The Lost Pleiad

by Sesh Heri

  “So will you do it?” Ade asked.

  “Sounds like I have to do it,” Welles said. “Sounds like I’ve been drafted.”

  “You have,” Ade said.

  “All right,” Welles said. “I just want to know a few things. Are there really Martians on Mars?”

  “There are,” Ade said.

  “And you’ve been there and seen ‘em?” Welles asked.

  “I have,” Ade said.

  Welles’ eyes squinted, then widened, then squinted.

  “Are they like you and me?” Welles asked.

  “More or less,” Ade said, “but not as good looking.”

  “Of course not,” Welles said. “But they do look something like a human being?”

  “They’re humans,” Ade said, “but sort of albinos. The result of living underground for thousands of years, we suppose. There is very little atmosphere on the surface of Mars.”

  “Do I get to go to Mars too?” Welles asked.

  “No,” Ade said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “How disappointing,” Welles said.

  “But you do get to tell about the Martians to the whole nation on the radio,” Ade said.

  “And what I’ll tell,” Welles asked, “is it true? Is it true that the Martians are coming to get us?”

  “Maybe,” Ade said.

  “You’re serious,” Welles said.

  “Your spaghetti is getting cold,” Ade said.

  “So it is,” Welles said. He picked up his fork, loaded it with noodles, and shoved it into his mouth.

  “I’ll do it, George,” Welles said, and then chewed the noodles in a maniacal laugh. “I’ll scare the hell out of all the kiddies and all the old folks, too— send the whole nation a-screamin’ fer the hills— give ‘em all one big, fat ‘boo’— and all before Halloween! Now am I in the Mars Club?”

  “You’re in,” Ade said.

  That afternoon during a rehearsal Orson Welles told John Houseman to get a copy of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.

  “What for?” Houseman asked airily.

  “Give it to Howard Koch,” Welles said. “I want him to adapt it for the radio show.”

  “War of the Worlds?” Houseman asked. “You want to do that? Why on earth?”

  “Because it’s there,” Welles said. “Just get the book. We’re doing it. I’ve already told CBS it’ll be aired October 30th.”

  “You want to have Koch adapt a whole novel in less than a week and have it on the air by next Sunday?” Houseman asked.

  “Yes,” Welles said. “That’s why you’ve got to go get a copy of the book now and give it to Koch. Tell him to switch the setting to America and write it as a series of radio bulletins.”

  “Oh my,” Houseman said. “That sounds like a disaster.”

  “Never mind,” Welles said. “Just go get the book.”

  Houseman went to a nearby bookstore, purchased a copy of War of the Worlds, and brought the book back to the theatre. A public preview of the Mercury Theatre’s latest production was underway, but an elevator on the stage set had jammed. Welles and another actor were now on stage playing scenes from Julius Caesar to keep from losing their audience. Houseman came upon Howard Koch standing in the wings.

  “What in hell is going on out there?” Houseman whispered.

  “Damn elevator’s stuck again,” Koch whispered in reply.

  “Here,” Houseman whispered, handing Koch the copy of War of the Worlds.

  “What’s this?” Koch whispered.

  “Orson wants you to adapt it for the radio show,” Houseman whispered.

  “This?” Koch whispered.

  “Orson wants you to set it in America,” Houseman whispered, “and tell the story as a series of radio bulletins.”

  “What?” Koch asked aloud.

  “Radio bulletins,” Houseman said. “News broadcasts.”

  Koch rolled his eyes and looked back toward the stage where Orson Welles was emoting.

  “From one disaster to another,” Koch mumbled.

  The next day, Howard Koch confronted Orson Welles and John Houseman backstage at the Mercury Theatre.

  “I can’t do this,” Koch said, extending the copy of War of the Worlds.

  “You can do whatever I tell you to do,” Welles said.

  “Why do you want to do this stuff?” Koch asked. “It’s dull and dated. Nobody will listen. I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”

  “Yes, you will,” Welles said.

  “Isn’t there anything else available right now?” Koch asked.

