This story was written for a proposed anthology 5 years ago, as it hasn't appeared anywhere by now, and the publishers will not enter into correspondence with me. Here it is - to be read for free. It takes place during H.G.Wells' War of The Worlds.
Simon Bucher-Jones
Ed. Note: Parts of this material appeared in: With Bicycle and Telescope - Stories of An Astronomical Amateur (London, 1897) by Captain Frederick Airy BA. The present text has been expanded from private papers as indicated, and is here published for the first time.
My second cousin once removed, George Biddell Airy, passed from this mortal coil in the early 1880s having, previously at the good age of eighty-one, surrendered his title as Astronomer Royal, somewhat grudgingly, to other, younger hands. In this he was unusual, as most astronomers permit their telescopes to be removed from their eyes, and their laurels from their brows, only by the grim figure of Death himself.
If he could have lived to see the events we have recently suffered through, I suspect he would have been—not philosophically affronted, as so many Englishmen and women seem to have been at the prospect of the boot being placed firmly upon the other foot in matters of the incursion of the outer heavens into our cosy environs—but rather vindicated in his beliefs about the capacity of the Planet Mars to harbour intelligent life. He was the last of the Astronomer Royals to have to decide this point from an academic distance without the advantage of empirical proof and indeed the last, to date, to serve his tenure entirely on a peaceful footing, untouched by the Martians—either their presence upon the Earth or the threat of their return.
His immediate successor in the post, Sir George Carling Stent, an unimaginative, though not unlikeable man, met his end, in an abortive attempt to signal peacefully to the bellicose travellers from the Red Planet, and the man chosen—somewhat hastily, to succeed him, Sir William Henry Mahoney Christie was, on taking up the position, also given a Colonel’s rank in the 6th Dragoon Guards, under the command of Major-General Sir Alexander James Hardy Eliot KCB, who had served with distinction at the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimea, and thereafter in the North British District, which is with typically heavy emphasis and little irony the English Military’s description of the land of Scotland.
He was expected to provide both military advice—as to the conditions likely to be found upon Mars and how might they inform the strategic and tactical choices of the Invaders—but also to translate into military terms the reports from the Observatories both within the Empire, and from Great Britain’s allies, as to any further activities upon the surface of Mars and their likely import upon the provision of re-enforcement and supply to the bridgeheads already established upon the Earth.
Such a call also went out to the other members of the Royal Society and to such interested amateurs as myself and my close friend Doctor Bartemus Lyttelton, who were known to the society by our contributions to its journals. However we were on an astronomical tour with the other members of the Frogmorton Amateur Astronomical Club, and while we were all aware of the recent activities upon the face of Mars—and had observed them with our various telescopes, both portable, and fixed—we had made our travel arrangements before their import became obvious (I still naively at that time favoured the volcanic explanation) and were far from London when the first of the cylinders fell.
Unable to afford as a party, as we would have devotedly wished to do, to travel to Norway for the Total Solar Eclipse predicted for the 8th of August, we had opted for the dark skies of Scotland, and with our paraphernalia had arranged to set up on the shores of Loch Ness. Although the Eclipse would not be visible from the British Isles, we still intended to make a jolly time of it—and to participate vicariously in the work being done by our colleagues abroad. There were six of us in all. We had our tents and our telescopes, our hand dug trench for the amenities, and a roaring fire, that we could douse to observe the stars. We had bicycled from Inverness, with a dour Scottish man with a horse and cart following up with our equipment. Including two large travelling trunks that Sybil insisted contained a surprise, and were not to be discussed. By such means, we were wonderfully removed, as we thought from the necessity of doing anything but watching the skies, and enjoying the company of equals.
Myself and Bartemus were the only gentlemen, and the remainder of our party were all of the fairer sex: scientists and observers in their own right and as capable of carrying out an observation with the most eagle-eyed man—possibly more so, as any male reader who has rashly attempted the threading of a needle in cold-blood may attest. I know that some readers may balk at the liberty which these women took in travelling by train, and bicycle, with two unattached men—but we were all old friends, united by our interest in the physical sciences and they were quite able to safeguard their good names. Our distaff members were Jane Wainwood Orr—whose cousin Mary Acworth Evershed in the Australias was then hard at work on the mapping of the Southern Skies. Jane had often thrilled us with second-hand accounts of the glories of the rising of Canopus, and the Constellation of Centaurus—which holds among its stars the one Astronomers believe to be the star closest to our own Sun, Rigil Kenturus - the Centaur’s Foot—the third brightest star visible in the Southern Skies.
With her, was her companion, Diana Wigg—newer to our ranks—but a steadfast watcher of the Heavens, who had often as a girl scaled the roof of her family’s house, Frogmorten Hall, with her brother Francis, to see the meteors of the Summer Perseid’s fall over Hertfordshire. By profession Jane was a School Teacher, and Diana was—as was Bartemus—a member of the minor Gentry, but in the rapture of the skies was no concern for the social separations of the daylight world, and both women were as close as sisters. The remaining two members of our party were sisters indeed, not in any spiritual sense, but by birth. Dorothy and Sybil Thorold were the twin daughters of no less a person than the late Bishop of Winchester, a descendant of the Baronetcy of Thorold—and this must well show the high esteem in which our Club was considered by the prelate, that he had immediately agreed to their journey to Scotland when, in principle, it had first been mooted the year before. His sad death late in 1895 had necessitated a period of decent mourning, but his own stated wishes, and the passage of time had allowed the twins’ inclusion in the party and their bright young faces showed that their natural spirits had recovered from their loss by the time we set out. Bishop Thorold had only recently moved to the Winchester Diocese from Rochester—my own native town—and he had been an old friend of my family, and had indeed spoken at my Officer’s Commission in 1888. I thought of Dorothy and Sybil as my own sisters, and my friend Bart regarded at least one of them in that light, and the other by that of a still more luminous and romantic star.
