Insistence of Vision (30 page)

I jumped, despite my efforts at self-control, as another, much
larger
machine appeared to the west of the first, towering majestically, also spouting bright red torrents of destruction. It set fires on the far southern horizon, the beam playing over city blocks, much as a cat licks a mouse.

“We shall never defeat such power,” Beauchamp said morosely.

“Certainly we do not have much time,” I allowed. “But you put my mind into harness, my friend.”

Around us people now openly bolted. Carriages rushed past without regard to panicked figures who dashed across the avenues. Horses clopped madly by, whipped by their masters. I stopped to unroll the paper from a Colombian cigar. Such times demand clear thinking. It was up to the higher minds and classes to display character and resolve.

“No, we must seize upon some technology closer to hand,” I said. “Not the Hertzian waves, but perhaps something allied...”

Beauchamp glanced back at the destructive tripods with lines of worry creasing his brow. “If rifle and cannon prove useless against these marching machines –”

“Then we must apply another science, not mere mechanics.”

“Biology? There are the followers of Pasteur, of course.” Beauchamp was plainly struggling to stretch his mind. “If we could somehow get these Martians – has anyone yet seen one? – to drink contaminated milk...”

I had to chuckle. “Too literal, my friend. Would you serve it to them on a silver plate?”

Beauchamp drew himself up. “I was only attempting –”

“No matter. The point is now moot. Can you not see where the second machine stands, atop the very site of Pasteur’s now ruined Institute?”

Although biology is a lesser cousin in the family of science, I nevertheless imagined with chagrin those fine collections of bottled specimens, now kicked and scattered under splayed tripod feet, tossing the remnants to the swirling winds. No help there, alas.

“Nor are the ideas of the Englishman, Darwin, of much use, for they take thousands of years to have force. No, I have in mind physics, but rather more recent work.”

I had been speaking from the airy spot wherein my head makes words before thought has yet taken form, as often happens when a concept lumbers upward from the mind’s depths, coming, coming...

Around us lay the most beautiful city in the world, already flickering with gas lamps lining the prominent avenues. Might that serve as inspiration? Poison gas? But no, the Martians had already proved invulnerable to even the foul clouds the Army had tried to deploy.

But then what? I have always believed that the solution to tomorrow’s problems usually lay in plain sight, in materials and concepts already at hand – just as the essential ideas for submarines, airships, and even interplanetary craft, have been apparent for decades. The trick lies in formulating the right combinations.

As that thought coursed through my mind, a noise erupted so cacophonously as to over-ride even the commotion further south. A rattling roar (accompanied by the plaint of already-frightened horses) approached from the
opposite
direction! Even as I turned round toward the river, I recognized the clatter of an explosive-combustion engine, of the type invented not long ago by Herr Benz, now propelling a wagon bearing several men and a pile of glittering apparatus! At once I observed one unforeseen advantage of horseless transportation – to allow human beings to ride
toward
danger that no horse on Earth would ever approach.

The hissing contraption ground to a halt not far from Beauchamp and me. Then a shout burst forth in that most penetrating of human accents – one habituated to open spaces and vast expanses.

“Come on, you Gol-durned piece of junk! Fire on up, or I’ll turn ya into scrap b’fore the Martians do!”

The speaker was dressed as a workman, with bandoliers of tools arrayed across his broad, sturdy frame. A shock of reddish hair escaped under the rim of a large, curve-brimmed hat, of the type affected by the troupe of Buffalo Bill, when that showman’s carnival was the sensation of Europe, some years back.

“Come now Ernst,” answered the man beside him, in a voice both more cultured and sardonic. “There’s no purpose in berating a machine. Perhaps we are already near enough to acquire the data we seek.”

An uneasy alliance of distant cousins, I realized. Although I have always admired users of the English language, for their boundless ingenuity, it can be hard to see the countrymen of Edgar Allen Poe as related to those of Walter Scott.

“What do you say, Fraunhoffer?” asked the Englishman of a third gentleman with the portly bearing of one who dearly loves his schnitzel, now peering through an array of lenses toward the battling tripods. “Can you get a good reading from here?”

“Bah!” The bald-pated German cursed. “From ze exploding buildings and fiery desolation, I get plenty of lines, those typical of combustion. But ze rays zemselves are absurd. Utterly absurd!”

I surmised that here were scientists at work, even as I had prescribed in my discourse to Beauchamp, doing the labor of sixty battalions. In such efforts by luminous minds lay our entire hope.

“Absurd how?” A fourth head emerged, that of a dark young man, wearing objects over his ears that resembled muffs for protection against cold weather – only these were made of wood, linked by black cord to a machine covered with dials. I at once recognized miniature speaker-phones, for presenting faint sounds directly to the ears. The young man’s accent was Italian, and curiously calm. “What is absurd about the spectrum of-a the rays, Professor?”

“There
iss
no spectrum!” the German expounded. “My device shows just the one hue of red light we see with our naked eyes, when the rays lash destructive force. There are no absorption lines, just a single hue of brilliant red!”

The Italian pursed his lips in thought. “One
frequency
, perhaps...?”

“If you
insist
on comparing light to your vulgar Hertzian waves –”

So entranced was I by the discussion that I was almost knocked down by Beauchamp’s frantic effort to gain my attention. I knew just one thing could bring him to behave so – the Martians must nearly be upon us! With this supposition in mind, I turned, expecting to see a disk-like foot of a leviathan preparing to crush us.

Instead, Beauchamp, white as a ghost, stammered and pointed with a palsied hand. “Verne, regardez!”

