The War of the Worlds

In those final, drowsy years of the nineteenth century, humanity busied itself with the pleasant trivialities of empire and progress, wholly unaware that vast intelligences regarded our green and watered world with calculating envy. Across the gulf of space, minds as superior to ours as ours are to the beasts watched the Earth with instruments beyond human imagining—scrutinising us, perhaps, as a scientist might study the ephemeral creatures teeming in a droplet of water. With infinite complacency, men dismissed the very notion of life upon other worlds, or if they entertained it at all, imagined only primitive beings who might welcome missionaries. Such was the comfortable blindness of those departed days.

Mars, that ancient and dying world, had long since begun its descent into frozen exhaustion. Its oceans had shrunk to mere thirds of their former glory, its atmosphere grown thin and bitter, its polar caps swelling and retreating with the slow rhythm of alien seasons. Where Earth remained lush with vegetation and teeming seas, Mars had become a world of desperate necessity—and necessity, as it so often does, had sharpened the intellects of its inhabitants into something cold and pitiless. Looking sunward, they beheld our planet as a morning star of hope, a refuge crowded with life they deemed inferior, ripe for conquest. To carry warfare toward the sun was their only salvation.

Before we judge them too harshly, we might recall our own species' ruthless history—the vanished bison, the extinct dodo, the Tasmanians swept from existence by European settlers within fifty years. Are we such paragons of mercy that we might protest if the Martians acted in the same spirit?

Their preparations proceeded with mathematical precision and perfect unanimity. As early as 1894, astronomers observed strange lights upon the Martian surface—the casting, perhaps, of the great gun from which their projectiles would be launched. Yet these observations stirred no alarm. When the storm finally burst, it announced itself through Lavelle of Java, whose instruments detected a colossal jet of incandescent gas erupting from Mars and hurtling earthward. The newspapers printed scarcely a word of it.

I might have remained ignorant myself had I not encountered Ogilvy, the astronomer, at Ottershaw. That night, trembling with excitement, he invited me to observe the red planet through his telescope. I remember the vigil distinctly—the black observatory, the feeble lantern glow, the steady ticking of clockwork, and through the eyepiece, Mars itself: a silvery disc no larger than a pin's head of light, impossibly remote across forty million miles of void. Even as I watched, invisible missiles were already speeding toward us through that unfathomable darkness.

At midnight, I witnessed another flash at the planet's edge—another projectile launched. Ogilvy dismissed talk of intelligent signals, insisting the phenomena must be volcanic or meteoric. "The chances against anything manlike on Mars," he declared, "are a million to one."

For ten consecutive nights, the flames appeared, then ceased. The daily papers finally took notice, treating the matter as scientific curiosity, fodder for cartoons in *Punch*. Meanwhile, the missiles drew earthward at thousands of miles per second, and humanity continued its petty concerns undisturbed. Markham celebrated his new photograph of Mars; I occupied myself learning to ride a bicycle and writing papers on moral philosophy.

One warm, starlit evening, I walked with my wife and pointed out Mars creeping toward the zenith—that bright dot toward which so many telescopes now aimed. Excursionists passed us singing; signal lights glowed red, green, and yellow against the railway framework; the distant sound of shunting trains softened into something almost like melody. It all seemed so impossibly safe and tranquil, that last quiet night before everything we knew would be shattered beyond recognition.

The night brought with it a harbinger from the heavens—a falling star that blazed eastward over Winchester in the early morning hours, trailing a greenish phosphorescent streak that lingered momentarily against the darkness before fading into memory. Hundreds witnessed its descent, dismissing it as nothing more remarkable than a common meteorite. The authorities weighed in with their calculations: Denning, that preeminent scholar of celestial debris, estimated its first appearance at some ninety or one hundred miles above the earth, its trajectory carrying it to ground perhaps a hundred miles to the east.

And yet, while this strangest of all arrivals from the void of space plummeted to earth, one man sat oblivious in his study, French windows thrown open to the night sky he so loved to contemplate, seeing nothing of the spectacle that passed before him. The irony was not lost—had he merely glanced upward at the precise moment, he would have witnessed the beginning of everything that was to follow.

It fell to poor Ogilvy—that earnest astronomer—to make the discovery. Convinced that a meteorite lay waiting somewhere upon the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking, he rose with the dawn and set out to claim his prize. He found it soon enough, not far from the sand-pits, where an enormous crater had been gouged into the earth by the violence of impact. Sand and gravel lay scattered in great heaps visible from a mile and a half distant, and the heather smouldered eastward, sending thin blue smoke curling against the brightening sky.

The Thing lay half-buried in the sand, surrounded by the shattered remnants of a fir tree it had destroyed in its descent. But this was no rounded meteorite—it was a cylinder, some thirty yards in diameter, its surface caked with a thick, scaly incrustation the colour of dun earth. Still radiating heat from its passage through the atmosphere, it forbade close approach. Ogilvy stood at the pit's edge, dimly perceiving even then some evidence of design in its arrival, listening to faint stirring sounds from within that he attributed to unequal cooling.

Then the ash began to fall. Flakes of grey clinker rained down from the circular end, and Ogilvy noticed—with dawning comprehension that sent his heart hammering—that the top of the cylinder was rotating. Slowly, inexorably, a black mark he had observed moved along the circumference, accompanied by a muffled grating sound. The truth struck him like lightning: the cylinder was artificial, hollow, and something within was unscrewing the top.

"Good heavens!" he cried. "There's a man in it—men in it! Half roasted to death! Trying to escape!"

In that instant, his mind leaped to connect the Thing with the strange flash observed upon Mars. Driven by compassion for whatever creature lay confined within, he nearly burned his hands attempting to help before the dull radiation arrested him. Instead, he fled toward Woking, wild-eyed and hatless, meeting only disbelief—a waggoner who drove on, a potman who tried to lock him away as a lunatic. Only Henderson, the London journalist, proved willing to listen, and together they returned to find the cylinder unchanged but silent, a thin circle of bright metal now visible where air hissed at the rim.

Unable to help, they shouted promises and hurried back to town. Henderson telegraphed London, and by eight o'clock, boys and unemployed men were streaming toward the common to see the "dead men from Mars." The narrator himself heard the news from his paperboy and, startled beyond measure, set off immediately for the sand-pits to witness for himself what had fallen from the sky.

What awaited him there would prove far more terrible than any dead men from another world.