The Astonishing Communication Of Mr Julius Wendigee

: The First Men In The Moon

When I had finished my account of my return to the earth at Littlestone, I

wrote, "The End," made a flourish, and threw my pen aside, fully believing

that the whole story of the First Men in the Moon was done. Not only had I

done this, but I had placed my manuscript in the hands of a literary

agent, had permitted it to be sold, had seen the greater portion of it

appear in the Strand Magazine, and was setting to work again upon the< r />
scenario of the play I had commenced at Lympne before I realised that the

end was not yet. And then, following me from Amalfi to Algiers, there

reached me (it is now about six months ago) one of the most astounding

communications I have ever been fated to receive. Briefly, it informed me

that Mr. Julius Wendigee, a Dutch electrician, who has been experimenting

with certain apparatus akin to the apparatus used by Mr. Tesla in America,

in the hope of discovering some method of communication with Mars, was

receiving day by day a curiously fragmentary message in English, which was

indisputably emanating from Mr. Cavor in the moon.



At first I thought the thing was an elaborate practical joke by some one

who had seen the manuscript of my narrative. I answered Mr. Wendigee

jestingly, but he replied in a manner that put such suspicion altogether

aside, and in a state of inconceivable excitement I hurried from Algiers

to the little observatory upon the Monte Rosa in which he was working. In

the presence of his record and his appliances--and above all of the

messages from Cavor that were coming to hand--my lingering doubts

vanished. I decided at once to accept a proposal he made to me to remain

with him, assisting him to take down the record from day to day, and

endeavouring with him to send a message back to the moon. Cavor, we

learnt, was not only alive, but free, in the midst of an almost

inconceivable community of these ant-like beings, these ant-men, in the

blue darkness of the lunar caves. He was lamed, it seemed, but otherwise

in quite good health--in better health, he distinctly said, than he

usually enjoyed on earth. He had had a fever, but it had left no bad

effects. But curiously enough he seemed to be labouring under a conviction

that I was either dead in the moon crater or lost in the deep of space.



His message began to be received by Mr. Wendigee when that gentleman was

engaged in quite a different investigation. The reader will no doubt

recall the little excitement that began the century, arising out an

announcement by Mr. Nikola Tesla, the American electrical celebrity, that

he had received a message from Mars. His announcement renewed attention to

fact that had long been familiar to scientific people, namely: that from

some unknown source in space, waves of electromagnetic disturbance,

entirely similar those used by Signor Marconi for his wireless telegraphy,

are constantly reaching the earth. Besides Tesla quite a number of other

observers have been engaged in perfecting apparatus for receiving and

recording these vibrations, though few would go so far to consider them

actual messages from some extraterrestrial sender. Among that few,

however, we must certainly count Mr. Wendigee. Ever since 1898 he had

devoted himself almost entirely to this subject, and being a man of ample

means he had erected an observatory on the flanks of Monte Rosa, in a

position singularly adapted in every way for such observations.



My scientific attainments, I must admit, are not great, but so far as they

enable me to judge, Mr. Wendigee's contrivances for detecting and

recording any disturbances in the electromagnetic conditions of space are

singularly original and ingenious. And by a happy combination of

circumstances they were set up and in operation about two months before

Cavor made his first attempt to call up the earth. Consequently we have

fragments of his communication even from the beginning. Unhappily, they

are only fragments, and the most momentous of all the things that he had

to tell humanity--the instructions, that is, for the making of Cavorite,

if, indeed, he ever transmitted them--have throbbed themselves away

unrecorded into space. We never succeeded in getting a response back to

Cavor. He was unable to tell, therefore, what we had received or what we

had missed; nor, indeed, did he certainly know that any one on earth was

really aware of his efforts to reach us. And the persistence he displayed

in sending eighteen long descriptions of lunar affairs--as they would be

if we had them complete--shows how much his mind must have turned back

towards his native planet since he left it two years ago.



You can imagine how amazed Mr. Wendigee must have been when he discovered

his record of electromagnetic disturbances interlaced by Cavor's

straightforward English. Mr. Wendigee knew nothing of our wild journey

moonward, and suddenly--this English out of the void!



It is well the reader should understand the conditions under which it

would seem these messages were sent. Somewhere within the moon Cavor

certainly had access for a time to a considerable amount of electrical

apparatus, and it would seem he rigged up--perhaps furtively--a

transmitting arrangement of the Marconi type. This he was able to operate

at irregular intervals: sometimes for only half an hour or so, sometimes

for three or four hours at a stretch. At these times he transmitted his

earthward message, regardless of the fact that the relative position of

the moon and points upon the earth's surface is constantly altering. As a

consequence of this and of the necessary imperfections of our recording

instruments his communication comes and goes in our records in an

extremely fitful manner; it becomes blurred; it "fades out" in a

mysterious and altogether exasperating way. And added to this is the fact

that he was not an expert operator; he had partly forgotten, or never

completely mastered, the code in general use, and as he became fatigued he

dropped words and misspelt in a curious manner.



Altogether we have probably lost quite half of the communications he made,

and much we have is damaged, broken, and partly effaced. In the abstract

that follows the reader must be prepared therefore for a considerable

amount of break, hiatus, and change of topic. Mr. Wendigee and I are

collaborating in a complete and annotated edition of the Cavor record,

which we hope to publish, together with a detailed account of the

instruments employed, beginning with the first volume in January next.

That will be the full and scientific report, of which this is only the

popular transcript. But here we give at least sufficient to complete the

story I have told, and to give the broad outlines of the state of that

other world so near, so akin, and yet so dissimilar to our own.