Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds Read online

  Hudson screamed. The tentacle had snapped two coils around his body, swift as thought, like a python seizing a prey. Hudson struggled and screamed again. His captor lifted him effortlessly and bore him away outside.

  Holmes tiptoed down the rest of the stairs, his hand on the wall to support him. Small windows gave a faint wash of light in the cellar. From the barroom overhead came tappings, scrapings, a tinkling crash of glass or crockery. Having secured Hudson, the invader had reached back its tentacles to search for food, the sort of food mankind ate. Holmes stood like a statue. At last the heavy humming clank resumed, like the fall of mighty feet. The invader was departing.

  Up the stairs he headed again, and to the smashed front of the shop. The gigantic enemy stood hardly a block away. Its cowl turned from side to side. It swung around and came rushing back to the shop. Holmes faintly glimpsed a steel basket on the monster's back, and a struggling figure inside—Hudson.

  He raced back through the shop and down into the cellar. As he ran, he heard a heavy booming sound like an explosion, as though the whole front of the building had been driven in. The floor above him shook with the crash of broken lumber and masonry.

  Then, silence again. If the monster had meant to capture him, too, it was defeated by the violence of its own attack on the building. The whole structure must have collapsed, trapping him in the cellar.

  Moving silently, he explored the dark basement, by what light the window gave. This was a stone-flagged storage space. There were kegs of what seemed to be salt fish, and crates of dried vegetables; and, on a side shelf, some tinned and potted delicacies. He stuffed the great pockets of his coat with tins of lobster, sardines, tongue, liver pate. Now to get out again—but not the way he had come.

  For that invader who had taken Hudson might still be in view of the smashed front door. Holmes moved as quietly as possible to a coal bin at the rear of the cellar. A square trap showed above it. He climbed upon the coal, shoved the trap upward, and climbed through. He found himself emerging upon a paved court, with a plank roof overhead and a narrow alleyway beyond.

  He prowled across and through a fenced area oppo­site the back door of a haberdasher's. It was locked, but he produced a pick and expertly sprung the catch. On through he went, to the front. No sign of lurking menace in the street, nor anywhere all the way home.

  12

  In the morning he came out again to observe, first from the top of his own building, then from the para­pet of Camden House, looking through powerful field glasses. For some hours he probed the distances of London, clear to see in all directions now with the smoke of industry blown away. Once or twice he heard remote siren voices, but he saw no movement of the enemy except miles away to the northeast. He con­sidered, and this time discarded, a scouting adventure toward Primrose Hill.

  Again that night he lighted no lamp, but he brought out his violin and played softly to himself to help his thoughts, the composition that Martha had remembered and liked. Then he made more notes to add to his sheaf, until it was too dark to see the page.

  On Sunday morning he wakened to remind himself that the tenth and last of the cylinders from Mars must have found its landing place on earth overnight. But again, there were no menacing sounds of machines outside his windows. Holmes studied the case on the mantelpiece that for years had held his hypodermic needle, studied the bottles of cocaine and morphine, so long unused. But he felt no impulse to take any such stimulant now, not with a problem itself so stimulating, so energizing, that it brought out the best in him. He pondered the mental processes of the invaders. He had been wont to say, whimsically, that he himself was principally a brain, that the rest of his body was no more than an appendage. That brain of his might not be despicable in comparison with those of his adversaries.

  After a while, he went out and down to steal along Baker Street, almost all the way to Regent's Park with its shadowing trees. Primrose Hill and enemy head-quarters lay beyond, no more than a mile or so. As he lounged within a doorway to estimate the situation, a prolonged cry rang out above the treetops of Regent's Park, and Sherlock Holmes listened.

  That cry was not so strident, not so dominating, this time. It sounded like a true voice, not a metallic note, and it seemed pleading, even troubled. Holmes gazed at the trees of the park. Above and away from them hovered a thread of a paler green color, the vapor the invaders emitted from their mechanical devices. It hung there in place. Whatever gave it form did not move. Again rose the plaintive cry, almost as though it begged for compassion.