It must perhaps be owned that Dorothy was the more studious of the two, and had by correspondence quite as many Professors and Doctors desirous of acquainting her with their astronomical findings, as Jane had from the antipodes. Her father had travelled extensively in North America and as well as meeting with the leaders of the Church of Latter Day Saints in his ecclesiastical capacity, he had meet Augustus Lowell and the latter’s son Percival, and Percival’s enthusiastic accounts of the works at the newly established Observatory that bore the family’s name had often been discussed over the Thorold breakfast table. Sybil—the younger by minutes of the two—was of a more poetic temperament and inclined to attribute fanciful and mythological explanations to events that to a more, staid intelligence would have been seem as the work of nature in its broadest sense. Her interest in such matters was primarily a point of competition with her sister, but she backed her claim for inclusion in the Club with flashes of insight, a profound capacity for sketching small features of the Moon, and the esoteria she too was accustomed to receive from the correspondence that she had taken over from her late father. She was presently attempting to work through a copy of Eureka, a philosophical poem of speculation by the late Edgar Allan Poe, she had been sent from a (male) acquaintance in the Americas, and had been regaling us on the train with the occasional delighted snippet such as, of especial interest to us, his comments on the (at the time of his writing) recent discovery of Neptune, still under its title of Leverrier’s Planet.
We had been camping around the Loch for three days when the cylinders began their fall onto the unsuspecting Earth. I say, unsuspecting, for even the astronomical fraternities and sororities of which we were, each in our own way, minor parts, had failed to draw the correct conclusions from the observations that had been made. There were a number of exceptions, although it was not until much later that we were to learn of them. Professor David Gill—formerly of the Dun Echt Observatory (whose sad and rather forlorn empty buildings, the contents of which had been donated to the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh in 1888, we had been able to visit on our way North, as a religiously inclined party might have visited a fallen temple raised by earlier votaries of their order)—had been one of those who had drawn a correct and urgent inference from his watching of the night skies. Long convinced of some intelligent activity upon Mars, since the time of various peculiarities he had observed in his “A Determination of the Solar Parallax from Observations of Mars at the Island of Ascension”—he had concluded that the explosions upon Mars were deliberate, and had successfully traced the trajectory of the approaching invaders. His later view, that the oddities among the facts observed in 1888, must have been as he put it ‘the Martians making landings upon Phobos and Deimos, and testing within their own worlds, the technologies and devices they would use to bring their appetites to our own Earth’, has never been conclusively proven, yet it seems to me as eminently sensible as the rest of his precise, mathematical, and reliable work. His public demand for action created a fervour in Cape Town, and if he had not reallocated (some initially said misappropriated) funding granted to the geodesic survey, in order to arm and prepare its members as a militia based around the observation points of the survey’s 500 trigometric reference stations to investigate and control any panic arising from the fall of the detected meteors whose passage across the Southern heavens he had observed, much harm might have gone—initially—undetected and unfought. His prompt suspicions were to lead to much saving of life, across an area stretching—relatively—as far as the Mediterranean to South Norway, or London to Prague. In a more immediate way, in the Battle of Cape Town, his own bravery—in leading to safety a group of French citizens, including a number of Catholic clergy, trapped under-fire by one of the Martians’ machines, was to lead to his receipt of the Legion d’honour. We could make no parallel claim for such an excess of foresight, nor for so ample a store of bravery—yet circumstances were to bring us to face Martians amid the heather and the beauties of Scotland.
#
Next section of narrative reprinted with permission from: The Frogmorten Letters: The Years of Conflict 1895-1900.
Dear, Brother Francis
We have set out our little tents on as lovely an undisturbed patch of heather as you could possibly imagine, on a green sward that gives down towards the famous Loch, at the point where the shore bends in North of Strone—not the substantial place of the same name on Holy Loch, but a tiny village of three or four cottages (from which eggs and ham may be had).
Above this on the western shore we are positioned in a pleasant cup shaped gap in woodland giving us tree-shelter from the few lights of Strone, and a clear view straight up into the depth of night. We are far enough from any habitation (it is an hour’s walk to the nearest farm house) that the visibility of stars in the night sky will be excellent, and we have determined to adjust ourselves to sleeping by day, and observing by night. We will however prepare our meals by day, so that the fire does not impede our observations, and live off the cold repasts made at Sunset. I know that you have never really shared my fascination with the stars, and that for you the roof-top scrambles of our younger days were conducted in your imagination as ship-born antics of smugglers or pirates, whereas for me they were always about the heavens above, but you cannot grasp, my dear, how much clearer and more defined the night sky is away from the cities of mankind. It is tempting to believe, as the ancients did that translunar space is the home of all peace and tranquillity, if only rational observation did not dispute this.
