War of the Worlds

by Manly Wade Wellman

  Challenger subsided, locking his shaggy brows in thought. “You may be right, Holmes,” he said at last. “It is not often that I feel obliged to retreat from a position.”

  “You are generous to give way,” replied Holmes smiling. “Earlier today, you spoke disparagingly of other scientists who cannot do that. But let us consider another point for the moment. Our view seems to be from the top of a mast, and twice we have seen one of those creatures coming near and seeming to look into our very faces, as it were. We have also noted the glints of light on the other masts. Might it not follow that on top of our mast is some device similar to this very crystal we have here? And that a view through that crystal gives them a look through this one at us, as a view from this one gives us a look at them?”

  “Indeed, what else?” demanded Challenger triumphantly, as though he himself had come up with the theory. “It is no more than sound logic, Holmes. On top of that mast on Mars is a contrivance which in some way is powered to observe across space to the area where this crystal is located on our own planet — to this very study.”

  “As one telegraphic instrument communicates with another, although the procedure is far more subtle than that,” said Holmes. “And these creatures on Mars may be far ahead of humanity, in more than mechanics.”

  Challenger grimaced in his beard. “Next you will be suggesting that they are a biological advance on the human race, an evolutionary development.”

  “What I have seen suggests that something of the sort has happened on Mars, over a long period of time. You saw them, Challenger. Those oval bodies must house massive brains. And their limbs, two tufts of tentacles. Might these not be a latter-day development of two hands?”

  “That is brilliant, Holmes!” Challenger’s fist smote the table so heavily that the crystal rocked. “You may well have the right of it,” and he began to scribble again as he talked. “Specialised development of the head and the hands. Nature’s two triumphs of the superior intellect. Yes, and a corresponding diminution of other organs, less necessary to their way of life — atrophy of the lower limbs, for instance, as has occurred with the whale.” He looked up again. “Truly, Holmes, I begin to think that you would have done well to devote yourself to the pure sciences.”

  Holmes smiled. “Instead of devoting myself to life and its complexities? I have trained myself to the science of deduction, which develops an ability to observe and to organise observations.”

  Challenger cocked his great head. “I must repeat, Holmes, we must keep these matters to ourselves for the present. If you will let me develop my reasons for insisting—”

  “No, permit me to offer one of my deductions,” put in Holmes. “You hesitate to confront your fellow scientists lest they jeer at you, charge you with reckless judgements, even with charlatanism.”

  Challenger’s stare grew wider. “I may have hinted something like that, but your interesting rationalisation is perfectly correct.”

  “It offered me no difficulty,” said Holmes. “In my ledgers at home, under the letter C, are several newspaper accounts that deal with your career. One of the most interesting of them describes your emphatic resignation in 1893 as Assistant Keeper of the Comparative Anthropology Department at the British Museum. There was considerable notice, with quotations, of your sharp differences with the museum heads.”

  “Oh, that.” Challenger gestured ponderously. “That is water under the bridge, of a particularly noisome sort. At any rate, I have not quarreled with you. Now, suppose we ask my wife to give us some tea, and then we will return to our observations here.”

  Tea was a pleasant relaxation, and Mrs Challenger proved a charming hostess. Half an hour later, the two were in the study again, their heads draped with the black cloth. They gazed at what the crystal showed them of the rooftop, the masts, the lawn below, and the strange creatures that moved here and there. Repeatedly they saw different Martians leave the ground to fly. Finally one of them discarded its wings in their sight. Challenger uttered a loud exclamation.

  “You are right, Holmes!” he cried. “The wings are artificial. I am fully convinced.”

  “Which disposes of them as sexual characteristics,” said Holmes.

  “Yes, of course. And I can observe in them no physical differences such as denote sexual differences to the zoologist.” He breathed deeply. “But why was this crystal sent here to Earth?”

  “And how?” asked Holmes in his turn.

  Challenger threw back the cloth. “By some strange method we cannot understand, any more than African savages understand a railroad train.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Manifestly to watch us,” said Challenger. “It was a triumph of extraterrestrial science, sending it thirty million miles or more across space.”

  “If it could cross space, might not living Martians follow suit?”

  “An expedition here?” said Challenger. “For what purpose?”

  “I wonder,” said Holmes slowly. “I wonder.”

  Four

  Their observations that day, and on subsequent days throughout December and on into 1902, developed their awareness of that strange distant, shifting Martian scenery. Holmes found himself involved in several criminal investigations, two of them in connection with Scotland Yard, but when he could spare time from these duties and his personal affairs he visited Enmore Park to gaze into the crystal and make careful notes of what he saw. Challenger spent far more time in observation. He dodged his wife’s inquiries and put aside the treatise which he had been writing, to sit long hours in the study, his great head draped to shut out the interfering light.

  The two jointly gathered increasingly clear, consistent impressions of the top of the city, wide and long and apparently of considerable height, set upon a level expanse of reddish soil with sparse lawnlike vegetation that extended to the bluffs on the horizon. That city bore something of the aspect of a fort, with its solid construction, its few openings for entrance or exit, and its location in open country as though to make a secret approach impossible. Neither Holmes nor Challenger could estimate the number of the inhabitants, but they seemed to appear by dozens, even by scores. On the green-fluffed plain around their massive dwelling moved metal vehicles of varying sizes and complexities.

