you stay in the rind. It has nothing to do with the real universe. Even the ordinary scientists-like what I used to be myself-are beginning to find that out. Haven’t you see the real meaning of all this modern stuff about the dangers of extrapolation and bent space and the indeterminacy of the atom? They don’t say it in so many words, of course, but what they’re getting to, even before they die nowadays, is what all men get to when they’re dead-the knowledge that reality is neither rational nor consistent nor anything else. In a sense you might say it isn’t there. ‘Real’ and ‘Unreal’, ‘true’ and ‘false’-they’re all only on the surface. They give way the moment you press them.”
“If all this were true,” said Ransom, “what would be the point of saying it?”
“Or of anything else?” replied Weston. “The only point in anything is that there isn’t any point. Why do ghosts want to frighten? Because they are ghosts. What else is there to do?”
“I get the idea,” said Ransom. “That the account a man gives of the universe, or of any other building, depends very much on where he is standing.”
“But specially,” said Weston, “on whether he’s inside or out. All the things you like to dwell upon are outsides. A planet like our own, or like Perelandra, for instance. Or a beautiful human body. All the colours and pleasant shapes are merely where it ends, where it ceases to be. Inside, what do you get? Darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation, stink”
They ploughed forward for a few minutes in silence over waves which were now growing larger. The fish seemed to be making little headway.
“Of course you don’t care,” said Weston. “What do you people in the rind care about us? You haven’t been pulled down yet. It’s like a dream I once had, though I didn’t know then how true it was. I dreamed I was lying dead-you know, nicely laid out in the ward in a nursing home with my face settled by the undertaker and big lilies in the room. And then a sort of a person who was all falling to bits-like a tramp, you know, only it was himself not his clothes that was coming to pieces-came and stood at the foot of the bed, just hating me. All right,” he said, “all right. You think you’re mighty fine with your clean sheet and your shiny coffin being got ready. I began like that. We all did. Just wait and see what you come down to in the end.”
“Really,” said Ransom, “I think you might just as well shut up.
“Then there’s Spiritualism,” said Weston, ignoring this suggestion. “I used to think it all nonsense. But it isn’t. It’s all true. You’ve noticed that all pleasant accounts of the dead are traditional or philosophical? What actual experiment discovers is quite different. Ectoplasm-slimy films coming out of a medium’s belly and making great, chaotic, tumbledown faces. Automatic writing producing reams of rubbish.”
“Are you Weston?” said Ransom, suddenly turning upon his companion. The persistent mumbling voice, so articulate that you had to listen to it and yet so inarticulate that you had to strain your ears to follow what it said, was beginning to madden him.
“Don’t be angry,” said the voice. “There’s no good being angry with me. I thought you might be sorry. My God, Ransom, it’s awful. You don’t understand. Right down under layers and layers. Buried alive. You try to connect things and can’t. They take your head off . . . and you can’t even look back on what life was like in the rind, because you know it never did mean anything even from the beginning.”
“What are you?” cried Ransom. “How do you know what death is like? God knows, I’d help you if I could. But give me the facts. Where have you been these few days?”
“Hush,” said the other suddenly, “what’s that?”
Ransom listened. Certainly there did seem to be a new element in the great concourse of noises with which they were surrounded. At first he could not define it. The seas were very big now and the wind was strong. All at once his companion reached out his hand and clutched Ransom’s arm.
“Oh, my God!” he cried. “Oh, Ransom, Ransom! We shall be killed. Killed and put back under the rind. Ransom, you promised to help me. Don’t let them get me again.”
“Shut up,” said Ransom in disgust, for the creature was wailing and blubbering so that he could hear nothing else: and he wanted very much to identify the deeper note that had mingled with the piping wind and roar of water.
“Breakers,” said Weston, “breakers, you fool! Can’t you hear? There’s a country over there! There’s a rocky coast. Look there-no, to your right. We shall be smashed into a jelly. Look-o God, here comes the dark!”
And the dark came. Horror of death such as he had never known, horror of the terrified creature at his side, descended upon Ransom: finally, horror with no definite object. In a few minutes he could see through the jet- black night the luminous cloud of foam. From the way in which it shot steeply upward he judged it was breaking on cliffs. Invisible birds, with a shriek and flurry, passed low overhead.
“Are you there, Weston?” he shouted. “What cheer? Pull yourself together. All that stuff you’ve been talking is lunacy. Say a child’s prayer if you can’t say a man’s. Repent your sins. Take my hand. There are hundreds of mere boys on Earth facing death this moment. We’ll do very well.”
His hand was clutched in the darkness, rather more firmly than he wished. “I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it,” came Weston’s voice.
“Steady now. None of that,” he shouted back, for Weston had suddenly gripped his arm with both hands.
“I can’t bear it,” came the voice again.
“Hi!” said Ransom. “Let go. What the devil are you doing?”-end as he spoke strong arms had plucked him from the saddle, had wrapped him round in a terrible embrace just below his thighs, and, clutching uselessly at the smooth surface of the fish’s body, he was dragged down. The waters closed over his head: and still his enemy pulled him down into the warm depth, and down farther yet to where it was no longer warm.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I CAN’T hold my breath any longer,” thought Ransom. “I can’t. I can’t.” Cold slimy things slid upwards over his agonised body. He decided to stop holding his breath, to open his mouth and die, but his will did not obey thus decision. Not only his chest but his temples felt as if they were going to burst. It was idle to struggle. His arms met no adversary and his legs were pinioned. He became aware that they were moving upwards. But this gave him no hope. The surface was too far away, he could not hold out till they reached it. In the immediate presence of death all ideas of the after life were withdrawn from his mind. The mere abstract proposition, “This is a man dying” floated before him in an unemotional way. Suddenly a roar of sound rushed back upon his ears, intolerable boomings and clangings. His mouth opened automatically. He was breathing again. In a pitch darkness full of echoes he was clutching what seemed to be gravel and kicking wildly to throw off the grip that still held his legs. Then he was free and fighting once more: a blind struggle half in and half out of the water on what seemed to be a pebbly beach, with sharper rocks here and there that cut his feet and elbows. The blackness was filled with gasping curses, now in his own voice, now in Weston’s, with yelps of pain, thudding concussions, and the noise of laboured breath. In the end he was astride of the enemy. He pressed its sides between his knees till its ribs cracked and clasped his hands round its throat. Somehow he was able to resist its fierce tearing at his arms-to keep on pressing. Once before he had had to press like this, but that had been on an artery, to save life, not to kill. It seemed to last for ages. Long after the creature’s struggles had ceased he did not dare to relax his grip. Even when he was quite sure that it breathed no longer he retained his seat on its chest and kept his tired hands, though now loosely, on its throat. He was nearly fainting himself, but he counted a thousand before he would shift his posture. Even then he continued to sit on its body. He did not know whether in the last few hours the spirit which had spoken to him was really Weston’s or whether he had been the victim of a ruse. Indeed, it made little difference.
There was, no doubt, a confusion of persons in damnation: what Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell. They were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down and loses his shape in the ladle held over the gas ring. The question whether Satan, or one whom Satan has digested, is acting on any given occasion, has in the long run no clear significance. In the meantime, the great thing was not to be tricked again.
There was nothing to be done, then, except to wait for the morning. From the roar of echoes all about him he concluded that they were in a very narrow bay between cliffs. How they had ever made it was a mystery. The morning must be many hours distant. This was a considerable nuisance. He determined not to leave the body till
