“You’re calm, Professor,” said Tovey, hovering near. “The one calm man I’ve seen since all this began. Like as if you, at least knowed what you’re doing.”
“I have had the opportunity of spying upon these invaders”, said Challenger.
“Blimey now, have you? However did you manage that?”
“I doubt if I could explain in terms simple enough for your comprehension. Suffice it to say, I have watched them at fairly close hand and am building a realization of their actions and intentions.”
“Reconnaissance, that’s the word!” cried Tovey. “So ‘elp me God, Professor, it’s what we need. If we could read them out, then we might deal with them, right?”
“Over-simply expressed, but right.”
They went back among the trees at the house. Challenger sat on a root beside the lane toward the sea. He watched for hours as the various craft, large and small, loaded themselves to the railings with passengers. Fortunes were being made aboard those vessels, he reflected; but what would money mean if all human civilisation was to fall? The sun sank toward the west. It was nearly five o’clock, his watch told him.
Then, far off to southward, he heard guns. Up above the torpedo ram rose a string of bright signal flags. The ships inshore began to stir, to move as though making way outward. Challenger shifted as he sat and looked in the direction of the gunfire.
There it was, emerging into view and tramping three-legged across the mud flats, a towering fighting-machine.
Even so far away, it seemed to approach with terrifying assurance. As he watched, another appeared from the west nearer at hand, and then a third, not more than a quarter of a mile away. Challenger set his glasses upon this closest machine. It walked smoothly and rapidly upon those three wonderfully jointed legs. They upheld its ovid carriage of metal, surmounted by a triangular superstructure that turned this way and that, like a great head in a cowl. Behind the carriage was slung an openwork cage of bright metal like aluminum. Here and there stirred long, supple tentacles, and close to the cowl jutted a sort of articulated arm like a crane, bearing some sort of a case. That, Challenger told himself, must house the heat-ray.
All three of the monsters moved in open order toward the shore. The one nearest Challenger stooped a trifle. Two of its tentacles caught up little fleeing men and flipped them into the cage at its back. Then all three machines waded confidently into the sea toward the ships.
They did not hesitate at entering the water, Challenger meditated. Surely there were no such waters as this on Mars. They knew oceans from another world. He nodded to himself, a trifle smugly.
From one machine rose a penetrating, prolonged shriek, like a steam siren. Another machine answered it. The three of them were like gigantic, grotesque children on a holiday, shouting back and forth as they sought treasures at the seaside. Now they closed the distances between them. Manifestly they meant to cut off the flight of the vessels.
“Not a chance for them poor beasts,” half-moaned Tovey behind Challenger. “I’ve told you, sir, they mean to kill us all.”
“And I have told you that they do not mean to kill us all,” reminded Challenger, the glasses to his eyes. “You will do well to take note of the things I say, Tovey.”
The machines were all wading swiftly out, moving faster, even in the water, than the retreating swarm of craft could pull away. Challenger shifted his glasses and saw something else.
It was the Thunder Child, full steam up and smoke pouring from its funnels as it fairly flew through the water toward the invaders. And all three machines paused, their cowled heads turning as though they stared at this onrushing curiosity. Motionless they stood, hip-deep in the water, so to speak, and stared.
“Upon my word, they’re caught off guard,” muttered Challenger.
“But what can that ship do?” Tovey gabbled.
If the invaders were deadly, so was the Thunder Child. Straight for the trio it drove. They separated and retreated, actually retreated toward the shore. Now they were like seaside venturers when some unknown monster from the deep comes swimming close. One of them lifted a tubelike object in its tentacles and seemed to aim.
Out from the tube flew a small bright projectile, which struck the approaching ram on the side and glanced off. As it struck the water it burst into a cloud of jet-black vapour, which abruptly shrouded the surface. But the Thunder Child had driven clear before the cloud could involve it.
“That there’s their black smoke, sir,” Tovey was saying.
