Book 1 · Chapter 1

Nobody would’ve believed, back in the late 1800s, that this world was being watched closely by beings smarter than humans - but just as vulnerable.

While people were busy with their own lives, they were being studied, maybe even as carefully as a scientist looks at tiny creatures swimming in a drop of water. People went about their days, totally confident in their control over everything.

It’s possible those tiny organisms under a microscope do the same thing. Nobody thought about other planets as a potential danger, or even considered the possibility of life existing there. It’s wild to think back to how people thought back then.

Most people figured there might be other humans on Mars, maybe not as advanced, and ready to welcome missionaries.

But across the vastness of space, minds that were way beyond our own - like our minds are to animals - cool, detached, and envious, were staring at Earth, slowly and surely plotting against us. And early in the 1900s came a huge wake-up call.

The planet Mars, as you probably remember, orbits the sun about one hundred and forty million miles away, and gets barely half the sunlight and heat we do. If scientists are right about how planets form, it's older than Earth. And long before our planet cooled down, life must have started on Mars.

The fact that it’s only about a seventh of Earth’s size probably sped up its cooling, making it suitable for life. It has air and water - everything needed to support living things.

But people were so full of themselves, and blinded by their own pride, that no writer, right up to the end of the 1800s, even considered the possibility of intelligent life developing there, or even at all beyond what we have on Earth.

Nobody really understood that because Mars is older than Earth, and much smaller, and farther from the sun, it's not only further back in time, but closer to its end. The slow cooling that will eventually happen to our planet has already happened a long time ago on Mars.

We don't know much about its condition, but we know that even near the equator, the temperature barely reaches what we consider a cold winter day.

Its atmosphere is thinner than ours, its oceans have shrunk to cover only a third of its surface, and huge snowcaps grow and melt around the poles, flooding its temperate zones. This final stage of exhaustion, which seems so far away for us, is a current problem for the people of Mars.

The urgent need for survival has sharpened their minds, boosted their abilities, and hardened their hearts.

And using instruments and intelligence beyond our wildest dreams, they look across space and see, at its closest point, just thirty-five million miles sunward, a morning star of hope: our own warmer planet, green with plants and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere full of promise, and glimpses through the drifting clouds of vast populated areas and busy shipping lanes.

And we humans, the creatures who live on this earth, must seem just as strange and unimportant to them as monkeys and lemurs do to us. Scientists already know that life is a constant struggle to survive, and it seems the minds on Mars believe that too.

Their world is getting colder and colder, but our world is still packed with life - though they see us as inferior beings. For them, launching a war towards the sun is their only way to escape the destruction that slowly creeps closer, generation after generation.

And before we judge them too harshly, we need to remember how ruthless and destructive our own species has been, not just to animals like the extinct bison and the dodo, but to other groups of people too.

The Tasmanians, even though they looked human, were completely wiped out in just fifty years, in a war where European settlers wanted to eliminate them. Are we really so full of mercy that we should complain if the Martians fought with the same attitude?

The Martians seem to have planned their decline with incredible skill - their math knowledge is clearly way beyond ours - and they’s carried out their preparations with near-perfect agreement. If our tools had been better, we might have seen the trouble coming a long time ago, back in the 1800s.

Guys like Schiaparelli watched the red planet - it’s weird, by the way, that for centuries Mars has been known as the star of war - but they didn’t understand what they were seeing when they mapped its markings. All that time, the Martians were getting ready.

During the Mars opposition in eighteen ninety-four, a bright light was seen on the lit-up side of the planet, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin in Nice, and then by other people. English newspapers heard about it first in the issue of Nature dated August two.

I think that flash might have been when they cast the huge gun, in the giant pit they dug into their planet, from which they fired their shots at us . Strange markings, that we still can’t explain, were seen near that area during the next two oppositions. The storm hit us six years ago now.

As Mars got closer, Lavelle in Java sent messages through the astronomical exchange wires, telling about a huge burst of glowing gas on the planet.

It happened around midnight on the twelfth; and the spectroscope, which he used right away, showed a mass of burning gas, mostly hydrogen, moving towards Earth at a crazy speed. That jet of fire disappeared about a quarter past twelve.

He compared it to a gigantic burst of flame suddenly and violently shot out of the planet, "like flaming gases rushing out of a gun." It turned out to be a pretty accurate description.

