Book 2 · Chapter 2

After eating, we crept back to the kitchen helpers’ area, and I must’ve dozed off again, because when I looked around, I was alone. That pounding vibration kept going, super annoying. I whispered for the priest a bunch of times, and finally felt my way to the kitchen door.

It was still daylight, and I saw him across the room, leaning against the triangular window that looked out onto the Martians' area. His shoulders were hunched, so I couldn't see his head.

I could hear a bunch of noises, almost like those in a car repair shop; and the place was rocking with that heavy thud. Through the hole in the wall, I could see the top of a tree touched with gold and the warm blue of a peaceful evening sky.

For a minute or so, I kept watching the priest, and then I moved forward, crouching and stepping carefully around the broken dishes that covered the floor. I touched the priest’s leg, and he jumped so hard that a bunch of plaster started sliding down the outside and fell with a loud crash.

I grabbed his arm, worried he’s going to yell, and we stayed crouched for a long time. Then I turned to see how much of our wall was still standing.

The plaster falling had left a vertical crack open in the rubble, and by carefully climbing across a beam, I was able to peek out through the gap into what had been a quiet neighborhood street the night before. Things had changed a lot.

The fifth cylinder must’ve landed right in the middle of the house we’ve visited first. The building was gone, completely smashed, crushed, and scattered by the impact. The cylinder was now way below the original foundations - deep in a hole, already way bigger than the pit I’d looked into at Woking.

The ground all around it had splashed out from that huge impact - "splashed" is the only word - and piled up in heaps that hid the remains of the houses nearby. It had acted exactly like mud hit by a powerful hammer.

Our house had collapsed backwards; the front part, even on the ground floor, had been destroyed completely. Luckily, the kitchen and helpers’ area had escaped, and were now buried under soil and rubble, closed in by tons of earth on every side except toward the cylinder.

Over that side, we were hanging onto the very edge of the huge circular pit the Martians were digging. The heavy pounding sound was right behind us, and every so often a bright green vapor shot up like a curtain across our peek-hole.

The cylinder was already open in the center of the pit, and on the far edge of the pit, among the smashed and gravel-covered bushes, one of the big fighting-machines, abandoned by its pilot, stood tall and stiff against the evening sky.

At first, I barely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it’s been helpful to describe them first, because of the amazing, sparkling mechanism I saw working in the excavation, and because of the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across the piled-up dirt near it.

The mechanism definitely grabbed my attention first. It was one of those complicated things that have since been called handling-machines, and studying them has already given a huge boost to Earth’s inventions.

At first glance, it looked like a metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs, and a crazy number of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and grabbing tentacles around its body.

Most of its arms were retracted, but with three long tentacles, it was fishing out a bunch of rods, plates, and bars that lined the covering and seemed to strengthen the walls of the cylinder. As it pulled them out, they were lifted and deposited on a level patch of dirt behind it.

It moved so fast, was so intricate, and worked so perfectly that at first I didn't even register it as a machine, even with its metallic shine. The war machines were coordinated and moving with incredible skill, but nothing compared to this.

People who’s only seen drawings by artists or heard descriptions from folks like me barely realize how alive it felt. I remember one of the first pamphlets about the war. The artist had clearly rushed a quick sketch of one of the machines, and that’s where his knowledge ended.

He drew them as tilted, stiff tripods - no flexibility, no subtlety, and a totally misleading look. The pamphlet was super popular, and I'm mentioning it just to warn you not to let it shape your impression.

They weren't anything like the Martians I saw in action - not even close, like a plastic doll compared to a real person. Honestly, the pamphlet would have been better without them. At first, I said, the handling-machine didn’t seem like a machine at all, but like a crab with a shiny shell.

The controlling Martian, with its delicate tentacles moving it, felt like the crab’s brain. But then I noticed how its grey-brown, shiny, leathery shell looked like the other bodies out there, and I realized what this skilled worker really was.

That's when my attention shifted to the other creatures - the real Martians. I'd already had a quick impression of them, and the initial wave of nausea wasn’t clouding my observation anymore. Plus, I was hidden and still, not feeling any pressure to move.

I could see now that they were the most bizarre creatures imaginable. They had huge, round bodies - or, really, heads - about four feet across, each with a face in front.

The face didn’t have nostrils - Martians don’t seem to have had a sense of smell - but it had a pair of very large, dark eyes, and just below that, a fleshy beak.