  “I am baffled,” confessed Challenger at one point. “We are like African savages, intelligent enough in their own culture, but unable to understand a train or a steamship.”

  “Yet African savages, if trained and educated can understand and operate such mechanisms,” said Holmes. “Your comparison may be too optimistic.”

  “Then what comparison would you offer?” inquired Challenger.

  “I defer answering that until I am more certain,” said Holmes. He smiled inwardly. He saw no point in risking Challenger’s wrath by implying that Challenger might, by comparison to the Martians, be an animal inferior in both physical and mental development.

  Challenger returned to his study of the scene. “The smallest and most agile of their machines seem to be unpiloted,” he said. “I would suspect that they are intelligent mechanisms, possessed of their own powers to act.”

  “Some of them may well be of that class,” agreed Holmes. “Yet they may be operated, at a distance, by thought processes of their operators.”

  The scene in the crystal faded as they talked, then reappeared, with no mechanisms visible. The bulbous, tentacled beings moved here and there on roof or lawn, walking on their handlike tufts of tentacles or assuming wings and flying above the roofs. Several of the flyers observed the glittering points on the masts or soared away out of sight, on missions difficult to guess. Challenger talked more than Holmes. His manner was that of a classroom lecturer, expounding propositions to students who must pass examinations on the subject. At last he shifted the crystal very painstakingly, to get a view well to one side. He almost shouted in excitement.

  “Mars is a planet with only the smallest amount of water to be detected on its surface,” he burst out,
almost as though Holmes had suggested the contrary. “Of course, there has been all the idle talk about canals, ever since 1877. The notion sprang up because Schiaparelli professed to have seen canali — he employed his native Italian. The word means simply channels. But various arbitrary fools, presuming to encroach on the outer fringes of scientific thought, have mistranslated and babble about ‘canal’, as though they were true waterways.”

  “Yet there may be some truth in their mistranslation,” said Holmes. “A canal, I take it, is an artificial engineering device. And just what sort of waterway is the one we now see in the crystal?”

  For a stream was visible, at a point in the plain well to the left of the buildings. A curious bridge spanned it.

  “I wonder about it,” Challenger admitted. “Perhaps it is an artificial canal, as you seem to suggest. But it could never have been seen by even the most powerful telescope on Earth, and can hardly be related to Schiaparelli’s purported discoveries.”

  Holmes frowned. “Yet what we are seeing may well relate to the strange disturbances, possibly signs of gigantic construction, which were detected on Mars at the opposition of 1894.”

  “I paid little attention to that,” Challenger confessed in a tone of embarrassment. “My attention was occupied with an impudent challenge to my theory of — well, no matter for that.”

  “If 1894 was a year of construction activity upon Mars, may that not have been the time that our crystal was somehow sent to Earth?” said Holmes.

  “An interesting theory,” said Challenger, “but, as such, best kept within limits.”

  “True,” said Holmes. “Theorising, in my experience, is dangerously apt to limit the progress of logical deduction. It should be used sparingly, like poetry in a scientific discussion.”

  He drew his head from under the black cloth and quickly made notes on his pad. “Discourse further, Challenger. Your scientific learning and comprehension are utterly without peer and almost without rival.”

  “Almost?” grumbled Challenger, but the compliment pleased him. He, too, emerged from under the cloth, smiling fearsomely in his beard.

  “Astronomy has not been one of my principal preoccupations,” he began to lecture again, “yet I have always tried to notice the findings and conclusions of those who make it a specialty. Mars is a red planet, blotched here and there with greenish areas and capped at its poles with expanses of white that have the look of ice or frost. The green areas, argue some, are vegetation, perhaps of a primitive sort like moss or lichen. Here, at hand,” and he cradled the crystal in his fingers. “we have some vindication of that argument. But no water has been detected by the most powerful telescope, and the atmosphere is thin — perhaps as thin as that to be found at the summits of Earth’s highest mountains. And the spectroscope reveals only the very smallest proportion of oxygen in that atmosphere, though it stands to reason that oxygen must exist in water and water vapour.”

  All this he uttered in his characteristic tone of high authority.

  “Man, of course, could never survive under such conditions,” Holmes offered.

  “No,” said Challenger, shaking his head emphatically. “On the basis of that oxygen-poor atmosphere, it has often been asserted that life upon Mars is an impossibility. But you and I, Holmes, know better.”

  “The argument should say, life as we know it upon Earth. What we have seen is life of a very different sort indeed. But as to the redness of the planet’s surface, our crystal agrees with our astronomers’ findings on this point. Why, do you think, is it so rusty red?”

  “I can be only speculative and hazard the conjecture that it is a soil similar to clay.”

  “Clay,” repeated Holmes weightily. “I have given some time to studying various soils. In several instances I have solved crimes by taking note of dust or sand of distinctive sorts on clothing or shoes. Clay, says the old textbook, is of hydrated silicates of aluminum and can become plastic when wet and can be made into bricks, tiles, and pottery. Redness in its colour indicates the presence of oxidised materials.”

