“We’re getting calls,” Taylor told Houseman. “Switchboards are swamped downstairs—people are going crazy out there.”
Houseman, who swivelled toward Taylor, asked, “Crazy in what manner?”
“If it’s true, deaths and suicides and injuries of all sorts, due to panic.”
“How widespread?”
“I don’t know, Jack, but you have to force Orson into making an explanatory station announcement. Right now.”
Houseman, despite his misgivings about Orson’s approach, took a hard line. “Not until the scheduled break.”
“This isn’t a request, Jack—”
“I don’t care what it is. We’re approaching the dramatic apex of the story, and the announcement will be made, as written, just after that. It’s a matter of minutes.”
Taylor shook his head. “Why do I back you people? You’re insane!”
Houseman made a little facial shrug, and turned away.
Amiable Ray Collins was out there, stepping up to a microphone, saying: “I’m speaking from the roof of Broadcasting Building, New York City. The bells you hear are ringing to warn the people to evacuate the city as...the Martians approach. Estimated in the last two hours, three million people have moved out along the roads to the north...”
Gibson leaned forward and whispered to Houseman, “So you stuck up for Orson, after all?”
Houseman offered a small, dry chuckle. “That is my fate, I’m afraid.”
“Jack—I know you did it.”
Houseman looked at Gibson.
The writer said, “I’ve finished my investigation. And I know you’re responsible.”
“Ah. Might I request you keep that information to yourself, just for the present? If Mr. Taylor is correct, we may have a crisis on our hands, first.”
“You can’t be serious...”
“Oh but I am. And don’t forget—I’m the one who signs your expense-account check.” He smiled beatifically and returned his attention to the window through which Ray Collins could be seen.
The actor was saying into the mike, “No more defenses. Our army is wiped out...artillery, air force, everything, wiped out. This may be the...last broadcast. We’ll stay here, to the end.... People are holding service here below us...in the cathedral.”
Ora Nichols blew through a hollow tube, approximating a ghostly boat whistle.
“Now I look down the harbor. All manner of boats, overloaded with fleeing population, pulling out from docks. Streets are all jammed. Noise in crowds like New Year’s Eve in city. Wait a minute, the...the enemy is now in sight above the Palisades. Five—five great machines. First one is...crossing the river, I can see it from here, wading...wading the Hudson like a man wading through a brook...”
Around the country, listeners—the fooled and the merely entertained—heard the “last announcer” speak from the CBS Building rooftop of Martian cylinders falling all over America, outside Buffalo, in Chicago and St. Louis.
Among the radio audience were Professor Barrington and the student reporter, Sheldon Judcroft, who arrived at the quaint, pre-Revolutionary War hamlet of Cranbury, New Jersey (pop. 1,278), to find half a dozen State Trooper patrol cars parked in front of the post office.
“So it is real,” Sheldon said breathlessly.
The professor pulled over, got out and went over to talk to the troopers. Sheldon stayed behind, to monitor the news on the radio.
The announcer was saying, “Now the first machine reaches the shore, he...stands watching, looking over the city. His steel, cowlish head is even with the skyscrapers.... He waits for the others. They rise like a line of new towers on the city’s west side....”
Sheldon watched the professor talking to a trooper who was shaking his head. Then it was the professor who was shaking his head....
“Now they’re lifting their metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out...black...smoke, drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They’re running toward the East River...thousands of them, dropping in like rats.”
The professor returned, got in the car and just sat there, wearing a stunned expression.
“Now the smoke’s spreading faster, it’s reached Times Square. People are trying to run away from it, but it’s no use, they...they’re falling like flies. Now the smoke’s crossing Sixth Avenue...Fifth Avenue...a...a hundred yards away...it’s fifty feet....”
The sound of the collapsing announcer on the roof was followed by ghostly boat whistles, and then...silence.
“My God,” Sheldon said.
“Good, isn’t it?”
Sheldon blinked. Twice. “Good?”
“It’s a radio show, my boy. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre. Only question, is—how big a fool should you make out of us when you write up the story for the school paper?”
“Oh, I don’t believe it—”
“The trooper says the countryside is crawling with farmers with shotguns, looking for Martians. The fire chief has checked out half a dozen nonexistent fires, already.”
“Why are these troopers here, then?”
“To calm the populace, son. To find and disarm these ‘defenders’ before somebody gets hurt.”
They were halfway back to Princeton before the laughter started—the professor kicked it off, but the student joined in heartily. They were laughing so hard, tears coming down, they almost hit a deer, in the fog.
It was the second-most frightened they’d been that night.
All around America, newspaper offices, police departments, sheriff’s offices, radio stations, as well as friends and relatives, received calls from believing listeners. The New York Times received 875 calls from its highly sophisticated readership. The worldly reporters of the New York Herald Tribune donned gas masks when they went out to cover the story. The Associated Press found it necessary to alert its member newspapers and radio stations that the invasion from Mars was not real. Electric light companies were called with demands that all power be shut down to keep Martians from having landing lights to guide them.
