War of the Worlds Page 6

  Trees and houses at the edge of town had also been stricken by fire. Along the street beyond these, people huddled at windows or peered in terror from doors. Nobody seemed to move in the streets except the two who now made their way toward Briarbrae, Sir Percy’s beautiful home. They entered at the door and came into the study, where they conferred; Sir Percy still shaken, his companion earnest but calm.

  Sir Percy scribbled a telegram and sent a servant running with it to wire to London, then dashed off others and sent a second man with those. At last he held out a shaking hand to his guest.

  “I haven’t had time to say thank you,” he said in a voice that could barely be heard. “Out there, when things were happening as though in a nightmare, you knew what to do, you kept us both safe and brought us away.”

  “Knowing what to do has been my lifelong study,” said the other. “At the time, I was thankful that they brought no worse weapon into play than that flashing beam.”

  “What weapon could be worse?” asked Sir Percy.

  “I should think they have it at hand. The ray might be compared to a pistol, something for short range and direct fire, for it could not reach us behind our dune. But very probably they are provided with something that can strike a target under cover, comparable, perhaps, to a rifle in human hands.”

  “What would it be like?”

  “There you call on me for a guess, and I am not prepared to make it. But I think your servants are setting out something for us to eat.”

  They went into the dining hall, where a supper of cold meat and bread and salad had been laid out. As they ate, a man arrived with a message from London. Troops were being sent to augment the sketchy units already on the scene. The night went on, at about one o’clock word arrived that another cylinder had landed at nearby Byfleet.

  “Two cargoes of horror have come to us across space,” Sir Percy half moaned. “What next?”

  “A third cargo next,” readily answered his guest, “and, after that, a fourth. Eight more in all making a total of ten.”

  “Yes, yes, there were ten flashes from Mars, were there not? I had forgotten.”

  “It would be well to bear it most faithfully in mind.”

  At last they sought their bedrooms to rest as well as they could, and were up at early dawn of Saturday. They dressed quickly, drank hot coffee, and walked together to the Woking railroad station to catch the first train for London. Sir Percy stopped to speak to the grizzled postmaster.

  “More troops will be coming here, with trained observers and heavy weapons,” he said. “Information on all that happens here is to be wired to my office by Brigadier Waring or various members of his staff. Now, here are my urgent orders to you personally. Any message addressed to me is to be sent in duplicate to my friend here.”

  “Don’t I know this gentleman, Sir Percy?” asked the postmaster. “I seem to remember that he visited you here in ‘88.”

  “Yes, he came to help me in a confidential matter that concerned the Italian naval treaty. This is Mr Sherlock Holmes, and his address in London is 221B Baker Street.”

  Eight

  Sherlock Holmes hailed a cab when he got off the train at Waterloo Station and was in Baker Street by seven o’clock. He went upstairs to 221B, but did not enter his own flat. Instead, he touched the bell above the doorplate that read Mrs HUDSON. In a moment his landlady opened to him. She was a stately blonde woman with a rosy face, smiling in happy welcome.

  “Has Watson come home?” he asked quickly.

  “No, he telephoned last night. He says he must stay with his poor old servant Murray until tomorrow, perhaps longer.”

  “Then we are alone.”

  Holmes stepped into her sitting room as he spoke and closed the door to the hall. They kissed, holding each other close, her rich curves pressed against his sinewy leanness. “My dear,” she whispered against his cheek, “I have always loved you.”

  “Let us not say quite always, Martha,” he amended, smiling. “Not until we met at Donnithorpe, when I was an undergraduate beginning my work as a consulting detective and you were a poor, troubled village girl.”

  “You are always exact, even when you are kissing me.”

  “Yes, call me a precisionist in that, too.”

  Expertly their mouths joined again.

  “You solved my troubles then,” she said, after long moments. “You set me free from Morse Hudson.”

  “It was then that I decided what my career would be.”