One of the machines shifted its arm with the heat-ray chamber. A lean, pale beam of light flashed from it. Steam rose from the water against the ship’s side. Above the steam rose a sudden, swift tongue of flame.
“She’s done for now,” groaned Tovey.
“Not yet, Tovey, not yet!” cried Challenger.
For the Thunder Child had fired her guns, even as she won free from the steam and the black smoke. Down went the machine that had used the heat-ray, a gigantic splashing sprawl into the ocean, with foam flying high and then more clouds of steam. More guns went off, a whole salvo of them. The Thunder Child was ablaze, flames spouting from ventilators and funnels, but she put about and charged at a second fighting-machine as it backed away toward shore.
She was within a hundred yards when the invader’s heat-ray jabbed its pale beam into her. The explosion shook the sea, and the Thunder Child i upper works rose into the air in jagged, flying fragments. She was finished, but not alone. The machine that had destroyed her reeled in the water, and a moment later the still hurtling wreck smashed into it. The machine caved in and went down in the water. More steam, great clouds of it, hid everything. Only the third invader could be dimly seen, actually striving back toward land.
“Oh, strike me blind, what a fight that was,” gasped Tovey.
“A brilliant action, a valiant one,” said Challenger. “She was blown up, brave ship, but she took two of them with her. And you told me that the artillery got one in Surrey—”
“Just the one, sir, that’s all.”
“But now, two more!” Challenger caught Tovey’s arm so powerfully that the hussar flinched. “My good man, don’t you see that they aren’t invulnerable? They destroy but, upon my word, they’ve found that they too, can be destroyed. And see, the Thunder Child sacrificed herself to save that whole fleet of rescue craft.”
For all the boats, large and small, were standing well out to sea. Down on the shore, knots and swirls of people seemed to caper back and forth. The third invader stepped over their heads and retreated swiftly inland.
“He, at least, has had enough,” said Challenger grimly. “He will have an embarrassing tale to tell his fellows.”
“And he won’t half cop it from his commander,” added Tovey.
“An interesting, and edifying, experience. I could wish that my friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes, had been here to witness it.”
“Coo, Professor, do you know Sherlock Holmes?” asked Tovey, in tones of awe that irritated Challenger.
“You sound as though you have heard of him.”
“Who ain’t heard of him, or anyway read of him?”
“Had you read more advanced publications than the popular magazines, you might know the names of those with greater claim to celebration. But let us think of supper, and perhaps find supplies for breakfast.”
Over the haphazard meal, Challenger spoke with authority.
“You may like it here, Tovey, and for all of me you may stay, perhaps thrive. But I am going back to London.”
“London, sir, on foot? But it’s fifty miles and more.”
“You remind me that you are a cavalryman. It happens that my chief recreation has been in taking long walks and climbing mountains. I see you have found a box of captain’s biscuits.” Challenger took a huge handful. “These will help me on my way.”
Out through the open window he climbed as evening fell. A shadow flickered overhead. Looking up, he saw a soaring disk, dark against the greying sky. As he
looked, it dipped down in a sweeping glide above the beach where people still stood in huddles. It dropped something. Up sprang an inky cloud of vapour, and another. They spread, cloaking the beach.
“The black smoke.” Tovey was saying again.
Fifteen
Challenger stood and watched. The vapour spread, hiding the roofs of the cottages but not rising to the church steeple. He lifted the opera glasses. The figure was still up there, so apparently at least one man would escape. He walked back to the yard, Tovey at his heels.
“Professor,” said Tovey, “asking your pardon, but could I take your hand?”
Grandly Challenger’s massive paw obliged. “Be of good cheer,” he bade Tovey. “Ponder on what I have said about this situation, and see if you cannot profit by my words. And now, I am going.”
He headed around the house, then purposefully to the high ground at the west. It would be above that black smoke, he felt sure, and evening was coming, with a scrap of moon already risen. He could make good progress, with as much safety as anybody could hope for with invaders abroad.
