CHAPTER 17

Mr. Bedford in Infinite Space

I was alone in empty space. A violent feeling of fear seized me. I seemed to be borne upward into an enormous darkness, My fingers floated off the studs, I hung in space, and at last very softly and gently I came against the bundle and the golden chain and the crowbars that had drifted to the middle of the sphere.

At the touch of the bundle I felt as if I had awakened from a dreamless sleep. I immediately realized that if I wanted to keep awake and alive I must get a light or open a blind, so as to fix my eyes on something. And besides, I was cold. I groped for the studs. I lit the little lamp and saw, floating in the void, an old newspaper that I had brought with me from the earth. That brought me out of the infinite to my real self again. I lit the heater until I felt warm, and then I took some food. Then I set to work very cautiously 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 blinded by the sunlight that had hit me. I started upon the blinds at right angles to this one, and got the huge crescent moon and the little crescent earth behind it. I was amazed to find how far I was from the moon.

I tried to imagine what could have happened to Cavor. I could think of nothing but death. I seemed to see him, bent and smashed at the foot of some high waterfall of blue. And all about him the stupid insects stared ... 

Under the touch of the drifting newspaper I became practical again for a while. It was quite clear to me that I was drifting away from the earth. I set myself to think how the return to earth could be accomplished. I did a very great deal of complicated thinking over this problem, and in the end I am certain it was much more my good luck than my reasoning that enabled me to hit the earth.

I opened all my moonward blinds, in order to gather speed, and waited for the crescent to get bigger and bigger until I felt I was near enough for safety. Then I shut out the sight of the moon from my eyes, and flew past it. I opened an earthward blind and sat down to begin a watch in the sphere until I should strike the earth. The heater had made the sphere tolerably warm, and except for that queer sensation in the head that was always with me while I was away from the earth, I was quite comfortable. I had put out the light again, lest it should fail me in the end; I was in darkness, except for the earth-shine and the glitter of the stars below me. Everything was so absolutely silent and still that I might indeed have been the only being in the universe, and yet, strangely enough, I had no more feeling of loneliness or fear than if I had been lying in bed on earth.

I do not know how long I remained in space: sometimes I seemed to have been ages, at others it was a momentary leap from moon to earth. In truth, it was altogether some weeks of earthly time.

At last I began to feel the pull of the earth upon me, and I set myself to think of the conditions under which I must fall to earth.