Gibson leaned forward and whispered to Houseman, “So you stuck up for Orson, after all?”
Houseman offered a small, dry chuckle. “That is my fate, I’m afraid.”
“Jack-I know you did it.”
Houseman looked at Gibson.
The writer said, “I’ve finished my investigation. And I know you’re responsible.”
“Ah. Might I request you keep that information to yourself, just for the present? If Mr. Taylor is correct, we may have a crisis on our hands, first.”
“You can’t be serious…”
“Oh but I am. And don’t forget-I’m the one who signs your expense-account check.” He smiled beatifically and returned his attention to the window through which Ray Collins could be seen.
The actor was saying into the mike, “No more defenses. Our army is wiped out…artillery, air force, everything, wiped out. This may be the…last broadcast. We’ll stay here, to the end…. People are holding service here below us…in the cathedral.”
Ora Nichols blew through a hollow tube, approximating a ghostly boat whistle.
“Now I look down the harbor. All manner of boats, overloaded with fleeing population, pulling out from docks. Streets are all jammed. Noise in crowds like New Year’s Eve in city. Wait a minute, the…the enemy is now in sight above the Palisades. Five-five great machines. First one is…crossing the river, I can see it from here, wading…wading the Hudson like a man wading through a brook…”
Around the country, listeners-the fooled and the merely entertained-heard the “last announcer” speak from the CBS Building rooftop of Martian cylinders falling all over America, outside Buffalo, in Chicago and St. Louis.
Among the radio audience were Professor Barrington and the student reporter, Sheldon Judcroft, who arrived at the quaint, pre-Revolutionary War hamlet of Cranbury, New Jersey (pop. 1, 278), to find half a dozen State Trooper patrol cars parked in front of the post office.
“So it is real,” Sheldon said breathlessly.
The professor pulled over, got out and went over to talk to the troopers. Sheldon stayed behind, to monitor the news on the radio.
The announcer was saying, “Now the first machine reaches the shore, he…stands watching, looking over the city. His steel, cowlish head is even with the skyscrapers…. He waits for the others. They rise like a line of new towers on the city’s west side….”
Sheldon watched the professor talking to a trooper who was shaking his head. Then it was the professor who was shaking his head….
“Now they’re lifting their metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out…black…smoke, drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They’re running toward the East River…thousands of them, dropping in like rats.”
The professor returned, got in the car and just sat there, wearing a stunned expression.
“Now the smoke’s spreading faster, it’s reached Times Square. People are trying to run away from it, but it’s no use, they…they’re falling like flies. Now the smoke’s crossing Sixth Avenue…Fifth Avenue…a…a hundred yards away…it’s fifty feet….”
The sound of the collapsing announcer on the roof was followed by ghostly boat whistles, and then…silence.
“My God,” Sheldon said.
“Good, isn’t it?”
Sheldon blinked. Twice. “Good?”
“It’s a radio show, my boy. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre. Only question, is-how big a fool should you make out of us when you write up the story for the school paper?”
“Oh, I don’t believe it-”
“The trooper says the countryside is crawling with farmers with shotguns, looking for Martians. The fire chief has checked out half a dozen nonexistent fires, already.”
“Why are these troopers here, then?”
“To calm the populace, son. To find and disarm these ‘defenders’ before somebody gets hurt.”
They were halfway back to Princeton before the laughter started-the professor kicked it off, but the student joined in heartily. They were laughing so hard, tears coming down, they almost hit a deer, in the fog.
It was the second-most frightened they’d been that night.
All around America, newspaper offices, police departments, sheriff’s offices, radio stations, as well as friends and relatives, received calls from believing listeners. The New York Times received 875 calls from its highly sophisticated readership. The worldly reporters of the New York Herald Tribune donned gas masks when they went out to cover the story. The Associated Press found it necessary to alert its member newspapers and radio stations that the invasion from Mars was not real. Electric light companies were called with demands that all power be shut down to keep Martians from having landing lights to guide them.
In Manhattan, hundreds jammed bus terminals and railroad stations seeking immediate evacuation; one woman calling a bus terminal asked a clerk to “Hurry, please-the world is coming to an end!” In Harlem, hundreds more poured into churches to pray about that very thing. Every city in New England was packed with cars bearing refugees from New York. Many people living within sight of the Hudson River reported seeing the Martians on their metal stilts, crossing.
In Pittsburgh a husband discovered his wife about to swallow pills from a bottle marked POISON because she would “rather die this way than that!” A woman in Boston reported seeing the fire in the sky. In Indianapolis, a woman ran into a church, interrupting the service to scream that the world was coming to an end-she heard it on the radio! — and hundreds of parishioners scurried into the night. In sororities and fraternities, especially on the East Coast, students lined up at phones to call and tell their parents and boy- or girlfriends good-bye. In Birmingham, Alabama, the streets were rushed en masse.
In Concrete, Washington, the coincidence of a power failure served to convince the populace that the Martians had indeed landed.
James and Robert were nearing the city when the chilling, solitary voice of a ham radio operator emerged, pitifully, from their car radio’s speaker.
“Two X two L, calling CQ…. Two X two L calling CQ…. Two X two L calling CQ, New York. Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there-anyone?… Two X two L…”
A horrible vacant silence followed, and James (at the wheel) glanced over at Bobby; both college boys looked bloodless white. In their minds was posed the question: Should they head north? Did they dare enter the ravaged city, to save Betty and her sister?
Then, suddenly, another voice emerged from the speaker, a pleasant, even good-natured one, saying, “You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells…. The performance will continue after a brief intermission. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.”
The college boys, drenched in perspiration, looked at each other in astonishment. They didn’t seem to know whether to laugh or cry, feel relief or anger.
So they stopped at a diner and had burgers.
Leroy Chapman was laughing and laughing. His little sister was, too, somewhat hysterically.
Les was shaking his twelve-year-old fist at the radio, saying, “What a gyp!”
“I told you so! I told you so!” Leroy did a little wild Indian dance. “It was the Shadow! It was the Shadow! Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of man-yah hah hah hah hah! Leroy does! Leroy does!”
Meanwhile, Grandfather and his son Luke and several other farmers they had stumbled into, in the woods, managing not to shoot each other, were taking aim at a Martian, which rose above them on its giant metal legs, frozen against the sky, clearly about to strike.