Miss Orr is quite well, and I trust you will forgive my mentioning in this letter someone who has been a matter of disagreeable differences between us in the past, but I must do justice to friendship as well as to family, you would not I think require me to be less than civil. Also, with us are Sybil and Dorothy who I think you met briefly at Lady Hanlon’s, and two strong and trustworthy young men, Fred and Bart, whose diligence in tent-rearing and fire-starting, and the digging of ditches, must be given its due. Both are quite reputable—a cousin of the late Astronomer Royal, and a cadet member of the Lyttelton family respectively, so you can be quite assured that Jane and I will be well observed, and that nothing at all untoward will occur. You must try to put such private matters from your mind, after all— καρδιά έχει τους λόγους, ο νους δεν καταλαβαίνει.
Something which may interest you—for you have surely seen in the papers the accounts of the lights upon Mars, even if you have rushed past them to the sporting news, is that we believe we have sighted a swarm of meteors, quite unlooked for in the annual calendar which gives every appearance of proceeding from the direction of Mars, and which as it passes the orbit of our own world we expect to be visible tonight to the naked eye as well as to our telescopes.
They must be unusually large, to be visible and their apparent magnitude increases even as they are observed which suggests a great velocity. I need not elaborate on the sort of romantic cast which Sybil has placed on these ‘firey chariots of the Gods’—if you recall Lady Hanlon’s affair at all, you will remember those ‘bright intimations of fairyland’ which you found so enticing in her. I fear she may have eyes for our Bart, and that your hopes there will best be set aside, but in these matters who can predict?
Postscript added to letter
An astonishing event! Which will I fear have to wait for my next to be covered in any detail. A giant meteor has actually fallen to Earth not three miles from us, into the very waters of the Loch!
We will investigate in the morning, after Bart takes this letter to the post box in Strone, but we are sure that this must be a major discovery for the astronomical sciences, if only there is some way to retrieve the aerolite from the depths. I believe Fred has a plan to attempt to sample it via a drill from a floating platform, the parts to be cabled for from Inverness. If only we can pinpoint the impact point. Things could not be more exciting.
Yours, your loving sister,
Diana
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From the pocket diary of Bartemus Lyttelton Esq. Hitherto-unpublished material.
What larks! And what price an Eclipse on the Rhialto now?—for we have such things here as are undreamt of. Not only did a huge display of meteoroids sweep over us, passing into the Southern sky of British Isles, perhaps to fall there or even on the Continent, but one laggard from the rest—Fred insists he saw a spurt of flame or gas emitted from it, which unequal combustion in the atmosphere may have acted as a rocket acts to drive it on a different course to its fellows—and has come down in the Loch! Pity the poor Monster, of whose existence all the natives are thoroughly convinced, to have dropped upon its head a mass of meteoric iron whose impact must have been on the order of an immense mound of explosives.
There was a great white flash, and a massive concussive ‘crump’. The noise reverberated back across the surface of the Loch, echoing the slap of the impact, and a water spout visible in the moon light, partially drenched our tents even as far back as we were.
Dear old Fred, is planning to attempt to fish for it—as likely I fear to be successful as the men of Gotham fishing for the reflection of the moon—but this is a matter for the morning. The sky now is full of water, and the stars are dimmed, a low fog lies all around us.
Later
A somewhat strange and disturbed night—the wildlife is much evident, as if the tenor of nature had been set on edge by this intrusive blow from the heavens. I have been tasked with walking into Strone, sending off the post—and cabling, if the little post office permits, for equipment from Inverness. Walking alongside the Loch, I see many dead fish visible—killed I have little doubt by the impact of the boloid, and the waters are muddy and brackish.
Possibly the meteor has buried itself forever in the ooze at the bottom of the Loch, beyond the reach of humanity.
One unusual thing is the number, and the ferocity, of the large eels that are coming to the surface to feast upon the floating bodies of the dead fish, one of which I am sure must be on the order of ten feet in length—is this perhaps one root of the tangled thicket that is the legend of the Monster of the Loch, in all its forms? You may think me foolish dear diary, but I felt a stab of fear at the sight, and I was glad I had brought an old revolver with me, for all that Sybil had mocked me for it—enquiring whether I believed Scotland to be full of rogues or wolves.
#
The Airy MS—Reprinted with permission. The section in square brackets was taken from private papers and is published here for the first time. It was possibly excluded from earlier publication because its tone is not unsympathetic to the Martians.
It was nearing noon, and the Doctor had yet to return from Strone—we were all of us, nervous as rabbits, and the very air seemed to have a potential in the electrical sense. The hairs on my arms were distinctly standing on end, as if from static electricity—an observation which Sybil was pleased to confirm by saying that I was ‘nervous as a hedgehog’. We determined that, if we were to go down to the Loch side proper, we would have a good sight of the road (rather a cart track than a proper thoroughfare) from Strone, and thus the first sight of our returning fellow.
It was as we approached the reeds and sedges of the Loch edge, that we saw the thing hauling itself out of the waters. A black and grey humped shape, that for an instant made us gasp with the idea of the Loch Ness Monster! It differed, we were later to learn, from the Martian Machines as they were observed elsewhere, in several respects. I can only conjecture that these changes were necessitated by the circumstances of being immersed in a liquid which must be rarity itself upon Mars, and for which the Martians might not have made specific allowances in their plans. They could not of course have failed to observe that the surface of our Earth was covered for fully three quarters of its surface in this chemical, but for the most part their landings were conducted entirely upon solid ground, and their machinery and expectations were clearly set for the same—yet in this instance their navigation had gone astray, [and they had had to improvise mightily in response to it. Despite everything we were later to learn of them, and despite their actions towards us, it is hard not in some way to feel sympathy for them. Not only had they travelled to another world, but they had plunged into a different element entirely than their intended destination, and they had not come out of it unscathed.]