In Manhattan, hundreds jammed bus terminals and railroad stations seeking immediate evacuation; one woman calling a bus terminal asked a clerk to “Hurry, please—the world is coming to an end!” In Harlem, hundreds more poured into churches to pray about that very thing. Every city in New England was packed with cars bearing refugees from New York. Many people living within sight of the Hudson River reported seeing the Martians on their metal stilts, crossing.
In Pittsburgh a husband discovered his wife about to swallow pills from a bottle marked POISON because she would “rather die this way than that!” A woman in Boston reported seeing the fire in the sky. In Indianapolis, a woman ran into a church, interrupting the service to scream that the world was coming to an end—she heard it on the radio!—and hundreds of parishioners scurried into the night. In sororities and fraternities, especially on the East Coast, students lined up at phones to call and tell their parents and boy- or girlfriends good-bye. In Birmingham, Alabama, the streets were rushed en masse.
In Concrete, Washington, the coincidence of a power failure served to convince the populace that the Martians had indeed landed.
James and Robert were nearing the city when the chilling, solitary voice of a ham radio operator emerged, pitifully, from their car radio’s speaker.
“Two X two L, calling CQ.... Two X two L calling CQ.... Two X two L calling CQ, New York. Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there—anyone?... Two X two L...”
A horrible vacant silence followed, and James (at the wheel) glanced over at Bobby; both college boys looked bloodless white. In their minds was posed the question: Should they head north? Did they dare enter the ravaged city, to save Betty and her sister?
Then, suddenly, another voice emerged from the speaker, a pleasant, even good-natured one, saying, “You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air in an original dramatization of The War of t
he Worlds by H.G. Wells.... The performance will continue after a brief intermission. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.”
The college boys, drenched in perspiration, looked at each other in astonishment. They didn’t seem to know whether to laugh or cry, feel relief or anger.
So they stopped at a diner and had burgers.
Leroy Chapman was laughing and laughing. His little sister was, too, somewhat hysterically.
Les was shaking his twelve-year-old fist at the radio, saying, “What a gyp!”
“I told you so! I told you so!” Leroy did a little wild Indian dance. “It was the Shadow! It was the Shadow! Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of man—yah hah hah hah hah! Leroy does! Leroy does!”
Meanwhile, Grandfather and his son Luke and several other farmers they had stumbled into, in the woods, managing not to shoot each other, were taking aim at a Martian, which rose above them on its giant metal legs, frozen against the sky, clearly about to strike.
Grandfather and Luke and the three other farmers let loose a volley of shotgun fire, but the water tower they attacked did not even seem to notice. The tower itself, with the Grovers Mill water supply therein, was safely out of firing range.
The remaining twenty minutes of the broadcast abandoned the “news bulletin” approach as Welles, playing Professor Pierson, recounted his adventures as one of earth’s lone survivors. The traditional conclusion as written by H.G. Wells was reached—the Martians defeated by “the humblest thing that God in his wisdom had put upon this earth,” bacteria—and Bernard Herrmann directed his orchestra in a dramatic crescendo, finally utilizing the power of the composer/conductor.
Houseman, becoming more and more aware of the chaos they had unleashed, had sent Welles a note on the subject.
This may have influenced Welles, who—having had to cut seven minutes on the fly—somehow managed to scribble a rewrite of his closing speech, even as he performed the bulk of the final section of the show, solo.
Now, Welles on his podium—smiling but perhaps a little shaky—again spoke into his microphone.
“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen—out of character to assure you that ‘The War of the Worlds’ has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be—the Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!”
In the sub-control booth, Dave Taylor had his face in his hands. Gibson noted that Houseman’s expression was as unreadable as an Easter Island statue’s.
“Starting now,” Welles was saying, “we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates, by tomorrow night, so we did the best next thing—we annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the CBS Building.... You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business.”
The cast was on its feet, smiling at Orson. They had no idea what they had turned loose on America, and only knew that a mediocre show had been transformed into something special, by their gifted leader.
Who was saying, “So good-bye everybody, and remember please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight—that grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the punkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there...that was no Martian, it’s Hallowe’en.”
Welles cued Herrmann for the Tchaikovsky theme, and Dan Seymour returned to his mike to make the farewell: “Tonight the Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations coast-to-coast have brought you ‘The War of the Worlds,’ by H.G. Wells, the seventeenth in its weekly series of dramatic broadcasts featuring Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air.... Next week we present a dramatization of three famous short stories.... This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.”
When the clock hit nine P.M., the OFF THE AIR sign switched on.
That was when men in blue uniforms began to stream into the studio, and the grin on Welles’s face froze, like a jack-o’-lantern’s.
CHAPTER NINE
TIMES AT MIDNIGHT
WALTER GIBSON AND JACK HOUSEMAN, along with everyone else in the control booth, watched agape in astonishment as a dozen cops, billy clubs in hand, poured into the studio, like raiders in Prohibition days rushing a speakeasy.
