"Herbert George Wells. The War of the Worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора

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
Ottershaw 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 signalling 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.

"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 atmos-
phere 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 periodi-
cal 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. People in these
latter times scarcely realise 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