The Eve of the War

Journalist: No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.

No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.

At midnight on the twelfth of August, a huge mass of luminous gas erupted from Mars and sped towards Earth.

Across two hundred million miles of void, invisibly hurtling towards us were the first of the missiles that were to bring so much calamity to Earth.