  “And you helped me find this place in town, and then you came to live here. You found Dr Watson as a fellow lodger, so that between you, you could pay the rent I must have.” She released him at last and drew back, relishing him with her eyes. “But have you had breakfast?”

  “Only a quick cup of coffee with Sir Percy Phelps.”

  “Then here, all ready for you.”

  She stepped to a table and lifted a silver cover from a chafing dish. Holmes smiled again as he sat down. “Curried chicken,” he said approvingly. “I often say, my dear, that you have as sound a notion of breakfast as a Scotchwoman.”

  Happily she served his plate and he ate with good appetite, telling her of what had befallen on Horsell Common outside Woking.

  “How fortunate for Sir Percy that you were there with him,” she said. “Only you would have thought to move so quickly and rescue him. Your mind has never moved with such magnificent speed as in that moment of danger last night.”

  “I’ll never tell Watson about it,” said Holmes, eating chicken. “Sometimes he embarrasses me with his praise. You never embarrass me with anything, because I love you.”

  Her blue eyes were wide with worry. “But however did these Martians come here, over those millions and millions of miles?”

  “The press gave us notice of that. Midnight after midnight, a flash of light on Mars like an explosion, ten of them in all. Each flash propelled a cylinder into space, aimed here to seek us out. The second cylinder has already arrived, and a third should be here by tonight.”

  Her hands clasped in admiration, like a girl happy with her first love. “You are so well-informed of everything. But once Dr Watson wrote that you know nothing of astronomy.”

  “Oh, I told Watson that as a joke, in the first days of our acquaintance, but I do my best to learn something about everything. Only lately I reread Moriarty’s Dynamics of an Asteroid, and found new stimulation in it.”

  “Let Dr Watson think what he will,” she said. “I believe that you have truly learned everything possible.”

  “Not I,” he demurred. “The greatest thing any of us can learn is that we can always learn something more.” He put down his fork and rose. “Yes, Moriarty’s study stimulated me, and I am stimulated by your excellent cooking. Thank you, my dear.”

  He went quickly down the hall to his own quarters. A letter was stuck in the frame of the door. He opened it and read:

  Friday morning

  My dear Holmes,

  Nobody, naturally, reflects that these invaders of Earth at Woking came prepared to be violent. If you have planned to join me there, I urge you to stay clear. I might be killed, and in that case mankind would doubly need your intelligence, which is not greatly inferior to my own, to help it in meeting this manifest danger.

  Yours truly,

  George Edward Challenger

  As he finished the letter and put it away, a messenger knocked and gave him a telegram:

  MARTIANS UNDER OBSERVATION FROM SAFE POSITIONS WILL FIRE AT FIRST HOSTILE MOVE

  SIR PRETERICK WARING KCB

  BRIG COMM

  Through the open window drifted the long-drawn cry of a newsboy. Holmes hurried down and bought a newspaper. STRANGE REPORT FROM WOKING, said the headline equivocally, and beneath this was a garbled account of the things he had seen and knew at firsthand. He sat at his desk and wrote rapidly:

  My dear Challenger,

  I went to Woking on Friday before receiving your letter, but did not find you.
I saw no Martians myself: however, descriptions tally with what we observed in the crystal egg I left with you.

  Like you, I was prepared for hostility, and this weapon people are beginning to call the heat-ray is disaster to face. Nor do we know as yet what more terrible armament they may have.

  Without indulging too greatly in surmise, I suggest that these are pioneers of a mass migration across space, with more to arrive when Mars and Earth are next in opposition, in 1904. Very likely they consider us lower animals, to be exterminated as pests or possibly to be exploited in some way.

  Keep the crystal in your possession. Its properties seem to include interplanetary communication. The Martians may try to recapture it. What if we could trap one of them in the attempt and learn more about how to oppose him and his fellows?

  It occurs to me that health on a strange world may be one of their problems. You may enlarge on the supposition.

  With warm regards,

  Sherlock Holmes

  He sealed the sheet in an envelope and rang for Billy.