Welles remained on his podium, a king surprised by revolting peasants, as his actors instinctively moved away, backing up almost against the far studio wall, and the blue invaders swarmed the platform. The police said nothing, but they were breathing hard, nostrils flared, nightsticks poised.
Then a plainclothes officer in a raincoat and fedora pushed through and looked up indignantly at the confused-looking figure and demanded, “Are you Welles?”
“Guilty as charged. What is—”
Gibson was following Houseman and Paul Stewart, who were on the heels of the CBS executive, Davidson Taylor, out of the control booth and down the handful of stairs onto the studio floor. The four men knifed through the small mob of blue uniforms.
The tall, slender, patrician exec faced the plainclothes officer, who was chewing on an unlit cigar.
“I’m in charge here,” Taylor said. “May I ask who you are, sir?”
“Inspector Kramer,” the copper said, flashing a badge, rolling the dead cigar around. “Don’t you people know you’ve incited a riot?”
Alland helping him on with his suitcoat, Welles came down off the podium, men in blue parting grudgingly to make way, and his expression remained confused though indignation was edging in. “Inspector, we’ve just finished a broadcast, of a fantasy piece. How in God’s name could we—”
The inspector had the remarkable faculty to squint and bug his eyes simultaneously. “You fake an invasion, with real-sounding newscasts, and you have the nerve to ask that?”
“How could anyone mistake what we were doing for reality?” Welles demanded. “It was little green men from Mars! We announced several times it wasn’t real!”
Taylor put himself between the two men like a referee, hands outstretched. When he spoke, the exec’s faint, gentlemanly Southern accent seemed suddenly more prominent. “Inspector, I understand you are responding to a genuine public crisis—”
Welles frowned. “Public...?”
The executive threw his star a quick hard look, then his face softened as he turned toward the stogie-chomping detective. “But this building and this studio remain private property, and I do not believe you have a warrant.”
The inspector had a water-splashed-in-the-face expression; the fragment of cigar almost fell out. “Warrant! Are you kidding?”
“No. I’m not. I’m going to advise Mr. Welles and everyone else involved not to answer any more of your questions until Mr. Paley arrives.”
“Who the hell is Mr. Paley?”
“The president of the network. He lives in Manhattan, and he’s on his way. These are our employees, and they have legal rights, like any other American.”
The inspector poked a thick finger at Welles. “Well, you keep these jokers handy, understand? Till we can talk to ’em. The citizens they terrorized have rights, too!”
“Fair enough,” Taylor said. “Would you mind taking your people out into the lobby, for the time being?”
The inspector frowned. “What, downstairs?”
“No—just right outside. The area by the elevators on this floor will do nicely.”
The inspector twitched a scowl, but he herded his nightstick troop back out again. Though space was again available for the actors to move back up, they stayed put, apparently hoping that they were bystanders and not accomplices.
Welles said, “Dave, what the hell is this?”
Taylor reached a hand into a suitcoat pocket and came back with a fat pile of notes. “This is just a sampling, Orson, of what the switchboard’s been getting since you finally broke in, after forty minutes, and identified the broadcast as fiction—outrage, indignation, death threats. You may espe
cially enjoy the most recent one—it’s from the mayor of Cleveland.”
“Whatever have I have done to the fine city of Cleveland?”
“Oh, nothing much—apparently just unleashed mobs into the streets, sent women and children huddling in church corners, incited violence, looting. His Honor says he’s coming to pay you a visit, Orson—to punch you in the nose.”
Welles looked pale, much as he had when he spotted the body of the murdered woman. “I...I admit I thought we might light a firecracker under a certain lunatic fringe, but I...I apparently seriously underestimated the size of that group. And, Dave, I never dreamed it would go all across the country!”
Arching an eyebrow, Taylor waggled a finger in Welles’s face and let him know what company policy was going to be: “You never dreamed anything like this—on any scale—would happen. Correct?”
Welles swallowed. “Correct.”
“Now, brace yourself...”
“There’s more?”
“Some of these calls indicate there may have been deaths—something about a fatal stampede in a New Jersey union hall, a suicide, some automobile fatalities as people fled the city...”
“My God. Is that possible?”
“None of it’s confirmed, but I mention it so that you grasp the seriousness of the matter—none of your cheek, understand? You could face criminal charges—criminal negligence, even homicide.”
“...for a radio broadcast?”
“For a hoax. A kind of fraud on the public trust.”
Welles said nothing; his eyes were unblinking, his mouth a soft pucker, as if he were about to kiss someone or something—perhaps his future—good-bye.
Taylor looked around and caught Paul Stewart’s mournful gaze. “Paul! Front and center, please.”
Stewart came to Taylor’s side, as Welles faded back.
“Paul,” the executive said, “you’re in charge of rounding up every script and scrap and every record.... Were we making a transcription?”
The War of the Worlds Murder Page 19