  “Only Lorna Doone,” Welles said.

  “Oh, God,” Koch said.

  “Oh, God, yes,” Welles said. “It’s Doone or Doom. Which is it?”

  “That’s no choice,” Koch whined.

  “Which is it?” Welles demanded.

  “Doom,” Koch said. “I’ll go to my Doom— and so will everybody else on the show.”

  “You let me worry about that,” Welles said. “You just get something down on paper right now— an outline even. Give me a forty-five minute storyline. Martians in America. A blow by blow, minute by minute description. Put some schmaltz into it. Jazz it up. Modernize it. Mobilize it. Give me word pictures.”

  “Why don’t you write it?” Koch asked.

  “I’m a busy man,” Welles said.

  “And now I’m a busy man,” Koch said.

  “Quit whining and get to work,” Welles said.

  Koch went to work, frantically reading War of the Worlds while simultaneously making notes. The next day, he had an outline that he presented to Welles, Houseman, and Houseman’s secretary. Koch had read several key passages before Houseman’s secretary could no longer contain her thoughts.

  “You can’t do this!” she exclaimed.

  “What did I tell you?” Koch asked, looking at Orson Welles.

  Houseman’s secretary went on: “Those old Martians are just a lot of nonsense! It’s all too silly. We’re all going to make fools of ourselves!”

  “Keep at it,” Welles said to Koch, rising from his seat and rushing away.

  “Keep at it?” Koch called out. “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

  Welles was already out the door.

  “He has Danton’s Death to stage,” Houseman said.

  “Yeah?” Koch asked. “What about my death?”

  “You heard him,” Houseman said. “Keep at it.”

  “Keep at it,” Koch said with disgust. “That’s all they have to say.”

  “You poor dear,” Houseman’s secretary said to Koch as she and Houseman rose from their seats and started out the door.

  “That’s what they’ll say,” Koch called after them. “That’s what they’ll put on my epitaph: He was a poor dear— a poor, poor dear who— ‘kept at it.’ Ha!”

  On October 29th, 1938 around midnight, the cast of the Mercury Theatre gathered at Orson Welles’ room at the St. Regis Hotel to listen to the first playback of a read-through of Howard Koch’s adaptation of War of the Worlds. After hearing it, everyone agreed that the show was a bore.

  “All right,” Welles said. “So now we go to work and re-write. We’re going to punch it up.”

  “You mean, beat it to death,” Koch said.

  “I want detail,” Welles said. “Detail. Make it breathe. Make it live. Give me some specific circumstances. Let’s go back to the beginning.”

  “This could take hours,” Koch said.

  “Not at all,” Welles said. “It’s going to take damn near all night. Now— page one!”

  After an all-night re-write session, the script was sent to the CBS censor the next day for a final re-write. The censor removed some of the real place names, but Welles insisted that the real setting of Grovers Mill, New Jersey be maintained. Majestic Seven had done a statistical study of population centers and found that Grovers Mill was the average point from all major industrial centers on the east coast of the United States. Its proximity to New York City was also important. Al
so its New Jersey location would link the fake Martian attack with the Hindenburg disaster in the minds of the radio audience. For these reasons, Welles had been given firm instructions from George Ade to set the radio drama in Grovers Mill.

  When the script came back from the censors, Welles and Koch read it over again together.

  “Why Grovers Mill?” Koch asked Welles.

  “Why not?” Welles asked Koch.

  “It’s dull,” Koch said.

  “It’s real,” Welles said.

  “Real dull,” Koch said.

  Welles shot a cold glance at Koch.

  “All right,” Koch said. “Grovers Mill it will be. But if anybody asks me why of all places in the world I picked that place for the story— what do I tell them?”

  “Why tell them anything?” Welles replied. “Look— just tell them you threw a dart at a map on the wall and it landed there on Grovers Mill.”

  “I don’t play darts,” Koch said.

  “Start learning,” Welles said.

  That evening, after eight hours of rehearsals, Orson Welles mounted the podium at the CBS Studios in New York City.

