Edisons Conquest of Mars

Conquest of Mars, by Garrett Putman
Serviss

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Title: Edison's Conquest of Mars
Author: Garrett Putman Serviss
Release Date: August 29, 2006 [EBook #19141]
Language: English
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Edison's Conquest of Mars
by
Garrett P. Serviss
1898
Chapter I.
It is impossible that the stupendous events which followed the disastrous invasion of the
earth by the Martians should go without record, and circumstances having placed the
facts at my disposal, I deem it a duty, both to posterity and to those who were witnesses
of and participants in the avenging counterstroke that the earth dealt back at its ruthless

enemy in the heavens, to write down the story in a connected form.
The Martians had nearly all perished, not through our puny efforts, but in consequence of
disease, and the few survivors fled in one of their projectile cars, inflicting their cruelest
blow in the act of departure.
Their Mysterious Explosive.
They possessed a mysterious explosive, of unimaginable puissance, with whose aid they
set their car in motion for Mars from a point in Bergen County, N. J., just back of the
Palisades.
The force of the explosion may be imagined when it is recollected that they had to give
the car a velocity of more than seven miles per second in order to overcome the attraction
of the earth and the resistance of the atmosphere.
The shock destroyed all of New York that had not already fallen a prey, and all the
buildings yet standing in the surrounding towns and cities fell in one far-circling ruin.
The Palisades tumbled in vast sheets, starting a tidal wave in the Hudson that drowned
the opposite shore.
Thousands of Victims.
The victims of this ferocious explosion were numbered by tens of thousands, and the
shock, transmitted through the rocky frame of the globe, was recorded by seismographic
pendulums in England and on the Continent of Europe.
The terrible results achieved by the invaders had produced everywhere a mingled feeling
of consternation and hopelessness. The devastation was widespread. The death-dealing
engines which the Martians had brought with them had proved irresistible and the
inhabitants of the earth possessed nothing capable of contending against them. There had
been no protection for the great cities; no protection even for the open country.
Everything had gone down before the savage onslaught of those merciless invaders from
space. Savage ruins covered the sites of many formerly flourishing towns and villages,
and the broken walls of great cities stared at the heavens like the exhumed skeletons of
Pompeii. The awful agencies had extirpated pastures and meadows and dried up the very
springs of fertility in the earth where they had touched it. In some parts of the devastated
lands pestilence broke out; elsewhere there was famine. Despondency black as night
brooded over some of the fairest portions of the globe.
All Not Yet Destroyed.
Yet all had not been destroyed, because all had not been reached by the withering hand of
the destroyer. The Martians had not had time to complete their work before they
themselves fell a prey to the diseases that carried them off at the very culmination of their
triumph.

From those lands which had, fortunately, escaped invasion, relief was sent to the sufferers.
The outburst of pity and of charity exceeded anything that the world had known.
Differences of race and religion were swallowed up in the universal sympathy which was
felt for those who had suffered so terribly from an evil that was as unexpected as it was
unimaginable in its enormity.
But the worst was not yet. More dreadful than the actual suffering and the scenes of death
and devastation which overspread the afflicted lands was the profound mental and moral
depression that followed. This was shared even by those who had not seen the Martians
and had not witnessed the destructive effects of the frightful engines of war that they had
imported for the conquest of the earth. All mankind was sunk deep in this universal
despair, and it became tenfold blacker when the astronomers announced from their
observatories that strange lights were visible, moving and flashing upon the red surface of
the Planet of War. These mysterious appearances could only be interpreted in the light of
past experience to mean that the Martians were preparing for