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Change <cite> to <i> and add publication semantics
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<p>He looked at me doubtfully. “But do you really think—?” he said. “And your play! How about that play?”</p>
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<p>“It’s vanished!” I cried. “My dear sir, don’t you see what you’ve got? Don’t you see what you’re going to do?”</p>
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<p>That was merely a rhetorical turn, but positively, he didn’t. At first I could not believe it. He had not had the beginning of the inkling of an idea. This astonishing little man had been working on purely theoretical grounds the whole time! When he said it was “the most important” research the world had ever seen, he simply meant it squared up so many theories, settled so much that was in doubt; he had troubled no more about the application of the stuff he was going to turn out than if he had been a machine that makes guns. This was a possible substance, and he was going to make it! <i lang="fr">V’la tout</i>, as the Frenchman says.</p>
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<p>Beyond that, he was childish! If he made it, it would go down to posterity as Cavorite or Cavorine, and he would be made an <abbr epub:type="z3998:initialism">F.R.S.</abbr>, and his portrait given away as a scientific worthy with <cite>Nature</cite>, and things like that. And that was all he saw! He would have dropped this bombshell into the world as though he had discovered a new species of gnat, if it had not happened that I had come along. And there it would have lain and fizzled, like one or two other little things these scientific people have lit and dropped about us.</p>
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<p>Beyond that, he was childish! If he made it, it would go down to posterity as Cavorite or Cavorine, and he would be made an <abbr epub:type="z3998:initialism">F.R.S.</abbr>, and his portrait given away as a scientific worthy with <i epub:type="se:name.publication.journal">Nature</i>, and things like that. And that was all he saw! He would have dropped this bombshell into the world as though he had discovered a new species of gnat, if it had not happened that I had come along. And there it would have lain and fizzled, like one or two other little things these scientific people have lit and dropped about us.</p>
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<p>When I realised this, it was I did the talking, and Cavor who said “Go on!” I jumped up. I paced the room, gesticulating like a boy of twenty. I tried to make him understand his duties and responsibilities in the matter—<em>our</em> duties and responsibilities in the matter. I assured him we might make wealth enough to work any sort of social revolution we fancied, we might own and order the whole world. I told him of companies and patents, and the case for secret processes. All these things seemed to take him much as his mathematics had taken me. A look of perplexity came into his ruddy little face. He stammered something about indifference to wealth, but I brushed all that aside. He had got to be rich, and it was no good his stammering. I gave him to understand the sort of man I was, and that I had had very considerable business experience. I did not tell him I was an undischarged bankrupt at the time, because that was temporary, but I think I reconciled my evident poverty with my financial claims. And quite insensibly, in the way such projects grow, the understanding of a Cavorite monopoly grew up between us. He was to make the stuff, and I was to make the boom.</p>
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<p>I stuck like a leech to the “we”—“you” and “I” didn’t exist for me.</p>
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<p>His idea was, that the profits I spoke of might go to endow research, but that, of course, was a matter we had to settle later. “That’s all right,” I shouted, “that’s all right.” The great point, as I insisted, was to get the thing done.</p>
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<p epub:type="title"><abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Bedford in Infinite Space</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>It was almost as though I had been killed. Indeed, I could imagine a man suddenly and violently killed would feel very much as I did. One moment, a passion of agonising existence and fear; the next, darkness and stillness, neither light nor life nor sun, moon nor stars, the blank infinite. Although the thing was done by my own act, although I had already tasted this very effect in Cavor’s company, I felt astonished, dumbfounded, and overwhelmed. I seemed to be borne upward into an enormous darkness. My fingers floated off the studs, I hung as if I were annihilated, and at last very softly and gently I came against the bale and the golden chain, and the crowbars that had drifted to the middle of the sphere.</p>
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<p>I do not know how long that drifting took. In the sphere of course, even more than on the moon, one’s earthly time sense was ineffectual. At the touch of the bale it was as if I had awakened from a dreamless sleep. I immediately perceived that if I wanted to keep awake and alive I must get a light or open a window, so as to get a grip of something with my eyes. And besides I was cold. I kicked off from the bale, therefore, clawed on to the thin cords within the glass, crawled along until I got to the manhole rim, and so got my bearings for the light and blind studs, took a shove off, and flying once round the bale, and getting a scare from something big and flimsy that was drifting loose, I got my hand on the cord quite close to the studs, and reached them. I lit the little lamp first of all to see what it was I had collided with, and discovered that old copy of <cite>Lloyd’s News</cite> had slipped its moorings, and was adrift in the void. That brought me out of the infinite to my own proper dimensions again. It made me laugh and pant for a time, and suggested the idea of a little oxygen from one of the cylinders. After that I lit the heater until I felt warm, and then I took food. Then I set to work in a very gingerly fashion on the Cavorite blinds, to see if I could guess by any means how the sphere was travelling.</p>
