Out Of The Silent Planet Read Online Free PDF Page B

inviting the other to follow him, and left the room by one
of the many doors which Ransom had not yet seen opened.
     

V
----
    THE PERIOD spent in the space-ship ought to have been one of terror and anxiety for Ransom. He was
separated by an astronomical distance from every member of the human race except two whom he had
excellent reasons for distrusting. He was heading for an unknown destination, and was being brought
thither for a purpose which his captors steadily refused to disclose. Devine and Weston relieved
each other regularly in a room which Ransom was never allowed to enter and where he supposed the
controls of their machine must be. Weston, during his watches on, was almost entirely silent.
Devine was more loquacious and would often talk and guffaw with the prisoner until Weston rapped
on the wall of the control room and warned them not to waste air. But Devine was secretive after
a certain point. He was quite ready to laugh at Weston's solemn scientific idealism. He didn't
give a damn, he said, for the future of the species or the meeting of two worlds.
    'There's more to Malacandra than that,' he would add with a wink. But when Ransom asked him what
more, he would lapse into satire and make ironical remarks about the white man's burden and the
blessings of civilization.
    'It is inhabited, then?' Ransom would press.
    'Ah - there's always a native question in these things, Devine would answer. For the most part his
conversation ran on the things he would do when he got back to Earth: ocean going yachts, the most
expensive women and a big place on the Riviera figured largely in his plans. 'I'm not running all
these risks for fun.'
    Direct questions about Ransom's own role were usually met with silence. Only once, in reply to such
a question, Devine, who was then in Ransom's opinion very far from sober, admitted that they
were rather 'handing' him the baby.
    'But I'm sure,' he added, 'you'll live up to the old school tie.'
    All this, as I have said, was sufficiently disquieting. The odd thing was that it did not very
greatly disquiet him. It is hard for a man to brood on the future when he is feeling so extremely
well as Ransom now felt. There was an endless night on one side of the ship and an endless day on
the other: each was marvellous and he moved from the one to the other at his will, delighted. In
the nights; which he could create by turning the handle of a door, he lay for hours in contemplation
of the skylight. The Earth's disk was nowhere to be seen, the stars, thick as daisies on an uncut
lawn, reigned perpetually with no cloud, no moon, no sunrise, to dispute their sway. There were
planets of unbelievable majesty, and constellations to dreamed of: there were celestial sapphires,
rubies, emeralds and pin-pricks of burning gold; far out on the left of the picture hung a comet,
tiny and remote: and between all and behind all, far more emphatic and palpable than it showed
on Earth, the undimensioned, enigmatic blackness. The lights trembled: they seemed to grow
brighter as he looked. Stretched naked on his bed, a second Dana, he found it night by night more
difficult to disbelieve in old astrology: almost he felt, wholly he imagined, 'sweet influence'
pouring or even stabbing into his surrendered body. All was silence but for the irregular tinkling
noises. He knew now that these were made by meteorite's, small, drifting particles of the
world-stuff that smote continually on their hollow drum of steel; and he guessed that at any
moment they might meet something large enough to make meteorites of ship and all. But he could not
fear. He now felt that Weston had justly called him little-minded in the moment of his first panic.
The adventure was too high, its circumstance too 'solemn', for any emotion, save a severe delight.
But the days - that is, the hours spent in the sunward hemisphere of their microcosm - were the
best of all. Often he rose after only a few hours sleep to