  Holmes frowned over the mystery. After several more moments he headed back home again, as circum­spectly as he had come forth. The cry sounded no more behind him.

  In his sitting room, he glanced at his watch. It was nearly noon, and he would do well to eat something. As before, he boiled water to make tea, while he opened a box of cracknels and two tins of choice Italian sar­dines. He partook of these things sparingly, then sat down in his armchair, his knees drawn up and his fingertips together, to rationalize what had happened and what still would happen.

  The invaders apparently patrolled London less freely. Their feet fell with heavy impact on the pavements, but their hold on the city seemed less arrogantly sure. That information he had sent to Birmingham—and by now Hopkins must have reached there—would help. So would later findings—if he could manage some way of sending them—help form new policies to help mankind deal with its danger.

  The red weed had given him a clue. It offered evi­dence to replace conjecture. Overwhelmingly swift in its growth, yet it perished almost as swiftly, fell to pieces, and washed away in the water. It could not face the conditions earth imposed for survival. Might this analogy be applied to the masters of those machines with their heat-rays and black smoke?

  Very likely.

  Holmes reflected deeply on certain aspects of world history, in which this race or that had been assailed by deadly plagues. Stalwart Indian warriors, for instance, had caught measles from white frontiersmen in America and had died by whole tribes from what Europe con­sidered a mild childhood disorder. On South Pacific islands, splendid physical specimens of native races had perished from nothing more deadly than the common cold. Their systems had not been conditioned to resist it, and it had destroyed them.

  Morse Hudson had been sick with a cold when he was snatched away from before Holmes's very eyes by the tentacle of an invader. Whatever they did with Hudson, what would they do with, or against, his disease?

  What could they do?

  Flying from Mars, they had assembled here in con­quered London. If a plague sprang up among them, none would escape it. Those fifty invaders would suffer and languish, would perish. Sherlock Holmes felt suddenly certain of that.

  Outside the open window, a bird sang. Holmes's saturnine face relaxed as he listened. He wished he had a companion with whom to discuss these concepts. Not that he wished Martha here, he was grateful that she was a comparatively safe distance apart from London. But it was too bad that Moriarty had been a menace, to be killed in that grapple at Reichenbach Falls. Holmes had overcome him by Oriental wrestling, what his Oriental coach had called baritsu, or jiu-jitsu, or judo. It used an opponent's strength against him; let his fierce overconfident aggression channel itself into a headlong fall to disaster. The same thing might happen now, if man could be found to apply the baritsu princi­ple and not collapse themselves in unreasoning panic.

  Had Moriarty been an ally, he would have had the mind and courage to help. Challenger, if he had sur­vived the invaders' assault, might yet join Holmes and help to plan a campaign. But the man Holmes wished for above all others was loyal, dependable Watson, wherever he might be.

  The lean face smiled. How often Holmes had teased Watson about not understanding the science of de­duction. As a joke, that was all very well, and Watson took it in good part. But Watson was a scientist him­self, would grasp and help rationalize this proposition of earthly diseases striking the invaders. He would see that, even if
the first battles had been lost, the war was not lost.

  For this was not simply a war of humanity against strangers from beyond space, it was a true War of the Worlds. Mother Earth herself would prevail against these unbidden, unwanted intruders.

  Watson? Was he still alive? Would he come home again?

  Holmes took up his cherrywood pipe and bent down to fill it with tobacco from the Persian slipper beside his chair.

  The door opened and Watson stumbled in.

  III

  GEORGE E. CHALLENGER

  VERSUS MARS

  by Edward Dunn Malone

  13

  Friday's twilight was falling over West Kensington when Challenger came home to Enmore Park. He lumbered in, slamming the door so fiercely that the whole house vibrated. Little Mrs. Challenger hurried into the hall to meet him.

  "Foolishness on every hand, arrant foolishness that brought disaster at Woking," he erupted before she could question him. "The Martians came out of their cylinder and struck down a whole crowd of people who came too close."