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<p>I do not know how long that drifting took. In the sphere of course, even more than on the moon, one’s earthly time sense was ineffectual. At the touch of the bale it was as if I had awakened from a dreamless sleep. I immediately perceived that if I wanted to keep awake and alive I must get a light or open a window, so as to get a grip of something with my eyes. And besides I was cold. I kicked off from the bale, therefore, clawed on to the thin cords within the glass, crawled along until I got to the manhole rim, and so got my bearings for the light and blind studs, took a shove off, and flying once round the bale, and getting a scare from something big and flimsy that was drifting loose, I got my hand on the cord quite close to the studs, and reached them. I lit the little lamp first of all to see what it was I had collided with, and discovered that old copy of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Lloyd’s News</i> had slipped its moorings, and was adrift in the void. That brought me out of the infinite to my own proper dimensions again. It made me laugh and pant for a time, and suggested the idea of a little oxygen from one of the cylinders. After that I lit the heater until I felt warm, and then I took food. Then I set to work in a very gingerly fashion on the Cavorite blinds, to see if I could guess by any means how the sphere was travelling.</p>
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<p>The first blind I opened I shut at once, and hung for a time flattened and blinded by the sunlight that had hit me. After thinking a little I started upon the windows at right angles to this one, and got the huge crescent moon and the little crescent earth behind it, the second time. I was amazed to find how far I was from the moon. I had reckoned that not only should I have little or none of the “kickoff” that the earth’s atmosphere had given us at our start, but that the tangential “fly off” of the moon’s spin would be at least twenty-eight times less than the earth’s. I had expected to discover myself hanging over our crater, and on the edge of the night, but all that was now only a part of the outline of the white crescent that filled the sky. And Cavor—?</p>
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<p>He was already infinitesimal.</p>
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<p>I tried to imagine what could have happened to him. But at that time I could think of nothing but death. I seemed to see him, bent and smashed at the foot of some interminably high cascade of blue. And all about him the stupid insects stared. …</p>
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<p>Incredible as it will seem, this interval of time that I spent in space has no sort of proportion to any other interval of time in my life. Sometimes it seemed as though I sat through immeasurable eternities like some god upon a lotus leaf, and again as though there was a momentary pause as I leapt from moon to earth. In truth, it was altogether some weeks of earthly time. But I had done with care and anxiety, hunger or fear, for that space. I floated, thinking with a strange breadth and freedom of all that we had undergone, and of all my life and motives, and the secret issues of my being. I seemed to myself to have grown greater and greater, to have lost all sense of movement; to be floating amidst the stars, and always the sense of earth’s littleness and the infinite littleness of my life upon it, was implicit in my thoughts.</p>
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<p>I can’t profess to explain the things that happened in my mind. No doubt they could all be traced directly or indirectly to the curious physical conditions under which I was living. I set them down here just for what they are worth, and without any comment. The most prominent quality of it was a pervading doubt of my own identity. I became, if I may so express it, dissociate from Bedford; I looked down on Bedford as a trivial, incidental thing with which I chanced to be connected. I saw Bedford in many relations—as an ass or as a poor beast, where I had hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a very spirited or rather forcible person. I saw him not only as an ass, but as the son of many generations of asses. I reviewed his schooldays and his early manhood, and his first encounter with love, very much as one might review the proceedings of an ant in the sand. … Something of that period of lucidity I regret still hangs about me, and I doubt if I shall ever recover the full-bodied self-satisfaction of my early days. But at the time the thing was not in the least painful, because I had that extraordinary persuasion that, as a matter of fact, I was no more Bedford than I was anyone else, but only a mind floating in the still serenity of space. Why should I be disturbed about this Bedford’s shortcomings? I was not responsible for him or them.</p>
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<p>For a time I struggled against this really very grotesque delusion. I tried to summon the memory of vivid moments, of tender or intense emotions to my assistance; I felt that if I could recall one genuine twinge of feeling the growing severance would be stopped. But I could not do it. I saw Bedford rushing down Chancery Lane, hat on the back of his head, coat tails flying out, <i lang="fr">en route</i> for his public examination. I saw him dodging and bumping against, and even saluting, other similar little creatures in that swarming gutter of people. Me? I saw Bedford that same evening in the sitting-room of a certain lady, and his hat was on the table beside him, and it wanted brushing badly, and he was in tears. Me? I saw him with that lady in various attitudes and emotions—I never felt so detached before. … I saw him hurrying off to Lympne to write a play, and accosting Cavor, and in his shirt sleeves working at the sphere, and walking out to Canterbury because he was afraid to come! Me? I did not believe it.</p>