  “See that this letter goes to Enmore Park, in Kensington West, by special messenger,” he said.

  “What’s all this about these Martian people, Mr Holmes?” asked Billy. “You were there, weren’t you? The paper says they can hardly creep about in that pit of theirs.”

  “Never trust such newspaper reports, Billy. They have complex machines to fight with, and undoubtedly to travel with. By the way, where does your mother live?”

  “Why, in Yorkshire. She went there last year, to raise a market garden.”

  “Here, my boy,” Holmes held out a pound note. “After you have seen that letter on its way to Professor Challenger, you may take a holiday to visit your mother.”

  Billy pocketed the note, somewhat slowly. “But I’d rather stay here in London, sir. Things sound like excitement hereabouts, they do.”

  “Excitement is exactly the word, Billy. But there is apt to be disruption, too, and very likely dangerous disruption. I would feel better if you were at a safe distance.”

  Billy departed. Holmes returned to his desk and looked through a great sheaf of his hasty notes, making fuller and clearer organisation in writing. Several excited callers came to his door with news, rumours mostly, of heavy fighting in Surrey. That evening, Martha appeared with a veal and ham pie and a fruit compote for their dinner.

  “You’re troubled,” she ventured as Holmes opened a bottle of Beaune.

  “And quite accurately deduced, my dear Martha,” he said. “A terrible fate seems to have befallen those unfortunate communities in Surrey. I have a special kindness for that country; it was there that I solved a puzzle at Reigate and explained a mystery at Wisteria Lodge, besides helping Sir Percy Phelps when he thought he had lost the naval treaty. Yet, bad as things are in Surrey, they may become bad here in London.” He considered that statement. “Worse,” he amended.

  She ate slowly. “But the people out there on the street do not seem particularly frightened, my dear.”

  “Because they have not taken thought. Their minds are incapable of grasping the implications of this strange invasion. But I find myself talking like my respected friend, the professor, who holds the intellect of the entire human race, except for his own, in utter scorn. I wish I could talk to him. Yes, or to Watson.”

  She was able to smile at that. “You have always laughed at Dr Watson when he is unable to follow your own reasoning.”

  “Yes, I have had my fun with him, but his mind has a good, sound scientific organisation, and again and again he has proved his great courage and dependability. Now,” he said, rising. “I must go to the telegraph office, but you may expect me back shortly. By the way, I sent Billy on a holiday to his mother in Yorkshire. Where is your maid?”

  “I let her go home to Cheltenham for the weekend.”

  “Then I hope she stays there, well away from London. But let us think of ourselves for a moment or two.” He went to take his violin from its case. “Before I go, how about a little night music?”

  She sat and listened happily as he played a Paganini melody, then a wilder, more haunting strain.

  “What is that?” Martha asked.

  “I learned it from a gypsy. It was all he could pay for my help when he was falsely accused of picking pockets. I think it is beautiful.”

  Again he changed key and mood. She sat up straight and alert.

  “I remember that, my dearest,” she said. “You played it long ago, at the Trevor house at Donnithorpe. I heard you from outside the window. Who composed it?”

  “I did,” he told her, smiling in his turn. “Once I had ambitions to play sweet music, to be thanked and renowned for it. But as you know, I took another way of life, and am content not be so greatly celebrated for my labours.”

  He returned the violin to its case and went out on his errand.

  That night, and on Sunday morning while the church bells rang, Holmes interviewed refugees from the towns in Surrey. In shaky voices they told him of troops wiped out wholesale by the flashing reflector devices that by now were called the heat-ray, and of gigantic machines like “boilers on stilts”, on the swift move everywhere below London. By Sunday noon, Holmes gathered that whole communities had been effortlessly destroyed and that military forces — horse, foot and artillery had proved helpless against those stalking, merciless fighting-machines. Back in his sitting room that afternoon, he made two copies of all he had learned and his own estimate of the desperate situation.

