The War of the Worlds Murder - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,67
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