The Cylinder (Book One, Chapters 1–6)

BOOK ONE: THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS

I. THE EVE OF THE WAR

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles. It is older than our world, and cooling; and its inhabitants, driven by the necessity of a refrigerated world, had looked across space to a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility.

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

During the opposition of 1894, a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disc, first at the Lick Observatory. I was at the observatory at Ottershaw that night with my friend Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, and saw through the telescope a jet of flame leap from the planet. It was the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us. For ten nights the flashes came, and Ogilvy scouted the idea of there being inhabitants on Mars. "The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one," he said.

II. THE FALLING STAR

Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in the morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the atmosphere. Ogilvy, who had seen it, went out early to find it, and on Horsell Common, between Horsell, Ottershaw and Woking, he found a huge hole, and in it, half buried, a great cylinder, thirty yards across, covered with a thick scaly dun-coloured incrustation. As he looked, the top began to turn. It was unscrewing from within. Something within was trying to get out. And Ogilvy ran, wild with excitement, to tell the world that men from Mars were in the cylinder.

III. ON HORSELL COMMON

By the afternoon, a crowd had gathered round the pit: loafers, children, a few cyclists, the curious from Woking. The newspapers carried the story. I went to see it, and found it disappointing: a huge cylinder, still slowly unscrewing. Nobody yet thought of danger.

IV. THE CYLINDER OPENS

When I returned to the common the sun was setting. Suddenly the lid fell off with a ringing concussion. A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather. Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.

Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance: the peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth; above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

I turned and ran madly for the trees.

V. THE HEAT-RAY

A deputation went forward toward the pit, waving a white flag: Ogilvy, Stent the Astronomer Royal, and others, to show the Martians that we, too, were intelligent. Suddenly there was a flash of light, and a quantity of luminous greenish smoke came out of the pit in three distinct puffs. Then something rose out of the pit, a humped shape, and from it a ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out.

Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if each were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire. Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run. An almost noiseless and blinding flash of light, and a man fell headlong and lay still; and as the unseen shaft of heat passed over them, pine trees burst into fire, and every dry furze bush became with one dull thud a mass of flames. It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat.

VI. THE HEAT-RAY IN THE CHOBHAM ROAD

It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men so swiftly and so silently. Many think that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity, and project it in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition. However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch; lead runs like water, iron softens, glass cracks and melts, and when it falls upon water, 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 crowd that fled along the Chobham road were caught by the edge of the beam; three were killed, and many trampled. And I ran home, through the darkness, a mere human animal, terrified, among the trees.

(End of Episode 1 — continued in Episode 2: The Fighting Machines)