As the machine whose long mechanical ‘arms’ each composed of flexible circles of—seeming steel—held I conjectured later around a bending core of magnetic forces—grappled onto the trees of a small copse at the Loch side, and began to use them as an anchor point to pulled itself up out of the water, we saw that it was supported on six squat legs which were arranged after the fashion of pile-drivers, expanding and contracting. To say that we were startled is to understate our confusion and our disbelief. The news of the landings to the South had not had time to reach us, and this eruption of the Martians on the Earth was perhaps also premature, driven by the necessity of escaping the waters of the Loch, rather than timed to co-incide with actions elsewhere. Like the nervous rabbits we felt, we concealed ourselves in the foliage and attempted in whispers to make some sense of this thing which was now revealed to us as no Monster, but as some wondrous piece of Engineering. As yet, I recall, I personally felt very little actual fear, not because I can claim any great bravery for myself, but because the circumstances were so unusual and unlooked for as to set the events aside from the idea of any real world of peril to life or property. In this respect we were, sadly, to be shortly disabused.
“It’s some sort of submarine,” Sybil said. “Perhaps it was already in the Loch, and the meteor damaged it, look I think there are bodies in the water.”
Up and out of the waters around it, there came bobbing to the surface two or three rough leathery shapes. If it is possible to imagine a thing practically all face, with great eyes gleaming dully through black goggles made of some oily material, with the self-same material shrouded around it, this was the sight that affrighted us.
“It’s not a submarine of this Earth,” Dorothy said, “and those are no diving suits of any terrestrial navy.”
It is impossible to say whether or not it was the active machine, away from whose jointed legs the water boiled and frothed, or those floating leathery lumps, which stirred not save for the motion of the water, and whose great eyes showed no more life than that of a mannikin in a shop window, that first bore in upon us the truth that we were observing something which had come to Earth within the meteor that we had observed the preceding night.
“Do you think, it’s a vessel from another world?” Joan asked.
“I think it must have come from one,” Dorothy said, “but not as a vessel in itself, but as a component, or as cargo of something bigger.”
“The Meteor,” I interjected, “and if that is the case…”
“Then the South of England, perhaps the world may be being visited by many such.”
(This last was Diana’s contribution, and I think the first realisation of fear also, was hers, not because she was in any way timid, but because she was always quick to spot anything that might impact upon her friend Jane’s well-being.)
“Those things in the Loch, are dead,” I said, “They’re not moving. If the meteor was some sort of ship, it may be that they didn’t anticipate landing in water. [How dreadful it must have been for them to be trapped within the shell of their conveyance, with what had in the depths of space been a place of safety now turned to an enclosing prison.” I guessed how they must have forced to exit their craft under the water, and make in the face of an adversary that—from what we know of Mars, for I had already begun to connect these creatures from the meteor with the explosions on that distant world—must have been wholly alien to them an attempt to make their way to air and to light. Whether they were on the verge of exhausting that air which they brought with them, or whether they generated an atmosphere chemically but the machinery for doing so was damaged in their forceful descent, we could not know—but it was clear from the bodies that they had risked much to reach the surface.
Of the Martians who had travelled millions of miles to end in that remote place, these three had given their lives so that their comrades could live.]
This machine had left the water by this time, and was to all appearances—nesting among the trees—like a six-legged spider. It’s gleaming rope like limbs reached back down and scooped up the three bodies, one by one, bringing them firstly close to the upper surface of the Machine where a slit of reddish light perhaps suggested a viewing port for those within, and then also one by one, laying them carefully upon the reed bed by the roots of the trees. A howling ululation burst from it, and the shining limbs began to excavate a space in the earth among the trees, scraping and patting the soil to the sides.
“It’s burying them,” Diana said. “This is fascinating! Don’t you see, it shows they have some reverence for the dead, that there can be points of contact with them.”
In this she was mistaken in one way. The Machine raised a new tentacle, one which deployed from a circular hatch upon the back of its carapace, and which carried a lensed box.
“A camera?” I wondered, but I too was mistaken.
It was as the Machine did this, that we saw, coming towards us around a bend, and in in sight of us, but not of the Machine, the still distant, but unmistakable, figure of Doctor Lyttelton. Here was a quandary. As yet the Machine had performed no hostile act, and it remained so far as we could tell unaware of us, yet at any moment Doctor Lyttelton would move past the trees that shaded the path further up the shoreline and come on the road into view of the other worldly device. If it were inclined to hostility, or if it were capable of it on being suddenly disturbed as a man might swat out at an intruding insect, Lyttelton would soon be in danger, yet if we attempted to warn him, what could we do but bring that possible danger down sooner upon ourselves whose presence at the Loch side had as yet gone unnoticed? I own that although Bart was my boyhood friend, I was prepared to let the risk reside with him rather than let any of it fall upon the three Ladies, and I remain convinced that this is the outcome he himself would have championed had he been able to confer with us, but the matter was taken out of my hands.