  “What you say is true, if somewhat banal,” said Challenger in a tone of lofty concession. “And where are you trying to lead us?”

  Holmes leaned back in his chair and placed his fingertips together, his habitual pose when deep in a problem.

  “It could well be that the soil of Mars has absorbed, over many ages, the oxygen that was once fairly rich in the atmosphere.”

  “Hum!” Challenger grunted. “That possibility has occurred to others before you. I do not perceive its relevance here.”

  “If a mineral deposit contains oxygen, a proper chemical action could release the oxygen again.”

  “By heaven, Holmes, I begin to see the direction of your reasoning.” Challenger’s teeth glinted in a smile. “Your association with me is a profit to your mental processes, my dear fellow. The buildings that we see in the crystal make up a group of considerable dimensions. They could house intricate mechanical and chemical equipment, and these creatures dwelling there might be able to produce a localized atmosphere that is breathable and can support them.”

  “Something keeps them alive, even if my specific suggestion here is at fault.”

  Challenger reached out and took Holmes’ hand to shake it. “My congratulations. You are a colleague worthy of George Edward Challenger. Much more so in fact, than a number of professional scientists I could name.”

  “I will try to merit that high endorsement,” said Holmes, bowing. “In order that I may do so, let us return to our studies.”

  Again they draped their heads with the cloth, and for some time they pored over the crystal in attentive silence. Challenger turned it this way and that, finally bringing it into position for a line of vision commanding the row of masts.

  “Here we see those points of light at the respective apexes,” he said. “Now one of the Martians, equipped with wings, is approaching to study, even as we do. But he is at another mast than the one from which we see. Again I feel more or less assured that each of those masts is furnished with a crystal similar to ours and so empowered as to provide a view of some faraway place.”

  “Perhaps also on Earth?” Holmes wondered. “As this crystal we have can communicate with their crystal on the farthest mast in the rank, might there be other crystals also projected across space, also communicating?”

  Lines of thought deepened on Challenger’s massive brow. “It may well be so. The speculation begets others. Among them, the question of how this crystal, and perhaps similar ones, made the journey to Earth.”

  He flung back the drapery and gazed at the gleaming crystal egg, turning it over and over.

  “Its construction and operation seem to have no analogy with anything in our own civilisation,” he said slowly. “The transmitted power may well be electrical, but that is merely a guess, not worth our discussion at present. Now, if they sent it to Earth in 1894, as you have suggested, they have been watching us for seven years. How much can they have learned about us in that time?”

  “A considerable amount, I would hazard,” said Holmes. “Far more than we might deduce about them in a comparable period.”

  “And what do they make of us?”

  “That would be interesting to know,” said Holmes. “But you and I agree that they may well be planning an expedition here to Earth. The concept of interplantary travel is not a new one. It has been a subject of imaginative tales for centuries. Now you and I face it as a reality; thus far, only you and I.”

  Challenger fondled the crystal, his beard jutting above it.

  “Fate did well to put this problem into my hands,” he said. “Aided a trifle by yourself.”

  “Perhaps it was not fate, but the Martians themselves, who put this into our hands,” said Holmes soberly. “What if they guided it into our possession to see how our rational minds would react to it? They might realise that men like you and me have unusual mental ability, and so arranged that it would come into our possession instead of
that of a fool and a philistine.”

  Challenger glanced sharply at Holmes. “You yourself are beginning to romanticise. Just why did you buy it?”

  “I decided, on the spur of the moment, that it might make a suitable Christmas present for my landlady. However, she has not seen or heard of it as yet.”

  “Which is for the best,” said Challenger, “You will, of course, make her a suitable gift of some other sort.”

  “Of course,” said Holmes.

  Five

  Late in the afternoon of the last day of January, Holmes sat playing softly on his violin. A timid knock sounded at the door. Holmes rose and opened it to a slight, black-haired young man who took off his hat and fumbled with it timidly.

  “Is Dr Watson at home?” he asked.

  “He’s gone to a meeting of medical colleagues,” said Holmes. “If you care to leave a message, I will be glad to give it to him.”

  “Are you Mr Sherlock Holmes, then? I came looking for Dr Watson — I have the honour of some slight acquaintance with him — to ask him to introduce me to you. My name is Jacoby Wace; I am assistant demonstrator at St Catherine’s Hospital in Westbourne Street.” The young man shifted his feet on the rug. “I scarcely know how to begin.”

  “Begin by sitting down and explaining.”

  Wace dropped into a chair and nervously related his story. He had known Cave the antiques dealer, and had often studied the crystal with him. To Cave, more than to Wace, the crystal had shown its secrets — Wace said that Cave had fairly clear impressions of the extraordinary scenes reflected within its depths. And Wace had been almost crushed when he found that, upon Cave’s death, the crystal had gone with other objects from the dead man’s shop to that of Templeton and there had been sold to someone whose name Templeton said he had forgotten.

  “I put advertisements in several collectors’ papers,” said Wace. “There has been no response whatever. But I am convinced that a great scientific truth can be yielded by that crystal, and I appeal to you to help me trace it.”