The way beyond the height curved to the northwest, toward the main road on which the pell-mell retreat of thousands had gone. As Challenger walked toward that thoroughfare, he saw nobody upon it. The myriads of fugitives had gone to the shore, some of them had been left, and there at the last the black smoke must have smothered them, or most of them. He stayed close to roadside trees and looked again and again into the dusky sky, but saw nothing of that flying disk that had brought its dark death.
Once on the main road, he took up the steady, knowledgeable gait that eats up distances. Rambling walks had been his pleasure ever since his boyhood in Scotland, and he knew how to pace himself for a long journey. On he trudged toward the sinking sun, and on. When he judged that twenty minutes had passed, he stopped and sat on a fence to rest. He ate a broad, hard biscuit, and washed out his mouth at the spout of a pump. Then he went on.
As he travelled the road he saw wreckage upon it. A dog cart stood on the far side, a little bay horse lying motionless between the shafts. Someone had driven it to death. A laden wheelbarrow stood abandoned, a velocipede with a broken wheel slumped in the ditch. Here and there lay scattered garments, hats, parcels, abandoned in flight. Challenger watched the last of the sunset fade. A spatter of stars appeared in the night, and the quarter moon rose behind him. He walked on, with intervals of rest. The miles fell away behind him. He went through Chelmsford, passing dark, silent homes. It was past midnight when he stopped and ate the last of his biscuits. He judged that he had accomplished fifteen miles.
Again he walked. He felt sweat trickling upon his great body, but the hard-muscled pillars of his legs did not tire. At three o’clock or so, he began to forage in dark houses. Most of them had been stripped of all food by their departed owners, or perhaps by fugitives from London. At last, in a homely little cottage, he found a dozen potatoes in a bin, with a pump at the sink. Striking a match, he built a small fire in a grate, then pumped water into a kettle and hung the potatoes on a crane to boil. After half an hour, he fished out three of the largest, mashed them on a plate beside a window where faint moonlight came in, put on salt and pepper and olive oil from a cruet. He ate them ravenously. Finally he slumped down in a creaky armchair and slept.
The sun was well up when he woke. He ate a cold potato and filled his pockets with others. Cautiously he peered outdoors, scanning the horizons for stalking machines, the heavens for that flying disk. Nothing moved except a figure far to the westward on the road. No, two figures, a man leading a spotted horse.
Was it Dapple? Challenger hastened his steps. But the man was mounting the horse. He rode off at an amble, around a bend of the road and put of sight. Challenger scowled as he set off for London again.
Town after little town he passed. They were silent as though Judgement Day had come and gone. Making his way along a stretch of the road with an open field to the left, he heard a cry. Looking that way, he saw someone rushing clumsily toward him. It was a plump, bald man with rumpled clothes who came near and wheezed inarticulately.
“If you have lived this long, you should know better than to show yourself in the open,” Challenger scolded him.
“I was wondering if anybody else was left alive in England,” the man panted out.
“Your eyes should convince you that somebody else is very much alive,” said Challenger, tapping his huge chest.
“Where are you bound?”
“To London,” said Challenger.
“Never say that, sir! London’s full of the Martians. I ran from there, I saw them.”
“Hardly full of them, though,” Challenger corrected him. “Ten of their cylinders were launched, each with five or six at most. That is no tremendous number. They will need all their manifest efficiency to patrol London.”
The plump man wiped his nose and complained that he was hungry. Challenger gave him two potatoes and left him spluttering thanks as he munched.
By noon, Challenger estimated that he had finished fully half of his journey. He found himself among gatherings of suburban homes, empty and silent. Again he foraged for food, and in one house discovered the end of a flitch of bacon and some slices of stale bread. This time he decided against a fire to send up betraying smoke. With the great knife he had taken from the tough in Chelmsford he cut slices of bacon which he put on bread and ate. Another house yielded a bottle of claret — not of particularly good quality, decided Challenger as he walked along drinking from it.
