Selected Stories of H. G. Wells by H.G. Wells Read Free Book Online Page A

towards me. “The damned stuff cuts like butter,” he said. He walked straight into the bench and recoiled. “None so buttery that!” he said, and stood swaying.
    I felt scared. “Davidson,” said I, “what on earth’s come over you?”
    He looked round him in every direction. “I could swear that was Bellows. Why don’t you show yourself like a man, Bellows?”
    It occurred to me that he must be suddenly struck blind. I walked round the table and laid my hand upon his arm. I never saw a man more startled in my life. He jumped away from me, and came round into an attitude of self-defence, his face fairly distorted with terror. “Good God!” he cried. “What was that?”
    “It’s I—Bellows. Confound it, Davidson!”
    He jumped when I answered him and stared—how can I express it?—right through me. He began talking, not to me, but to himself. “Here in broad daylight on a clear beach. Not a place to hide in.” He looked about him wildly. “Here! I’m
o f.
” He suddenly turned and ran headlong into the big electromagnet—so violently that, as we found afterwards, he bruised his shoulder and jawbone cruelly. At that he stepped back a pace, and cried out with almost a whimper: “What, in Heaven’s name, has come over me?” He stood, blanched with terror and trembling violently, with his right arm clutching his left, where that had collided with the magnet.
    By that time I was excited and fairly scared. “Davidson,” said I, “don’t be afraid.”
    He was startled at my voice, but not so excessively as before. I repeated my words in a clear and as firm a tone as I could assume. “Bellows,” he said, “is that you?”
    “Can’t you see it’s me?”
    He laughed. “I can’t even see it’s myself. Where the devil are we?”
    “Here,” said I, “in the laboratory.”
    “The laboratory!” he answered in a puzzled tone, and put his hand to his forehead. “I
was
in the laboratory—till that flash came, but I’m hanged if I’m there now. What ship is that?”
    “There’s no ship,” said I. “Do be sensible, old chap.”
    “No ship!” he repeated, and seemed to forget my denial forthwith. “I suppose,” said he slowly, “we’re both dead. But the rummy part is I feel just as though I still had a body. Don’t get used to it all at once, I suppose. The old ship was struck by lightning, I suppose. Jolly quick thing, Bellows—eigh?”
    “Don’t talk nonsense. You’re very much alive. You are in the laboratory, blundering about. You’ve just smashed a new electrometer. I don’t envy you when Boyce arrives.”
    He stared away from me towards the diagrams of cryohydrates. “I must be deaf,” said he. “They’ve fired a gun, for there goes the puff of smoke, and I never heard a sound.”
    I put my hand on his arm again, and this time he was less alarmed. “We seem to have sort of invisible bodies,” said he. “By Jove! there’s a boat coming round the headland. It’s very much like the old life after all—in a different climate.”
    I shook his arm. “Davidson,” I cried, “wake up!”
    It was just then that Boyce came in. So soon as he spoke Davidson exclaimed: “Old Boyce! Dead too! What a lark!” I hastened to explain that Davidson was in a kind of somnambulistic trance. Boyce was interested at once. We both did all we could to rouse the fellow out of his extraordinary state. He answered our questions, and asked us some of his own, but his attention seemed distracted by his hallucination about a beach and ship. He kept interpolating observations concerning some boat and the davits, and sails filling with the wind. It made one feel queer, in the dusky laboratory, to hear him saying such things.
    He was blind and helpless. We had to walk him down the passage, one at each elbow, to Boyce’s private room, and while Boyce talked to him there, and humoured him about this ship idea, I went along the corridor and asked old Wade to come and look at him. The voice of our