“As for strange knowledge—” said I, and language failed me.
“Look here, Bedford,” said Cavor, “you came on this expedition of your own free will.”
“Especially when you do it unarmed and without thinking out every possibility.”
“I was so taken up with the sphere. The thing rushed on us, and carried us away.”
“Rushed on me just as much. How was I to know when I set to work on molecular physics that the business would bring me here—of all places?”
“It’s this accursed science,” I cried. “It’s the very Devil. The mediæval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it—and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions and new weapons—now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!”
“Anyhow, it’s no use your quarrelling with me _now_. These creatures—these Selenites, or whatever we choose to call them—have got us tied hand and foot. Whatever temper you choose to go through with it in, you will have to go through with it.... We have experiences before us that will need all our coolness.”
He paused as if he required my assent. But I sat sulking. “Confound your science!” I said.
“The problem is communication. Gestures, I fear, will be different. Pointing, for example. No creatures but men and monkeys point.”
That was too obviously wrong for me. “Pretty nearly every animal,” I cried, “points with its eyes or nose.”
Cavor meditated over that. “Yes,” he said at last, “and we don’t. There’s such differences—such differences!”
“One might.... But how can I tell? There is speech. The sounds they make, a sort of fluting and piping. I don’t see how we are to imitate that. Is it their speech, that sort of thing? They may have different senses, different means of communication. Of course they are minds and we are minds; there must be something in common. Who knows how far we may not get to an understanding?”
“The things are outside us,” I said. “They’re more different from us than the strangest animals on earth. They are a different clay. What is the good of talking like this?”
Cavor thought. “I don’t see that. Where there are minds they will have something _similar_—even though they have been evolved on different planets. Of course if it was a question of instincts, if we or they are no more than animals—”