  "Thank heaven you have escaped, George," his wife quavered.

  "They would not listen to me," he went on angrily. "I came there with the one device that would have served, this crystal egg." From a side pocket of his tweed jacket he rummaged the thing, a blue light shining from it as he held it out. "I told Stent, the Astronomer Royal, and his stupid friend Ogilvy that it had power to communicate with those creatures—that I had seen them by its agency, and that they certainly must have seen me. I pleaded with the two fools, earnestly, eloquently!" His great voice rose to a roar. "And they? They brushed me aside, like a thing of no account, ignored my warnings of manifest danger, and formed a party under a white flag."

  "What is this crystal?" asked Mrs. Challenger, eyeing it timidly.

  "Oh, I don't believe I have mentioned it to you, Jessie. Sherlock Holmes and I have been observing the Martians in it. But I was speaking of the arrant stupidity of their flag of truce. Why should they think that a white flag would seem a peace overture to such alien observers? To these invaders—which is what I take them to be—it might well have seemed the very opposite."

  He strode off down the hall to his study and set the crystal on his table. His wife trotted at his heels.

  "You said that people were killed," she reminded him. "A whole crowd of them."

  "I saw that from a distance, after I had turned my back on Stent and Ogilvy. It was some sort of flashing light, which I judge burned as it struck. Those who survived ran. I heard about it from them."

  His brow furrowed. "Nor was that all, my dear. Some poor devil was shoved into the pit when the cylinder opened, pushed into it by fools crowding eagerly to see the invaders, and I thought I saw him caught by some sort of mechanical contrivance. There was no possible chance to go to his aid. Later, at a distance, I saw his head bob up and down, heard him cry out as though he struggled. No doubt they dragged him into the cylinder. Almost at once, they brought their weapon into play. I now wonder what they will do to their first prisoner of war."

  "You call it a war," she said softly.

  "I foresee that it will be a war between worlds." He gazed at his wife, and his scowling face relaxed. "Yes, my dear, G. E. C. has been spared to you, and to an undeserving nation which will need him badly. I am glad to be home, and I begin to realize that I have had no dinner. Might there be something in the kitchen that may be readily prepared?"

  "I'll ask Austin to bring you something."

  She pattered out. Left alone, Challenger stared down into the crystal. After a moment, he dragged out the black cloth to screen away the light. He was able to get a view of dust and shadows, where several bladdery bodies sprawled. They seemed to work with their tentacles, fitting together lengths and pieces of bright metal.

  "The thing moves," he grunted to himself. "It is articulated, after the manner of the jointed leg of a living creature. No slightest sign of a wheel anywhere."

  He turned his swivel chair and rose, walking out into the hall to where the telephone was fixed to the wall. He rang and asked for a number. Nobody an­swered and he hung up, fuming.

  "Holmes!" he snorted the name aloud. "What is he doing away from home at a time like this?"

  Back he went to his study. Austin appeared, quiet and leathery-faced, bearing a tray set with dishes. Challenger tucked a napkin under his bearded chin.

  "Hot roast pork, I see," he remarked. "And Brussels sprouts and scones, and gooseberry tart. Capital, Austin."

  He ate with good appetite, and Austin carried the dishes away. Again Challenger tried to telephone Holmes, and again there was no answer. He shook his great head unhappily. A newsboy cried shrilly out­side, and Challenger hurried out to buy a copy of the the special edition offered for sale. Standing in the street, he read the headlines and the leader article, then stormed into the house again.

  "Imbecility compounded!" he bellowed, flourishing the paper in his wife's startled face. "The inaccuracy of England's pressmen is rivaled only by the foolish misdirection of the scientific pundits."

  He jabbed at the page with his mighty forefinger. "Here it is stated, with complete certitude, that the Martians are harmless beyond the direct range of their weapons, and that they can scarcely crawl. Dolt, simpleton! Does he think—if thinking is not impossiible to a journalist—that they came among us with no means of transportation? They will have mechanical devices beyond anything that our earth has ever con­ceived. I question even if they are hindered by our gravity. For that matter, they may not be Martians. I tried to explain that to Stent, but the idiot refused to listen."

