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 graying 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 vapor, and another. They spread, cloaking the beach. "The Black Smoke." Tovey was saying again.
17
Challenger stood and watched. The vapor 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 traveled 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 out of sight. Challenger scowled as he set off for London again.
Town after little town he passed. They were silent as though Judgment 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 portico 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 parlor. 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 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.
His first consideration was that, as usual, he had done well. But then it occurred to him that human affairs, even when directed by a supremely brilliant intelligence, sometimes needed luck to prosper them.
18
Again he looked out at the door. The thing was prowling more distantly, looming high above the housetops on streets to the north. Challenger closed the door stealthily, walked up the hall to his study, and sat down. Weariness flowed over him like dark water, and he stayed there, motionless, for long minutes before he went again to peer from a back window. His pursuer was no longer in sight. He grinned triumphantly through the forest of his beard and again sought the kitchen to explore for food.
There was plenty on the shelves, and he ate a great deal of it. There was still a slow trickle of water in the taps here, as in the store he had visited earlier. He drank a glassful and set a small kettle to catch more, while he returned to his study. There, just where he had left it on his table, was the lead tea canister with the crystal egg.
Quickly he draped himself with the black cloth and looked into the blue glow. A few shifts of the crystal suddenly gave him a clear view.
He saw the interior of a great excavation, larger than that pit made by the cylinder he remembered at Woking. It was almost full of machinery, fighting-machines and handling-machines, as well as other elaborate assemblages he could not identify. And on the gravelly floor of the crater were grouped invaders, grossly swollen, with something in the midst of them that struggled and fought unavailingly.
He slammed the lid of the canister shut and sat back from it. Not without difficulty, he put from his imagination the picture of himself in just that nightmare situation.
He drew out his watch. It was midafternoon. He went and set another kettle to catch the dribble of water, while with the first kettleful he managed to take a sponge bath, clammy cold but refreshing. Then he dressed in clean clothes, pulled on his heavy boots, and again sat in his study. His tired body relaxed gratefully, but his mind was furiously active, and, as so often in the past, he found reason for self-congratulation.
Not only had he escaped the merciless invaders, here and at the shore, but he had actually hoodwinked one of them into running off and leaving him alone. They were gigantically brilliant, but they were not omniscient. Their behavior in the fight with the Thunder Child had seemed to indicate confusion. He, Challenger, felt that he might well be assessing them as well as they assessed humanity.
Their machines were bewildering, but he took refuge in the memory of Robinson Crusoe's sober conclusion: ... as reason is the substance and original of the mathematics, so by stating and squaring everything by reason, and by making the most rational judgment of things, every man may be, in time, master of every mechanic art. That could be as true in overrun England as on that island where Robinson Crusoe had survived and prevailed. Intelligence could solve the mysteries of invader mechanisms, could even, God willing, capture them, use them. As he thought of these things, he fell asleep.
He wakened after night had fallen and decided to venture out. No hint of the enemy could be discovered. Again he found his way through Kensington Gardens and Regent's Park to Baker Street. His own footfalls seemed to ring in the stillness. He found Holmes's stairs and went up to the door above, but it was locked and no sound could be detected in the dark. Again he returned, as cautiously as ever, to Enmore Park, stopping here and there to forage in stores and public houses. At home he set a light under a chafing dish and heated some canned peas and some turtle soup. It was his first satisfying hot meal since he and his wife had driven away on Monday morning. That night he slept soundly in his own room.
Next morning he climbed to an attic window and surveyed London to the northward. In the distance, somewhat east of north, rose green fumes. That might well be the main station of the enemy, the great cavity he had seen in the crystal the day before.
He thought of breakfast. There were eggs in the kitchen, but he sagely decided against those after they had lain in the basket a week, and opened a can of smelts. Finally he went to his study and opened the canister with the crystal. Spreading his black cloth, he concentrated upon it.
There they were, revealed to his gaze, the invaders in their pit. He could make out more than a dozen, slumped at various tasks. Handling-machines moved here and there. A sort of furnace gave off gray-green smoke, and one machine shoveled in earth, then pulled out a shiny bar of pale metal that looked like aluminum. Thus the invaders set up industries, consolidated their gains.
In the midst of his observations, a pair of round, brilliant eyes came close as though to stare from the crystal into his face. Then they were gone and the viewpoint of the crystal seemed to change abruptly and utterly. Now Challenger seemed to be looking down from a height. He instantly closed the lid of the canister. The invaders had taken their own crystal, that which was attuned to his, into the cockpit of a machine.
It was not many minutes before he heard the clank and whirr of a mechanism from the street in front of the house. Taking the canister, he stepped into the hall. As before, there was the smash of breaking glass, then the sound of furniture being overturned. Inquiring tentacles had come into the parlor.
But Challenger had made up his mind what to do. He was at the kitchen door and out of it within brief seconds. Moving furtively under the garden shrubbery, he gained the alley beyond. There he moved along to eastward, keeping close to the shade and the fences lest the invader spy him from above the roofs. He did not venture out into the street, but plunged into a yard on the far side of the alley and sought c
over in the midst of some prickly ornamental bushes. For many minutes he lay there, then ventured on across more yards and at last into Kensington Gardens.
Crouching under a tree, he saw his pursuer still hulking against the sky, back at the place from which Challenger had fled. No tricking it away from Enmore Park this time, he told himself. He struck off through the trees and thickets, reached Hyde Park and then Baker Street. Again he went upstairs to Holmes's door, and again found it locked, with silence beyond it. He frowned, asking himself if Holmes had managed to escape from London, and if he had, whether he would be back. Walking across Regent Street, he looked north and again saw the green haze that must mark the enemy headquarters.
The afternoon he spent wandering here and there, looking for food. Many stores had been broken open and their contents plundered. In a confectionery he found a jar of smoked turkey slices and some currant buns for his supper. Then he lay back in an armchair behind a desk. It was Saturday night. The Martians had subdued London in twelve days; how far beyond had their rule been extended? He speculated on chances of heading north, of reaching some place where mankind still planned defense, giving that plan the benefit of his observations. Sleep rode down upon him.
He wakened to hear excited voices outside, a dozen at once. Hurriedly he rose and walked out. It was dark. A knot of men jabbered and laughed there.
"What is happening?" he thundered, so loudly that all swung around to look at him.
"Look yonder, mate," cried one, pointing westward. Light came from somewhere in that direction, white light and not the green radiance that hung around the devices of the invaders.
"Somebody's got the lights goin' again," said another, apparently far gone in drink. "Come on, chums, let's have a look."
Regent Street was a broad blaze of light. It gave Challenger a chance to see his watch—it was just past four o'clock. Soon the midsummer sun would be rising. To the right he made out Oxford Circus, with the Langham Hotel standing tall, and in the other direction was Piccadilly. People flowed here and there across the pavement, raucously calling and laughing. Through the din came a shrill spatter of music, like the pipes at a Punch and Judy show. Some of the celebrants danced clumsily to its measure. Everywhere, men and women drank out of bottles.
Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds Page 13