"For lack of a better term, we might call the process television," offered Challenger. "Do not feel ashamed, Dr. Watson, if you find it difficult to understand all this. The common run of humanity could no more comprehend the properties of this crystal and what activates them than could monkeys rationalize the way to use a pair of lost binoculars they happened to pick up. But suppose I give you a chance to examine it for yourself."
He opened the tea casket and took out something wrapped in black velvet cloth. Loosening the folds, he revealed a clear, burnished crystal, the shape of an egg and almost as large as his massive fist. I saw a play of light and movement, deep inside the thing. For a moment I thought of those ornamental glass globes in which flakes are suspended in liquid, to simulate a snowstorm.
"You have had this at your home since the start of the invasion," Holmes reminded him. "Why, would you say, did they not come for it at their very first advance into London from Surrey?"
"Why, for that matter, should they not come and seek for it now?" I asked nervously. "Would these Martians not have other crystals, with the same qualities of seeing far distances?"
"Perhaps none like this one, which is able to transmit images far across space to Mars itself," said Challenger. "You and I knew that it showed us Mars, Holmes, for when I observed the landscape there earlier, there were two moons in the night sky. No other planet of the solar system would afford such a spectacle."
"There are more moons than one circling Jupiter," I pointed out. "And more than one moves around Saturn."
"But both Jupiter and Saturn have cloudy atmospheres, as Mars does not," returned Challenger. "In any case, my friends, I suggest that they need this particular crystal with which to set up communication with their home base on Mars."
"But they did not at once come seeking it on their arrival more than a week ago," Holmes pursued. "Gentlemen, this indicates to me a grave necessity with them, even a critical one."
Again I looked into the crystal. Its pulsing light came and went.
"Where are those images you speak of?" I asked.
"We need darkness to see them properly," said Challenger. "A black cloth of some sort is indicated, Holmes."
Holmes stepped across to the sofa and caught up a a dark drapery from it. We three crouched together around the table, drawing the fabric over our heads and shoulders. In the gloom, the light from the crystal waxed and glowed strongly. Movement was discernible in it. Then the mist thinned, and there came a clear image. I saw a sort of crumpled face, with brilliant dark eyes, surrounded by what seemed intricate machinery.
"A Martian?" I whispered.
"Yes, and looking into a crystal of his own that matches its impulses with this one," said Holmes, his own hawk face bending and peering intently.
"Repeatedly I have had such a close view of an invader," said Challenger from where he sat a Holmes's other side. "This one, I should say, is in the cockpit of a machine. He may be traveling in it, on his way to find this crystal of ours."
"I marvel that they did not find it when they came to your house," I said.
"They made a search, but they seemed baffled when I put it into the casket," said Challenger, his beard close to the image. "It happens that the casket is of lead, and the lead can interfere with electrical impulses."
"I daresay we shall soon know about this fellow's errand," commented Holmes. "When he is closer at hand, I mean."
Hurriedly I bobbed out from under the cloth and sprang to my feet. "What!" I exclaimed. "Is a Martian coming here now?"
"Doubtless the one we have seen is now being guided by the vibrations of our own crystal," said Challenger in the calmest of voices, also casting the drapery aside and leaning back. "Of course, he may be miles away at present."
"But they can move at a mile a minute!" I groaned desperately.
Holmes was striding to the front window and peering up the street. "I take comfort, Challenger," he said, "when you tell me that they did no great damage to your house when they sought the crystal there. Perhaps they will not utterly wreck these premises, as they have wrecked provision shops, for instance."
Cold fear had ridden down upon me. I think I must have swayed on my feet, like a bush blown in a gale.
"How can you both be so calm?" I cried out. "You seem to think that a Martian is even now hurrying to come here to Baker Street."
"Exactly," replied Challenger, running big fingers through his shock of dark hair. "Like a client, seeking help from Holmes."
"And here, Watson, if I mistake not, comes our client now," reported Holmes from where he stood at the window.
