“If it happened to want you, it could come back and get you as you ran,” said Holmes coldly. “Well, if you’re running away, goodbye to you.”
“But what will you do, sir? Bide here at Ware?”
“No,” snapped Holmes over his shoulder as he turned away. “I am going to London.”
He strode quickly off along the platform. Beyond, he followed a grassy lane beside the railroad tracks, with hedge growing close at hand. He could dart in there to hide should the flying thing come back. Nobody passed him, and nobody peered from the doors and windows of silent houses. As he walked, he ate the sandwiches Martha had disconsolately made for his lunch. By late evening he reached Cheshunt. The railroad station was empty, but he found food and water in its restaurant. He rested on a bench, until twilight, he took the way to London once again.
The stars came winking out overhead, and a new moon like a curved blade. On trudged Holmes, and on. In the deep darkness he crossed the bridge over Hackney Marsh and entered among the dark, deserted streets of London. He heard no sound other than his own tireless footsteps on the pavement until, distant but shrill and piercing, rose a burst of noise like a steam siren. Holmes stood still under a shop awnings to listen. Another howl rose, as though in reply. The invaders, he decided, signalling to each other. That meant that they could hear, though not keenly if they needed such strident voices for signals.
At any rate, there was no movement anywhere in those streets by those giant machines. Perhaps, like men, they preferred to hunt by daylight. But hunt what? If man was their prey, how would they use him? He pondered several possibilities as he resumed his journey.
He began to feel increasingly weary as he negotiated square after square. On his way through Hoxton he heard a clatter of metal, at a remote distance. No human contrivance could make such a noise as that. He wished he were close enough to observe without being observed.
As dawn came, he slowed his journey. The voices of the invaders were loud to the north of him. They must be on patrol again. He was shrewdly careful at crossing a street whenever he came to a corner, and he stopped again and again to look both ways before he ventured into the open. One strident clanging came near at hand, and he slipped inside a tobacconist’s to wait until it departed. From the counter he took two pouches of shag. It was fairly late on Thursday evening when once more he mounted the stairs at 221B Baker Street.
He counted the seventeen steps — it had become a habit with him over the years. Unlocking his door, he entered his quarters. It was dark inside, but he made no light as he explored. His sheaf of notes and the message to Watson were still undisturbed, there on the blade of the knife at the mantel. He tested the taps and found that a small stream of water still ran in the pipes. He drew a cold bath and washed himself quickly, feeling much the better for it. Then, at last, he kindled his spirit stove and set a kettle of water to boil. A supper of tea and sweet biscuits gave him a further sense of refreshment. After eating, he lay down in his old blue dressing gown and slept fitfully. Now and then he wakened to the sound of metallic stirrings, not unthinkably far away. But finally his weariness lulled him soundly to sleep, and he did not waken until early morning.
He went along the corridor to Martha’s rooms, let himself in with his pass key, and from her kitchen took potted ham, marmalade, a plate of stale scones, and a saucer of radishes. With these and some more strong tea he made his breakfast. He peered from behind his window curtains, but saw nothing outside to dismay him. The prolonged scream of an invader’s siren rose, but this time far away, somewhere well to northward, as he judged.
Suddenly he was startled by the sound of the bell at his front door. He hurried to open and saw young Stanley Hopkins, his chief friend and reliance at Scotland Yard. Hopkins’s usually neat clothing looked sadly rumpled, and his square jaw was stubbled with several days’ growth of dark beard.
“You’re alive, Mr Holmes,” Hopkins stammered. “Thank God for that! I’ve been to the Yard, but found nobody there — nobody much anywhere. Nobody but those damnable Martians, tramping around in their great machines, like constables on their beats.”
Holmes stepped back to let his friend in, studying him closely. “I can see that you have been riding horseback, and at a fast pace,” he commented after a moment.
“Yes, so I have,” said Hopkins, amazed. “That is quite true. But how can you know? I left the beast miles away, out on the eastern edge of town.”
