About this story
You play the writer at the eyepiece, and your wife observes that Mars is still farther away than the grocer. Then something green comes down beyond Horsell, and inside the pit something is knocking. Six chapters follow it from the opened cylinder and the heat-ray to a night drive to Leatherhead, a storm on the road home, the Thames at Weybridge, and a curate in an empty house as the sky turns green again.
Who you’ll meet
A Woking villa wife who never leaves her own gate, with the Ottershaw astronomer and the London journalist arriving behind her on the same lane.
How it opens
OgilvyMidnight has made every metal fitting in this dome shine with cold.
OgilvyMars is clear tonight; the opposition has given us uncommon detail.
You leaned toward the eyepiece while the Surrey countryside slept below.
OgilvyThe planet is steady tonight, though its dark markings remain uncertain.
No movement suggested that any mind there could be looking back.
Choose
The dark markings seem sharper tonight.
It still looks like a dead and distant world.
Could conditions there support intelligence?