50+ Space Action Adventure Classics. Жюль Верн

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50+ Space Action Adventure Classics - Жюль Верн


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Edward Everett Hale

       The Brick Moon

      H. G. Wells

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

       Book One. The Coming of the Martians

       Chapter One. The Eve of the War

       Chapter Two. The Falling Star

       Chapter Three. On Horsell Common

       Chapter Four. The Cylinder Opens

       Chapter Five. The HeatRay

       Chapter Six. The HeatRay in the Chobham Road

       Chapter Seven. How I Reached Home

       Chapter Eight. Friday Night

       Chapter Nine. The Fighting Begins

       Chapter Ten. In the Storm

       Chapter Eleven. At the Window

       Chapter Twelve. What I Saw of the Destruction

       Chapter Thirteen. How I Fell in with the Curate

       Chapter Fourteen. In London

       Chapter Fifteen. What Had Happened in Surrey

       Chapter Sixteen. The Exodus from London

       Chapter Seventeen. The “Thunder Child”

       Book Two. The Earth Under the Martians

       Chapter One. Under Foot

       Chapter Two. What We Saw from the Ruined House

       Chapter Three. The Days of Imprisonment

       Chapter Four. The Death of the Curate

       Chapter Five. The Stillness

       Chapter Six. The Work of Fifteen Days

       Chapter Seven. The Man on Putney Hill

       Chapter Eight. Dead London

       Chapter Nine. Wreckage

       Chapter Ten. The Epilogue

      Book One.

       The Coming of the Martians

       Table of Contents

      Chapter One.

       The Eve of the War

       Table of Contents

      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 scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise 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 it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.

      The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. 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


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