“It is quite simple. I see traces of dried foam on your trouser knee and on the skirt of your coat. And I will add that, if you dismounted at the eastern limits, you came from considerably farther beyond in that direction. Perhaps as far as the sea.”
“Mr Holmes, you are right, as usual. Yes, I have been to the coast.”
“Sit down, Hopkins,” Holmes invited him. “Please have something to eat. There is plenty here.”
Hopkins sank gratefully into a chair, helped himself, and ate eagerly. Holmes busied himself making more tea. “And now,” he said at last, filling a cup for Hopkins and pouring a fresh one for himself, “if you have been east of town, you can fill in some of my deductions. Tell me how far you went, and what you saw.”
“I went east on Monday, with the main retreat of people from town.” Hopkins told him between mouthfuls. “The Martians came up from the west and south, and the impulse was to get away to the east. I got hold of a bicycle, but even then it was an ordeal—a great, wild scramble, like rats from a burning house,” He drew up his broad shoulders, almost shuddering. “I never want to go through such an experience again. I reached the coast by Tuesday afternoon, and there was a tremendous crowd already on the beach, at the mouth of the Blackwater, growing and growing with every hour. On Wednesday, all sorts of shipping gathered offshore to take away the refugees. And then—” He paused, trembling. “Then those Martians came rushing in.”
“I see,” said Holmes, quiet in his deep interest. “Were you able to observe much about them?”
“I had climbed a tall church steeple to watch. Three of them came into view, in their machines a hundred feet high. They went wading out to sea, to head off those refugee ships; but then a naval ironclad, one of those old torpedo-rams — the Thunder Child, I think it was — came steaming up to fight them. That was a glorious fight, Mr Holmes.”
“Undoubtedly, but how successful a fight?”
“The poor ship was blown up with all on board. The Martians set fire to it somehow. But first it smashed two of their machines, and that gained time so that the refugee craft had all gone too far out for the third one to follow. That third one shot black smoke at them, and then came a flying-machine and put down more, all along the beach where people had been left. You may find that hard to believe, what I say about a flying-machine.”
“Not I,” Holmes assured him. “I have seen it myself. Tell me about the black smoke, so far, I have heard only rumours.”
“For one thing, it is heavier by far than any smoke I have ever seen. It is so heavy that it pours down along the ground, almost like liquid. Fortunately, that steeple from which I watched was so high that it could not rise to me, or I would not be here. At last it settled. It made the ground all sooty. When I came down, I saw only dead in all directions about me. Hundreds of dead, I should think.”
Hopkins’s face looked drawn. Holmes poured him more strong tea.
“Then it was dusk,” Hopkins continued. “Two or three more Martians came to join the one that was left, and they tinkered with the two wrecked ones. I headed for London once again, taking advantage of any cover I could find, sometimes hiding and resting, all of Wednesday night. I scrounged for food and found a little — not much.”
“I had much the same experience, coming down from Norfolk.”
“On Thursday morning, between Tillingham and Chelmsford, I found a horse,” said Hopkins. “A spotted horse, all ready saddled and bridled. He was a good horse.” At last Hopkins smiled. “Nobody was with him. So I rode him back to town; rode him into
a lather, as you saw. By dawn today we were at Great Ilford, on the eastern town limit. Then I took off his bridle and saddle and left him grazing on a lawn. And I made the rest of the way here on foot.”
He set down his teacup with a sigh. “And now, Mr Holmes, tell me what we are to do.”
“We are to keep our heads, to begin with,” was Holmes’ prompt rejoinder. “For my own part, as I just said, I have been in the north, up at Donnithorpe in Norfolk.”
“A problem, no doubt?”
“A problem of a sort. I got back here yesterday, walking part of the way. What I have been able to see and surmise of the Martians is dismaying, I must confess. Yet you yourself have seen that they are not omnipotent, that it is possible to fight and destroy them. And I have been trying to establish some facts about their weapons — their offensive weapons, I mean.”
