I was a dozen yards from it.  My eyes had become dim.  “Lie down!” screamed despair; “lie down!”

I touched it, and halted.  “Too late!” screamed despair; “lie down!”

I fought stiffly with it.  I was on the manhole lip, a stupefied, half-dead being.  The snow was all about me.  I pulled myself in.  There lurked within a little warmer air.

The snowflakes—­the airflakes—­danced in about me, as I tried with chilling hands to thrust the valve in and spun it tight and hard.  I sobbed.  “I will,” I chattered in my teeth.  And then, with fingers that quivered and felt brittle, I turned to the shutter studs.

As I fumbled with the switches—­for I had never controlled them before—­I could see dimly through the steaming glass the blazing red streamers of the sinking sun, dancing and flickering through the snowstorm, and the black forms of the scrub thickening and bending and breaking beneath the accumulating snow.  Thicker whirled the snow and thicker, black against the light.  What if even now the switches overcame me?  Then something clicked under my hands, and in an instant that last vision of the moon world was hidden from my eyes.  I was in the silence and darkness the inter-planetary sphere.

Chapter 20

Mr. Bedford in Infinite Space

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 of 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.

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 Lloyd’s News had slipped its