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Text © 2007 Chris Sasaki

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ISBN 978-1-4549-5098-1

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Interior illustrations by MUTI

Interior design by Liam Donnelly

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

CHAPTER 1

The Eve of the War

CHAPTER 2

The Falling Star Lands on Horsell Common

CHAPTER 3

The Cylinder and the Heat-Ray

CHAPTER 4

How I Reached Home Friday Night

CHAPTER 5

The Fighting Begins

CHAPTER 6

The Artilleryman

CHAPTER 7

Destruction on the River Thames

CHAPTER 8

How I Met the Curate

CHAPTER 9

The March toward London

CHAPTER 10

In London

CHAPTER 11

The Flight from London

CHAPTER 12

The Thunder Child

CHAPTER 13

Underfoot

CHAPTER 14

What We Saw from the Ruined House

CHAPTER 15

The Death of the Curate

CHAPTER 16

Stillness

CHAPTER 17

The Man on Putney Hill

CHAPTER 18

Dead London

CHAPTER 19

Wreckage

CHAPTER 20

Epilogue

What Do You Think?

Classic Starts Library

CHAPTER 1 The Eve of the War

At the dawn of the twentieth century, no one would have believed that the Earth was being watched by creatures smarter than we are. No one would have thought humans were being studied in the same way that we study living creatures under a microscope. We thought we were the masters of our world. But then, perhaps the tiny things under our microscopes think they are the masters of their world too.

Who would have thought that a threat to humanity could come from another planet? Who would have thought there was even life on other planets? But creatures were watching us from across space and making their plans. And so we discovered that we are not alone and we are not the masters.

Astronomers say that Mars is older than the Earth. They also say that if life has found a home on the red planet, it must have started long before life began here. And if it started long before life on Earth, Martian creatures must be more advanced than we are.

We also know that the red planet lies farther from the light and heat of the Sun than the Earth does. In fact, no place on its surface gets warmer than our coldest winters. The air is thinner than ours, and its oceans have disappeared. Its north and south poles are covered by huge polar ice caps. Martians would need to be intelligent to survive in such a hostile environment. It’s possible that the difficult conditions would have made them crueler and more willing to do anything to stay alive.

Scientists think Mars is a dying planet. Perhaps it was becoming harder for the Martians to live there. They must have looked across space and seen our planet—warm, filled with green plants and blue water, with an atmosphere full of clouds. Maybe this was how their planet had once been. Perhaps invading Earth was the only thing they could do to survive.

The Martians had probably been preparing for years. With their advanced intelligence, they built spacecraft and planned their invasion in great detail. In 1894, astronomers saw a bright light on the surface of the planet. I believe the light came from the building of a huge cannon, which they used to launch their spacecraft to Earth.

The next sign of the approaching invasion came at a time when Mars was at its closest to Earth. At around midnight on a clear, dark night, great clouds of bright gas were seen on the planet’s surface. It was as if a huge jet of flame had been shot from a cannon. The next day I happened to meet an astronomer named Ogilvy on my daily walk. He told me about the sighting and invited me to join him at his observatory after sunset.

The observatory was dark and quiet. The only light came from a small lantern. The only sound was the steady ticking of the telescope’s gears. I looked through the instrument and saw Mars, a pin’s head of light surrounded by the darkness of space. It seemed like such a little thing, so bright and small. Through the telescope, I could just make out markings on its surface. It lay some forty million miles from us. I understood then what few people understand—that the planets are like specks of dust floating in the vast emptiness of space.

What I could not see with the telescope was the Thing the Martians had just launched. As I would learn soon, however, the object was flying swiftly and steadily toward us. It crossed that great distance, getting closer with every minute. It was the Thing that would bring terrible destruction.

Around midnight, I saw a flash of red light coming from the planet. Ogilvy looked through the telescope and cried out. A jet of gas was being shot into space. As we would find out, it was the launch of another missile from Mars to Earth. This one had been launched only twenty-four hours after the first. Ogilvy and I watched until one in the morning, but we didn’t see anything else. Finally, we closed the observatory and walked to his house. Around us, people slept peacefully in the darkness of the night.

Ogilvy didn’t believe there was life on Mars. And even if there was, he explained, it was unlikely that life on two different planets would turn out the same. “The chances are a million to one that there are humanlike beings on Mars,” he said. Ogilvy believed that meteorites were falling on the red planet and creating explosions. Or that huge volcanoes were erupting on its surface.

The next night, another flame was seen, and again the night after that. The flames appeared for a total of ten nights. Astronomers watched as great clouds of smoke spread around the red planet, hiding its surface from view. Stories began to appear in the newspapers. Still, as the missiles rushed toward us, we carried on with our daily lives.

A few days after my night in the observatory, my wife and I went for a walk after dinner. We lived in Maybury, a small village southwest of London. From the road, we could see the lights of nearby Horsell and Woking shining across the fields. Woking was the largest town in the area, and its lights shone brightly. As we walked the country roads, I pointed out Mars to my wife. It was just a bright dot of light getting higher in the sky. Everything seemed so safe and peaceful.