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what will you eat? How will you breathe?’
    ‘He tells me I shall need to do neither. I shall be in some state of suspended animation, as far as I can make out. I can’t understand him when he tries to describe it. But that’s his affair.’
    ‘Do you feel quite happy about it?’ said I, for a sort of horror was beginning once more to creep over me.
    ‘If you mean, Does my reason accept the view that he will (accidents apart) deliver me safe on the surface of Perelandra? – the answer is Yes,’ said Ransom. ‘If you mean, Do my nerves and my imagination respond to this view? – I’m afraid the answer is No. One can believe in anaesthetics and yet feel in a panic when they actually put the mask over your face. I think I feel as a man who believes in the future life feels when he is taken out to face a firing party. Perhaps it’s good practice.’
    ‘And I’m to pack you into that accursed thing?’ said I.
    ‘Yes,’ said Ransom. ‘That’s the first step. We must get out into the garden as soon as the sun is up and point it so that there are no trees or buildings in the way. Across the cabbage bed will do. Then I get in – with a bandage across my eyes, for those walls won’t keep out all the sunlight once I’m beyond the air – and you screw me down. After that, I think you’ll just see it glide off.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘Well, then comes the difficult part. You must hold yourself in readiness to come down here again the moment you are summoned, to take off the lid and let me out when I return.’
    ‘When do you expect to return?’
    ‘Nobody can say. Six months – a year – twenty years. That’s the trouble. I’m afraid I’m laying a pretty heavy burden on you.’
    ‘I might be dead.’
    ‘I know. I’m afraid part of your burden is to select a successor: at once, too. There are four or five people whom we can trust.’
    ‘What will the summons be?’
    ‘Oyarsa will give it. It won’t be mistakable for anything else. You needn’t bother about that side of it. One other point. I’ve no particular reason to suppose I shall come back wounded. But just in case – if you can find a doctor whom we can let into the secret, it might be just as well to bring him with you when you come down to let me out.’
    ‘Would Humphrey do?’
    ‘The very man. And now for some more personal matters. I’ve had to leave you out of my will, and I’d like you to know why.’
    ‘My dear chap, I never thought about your will till this moment.’
    ‘Of course not. But I’d like to have left you something. The reason I haven’t, is this. I’m going to disappear. It is possible I may not come back. It’s just conceivable there might be a murder trial, and if so one can’t be too careful. I mean, for your sake. And now for one or two other private arrangements.’
    We laid our heads together and for a long time we talked about those matters which one usually discusses with relatives and not with friends. I got to know a lot more about Ransom than I had known before, and from the number of odd people whom he recommended to my care, ‘If ever I happened to be able to do anything’, I came to realise the extent and intimacy of his charities. With every sentence the shadow of approaching separation and a kind of graveyard gloom began to settle more emphatically upon us. I found myself noticing and loving all sorts of little mannerisms and expressions in him such as we notice always in a woman we love, but notice in a man only as the last hours of his leave run out or the date of the probably fatal operation draws near. I felt our nature’s incurable incredulity; and could hardly believe that what was now so close, so tangible and (in a sense) so much at my command, would in a few hours be wholly inaccessible, an image – soon, even an elusive image – in my memory. And finally a sort of shyness fell between us because each knew what the other was feeling. It had got very cold.
    ‘We must be going