No one
would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world
was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and
yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various
concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man
with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and
multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro over
this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their
empire over matter.
It is
possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a
thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of
them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It
is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most
terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to
themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of
space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and
cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and
surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the
great disillusionment. The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves
about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat
it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must
be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long
before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun
its course.
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The fact
that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have
accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has
air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the
very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life
might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor
was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with
scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it
necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer
its end.
The secular cooling that must someday
overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbor. Its physical
condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its
equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest
winter.
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Its air is much more attenuated than ours,
its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its
slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and
periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which
to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the
inhabitants of Mars.
The immediate pressure of necessity has
brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts.
And looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have
scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles
sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with
vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility,
with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous
country and narrow, navy crowded seas. And we men, the creatures who inhabit
this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and
lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an
incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief
of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world
is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior
animals.
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To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their
only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon
them. And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless
and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such
as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The
Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of
existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space
of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians
warred in the same spirit? The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with
amazing subtlety—their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of
ours—and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect
unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering
trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the
red planet—it is odd, by-the-bye, that for count- less centuries Mars has been
the star of war—but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the
markings they mapped so well.
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All that time the Martians must have been
getting ready. During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the
illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrot in
of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in the
issue of NATURE dated August 2. I am inclined to think that this blaze may have
been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from
which their shots were fired at us.
Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained,
were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions. The
storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle
of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing
intelligence of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had
occurred towards midnight of the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had
at once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving
with an enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had become
invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal puff of
flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, ‘as flaming gases
rushed out of a gun.’ A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next
day there was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the DAILY
TELEGRAPH, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that
ever threatened the human race.
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I
might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the
well-known astronomer, at Otter Shaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and
in the excess of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night
in a scrutiny of the red planet. In spite of all that has happened since, I
still remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory,
the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the
steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the
roof—an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved
about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle
of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such
a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse
stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was,
so silvery warm—a pin’s-head of light! It was as if it quivered, but really
this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that kept
the planet in view.
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As I watched, the planet seemed to grow
larger and smaller and to advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye
was tired. Forty millions of miles it was from us—more than forty millions of
miles of void. Few people realize the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of
the material universe swims.
Near it in the field, I remember, were
three faint points of light, three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all
around it was the unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that
blackness looks on a frosty starlight night. In a telescope it seems far
profounder. And invisible to me because it was so remote and small, flying
swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible distance, drawing nearer
every minute by so many thousands of miles, came the Thing they were sending
us, the Thing that was to bring so much struggle and calamity and death to the
earth. I never dreamed of it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that
unerring missile. That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from
the distant planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at the edge, the slightest
projection of the outline just as the chronometer struck midnight; and at that
I told Ogilvy and he took my place. The night was warm and I was thirsty, and I
went stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way in the darkness, to the
little table where the siphon stood, while Ogilvy exclaimed at the streamer of
gas that came out towards us.
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That night another invisible missile
started on its way to the earth from Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four
hours after the first one. I remember how I sat on the table there in the
blackness, with patches of green and crimson swimming before my eyes. I wished
I had a light to smoke by, little suspecting the meaning of the minute gleam I
had seen and all that it would presently bring me. Ogilvy watched till one, and
then gave it up; and we lit the lantern and walked over to his house. Down
below in the darkness were Otter Shaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of
people, sleeping in peace. He was full of speculation that night about the
condition of Mars, and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having in- habitants
who were signaling us. His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy
shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was in progress. He
pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken the same
direction in the two adjacent planets.
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‘The chances against anything manlike on Mars
are a million to one,’ he said. Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night
and the night after about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten
nights, a flame each night. Why the shots ceased after the tenth no one on
earth has attempted to explain.
It may be the gases of the firing caused
the Martians in- convenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through a
powerful telescope on earth as little grey, fluctuating patches, spread through
the clearness of the planet’s atmosphere and obscured its more familiar
features. Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at last, and
popular notes appeared here, there, and everywhere concerning the volcanoes
upon Mars. The seriocomic periodical PUNCH, I remember, made a happy use of it
in the political cartoon. And, all unsuspected, those missiles the Martians had
fired at us drew earthward, rushing now at a pace of many miles a second
through the empty gulf of space, hour by hour and day by day, nearer and
nearer. It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift
fate hanging over us, men could go about their petty concerns as they did. I
remember how jubilant Markham was at securing a new photograph of the planet
for the illustrated paper he edited in those days.
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People in these latter times scarcely realize
the abundance and enterprise of our nineteenth century papers. For my own part,
I was much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a series of
papers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas as civilization
progressed. One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been
10,000,000 miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight and I
explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a bright dot of
light creeping zenith ward, towards which so many telescopes were pointed. It
was a warm night. Coming home, a party of excursionists from Chertsey or Isle
worth passed us singing and playing music. There were lights in the upper
windows of the houses as the people went to bed. From the railway station in
the distance came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened
almost into melody by the distance. My wife pointed out to me the brightness of
the red, green, and yellow signal lights hanging in a framework against the
sky. It seemed so safe and tranquil.
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