Amelia was waiting within, standing by the window.
“Here we are!” I called as soon as I saw her. “It flies too!”
Amelia showed no sign of awareness.
“She cannot bear us,” Mr Wells reminded me. “Now… I must see if I can settle us on the floor.”
We were hovering some eighteen inches above the carpet, and Mr Wells made fine adjustments to his controls. Mean while Amelia had left the window and was looking curiously around, evidently waiting for us to materialize. I amused myself first by blowing a kiss to her, then by pulling a face, but she responded to neither.
Suddenly, Mr Wells released his levers, and we dropped with a bump to the floor. Amelia started in surprise.
“There you are!” she said. “I wondered how you would appear.”
“Allow us to take, you downstairs,’ said Mr Wells, gallantly. “Climb aboard, my dear, and let us make a tour of the house.”
So, for the next half-hour, we experimented with the Space Machine, and Mr Wells grew accustomed to making it manoeuvre exactly as he wished. Soon he could make it turn, soar, halt, as if he had been at its controls all his life. At first, Amelia and I clung nervously to the bedstead, for it seemed to turn with reckless velocity, but gradually we too saw that for all its makeshift appearance, the Space Machine was every bit as scientific as its original.
We left the house just once, and toured the garden. Here Mr Wells tried to increase our forward speed, but to our disappointment we found that for all its other qualities, the Space Machine could travel no faster than the approximate speed of a running man.
“It is the shortage of crystals,” said Mr Wells, as we soared through the upper branches of a walnut tree. “If we had more of those, there would be no limit to our velocity.”
“Never mind,” said Amelia. “We have no use for great speed. Invisibility is our prime advantage.”
I was staring out past the house to the overgrown redness of the valley. It was the constant reminder of the urgency of our efforts.
“Mr Wells,” I said quietly. “We have our Space Machine. Now is the time to put it to use.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
AN INVISIBLE NEMESIS
i
When we had landed the Space Machine, and I had loaded several of the hand-grenades on to it, Mr Wells was worried about the time we had left to us.
“The sun will be setting in two hours,” he said. “I should not care to drive the Machine in darkness.”
“But, sir, we can come to no harm in the attenuation.”
“I know, but we must at some time return to the house and leave the attenuated dimension. When we do that, we must be absolutely certain there are no Martians around. How terrible it would be if we returned to the house in the night, and discovered that the Martians were waiting for us!”
“We have been here for more than two weeks,” I said, “and no Martian has so much as glanced our way.”
Mr Wells had to agree with this, but he said: “I think we must not lose sight of the seriousness of our task, Turnbull. Because we have been confined so long in Richmond, we have no knowledge of the extent of the Martians’ success. Certainly they have subdued all the land we can see from here; in all probability they are now the lords of the entire country. For all we know, their domain might be worldwide. If we are, as we suspect, in command of the one weapon they cannot resist, we cannot afford to lose that advantage by taking unnecessary risks. We have a tremendous responsibility thrust upon us.”
“Mr Wells is right, Edward,” said Amelia. “Our revenge on the Martians is late, but it is all we have.”
“Very well,” I said. “’But we must try at least one sortie today. We do not yet know if our scheme will work.”
So at last we mounted the Space Machine, and sat with suppressed excitement as Mr Wells guided us away from the house, above the obscene red tangle of weeds, and out towards the heart, of the Thames Valley.
As soon as we were under way, I saw some of’ the wisdom of the others’ words. Our search for Martian targets was to be unguided, for we had no idea where the evil brutes currently were. We could search all day for just one, and in the boundless scale of the Martians’ intrusion we might never find our goal.
We flew for about half an hour, circling over the river, looking this way and that for some sign of the invaders, but without success.
At last Amelia suggested a plan which presented logic and simplicity. We knew, she said, where the projectiles had fallen, and further, we knew that the Martians used the pits as their headquarters. Surely, if we were seeking the monsters, the pits would be the most sensible places to look first.
Mr Wells agreed with this, and we turned directly for the nearest of the pits. This was the one in Bushy Park, where the fourth projectile had fallen. Suddenly, as I realized we were at last on the right track, I felt my heart pounding with excitement.
The valley was a dreadful sight: the red weed was growing rampantly over almost every physical protuberance, houses included. The landscape seemed from this height to be like a huge undulating field of red grass bent double by heavy rain. In places, the weeds had actually altered the course of the river, and wherever there was low-lying ground stagnant lakes had formed.
The pit had been made in the north-eastern corner of Bushy Park, and was difficult to distinguish by virtue of the fact that it, no less than anywhere else, was heavily overgrown with weed. At last we noticed the cavernous mouth of the projectile itself, and Mr Wells brought the Space Machine down to hover a few feet from the entrance. All was dark within, and there was no sign of either the Martians or their machines.
We were about to move away, when Amelia suddenly pointed into the heart of the projectile.
“Edward, look … it is one of the people!”
Her move had, startled me, but I looked in the direction she was indicating. Sure enough, lying a few feet inside the hold was a human figure. I thought for a moment that this must be one of the hapless victims snatched by the Martians … but then I saw that the body was that of a very tall man, and that he was wearing a black uniform. His skin was a mottled red, and his face, which was turned towards us, was ugly and distorted.
We stared in silence at this dead Martian human. It was perhaps even more of a shock to see one of our erstwhile allies in this place than it would have been to see one of the monsters.
We explained to Mr Wells that the man was probably one of the humans coerced into driving the projectile, and he looked at the dead Martian with great interest.
“The strain of our gravity must have been too much for his heart,” said Mr Wells.
“That has not upset the monsters’ plans,” Amelia said.
“Those beasts are without hearts,” said Mr Wells, but I supposed that he was speaking figuratively.
We recalled that another cylinder had fallen near Wimbledon, and so we turned the Space Machine away from the pathetic figure of the dead Martian human, and set off eastwards at once. From Bushy Park to Wimbledon is a distance of some five miles, and so even at our maximum speed the flight took nearly an hour. During this time we were appalled to see that even parts of Richmond Park were showing signs of the red weed.
Mr Wells had been casting several glances over his shoulder to see how long there was until sunset, and was clearly still unhappy with this expedition so soon before nightfall. I resolved that if the Martian pit at Wimbledon was also empty, then it would be I who proposed an immediate return to Reynolds House. The satisfaction of taking positive action at last had excited my nerve, though, and I would be sorry not to make at least one kill before returning.