I. The Eve of the War
Book One: The Coming of the Martians
No one would have believed it in the last years of the nineteenth century. But this world was being watched, keenly and closely. Minds greater than man’s were watching it, and yet these minds could die, just as men can. Men busied themselves about their many interests. All the while they were being studied. They were studied almost as closely as a man with a microscope studies tiny creatures in a drop of water. Those creatures swarm and multiply, and they live only a short time. Men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, endlessly pleased with themselves. They felt calm and sure of their power over the whole material world. Perhaps the tiny water creatures under the microscope feel the same.
No one thought of the older worlds in space as a danger to people. Or if they thought of them, they decided that life there was impossible or unlikely. It is strange to remember some of the ways people thought in those days. At most, people on Earth imagined there might be other men on Mars. Perhaps those men were lower than themselves and ready to welcome missionaries. Yet across the great gulf of space there were other minds. These minds were to ours as ours are to the minds of animals. They were huge, cool and without feeling for us. They looked at this earth with envious eyes. Slowly and surely, they made their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century our comfortable dream came to a terrible end.
The planet Mars goes round the sun at an average distance of 140,000,000 miles. I hardly need to remind the reader of this. It receives barely half as much light and heat from the sun as our world does. If the scientists’ theory about how the planets were formed is true, Mars must be older than our world. Long before this earth stopped being melted rock, life on Mars must have begun. Mars is hardly one seventh of the volume of the earth. So it must have cooled faster to the temperature where life could begin. It has air and water, and everything that living things need.
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Yet man is so vain, and so blinded by his vanity! Up to the very end of the nineteenth century, no writer had this idea. No one suggested that intelligent life on Mars might have developed far beyond our earthly level. No one even suggested that it might have gone beyond it a little. People also did not understand something else. Mars is older than our earth. It has hardly a quarter of the earth’s surface area, and it is further from the sun. So it is further from the beginning of time, and it must also be nearer its end.
One day our planet will slowly grow cold. On our neighbour, this cooling has already gone very far. Much about Mars is still a mystery. But we know now that even at its equator the midday temperature is hardly as warm as our coldest winter. Its air is much thinner than ours. Its oceans have shrunk until they cover only a third of its surface. Its seasons change slowly. As they change, huge snowcaps gather and melt around each pole. From time to time the melting snow floods the milder lands between the poles and the equator. For us, that last stage of a dying world is still unbelievably far away. But for the people of Mars it has become a problem of today. This urgent need has sharpened their minds, increased their powers and hardened their hearts. They look across space with instruments, and with minds such as we have hardly dreamed of. At its nearest, only 35,000,000 miles sunward of them, they see a morning star of hope. It is our own warmer planet, green with plants and grey with water. Its cloudy air tells of rich, fertile land. Through its drifting clouds they catch glimpses of wide countries full of people. They see narrow seas crowded with navies.
And we men, the creatures who live on this earth, must seem strange and low to them. We must seem at least as strange and low as monkeys and lemurs seem to us. Thinking men already accept that life is a never-ending struggle for existence. It seems that the minds on Mars believe this too. Their world has cooled very far, and this world is still crowded with life. But to them it is crowded only with lower animals. Generation after generation, destruction is creeping upon them. To carry war sunward, to our world, is their only escape.
Before we judge them too harshly, we must remember what our own kind has done. We have destroyed without pity and without stopping. We destroyed animals, such as the bison and the dodo, which have now vanished. We also destroyed human races that we thought were lower than ourselves. The Tasmanians were human beings like us. Yet European settlers made war on them until not one was left, and it took only fifty years. Are we so full of mercy that we can complain if the Martians made war in the same spirit?
The Martians seem to have planned their arrival with amazing cleverness. Their knowledge of mathematics is clearly far greater than ours. They seem to have made their preparations together, in almost perfect agreement. If our instruments had been good enough, we might have seen the trouble coming far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet. (It is strange, by the way, that for countless centuries Mars has been called the star of war.) But they could not explain the changing markings, even though they mapped them so well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.
During the opposition of 1894, a great light was seen on the bright part of the planet. It was seen first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers first heard of it in the issue of Nature dated August 2. I think this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun. They had dug a vast pit into their planet, and they made the gun there. From it they fired their shots at us. Strange markings were seen near the place of that blaze during the next two oppositions. No one has explained them yet.