The Martian War Read Online Free PDF

watching. He had so much to say to them.
    * * *
    Even long after the inferno had died down, Lowell found it difficult to sleep. He lay on his cot, smelling the dying smoke and harsh fumes, listening to the whisper of sand sloughing into the trench from the burned walls. Far off in the Tuareg camp a pair of camels belched at each other.
    Lying awake on his cot, he spoke aloud to the apex of his tent. “I am an experienced ambassador to foreign cultures. I have diplomatic credentials. How could Martians be stranger than what I have already seen?”
    If only they would arrive … .
    * * *
    Days later, the cylinder screamed through the air with the wailing of a thousand lost souls, trailing a flaming banner from atmospheric friction and a bright green mist from outgassing extraterrestrial substances.
    Lowell scrambled out of his shaded tent to see the commotion. A burnt smudge smoldered like a scar across the ceramic-blue sky. Booms of sound came in waves as the gigantic projectile crossed overhead.
    Moreau was already outside. “It’s the emissaries from Mars, Lowell!” He raised his hands in the air. “The Martians!”
    The cylinder crashed into the desert, spewing a plume of sand and dust. Lowell felt the tremor of impact in his knees. He and Moreau both laughed aloud and pounded each other on the back.
    After the burning of the enormous triangle, the place had rapidly turned into a ghost town, but Lowell and Moreau had remained here to wait. Now, as the dust settled in the distance, Lowell cried, “We are vindicated!”
    Moreau clapped him on the shoulder. “It is a very good feeling, Lowell.”
    The last Tuareg helpers retreated in panic, thrashing their camels to an awkward gallop across the dunes to a safe distance. Fools . They did not realize the magnitude of what was happening here.
    “The world as we know it is about to change, Moreau. Come, we must welcome our visitors from space.”
    Together, they set off toward the pit.

PART I

SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE

CHAPTER THREE
A MESSAGE FROM AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
    1894
    A nother day of writing finished already, and the morning was still fresh. H.G. Wells set his handwritten pages aside and fairly leaped from his desk, satisfied with what he had done and ready for the rest of the day with Jane. Despite its lack of great literary merit, he was confident the article would bring in a few more shillings from the Pall Mall Gazette .
    Such pieces were easy to do, and the readers certainly enjoyed them, though few of his writings contained any profound insights. Earning money as a writer was certainly better than being a teacher, a shopkeeper, or—he shuddered—a draper, handling bolts of cloth in a dreary warehouse. No, writing suited him best and, at twenty-eight years old, Wells had littlechance for a more active profession since his latest collapse and the continued decline of his health.
    Five years earlier, one of Wells’s hateful students had intentionally hurt him while they were playing football in the schoolyard. The bully had viciously kicked his teacher in the kidneys, though he later claimed it was an accident. Wells spat blood for months and never really recovered.
    In the seven years since Wells had graduated from the Normal Academy in South Kensington, he had accepted various teaching positions. But one night when returning from the train station he’d begun coughing blood, a relapse of his old kidney injury. The hemorrhage had continued, leading to a severe breakdown, which now required a long convalescence. When he first gave up teaching, he had stared at the specter of poverty—until he realized that he could write his little articles, and sell them.
    Now he was attempting to be a full-time writer, producing short stories and essays and a constant stream of ruminations that the magazines liked. Luckily, the 1870 Education Act had opened schooling to many formerly illiterate British children, and now the population had a new crop of readers hungry for fiction