21
I ran shakily to his side and looked along Baker Street toward Foreman Square.
A fighting-machine stood on the pavement there, rising high above the buildings to either side. Its three great, jointed legs quivered as though with palsy, while green spurts of vapor issued from them and from the great oval body that housed the machinery. Steel tentacles writhed this way and that. The triangular housing of its pilot swung slowly this way and that, like a head peering nearsightedly. I had an impression of sickness, of unsure, unhappy motion.
Challenger, too, had joined us to look. "It must have been fairly close at hand when I brought the crystal out of the case," he commented.
The monster took a slow step forward, then another. It approached creakily on the broad flat pedestals of its feet, nothing like the headlong, confident machines I had watched a week before. I wondered if it was searching its way to us, as a hunter follows the trace of game.
"This is precisely what we have hoped for, Challenger," said Holmes. I stared at him uncomprehendingly.
Challenger stamped back across the room. He put the crystal back inside its leaden case and then carefully arranged the case, its lid open, on the seat of a chair against the rear wall.
"Now," he pronounced in a satisfied tone, "the impulse will operate, but any view must be of your ceiling only." Back he came to us. "Your client, Holmes, very probably will leave his machine to enter at the window, lest he damage the house and perhaps lose the crystal. And we are here to await him."
Holmes stepped to the fireplace. From the corner of the mantel he took a small bottle. He opened a neat morocco case and lifted from it a hypodermic syringe. I was so aghast that I actually forgot the Martian for a moment.
"Holmes!" I protested wretchedly. "Surely you will not use a drug now, after more than a dozen years of total abstinence—"
"I would not use it now except that it is vitally needed," he said, inserting the syringe and drawing back the plunger to fill it.
Metal rang and scraped loudly, just outside. I looked out of the window again. The machine had come opposite the houses only a few doors away, approaching slowly and painfully. The green vapor dimmed the air. I fell back lest it should see me.
"Suppose you stand in the corner, Watson," said Holmes, as quietly as I had ever heard him speak. "But be ready."
Utterly uncomprehending, I moved obediently to the corner of the room next the window. Challenger had returned from setting down the crystal. Holmes gestured to him, and the two of them pressed their bodies to the wall on either side of the window.
The metal clanked fearsomely outside. A shadow fell across the window, shutting away the bright June sunlight. I heard a mechanical drone, like the hum of an unthinkably giant bee. Holmes stood taut and lean as a wire cable. Challenger's mighty frame hunched powerfully. I watched helplessly from where I stood.
There was movement upon the window sill. A cluster of tentacles came gropingly into view there, like dark, searching snakes. These were not metal tentacles. As I stared, holding my breath, a dull-colored bulk followed them. I could see the strange face that had appeared in the crystal. Its brilliant eyes, with fluttering lids, were fixed on the chair where the casket lay open across the room. Beneath the eyes gaped a triangular mouth, stirring loosely and dripping saliva.
The tentacles extended themselves to the floor, brace
d there, and heaved laboriously. In came the great bladdery shape, as big as a bear. Its shiny, leathery hide twitched and pulsed, as though with painful breathing. Another effort, and the whole form slid across the sill and thumped heavily down on the floor just inside.
Instantly Challenger leaped, swift as a pouncing cat for all his great size. The tentacles, two bunches of them, writhed up to grapple him. They wound around his arms, and one flung itself to clasp his neck. He tore at them with both hands. For all his tremendous strength, he seemed clamped, strangled. He was like a hairy Hercules, struggling with the Hydra.
"Now, Holmes," he gurgled, his face crimson with effort.
Holmes stooped down quickly and extended his arm. With a perfectly steady hand, he drove the needle of the syringe into the heaving bulb of a body, just behind the face.
The creature's mouth gaped wider and emitted a wild, bubbling cry. Holmes stood up straight again, setting the syringe in the bottle and again drawing it full. He bent down to thrust in the needle and inject a second dose.
