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Chapter 23
An Abstract of the Six Messages First Received from Mr. Cavor
The two earlier messages of Mr. Cavor may very well be reserved for that
larger volume. They simply tell, with greater brevity and with a
difference in several details that is interesting, but not of any vital
importance, the bare facts of the making of the sphere and our departure
from the world. Throughout, Cavor speaks of me as a man who is dead, but
with a curious change of temper as he approaches our landing on the moon.
"
Poor Bedford," he says of me, and "this poor young man," and he blames
himself for inducing a young man, "by no means well equipped for such
adventures," to leave a planet "on which he was indisputably fitted to
succeed" on so precarious a mission. I think he underrates the part my
energy and practical capacity played in bringing about the realisation of
his theoretical sphere. "We arrived," he says, with no more account of our
passage through space than if we had made a journey of common occurrence
in a railway train.
And then he becomes increasingly unfair to me. Unfair, indeed, to an
extent I should not have expected in a man trained in the search for
truth. Looking back over my previously written account of these things, I
must insist that I have been altogether juster to Cavor than he has been
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