Chapter 3 - The Building of the Sphere


I REMEMBER the occasion very distinctly when Cavor told me of his idea of
the sphere. He had had intimations of it before, but at the time it seemed
to come to him in a rush. We were returning to the bungalow for tea, and
on the way he fell humming. Suddenly he shouted, "That's it! That
finishes it! A sort of roller blind!"

"Finishes what?" I asked.

"Space - anywhere! The moon."

"What do you mean? "

"Mean? Why - it must be a sphere! That's what I mean!"

I saw I was out of it, and for a time I let him talk in his own fashion. I
hadn't the ghost of an idea then of his drift. But after he had taken tea
he made it clear to me.

"It's like this," he said. "Last time I ran this stuff that cuts things
off from gravitation into a flat tank with an overlap that held it down.
And directly it had cooled and the manufacture was completed all that
uproar happened, nothing above it weighed anything, the air went squirting
up, the house squirted up, and if the stuff itself hadn't squirted up too,
I don't Know what would have happened! But suppose the substance is loose,
and quite free to go up? "

"It will go up at once!"

"Exactly. With no more disturbance than firing a big gun."

"But what good will that do? "

"I'm going up with it! "

I put down my teacup and stared at him.

"Imagine a sphere," he explained, "large enough to hold two people and
their luggage. It will be made of steel lined with thick glass; it will
contain a proper store of solidified air, concentrated food, water
distilling apparatus, and so forth. And enamelled, as it were, on the
outer steel - "

"Cavorite? "

"Yes."

"But how will you get inside? "

"There was a similar problem about a dumpling."

"Yes, I know. But how?"

"That's perfectly easy. An air-tight manhole is all that is needed. That,
of course, will have to be a little complicated; there will have to be a
valve, so that things may be thrown out, if necessary, without much loss
of air."

"Like Jules Verne's thing in A Trip to the Moon."

But Cavor was not a reader of fiction.

"I begin to see," I said slowly. "And you could get in and screw yourself
up while the Cavorite was warm, and as soon as it cooled it would become
impervious to gravitation, and off you would fly -"

"At a tangent."

"You would go off in a straight line - " I stopped abruptly. "What is to
prevent the thing travelling in a straight line into space for ever?" I
asked. "You're not safe to get anywhere, and if you do - how will you get
back? "

"I've just thought of that," said Cavor. "That's what I meant when I said
the thing is finished. The inner glass sphere can be air-tight, and,
except for the manhole, continuous, and the steel sphere can be made in
sections, each section capable of rolling up after the fashion of a roller
blind. These can easily be worked by springs, and released and checked by
electricity conveyed by platinum wires fused through the glass. All that
is merely a question of detail. So you see, that except for the thickness
of the blind rollers, the Cavorite exterior of the sphere will consist of
windows or blinds, whichever you like to call them. Well, when all these
windows or blinds are shut, no light, no heat, no gravitation, no radiant
energy of any sort will get at the inside of the sphere, it will fly on
through space in a straight line, as you say. But open a window, imagine
one of the windows open. Then at once any heavy body that chances to be in
that direction will attract us "

I sat taking it in.

"You see?" he said.

"Oh, I see."

"Practically we shall be able to tack about in space just as we wish. Get
attracted by this and that."

"Oh, yes. That's clear enough. Only - "

" Well? "

"I don't quite see what we shall do it for! It's really only jumping off
the world and back again."

"Surely! For example, one might go to the moon."

"And when one got there? What would you find? "

"We should see - Oh! consider the new knowledge."

"Is there air there? "

"There may be."

"It's a fine idea," I said, "but it strikes me as a large order all the
same. The moon! I'd much rather try some smaller things first."

"They're out of the question, because of the air difficulty."

"Why not apply that idea of spring blinds - Cavorite blinds in strong
steel cases - to lifting weights?"

"It wouldn't work," he insisted. "After all, to go into outer space is not
so much worse, if at all, than a polar expedition. Men go on polar
expeditions."