But the next day, there was nothing about it in the newspapers except a tiny note in the Daily Telegraph, and the world was totally unaware of one of the biggest threats ever to face humanity.

I might not have heard about the eruption at all if I hadn’t run into Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was super excited about the news, and in his enthusiasm, invited me up that night to look at the red planet with him.

Even though so much has happened since, I still remember that night really clearly: the dark, quiet observatory, the shadowy lantern casting a weak glow on the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the telescope’s gears, and the little slit in the roof - a long, dark opening with stardust streaked across it.

Ogilvy was moving around, invisible but you could hear him. Looking through the telescope, you’d see a circle of deep blue and the little round planet floating in view. It seemed so small, so bright and tiny, with faint lines across it, and a little flattened, not perfectly round.

But it was so little, so silvery and warm - like a pinprick of light! It looked like it was quivering, but really it was the telescope shaking from the gears keeping the planet in view.

As I watched, the planet seemed to get bigger and smaller, moving closer and farther away, but that was just my eyes getting tired. It was forty million miles away - more than forty million miles of empty space. Most people don’t realize how much nothingness there is in the universe.

Near it, I remember, were three faint points of light, three super-distant stars you could only see through a telescope, and all around it was the endless darkness of space. You know how that blackness looks on a frosty, starry night. Through a telescope, it seems even deeper.

And invisible to me because it was so far away and small, flying quickly and steadily towards me across that incredible distance, getting closer every minute by thousands of miles, came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that would bring so much trouble, disaster, and death to Earth.

I never thought about it like that as I watched; no one on Earth dreamed about that unstoppable missile. That night, there was another burst of gas shooting out from the distant planet. I saw it.

A red flash at the edge, the tiniest bit of a change in the outline, just as the clock struck midnight; and at that I told Ogilvy and he took my place.

The night was warm and I was thirsty, so I went stumbling around clumsily in the darkness to the little table where the soda siphon was, while Ogilvy was freaking out about the stream of gas coming toward us.

That night, another invisible missile started its journey to Earth from Mars, just a little over twenty-four hours after the first one. I remember sitting on the table there in the darkness, with patches of green and red swimming before my eyes.

I wished I had a lighter to smoke by, totally clueless about what that tiny flash of light meant and everything it would eventually bring me. Ogilvy watched until one, and then gave up; and we turned on the lantern and walked over to his house.

Down below in the darkness were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of people, sleeping soundly. He was full of theories that night about what Mars was like, and laughed at the silly idea that it had people signaling us.

His idea was that meteorites might be falling on the planet, or that there was a huge volcanic eruption going on. He pointed out how unlikely it was that life had evolved in the same way on both planets. "The odds against anything even remotely human on Mars are a million to one," he said.

Hundreds of people saw the flash that night and the night after around midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a flash each night. No one on Earth has ever figured out why the flashes stopped. Maybe the gases from the firing bothered the Martians.

Thick clouds of smoke or dust, visible through a powerful telescope on Earth as little grey, shifting patches, spread through the planet’s clear atmosphere and hid its familiar features.

Even the newspapers finally caught wind of the weird stuff happening, and articles popped up everywhere about the volcanoes on Mars. I remember Punch, a funny magazine, used it in a political cartoon.

Totally under the radar, those missiles the Martians fired at us were zooming toward Earth, picking up speed through space - miles every second, getting closer and closer every hour, every day. It's crazy to me now that, with all that doom hanging over us, people just went about their normal lives.

I remember Markham was stoked to get a new photo of the planet for the illustrated paper he was editing back then. People these days don't really get how awesome and ambitious our newspapers were in the 1800s.

I was busy learning to ride a bike and writing a bunch of papers about how moral ideas might change as society moved forward. One night (the first missile was probably over ten million miles away) I went for a walk with my wife.

It was a clear night, and I showed her the constellations, pointing out Mars - a bright spot creeping across the sky, towards which so many telescopes were pointed. It was a warm night. Coming home, we passed a group of people from Chertsey or Isleworth who were singing and playing music.

Lights were on in the upper windows of houses as people went to bed. From the train station in the distance, you could hear the sound of trains moving around, a kind of clanging and rumbling that the distance softened into almost a melody.

My wife pointed out how bright the red, green, and yellow signal lights were hanging in a framework against the sky. It felt so safe and chill.