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The War of the Worlds
Chapter 1. THE EVE OF THE WAR
In the last years of the nineteenth century, no one believed this world was watched closely by intelligences greater than man's.
Yet those intelligences were as mortal as man's.
No one believed that men were being studied while they went about their daily business.
They were watched as carefully as a man with a microscope studies tiny creatures in a drop of water.
Men walked around the globe with complete satisfaction, feeling sure of their control over the world.
It's possible that the tiny creatures under the microscope do the same.
No one thought older worlds in space were a danger to humans, if they did, they decided life there was impossible or unlikely.
It's strange to remember the way people thought in those days.
At most, people on Earth imagined there might be other men on Mars, perhaps less intelligent than themselves and ready to welcome a missionary.
Across the great distance of space, there were vast and cold intellects.
They looked at this earth with jealous eyes.
Their minds were far beyond ours, Slowly and surely, they made their plans against us.
And early in the twentieth century came the great disappointment.
Mars goes around the sun at an average distance of 140,000,000 miles.
The light and heat it gets from the sun is only half of what this world receives.
It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world.
Long before this earth stopped being molten, life on its surface must have begun.
The fact that it's only about one seventh the size of the earth must have sped up its cooling to the temperature where life could begin.
It has air and water and everything needed to support living things.
Man is so vain, and blinded by his vanity.
No writer, up to the end of the nineteenth century, suggested that intelligent life might have developed there.
It might have developed far beyond its earthly level, or even at all beyond it.
Mars is older than our earth, it has only a quarter of the surface area and is farther from the sun.
So it isn't only farther from time's beginning but closer to its end.
The slow cooling that must someday happen to our planet has already gone far with our neighbor.
Its physical condition is still mostly a mystery.
But we know now that even at its equator, the midday temperature barely reaches that of our coldest winter.
Its air is much thinner than ours.
Its oceans have shrunk until they cover only a third of its surface.
As its slow seasons change, huge snowcaps gather and melt around each pole, these regularly flood its temperate zones.
That final stage of exhaustion, which is still incredibly far away for us, has become a current problem for the inhabitants of Mars.
The immediate pressure of need has sharpened their minds, increased their powers, and hardened their hearts.
They look across space with instruments and intelligences we have hardly dreamed of.
They see a morning star of hope only 35,000,000 miles toward the sun.
It's our own warmer planet, green with plants and grey with water.
Its cloudy atmosphere shows fertility, Through drifting clouds, they glimpse wide stretches of populated country and narrow seas crowded with ships.
We men must be to them at least as strange and lowly as the monkeys and lemurs are to us.
The intellectual side of man already admits that life is a constant struggle to survive.
And it seems that this is also the belief of the minds on Mars.
Their world is far along in its cooling, and this world is still full of life, but full only of what they consider inferior animals.
To carry war toward the sun is, in fact, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, slowly comes toward them.
We must remember what cruel destruction our own species has caused.
We have harmed animals like the vanished bison and the dodo.
We have also harmed our inferior races.
The Tasmanians, despite their human appearance, were wiped out in a war of extermination by European immigrants within fifty years.
Are we such apostles of mercy that we can complain if the Martians fought in the same spirit?
The Martians seem to have planned their descent with amazing cleverness.
Their mathematical knowledge is clearly far beyond ours, and they carried out their preparations with almost perfect agreement.
If our instruments had allowed it, we might have seen the growing trouble far back in the nineteenth century.
Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet.
It's strange, by the way, that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war.
But they failed to understand the changing appearances of the markings they mapped so well.
All that time, the Martians must have been getting ready.
During the opposition of 1894, a great light was seen on the lit part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory.
Then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers.
English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2.
I'm inclined to think this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun.
It was cast in the vast pit dug into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us.
Strange markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.
The storm burst upon us six years ago now.
As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the astronomical exchange buzzing with news of huge outbreak of burning gas on the planet.
It had happened around midnight of the twelfth.
The spectroscope, which he had used at once, showed a mass of flaming gas, mostly hydrogen, moving with enormous speed toward this earth.
This jet of fire had become invisible around a quarter past twelve.
He compared it to a huge puff of flame suddenly and violently shot out of the planet, "as flaming gases rushed out of a gun."
