The War of the Worlds
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Оглавление
Герберт Уэллс. The War of the Worlds
Book One. The Coming of the Martians
Chapter 1. The Eve of the War
Chapter 2. The Falling Star
Chapter 3. On Horsell Common
Chapter 4. The Cylinder Opens
Chapter 5. The Heat-Ray
Chapter 6. The Heat-Ray in the Chobham Road
Chapter 7. How I Reached Home
Chapter 8. Friday Night
Chapter 9. The Fighting Begins
Chapter 10. In the Storm
Chapter 11. At the Window
Chapter 12. What I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton
Chapter 13. How I fell in with the Curate
Chapter 14. In London
Chapter 15. What had Happened in Surrey
Chapter 16. The Exodus from London
Chapter 17. The «Thunder Child»
Book Two. The Earth under the Martians
Chapter 1. Under Foot
Chapter 2. What We Saw from the Ruined House
Chapter 3. The Days of Imprisonment
Chapter 4. The Death of the Curate
Chapter 5. The Stillness
Chapter 6. The Work of Fifteen Days
Chapter 7. The Man on Putney Hill
Chapter 8. Dead London
Chapter 9. Wreckage
Chapter 10. The Epilogue
Отрывок из книги
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.
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By eight o'clock a number of boys and unemployed men had already started for the common to see the «dead men from Mars.» That was the form the story took. I heard of it first from my newspaper boy about a quarter to nine when I went out to get my Daily Chronicle. I was naturally startled, and lost no time in going out and across the Ottershaw bridge to the sand pits.
The fear I felt was no rational fear, but a panic terror not only of the Martians, but of the dusk and stillness all about me. Such an extraordinary effect in unmanning me it had that I ran weeping silently as a child might do. Once I had turned, I did not dare to look back.
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