The Eve of the War
In the last years of the nineteenth century no one would have believed
that this world was being watched eagerly and closely by the intelligentsia
geaterthanman and yet as mortal as his own; that busy as men
They were examined about their various concerns and
studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope could
Examine ephemeral organisms that flock and multiply in a single drop
Water. People used to move around in this world with infinite decency
about his petty affairs, calm in his assurances of his empire
Case. It is possible that under the microscope the infusoria does
Same. no one thought of the old world of space as the source of
human danger, or the thought of them simply rejecting the idea of life
them as impossible or impossible. curious to recall some of them
Mental habits of those late days. most terrestrial men imagined
There may be other men on Mars, perhaps less than yourself and are ready to welcome a missionary venture. Even then . across the bay
Space, minds that are to our brains as are to our animals
perishable, wisdom vast and calm and inconspicuous, considered this earth
With envious eyes, and slowly and surely made their plans against us.
And at the beginning of the twentieth century came great disillusionment.
Mars, I hardly need to remind the reader, rotates about
Sun, and light and heat at an average distance of 140,000,000 miles
What is received from the Sun is only half of what this world receives. This is important
Yes, if there is any truth in the nebular hypothesis, which is older than our world; And
Long before this Earth's melting stops, there must be life on its surface
has started its course. the fact that it's barely a seventh
Earth's volume would have increased its cooling to a temperature
Where life can begin. It has air and water and everything that is needed
For support of animated existence.
Yet man is so vain, and so blind to his pride that no writer,
At the end of the nineteenth century, no one expressed the view that
intelligent life may develop there, or indeed, beyond
Its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older
compared to our Earth, with barely a quarter of the surface area and
away from the Sun, it essentially follows that it is not only more
Far from the beginning of time but nearing its end.
Secular cooling that should someday overtake our planet
Already really gone too far with our neighbor. its physical condition
still largely a mystery, but we now know that its equatorial region also
Afternoon temperatures barely approach our coldest winter.
Its air is much weaker than ours, its oceans have shrunk until
They cover a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons become much large .Snowcaps collect and melt around either pole and get submerged from time to time
its temperate zone. That final stage of exhaustion that's still there for us
has become a current problem for incredibly remote,
Inhabitants of Mars. There is an urgent pressure of need sharpened their intelligence, increased their powers, and hardened them
heart. looking at space with more instruments, and more intelligence
As we seldom dreamed, they see, at its closest
35,000,000 miles of them, a morning star of hope, our own
Hot planet, green with vegetation and gray with water, with clouds
An atmosphere of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud
the desires of the wide parts of the populated country and the narrow, navy-crowded
Sea
And we humans, beings who live on this earth, must have
Alien and despicable as monkeys and lemurs, at least to us.
The intellectual side of man already accepts that life is a constant struggle
for existence, and it appears that this is also the belief of the mind
on Mars. Their world has gone too far in its coolness and this world is still quiet
full of life, but only crowded with what they consider inferior
animals. To lead the war to the sun is, in fact, their only escape.
Destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.
And before we judge them too harshly, we must remember that
Brutal and utter destruction is not done by our own species
on animals, such as the vanished bison and dodo, but its
low castes. Tasmanians, despite their human similarities, were
completely out of existence in the war of destruction waged by
European immigrants in a span of fifty years. are we so inspired
To complain as pity if Martians do battle in the same spirit? Martians seem to have calculated their lineage astonishingly
Subtlety—their mathematical education apparently far exceeds ours
—and to fully complete your preparation
unanimous. If our devices had allowed it, we could see
Gathering the problem a long time ago in the nineteenth century. men like
Schiaparelli Sees the Red Planet—It's Weird, By-the-Bye, For It
For Countless Centuries Mars Has Been the Star of War—But Failed explain the fluctuating appearances of the markings mapped to them
Well. The Martians would be getting ready at that time.
During the 1894 protests a great light was seen on
The illuminated part of the disc, first at Lick Observatory, then by
Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers listened
It first appears in the August 2 issue of Nature. I'm inclined to think that
Maybe it's the casting of the huge gun, in the fire pit
sunk into their planet, from where their shots were fired at us. Weird
Scars, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak.
During the next two protests.
Six years ago we were hit by a storm. as Mars approached
Protest, Java's Lavelle sets up strings of astronomical exchange
to harmonize with the wonderful wisdom of a vast wrath of
Incandescent gas on the planet. it happened towards midnight
twelfth; and the spectroscope which he immediately resorted to,
Indicated a mass of flammable gas, mainly hydrogen, an . moving with
Extreme velocity towards this earth. this jet of fire had become
Invisible around twelve o'clock. He compared it to a giant puff
The flame suddenly and violently ejected from the planet, "as in flames".