“And very offensive they are,” Hopkins said, and Holmes smiled because his friend could make a small joke.
“As for their defences,” he elaborated, “they may well prove to have some interesting chinks.”
“Surely you don’t mean to stay in London, Mr Holmes.”
“But that is precisely what I mean to do. Why not? They seem to have ceased their wholesale destruction here in town, and in any case it was not as terrible as what they wreaked upon Surrey. You and I can be circumspect, Hopkins. We can stay tactfully out of sight and make a profitable investigation of their motives and behavior.”
“Investigation?” The word made Hopkins sit up straight. “You speak as though you were studying a crime, Mr Holmes.”
“And so I am, Hopkins, the most infamous crime ever perpetrated upon Earth and against Earth. But just now, why not freshen yourself in the bathroom yonder? You will find soap, towels, and a razor, and I believe some water runs as yet in the taps. Then come down and have a rest on the sofa here.”
Holmes’ calm confidence had had a good effect upon the young inspector. He shaved and washed thoroughly, then came back to the sitting room to take off his boots and fall into a deep sleep on the sofa. Holmes sat alone at his desk, thinking and now and then jotting down a note. After a while, he dressed and ventured down the stairs.
There was no sound or motion in empty Baker Street. Holmes went across to Camden House that stood next to Dolamore’s wine and spirits establishment, directly opposite 221B. Camden House had remained untenanted since the arrest there of Colonel Sebastian Moran in 1895, but the door sagged open. Holmes entered and mounted four flights of dusty stairs, then climbed a ladder to a trapdoor in the roof. He crept cautiously into the open and peered over the parapet.
The smudgy vapour that so long had poured from London’s countless chimneys had vanished, and the air was as clear and bright as that of Donnithorpe. To the northward Holmes saw the green trees of Regent’s Park, strangely peaceful in that captured city. There was no sound in the streets between, those streets once so thronged and busy. He looked past the trees of the park toward Primrose Hill, rising two miles distant. Metal glinted in the morning sun there, and something moved, probably one of the invaders’ machines that Hopkins had likened to tramping constables on their beats. Holmes looked this way and that. There was nothing nearer at hand to hint of the enemy abroad. At last he went down the ladder again, and down the stairs and back across the street, meditating.
Ten
Seven cylinders had landed in the London area before he had come down from Donnithorpe, and undoubtedly an eighth had arrived at midnight of Thursday, very probably not any great distance from its fellows. That meant that two more were still on the way, making ten in all, with a total of fifty of the invaders and their machines and weapons. The heat-ray and the black smoke were as terrible as the destructions in the Book of Revelations; but to produce them must take method and materials, and these might be in limited supply on Earth, so far from the base on Mars. What if the invaders were to run out of ammunition? But in the meantime, it remained to define the exact purposes of the deadly assault, to rationalise and oppose those purposes.
Hopkins stirred at noon and then woke up, much refreshed. He was able to describe, more calmly and fully, the things he had seen at the sea coast.
“Those Martians could have wiped out everyone on the shore had they so chosen,” he said. “But there was no wholesale killing, except at the last when they put down their black smoke. Before that, I saw them scoop up some people into cages that they carried at their backs.”
“They captured people alive?” exclaimed Holmes. “If they did, it proves that they have a special interest in us. I deduced as much when I saw they had more or less spared London after taking it.” He frowned. “Disregarding several possibilities, I would suggest that they might consider men as edible.”
“As if we were animals!” cried Hudson, shocked.
“Well, we are neither vegetable nor mineral. But reflect, lower animals have outwitted, even outfought, men ere this. Baboons may not understand the hunter’s rifle, but sometimes they trick a hunter into an ambush and kill him. The same is true, as I have heard, of the Cape buffalo. And in the United States, the timber wolf has been almost exterminated, but the cunning coyote is more numerous in these days than ever before. It refuses to be stalked or trapped or poisoned. And our common rats, for all our efforts to wipe them out, still swarm in the basements and cellars of our cities. Some of them are so wise that they might be called animal geniuses.”