"Not business men. And besides, they get paid for polar expeditions. And
if anything goes wrong there are relief parties. But this - it's just
firing ourselves off the world for nothing."

"Call it prospecting."

"You'll have to call it that.... One might make a book of it perhaps," I
said.

"I have no doubt there will be minerals," said Cavor.

"For example? "

"Oh! sulphur, ores, gold perhaps, possibly new elements."

"Cost of carriage," I said. "You know you're not a practical man. The
moon's a quarter of a million miles away."

"It seems to me it wouldn't cost much to cart any weight anywhere if you
packed it in a Cavorite case."

I had not thought of that. "Delivered free on head of purchaser, eh? "

"It isn't as though we were confined to the moon."

"You mean? "

"There's Mars - clear atmosphere, novel surroundings, exhilarating sense
of lightness. It might be pleasant to go there."

"Is there air on Mars? "

"Oh, yes! "

"Seems as though you might run it as a sanatorium. By the way, how far is
Mars? "

"Two hundred million miles at present," said Cavor airily; "and you go
close by the sun."

My imagination was picking itself up again. "After all," I said, there's
something in these things. There's travel -"

An extraordinary possibility came rushing into my mind. Suddenly I saw, as
in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavorite liners and
spheres deluxe. "Rights of pre-emption," came floating into my head -
planetary rights of pre-emption. I recalled the old Spanish monopoly in
American gold. It wasn't as though it was just this planet or that - it
was all of them. I stared at Cavor's rubicund face, and suddenly my
imagination was leaping and dancing. I stood up, I walked up and down; my
tongue was unloosened.

"I'm beginning to take it in," I said; "I'm beginning to take it in." The
transition from doubt to enthusiasm seemed to take scarcely any time at
all. "But this is tremendous!" I cried. "This is Imperial! I haven't
been dreaming of this sort of thing."

Once the chill of my opposition was removed, his own pent-up excitement
had play. He too got up and paced. He too gesticulated and shouted. We
behaved like men inspired. We were men inspired.


"We'll settle all that!" he said in answer to some incidental difficulty
that had pulled me up. "We'll soon settle that! We'll start the drawings
for mouldings this very night."

"We'll start them now," I responded, and we hurried off to the laboratory
to begin upon this work forthwith.

I was like a child in Wonderland all that night. The dawn found us both
still at work - we kept our electric light going heedless of the day. I
remember now exactly how these drawings looked. I shaded and tinted while
Cavor drew - smudged and haste-marked they were in every line, but
wonderfully correct. We got out the orders for the steel blinds and frames
we needed from that night's work, and the glass sphere was designed within
a week. We gave up our afternoon conversations and our old routine
altogether. We worked, and we slept and ate when we could work no longer
for hunger and fatigue. Our enthusiasm infected even our three men, though
they had no idea what the sphere was for. Through those days the man Gibbs
gave up walking, and went everywhere, even across the room, at a sort of
fussy run.

And it grew - the sphere. December passed, January - I spent a day with a
broom sweeping a path through the snow from bungalow to laboratory -
February, March. By the end of March the completion was in sight. In
January had come a team of horses, a huge packing-case; we had our thick
glass sphere now ready, and in position under the crane we had rigged to
sling it into the steel shell. All the bars and blinds of the steel shell
- it was not really a spherical shell, but polyhedral, with a roller blind
to each facet - had arrived by February, and the lower half was bolted
together. The Cavorite was half made by March, the metallic paste had gone
through two of the stages in its manufacture, and we had plastered quite
half of it on to the steel bars ad. blinds. It was astonishing how closely
we kept to the lines of Cavor's first inspiration in working out the
scheme. When the bolting together of the sphere was finished, he proposed
to remove the rough roof of the temporary laboratory in which the work was
done, and build a furnace about it. So the last stage of Cavorite making,
in which the paste is heated to a dull red glow in a stream of helium,
would be accomplished then it was already on the sphere.

