The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells [little red riding hood ebook free .txt] 📗

these seem to have been brought in each cylinder, and

all were killed before earth was reached. It was just as well for

them, for the mere attempt to stand upright upon our planet would have

broken every bone in their bodies.

 

And while I am engaged in this description, I may add in this place

certain further details which, although they were not all evident to

us at the time, will enable the reader who is unacquainted with them

to form a clearer picture of these offensive creatures.

 

In three other points their physiology differed strangely from

ours. Their organisms did not sleep, any more than the heart of man

sleeps. Since they had no extensive muscular mechanism to recuperate,

that periodical extinction was unknown to them. They had little or no

sense of fatigue, it would seem. On earth they could never have moved

without effort, yet even to the last they kept in action. In twenty-four hours they did twenty-four hours of work, as even on earth is

perhaps the case with the ants.

 

In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the

Martians were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the

tumultuous emotions that arise from that difference among men. A

young Martian, there can now be no dispute, was really born upon earth

during the war, and it was found attached to its parent, partially

BUDDED off, just as young lilybulbs bud off, or like the young animals

in the fresh-water polyp.

 

In man, in all the higher terrestrial animals, such a method of

increase has disappeared; but even on this earth it was certainly the

primitive method. Among the lower animals, up even to those first

cousins of the vertebrated animals, the Tunicates, the two processes

occur side by side, but finally the sexual method superseded its

competitor altogether. On Mars, however, just the reverse has

apparently been the case.

 

It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific repute, writing long before the Martian invasion, did

forecast for man a final structure not unlike the actual Martian

condition. His prophecy, I remember, appeared in November or

December, 1893, in a long-defunct publication, the PALL MALL BUDGET,

and I recall a caricature of it in a pre-Martian periodical called

PUNCH. He pointed out—writing in a foolish, facetious tone—that the

perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs;

the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as

hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential

parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection

would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the

coming ages. The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one

other part of the body had a strong case for survival, and that was

the hand, “teacher and agent of the brain.” While the rest of the

body dwindled, the hands would grow larger.

 

There is many a true word written in jest, and here in the Martians

we have beyond dispute the actual accomplishment of such a suppression

of the animal side of the organism by the intelligence. To me it is

quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not

unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the

latter giving rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last)

at the expense of the rest of the body. Without the body the brain

would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of

the emotional substratum of the human being.

 

The last salient point in which the systems of these creatures

differed from ours was in what one might have thought a very trivial

particular. Micro-organisms, which cause so much disease and pain on

earth, have either never appeared upon Mars or Martian sanitary

science eliminated them ages ago. A hundred diseases, all the fevers

and contagions of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such

morbidities, never enter the scheme of their life. And speaking of

the differences between the life on Mars and terrestrial life, I may

allude here to the curious suggestions of the red weed.

 

Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green

for a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood-red tint. At any rate, the

seeds which the Martians (intentionally or accidentally) brought with

them gave rise in all cases to red-coloured growths. Only that known

popularly as the red weed, however, gained any footing in competition

with terrestrial forms. The red creeper was quite a transitory

growth, and few people have seen it growing. For a time, however, the

red weed grew with astonishing vigour and luxuriance. It spread up

the sides of the pit by the third or fourth day of our imprisonment,

and its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe to the edges of

our triangular window. And afterwards I found it broadcast throughout

the country, and especially wherever there was a stream of water.

 

The Martians had what appears to have been an auditory organ, a

single round drum at the back of the head-body, and eyes with a visual

range not very different from ours except that, according to Philips,

blue and violet were as black to them. It is commonly supposed that

they communicated by sounds and tentacular gesticulations; this is

asserted, for instance, in the able but hastily compiled pamphlet

(written evidently by someone not an eyewitness of Martian actions)

to which I have already alluded, and which, so far, has been the chief

source of information concerning them. Now no surviving human being

saw so much of the Martians in action as I did. I take no credit to

myself for an accident, but the fact is so. And I assert that I

watched them closely time after time, and that I have seen four, five,

and (once) six of them sluggishly performing the most elaborately

complicated operations together without either sound or gesture. Their

peculiar hooting invariably preceded feeding; it had no modulation,

and was, I believe, in no sense a signal, but merely the expiration of

air preparatory to the suctional operation. I have a certain claim to

at least an elementary knowledge of psychology, and in this matter I

am convinced—as firmly as I am convinced of anything—that the

Martians interchanged thoughts without any physical intermediation.

And I have been convinced of this in spite of strong preconceptions.

Before the Martian invasion, as an occasional reader here or there may

remember, I had written with some little vehemence against the

telepathic theory.

 

The Martians wore no clothing. Their conceptions of ornament and

decorum were necessarily different from ours; and not only were they

evidently much less sensible of changes of temperature than we are,

but changes of pressure do not seem to have affected their health at

all seriously. Yet though they wore no clothing, it was in the other

artificial additions to their bodily resources that their great

superiority over man lay. We men, with our bicycles and road-skates,

our Lilienthal soaring-machines, our guns and sticks and so forth, are

just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked

out. They have become practically mere brains, wearing different

bodies according to their needs just as men wear suits of clothes and

take a bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in the wet. And of their

appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the

curious fact that what is the dominant feature of almost all human

devices in mechanism is absent—the WHEEL is absent; among all the

things they brought to earth there is no trace or suggestion of their

use of wheels. One would have at least expected it in locomotion. And

in this connection it is curious to remark that even on this earth

Nature has never hit upon the wheel, or has preferred other expedients

to its development. And not only did the Martians either not know of

(which is incredible), or abstain from, the wheel, but in their

apparatus singularly little use is made of the fixed pivot or

relatively fixed pivot, with circular motions thereabout confined to

one plane. Almost all the joints of the machinery present a

complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully

curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter of detail, it is

remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases

actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic

sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully

together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the

curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and

disturbing to the human beholder, was attained. Such quasi-muscles

abounded in the crablike handling-machine which, on my first peeping

out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder. It seemed

infinitely more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in the

sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual tentacles, and moving

feebly after their vast journey across space.

 

While I was still watching their sluggish motions in the sunlight,

and noting each strange detail of their form, the curate reminded me

of his presence by pulling violently at my arm. I turned to a

scowling face, and silent, eloquent lips. He wanted the slit, which

permitted only one of us to peep through; and so I had to forego

watching them for a time while he enjoyed that privilege.

 

When I looked again, the busy handling-machine had already put

together several of the pieces of apparatus it had taken out of the

cylinder into a shape having an unmistakable likeness to its own; and

down on the left a busy little digging mechanism had come into view,

emitting jets of green vapour and working its way round the pit,

excavating and embanking in a methodical and discriminating manner.

This it was which had caused the regular beating noise, and the

rhythmic shocks that had kept our ruinous refuge quivering. It piped

and whistled as it worked. So far as I could see, the thing was

without a directing Martian at all.