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Chapter One

As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-e, I reflected that no one on that platfor to visit The flat heath which spread out before e lies all behind and to the north of the station)looked like an ordinary heath The glooht see on any autumn afternoon The few houses and the clumps of red or yellowish trees were in no way reine that a little farther on in that quiet landscape I should meet and shake by the hand a man who had lived and eaten and drunk in a world forty million miles distant from London, who had seen this Earth froreen fire, and who had spoken face to face with a creature whose life began before our own planet was inhabitable?

For Ransos in Mars besides the Martians He had reat eldil who is the ruler of Mars or, in their speech; the Oyarsa of Malacandra The eldila are very different froanism it can be called, is quite unlike either the human or the Martian They do not eat, breed, breathe, or suffer natural death, and to that extent rese we should recognise as an anih they appear on planets and may even seem to our senses to be sometimes resident in them, the precise spatial location of an eldil at any ard space (or 'Deep Heaven') as their true habitat, and the planets are to the points - perhaps even interruptions - in e know as the Solar System and they as the Field of Arbol

At present I was going to see Ransom in answer to a hich had said 'Couessed what sort of business heht with Ranso the prospect as ht to It was the eldila that were et used to the fact that Ransom had been to Marsbut to havewhose life appeared to be practically unendingEven the journey to Mars was bad enough A ed One can't put the difference into words When theis not easy to recover Butconviction that, since his return, the eldila were not leaving his in his conversation, little mannerisms, accidental allusions which he ested that he was keeping strange coe

As I plodded along the empty, unfenced road which runs across thesense ofit What, after all, was I afraid of? The retted it I was shocked to find that I had mentally used the word 'afraid' Up till then I had tried to pretend that I was feeling only distaste, or embarrassment, or even boredo I realised now that my emotion was neither more, nor less, nor other, than Fear And I realised that I was afraid of two things - afraid that sooner or later I et 'drawn in' I suppose everyone knows this fear of getting 'drawn in' - the moment at which a man realises that what had see him in the Communist Party or the Christian Church - the sense that a door has just sla was such sheer bad luck Ransoainst his will and almost by accident, and I had become connected with his affair by another accident Yet here ere both getting more and more involved in what I could only describe as inter-planetary politics As to my intense wish never to come into contact with the eldila myself I am not sure whether I canmore than a prudent desire to avoid creatures alien in kind, very powerful, and very intelligent The truth was all that I heard about thes which our ave me a sort of shock We tend to think about non-huories which we label 'scientific' and 'supernatural' respectively We think, in one mood, of Mr Wells' Martians (very unlike the real Malacandrians, by the bye), or his Selenites In quite a different hosts, fairies, and the like But the very nise a creature in either class as real the distinction begins to get blurred: and when it is a creature like an eldil the distinction vanishes altogether These things were not animals - to that extent one had to classify theroup; but they had some kind of material vehicle whose presence could (in principle) be scientifically verified To that extent they belonged to the first group The distinction between natural and supernatural, in fact, broke down; and when it had done so, one realised how great a comfort it had been - how it had eased the burden of intolerable strangeness which this universe i the mind never to think of both in the same context What price we may have paid for this comfort in the way of false security and accepted confusion of thought is another matter

'This is a long, dreary road,' I thought toto carry' And then, with a start of realisation, I re ht I swore toin the train Will you believe me when I say that my immediate i about it'? Of course there was nothing to be done which could not equally well be done by ringing up froe That train, with my pack in it, must by this time be miles away

I realise that now as clearly as you do But at the moment it seemed perfectly obvious that I un to do so before reason or conscience awoke and setthis I discovered more clearly than before how very little I wanted to do it It was such hard work that I felt as if I alking against a headwind; but in fact it was one of those still, dead evenings when no twig stirs, and beginning to be a little foggy

The farther I went theexcept these eldila What, after all, did Ransom really know about them? By his own account the sorts which he had un to do so since his return from Mars We had eldila of our own, he said, Tellurian eldils, but they were of a different kind and mostly hostile to man That, in fact, hy our world was cut off from co in a state of siege, as being, in fact, an enemy-occupied territory, held down by eldils ere at war both with us and with the eldils of 'Deep Heaven', or 'space' Like the bacteria on thepests on the macroscopic permeate our whole life invisibly and are the real explanation of that fatal bent which is the main lesson of history If all this were true, then, of course, we should welcome the fact that eldila of a better kind had at last broken the frontier (it is, they say, at the Moon's orbit) and were beginning to visit us Always assu that Ransom's account was the correct one

A nasty idea occurred tofro to invade our planet, what better smoke-screen could it put up than this very story of Ransohtest evidence, after all, for the existence of the supposed maleficent eldils on this earth? How if e, the Trojan Horse, whereby so on Tellus? And then once more, just as when I had discovered that I had to pack, the io back," it whispered to me, "send him a wire, tell hi" The strength of the feeling astonishedmyself not to be a fool, and when I finally resuinning of a nervous breakdown No sooner had this idea occurred toRansom Obviously, I wasn't fit for any such juram almost certainly referred to I wasn't even fit to spend an ordinary weekend away froet safe home, before I lost my memory or became hysterical, and to put o on