“Like yourself, Mr Holmes.”
“Like me, if you care to say so. Observing and deducing, in their animal fashion, comprehending abstracts and infinities, solving problems and escaping dangers.”
“Marvellous,” said Hopkins, almost raptly, “and please don’t say elementary.”
“But the elementary is the foundation upon which all structures, concrete or abstract, must be founded,” Holmes said with a smile. “Yes, our task is hard and dangerous, but by no means hopeless. Come now, we can have lunch and then go calling on a friend of mine — Professor-Challenger, an excellent rationality.”
They made themselves sandwiches and drank wine. Hopkins washed their dishes. Then after carefully studying the street from the windows, they went down stairs and moved along empty, silent streets westward, into Hyde Park and beyond into Kensington Gardens. Once Hopkins climbed a tall tree and descended to report that three machines were in sight, miles away above Primrose Hill. He and Holmes walked on, at the side of a brook that was choked with a great mass of murky-red weed. “What is that, Mr Holmes?” asked Hopkins. “I have never seen its like before.”
“Nor have I,” confessed Holmes. “To me it proves that more than one sort of life has crossed space to take a foothold here on Earth.”
He plucked a fleshy sprout and examined it with a magnifying glass.
“It has grown and spread quickly in these few days, but see this brown wilt upon it,” he said. “Very interesting, Hopkins, and I venture to say, encouraging.”
“Encouraging, Mr Holmes?”
“Quite manifestly it spreads with bewildering swiftness, but then it dies with equal rapidity. I give myself to doubt if it grows and perishes so fast on its home planet. Indeed, I surmise — no, I cease to surmise and begin to deduce again. Our terrestrial climate seems strangely unhealthy to confident, invading organisms such as this red weed.”
Emerging from the Gardens, they stole along Kensington Road below. “The invaders have been here,” pointed out Holmes. “The provision shop yonder has been broken into.”
They stopped to look. The exposed interior was violently disordered. Entering, Holmes looked here and there. “The shelves have been almost stripped,” he remarked. “Here, however, are still a few tins of meat and some biscuits. Put them into your pockets, Hopkins. And here, two bottles of ale. They carried off the rest of the stock.”
“Do you mean the Martians?” asked Hopkins, taking the tins from the shelf. “Might they not have been taken by hungry men?”
“No, the whole front was smashed in by a blow more
powerful than any man could achieve.”
“But why would the Martians take food? To eat and and drink, I suppose.”
“More probably they will supply their captives with these provisions. I wonder increasingly if they themselves do not eat and drink something vastly different.”
This time he did not elaborate upon his suggestion.
Reaching Challenger’s home, they mounted the broad steps. A front window had been shattered, but the door was locked, and repeated pushes on the bell brought no answer.
“I begin to fear that Challenger died with those others at Woking,” said Holmes. “Someone said that he suspected that the invaders might not be Martians at all, that Mars was but an advance base to which they came from a more distant world. That might be related in some way to their primitive means of crossing space to Earth.”
“Would you call those cylinders primitive, Mr Holmes?”
“Decidedly. I would compare their use to a human crossing of a ford or river in rowboats or on makeshift rafts.”
He fished a notebook and pencil from his pocket, sat down on the top step, and began to write swiftly. He filled one page, another, and a third. Then he tore them out, folded them, and gave them to Hopkins.
“Off you go,” he said. “Find your way to Birmingham. Report to Sir Percy Phelps of the Foreign Office.”
“Birmingham’s a walk of a hundred miles and more,” protested Hopkins.
“Approximately, yes. But once you’re out of London, you will find people and transportation. As a police official you can requisition a horse and carriage, and if you travel cautiously you probably will avoid any embarrassing attention by the Martians. No, Hopkins, I must insist that you go. What I have given you for Sir Percy is a written summary of our views and findings to date, matters of the utmost value to the defence effort which soon will be mounted.”
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