“Come on, godparent, let’s see the bally thing in action then!” Monty said at last, and we all trooped down the hall to the study.
A projection screen filled one whole wall. A veritable spaghetti Bolognese of wiring connected this apparatus to a brass control unit, which was, in turn, hooked up to the gigantic sieve on the other side of the partially open French windows.
“You do the honours, Kong,” the professor said, and the whole lash-up was switched on. A wavering image came slowly into focus, and we realised that we were looking at ourselves.
“Have I put on weight?” bleated Monty as he saw himself from behind, but everyone else ignored him as Kong tweaked the controls. The screen blurred again and we saw London Bridge.
“The Taj Mahal next, I think!” the professor commanded, and so it was. People and places were paraded before us, and I, for one, was completely captivated by this novel magic lantern show. Unfortunately, Monty had an attention span so short it couldn’t form a bridge across the space between his ears.
“Seen it before, been there, done that,” he rambled irritatingly after only a few minutes.
“Gadzooks, lad! Are y’tired of the grand tour already?” the professor retorted and turned to his assistant. “Go on, Kong, pull out all the stops!”
The picture was wiped blank in a trice and only a few spangles of light broke the velvety darkness. Then the Moon loomed into view like a great, mottled balloon. The perspective lurched sickeningly, and the grey face of the rocky ball swelled to fill the screen.
“It looks a little arid,” I remarked dryly as the seas, craters and ridges of our satellite became ever larger and more detailed.
“Wait, m’dear,” the professor cautioned. “Although this airless waste is the lunar surface, it’s only one part of it...”
A vast and seemingly bottomless crater came into view. Then our viewpoint plunged into the darkened well, and the sides of the shadowy pit slipped past at extreme speed. Eventually, stars pinpricked the darkness at what I imagined should have been the bottom of the enormous shaft, and I was amazed to find that the tunnel ran right through the core of our satellite.
“Now we’ll be the first people to see the dark side of the Moon,” the professor crowed with glee. “Then to the lunar pole, Kong!”
More drab and lifeless territory flashed past until we were confronted by a gigantic ice-ringed pit that punctured the roof of the Moon. For a moment, as if by pre-arrangement, the vertiginous motion ceased and Kong took his hands from the controls of the Omniscope. The professor lit his pipe as I struggled to catch up with my shorthand notes, then he addressed the room.
“Dear lady and gentlemen, not only have we proved the worth of the Omniscope, I’ve accomplished the main task for which it was designed!” Kong applauded politely as Monty and I glanced at each other in confusion. “Many astronomers have recently maintained that the Moon is a barren desert with no atmosphere worth speaking of—a celestial Slough, if you will. Their understandable error has been founded on astronomical observations of only one part of the lunar exterior. They would say one half of the surface, but I now argue that their telescopes can view even less. For, y’see, the Moon is a Klein bottle—a Möbius strip spun into three dimensions—a satellite with a single surface that can be exposed to vacuum on what previous observers have mistakenly described as its ‘outside’, but one that may sustain an entirely different environment within!”
My astonishment at what had gone before was made redundant by what happened next. Kong manipulated the levers, and our perspective plummeted into the vast hole yawning in the pockmarked surface. Far from the Stygian tunnel that we had observed previously, we were shown a realm of cloudy luminescence as our bird’s-eye view drifted into the hidden realm.
“Just as I thought, m’boy!” the professor chortled as he nudged the dazed-looking Monty into alertness again. “The Moon does have an atmosphere—on the inside! And there’s light too. Any thoughts, Kong?”
“I would hazard a guess that phosphorescence from minerals, or even rudimentary life forms, could be responsible for the illumination we can see, Professor,” his assistant replied.
“Rudimentary?” I asked incredulously as the cloud cover broke and an extraordinary landscape became visible. Life burgeoned within the Moon: corkscrew trees with indigo foliage erupted from a swamp that steamed like primordial soup; things with leathery wings swooped over the forest snapping at iridescent insects of every shape and size; and down in the mire, massive eels coiled through the waters—or perhaps these were just the tentacles of some even more mind-boggling beast.
Wonder followed wonder in this subterranean bayou. Then we came upon the things that walked like men, but even more like men on stilts. Their extraordinarily long legs allowed these prodigies of nature to stride unhindered across the turbid waters of their world, while great flapping ears like those of elephants seemed to act as balancing mechanisms. In other respects, the creatures seemed almost human. They even wore simple, roughly made clothes, including huge puffy hats, and carried tools which looked surprisingly sophisticated.
“That one, Kong,” the professor barked. “Let’s take a closer look at this fellow and see what he’s got in his three-fingered hands.”