To my amazement, the invaders had abruptly changed course, swerving from the direct route to the Seine. Instead they turned left and were stomping swiftly toward the part of town that Beauchamp and I had only just left, crushing buildings to dust as they hurried ahead. At the time, we shared a single thought. The commanders of the battle tripods must have spied the military camp on the
Champs de Mars
. Or else they planned to wipe out the nearby military academy. It even crossed my mind that their objective might be the tomb of humanity’s greatest general – to destroy that shrine, and with it our spirit to resist.

But no. Only much later did we realize the truth.

Here in Paris, our vanquishers suddenly had another kind of conquest in mind.

ᚖ

Flames spread as evening fell. Although the Martian rampage seemed to have slackened somewhat, the city’s attitude of
sang froid
was melting rapidly into frothy panic. The broad boulevards that Baron Haussmann gave the city, during the Second Empire, proved their worth as aisles of escape while buildings burned.

But not for all. By nightfall, Beauchamp and I found ourselves across the river at the new army headquarters, in the tree-lined Tuilleries, just west of the Louvre – as if the military had decided to make its last stand in front of the great museum, delaying the invaders in order to give the curators more time to rescue treasures.

A great crowd surrounded a cage wherein, some said, several captured Martians cowered. Beauchamp rushed off to see, but I had learned to heed my subconscious – (to use the terminology of the Austrian alienist, Freud) – and wandered about the camp instead. Letting the spectacle play in my mind.

While a colonel with a sooty face drew arrows on a map, I found my gaze wandering to the trampled gardens, backlit by fire, and wondered what the painter, Camille Pissarro, would make of such a hellish scene. Just a month ago I had visited his apartment at 204 rue de Rivoli, to see a series of impressions he had undertaken to portray the peaceful Tuilleries. Now, what a parody fate had decreed for these same gardens!

The colonel had explained that invader tripods came in two sizes, with the larger ones appearing to control the smaller. There were many of the latter kind, still rampaging the city suburbs, but all three of the great ones reported to be in Northern France had converged on the same site before nightfall, trampling back and forth across the
Champs de Mars
, presenting a series of strange behaviors that as yet had no lucid explanation. I did not need a military expert to tell me what I had seen with my own eyes... three titanic metal leviathans, twisting and capering as if in a languid dance, round and round the same object of their fierce attention.

I wandered away from the briefing, and peered for a while at the foreign scientists. The Italian and the German were arguing vehemently, invoking the name of the physicist Boltzmann, with his heretical theories of “atomic matter,” trying to explain why the heat ray of the aliens should emerge as just a single, narrow color. But the discussion was over my head, so I moved on.

The American and the Englishman seemed more pragmatic, consulting with French munitions experts about a type of fulminating bomb that might be attached to a Martian machine’s kneecap – if only some way could be found to carry it there... and to get the machine to stand still while it was attached. I doubted any explosive device devised overnight would suffice, since artillery had been next to useless, but I envied the adventure of the volunteer bomber, whoever it might be.

Adventure.
I had spent decades writing about it, nearly always in the form of extraordinary voyages, with my heroes bound intrepidly across foaming seas, or under the waves, or over icecaps, or to the shimmering moon. Millions read my works to escape the tedium of daily life, and perhaps to catch a glimpse of the near future. Only now the future had arrived, containing enough excitement for anyone. We did not have to seek adventure far away. It had come to us. Right to our homes.

The crowd had ebbed somewhat, in the area surrounding the prisoners’ enclosure, so I went over to join Beauchamp. He had been standing there for hours, staring at the captives, our only prizes in this horrid war, lying caged within stout iron bars, a dismal set of figures, limp yet atrociously fascinating.

“Have they any new ideas?” Beauchamp asked in a distracted voice, while keeping his eyes focused toward the four beings from Mars. “What new plans from the military geniuses?”

The last was spoken with thick sarcasm. His attitude had changed since noon, most clearly.

“They think the key is to be found in the Master Tripods, those that are right now stomping flat the region near Eiffel’s Spire. Never have all three of the Master Machines been seen so close together. Experts suggest that the Martians may use
movement
to communicate. The dance they are now performing may represent a conference on strategy. Perhaps they are planning their next move, now that they have taken Paris.”

Beauchamp grunted. It seemed to make as much sense as any other proposal to explain the aliens’ sudden, strange behavior. While smaller tripods roamed about, dealing destruction almost randomly, the three great ones hopped and flopped like herons in a marsh, gesticulating wildly with their flailing legs, all this in marked contrast to the demure solidity of Eiffel’s needle.

For a time we stared in silence at the prisoners, whose projectile had hurtled across unimaginable space only to shatter when it struck an unlucky hard place on the Earth, shattering open and leaving its occupants helpless, at our mercy. Locked inside iron, these captives did not look impressive, as if this world weighed heavy on their limbs. Or had another kind of languor invaded their beings? A depression of spirits, perhaps?

“I have pondered one thing, while standing here,” Beauchamp mumbled. “An oddity about these creatures. We had been told that everything about them came in threes... note the trio of legs, and of arms, and of eyes –”

“As we have seen in newspaper sketches, for weeks,” I replied.

“Indeed. But regard the one in the center. The one around which the others arrayed themselves, as if protectively... or perhaps in mutual competition?”

I saw the one he meant. Slightly larger than the rest, with a narrower aspect in the region of the conical head.

“Yes, it does seem different, somehow... but I don’t see –”

I stopped, for just then I
did
see... and thoughts passed through my brain in a pell mell rush.

“Its legs and arms... there are
four!
Its symmetry is different! Can it be of another race? A servant species, perhaps? Or something superior? Or else...”

My next cry was of excited elation.

“Beauchamp! The Master Tripods... I believe I know what they are doing!