[Illustration: “I sat across the edge of the manhole and looked down into the black interior”]
“I forgot to tell you. There are uncertainties--The voyage may last--We may be weeks!”
“We shall be floating in this sphere with absolutely no occupation.”
He peered out of the manhole. “Look!” he said. “There’s something there!”
I looked out. It was an old number of _Tit-Bits_ that one of the men must have brought. Further away in the corner I saw a torn _Lloyds’ 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.
“He knew a little you know--in an irregular sort of way.”
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.
“I’ve settled all that,” said Cavor. “We shan’t need them.”
“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 it too late to withdraw? The world outside the sphere, I knew, would be cold and inhospitable enough to 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.