Monty had wandered right up to screen, as if mesmerised by the images. “It looks like he’s got some kind of camera in his mitts. Golly, you can almost smell the swamp water... In fact, you can almost smell the blighter himself –”
Things became somewhat confused at this point.
As the Omniscope zeroed in on the stilt-man, the creature started in surprise, folded his face in a frown, and jerked the lens of his own contraption in what seemed to be our direction. There was a bang as several of the valves on the console exploded. Then, accompanied by an audible pop, the stilt-man reached through the screen and grabbed a flabbergasted Monty Monk by the ears. It was a moment’s work for the Man-in-the-Moon to haul the man about town through the window made by the Omniscope—and into the strange new world on the other side.
At this point, the power failed and the professor’s study was plunged into darkness. Three things were audible: Monty’s fading squeals of “Oh, I say!”; the professor’s inventive but unprintable profanity; and someone or something yelling, “Kumquats! Hose-pipe! Banana peel!”
III. A Surprising Development
As soon as the lights had flickered on again, Kong set about repairing what I now regarded as his machine. Once the spent valves were replaced, the view of the now-deserted lunar swamps came back into focus. The professor repeatedly poked a shooting stick through the Omniscope’s screen to confirm that the weird portal remained open, and we hatched a Curate’s egg of a plan.
MacGuffin gathered together the rest of his staff and assembled an arsenal of small arms and hunting rifles. The French windows were opened wide, and the servants hauled a small motor launch—commandeered from a nearby lake—along the drive, through the study and up to the screen, before plunging it into the waters of the lunar interior. Finally, Kong, the professor and I—all now changed into outdoor clothing—clambered through the omniscopic window and into the boat. The lower lunar gravity made the transition difficult, but reassuringly increased our strength in that curious place.
Looking back at our point of entry, I was disoriented by the sight of the portal hanging in mid-air. It was as if a magical knife had cut a rectangular hole in reality, peeling away a slice of the lunar landscape to reveal the professor’s crowded study. One could even have fancied that the scene was only a cleverly rendered trompe-l’œil, if not for the busy movements of the servants within. Queerer still was the effect created when Kong piloted our boat around the portal, for there was no back to the gateway! We found that our egress only existed in one dimension: there was no discernible edge to the thing, and our views of the steaming lunar interior were uninterrupted once we had positioned ourselves to the rear.
Such riddles could have occupied us for days, but that was time we could ill afford to spend in contemplation when we had a blue-blooded buffoon to rescue. Kong gunned the engine and the launch surged forward, taking us towards our unsolicited appointment with destiny.
It was only once we were moving that the professor remembered that I was a woman.
“Good God, we can’t take you with us, gel—this is no place for a lady. Kong, turn this boat around!”
I was about to argue when Kong replied for me.
“I believe that Miss Underhill was one of the leading markswomen in the ladies’ shooting club when she attended Harvard, sir.”
MacGuffin stared at me as I nodded frostily, adding, “One doesn’t like to boast.” The matter was settled when I pointedly plucked a large log from the water and crushed it with my bare hands. “What’s more, I no longer appear to be a member of the weaker sex in this sphere.”
Kong steered the boat in a broad circle through the mauve and heliotrope foliage. The purplish world around us exploded with life as we passed. Most of the bizarre creatures around us fled from the noise, fumes and surging wake of our boat, and the rest recoiled from sharp blows from the professor’s shooting stick.
The air was heavy with humidity and the overpoweringly spicy odours of the swamp. High above us, thick cumuli boiled around a nebulous source of light. Some of these clouds seemed to break apart into smaller clumps, and these floated downwards in a distinct direction. Although we saw no stilt-men, the drifting clouds pointed us towards what had to be their stronghold.
A great spiral tower rose out of the swamps, beckoning us like an index finger signalling to a lackadaisical waiter. We certainly intended to give the Moon-men something to chew on, but I, for one, was not out to serve up any dish as cold as revenge. Rather, I wanted to spare the stilt-men from sampling too much of their entrée—Monty Monk was hardly a good appetiser for our civilisation. To be frank, he was enough to give anybody indigestion.
“We’ll give ’em Hell for kidnapping m’godson, won’t we, m’dear?” MacGuffin growled. “Two crack shots should be enough to settle their hash. Course Kong here won’t touch firearms because of his religion, but he’s a master of Carrot or Judy, one of those Oriental martial arts.”
“With all due respect, I think we should be careful, Professor,” I replied. “After all, the stilt-man may have just been as curious as we were. We don’t know he meant any harm.”
“Well, he acted as if he was up to no good—I say we take no chances, no prisoners and no lip!”
