eep their hands off such a
possibility. No! But they will examine it. Clearly they are intelligent
and inquisitive. They will examine it--get inside it--trifle with the
studs. Off! ... That would mean the moon for us for all the rest of our
lives. Strange creatures, strange knowledge...."

"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."

"You said to me, 'Call it prospecting'."

"There's always risks in prospecting."

"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_, you mean."

"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 medieval
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. "The