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talked of all the strength and irrational violence of men, of their

insatiable aggressions, their tireless futility of conflict. He had filled

the whole moon world with this impression of our race, and then I think it

is plain that he made the most fatal admission that upon himself alone

hung the possibility--at least for a long time--of any further men

reaching the moon. The line the cold, inhuman reason of the moon would

take seems plain enough to me, and a suspicion of it, and then perhaps

some sudden sharp realisation of it, must have come to him. One imagines

him about the moon with the remorse of this fatal indiscretion growing in

his mind. During a certain time I am inclined to guess the Grand Lunar was

deliberating the new situation, and for all that time Cavor may have gone

as free as ever he had gone. But obstacles of some sort prevented his

getting to his electromagnetic apparatus again after that message I have

just given. For some days we received nothing. Perhaps he was having fresh

audiences, and trying to evade his previous admissions. Who can hope to

guess?



And then suddenly, like a cry in the night, like a cry that is followed by

a stillness, came the last message. It is the briefest fragment, the

broken beginnings of two sentences.



The first was: "I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know--"



There was an interval of perhaps a minute. One imagines some interruption

from without. A departure from the instrument--a dreadful hesitation

among the looming masses of apparatus in that dim, blue-lit cavern--a

sudden rush back to it, full of a resolve that came too late. Then, as if

it were hastily transmitted came: "Cavorite made as follows: take--"



There followed one word, a quite unmeaning word as it stands: "uless."



And that is all.



It may be he made a hasty attempt to spell "useless" when his fate was

close upon him. Whatever it was that was happening about that apparatus we

cannot tell. Whatever it was we shall never, I know, receive another

message from the moon. For my own part a vivid dream has come to my help,

and I see, almost as plainly as though I had seen it in actual fact, a

blue-lit shadowy dishevelled Cavor struggling in the grip of these insect

Selenites, struggling ever more desperately and hopelessly as they press

upon him, shouting, expostulating, perhaps even at last fighting, and

being forced backwards step by step out of all speech or sign of his

fellows, for evermore into the Unknown--into the dark, into that silence

that has no end....