Our visitor seemed to flutter all over, and then, abruptly, it subsided into slack submission. Its tentacles drooped around Challenger, its brilliant eyes glazed. Only the heave and fall of its respiration showed that it lived.
Struggling mightily, Challenger won free of the tentacles and gazed at the monster. I, too, left my corner to look. My nostrils were assailed by a musty, sickening odor of decay.
"Gentlemen, this Martian is dying," I stammered out. "Look, it is far gone in some fatal disease."
"Dying, yes," said Challenger, wiping his broad palms on his tweed jacket. "Of disease, yes. But a Martian—"
He shook his head at me, "No, my dear Watson, no."
22
I was goggling foolishly again. Holmes emitted his quiet chuckle. He turned his aquiline face toward Challenger and nodded in agreement.
"I remember hearing Ogilvy say that you had said something of that sort at Woking," he said.
"But, Professor, we know this creature comes from Mars," I put in. "You yourself told us that what you saw in the crystal proved that. And those fiery blasts reported by astronomers, ten of them, sending the cylinders to us across space."
"Yes, I remarked something of the sort," he agreed cheerfully.
"And at the oppositions of 1894 and 1896," I elaborated. "The telescope showed evidence then of what seemed gigantic artificial constructions on Mars. This creature manifestly comes from there."
"I am not unacquainted with those phenomena you mention," said Challenger, locking his brows as he studied the drugged mass that now breathed only spasmodically. "And I agree wholeheartedly that this specimen and his fellows came here from Mars. But it does not necessarily follow that they are natives of Mars."
"No, Challenger, it does not," agreed Holmes. "Good logic could demonstrate what you say."
"And I shall endeavor to supply the logic." Challenger squared his shoulders and flung back his head in his lecturer's manner. "Bear in mind," he said, "that no evidence of possible construction upon Mars was evident earlier than that 1894 opposition mentioned by Dr. Watson."
Holmes returned the bottle to the mantelpiece and the syringe to its case.
"It may be that I have eased the pain the poor creature felt," he said. "Come now, Watson, you are our medical adviser. Of what does it suffer, in your opinion?"
"To judge from the odor, decomposition involves its tissues," I replied. "It rots, even while it still clings to life."
"Precisely so," said Challenger, with a grand air of official endorsement. "Which indicates to me that there are no bacteria of decay on whatever world these invaders have come from to visit us," He gestured with both arms. "Wise as they are, lords of planet after planet, as they seem to consider themselves, they did not foresee this deadly, invisible ally of man. We survive on earth because our systems have developed resistance to bacteria through all the ages. But they thrust themselves among us, breathing and feeding and drinking, and in so doing they took death unto themselves along with what else they seized of earth's things."
It was true, and I bowed my head in acknowledgment; in thanksgiving, as well.
"This makes clear the reason that they are sluggish in patrolling our streets," contributed Holmes. "They do not range here and there so freely. I deduce that they are gathered in dismay, at their principal camp on Primrose Hill. This one," and he gestured at the slack form of our visitor, "came stumbling hither in an effort to get hold of the crystal. Undoubtedly they want it to signal back across space, to warn their fellows to send no more cylinders to certain disaster."
"And as to those already here—" I began.
"To sum up briefly, the invasion is doomed," said Holmes, picking up his pipe and filling it. "We need speculate no further on how to meet and resist it."
"I am still in the dark on one matter," I confessed. "Professor Challenger reasons that this is no Martian, though he came here from Mars."
"My reasoning, like that of all brilliant intellectual conclusions, is simplicity itself," Challenger rolled out, stroking his beard. "Mars, with its lesser gravity and comparative nearness to earth was a most logical base from which to launch the cylinders at us. But this creature's lungs show that Mars was not his native planet."
I looked at the labored heaving of the bladder-body. "Its lungs move bulkily."
