What I actually said was, “Oh, Ransom. Thank God you’ve come.”

CHAPTER TWO

The door was slammed (for the second time that night) and after a moment’s groping Ransom had found and lit a candle. I glanced quickly round and could see no one but ourselves. The most noticeable thing in the room was the big white object. I recognised the shape well enough this time. It was a large coffin-shaped casket, open. On the floor beside it lay its lid, and it was doubtless this that I had tripped over. Both were made of the same white material, like ice, but more cloudy and less shining.

“By Jove, I’m glad to see you,” said Ransom, advancing and shaking hands with me. “I’d hoped to be able to meet you at the station, but everything has had to be arranged in such a hurry and I found at the last moment that I’d got to go up to Cambridge. I never intended to leave you to make that journey alone.” Then, seeing, I suppose, that I was still staring at him rather stupidly, he added, “I say-you’re all right, aren’t you? You got through the barrage without arty damage?”

“The barrage?-I don’t understand.”

“I was thinking you would have met some difficulties in getting here.”

“Oh, that!” said I. “You mean it wasn’t just my nerves? There really was something in the way?”

“Yes: They didn’t want you to get here. I was afraid something of the sort might happen but there was no time to do anything about it. I was pretty sure you’d get through somehow.”

“By they you mean the others-our own eldila?”

“Of course. They’ve got wind of what’s on hand . . .”

I interrupted him. “To tell you the truth, Ransom,” I said, “I’m getting more worried every day about the whole business. It came into my head as I was on my way here-”

“Oh, they’ll put all sorts of things into your head if you let them,” said Ransom lightly. “The best plan is to take no notice and keep straight on. Don’t try to answer them. They like drawing you into an interminable argument.”

“But, look here,” said I. “This isn’t child’s play. Are you quite certain that this Dark Lord, this depraved Oyarsa of

Tellus, really exists? Do you know for certain either that there are two sides, or which side is ours?”

He fixed me suddenly with one of his mild, but strangely formidable, glances.

“You are in real doubt about either, are you?” he asked. “No,” said I, after a pause, and felt rather ashamed “That’s all right, then,” said Ransom cheerfully. “Now let’s get some supper and I’ll explain as we go along.”

“What’s that coffin affair?” I asked as we moved into the kitchen.

“That is what I’m to travel in.”

“Ransom!” I exclaimed. “He-it-the eldil-is not going to take you back to Malacandra?”

“Don’t!” said he. “Oh, Lewis, you don’t understand. Take me back to Malacandra? If only he would! I’d give anything I possess . . . just to look down one of those gorges again and see the blue, blue water winding in and out among the woods. Or to be up on top-to see a Sorn go gliding along the slopes. Or to be back there of an evening when Jupiter was rising, too bright to look at, and all the asteroids like a Milky Way, with each star in it as bright as Venus looks from Earth! And the smells! It is hardly ever out of my mind. You’d expect it to be worse at night when Malacandra is up and I can actually see It. But it isn’t then that I get the real twinge. It’s on hot summer days-looking up at the deep blue and thinking that in there, millions of miles deep where I can never, never get back to it, there’s a place I know, and flowers at that very moment growing over Meldilorn, and friends of mine, going about their business, who would welcome me back. No. No such luck. It’s not Malacandra I’m being sent to. It’s Perelandra.”

“That’s what we call Venus, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And you say you’re being sent.”

“Yes. If you remember, before I left Malacandra the Oyarsa hinted to me that my going there at all might be the beginning of a whole new phase in the life of the Solar System-the Field of Arbol. It might mean, he said, that the isolation of our world, the siege, was beginning to draw to an end.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“Well, it really does look as if something of the sort were afoot. For one thing, the two sides, as you call them, have begun to appear much more clearly, much less mixed, here on

Earth, in our own human affairs-to show in something a little more like their true colours.”

“I see that all right.”

“The other thing is this. The black archon-our own bent Oyarsa-is meditating some sort of attack on Perelandra.”

“But is he at large like that in the Solar System? Can he get there?”

“That’s just the point. He can’t get there in his own person, in his own photosome or whatever we should call it. As you know, he was driven back within these bounds centuries before any human life existed on our planet. If he ventured to show himself outside the Moon’s orbit he’d be driven back again by main force. That would be a different kind of war. You or I could contribute no more to it than a flea could contribute to the defence of Moscow. No. He must be attempting Perelandra in some different way.”

“And where do you come in?”

“Well-simply I’ve been ordered there.”

“By the-by Oyarsa, you mean?”

“No. The order comes from much higher up. They all do, you know, in the long run.”

“And what have you got to do when you get there?”

“I haven’t been told.”

“You are just part of the Oyarsa’s entourage?”

“Oh no. He isn’t going to be there. He is to transport me to Venus-to deliver me there. After that, as far as I know, I shall be alone.”

“But, look here, Ransom-I mean . . .” my voice trailed away.

“I know!” said he with one of his singularly disarming smiles. “You are feeling the absurdity of it. Dr Elwin Ransom setting out single-handed to combat powers and principalities. You may even be wondering if I’ve got megalomania.”

“I didn’t mean that quite,” said I.

“Oh, but I think you did. At any rate that is what I have been feeling myself ever since the thing was sprung on me. But when you come to think of it, is it odder than what all of us have to do every day? When the Bible used that very expression about fighting with principalities and powers and depraved hypersomatic beings at great heights (our translation is very misleading at that point, by the way) it meant that quite ordinary people were to do the fighting.”

“Oh, I dare say,” said I. “But that’s rather different. That refers to a moral conflict.”

Ransom threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, Lewis, Lewis,” he said, “you are inimitable, simply inimitable!”

“Say what you like, Ransom, there is a difference.”

“Yes. There is. But not a difference that makes it megalomania to think that any of us might have to fight either way. I’ll tell you how I look at it. Haven’t you noticed how in our own little war here on earth, there are different phases, and while any one phase is going on people get into the habit of thinking and behaving as if it was going to be permanent? But really the thing is changing under your hands all the time, and neither your assets nor your dangers this year are the same as the year before. Now your idea that ordinary people will never have to meet the Dark Eldila in any form except a psychological or moral form-as temptations or the like-is simply an idea that held good for a certain phase of the cosmic war: the phase of the great siege, the phase which gave to our planet its name of Thulcandra, the silent planet. But supposing that phase is passing? In the next phase it may be anyone’s job to meet them, well, in some quite different mode.”

“I see.”

“Don’t imagine I’ve been selected to go to Perelandra because I’m anyone in particular. One never can see, or not till long afterwards, why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity. Certainly, it is never for what the man himself would have regarded as his chief qualifications. I rather fancy I am being sent because those two blackguards who kidnapped me and took me to Malacandra, did something which they never intended: namely, gave a human being a chance to learn that language.”