He began to take longer rests. At one stopping place, on a bench before a silent shop, he took off his heavy boots and turned his socks inside out to ease his now tingling feet. That gave relief as he resumed his journey.
Late in the night he knew he was close to London. It gave him new reserves of determined strength. West Kensington — he would go there, would find the crystal in his study and consult it. Into the town he tramped, along deserted streets. The hush was awesome until he heard, far away in the darkness, the bellowing siren of an invader on patrol. At last he dragged himself into a shop, a clothier’s shop as well as he could tell in the dark, stretched out upon the counter, and slept again with the soundness of exhaustion.
He roused, with the sun well up once more. His muscles ached, but not too painfully. In a rear room of the establishment he found a tap that still ran a trickle of water, in which he washed his hands and face and under his bearded chin. His last cold potato made his breakfast. Out he ventured in the bright morning.
Again, no hint of enemy machines peering above the buildings. He judged that he was not far from Bethnal Green Road, perhaps seven miles or so from his own home in Kensington, but he must move with care. He crossed the Cambridge Road into Whitechapel. Off to the northwest, like a grotesque toy in the distance, showed a stalking machine monster. He watched from a basement door until it moved on east and out of sight. His feet were sore and his legs tired, but he trudged on in the direction of Hyde Park and, beyond that, Kensington.
The streets toward the Thames were sprinkled and sheeted with dusty black grains. That would be the black smoke, precipitated and harmless, judged Challenger. He avoided touching the stuff, though birds sang cheerfully there and two dogs romped in a game of their own. He walked with cautiously steady steps, now and then hearing distant sirenlike whoops. He made his way through Grosvenor Square. To the north was Baker Street. He would go looking for Holmes there, but not just now. In among the trees of Hyde Park he moved, and furtively on the bridge across the Serpentine. A strange rank growth of red weed showed itself there, and broken tufts of it floated. Challenger had never seen such a growth before. It, too, was an aspect of the invasion. Had it been planted by design or by accident? Beyond Hyde Park he walked through Kensington Gardens.
Miles to the southwest rose sooty clouds that looked like fire. Undoubtedly the blaze had been set by the heat-rays during the battles in Surrey. Entering his own street, he saw with weary exultation the massive portic
o of his Enmore Park home. Up the steps he climbed, and set his big key in the lock.
Just then, a shadow fell across him. A towering fighting-machine came stalking along the street toward the house.
Instantly Challenger was inside, locking the door behind him. He heard a metallic racket at the front of the house. He looked quickly through the open door to the front parlour. The window glass broke with a crash, and a snaky tentacle came creeping in.
Challenger tiptoed back through the hall, into the kitchen beyond, and out at a back door into the rose garden. But he did not flee away. Instead he crept along the wall toward the street and gingerly poked his bearded face around the corner of the house.
The metal machine crouched down there. He took a fleeting moment to admire the intricate mechanism of the joints of its legs, set at half a dozen places along the metal rods. It had lowered its oval body almost to ground level, and the cowled housing in which the operator lay pushed close to the window. Its tentacles groped within. At any moment, it might turn the heat-ray upon his house.
Challenger wheezed as he bent down and wrenched a brick from the border of the side path. Then he straightened, drew his hand back and, with all the strength of his brawny arm, hurled the brick. It clanged loudly against the metal shield just below the cowl and glanced away.
At once that cowl swung toward him, as though to stare. He whipped around and, for all his weariness, ran like a huge hare along the way he had come. He dodged around the house, scrambled through the garden and into the door to the kitchen. A moment later the gigantic mechanism came rushing past between his house and the next, then away between two a more houses that faced on the street beyond. He looked up and saw its cowl, turning this way and that.
It thought that he had run for his life, perhaps toward the Gardens. He leaned against the door jamb, breathing hard.
War of the Worlds Page 13