  “This will have to be it,” Welles said to the show’s announcer, Dan Seymour. Welles lifted a full bottle of pineapple juice, put it to his lips, and guzzled down all of its contents.

  “Ahem,” Welles intoned, clearing his throat, and wiggling his lips. He slipped on a set of headphones, tugged on his tie until it came off, and then pulled open his shirt collar. He then looked up at the clock on the wall. Its hands moved precisely to the 8 o’clock position. Welles pointed to Dan Seymour.

  Seymour spoke into his microphone: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and ‘The Mercury Theatre on the Air’ in War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.”

  The studio orchestra suddenly poured forth the sounds of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor.

  After twenty seconds of music, Seymour introduced Orson Welles, whose voice, deep and pensive, rolled out across the ether of America:

  “We know that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own….”

  At the exact moment Orson Welles was speaking these words, only a few blocks away from the CBS Studios Nikola Tesla sat in his apartment on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker listening to the radio, but not to Welles’ broadcast. He was tuned, as was his habit on Sunday nights, to the Chase and Sanborn Hour on NBC. Tesla enjoyed listening to the comedy and music on this program. He liked Don Ameche and Dorothy Lamour and in particular Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. He was now listening to Charlie and Edgar, all the while chuckling and sipping contentedly from a silver chafing dish a warm concoction of milk and Nabisco crackers.

  At 8:12 pm Charlie and Edgar finished their opening bit and Nelson Eddy’s voice came over the airwaves, delivering a rendition of “Neopolitan Love Song.”

  “Ugh!” Tesla said involuntarily. Eddy’s voice nauseated Tesla and whenever the singer would come on the radio program Tesla would turn the radio to another station for several minutes. This is what he did now. He turned the dial of his radio, searching for something of interest. Amid the static, he passed through the sounds of a gospel choir, a symphonic orchestra, and the droning voice of a man. Tesla stopped turning the dial and listened. The man was speaking on some erudite subject, something about the course of civilization and history. Tesla wrinkled his nose; this, to him, was as bad as Nelson Eddy. Tesla turned the dial again and then stopped. He had come upon an ambient collection of noises that he had never heard before on commercial radio: in the distance a police siren wailed, closer to the microphone came the sounds of voices, like those coming from a crowd. At first Tesla thought he had come upon the broadcast of a night baseball game. Then a newscaster’s voice came over the speaker of Tesla’s radio saying he was broadcasting from Wilmuth Farm in Grovers Mill, New Jersey.

  Tesla sat forward. Grovers Mill , New Jersey was a place of great significance to him. Just outside this town in 1893 Tesla had supervised the construction of an airship inside a top-secret factory.

  Tesla kept listening. The newscaster was describing an object that had plummeted to the earth and landed in a pit. He mentioned the possibility that the object might have come from Mars.

  Tesla pushed his dish aside and turned up the volume on his radio.

  The newscaster was now describing how the object was unscrewing at the top, and then how it opened, allowing a creature to emerge.

  Suddenly the newscaster cried out that the creature was sending out rays of light that were instantly incinerating everything in their path— barns, automobiles— and people. The newscaster’s voice broke down into a sobbing hysteria— and then cut off.

  Another voice came on the air and announced that the remote broadcast from Grovers Mill had been terminated “due to circumstances beyond our control.”

  Tesla switched off his radio and leapt to his feet.

  It had finally happened.

  Just as he had always warned.

  Mars had attacked!

  At the CBS Studios across town the telephone in the control room began ringing. A sound engineer answered the phone.

  “We’re on the air,” the engineer said. “You know you’re not supposed to call in here now.”

  “It’s the police on the other line,” the studio secretary said.

  “Can’t it wait?” the engineer asked.

  “They’re insistent,” the studio secretary said. “They want to know what’s going on.”

  “Put them on,” the engineer said.

  The line clicked.

  “Hello? Hello?” a voice asked, graveled and panicky.

  “What is it?” the engineer asked.

  “What’s going on down there?” the voice asked.

  “A radio show,” the engineer said. “Why?”

