?The creations of Mr. Wells . . . belong unreservedly to an age
and degree of scientific knowledge far removed from the present,
though I will not say entirely beyond the limits of the possible.?
?Jules Verne -- Review
內容簡介：
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of H.
G. Wells''sfamous novel about a Martian invasion. To celebrate, we
are reissuing ouradaptation of this sci-fi classic with brand-new
cover art.
關於作者：
Sir Arthur C. Clarke is the honorary vice
president of the H. G. Wells Society and the author of more than
sixty works of science fiction, including the bestsellers 2001:
A Space Odyssey and Childhood’s End. He lives in
Colombo, Sri Lanka.
內容試閱：
Book One:
The Coming of the Martians
Chapter 1
The Eve of the War No one
would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century
that this world was being watched keenly and closely by
intelligences greater than man?s and yet as mortal as his own; that
as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were
scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a
microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and
multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to
and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their
assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the
infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought
to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought
of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or
improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of
those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be
other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to
welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space,
minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that
perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this
earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans
against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great
disillusionment.
The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about
the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and
heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by
this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth,
older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be
molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact
that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must
have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could
begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the
support of animated existence.
Yet so vain is man and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer up
to the very end of the nineteenth century expressed any idea that
intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all,
beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that
since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the
superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows
that Mars is not only more distant from life?s beginning but also
nearer its end.
The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has
already gone far indeed with our neighbor. Its physical condition
is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its
equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of
our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its
oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and
as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about
either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That
last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote,
has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The
immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects,
enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking
across space with instruments, and with intelligences such as we
have scarcely dreamed of they see, at its nearest distance only
35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope?our own
warmer planet, green with vegetation and gray with water, with a
cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through
drifting cloud-wisps of broad stretches of populous country and
narrow navy-crowded seas.
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them
at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us.
The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an
incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too
is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in
its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded
only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare
sunward is indeed their only escape from the destruction that
generation after generation creeps upon them.
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what
ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not
only upon animals such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon
its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human
likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of
extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty
years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians
warred in the same spirit?
The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing
subtlety?their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of
ours?and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh
perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have
seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men
like Schiaparelli watched the red planet?it is odd, by the way,
that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war?but
failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings
they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been
getting ready.
During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the
illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then
by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers
heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2nd. I am
inclined to think that this blaze may have been the casting of the
huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their
shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings as yet unexplained were
seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two
oppositions.
The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached
opposition Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical
exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge
outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred
toward midnight of the 12th; and the spectroscope to which he had
at once resorted indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen,
moving with an enormous velocity toward this earth. This jet of
fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared
it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out
of the planet, ?as flaming gases rushed out of a gun.?
A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there
was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the Daily
Telegraph, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest
dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard
of the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known
astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and
in the excess of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him
that night in a scrutiny of the red planet.
In spite of all that has happened since I still remember that vigil
very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed
lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the
steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit
in the roof?an oblong profundity with the star dust streaked across
it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the
telescope one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet
swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and
small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes and
slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so
silvery warm?a pin?s head of light! It was as if it quivered, but
really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the
clockwork that kept the planet in view.
As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to
advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired.
Forty millions of miles it was from us?more than forty million
miles of void. Few people realize the immensity of vacancy in which
the dust of the material universe swims.
Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light,
three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the
unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that blackness
looks on a frosty starlight night. In a telescope it seems far
profounder. And invisible to me because it was so remote and small,
flying swiftly and steadily toward me across that incredible
distance, drawing nearer every minute by so many thousands of
miles, came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was to
bring so much struggle and calamity and death to the earth. I never
dreamed of it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that
unerring missile.
That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from the
distant planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at the edge, the
slightest projection of the outline just as the chronometer struck
midnight; and at that I told Ogilvy and he took my place. The night
was warm and I was thirsty, and I went, stretching my legs clumsily
and feeling my way in the darkness, to the little table where the
siphon stood, while Ogilvy exclaimed at the streamer of gas that
came out toward us.
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 inhabitants who were
signaling 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 inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust,
visible through a powerful telescope on earth as little gray
fluctuating patches, spread through the clearness of the planet?s
atmosphere 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 periodical 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
realize the abundance and enterprise of our nineteenth-century
papers. For my own part, I was much occupied in learning to ride a
bicycle, and busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable
developments of moral ideas as civilization progressed.
One night the first missile then could scarcely have been
10,000,000 miles away I went for a walk with my wife. It was
starlight, and I explained the signs of the zodiac to her and
pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping zenithward, toward
which so many telescopes were pointed. It was a warm night. Coming
home, a party of excursionists from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us
singing and playing music. There were lights in the upper windows
of the houses as the people went to bed. From the railway station
in the distance came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and
rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance. My wife
pointed out to me the brightness of the red, green, and yellow
signal lights hanging in a framework against the sky. It seemed so
safe and tranquil.
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