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Updated: June 11, 2025
Then suddenly the white flashes of the Heat-Ray came leaping towards me. The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch, and darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar. The Ray flickered up and down the towing path, licking off the people who ran this way and that, and came down to the water's edge not fifty yards from where I stood.
One or two adventurous souls, it was afterwards found, went into the darkness and crawled quite near the Martians; but they never returned, for now and again a light-ray, like the beam of a warship's searchlight swept the common, and the Heat-Ray was ready to follow.
Then the monster had risen to its feet and had begun to walk leisurely to and fro across the common among the few fugitives, with its headlike hood turning about exactly like the head of a cowled human being. A kind of arm carried a complicated metallic case, about which green flashes scintillated, and out of the funnel of this there smoked the Heat-Ray.
The houses seemed deserted. In the road lay a group of three charred bodies close together, struck dead by the Heat-Ray; and here and there were things that people had dropped a clock, a slipper, a silver spoon, and the like poor valuables. At the corner turning up towards the post office a little cart, filled with boxes and furniture, and horseless, heeled over on a broken wheel.
We were far beyond the range of the Heat-Ray there, and had it not been for the silent desertion of some of the houses, the stirring movement of packing in others, and the knot of soldiers standing on the bridge over the railway and staring down the line towards Woking, the day would have seemed very like any other Sunday.
When she sees you in torment, she kisses me sweetly for der prifilege of stopping der heat-ray. I count upon you, my friend, to plead with her to grant me der most extrafagant of concessions, when der heat-ray is searing der flesh from your bones. I feel that she is soft-hearted enough to oblige you. Yes?" He touched a button and the repaired television-screen lighted up.
We left him nursing his head, sitting belligerent at his post, alert to any danger and armed now with my heat-ray cylinder. "Strange doings this voyage," he told us. "All the crew knows it. I'll stick it out now, but when we get back home I'm done with this star travelin'. I belong on the sea anyway." We hurried back to the upper level.
One of them a man assailed by a heat-ray, came hurtling down past me. The other wavered a girl with her flying mechanism out of control. She was a hundred feet or more above me, wavering downward. Elza! I shot myself up to her, seized her in my arms, my own supporting mechanism sustaining us both. Elza, spent, but uninjured, I held her close. "Elza dear! My Elza!" We hung there in the air.
In three strides he was among them, and they ran radiating from his feet in all directions. He used no Heat-Ray to destroy them, but picked them up one by one. Apparently he tossed them into the great metallic carrier which projected behind him, much as a workman's basket hangs over his shoulder.
As the camera of the Heat-Ray hit the water, the latter had immediately flashed into steam. In another moment a huge wave, like a muddy tidal bore but almost scaldingly hot, came sweeping round the bend upstream. I saw people struggling shorewards, and heard their screaming and shouting faintly above the seething and roar of the Martian's collapse.
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