That turned out to be a very fitting phrase.
Yet the next day, the papers had nothing about this.
There was only a little note in the Daily Telegraph.
The world remained ignorant of one of the greatest dangers that ever threatened the human race.
I might not have heard of the eruption at all if I hadn't met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw.
He was extremely excited by the news.
In his excitement he invited me to come up that night and take a turn with him to examine the red planet.
In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that watch very clearly.
The observatory was black and silent, with a shaded lantern throwing a weak light on the floor in the corner.
I heard the steady ticking of the telescope's clockwork and saw the little slit in the roof.
It was an oblong opening with the stardust streaked across it, Ogilvy moved around, invisible but audible.
Looking through the telescope, I saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field.
It seemed such a small thing, so bright and still, faintly marked with lines across it, and slightly flattened from the perfect round.
But it was so little, so silvery warm, a pin's head of light!
It seemed to shake, but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.
As I watched, the planet seemed to grow and shrink, to come closer and recede, but my eye was tired.
It was forty million miles from us.
More than forty million miles of empty space.
Few people realize the huge emptiness in which the dust of the material universe swims.
Near it in the field were three faint points of light, three telescopic stars infinitely far away, and all around was the deep darkness.
You know how that blackness looks on a frosty starlight night.
In a telescope, it seems much deeper.
The Thing they were sending us came.
It was invisible because it was so far away and small.
It flew quickly and steadily across that incredible distance.
It drew nearer every minute by many thousands of miles.
The Thing that was to bring so much struggle and disaster and death to the earth.
I never dreamed of it then as I watched.
No one on earth dreamed of that unerring missile.
That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from the distant planet.
I saw it, a reddish flash at the edge, the slightest projection of the outline just as the clock struck midnight.
At that, I told Ogilvy, and he took my place.
The night was warm, and I was thirsty.
I went to the little table where the siphon stood, stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way in the darkness.
Ogilvy shouted at the streamer of gas that came out toward us.
That night, another invisible missile started on its way to the earth from Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four hours after the first one.
I remember how I sat on the table there in the blackness, with patches of green and red swimming before my eyes.
I wished for a light to smoke by, unaware of the tiny gleam's meaning and what it would soon bring me.
Ogilvy watched until one, and then he gave up.
We lit the lantern and walked over to his house.
Down below in the darkness were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of people, sleeping in peace.
He was full of speculation that night about the condition of Mars.
And he laughed at the common idea that it had inhabitants who were signaling us.
His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy shower on the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was happening.
He pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken the same direction on the two neighboring planets.
"The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one," he said.
Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after around midnight, and again the night after.
And so for ten nights, a flame each night.
Why the shots stopped after the tenth, no one on earth has tried to explain.
It may be that the gases from the firing caused the Martians inconvenience.
Dense clouds of smoke or dust spread through the clearness of the planet's atmosphere.
Seen through a powerful telescope on earth as little grey changing patches, they hid the planet's more familiar features.
Even the daily papers finally woke up to the disturbances, and popular notes appeared here, there, and everywhere about the volcanoes on Mars.
The seriocomic magazine Punch, I remember, made good use of it in a political cartoon.
The Martians had fired those missiles at us, all unsuspected.
They rushed toward Earth at many miles per second through the empty gulf of space.
Hour by hour and day by day, they came nearer and nearer.
It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their small concerns as they did.
I remember how happy Markham was to get a new photograph of the planet for the illustrated paper he edited in those days.
People in these later times hardly realize the abundance and energy of our nineteenth-century papers.
For my part, I was busy learning to ride the bicycle and writing papers on likely developments of moral ideas as civilization progressed.
One night, the first missile could hardly have been 10,000,000 miles away, I went for a walk with my wife.
It was starlight, I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her.
I pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light climbing toward the top of the sky.
So many telescopes were pointed toward it.
It was a warm night, Coming home, a group of excursionists from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us, singing and playing music.
There were lights in the upper windows of the houses as people went to bed.
From the railway station in the distance came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost into music by the distance.
My wife pointed out to me the brightness of the red, green, and yellow signal lights hanging in a frame against the sky.
It seemed so safe and peaceful, with lamps glowing and people asleep.