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.