He awoke from his abstraction to find that Weston anti the Lady had been conversing fluently, but without mutual understanding. “It is no use,” she was saying. “You are not old enough to speak together, it seems. The sea in rising; let us go back to the islands. Will he come with us, Piebald?”
“Where are the two fishes?” said Ransom.
“They will be waiting in the next bay,” said the Lady. “Quick, then,” said Ransom to her; and then, in answer t( her look: “No, he will not come.” She did not, presumably understand his urgency, but her eye was on the sea and he understood her own reason for haste. She had already begin to ascend the side of the valley, with-Ransom following her when Weston shouted, “No, you don’t.” Ransom turned any found himself covered by a revolver. The sudden heat whirl swept over his body was the only sign by which he knew that he was frightened. His head remained clear.
“Are you going to begin in this world also by murdering one of its inhabitants?” he asked.
“What are you saying?” asked the Lady, pausing and looking back at the two men with a puzzled, tranquil face.
“Stay where you are, Ransom,” said the Professor. “That native can go where she likes; the sooner the better.” Ransom was about to implore her to make good her escape when he realised that no imploring was needed. He had irrationally supposed that she would understand the situation; but apparently she saw nothing more than two strangers talking about something which she did not at the moment understand-What, and her own necessity of leaving the Fixed Land at once.
“You and he do not come with me, Piebald?” she asked. “No,” said Ransom, without turning round. “It may be that you and I shall not meet soon again. Greet the King for me if you find him and speak of me always to Maleldil. I stay here.”
“We shall meet when Maleldil pleases,” she answered, “or if not, some greater good will happen to us instead.” Then he heard her footsteps behind him for a few seconds, and then he heard them no more and knew he was alone with Weston. “You allowed yourself to use the word Murder just now, Dr Ransom,” said the Professor, “in reference to an accident that occurred when we were in Malacandra. In any case, the creature killed was not a human being. Allow me to tell you that I consider the seduction of a native girl as an almost equally unfortunate way of introducing civilisation to a new planet.”
“Seduction?” said Ransom. “Oh, I see. You thought I was making love to her.”
“When I find a naked civilised man embracing a naked savage woman in a solitary place, that is the name I give to it.”
“I wasn’t embracing her,” said Ransom dully, for the whole business of defending himself on this score seemed at that moment a mere weariness of the spirit. “And no one wears clothes here. But what does it matter? Get on with the job that brings you to Perelandra.”
“You ask me to believe that you have been living here with that woman under these conditions in a state of sexless innocence?”
“Oh, sexless !” said Ransom disgustedly. “All right, if you like. It’s about as good a description of living in Perelandra as it would be to say that a man had forgotten water because Niagara Falls didn’t immediately give him the idea of making it into cups of tea. But you’re right enough if you mean that I have had no more thought of desiring her than-than . . . Comparisons failed him and his voice died. Then he began again: “But don’t say I’m asking you to believe it, or to believe anything. I am asking you nothing but to begin and end as soon as possible whatever butcheries and robberies you have come to do.”
Weston eyed him for a moment with a curious expression then, unexpectedly, he returned his revolver to its holster. “Ransom,” he said, “you do me a great injustice.”
For several seconds there was silence between them. Long breakers with white woolpacks of foam on them were now rolling into the cove exactly as on Earth.
“Yes,” said Weston at last, “and I will begin with a frank admission. You may make what capital of it you please. I shall not be deterred. I deliberately say that I was, in some respects, mistaken-seriously mistaken-in my conception of the whole interplanetary problem when I went to Malacandra.”
Partly from the relaxation which followed the disappearance of the pistol, and partly from the elaborate air of magnanimity with which the great scientist spoke, Ransom felt very much inclined to laugh. But it occurred to him that this was possibly the first occasion in his whole life in which Weston had ever acknowledged himself in the wrong, and that even the false dawn of humility, which is still ninety-nine per cent of arrogance, ought not to be rebuffed-or not by him.
“Well, that’s very handsome,” he said. “How do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you presently,” said Weston. “In the meantime I must get my things ashore.” Between them they beached the punt, and began carrying Weston’s primus-stove and tins and tent and other packages to a spot about two hundred yards in-land. Ransom, who knew all the paraphernalia to be needless, made no objection, and in about a quarter of an hour something like an encampment had been established in a mossy place under some blue-trunked silver-leaved trees beside a rivulet. Both men sat down and Ransom listened at first with interest, then with amazement, and finally with incredulity. Weston cleared his throat, threw out his chest, and assumed his lecturing manner. Throughout the conversation that followed, Ransom was filled with a sense of crazy irrelevance. Here were two human beings, thrown together in an alien world under conditions of inconceivable strangeness; the one separated from his space-ship, the other newly released from the threat of instant death. Was it sane-was it imaginable-that they should find themselves at once engaged in a philosophical argument which might just as well have occurred in a Cambridge combination room? Yet that, apparently, was what Weston insisted upon. He showed no interest in the fate of his space-ship; he even seemed to feel no curiosity about Ransom’s presence on Venus. Could it be that he had travelled more than thirty million miles of space in search of-conversation? But as he went on talking, Ransom felt himself more and more in the presence of a monomaniac. Like an actor who cannot think of anything but his celebrity, or a lover who can think of nothing but his mistress, tense, tedious, and unescapable, the scientist pursued his fixed idea.
“The tragedy of my life,” he said, “and indeed of the modern intellectual world in general, is the rigid specialisation of knowledge entailed by the growing complexity of what is known. It is my own share in that tragedy that an early devotion to physics has prevented me from paying any proper attention to Biology until I reached the fifties. To do myself justice, I should make it clear that the false humanist ideal of knowledge as an end in itself never appealed to me. I always wanted to know in order to achieve utility. At first, that utility naturally appeared to me in a personal form-I wanted scholarships, an income, and that generally recognised position in the world without which a man has no leverage. When those were attained, I began to look farther: to the utility of the human race!”
He paused as he rounded his period and Ransom nodded to him to proceed.
“The utility of the human race,” continued Weston, “in the long run depends rigidly on the possibility of interplanetary, and even inter-sidereal, travel. That problem 1 solved. The key of human destiny was placed in my hands. It would be ° unnecessary-and painful to us both-to remind you how it was wrenched from me in Malacandra by a member of a hostile intelligent species whose existence, I admit, I had not anticipated.”