Wednesday 16 November 2011

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Red Weed

EPISODE XIXa: WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE


After eating we crept back to the scullery, and there I grabbed a few hours sleep. When I awoke was alone. I called after the curate several times, and finally went to the kitchen. It was still daylight, and I saw him across the room, lying against the hole that looked out upon the Marsians. His shoulders were hunched, so that his head was hidden from me. I crossed my fingers that he had been decapitated.

I could hear a number of noises almost like those in an engine shed; and the place rocked with that beating thud. For a minute or so I remained watching Father Irritating, and then I advanced, crouching and stepping with extreme care amid the broken crockery that littered the floor.

I tapped the priest’s shoulder, and he jumped so high that he cracked his head on the ceiling and a mass of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a loud impact. I supressed a giggle at his pain. The detachment of the plaster had left a vertical slit open in the debris, and by raising myself cautiously I was able to see out of this gap into what had once been a quiet roadway.

The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the house we had first visited. The building had vanished, completely smashed, pulverised, and kersploded by the impact. The cylinder lay now far beneath the original foundations—deep in a hole, already vastly larger than the pit I had looked into at Woking. The earth all round it had splashed under that tremendous impact and lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent houses. Our house had collapsed backward; the front portion, even on the ground floor, had been destroyed completely. We hung now on the very edge of the great circular pit the Marsians were engaged in making.


The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on the farther edge of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel-heaped shrubbery, one of the great fighting-machines, deserted by its occupant, stood stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first I scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, on account of the extraordinary glittering mechanism I saw busy in the excavation, and on account of the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across the heaped mould near it.

The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It was one of those complicated fabrics that have since been called handling-machines, and the study of which has already given such an enormous impetus to terrestrial invention. As it dawned upon me first, it presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs, and with an extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and clutching tentacles about its body.

Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I did not see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. The fighting-machines were coordinated and animated to an extraordinary pitch, but nothing to compare with this. People who have never seen these structures, and have only the ill-imagined efforts of artists or the imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go upon, scarcely realise that living quality.

At first, I say, the handling-machine did not impress me as a machine, but as a crablike creature. The controlling Martian whose delicate tentacles actuated its movements seeming to be simply the equivalent of the crab's brain. But then I perceived the resemblance of its grey-brown, shiny, leathery integument to that of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and the true nature of this dexterous workman dawned upon me. With that realisation my interest shifted to those other creatures, the real Marsians.


They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive. They were huge round bodies—or, rather, heads—about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils—indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak.

In the back of this head or body—I scarcely know how to speak of it—was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our dense air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. These bunches have since been named rather aptly, by that distinguished anatomist, Professor Howes, the hands. Even as I saw these Marsians for the first time they seemed to be endeavouring to raise themselves on these hands, but of course, with the increased weight of terrestrial conditions, this was impossible. There is reason to suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon them with some facility.

The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has since shown, was almost equally simple. The greater part of the structure was the brain, sending enormous nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the heart and its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused by the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction was only too evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin.
And this was the sum of the Marsian organs. Strange as it may seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were heads—merely heads. Dickheads. Massive, planet invading dickheads.

Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins. I have myself seen this being done, as I shall mention in its place. But, squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal...

TO BE CONTINUED...

Words: Brad Harmer & H.G. Wells
You can become Brad's "friend" on Facebook, or you can "follow" him on Twitter. Depends how creepy you want to sound really.


JIMMY CARR GIVEAWAY

Having performed live to over 1.2m people, the UK's hardest working comedian Jimmy Carr is back with his brand new stand-up DVD.


Star of hit TV shows 8 Out of 10 Cats and 10 O'clock Live, Jimmy is well known for his slick one-liners and non-stop gags, but his acerbic wit and fast-paced comedy style are at their brilliant best when he has the stage to himself.

Packed with over 100 minutes of brand new material, including too-rude-for-TV jokes, hilarious heckling, and even better put-downs, Jimmy pushes the boundaries of comedy and delivers a spectacular show.

Thanks to our friends at Channel 4, we've got three signed copies of Jimmy Carr: Being Funny on DVD to give away! For your chance of winning, send your name and full postal address to emotionally14@hotmail.co.uk before midday on Wednesday 23rd November, making sure to put "Jimmy Carr" as the subject. The first three entries out of the electronic hat after the competition closes will receive a *signed* copy of this awesome DVD!

Don't forget to put "Jimmy Carr" in the subject line. Incorrectly labelled or blank entries will be discarded.

Jimmy Carr: Being Funny is available as of November 21st, courtesy of Channel 4 DVD.

Entries limited to one per household. Offer open only to postal addresses in the UK and Ireland.

No comments:

Post a Comment