第 4 页

able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute

non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam

against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic

mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a

lighthouse projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutely proved

these details. However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat

is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of

visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its

touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass,

and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.

That night nearly forty people lay under the starlight about the

pit, charred and distorted beyond recognition, and all night long the

common from Horsell to Maybury was deserted and brightly ablaze.

The news of the massacre probably reached Chobham, Woking, and

Ottershaw about the same time. In Woking the shops had closed when

the tragedy happened, and a number of people, shop people and so

forth, attracted by the stories they had heard, were walking over the

Horsell Bridge and along the road between the hedges that runs out at

last upon the common. You may imagine the young people brushed up

after the labours of the day, and making this novelty, as they would

make any novelty, the excuse for walking together and enjoying a

trivial flirtation. You may figure to yourself the hum of voices

along the road in the gloaming. . . .

As yet, of course, few people in Woking even knew that the cylinder

had opened, though poor Henderson had sent a messenger on a bicycle to

the post office with a special wire to an evening paper.

As these folks came out by twos and threes upon the open, they

found little knots of people talking excitedly and peering at the

spinning mirror over the sand pits, and the newcomers were, no doubt,

soon infected by the excitement of the occasion.

By half past eight, when the Deputation was destroyed, there may

have been a crowd of three hundred people or more at this place,

besides those who had left the road to approach the Martians nearer.

There were three policemen too, one of whom was mounted, doing their

best, under instructions from Stent, to keep the people back and deter

them from approaching the cylinder. There was some booing from those

more thoughtless and excitable souls to whom a crowd is always an

occasion for noise and horse-play.

Stent and Ogilvy, anticipating some possibilities of a collision,

had telegraphed from Horsell to the barracks as soon as the Martians

emerged, for the help of a company of soldiers to protect these

strange creatures from violence. After that they returned to lead that

ill-fated advance. The description of their death, as it was seen by

the crowd, tallies very closely with my own impressions: the three

puffs of green smoke, the deep humming note, and the flashes of flame.

But that crowd of people had a far narrower escape than mine. Only

the fact that a hummock of heathery sand intercepted the lower part of

the Heat-Ray saved them. Had the elevation of the parabolic mirror

been a few yards higher, none could have lived to tell the tale. They

saw the flashes and the men falling and an invisible hand, as it were,

lit the bushes as it hurried towards them through the twilight. Then,

with a whistling note that rose above the droning of the pit, the beam

swung close over their heads, lighting the tops of the beech trees

that line the road, and splitting the bricks, smashing the windows,

firing the window frames, and bringing down in crumbling ruin a

portion of the gable of the house nearest the corner.

In the sudden thud, hiss, and glare of the igniting trees, the

panic-stricken crowd seems to have swayed hesitatingly for some

moments. Sparks and burning twigs began to fall into the road, and

single leaves like puffs of flame. Hats and dresses caught fire. Then

came a crying from the common. There were shrieks and shouts, and

suddenly a mounted policeman came galloping through the confusion with

his hands clasped over his head, screaming.

"They're coming!" a woman shrieked, and incontinently everyone was

turning and pushing at those behind, in order to clear their way to

Woking again. They must have bolted as blindly as a flock of sheep.

Where the road grows narrow and black between the high banks the crowd

jammed, and a desperate struggle occurred. All that crowd did not

escape; three persons at least, two women and a little boy, were

crushed and trampled there, and left to die amid the terror and the

darkness.

CHAPTER SEVEN

HOW I REACHED HOME

For my own part, I remember nothing of my flight except the stress

of blundering against trees and stumbling through the heather. All

about me gathered the invisible terrors of the Martians; that pitiless

sword of heat seemed whirling to and fro, flourishing overhead before

it descended and smote me out of life. I came into the road between

the crossroads and Horsell, and ran along this to the crossroads.

At last I could go no further; I was exhausted with the violence of

my emotion and of my flight, and I staggered and fell by the wayside.

That was near the bridge that crosses the canal by the gasworks. I

fell and lay still.

I must have remained there some time.

I sat up, strangely perplexed. For a moment, perhaps, I could not

clearly understand how I came there. My terror had fallen from me

like a garment. My hat had gone, and my collar had burst away from

its fastener. A few minutes before, there had only been three real

things before me--the immensity of the night and space and nature, my

own feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of death. Now it

was as if something turned over, and the point of view altered

abruptly. There was no sensible transition from one state of mind to

the other. I was immediately the self of every day again--a decent,

ordinary citizen. The silent common, the impulse of my flight, the

starting flames, were as if they had been in a dream. I asked myself

had these latter things indeed happened? I could not credit it.

I rose and walked unsteadily up the steep incline of the bridge. My

mind was blank wonder. My muscles and nerves seemed drained of their

strength. I dare say I staggered drunkenly. A head rose over the

arch, and the figure of a workman carrying a basket appeared. Beside

him ran a little boy. He passed me, wishing me good night. I was

minded to speak to him, but did not. I answered his greeting with a

meaningless mumble and went on over the bridge.

