You can imagine how amazed Mr. Wendigee must have been when he discovered his record of electromagnetic disturbances interlaced by Cavor’s straightforward English.  Mr. Wendigee knew nothing of our wild journey moonward, and suddenly—­this English out of the void!

It is well the reader should understand the conditions under which it would seem these messages were sent.  Somewhere within the moon Cavor certainly had access for a time to a considerable amount of electrical apparatus, and it would seem he rigged up—­perhaps furtively—­a transmitting arrangement of the Marconi type.  This he was able to operate at irregular intervals:  sometimes for only half an hour or so, sometimes for three or four hours at a stretch.  At these times he transmitted his earthward message, regardless of the fact that the relative position of the moon and points upon the earth’s surface is constantly altering.  As a consequence of this and of the necessary imperfections of our recording instruments his communication comes and goes in our records in an extremely fitful manner; it becomes blurred; it “fades out” in a mysterious and altogether exasperating way.  And added to this is the fact that he was not an expert operator; he had partly forgotten, or never completely mastered, the code in general use, and as he became fatigued he dropped words and misspelt in a curious manner.

Altogether we have probably lost quite half of the communications he made, and much we have is damaged, broken, and partly effaced.  In the abstract that follows the reader must be prepared therefore for a considerable amount of break, hiatus, and change of topic.  Mr. Wendigee and I are collaborating in a complete and annotated edition of the Cavor record, which we hope to publish, together with a detailed account of the instruments employed, beginning with the first volume in January next.  That will be the full and scientific report, of which this is only the popular transcript.  But here we give at least sufficient to complete the story I have told, and to give the broad outlines of the state of that other world so near, so akin, and yet so dissimilar to our own.

Chapter 23

An Abstract of the Six Messages First Received from Mr. Cavor

The two earlier messages of Mr. Cavor may very well be reserved for that larger volume.  They simply tell, with greater brevity and with a difference in several details that is interesting, but not of any vital importance, the bare facts of the making of the sphere and our departure from the world.  Throughout, Cavor speaks of me as a man who is dead, but with a curious change of temper as he approaches our landing on the moon.  “Poor Bedford,” he says of me, and “this poor young man,” and he blames himself for inducing a young man, “by no means well equipped for such adventures,” to leave a planet “on which he was indisputably fitted to succeed” on so precarious a mission.  I think he underrates the part my energy and practical capacity played in bringing about the realisation of his theoretical sphere.  “We arrived,” he says, with no more account of our passage through space than if we had made a journey of common occurrence in a railway train.