At the back of this head or body - I’m not even sure how to describe it - was a single, tight, drum-like surface, which we now know is an ear, though it probably wasn’t very useful in our thick air. Around the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whip-like tentacles, arranged in two groups of eight.

These groups have since been named, pretty aptly, by that amazing anatomist, Professor Howes, the hands. Even as I saw them for the first time, they seemed to be trying to lift themselves up on these hands, but with the extra weight of Earth, that was impossible.

It’s likely they could have moved around on them easily on Mars. I can mention here, as dissection has shown, that the inside was almost equally simple. Most of the structure was the brain, sending huge nerves to the eyes, ear, and the tactile tentacles.

There were also big lungs, which the mouth opened into, and the heart and its blood vessels. The struggle with the thicker atmosphere and stronger gravity was super obvious in the shaking of their outer skin.

That was basically the deal with Martian bodies. It’s weird to think about, but Martians didn’t have all the complicated stuff we do to digest food - you know, the whole digestive system that makes up most of our bodies. They were just heads - literally just heads.

They didn’t have guts, and they definitely didn’t eat or digest anything. Instead, they sucked the fresh, living blood of other creatures and injected it straight into their veins. I’ve seen it happen myself, and I’m going to tell you about it later.

But, even though I might seem a little grossed out, I can’t even describe it without feeling like I’m going to throw up. Just know that they got blood from living animals - often from humans - and used a tiny pipette to pump it directly into their veins.

The idea is probably pretty disgusting to us, but we have to remember how weird our meat-eating habits would seem to a smart rabbit. There are some serious benefits to injecting blood instead of eating, if you think about how much time and energy we waste eating and digesting.

Our bodies are half filled with glands, tubes, and organs, all working to turn food into blood. Digestion and how it affects our nervous system drain our strength and mess with our moods. People are happy or miserable depending on whether they have healthy livers or good stomachs.

But the Martians were way above all that moodiness and emotional stuff. They really preferred humans as their food source, and it’s partly because of what was left of the creatures they’d brought with them from Mars as supplies.

Based on the dried-up remains that have been found, these creatures were bipedal - they walked on two legs - with flimsy skeletons made of silica (like sponges) and weak muscles. They stood about six feet tall and had round heads that stood straight up, with big eyes set in stony sockets.

Two or three of these were brought in each cylinder, and they were all killed before they reached Earth. It was probably for the best, because just trying to stand up on our planet would have broken every bone in their bodies.

While I’m talking about this, I should mention a few more details about them that, even though we didn’t realize it at the time, will help you picture these creepy creatures better. In three other ways, their bodies were totally different from ours.

They didn't sleep, just like our hearts don’t sleep. They didn't have a lot of muscle to recover, so they didn’t need to rest. They didn't seem to get tired easily. They would have struggled to move around on Earth without effort, but even until the very end, they kept going.

They worked for twenty-four hours straight, like ants do, even here on Earth. Also, it's wild to think about, but the Martians weren't male or female - they didn’t have any sex, and therefore didn’t experience any of the crazy emotions that come with that difference among humans.

A young Martian - there’s no doubt about it - was actually born on Earth during the war, and it was found attached to its parent, partially budded off, just like lilybulbs or the young animals in freshwater polyps. In humans and most other land animals, this way of reproducing has disappeared.

But even on Earth, it was definitely how things started. Among simpler animals, like tunicates, the two methods happen side by side, but eventually, the sexual method took over. On Mars, though, it seems like the opposite happened.

It's pretty wild to think that a writer, way back when - like, before the Martians even showed up - actually predicted something like what happened.

I remember reading his stuff, probably in November or December eighteen ninety-three, in a magazine that doesn't even exist anymore, the Pall Mall Budget. There was even a cartoon about it in another old magazine called Punch.

He was writing in a kind of goofy, joking way, but he pointed out that eventually, machines would replace our limbs, and chemical stuff would handle digestion.

He thought things like hair, noses, teeth, ears, and chins weren’t really necessary anymore, and that over time, people would just naturally lose them. He figured the brain was the only thing that really mattered.

Except for the hands - he said they had a strong case for sticking around, calling them "the brain’s teacher and helper." While the rest of the body got smaller, the hands would get bigger.

Seriously, there's a lot of truth hidden in jokes, and the Martians totally prove that intelligence can take over the animal side of a living thing.