  “And I have had no further word from either Watson or Challenger,” he caid to Martha. “Small wonder — the telephone service seems completely disrupted by a great flood of calls. Well, I shall leave one copy of my notes here.”

  He stuck them to the mantelpiece with a jacknife. Martha winced as the point of the blade drove into the varnished wood, but he did not seem to notice.

  “The third cylinder’s arrival has been reported,” he went on. “It fell last night, again in Surrey. Apparently they are able to concentrate their landfalls within a few miles of each other and consolidate a position from which to operate.”

  “At least they have not come to London,” offered Martha, though with no great optimism.

  “But it takes no great deductive reasoning to see that this hopelessly one-sided war of the worlds will move toward us,” he replied. “They are well aware that this is the largest city, the largest center of population on Earth, and they mean to capture it.”

  “But London,” she said. “Great, powerful London. How can London fall to them?”

  “That, my dear Martha, you and I shall not be here to witness. Both Billy and your maid have gone to safe distances, and so shall we go. Pack some things, my dear while I do the same.”

  “Yes, yes,” she agreed quickly, “but where shall we go?”

  “If you approve, we shall take our own holiday up at Donnithorpe, where we have not been for almost twenty-five years. You told me that your uncle is now landlord of the inn there, and my old friend Trevor is justice of the peace, like his father before him.”

  Yet again he went to the post office, where he read more tersely wired reports of Martians on the move. Five of them, it seemed, came with each cylinder. That meant fifteen thus far, with more on the way. One of their fighting-machines had been smashed by an artillery shell at Weybridge, though the batteries there had been promptly obliterated by its comrades. Descriptions of those fighting-machines were exaggerated and sometimes incoherent passages, and Holmes felt more inclined to accept the “boilers on stilts” comparison he had heard on the street. Even as he read the telegrams, all information from Surrey ceased abruptly. The operator told Holmes that telegraphic communication had broken down and that railway service was disrupted.

  He swiftly made his way home. There he packed two valises and wrote a note to Watson, spiking it to the mantelpiece with his report. As he did so, a knock sounded. He opened the door to Sir Percy Phelps.

  “Come in, my dear fellow,”
said Holmes. “I am just on my way from town, and I strongly advise you to go as well. The news here is of continual disaster.”

  “But you must not leave,” said Sir Percy, his voice shakily earnest. “I have brought you a most important secret commission.”

  He handed a folded paper to Holmes, who spread it out and read it at a glance. He frowned in concentration over it.

  “Dear me,” he said after a moment. “This appears to give me the most sweeping powers and responsibilities.”

  “The Government itself is leaving for Birmingham,” said Sir Percy. “We are asking you, Holmes, in the name of your country — nay, in the name of all human-kind — to be our observer here in London, help to plan for whatever can be done. You cannot leave.”

  “But I must,” said Holmes flatly. “I have another important duty in Norfolk, which I consider to be as important as this assignment you offer. What is my brother Mycroft doing? He reasons profitably in an armchair, which may well be exactly the place in which to resolve this matter.”

  “Your brother has accompanied the Royal Family up to Balmoral Castle in Scotland,” replied Sir Percy. “No, Holmes, there is no living man better fitted, none more worthy, of this important and dangerous commission than yourself. Surely someone else is able to represent you in Norfolk.”

  “I must ago there in person,” insisted Holmes. “But I promise you to come back as soon as I can.”

  “Back to London, Holmes? In the face of the Martians?”

  “I do not despair of successfully accomplishing that return. Meanwhile let me communicate with you by wire at Birmingham, and you may say that I can be relied upon to return and do my best duty here.”

  “Thank you, Holmes, thank you in the name of the Government itself.” Sir Percy wrung his friend’s hand. “Let me say one thing more. If you and I survive this crisis, if England and humanity survive it, a fitting reward will be given you for your services. I am in a position to speak for people in the highest places. There will be recognition for you. A knighthood.”