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<p>I still reasoned that all this was hallucination due to my solitude, and the fact that I had lost all weight and sense of resistance. I endeavoured to recover that sense by banging myself about the sphere, by pinching my hands and clasping them together. Among other things I lit the light, captured that torn copy of <cite>Lloyd’s</cite>, and read those convincingly realistic advertisements again about the Cutaway bicycle, and the gentleman of private means, and the lady in distress who was selling those “forks and spoons.” There was no doubt they existed surely enough, and, said I, “This is your world, and you are Bedford, and you are going back to live among things like that for all the rest of your life.” But the doubts within me could still argue: “It is not you that is reading, it is Bedford, but you are not Bedford, you know. That’s just where the mistake comes in.”</p>
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<p>I still reasoned that all this was hallucination due to my solitude, and the fact that I had lost all weight and sense of resistance. I endeavoured to recover that sense by banging myself about the sphere, by pinching my hands and clasping them together. Among other things I lit the light, captured that torn copy of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Lloyd’s</i>, and read those convincingly realistic advertisements again about the Cutaway bicycle, and the gentleman of private means, and the lady in distress who was selling those “forks and spoons.” There was no doubt they existed surely enough, and, said I, “This is your world, and you are Bedford, and you are going back to live among things like that for all the rest of your life.” But the doubts within me could still argue: “It is not you that is reading, it is Bedford, but you are not Bedford, you know. That’s just where the mistake comes in.”</p>
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<p>“Confound it!” I cried; “and if I am not Bedford, what am I?”</p>
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<p>But in that direction no light was forthcoming, though the strangest fancies came drifting into my brain, queer remote suspicions, like shadows seen from far away. … Do you know, I had a sort of idea that really I was something quite outside not only the world, but all worlds, and out of space and time, and that this poor Bedford was just a peephole through which I looked at life? …</p>
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<p>Bedford! However I disavowed him, there I was most certainly bound up with him, and I knew that wherever or whatever I might be, I must needs feel the stress of his desires, and sympathise with all his joys and sorrows until his life should end. And with the dying of Bedford—what then? …</p>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XXII</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">The Astonishing Communication of <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Julius Wendigee</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>When I had finished my account of my return to the earth at Littlestone I wrote, “The End,” made a flourish, and threw my pen aside, fully believing that the whole story of the First Men in the Moon was done. Not only had I done this, but I had placed my manuscript in the hands of a literary agent, had permitted it to be sold, had seen the greater portion of it appear in the <cite>Strand Magazine</cite>, and was setting to work again upon the scenario of the play I had commenced at Lympne before I realised that the end was not yet. And then, following me from Amalfi to Algiers, there reached me (it is now about six months ago) one of the most astounding communications I have ever been fated to receive. Briefly, it informed me that <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Julius Wendigee, a Dutch electrician, who has been experimenting with certain apparatus akin to the apparatus used by <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering some method of communication with Mars, was receiving day by day a curiously fragmentary message in English, which was indisputably emanating from <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Cavor in the moon.</p>
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<p>When I had finished my account of my return to the earth at Littlestone I wrote, “The End,” made a flourish, and threw my pen aside, fully believing that the whole story of the First Men in the Moon was done. Not only had I done this, but I had placed my manuscript in the hands of a literary agent, had permitted it to be sold, had seen the greater portion of it appear in the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Strand Magazine</i>, and was setting to work again upon the scenario of the play I had commenced at Lympne before I realised that the end was not yet. And then, following me from Amalfi to Algiers, there reached me (it is now about six months ago) one of the most astounding communications I have ever been fated to receive. Briefly, it informed me that <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Julius Wendigee, a Dutch electrician, who has been experimenting with certain apparatus akin to the apparatus used by <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering some method of communication with Mars, was receiving day by day a curiously fragmentary message in English, which was indisputably emanating from <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Cavor in the moon.</p>
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<p>At first I thought the thing was an elaborate practical joke by someone who had seen the manuscript of my narrative. I answered <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Wendigee jestingly, but he replied in a manner that put such suspicion altogether aside, and in a state of inconceivable excitement I hurried from Algiers to the little observatory upon the <abbr>St.</abbr> Gothard in which he was working. In the presence of his record and his appliances—and above all of the messages from Cavor that were coming to hand—my lingering doubts vanished. I decided at once to accept a proposal he made me to remain with him, assisting him to take down the record from day to day, and endeavouring with him to send a message back to the moon. Cavor, we learnt, was not only alive but free, in the midst of an almost inconceivable community of these ant-like beings, these ant-men, in the blue darkness of the lunar caves. He was lamed, it seemed, but otherwise in quite good health—in better health, he distinctly said, than he usually enjoyed on earth. He had had a fever, but it had left no bad effects. But curiously enough he seemed to be labouring under a conviction that I was either dead in the moon crater or lost in the deep of space.</p>
