Read Out Of The Silent Planet for Free Online

return, drawn by an irresistible
attraction, to the regions of light; he could not cease to wonder at the noon which always awaited
you however early you were to seek it. There, totally immersed in a bath of pure ethereal
colour and of unrelenting though unwounding brightness, stretched his full length and with eyes
half closed in the strange chariot that bore them, faintly quivering, through depth after depth
of tranquillity far above the reach of night, he felt his body and mind daily rubbed and scoured
and filled with new vitality. Weston, in one of his brief, reluctant answers, admitted a
scientific basis for these sensations: they were receiving, he said, many rays that never
penetrated the terrestrial atmosphere.
    But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his
progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind
by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of
'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold
vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how
much it affected him till now - now that the very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for
this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life
pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this
ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren; he saw now that it was
the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the
Earth with so many eyes - and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older
thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens - the heavens which declared
the glory - the
'happy climes that ly
Where day never shuts his eye
Up in the broad fields of the sky.'
    He quoted Milton's words to himself lovingly, at this time and often.
    He did not, of course, spend all his time in basking. He explored the ship (so far as he was allowed),
passing from room to room with those slow movements which Weston enjoined upon them lest exertion
should over-tax their supply of air. Ftom the necessity of its shape, the space-ship contained a
good many more chambers than were in regular use; but Ransom was also inclined to think that its
owners - or at least Devine - intended these to be filled with cargo of some kind on the return
voyage. He also became, by an insensible process, the steward and cook of the company; partly because
he felt it natural to share the only labours he could share - he was never allowed into the
control room - and partly in order to anticipate a tendency which Weston showed to make him a
servant whether he would or not. He preferred to work as a volunteer rather than in admitted
slavery: and he liked his own cooking a good deal more than that of his companions.
    It was these duties that made him at first the unwilling, and then the alarmed, hearer of a
conversation which occurred about a fortnight (he judged) after the beginning of their voyage.
He had washed up the remains of their evening meal, basked in the sunlight, chatted with Devine -
better company than Weston, though in Ransom's opinion much the more odious of the two - and
retired to bed at his usual time. He was a little restless, and after an hour or so it occurred
to him that he had forgotten one or two small arrangements in the galley which would facilitate
his work in the morning. The galley opened off the saloon or day room, and its door was close to
that of the control room. He rose and went there at once. His feet, like the rest of him, were bare.
    The galley skylight was on the dark side of the ship, but Ransom did not turn on the light. To
leave the door ajar was sufficient, as this admitted a stream of brilliant sunlight. As everyone
who has 'kept house' will