Dorothy clambering up from her crouching concealment, shouted and waved, “Doctor Lyttelton, the Loch path is unsafe, be careful!” It was hard to say how helpful this warning could be to him, but it was surely better than shouting of Monsters or of visitations from Mars, to which he would surely have responded to with curiosity or laughter rather than caution.
As she shouted the Machine was moving the ‘camera’ arm to bear upon the hole it had dug in between the trees. A flash of light, an almost invisible line in the air—as of the heat haze that forms on a summer’s day but compressed into a tiny wedge of the atmosphere, and the soil and damp clay of the hole was baked into a defined reddish chamber. I thought, and I still think that this was a tomb for the three lost Martians, but before they could be placed, there in, at the instant of Dorothy’s cry, the arm with its heating apparatus swung around, and she was caught full in the beam of superheated air.
I grabbed at her legs intending to draw her down into the wet reeds, and my arms found only burning cloth and bones. In a single instant, all possible sympathy for the Martians left me, as in a single instant without provocation and without remorse they took the life of one of my oldest friends.
If the focus of that ray had remained upon us, had swept back and forth upon our hiding places, we all would, I am sure, have followed Dorothy into death in the next few moments, but our screams were interrupted by the crack of a revolver, as from concealment on the other side Bart opened fire on the Machine.
Hearing Dorothy’s cry of warning, and her scream, as that uncanny ray of heat passed through her body, he had broken into a run, drawing a weapon I did not know he possessed, and had come close enough to receive the sight of Dorothy’s death in all its horror. Were these shots—as some have said—the first fired in that War between the Worlds which was to bring so much horror and despair? It is impossible to be sure, as the widespread fall of the Martian cylinders and their failure to open in any co-ordinated way (some it was later found, never opened at all—the creatures inside liquefied by an impact that had exceeded whatever protective devices had preserved the majority of their kind) meant that it was a War begun without formal declaration or statement of demands. It was as many historians have noted, the first absolute war—in which so different were the combatants that no quarter could be asked and no ceasefires negotiated. Lord, let it remain true that there are never such wars fought between the nations of Mankind.
The revolver shots accomplished little in the way of damage, for the Machine must have been armoured heavily, but they accomplished the aim of drawing its attention in that direction. Bart was in great danger now, the greatest of all of us—for we were able to withdraw through the trees as the Martians were distracted.
#
From the pocket diary of Doctor Bartemus Lyttelton Esq. Hitherto-unpublished material. The notes in the book were necessarily much compacted and in the Pictman shorthand. In presenting a narrative here some liberties have been taken in expanding Bart’s notes into a coherent account.
That the monstrous device did not kill me at once, although it had had no compunction about the swiftness of its power to kill, was for a long time unexplained. I was seized by its great tentacular arms of the brute, and grappled closely to it—the breath knocked from my body by the impact, and my revolver (already empty and hence, useless) knocked from my hand. Luckily, my notebook and pen were still in my jacket pocket, and I was able upon my recovery to take stock of my situation. I make these notes not in any hope that I may live to make use of them, but in case—in the possibility—that the book is discarded as meaningless by the device and found by Airey and the others, that something I have observed may be of use in the stopping of this murderous device.
The thing has a kind of belt of lobster-like pots, maybe eight or nine in all. It is into one of these that I have been thrust. Coming upon it in haste as I did, in the shock of my friend’s scream, I found I had little idea of its total shape, save that it had reared out of the water, and that it had possessed a single burning eye, at the end of one of its arms that spewed forth fire. Was this, the Monster of the Loch—some madman’s creation out of Jules Verne? Had a Nemo or a Robur arisen to affright the world? And if so, why Scotland? Was this a trial in a remote place that we had by ill-luck interrupted? I thought then of the Meteor. It is a famous truism attributed to William of Occam, that an explanation should not invoke additional entities unless necessary, but it is also true that an explanation should not leave out, as merely co-incidental, evidence of entities. We had seen the Meteors overhead, and heard the impact on the Loch. Something had certainly come from space. Now what were the odds that a human maniac and his evil device were here waiting for such a fall? Slim, unless they caused it in some way, or had been already aware of it? In which case was it not wholly more likely that this was a Machine from the Meteor, a mechanism not of this Earth?
Concluding that, I also reasoned that this was a mechanism from Mars.
The lobster pot affair in which I was confined, was damp and unpleasant, and had retained a muddy effluvium from the Loch, but its outer surface was semi-transparent and I was able to see something of the outside world, albeit at an odd and disconcerting angle.
The Machine was engaged in fishing for something from the side of the Loch. One at a time it drew up a black, bloated form—deftly peeled from it its outer covering (I was barely able to call it clothing)—and after placing the coveralls and the devices which the body had into one of the pots (not, alas mine, I would have given much to have inspected them), dropped the body naked, into a circular reddish bowl of fused clay before the Machine’s front legs. In doing so it moved the lifted form close to my pot and I saw that the body was in no way human, but resembled a massive crepuscular brain, with great dead eyes to the front, and small limbs (such as they were) folded in death along its underside.
