CHAPTER 23

Cavor's Last Message

In this unsatisfactory manner Cavor's last message but one dies out. One seems to see him away there in the blue darkness amidst his apparatus intently signalling to us to the last, all unaware of the interruption of his messages, and of the final dangers creeping upon him. He had talked of war, he had talked of the violence and foolishness of men, and then I think it is plain that he made the most fatal confession that he alone knew how to make Cavorite. Then he must have realized the folly of making such a confession. During a certain time I am inclined to think the Grand Lunar was considering what to do, and for all that space of time Cavor may have gone quite free. But obstacles of some sort prevented his getting to his apparatus again after that message I have just given. For some days we received nothing.

And then suddenly, like a cry in the night, came the last message. It consists merely of the broken beginnings of two sentences.

The first was: "I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know—"

There was an interval of perhaps a minute. One imagines some interruption from without. A departure from the instrument—a sudden rush back to it, full of a resolve that came too late. Then, as if it were hastily transmitted, came: "Cavorite made as follows: take—"

There followed one meaningless word: "uless."

And that is all.

It may be he made a hasty attempt to spell "useless" when his fate was close upon him. Whatever it was that was happening about that apparatus we cannot tell. Whatever it was, we shall never, I know, receive another message from Cavor. I can imagine him struggling in the grip of those insect Selenites, struggling even more desperately as they press upon him, and being forced backward step by step into the Unknown—into the dark, into that silence that has no end ...