LITMIR.BIZ

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rcely one seventh of the volume of the earth accelerated its cooling[1] to the temperature at which life began. Mars has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.

      The exhaustion of solar warmth has become a problem for the inhabitants of Mars. And it has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. They were looking across space with tools and intelligences such as we could scarcely dream of. They saw, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them a morning star of hope. It was our own warm planet.

      And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, were alien and lowly to them. To win that earth is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, had been creeping upon them.

      The Martians have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety. Their mathematical skills are evidently excellent. If our instruments permitted, we could see the trouble in the nineteenth century. It is odd that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war. Astronomers watched the red planet, but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings[2]. All that time the Martians were preparing for the invasion.

      In 1894 they saw a great light on the illuminated part of the disk – first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then other observers. English readers heard of it first in the issue of “Nature” dated August 2. I think that this blaze was the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit of their planet.

      The storm burst upon us six years ago. As Mars approached the Earth, Lavelle of Java told the scientists about a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It occurred towards midnight of the twelfth. The spectroscope indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen. The mass was moving towards this earth. This jet of fire became invisible about a quarter past twelve. Lavelle compared it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, “as flaming gases rushed out of a gun.”

      Yet the next day there was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the “Daily Telegraph”. The world did not know about one of the gravest dangers that ever threatened the human race. But I met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news. He invited me to watch the red planet.

      I remember that vigil very distinctly. The black and silent observatory, the lantern in the corner, the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. I looked through the telescope and saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet which was swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes. It was very little and silvery warm – a pin’s head of light!

      The planet grew larger and smaller, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty millions of miles it was from us – more than forty millions of miles of void.

      Near the planet, I remember, were three faint points of light, three stars, and all around it was the unfathomable darkness of empty space.

      And invisible to me because it was so remote and small, came the Thing they were sending us. That Thing was bringing much struggle and calamity and death to the earth.

      That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas[3] from the distant planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at the edge, just as the chronometer struck midnight. 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, while Ogilvy exclaimed. He saw the streamer of gas that came out towards us.

      That night another invisible missile started on its way to the earth from Mars, almost twenty-four hours after the first one. I remember how I sat on the table there in the blackness. I did not suspect the meaning of the gleam. We lit the lantern and walked over to Ogilvy’s house. Down below in the darkness were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of people. They were sleeping in peace.

      Ogilvy was full of speculation that night about the condition of Mars. He scoffed at the vulgar idea of their signalling us. His idea was that meteorites were falling in a shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was in progress. He did not believe that life had evolved in the same way on both planets.

      The daily papers wrote about volcanoes upon Mars. But those missiles from Mars drew earthward.

      Chapter 2 The Falling Star

      Then came the night of the first falling star. We saw it early in the morning, it was rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the atmosphere.

      I was at home at that hour. I was writing in my study. Poor Ogilvy rose very early. He wanted to find the meteorite. And he found it, soon after dawn, and not far from the sand-pits[4]. The sand and gravel around the enormous hole formed heaps visible a mile and a half away. The heather was on fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke rose against the dawn.

      The Thing itself lay in sand, amidst the splinters of a fir tree. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder. It had a diameter of about thirty yards. Ogilvy approached the mass, surprised at the size and more so at the shape. It was a cylinder, still very hot from its flight through the air. Ogilvy heard a stirring noise within it and realised that the cylinder was hollow. And then he saw that, very slowly, the circular top of the cylinder started rotating on its body. The muffled sound was still coming from inside it.

      “Good heavens![5]” said Ogilvy. “There’s a man in it! And he tries to escape!”

      He linked the Thing with the flash upon Mars.

      He went forward to the cylinder. He stood irresolute for a moment, then turned, scrambled out of the pit, and ran away wildly into Woking. It was about six o’clock.

      Ogilvy met a wagoner and tried to tell him everything. But the man simply drove away. That sobered Ogilvy a little. When he saw Henderson, the London journalist, in his garden, he called over the palings[6].

      “Henderson,” he called, “you saw that shooting star last night? It’s out on Horsell Common now.”

      “Good Lord!” said Henderson. “A meteorite! That’s good.”

      “But it’s something more than a meteorite. It’s a cylinder – an artificial cylinder! And there’s something inside.”

      “What’s that?” Henderson asked.

      Ogilvy told him all. Henderson came out into the road. The two men hurried back at once to the cylinder. The cylinder was still lying in the same position. But the sounds inside ceased, and a thin circle of bright metal showed between the top and the body of the cylinder.

      They listened and rapped on the metal with a stick. They got no response. So they both concluded the man or men inside were dead.

      They went off back to the town again to get help. They were covered with sand and excited. Henderson went to the railway station at once, in order to telegraph the news to London.

      By eight o’clock many boys and unemployed men already started to talk about the “dead men from Mars.” I went out and across the Ottershaw bridge to the sand-pits.

      Chapter 3

      The Cylinder

      I found a little crowd of perhaps twenty people. The cylinder lay in the huge hole. The turf and gravel about it were charred. Henderson and Ogilvy were not there.

      There were four or five boys on the edge of the Pit. They were throwing stones at the giant mass until I stopped them.

      When I got close to it, the strangeness of this object was evident to me. It looked like a rusty gas float[7]. But the yellowish-white metal that gleamed in the crack between the lid and the cylinder had an unfamiliar hue.

      The Thing came from the planet Mars. But I did not think it contained

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