The beast’s mouth was a lipless ‘V’ shape, and the whole was nightmarishly devoid of any sign of potential sympathy. When three such corpses had been shucked of their gear by the tentacles as methodically as a man might peel oranges, and dropped into the pit, the fire-eye did its work again, and their bodies were consumed into ash in an instant. From the Machine came a hollow awful cry, not made by any organic throat but by a siren of some sort. Whether its sombre note conveyed any genuine grief at the deaths of the three creatures, I cannot say, but while it may have been foolish to attribute such feelings to the heartless invaders, I cannot deny that I believed it to be mourning them.
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The Airy MS—Reprinted with permission.
Diana and Jane were in tears, and Sybil and I were consumed not with sadness but with a burning fury that compelled us at once to seek for some way to bring destruction to the Machine. We had seen its capture of Lyttelton, and could only hope that his imprisonment (for we did not see any way in which he might escape) would give us time to get clear from its immediate range of action, and buy us time to conclude some means of retaliation.
It had made its bridgehead on the shores between us and Strone, but we determined that Diana and Jane would attempt to strike North-west towards Kilmore and Lewsiton, in the hope of alerting the people there to their danger, and of preparing some kind of defence. It was hard to know what this could be, but the attempt had to be made. I recalled that the military garrisons in Scotland had been run down to the quartering of only three battalions—although ten Scottish territorial regiments remained on the Army list—with only thousands a year spend on their upkeep, compared with tens of thousands in Ireland, and hundreds of thousands in England. There was a great danger that one Martian Machine, armed as we had seen it to be, might be more than a match for the forces of Her Majesties Army in the North .
The nearest garrison, was at Fort George in Inverness—the depot of the Seaforth Highlanders, which regiment was the amalgamation of the 72nd—the Duke of Albany’s own Highlanders, and the 78th—the Ross-shire Buffs. But there could be little hope that a message would reach them in time for any fortification of the Loch side settlements to begin in advance of an assault. The local towns though, if they could be raised might do something, and the English have long learned not to underestimate even an unarmed Scotsman.
To Sybil and I fell the task of taking the battle back to the Machine—and if it were possible rescuing Lyttelton or—and in silence we faced this prospect—recovering his body. I would have preferred to attempt this alone, but so furious, and rightly furious, was Sybil at the death of Dorothy that to suggest she might leave to seek help with the others would have been to invite violence upon my person. We surveyed our camp in the hope of discovering something we could use, and our thoughts turned ever upon poor Dorothy, the fate of Bart, and the baleful overarching influence of the planet Mars!
#
From the pocket diary of Doctor Bartemus Lyttelton Esq. Hitherto-unpublished material.
Inside the pot I am not restrained, and may to a limited extent explore. There are a set of taps or nozzles in the rear wall of the ‘lobster pot’—the right most provides a tepid water that tastes as if it has been repeatedly distilled, the one on the left, a fine paste, which I find, when mixed with water, has the flavour of mushrooms. It may be lethal but I fancy I have little left to risk. My chest hurts and I have been coughing up blood. I suspect I have broken a rib, and it may also be a lung is punctured. Without medical aid, or even with it, it is unlikely that I will survive another dozen hours.
The presence of the amenities of food (after a fashion) and water, suggests that the ‘pots’ are deliberately intended for the conveying of prisoners—as I cannot believe that they are for the convenience of the Martians, being most in-conveniently positioned, and providing only the drabbest of rations. There is also a grating, with a further nozzle at the base of the ‘pot’ which may be for the purpose of removing waste. I do not intend to use this if I can wait out my time without, at least not for so demeaning a purpose. I note, though, that the grating is simply that, an opening into the outside air, and if it looks like the end is coming, I believe I will be able to push this note book through, in the hope that it reaches some human hands, before I can be dragged out of the ‘pot’ or indeed, off it.
I suppose I am expecting dissection, or interrogation—although the language issue will surely be a problem with regard to the latter—and I must steel myself now to give nothing of importance away that might conceivably help my captors. I cannot help what they may be able to divine from my body, but I retain control of my mind.
I wish I could say that I had discovered some weakness or weapon that might be turned against them, but so far, I have seen nothing aside from their disposal of the bodies of their dead, in the pure flash of flame, in a place prepared for them to even indicate that any Martians in fact remain within this brute Machine. Would it be more horrible still if it was following previously set instructions by a kind of clockwork, even with all of its makers drowned within, or outside it?
I feel though that they are not all dead, for I have felt for some time as if I was being observed. If so, I wonder whether they understand—not the content—but the fact that I am writing in this book, means that I am recording my impressions? Can they have constructed such machines without a written language? Would not the necessity of blue-prints and engineering instructions require it? Or did they bring a Master Machine, now drowned, that had the parts and capacity to build other lesser Machines by wrote? I would give much, perhaps even my nearly worthless life, to find out—if I could only hope to communicate it to Fred and the others. I hope dear Sybil is safe. But the image of poor Dorothy is still with me.
Later.
An interrogation of a kind but a strange one, and one I am still not sure I have understood.
It was conducted entirely in the pot, without contact with a Martian, in person. Instead—through the nozzles which I had believed were purposed with the supply of food and water—two slim tentacles, like the great arms of the Machine in design, but on a vastly reduced scale and made of some material like a hard, yet pliable, glass, entered my confines. The tentacle which had entered from the left, fanned out at the tip—splitting into hundreds of microscopic fibres, each of which was capable of being illuminated by a different, changing, colour of light. Moving and changing this ‘fanned out surface’ made a kind of display, at which the other tentacle—narrowed to a single, razor point—jabbed emphatically. I concluded that I was being shown something, and that I was invited to pay particular attention where the pointer fell.
