The Complete Works: Fantasy & Sci-Fi Novels, Religious Studies, Poetry & Autobiography. C. S. Lewis

the dawn of reason in two different worlds? It was all very well to talk of Maleldil: but where was Maleldil now? If this illimitable ocean said anything, it said something very different. Like all solitudes it was, indeed, haunted: but not by an anthropomorphic Deity, rather by the wholly inscrutable to which man and his life remained eternally irrelevant. And beyond this ocean was space itself. In vain did Ransom try to remember that he had been in “space” and found it Heaven, tingling with a fulness of life for which infinity itself was not one cubic inch too large. All that seemed like a dream. That opposite mode of thought which he had often mocked and called in mockery The Empirical Bogey, came surging into his mind—the great myth of our century with its gases and galaxies, its light years and evolutions, its nightmare perspectives of simple arithmetic in which everything that can possibly hold significance for the mind becomes the mere by-product of essential disorder. Always till now he had belittled it, had treated with a certain disdain its flat superlatives, its clownish amazement that different things should be of different sizes, its glib munificence of ciphers. Even now, his reason was not quite subdued, though his heart would not listen to his reason. Part of him still knew that the size of a thing is its least important characteristic, that the material universe derived from the comparing and mythopœic power within him that very majesty before which he was now asked to abase himself, and that mere numbers could not over-awe us unless we lent them, from our own resources, that awfulness which they themselves could no more supply than a banker’s ledger. But this knowledge remained an abstraction. Mere bigness and loneliness overbore him.

      These thoughts must have taken several hours and absorbed all his attention. He was aroused by what he least expected—the sound of a human voice. Emerging from his reverie he saw that all the fishes had deserted him. His own was swimming feebly: and there a few yards away, no longer fleeing him but moving slowly towards him, was the Un-man. It sat hugging itself, its eyes almost shut up with bruises, its flesh the colour of liver, its leg apparently broken, its mouth twisted with pain.

      “Ransom,” it said feebly.

      Ransom held his tongue. He was not going to encourage it to start that game again.

      “Ransom,” it said again in a broken voice, “for God’s sake speak to me.”

      He glanced at it in surprise. Tears were on its cheeks.

      “Ransom, don’t cold-shoulder me,” it said. “Tell me what has happened. What have they done to us? You—you’re all bleeding. My leg’s broken . . .” its voice died away in a whimper.

      “Who are you?” he asked sharply.

      “Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know me,” mumbled Weston’s voice. “I’m Weston. You’re Ransom—Elwin Ransom of Leicester, Cambridge, the philologist. We’ve had our quarrels, I know. I’m sorry. I dare say I’ve been in the wrong. Ransom, you’ll not leave me to die in this horrible place, will you?”

      “Where did you learn Aramaic?” asked Ransom, keeping his eyes on the other.

      “Aramaic?” said Weston’s voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not much of a game to make fun of a dying man.”

      “But are you really Weston?” said Ransom, for he began to think that Weston had actually come back.

      “Who else should I be?” came the answer, with a burst of weak temper, on the verge of tears.

      “Where have you been?” asked Ransom.

      Weston—if it was Weston—shuddered. “Where are we now?” he asked presently.

      “In Perelandra—Venus, you know,” answered Ransom.

      “Have you found the space-ship?” asked Weston.

      “I never saw it except at a distance,” said Ransom. “And I’ve no idea where it is now—a couple of hundred miles away for all I know.”

      “You mean we’re trapped?” said Weston, almost in a scream. Ransom said nothing and the other bowed his head and cried like a baby.

      “Come,” said Ransom at last, “there’s no good taking it like that. Hang it all, you’d not be much better off if you were on Earth. You remember they’re having a war there. The Germans may be bombing London to bits at this moment!” Then seeing the creature still crying, he added, “Buck up, Weston. It’s only death, all said and done. We should have to die some day, you know. We shan’t lack water, and hunger—without thirst—isn’t too bad. As for drowning—well, a bayonet wound, or cancer, would be worse.”

      “You mean to say you’re going to leave me,” said Weston.

      “I can’t, even if I wanted to,” said Ransom. “Don’t you see I’m in the same position as yourself?”

      “You’ll promise not to go off and leave me in the lurch?” said Weston.

      “All right, I’ll promise if you like. Where could I go to?”

      Weston looked very slowly all round and then urged his fish a little nearer to Ransom’s.

      “Where is . . . it?” he asked in a whisper. “You know,” and he made meaningless gestures.

      “I might ask you the same question,” said Ransom.

      “Me?” said Weston. His face was, in one way and another, so disfigured that it was hard to be sure of its expression.

      “Have you any idea of what’s been happening to you for the last few days?” said Ransom.

      Weston once more looked all round him uneasily.

      “It’s all true, you know,” he said at last.

      “What’s all true?” said Ransom.

      Suddenly Weston turned on him with a snarl of rage. “It’s all very well for you,” he said. “Drowning doesn’t hurt and death is bound to come anyway, and all that nonsense. What do you know about death? It’s all true, I tell you.”

      “What are you talking about?”

      “I’ve been stuffing myself up with a lot of nonsense all my life,” said Weston. “Trying to persuade myself that it matters what happens to the human race . . . trying to believe that anything you can do will make the universe bearable. It’s all rot, do you see?”

      “And something else is truer!”

      “Yes,” said Weston, and then was silent for a long time.

      “We’d better turn our fishes head on to this,” said Ransom presently, his eyes on the seas, “or we’ll be driven apart.” Weston obeyed without seeming to notice what he did, and for a time the two men were riding very slowly side by side.

      “I’ll tell you what’s truer,” said Weston presently.

      “What?”

      “A little child that creeps upstairs when nobody’s looking and very slowly turns the handle to take one peep into the room where its grandmother’s dead body is laid out—and then runs away and has bad dreams. An enormous grandmother, you understand.”

      “What do you mean by saying that’s truer?”

      “I mean that child knows something about the universe which all science and all religion is trying to hide.”

      Ransom said nothing.

      “Lots of things,” said Weston presently. “Children are afraid to go through a churchyard at night, and the grown-ups tell them not to be silly: but the children know better than the grown-ups. People in Central Africa doing beastly things with masks on in the middle of the night—and missionaries and civil servants say it’s all superstition. Well, the blacks know more about the universe than the white people. Dirty priests in back streets in Dublin frightening half-witted children to death with stories about it. You’d say they are unenlightened. They’re not: except that they think there is a way of escape. There isn’t. That is the real universe, always has