And then we had to discuss and decide what provisions we were to take -
compressed foods, concentrated essences, steel cylinders containing
reserve oxygen, an arrangement for removing carbonic acid and waste from
the air and restoring oxygen by means of sodium peroxide, water
condensers, and so forth. I remember the little heap they made in the
corner - tins, and rolls, and boxes - convincingly matter-of-fact.

It was a strenuous time, with little chance of thinking. But one day,
when we were drawing near the end, an odd mood came over me. I had been
bricking up the furnace all the morning, and I sat down by these
possessions dead beat. Everything seemed dull and incredible.

"But look here, Cavor," I said. "After all! What's it all for?"

He smiled. "The thing now is to go."

"The moon," I reflected. But what do you expect? I thought the moon was a
dead world."

He shrugged his shoulders.

"We're going to see."

"Are we?" I said, and stared before me.

"You are tired," he remarked. "You'd better take a walk this afternoon."

"No," I said obstinately; "I'm going to finish this brickwork."

And I did, and insured myself a night of insomnia. I don't think I have
ever had such a night. I had some bad times before my business collapse,
but the very worst of those was sweet slumber compared to this infinity of
aching wakefulness. I was suddenly in the most enormous funk at the thing
we were going to do.

I do not remember before that night thinking at all of the risks we were
running. Now they came like that array of spectres that once beleaguered
Prague, and camped around me. The strangeness of what we were about to do,
the unearthliness of it, overwhelmed me. I was like a man awakened out of
pleasant dreams to the most horrible surroundings. I lay, eyes wide open,
and the sphere seemed to get more flimsy and feeble, and Cavor more unreal
and fantastic, and the whole enterprise madder and madder every moment.

I got out of bed and wandered about. I sat at the window and stared at
the immensity of space. Between the stars was the void, the unfathomable
darkness! I tried to recall the fragmentary knowledge of astronomy I had
gained in my irregular reading, but it was all too vague to furnish any
idea of the things we might expect. At last I got back to bed and snatched
some moments of sleep - moments of nightmare rather - in which I fell and
fell and fell for evermore into the abyss of the sky.

I astonished Cavor at breakfast. I told him shortly, "I'm not coming with
you in the sphere."

I met all his protests with a sullen persistence. "The thing's too mad,"
I said, "and I won't come. The thing's too mad."

I would not go with him to the laboratory. I fretted bout my bungalow for
a time, and then took hat and stick and set out alone, I knew not whither.
It chanced to be a glorious morning: a warm wind and deep blue sky, the
first green of spring abroad, and multitudes of birds singing. I lunched
on beef and beer in a little public-house near Elham, and startled the
landlord by remarking apropos of the weather, "A man who leaves the world
when days of this sort are about is a fool!"

"That's what I says when I heerd on it!" said the landlord, and I found
that for one poor soul at least this world had proved excessive, and there
had been a throat-cutting. I went on with a new twist to my thoughts.

In the afternoon I had a pleasant sleep in a sunny place, and went on my
way refreshed. I came to a comfortable - looking inn near Canterbury. It
was bright with creepers, and the landlady was a clean old woman and took
my eye. I found I had just enough money to pay for my lodging with her. I
decided to stop the night there. She was a talkative body, and among many
other particulars learnt she had never been to London. "Canterbury's as
far as ever I been," she said. "I'm not one of your gad-about sort."

"How would you like a trip to the moon?" I cried.

"I never did hold with them ballooneys," she said evidently under the
impression that this was a common excursion enough. "I wouldn't go up in
one - not for ever so."

This struck me as being funny. After I had supped I sat on a bench by the
door of the inn and gossiped with two labourers about brickmaking, and
motor cars, and the cricket of last year. And in the sky a faint new
crescent, blue and vague as a distant Alp, sank westward over the sun.

The next day I returned to Cavor. "I am coming," I said. "I've been a
little out of order, that's all."

That was the only time I felt any serious doubt our enterprise. Nerves
purely! Alter that I worked a little more carefully, and took a trudge for
an hour every day. And at last, save for the heating in the furnace, our
labours were at an end.