It took me some minutes to realise that I was being shown a map of the British Isles as it might appear from above the heights which our observation balloons have reached. The pointer indicated first the area to the south, where London—the largest city—lay. It took me some time to realise this for the map was rotated from our normal practises having the East to the top (this orientation by axis, made me wonder if Mars in fact possessed Magnetic poles?) and its composition as of a myriad photographs composited, was quite unlike a normal cartographer’s drawing. The pointer jabs around furiously, and I believe it is seeking an indication from me as to how far our location is from London. The humour of the proceedings strikes me and I laugh until it hurts—which is to say I laugh once. Here is this Machine, beyond all present human manufacture, brought to Earth by a science we cannot as yet emulate, as lost in the Highlands of Scotland as any English school teacher on a hiking tour. The thought of school teachers reminds me of Jane and the others. I determine to tell these Martians nothing (indeed I was somewhat at a loss as to how I could have communicated with them if I had desired to give them latitude and longitude).
Indicating with a dumbshow that that was I fear rude in two senses of the term, I was able to withdraw to the grating and having made this last note (undercover of my coat) I will commend this journal to the air. Then I will go back to tell them nothing, and I fear, to die. May God be with me, and with us all.
#
The Airy MS—Reprinted with permission.
We made stock of our possessions. Telescopes in profusion, and binoculars, tents and clothing. Nothing in the way of weapons, at least, so I thought. However in coming to Sybil’s luggage, which had been throughout the tour to date a closely guarded secret, I was alarmed—yet also under the circumstances pleased—to discover a set of items which might at least serve us in some way. I have mentioned that Sybil was the least ‘pure’ astronomer of us all, and the one most inclined to mythologise the science. I was however still surprised to have her reveal to me, packed in those two stout trunks, a collection of fireworks (to celebrate the passing of the eclipse we were going to be unable to see), and what appeared to be a large mass of multi-coloured silk together with a cylinder of gas. I enquired as to the latter, and was informed that it was an atmospheric balloon. Sybil explained to me that she had intended to play a substantial prank upon the rest of us, for the balloon—partly inflated by the hydrogen gas , she had in the cylinder, partly with air (for which purpose she also had a small pump) would have made a glimmering mystery: a wraith, darting at the edges of the Loch. This strange will o’ the wisp, she had intended to be a shocking and supernatural seeming jolt to our mechanistic sensibilities. This and the fireworks were to have been a celebratory climax to our holiday, a holiday that now had developed into a tragedy and a fight for our lives and those of the natives of the Highlands.
I recalled from my university days, the flammable properties of hydrogen gas, both on its own, and when mixed with air. If the balloon was filled correctly, it would be light enough to float just over the ground. It could be shepherded towards the Machine, and, I had no doubt, it would explode at the touch of the heat ray. But wouldn’t that explosion just be useless…unless? While I thought, Sybil had been unfolding the balloon, and I now saw that its form was not simply a sphere, and that its mass of colours had a definite shape.
“What’s it meant to be?” I asked.
“I’d intended to offer you all a glimpse of a ghost or of the Monster in the Loch,” she said softly, sorrow fighting with memories of a better time. “But the artisans of London’s China-town that I paid for the balloon—their people have been making them for centuries before Montgolfier or de Bort—had their own ideas of what the Monster of the Loch might be like.”
On the muddy field of the camp site, a Chinese Dragon was taking shape, as the silk was unrolled.
“It might work,” I said later after we’d talked some more, “but it would work better on the Chinese than on Martians, these creatures must be scientists—why should they respond with fear and withdraw?”
“Chinese would see the balloon for what it is, they’re no fools. But what do we know about Mars, Fred?”
“That its old, older than Earth—born when the Sun was shrinking in its condensing to its present size.”
“And that its air is thin, and its atmosphere lost to space over the aeons by its lower gravity. There must be only enough now to support the Martians and whatever subsistence diet they can manage to produce. A balloon floats because of the pressure of the atmosphere around it, denser than its own interior gases. To a Martian a balloon will be a thing long ages forgotten. And how are they to be sure what creatures live and breath upon the Earth? Even we with all the learning of our present century have not yet explored all of Africa, nor do we know what might live and move in the depths of the Loch.”
“And with the balloon to distract from one side, and what explosives we can make from the black powder in the fireworks on the other.”
“It’s a chance. Not a big chance. The Machine must be armoured and strong, and we are weak. But by God, they killed my sister and I am not going to do nothing while they kill again.”
“No more am I, she was my friend too, and they have Bart, if he’s not already dead. But I think I have a better idea than trying to take the Dragon to the Loch’s edge. We’d be at the mercy of the wind, and it would only take one shot of their fire to burst the illusion asunder too far from them. We need them to come here, and we need a trap.” I pointed to the hay-ricks in the middle distance. “You’ll need to make things ready, and I’ll draw the Machine here.”
Sybil’s eye gleamed as I explained further, she had always been the more mischievous of the sisters and she rapidly made my few ideas, better and deeper. I kept my fingers crossed that she wouldn’t see that I might well be walking to my death, for it was more than likely that the Machine would simply burn me down on sight, unless I could find some way to intrigue it into following me. My eyes were caught by the dry logs we had set aside and covered for our camp-fires, and I thought of how bright they could be made to burn.
