A Honeymoon in Space
"Yes," she said dreamily, "glorious, isn't it? That and all the
stars--but I can't think anything yet, Lenox, it's all too mighty and
too marvellous. It doesn't seem as though human eyes were meant to look
upon things like this. But where's the earth? We must be able to see
that still."
"Not from here," he said, "because it's underneath us. Come below now,
and you shall see what I promised you."
They went down into the lower part of the vessel and to the after end
behind the engine-room. Redgrave switched on a couple of electric
lights, and then pulled a lever attached to one of the side-walls. A
part of the flooring about six feet square slid noiselessly away; then
he pulled another lever on the opposite side and a similar piece
disappeared, leaving a large space covered only by a thick plate of
absolutely transparent glass. He switched off the lights again and led
her to the edge of it, and said:
"There is your native world, dear. That is your Mother Earth."
Wonderful as the moon had seemed, the gorgeous spectacle which lay
seemingly at her feet was infinitely more magnificent. A vast disc of
silver grey, streaked and dotted with lines and points of dazzling
lights, and more than half covered with vast, glimmering, greyish-green
expanses, seemed to form the floor of the tremendous gulf beneath them.
They were not yet too far away to make out the general features of the
continents and oceans, and fortunately the hemisphere presented to them
happened to be singularly free from clouds.
To the right spread out the majestic outlines of the continents of North
and South America, and to the left Asia, the Malay Archipelago, and
Australia. At the top was a vast, roughly circular area of dazzling
whiteness, and Redgrave, pointing to this, said:
"There, look up a little further north than the middle of that white
patch, and you'll see what no eyes but yours and mine have ever
seen--the North Pole! When we come back we shall see the South Pole,
because we shall approach the earth from the other end, as it were.
"I suppose you recognise a good deal of the picture. All that bright
part up to the north, with the black spots on it, is Canada. The black
spots are forests. That long white line to the left is the Rockies. You
see they're all bright at the north, and as you go south you only see a
few bright dots. Those are the snow-peaks.
"Those long thin white lines in South America are the tops of the Andes,
and the big, dark patches to the right of them are the forests and
plains of Brazil and the Argentine. Not a bad way of studying geography,
is it? If we stopped here long enough we should see the whole earth spin
right round under us, but we haven't time for that. We shall be in the
moon before it's morning in New York, but we shall probably get a
glimpse of Europe to-morrow."
Zaidie stood gazing for nearly an hour at this marvellous vision of the
home-world which she had left so far behind her before she could tear
herself away and allow her husband to shut the slides again. The greatly
diminished weight of her body destroyed the fatigue of standing almost
entirely. In fact, on board the _Astronef_ just then it was almost as
easy to stand as it was to lie down.
There was of course very little sleep for the travellers on this first
night of their wonderful voyage, but towards the sixth hour after
leaving the earth, Zaidie, overcome as much by the emotions which had
been awakened within her as by physical fatigue, went to bed, after
making her husband promise that he would wake her in good time to see
the descent upon the moon. Two hours later she was awake and drinking
the coffee which he had prepared for her. Then she went on to the upper
deck.
To her astonishment she found, on one hand, day more brilliant than she
had ever seen it before, and on the other hand darkness blacker than the
blackest earthly night. On the right was an intensely brilliant orb,
about half as large again as the full moon seen from the earth, shining
with inconceivable brightness out of a sky black as midnight and
thronged with stars. It was the Sun; the Sun shining in the midst of
airless Space.
The tiny atmosphere enclosed in the glass-domed deck-space was lighted
brilliantly, but it was not perceptibly warmer, though Redgrave warned
her not to touch anything upon which the sun's rays fell directly, as
she might find it uncomfortably hot. On the other side was the same
black immensity which she had seen the night before, an ocean of
darkness clustered with islands of light. High above in the zenith
floated the great silver-grey disc of earth, a good deal smaller now.
But there was another object beneath them which was at present of far
more interest to her.
Looking down to the left, she saw a vast semi-luminous area in which not
a star was to be seen. It was the earth-lit portion of the long familiar
and yet mysterious orb which was to be their resting place for the next
few hours.
"The sun hasn't risen over there yet," said Redgrave, as she was peering
down into the void. "It's earth-light still. Now look at the other
side."
She crossed the deck, and saw the strangest scene she had yet beheld.
Apparently only a few miles below her was a huge crescent-shaped plain
arching away for hundreds of miles on either side. The outer edge had a
ragged look, and little excrescences, which soon took the shape of
flat-topped mountains, projected from it and stood out bright and sharp
against the black void beneath, out of which the stars shone up, as it
seemed, a few feet beyond the edge of the disc.
The plain itself was a scene of awful and utter desolation. Huge
mountain-walls, towering to immense heights and enclosing great circular
and oval plains, one side of them blazing with intolerable light, and
the other side black with impenetrable obscurity; enormous valleys
reaching down from brilliant day into rayless night--perhaps down into
the very bowels of the dead world itself; vast grey-white plains lying
round the mountains, crossed by little ridges and by long black lines,
which could only be immense fissures with perpendicular sides--but all
hard, grey-white and black, all intolerable brightness or inky gloom;
not a sign of life anywhere; no shady forests, no green fields, no
broad, glittering oceans; only a ghastly wilderness of dead mountains
and dead plains.