  Yet again he tried to call Holmes, and hung up with a wheezing sigh of discontent.

  "Holmes, at least, has caution and can understand the presence of danger," he said. "You tell me he went to Woking. I give myself to hope that he was not one of the fools who died there."

  She gave a little cry of protest. "Oh, George, how can you be so callous when those scientists died so miserably?"

  "Their loss, my dear, may be a tragedy considered from a conservative human standpoint," he admitted, more quietly. "For my part, I will seek to bear it with fortitude. But I value Holmes more than Stent, Ogilvy, and all their colleagues together, and my principal concern is for him. Our researches together with the crystal were rewarding."

  She still lingered, her wide eyes upon him. "George, I have a right to ask you why you never hinted to me of all these things until now. Did you believe I would be frightened to distraction?"

  He put the newspaper aside.

  "That, my dear, is exactly what I believed," he said, smiling in his beard. "Had I taken you into my con­fidence about this communication with Mars, and this knowledge that they were on their way to earth, you would never have slept at night and you would have worried by day, which in turn would have worried me. But now there is no reason to keep anything from you."

  And he bent his shaggy face to kiss her.

  Early on Saturday morning, he rang up Holmes again, and when there was no answer, he went out to buy newspapers.

  These were full of tremendous headlines and very little news. It was plain to see that the advent of the invaders—another cylinder had landed, not far from the first—tremendously excited the British Government, without any suggestion of how to receive such a visi­tation. Troops had encircled the Martian positions, heavy guns were moving up, but strict orders had been issued not to attack. Efforts must be made, said the authorities, to signal the Martians in their pit; and nobody seemed vastly to fear the emergence of any dangerous Martian technology. One witness was quoted as saying that the Martians wielded their heat-ray from a mechanical vehicle, "like a moving dish-cover." Challenger shook his head over these.

  "Typical journalistic garblings of hysterical reports," he said to Mrs. Challenger at breakfast. "Those creatures might laugh, if they could laugh, over these things. Why do the papers not tell us something of true importance—the fate of Holmes, for instance?"


  But by late morning, a letter came by special mes­senger. Challenger tore it open eagerly.

  "He has escaped, and is back in London," he said happily to his wife. "But hear what he says, to the effect that 'Very likely they consider us lower animals.' " He crumpled the sheet in his great paw. "Lower ani­mals, indeed; how much lower, does Holmes think? This was the conclusion he did not divulge to me, just as I did not develop to him my suspicion that the creatures observed on Mars are not native to Mars."

  "George, why do you say that?"

  "Because only now have I given it serious meditation. Well, I wonder if Holmes is right about lower animals. I have felt that we are better compared to savage tribes­men than to lower animals."

  "At least Mr. Holmes was fortunate to escape," offered Mrs. Challenger.

  "Fortunate be damned! He was wise and prudent. He tells about it modestly. Modesty is a trait which Holmes shares with myself."

  Austin brought in more special editions of the news­papers as the day went along. They reported that the Martians were busily working in their first pit. The town of Woking had been badly damaged, many of its buildings having been set ablaze by the heat-ray. Troops were concentrating in Surrey—infantry, ar­tillery, cavalry, and engineers—and their command­ing officers confidently predicted a swift destruction of the invaders. Challenger wondered what Holmes would say.

  Again he tried to telephone to 221-B Baker Street, but service was disrupted and he could not achieve a connection. He tried Martha Hudson's number, but in vain. At last he brought out the the crystal in his study and tented himself in the black cloth to look into it.

  He saw a gouged, tumbled place in the earth. In the background a machine moved and revolved, stack­ing what appeared to be bars of pale metal. Several invaders crept and slumped there, and in their midst Challenger made out a struggling something, a human figure—undoubtedly the man who had been shoved into the pit and captured.