“How would you like a trip to the moon?” I cried.

“I never did hold with them ballooneys,” she said evidently under the impression that this was a common excursion enough.  “I wouldn’t go up in one—­not for ever so.”

This struck me as being funny.  After I had supped I sat on a bench by the door of the inn and gossiped with two labourers about brickmaking, and motor cars, and the cricket of last year.  And in the sky a faint new crescent, blue and vague as a distant Alp, sank westward over the sun.

The next day I returned to Cavor.  “I am coming,” I said.  “I’ve been a little out of order, that’s all.”

That was the only time I felt any serious doubt our enterprise.  Nerves purely!  After that I worked a little more carefully, and took a trudge for an hour every day.  And at last, save for the heating in the furnace, our labours were at an end.

Chapter 4

Inside the Sphere

“Go on,” said Cavor, as I sat across the edge of the manhole, and looked down into the black interior of the sphere.  We two were alone.  It was evening, the sun had set, and the stillness of the twilight was upon everything.

I drew my other leg inside and slid down the smooth glass to the bottom of the sphere, then turned to take the cans of food and other impedimenta from Cavor.  The interior was warm, the thermometer stood at eighty, and as we should lose little or none of this by radiation, we were dressed in shoes and thin flannels.  We had, however, a bundle of thick woollen clothing and several thick blankets to guard against mischance.

By Cavor’s direction I placed the packages, the cylinders of oxygen, and so forth, loosely about my feet, and soon we had everything in.  He walked about the roofless shed for a time seeking anything we had overlooked, and then crawled in after me.  I noted something in his hand.

“What have you got there?” I asked.

“Haven’t you brought anything to read?”

“Good Lord!  No.”

“I forgot to tell you.  There are uncertainties—­ The voyage may last—­ We may be weeks!”

“But—­”

“We shall be floating in this sphere with absolutely no occupation.”

“I wish I’d known—­”

He peered out of the manhole.  “Look!” he said.  “There’s something there!”

“Is there time?”

“We shall be an hour.”

I looked out.  It was an old number of Tit-Bits that one of the men must have brought.  Farther away in the corner I saw a torn Lloyd’s News.  I scrambled back into the sphere with these things.  “What have you got?” I said.

I took the book from his hand and read, “The Works of William
Shakespeare”.

He coloured slightly.  “My education has been so purely scientific—­” he said apologetically.

“Never read him?”

“Never.”