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—?

He was already infinitesimal.

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...

Under the inspiring touch of the drifting newspaper I became practical again for a while.  It was quite clear to me that what I had to do was to get back to earth, but as far as I could see I was drifting away from it.  Whatever had happened to Cavor, even if he was still alive, which seemed to me incredible after that blood-stained scrap, I was powerless to help him.  There he was, living or dead behind the mantle of that rayless night, and there he must remain at least until I could summon our fellow men to his assistance.  Should I do that?  Something of the sort I had in my mind; to come back to earth if it were possible, and then as maturer consideration might determine, either to show and explain the sphere to a few discreet persons, and act with them, or else to keep my secret, sell my gold, obtain weapons, provisions, and an assistant, and return with these advantages to deal on equal terms with the flimsy people of the moon, to rescue Cavor, if that were still possible, and at any rate to procure a sufficient supply of gold to place my subsequent proceedings on a firmer basis.  But that was hoping far; I had first to get back.

I set myself to decide just exactly how the return to earth could be contrived.  As I struggled with that problem I ceased to worry about what I should do when I got there.  At last my only care was to get back.