20. Mr. Bedford In Infinite Space
IT was almost as though I had been killed. Indeed, I could imagine a man suddenly and
violently killed would feel very much as I did. One moment, a passion of agonising
existence and fear; the next darkness and stillness, neither light nor life nor sun, moon nor
stars, the blank infinite. Although the thing was done by my own act, although I had
already tasted this very of effect in Cavor's company, I felt astonished, dumbfounded, and
overwhelmed. I seemed to be borne upward into an enormous darkness. My fingers
floated off the studs, I hung as if I were annihilated, and at last very softly and gently I
came against the bale and the golden chain, and the crowbars that had drifted to the
middle of the sphere.
I do not know how long that drifting took. In the sphere of course, even more than on the
moon, one's earthly time sense was ineffectual. At the touch of the bale it was as if I had
awakened from a dreamless sleep. I immediately perceived that if I wanted to keep awake
and alive I must get a light or open a window, so as to get a grip of something with my
eyes. And besides, I was cold. I kicked off from the bale, therefore, clawed on to the thin
cords within the glass, crawled along until I got to the manhole rim, and so got my
bearings for the light and blind studs, took a shove off, and flying once round the bale,
and getting a scare from something big and flimsy that was drifting loose, I got my hand
on the cord quite close to the studs, and reached them. I lit the little lamp first of all to see
what it was I had collided with, and discovered that old copy of Lloyd's News had slipped
its moorings, and was adrift in the void. That brought me out of the infinite to my own
proper dimensions again. It made me laugh and pant for a time, and suggested the idea of
a little oxygen from one of the cylinders. After that I lit the heater until I felt warm, and
then I took food. Then I set to work in a very gingerly fashion on the Cavorite blinds, to
see if I could guess by any means how the sphere was travelling.
The first blind I opened I shut at once, and hung for a time flattened and blinded by the
sunlight that had hit me. After thinking a little I started upon the windows at right angles
to this one, and got the huge crescent moon and the little crescent earth behind it, the
second time. I was amazed to find how far I was from the moon. I had reckoned that not
only should I have little or none of the "kick-off" that the earth's atmosphere had given us
at our start, but that the tangential "fly off" of the moon's spin would be at least twenty-
eight times less than the earth's. I had expected to discover myself hanging over our
crater, and on the edge of the night, but all that was now only a part of the outline of the
white crescent that filled the sky. And Cavor - ?
I tried to imagine what could have happened to him. But at that time I could think of
nothing but death. I seemed to see him, bent and smashed at the foot of some
interminably high cascade of blue. And all about him the stupid insects stared...