Gases came out of the gun. ,
A singularly apt phrase it turned out to be. still the next day was
There is nothing in the newspapers about it except a small note in the Daily Telegraph,
And the world went into ignoring one of the most serious dangers ever
Threatened mankind. I wouldn't have heard of the explosion at all
Had I not met Ogilvy, a well-known astronomer at Ottershaw. it was
extremely excited at the news, and invited over his feelings
I'm ready to take a turn with him that night in his investigation of the Red Planet.
Despite what has happened since then, I still remember that attentiveness
Clearly: Black and Silent Observatory, The Shadow Lantern
The steady ticking of, throwing a weak glow on the floor in the corner
Telescopic clockwork, small slit in the ceiling—a slant Depth with Stardust scattered all over it. Ogilvy went around,
invisible but audible. Looking through binoculars, one sees a circle of
The dark blue and small round planet is floating in the field. It seemed
So little thing, so bright and small and steady, so lightly marked
Transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from perfect round. but again
It was a little, so much silver hot—a pin's head of light! it was like it
trembled, but it was actually the telescope that was vibrating with the movement of
The clockwork clock that took the planet into account.
As I watched, it seemed the planet was getting bigger and smaller
Move forward and back, but it was just that my eyes got tired. forty
It was millions of miles away from us—over forty million miles
Zero. Few realize the enormity of the vacancy in which the dust
The physical universe floats.
In the field near it, I remember, there were three faint dots of light, three
the telescopic stars were infinitely far away, and were around
The darkness of the empty space. you know how dark it is
Looking at a frosty starry night. In binoculars it looks much deeper.
and invisible to me because it was so far and small, flying fast
And across that incredible distance is constantly drawing closer, closer to me
Every minute so many thousand miles away, came what they were
sending us, the thing that was going to bring so much conflict and calamity
and death on earth. I've never dreamed of it like I saw it; No one
Dreamed of that surefire missile on Earth.
Also that night, there was another jetting from the gas in the distance
The planet. I saw him a red flash on the side, slight projection of
Outline Just as the chronology struck midnight; and on that i said
Ogilvy and he took my place. The night was hot and I was thirsty, and
I went on clumsily spreading my legs and feeling my way in the dark, so
the little table where the siphon stood, while Ogilvy said
A ray of gas that came out towards us. That night another invisible missile started heading towards Earth
from Mars, exactly one second after the first twenty-four hours
One. I remember how I sat there in the dark at the table
Green and red spots floating before my eyes. I wish I had
A little doubting the meaning of the glow of a light, minute to smoke.
Saw and all that it will bring me in the present. Ogilvy saw by then
one, and then left him; and we lit the lantern and went to him
House. Down in the dark were Ottershaw and Chertsey and
All his hundreds of people are sleeping peacefully.
He was full of speculation about the position of Mars that night,
and ridiculed the obscene idea of its inhabitants who were
giving us a signal. His idea was that meteorites could fall in massive amounts
showered on the planet, or that a huge volcanic eruption was
progress. They told me how unlikely it was to be organic
Evolution had taken the same direction in two adjacent planets.
"The chances against anything human-like on Mars are one in a million,"
They said, Hundreds of observers watched the flame that night and after
around midnight, and the night after that; And so for ten nights, a flame
every night. Why did the shots stop after the tenth, no one on earth has
Tried to explain. This may be the reason for firing gases.
Martians inconvenience. Thick clouds of smoke or dust, visible through
A powerful telescope spreads across Earth as tiny gray, fluctuating patches
Through the clarity of the planet's atmosphere and its more obscure
Familiar features.
Even dailies eventually woke up and became popular
Notes appeared here, there and everywhere about volcanoes
on Mars. The seriocomic periodical punch, I remember, made a
Its pleasant use in political cartoons. And, all unheard of, that
themissiles that the Martians fired at us were pulled towards the earth, are now running faster
speed of several miles per second, hour by hour, through an empty gulf of space Hour and day by day, near and near. it almost seems to me now
Incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging upon us, men
can go about their petty concerns as they did. i remember how
The Jubilants were in order to acquire a new picture of the planet for Markham.
Illustrated letter which he edited in those days. people in these later times
Our nineteenth century abundance and enterprise are scarcely realized
documents. For my part, I was too busy learning to ride
engaged on a series of papers discussing the cycle, and the potential
The development of moral ideas as civilization progresses.
one night (the first missile then could hardly have been 10,000,000 )
miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight and I
told him of the signs of the zodiac, and pointed to Mars, a bright
The dot of light creeps towards the zenith, towards which so many telescopes
were pointing. It was a hot night. Coming home, a party
Tourists from Chertsey or Isleworth made us sing and play
music. There was light in the upper windows of the houses like
People went to bed. came in distance from railway station
The sound of shunting trains, the ringing and rumbling, almost softened
Anger from a distance my wife pointed to the glow of me
Hanging in a framework against red, green, and yellow signal lights
sky. How safe and calm it looked.