“He knew a little, you know—­in an irregular sort of way.”

“Precisely what I am told,” said Cavor.

I assisted him to screw in the glass cover of the manhole, and then he pressed a stud to close the corresponding blind in the outer case.  The little oblong of twilight vanished.  We were in darkness.  For a time neither of us spoke.  Although our case would not be impervious to sound, everything was very still.  I perceived there was nothing to grip when the shock of our start should come, and I realised that I should be uncomfortable for want of a chair.

“Why have we no chairs?” I asked.

“I’ve settled all that,” said Cavor.  “We won’t need them.”

“Why not?”

“You will see,” he said, in the tone of a man who refuses to talk.

I became silent.  Suddenly it had come to me clear and vivid that I was a fool to be inside that sphere.  Even now, I asked myself, is to too late to withdraw?  The world outside the sphere, I knew, would be cold and inhospitable enough for me—­for weeks I had been living on subsidies from Cavor—­but after all, would it be as cold as the infinite zero, as inhospitable as empty space?  If it had not been for the appearance of cowardice, I believe that even then I should have made him let me out.  But I hesitated on that score, and hesitated, and grew fretful and angry, and the time passed.

There came a little jerk, a noise like champagne being uncorked in another room, and a faint whistling sound.  For just one instant I had a sense of enormous tension, a transient conviction that my feet were pressing downward with a force of countless tons.  It lasted for an infinitesimal time.

But it stirred me to action.  “Cavor!” I said into the darkness, “my nerve’s in rags.  I don’t think—­”

I stopped.  He made no answer.

“Confound it!” I cried; “I’m a fool!  What business have I here?  I’m not coming, Cavor.  The thing’s too risky.  I’m getting out.”

“You can’t,” he said.

“Can’t!  We’ll soon see about that!”

He made no answer for ten seconds.  “It’s too late for us to quarrel now, Bedford,” he said.  “That little jerk was the start.  Already we are flying as swiftly as a bullet up into the gulf of space.”

“I—­” I said, and then it didn’t seem to matter what happened.  For a time I was, as it were, stunned; I had nothing to say.  It was just as if I had never heard of this idea of leaving the world before.  Then I perceived an unaccountable change in my bodily sensations.  It was a feeling of lightness, of unreality.  Coupled with that was a queer sensation in the head, an apoplectic effect almost, and a thumping of blood vessels at the ears.  Neither of these feelings diminished as time went on, but at last I got so used to them that I experienced no inconvenience.

I heard a click, and a little glow lamp came into being.

I saw Cavor’s face, as white as I felt my own to be.  We regarded one another in silence.  The transparent blackness of the glass behind him made him seem as though he floated in a void.