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<p>His message began to be received by <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Wendigee when that gentleman was engaged in quite a different investigation. The reader will no doubt recall the little excitement that began the century, arising out of an announcement by <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Nikola Tesla, the American electrical celebrity, that he had received a message from Mars. His announcement renewed attention to a fact that had long been familiar to scientific people, namely: that from some unknown source in space, waves of electromagnetic disturbance, entirely similar to those used by Signor Marconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the earth. Besides <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Tesla quite a number of other observers have been engaged in perfecting apparatus for receiving and recording these vibrations, though few would go so far as to consider them actual messages from some extraterrestrial sender. Among that few, however, we must certainly count <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Wendigee. Ever since 1898 he had devoted himself almost entirely to this subject, and being a man of ample means he had erected an observatory on the flanks of Monte Rosa, in a position singularly adapted in every way for such observations.</p>
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<p>My scientific attainments, I must admit, are not great, but so far as they enable me to judge, <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Wendigee’s contrivances for detecting and recording any disturbances in the electromagnetic conditions of space are singularly original and ingenious. And by a happy combination of circumstances they were set up and in operation about two months before Cavor made his first attempt to call up the earth. Consequently we have fragments of his communication even from the beginning. Unhappily, they are only fragments, and the most momentous of all the things that he had to tell humanity—the instructions, that is, for the making of Cavorite, if, indeed, he ever transmitted them—have throbbed themselves away unrecorded into space. We never succeeded in getting a response back to Cavor. He was unable to tell, therefore, what we had received or what we had missed; nor, indeed, did he certainly know that anyone on earth was really aware of his efforts to reach us. And the persistence he displayed in sending eighteen long descriptions of lunar affairs—as they would be if we had them complete—shows how much his mind must have turned back towards his native planet since he left it two years ago.</p>
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<p>He peered out of the manhole. “Look!” he said. “There’s something there!”</p>
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<p>“Is there time?”</p>
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<p>“We shall be an hour.”</p>
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<p>I looked out. It was an old number of <cite>Tit-Bits</cite> that one of the men must have brought. Further away in the corner I saw a torn <cite>Lloyds’ News</cite>. I scrambled back into the sphere with these things. “What have you got?” I said.</p>
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<p>I looked out. It was an old number of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Tit-Bits</i> that one of the men must have brought. Further away in the corner I saw a torn <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Lloyds’ News</i>. I scrambled back into the sphere with these things. “What have you got?” I said.</p>
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<p>I took the book from his hand and read, “The Works of William Shakespeare.”</p>
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<p>He coloured slightly. “My education has been so purely scientific—” he said apologetically.</p>
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<p>“Never read him?”</p>
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<p>“I don’t see ’em here.”</p>
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<p>“No,” said Cavor; “but you’ll get over all that.”</p>
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<p>“I suppose I’m made to turn right side up again. Still, <em>this</em>—For a moment I could half believe there never was a world.”</p>
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<p>“That copy of <cite>Lloyds’ News</cite> might help you.”</p>
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<p>“That copy of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Lloyds’ News</i> might help you.”</p>
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<p>I stared at the paper for a moment, then held it above the level of my face, and found I could read it quite easily. I struck a column of mean little advertisements. “A gentleman of private means is willing to lend money,” I read. I knew that gentleman. Then somebody eccentric wanted to sell a Cutaway bicycle, “quite new and cost £15,” for five pounds; and a lady in distress wished to dispose of some fish knives and forks, “a wedding present,” at a great sacrifice. No doubt some simple soul was sagely examining these knives and forks, and another triumphantly riding off on that bicycle, and a third trustfully consulting that benevolent gentleman of means even as I read. I laughed, and let the paper drift from my hand.</p>
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<p>“Are we visible from the earth?” I asked.</p>
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<p>“Why?”</p>
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