  “It’s not real?” the voice asked.

  “Of course it isn’t real!” the engineer said. “It’s a dramatization of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.”

  “Well, for Chris’ sakes!” the voice exclaimed. “You’ve got the whole city in an uproar. People think it’s real.”

  “It’s not real!” the engineer said, and hung up. “Stupid people.”

  Down at the precinct station, the sergeant who had placed the call turned to his lieutenant and said, “They said it’s not real. It’s just a damned show!”

  “Switchboard’s jammed. Can’t have this,” the lieutenant said. “Send a squad car over to CBS and see what’s going on.”

  “Want the boys to shut ‘em down?” the sergeant asked.

  “Damn!” the lieutenant exclaimed in frustration. “I don’t know! We’ve got to think about the laws on this. There are constitutional issues— but, no, they’re creating a panic. We have to step in, do something. Let the lawyers figure it out later. Right now, just send a squad car over there and have them get a look at the situation and report back to me immediately. Then we’ll figure out where to go from there.”

  The sergeant immediately dispatched a squad car to the CBS Studios. In three minutes the car came squealing up to the front door of the studio, its siren blaring. The two officers jumped out of the car and went through the studio’s front door.

  “Police!” one of the officers barked at a secretary behind a desk. “Where’s the show? The place with the microphones? On your feet! Move!”

  The secretary, terrified out of her skin, leapt to her feet and started toward the broadcast studio. She and the two policemen reached a hallway where a window gave them a view of Welles and the other actors on the air.

  “Where’s the door?” one of the policemen asked.

  “Over there,” the secretary said, pointing. “But they’re on the air now— a national broadcast.”

  “We know that,” the policeman said. “That’s why we’re here— to put a stop to it.”

  Welles had alread
y stationed one of the actors in the show at the door of the sound studio in case the police showed up. Welles had told the actor to refuse the police admittance, to stall them, but not resist them. Welles assured the actor that no matter what transpired he would be protected from prosecution by CBS’ lawyers.

  Now the actor spoke to the policemen: “What’s the problem?”

  “You’re creating a panic,” the policeman said.

  “Nonsense,” the actor replied.

  “Is this a show or what?” the policeman asked.

  “It’s a CBS national broadcast,” the actor said.

  “Out of the way,” the policeman said. “I want some answers from those people in there.”

  “The door’s locked,” the actor said. “See for yourself.”

  The policeman tried the door knob. It would not turn.

  “They always lock it when they do a show,” the actor said.

  “Where’s the key?” the policeman asked.

  “I don’t know,” the actor said.

  “Where’s the key?” the policeman asked the secretary.

  “I don’t know,” the secretary said. “I don’t have it.”

  “Nobody knows nothing,” the policeman said. “Is that your stories?”

  Several more people began gathering in the outside hall.

  “Any of you know where the key to this door is?” the policeman asked.

  Everyone shook their heads.

  “If any of you are lying to me, you’re all in big trouble,” the policeman said. “Don’t anybody move.”

  The policeman turned to his partner, and said, “Call the station. Tell them this is damned fishy business. Ask them what we’re supposed to do. I’ll keep an eye on things here.”

  The other policeman went out of the studio. The first policeman went over to the window and looked at Welles who was speaking into his microphone.

  “What the hell is going on here?” the policeman asked.

  What was going on was a nationwide panic. While most Americans understood that the War of the Worlds broadcast was fictional, thousands of people across the nation who had tuned in late to the program had jumped to the conclusion that they were listening to a news broadcast. It was the reaction of these few thousands who interested Majestic Seven— these people were the test subjects. As the War of the Worlds radio dramatization continued to be broadcast, people across America, as on a single impulse, leapt to their feet, gathered their most cherished possessions, and rushed out of their homes for— elsewhere. It was the mad flight of panic buried deep in the animal part of the human brain. People moved— in cars, in buses, in trains, on foot— moved against a chill October night sky filled with stars and specters of spacemen who had come to incinerate them all in an instantaneous flash from a DEATH RAY!