The War of the Worlds

 by H. G. Wells [1898]

      But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be

      inhabited? .  .  .  Are we or they Lords of the

      World? .  .  .  And how are all things made for man?--

           KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)

 CHAPTER ONE

 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.  It is possible that the

 infusoria under the microscope do the same.  No one gave a thought to

 the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of

 them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or

 improbable.  It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of

 those departed days.  At most terrestrial men fancied there might be

 other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to

 welcome a missionary enterprise.  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, and the light and heat it

 receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world.

 It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our

 world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its

 surface must have begun its course.  The fact that it is scarcely one

 seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling

 to the temperature at which life could begin.  It has air and water

 and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.

 Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer,

 up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that

 intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all,

 beyond its earthly level.  Nor was it generally understood that since

 Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the

 superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that

 it is not only more distant from time's beginning but nearer its end.

 The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has

 already gone far indeed with our neighbour.  Its physical condition is

 still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial

 region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest

 winter.  Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have

 shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow

 seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and

 periodically inundate its temperate zones.  That last stage of

 exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a

 present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars.  The immediate

 pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their

 powers, and hardened their hearts.  And looking across space with

 instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of,

 they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of

 them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with

 vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of

 fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad

 stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

 And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them

 at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us.  The

 intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant

 struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief

 of the minds upon Mars.  Their world is far gone in its cooling and

 this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they

 regard as inferior animals.  To carry warfare sunward is, indeed,

 their only escape from the destruction that, generation after

 generation, creeps upon them.

 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?

 The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing

 subtlety--their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of

 ours--and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh

 perfect unanimity.  Had our instruments permitted it, we might have

 seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century.  Men

 like Schiaparelli watched the red planet--it is odd, by-the-bye, that

 for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war--but failed to

 interpret the fluctuating 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

 illuminated 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 am inclined to

 think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in

 the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired

 at us.  Peculiar 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 wires of the astronomical exchange

 palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of

 incandescent gas upon the planet.  It had occurred towards midnight of

 the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted,

 indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an

 enormous velocity towards this earth.  This jet of fire had become

 invisible about a quarter past twelve.  He compared it to a colossal

 puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, "as

 flaming gases rushed out of a gun."

 A singularly appropriate phrase it proved.  Yet the next day there

 was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the _Daily

 Telegraph_, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest

 dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard of

 the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer,

 at Ottershaw.  He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess

 of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a

 scrutiny of the red planet.

 In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that

 vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed

 lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the

 steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in

 the roof--an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it.

 Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible.  Looking through the

 telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet

 swimming in the field.  It seemed such a little thing, so bright and

 small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly

 flattened from the perfect round.  But so little it was, so silvery

 warm--a pin's-head of light! It was as if it quivered, 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 larger and smaller and to

 advance and recede, 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.  Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust

 of the material universe swims.

 Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light,

 three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the

 unfathomable darkness of empty space.  You know how that blackness

 looks on a frosty starlight night.  In a telescope it seems far

 profounder.  And invisible to me because it was so remote and small,

 flying swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible

 distance, drawing nearer every minute by so many thousands of miles,

 came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was to bring so

 much struggle and calamity 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 chronometer struck midnight; and

 at that I told Ogilvy and he took my place.  The night was warm and I

 was thirsty, and I went stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way

 in the darkness, to the little table where the siphon stood, while

 Ogilvy exclaimed at the streamer of gas that came out towards 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 crimson swimming before my eyes.  I wished I

 had a light to smoke by, little suspecting the meaning of the minute

 gleam I had seen and all that it would presently bring me.  Ogilvy

 watched till one, and then gave it up; and we lit the lantern and

 walked over to his house.