Over the Maybury arch a train, a billowing tumult of white, firelit

smoke, and a long caterpillar of lighted windows, went flying

south--clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it had gone. A dim group of

people talked in the gate of one of the houses in the pretty little

row of gables that was called Oriental Terrace. It was all so real

and so familiar. And that behind me! It was frantic, fantastic!

Such things, I told myself, could not be.

Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my

experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of

detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all

from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time,

out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling

was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my

dream.

But the trouble was the blank incongruity of this serenity and the

swift death flying yonder, not two miles away. There was a noise of

business from the gasworks, and the electric lamps were all alight. I

stopped at the group of people.

"What news from the common?" said I.

There were two men and a woman at the gate.

"Eh?" said one of the men, turning.

"What news from the common?" I said.

"'Ain't yer just _been_ there?" asked the men.

"People seem fair silly about the common," said the woman over the

gate. "What's it all abart?"

"Haven't you heard of the men from Mars?" said I; "the creatures

from Mars?"

"Quite enough," said the woman over the gate. "Thenks"; and all

three of them laughed.

I felt foolish and angry. I tried and found I could not tell them

what I had seen. They laughed again at my broken sentences.

"You'll hear more yet," I said, and went on to my home.

I startled my wife at the doorway, so haggard was I. I went into

the dining room, sat down, drank some wine, and so soon as I could

collect myself sufficiently I told her the things I had seen. The

dinner, which was a cold one, had already been served, and remained

neglected on the table while I told my story.

"There is one thing," I said, to allay the fears I had aroused;

"they are the most sluggish things I ever saw crawl. They may keep

the pit and kill people who come near them, but they cannot get out

of it. . . . But the horror of them!"

"Don't, dear!" said my wife, knitting her brows and putting her

hand on mine.

"Poor Ogilvy!" I said. "To think he may be lying dead there!"

My wife at least did not find my experience incredible. When I saw

how deadly white her face was, I ceased abruptly.

"They may come here," she said again and again.

I pressed her to take wine, and tried to reassure her.

"They can scarcely move," I said.

I began to comfort her and myself by repeating all that Ogilvy had

told me of the impossibility of the Martians establishing themselves

on the earth. In particular I laid stress on the gravitational

difficulty. On the surface of the earth the force of gravity is three

times what it is on the surface of Mars. A Martian, therefore, would

weigh three times more than on Mars, albeit his muscular strength

would be the same. His own body would be a cope of lead to him. That,

indeed, was the general opinion. Both _The Times_ and the _Daily

Telegraph_, for instance, insisted on it the next morning, and both

overlooked, just as I did, two obvious modifying influences.

The atmosphere of the earth, we now know, contains far more oxygen

or far less argon (whichever way one likes to put it) than does Mars.

The invigorating influences of this excess of oxygen upon the Martians

indisputably did much to counterbalance the increased weight of their

bodies. And, in the second place, we all overlooked the fact that

such mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed was quite able

to dispense with muscular exertion at a pinch.

But I did not consider these points at the time, and so my

reasoning was dead against the chances of the invaders. With wine and

food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring

my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.

"They have done a foolish thing," said I, fingering my wineglass.

"They are dangerous because, no doubt, they are mad with terror.

Perhaps they expected to find no living things--certainly no

intelligent living things."

"A shell in the pit" said I, "if the worst comes to the worst will

kill them all."

The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my

perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner

table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet

anxious face peering at me from under the pink lamp shade, the white

cloth with its silver and glass table furniture--for in those days

even philosophical writers had many little luxuries--the crimson-purple

wine in my glass, are photographically distinct. At the end of

it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's

rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians.

So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in

his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless

sailors in want of animal food. "We will peck them to death tomorrow,

my dear."

I did not know it, but that was the last civilised dinner I was to

eat for very many strange and terrible days.

CHAPTER EIGHT

FRIDAY NIGHT

The most extraordinary thing to my mind, of all the strange and

wonderful things that happened upon that Friday, was the dovetailing

of the commonplace habits of our social order with the first

beginnings of the series of events that was to topple that social

order headlong. If on Friday night you had taken a pair of compasses

and drawn a circle with a radius of five miles round the Woking sand

pits, I doubt if you would have had one human being outside it, unless

it were some relation of Stent or of the three or four cyclists or

London people lying dead on the common, whose emotions or habits were

at all affected by the new-comers. Many people had heard of the

cylinder, of course, and talked about it in their leisure, but it

certainly did not make the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany

would have done.

In London that night poor Henderson's telegram describing the

gradual unscrewing of the shot was judged to be a canard, and his

evening paper, after wiring for authentication from him and receiving

no reply--the man was killed--decided not to print a special edition.

Even within the five-mile circle the great majority of people were

inert. I have already described the behaviour of the men and women to

whom I spoke. All over the district people were dining and supping;

working men were gardening after the labours of the day, children

were being put to bed, young people were wandering through the lanes

love-making, students sat over their books.

Maybe there was a murmur in the village streets, a novel and

dominant topic in the public-houses, and here and there a messenger,

or even an eye-witness of the later occurrences, caused a whirl of

excitement, a shouting, and a running to and fro; but for the most

part the daily routine of working, eating, drinking, sleeping, went on