It’s believable to me that they might have come from beings not unlike us, slowly developing bigger brains and hands (which eventually turned into those delicate tentacles). Without a body, the brain would just be a selfish intelligence, missing all the feelings that make us human.

One really interesting difference between them and us was something that might seem small. On Earth, tiny organisms cause tons of sickness and pain, but either they never existed on Mars, or Martian science got rid of them long ago.

A hundred diseases - all the fevers, contagions, consumption, cancers, tumors, and other nasty stuff - never even entered their lives. And speaking of the differences between life on Mars and Earth, I have to mention the red weed. Apparently, the plants on Mars aren’t green - they’re a bright red.

At least, the seeds the Martians brought with them always grew into red plants. But only the red weed actually took hold. The red creeper was just a flash in the pan, and not many people even saw it growing. For a while, though, the red weed grew like crazy.

It climbed up the sides of the pit where we were trapped by the third or fourth day, and its cactus-like branches formed a bright red border around our triangular window. Later, I found it everywhere, especially near streams of water.

The Martians had what seemed to be an ear - just one round thing at the back of their head-body. Their eyes saw about the same as ours, except, according to Philips, blue and violet looked totally black to them. Most people figured they talked and used their tentacles to signal, right?

A really smart but rushed pamphlet (written by someone who definitely wasn’t there to see what they did) says that, and it's been the main thing we’ve learned about them so far. But honestly, no one else saw as much of the Martians in action as I did. I’m not bragging, it just happened that way.

And I’m telling you, I watched them closely, again and again. I saw four, five, and once, even six of them, working together on these super complicated tasks, without making a single sound or using any hand signals.

Their weird hooting always came before they ate; it was just a flat noise, no changes in tone. I don’t think it was a signal at all, just them breathing out before they sucked up their food.

I know a bit about how the mind works, and I’m totally convinced - as sure as I am about anything - that the Martians shared thoughts without needing to physically communicate. And I’m convinced of this even though I used to think telepathy was a total myth.

Before the Martians showed up, some of you might remember, I wrote pretty strongly against the idea.

The Martians didn't wear clothes. Their ideas about style and manners were totally different from ours. Plus, they didn’t seem to notice temperature changes like we do, and changes in air pressure didn’t bother them much.

But even though they didn’t wear clothing, their amazing upgrades to their bodies were what really set them apart from humans. We humans, with our bikes and roller skates, our early flying machines, our guns and sticks - we’re just starting the kind of progress the Martians have already achieved.

They'd basically become brains, using different bodies depending on what they needed, like we wear different outfits or grab a bike when we’re in a hurry or an umbrella when it rains. And speaking of their stuff, it’s crazy that almost all human tools rely on something they didn’t have - wheels!

There wasn’t a single wheel or hint of them among the things they brought to Earth. You’d think they’d use them for getting around. It's also weird that even here on Earth, nature hasn’t really figured out the wheel, or prefers other ways to do things.

And the Martians either didn’t know about (which is hard to believe) or just didn’t use wheels. Their machines also didn’t use fixed pivots or spinning parts in a single plane very much.

Instead, they had complicated systems of sliding parts moving over tiny, perfectly curved surfaces that reduced friction. Also, it's worth noting that the long levers on their machines were often moved by a kind of fake muscle made of disks inside a stretchy covering.

These disks would become charged with electricity and pull together really tightly. This is how they got their machines to look like they were moving like animals, which was so striking and unsettling to us humans.

We saw lots of these fake muscles on the crab-like machine that was unpacking the cylinder when I first peeked out the slit.

It seemed way more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in the sunset, panting, twitching their useless tentacles, and moving weakly after their long trip across space.

While I was still watching their slow movements in the sunlight and noticing every weird detail about them, the curate reminded me he was there by yanking hard on my arm. I turned to see a scowling face and silent, expressive lips.

He wanted to look through the slit, which only allowed one of us at a time. So, I had to stop watching them for a bit while he had his turn.

When I looked again, the busy handling machine had already put together several pieces of equipment from the cylinder into a shape that looked a lot like itself.

And down on the left, a small digging machine came into view, spraying green vapor and working its way around the pit, digging and building in a methodical and careful way. This was what caused the regular thumping noise and the rhythmic shaking that had our crumbling shelter trembling.

It hissed and whistled as it worked. As far as I could tell, it wasn't being controlled by a Martian at all.