"But for that great mass of flesh—and I would estimate it at four hundred pounds, earth weight—they are not particularly big," said Challenger. "They would be fatally inadequate in the Martian atmosphere. Are you not acquainted with Stoney's spectroscopic observations of Mars?"
I was ashamed to tell him that I did not know who Stoney was, and so I kept my silence.
"The atmosphere is extremely rare, but with a bare trace of oxygen to support life," Challenger said. "No, these invaders came from another world to build their base on Mars, and on Mars they existed temporarily and artificially. They would need respirators of some sort while they prepared there to accomplish their assault upon earth."
"Where might they have originated, Challenger?" inquired Holmes. "From a planet more distant than Mars from the sun?"
"From farther across space than that, as I theorize. From a planet in another system in our galaxy. Who can say, who could count, how many habitable worlds the universe holds?"
Holmes gazed at the dying invader with solemn, almost compassionate, attention.
"This doubt of the Martian origin is not offhand with you, Challenger. As I said, poor Ogilvy mentioned your theory to me on the evening of the sixth, only a few minutes before he was killed by the heat-ray. I would judge that the thought had occurred to you even before the arrival of the first cylinder, but that you declined to divulge it to me."
"So I did, Holmes. I forebore, for a reason you yourself should discern—simply because I wasn't sure. You withheld your own suspicion that they viewed us as mere lower animals, farther down the ladder of evolution than themselves."
"All these matters we discuss help me to clarification of one of my own questions," said Holmes, puffing on his pipe. "The year 1894, as Watson has reminded us, was the time when evidences of artificial construction upon Mars were first observed from earth. Among other importances of that time and event, is probably the sending of the crystal egg at that time, to observe us."
I had been watching the invader. It stirred and breathed no more. Again I stooped close to look at it.
"This invader is quite dead," I said.
"Then suppose we get it down to the cellar below here," said Holmes. "There is a great tub in the floor there, into which it will fit. Afterward, we can venture out-—-and in some degree of comparative safety, as I believe—to fetch rum and brandy and other spirits from public houses, to fill the tub and preserve this specimen for scientific study."
All three of us bent down to hoist the heavy, evil-smelling carcass.
V
VENUS, MARS, AND BAKER STREET
by
John H. Watson, M.D.
23
Mr. H. G. Wells apparently chooses to ignore my published comments on his misleading brochure, The War of the Worlds. A few scientists have derided the brilliant perceptions of Sherlock Holmes and Professor George E. Challenger that the invaders who came so balefully close to destroying our civilization, and the human race with it, were not native to Mars. In most quarters, that supreme scientific rationalization seems to be very little known indeed.
Some time ago I visited Holmes at his cottage five miles from Eastbourne on the Sussex Downs overlooking the Channel. It is difficult for me to understand why he retired there, at the very height of his brilliantly useful career as a consulting detective. Holmes had always seemed to me a confirmed Londoner, happy in the busy streets of the city, within easy reach of such enthusiasms as violin concerts, Turkish baths, and-gourmet restaurants. I recognize the kindly loyalty of Mrs. Martha Hudson, who gave up her prosperous and respected position as landlady in Baker Street to go with Holmes and serve as his housekeeper. Yet I have also wondered why the two of them settled in Sussex when both are North Country born, with family connections in that part of the kingdom.
Holmes greeted me happily at the door of the picturesque little thatched cottage, around which hung the whispering hum of bees in their hives. Over the teacups he laughingly shrugged away my suggestion that he himself take public notice of Wells's imperfect historical publication.
"No, my dear Watson, his shortcomings strike me as mere trifles, not worthy the dignity of debate," he said, buttering a muffin. "For my part, I am busy writing a book of my own, Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations on the Segregation of the Queen."
Mrs. Hudson laughed at that, from where she stood at the door of the kitchen, though I myself saw nothing funny in the title.
More recently I dropped in on Challenger, who likewise scoffs at the scoffers. I found him studying maps and catalogues.
Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds Page 16