"What an awful place," Zaidie whispered. "Surely we can't land there.
How far are we from it?"
"About fifteen hundred miles," replied Redgrave, who was sweeping the
scene below him with one of the two powerful telescopes which stood on
the deck. "No, it doesn't look very cheerful, does it? But it's a
marvellous sight for all that, and one that a good many people on earth
would give one of their eyes to see from here. I'm letting her drop
pretty fast, and we shall probably land in a couple of hours or so.
Meanwhile you may as well get out your moon atlas, and study your
lunography. I'm going to turn the power a bit astern so that we shall go
down obliquely, and see more of the lighted disc. We started at new moon
so that you should have a look at the full earth, and also so that we
could get round to the invisible side while it is lighted up."
They both went below, he to deflect the repulsive force so that one set
of engines should give them a somewhat oblique direction, while the
other, acting directly on the surface of the moon, simply retarded their
fall; and she to get out her maps.
When they got back the _Astronef_ had changed her apparent position,
and, instead of falling directly on to the moon, was descending towards
it in a slanting direction. The result of this was that the sunlit
crescent rapidly grew in breadth. Peak after peak and range after range
rose up swiftly out of the black gulf beyond. The sun climbed quickly up
through the star-strewn, mid-day heavens, and the full earth sank more
swiftly still behind them.
Another hour of silent, entranced wonder and admiration followed, and
then Redgrave said:
"Don't you think it's about time we were beginning to think of
breakfast, dear--or do you think you can wait till we land?"
"Breakfast on the moon!" she exclaimed. "That would be just too lovely
for words--of course we'll wait!"
"Very well," he said; "you see that big black ring nearly below
us?--that, as I suppose you know, is the celebrated Mount Tycho. I'll
try and find a convenient spot on the top of the ring to drop on, and
then you will be able to survey the scenery from seventeen or eighteen
thousand feet above the plains."
About two hours later a slight, jarring tremor ran through the frame of
the vessel, and the first stage of the voyage was ended. After a passage
of less than twelve hours the _Astronef_ had crossed a gulf of nearly
two hundred and fifty thousand miles, and rested on the untrodden
surface of the lunar world.
CHAPTER VII
"Well, Madame, we've arrived. This is the moon and there is the earth.
To put it into plain figures, you are now two hundred and forty thousand
odd miles away from home. I think you said you would like breakfast on
the surface of the World that Has Been, and so, as it's about eleven
o'clock earth-time, we'll call it a _dejeuner_, and then we'll go and
see what this poor old skeleton of a world is like."
"Oh, then we shan't actually have breakfast on the moon?"
"My dear child, of course you will. Isn't the _Astronef_ resting
now--right now as they say in some parts of the States--on the top of
the crater wall of Tycho? Aren't we really and actually on the surface
of the moon? Just look at this frightful black and white, god-forsaken
landscape! Isn't it like everything that you've ever learnt about the
moon? Nothing but light and shade, black and white, peaks of mountains
blazing in sunlight, and valleys underneath them as black as the hinges
of----"
"Tophet," said Zaidie, interrupting him quickly. "Yes, I see what you
mean. So we'll have our _dejeuner_ here, breathing our own nice
atmosphere, and eating and drinking what was grown on the soil of dear
old Mother Earth. It's a wee bit paralysing to think of, isn't it, dear?
Two hundred and forty thousand miles across the gulf of Space--and we
sitting here at our breakfast table just as comfortable as though we
were in the Cecil in London, or the Waldorf-Astoria in New York!"
"There's nothing much in that, I mean as regards distance. You see,
before we've finished we shall probably, at least I hope we shall, be
eating a breakfast or a dinner together a thousand million miles or more
from New York or London. Your Ladyship must remember that this is only
the first stage on the journey, the jumping-off place as you called it.
You see the distance from Washington to New York is--well, it isn't even
a hop, skip and a jump in comparison with----"
"Oh yes, I see what you mean of course, and so I suppose I had better
cut off or short-circuit such sympathies with Mother Earth as are not
connected with your noble self, and get breakfast ready. How's that?"
"Well," said Lord Redgrave, looking at her as she rose from the table,
"I think our honeymoon in Space is young enough yet to make it possible
for me to say that your Ladyship's opinion is exactly right."
"That's a hopeless commonplace! Really, Lenox, I thought you were
capable of something better than that."
"My dear Zaidie, it has been my fate to have many friends who have had
honeymoons on earth, and some of their experience seems to be that the
man who contradicts his wife during the first six weeks of matrimony
simply makes an ass of himself. He offends her and makes himself
unhappy, and it sometimes takes six months or more to get back to
bearings."
"What a lot of silly men and women you must have known, Lenox. Is that