#
Lyttelton’s testimony, given later, as remembered by Sybil.
After I’d ‘relieved myself’ and sent the note book down to earth, in the hope someone would find it. I’d gone back, that is I’d been dragged back, to the interrogation. Well I shouted and gestured, all meaninglessly, and pointed here there and everywhere, and grabbed the pointing arm and tried to bend it, and did everything I could to confuse the issue. Eventually I think the Martians concluded that I was too stupid a creature to be of help to them, at least in that way. The end of the pointing arm had unfolded into a thing like a ghastly glass pippet with a sharpened end, and I was expecting that at any moment it would slash or embed itself in my throat. The screen of the glass lights was helpfully showing me images of Martians being connected by tubes to other creatures—things more like ourselves than they—as if I would be placated and made co-operative in my fate by the knowledge that I would be feeding a superior set of brains. It may be that they have so cowed the other races of Mars that they acquiesce in their own slaughter, and are pacified by images of the abattoir, but they would find that this was not the case with us.
The luck which has always shone on the Lytteltons was not however entirely extinguished even in this Martian nightmare, for before I could be punctured and put to the purposes of harvest, the first of the explosions went off. This although I did not know it was the work of good old Fred, exploding small packets of powder from the fireworks to attract the Martian’s attention. The handling arms, display, and pointer-syringe alike snapped back out of my ‘pot’, and through its partly transparent exterior I could see the Earth and Sky wheel as the Machine moved. The motion was a sickening skitter on the six legs, and I saw against the summer sky, the pale flash and flare of the fire-ray.
Airy must have been thinking furiously about Mars, and all that we knew or thought we knew about it. In particular what had been learned of the composition of its atmosphere, which we believed to be mostly nitrogen. How their fire ray worked he could not have been certain, but he must have known it could not rely upon oxygen in the atmosphere to fuel combustion if it had originally been designed to work upon Mars, perhaps to carve the canals that Schiaparelli observed thirty years ago, and Perrotin and Thollon confirmed thereafter. He had concluded that the extreme rapidity of the spread of fire on Earth would be a new thing to the Martians, that they would not at first connect the wildfires that came from such small explosions—in the (to them) hyper-oxygenated atmosphere of Earth—with the flares, nor with the work of their own ray, but that they would believe as the trees back from the Loch edge and the dry grass caught light, that they were lit by a more massive ray, trained on them by an Earth more technically advanced than their observations had trained them to expect—fielded perhaps by some unseen terrestrial super-race, which feasted in secret upon the foolish apes they had come to conquer.
Perceiving an attack from the South-West, an attack which their own heat-ray only fuelled in their minds, for their weapon was not powerful enough to make so great an inferno upon Mars, ergo the burning of the woodland was aimed at them, they retreated along the line Fred wished. It was a tactic that could not have worked but the once. These Martians had been shaken and battered by the misplacement of their landing, they had taken casualties before any interaction with man, and they had been hindered in the observing of the power of their ray by the damp and misty Loch. Only now at noon as Airy’s dried wood burned hard, did they see for the first time the fires of Earth.
They fled the fire as a troop of soldiers might flee a cannonade, up to higher ground, looking for vantage. Perhaps they expected to see a terrestrial War Machine, a human land-ironclad and draw their bead upon it. Instead I now know they came to the second set of traps. But I saw little of this, except the strange vision of a great dragon rearing in majesty out of the Earth itself, and then the Machine crashed down, and I went down with it, into the oblivion from which you woke me. Oh Sybil, it is good to have seen you once more, before the end.
#
From Sybil’s speech at the service for her sister. Inverness (1896)
We lost you to the Martians, my darling sister, and we took other casualties. Poor Airy was badly burnt directing the Machine towards the camp site, and though by doing so he rescued his friend, Bart Lyttelton, from the wreckage of the Machine, and no doubt many more in the towns around the Loch from the danger it presented to them, he was unable to save his friend from the wounds he had already suffered, and Bartemus died in my arms.
It is to Airy that credit must be given for the ruse that brought the Martian down, for although I had supplied the means, the balloon creature that they could not have expected nor understood, it was he who saw how best to make use of it. Held down and concealed under hay until the last moment, the Dragon sprang forth, as the rising hydrogen lifted the tent ropes and loose pegs that held it. To the Martians it must have seemed that they were attacked by superior science behind, and by monsters in front. We have sometimes speculated upon Venus being a younger world than ours, populated with the beasts of our prehistory. Maybe the Martians knew that fear, for a moment, as a prehistoric beast out of some dark Martian aeon lived again upon our barbaric globe. I hope they were afraid. Attempting to avoid this new horror they rushed to pass it, believing that where the monster stood was firm ground, only for three of their legs to go down into the boggy soil of the lavatory trench, and for the bomb in whose strings they had tangled themselves to explode against the upper part of their Machine.
Knowing now how armoured and how strong their Machines are, we must be grateful that we were, by providence able, to crack that shell, and that the clean fire of Earth cleansed that which was within. You gave your life, Dorothy, in the act of crying warning, as Bart gave his life in resisting, and I cry warning now to all Mankind that we must take up arms against the Martians who are not infallible, though their strength is great, and who are not incapable of error, although their minds may be vast, and resist! We know the Earth as they can never know it, and its defence is the task of our generation.
