way I wouldn't
be here. Will your Ladyship please to come down?"
Zaidie bowed her beautiful head in recognition of this ages-old
devotion, and said as she passed him, more sweetly than he had ever
heard human lips speak:
"Thank you, Mr. Murgatroyd. You've taught me something in those few
words that we have no knowledge of in the States. Good service is as
honourable as good mastership. Thank you."
Murgatroyd put up his lower lip and half smiled with his upper, for he
was not yet quite sure of this radiant beauty, who, according to his
ideas, should have been English and wasn't. Then, with a rather clumsy
and yet eloquent gesture, he showed her the way down to the air-chamber.
She nodded to him with a smile as she passed in through the air-tight
door, and when she heard the levers swing to and the bolts shoot into
their places she felt as though, for the time being, she had said
goodbye to a friend.
Her husband was waiting for her almost fully clad in his
breathing-dress. He had hers all ready to put on, and when the necessary
changes and investments had been made, Zaidie found herself clad in a
costume which was not by any means unlike the diving-dresses of common
use, save that they were very much lighter in construction.
The helmets were smaller, and not having to withstand outside pressure
they were made of welded aluminum, lined thickly with asbestos, not to
keep the cold out, but the heat in. On the back of the dress there was a
square case, looking like a knapsack, containing the expanding
apparatus, which would furnish breathable air for an almost unlimited
time as long as the liquefied air from a cylinder hung below it passed
through the cells in which the breathed air had been deprived of its
carbonic acid gas and other noxious ingredients.
The pressure of air inside the helmet automatically regulated the
supply, which was not permitted to circulate through the other portions
of the dress. The reasons for this precaution were very simple. Granted
the absence of atmosphere on the moon, any air in the dress, which was
woven of a cunning compound of silk and asbestos, would instantly expand
with irresistible force, burst the covering, and expose the limbs of the
explorers to a cold which would be infinitely more destructive than the
hottest of earthly fires. It would wither them to nothing in a moment.
A human hand or foot--we won't say anything about faces--exposed to the
summer or winter temperature of the moon--that is to say, to its
sunlight and its darkness--would be shrivelled into dry bone in a
moment, and therefore Lord Redgrave, foreseeing this, had provided the
breathing-dresses. Lastly, the two helmets were connected, for purposes
of conversation, by a light wire, the two ends of which were connected
with a little telephonic receiver and transmitter inside each of the
head-dresses.
"Well, now I think we're ready," said Redgrave, putting his hand on the
lever which opened the outer door.
His voice sounded a little queer and squeaky over the wire, and for the
matter of that so did Zaidie's as she replied:
"Yes, I'm ready, I think. I hope these things will work all right."
"You may be quite sure that I shouldn't have put _you_ into one of them
if I hadn't tested them pretty thoroughly," he replied, swinging the
door open and throwing out a light folding iron ladder which was hinged
to the floor.
They were in the shade cast by the hull of the _Astronef_. For about ten
yards in front of her Zaidie saw a dense black shadow, and beyond it a
stretch of grey-white sand lit up by a glare of sunlight which would
have been intolerable if it had not been for the smoke-coloured slips of
glass which had been fitted behind the glass visors of the helmets.
Over it were thickly scattered boulders and pieces of rock bleached and
desiccated, and each throwing a black shadow, fantastically shaped and
yet clearly defined on the grey-white sand behind it. There was no soil,
and all the softer kind of rock and stone had crumbled away ages ago.
Every particle of moisture had long since evaporated; even chemical
combinations had been dissolved by the alternations of heat and cold
known only on earth to the chemist in his laboratory.
Only the hardest rocks, such as granites and basalts, remained.
Everything else had been reduced to the universal grey-white impalpable
powder into which Zaidie's shoes sank when she, holding her husband's
hand, went down the ladder and stood at the foot of it--first of the
earth-dwellers to set foot on another world.
Redgrave followed her with a little spring from the centre of the ladder
which landed him with strange gentleness beside her. He took both her
gloved hands and pressed them hard in his. He would have kissed his
welcome to the World that Had Been if he could, but that of course was
out of the question, and so he had to be content with telling her that
he wanted to.
Then, hand in hand, they crossed the little plateau towards the edge of
the tremendous gulf, fifty-four miles across and nearly twenty thousand
feet deep, which forms the crater of Tycho. In the middle of it rose a
conical mountain about five thousand feet high, the summit of which was
just beginning to catch the solar rays. Half of the vast plain was
already brilliantly illuminated, but round the central cone was a
semicircle of shadow of impenetrable blackness.
"Day and night in this same valley, actually side by side!" said Zaidie.
Then she stopped and pointed down into the brightly lit distance, and
went on hurriedly, "Look, Lenox; look at the foot of the mountain there!
Doesn't that seem like the ruins of a city?"
"It does," he said, "and there's no reason why it shouldn't be. I've
always thought that, as the air and water disappeared from the upper
parts of the moon, the inhabitants, whoever they were, must have been
driven down into the deeper parts. Shall we go down and see?"
"But how?" she said.
He pointed towards the _Astronef_. She nodded her helmeted head, and
they went back towards the vessel.
A few minutes later the Space-Navigator had risen from her resting-place
with an impetus which rapidly carried her over half of the vast crater,
and then she began to drop slowly into the depths. She grounded gently,
and presently they were standing on the ground about a mile from the
central cone. This time, however, Redgrave had taken the precaution to
bring a magazine rifle and a couple of revolvers with him in case any
strange monsters, relics of the vanished fauna of the moon, might still
be taking refuge in these mysterious depths. Zaidie, although like a
good many American girls she could shoot excellently well, carried no
weapon more offensive than the photographic apparatus aforesaid.
The first thing that Redgrave did when they stepped out on to the sandy
surface of the plain was to stoop down and strike a wax match. There was
a tiny glimmer of light, which was immediately extinguished.
"No air here," he said, "so we shall find no living beings--at any rate,
none like ourselves."