The War of the Worlds Murder (25 page)

Delmar was wrapping up: “In the meantime, placing our faith in God, we must continue the performance of our duties, each and every one of us, so that we may confront this destructive adversary with a nation united, courageous, and consecrated to the preservation of human supremacy on this earth.”

Delmar took a dramatic pause, then: “I thank you.”

The bulletins continued at breakneck speed: from Langham Field, scout planes reported a trio of Martian machines visible above the trees, heading north; in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, a second cylinder had been found and the army was rushing to blow it up before it opened; in the Watchung Mountains, the 22
^nd
Field Artillery closed in on the enemy, but poisonous black smoke dispatched by the invaders wiped out the battery.

Eight bombers were set on fire by the tripods in a flash of green. More of the lethal black smoke was leaching in from the Jersey marshes, and gas masks were of no use, the populace urged to make for open spaces.

Recommended routes of escape were shared with listeners.

When the phone rang, the Dorn sisters—kneeling before their living-room radio as if taking communion—yelped in surprise and fear.

Miss Jane rose, patted her sister’s shoulder, and went to answer it, in the nearby hallway.

Her friend Mrs. Roberta Henderson, a third-grade teacher, was calling to ask about the upcoming bake sale. Could Jane and Eleanor provide their usual delicious cherry pies?

“Haven’t you heard?” Miss Jane asked, frantically, amazed that her friend could be caught up in such mundane matters at a time like this.

“Heard?”

Miss Jane’s words tumbled out on top of each other, uncharacteristically, as she told of the news reports of the Martian invasion.

“You can’t be serious, Jane—that’s the radio.”

“Of course it’s the radio!”

“No...no, I mean, it’s just a play.”

“A...play? Why, that’s nonsense! It’s, it’s...news!”

“No—just a play. A clever play. Jane, you need to settle down. Is Eleanor handy?”

“She’s in the living room. Praying. Roberta, surely you understand that the forces of God are overpowering us, and we are at last being given our deserved punishment for all our evil ways.”

“Hmm-huh. Listen to me, Jane. Call the newspaper office. Promise me you will.”

“Well...all right.”

“Do it now.”

Miss Jane said good-bye, hung up, and asked the operator to connect her with the local paper.

“We’re getting a lot of calls,” a male voice said. “It’s just a radio show. Kind of a...practical joke.”

“Well, it’s not very funny!”

“I agree with you, lady. Have a happy Hallowe’en!”

“No thank you! It’s a
pagan
celebration!”

“Ain’t it though. Good night.”

Miss Jane went into the living room and, as Miss Eleanor looked up at her like a child, shared what she’d learned.

Soon they were sitting in their rockers, the radio switched off.

Miss Eleanor cleared her throat and said, “I’m glad I asked for forgiveness, even if I didn’t have to.”

Miss Jane shared that sentiment, adding, “It was a good opportunity to atone for our sins. The end will come, and those who have freely indulged will face a horrible reckoning.”

“It is the life after this life which is important,” her sister added.

“I don’t mind death,” Miss Jane said, “but I do want to die forgiven.”

The two women smiled at each other, serenely. They again began to knit. In silence.

But within themselves, they were furious—though they were not sure why. A vague sense enveloped them that they had been duped by the sinful world.

Well, the joke was on the sinners. Though the Martians hadn’t come, one day sheets of God’s vengeful fire would sweep over this wretched land.

And the girls had that, at least, to look forward to.

Gibson was sitting in a chair behind John Houseman, who sat between stopwatch-watcher Paul Stewart and the sound engineer. That polished scarecrow, CBS exec Davidson Taylor, stepped in, his expression grave.

“We’re getting calls,” Taylor told Houseman. “Switchboards are swamped downstairs—people are going crazy out there.”

Houseman, who swivelled toward Taylor, asked, “Crazy in what manner?”

“If it’s true, deaths and suicides and injuries of all sorts, due to panic.”

“How widespread?”

“I don’t know, Jack, but you have to force Orson into making an explanatory station announcement. Right now.”

Houseman, despite his misgivings about Orson’s approach, took a hard line. “Not until the scheduled break.”

“This isn’t a request, Jack—”

“I don’t care what it is. We’re approaching the dramatic apex of the story, and the announcement will be made, as written, just after that. It’s a matter of minutes.”

Taylor shook his head. “Why do I back you people? You’re insane!”

Houseman made a little facial shrug, and turned away.

Amiable Ray Collins was out there, stepping up to a microphone, saying: “I’m speaking from the roof of Broadcasting Building, New York City. The bells you hear are ringing to warn the people to evacuate the city as...the Martians approach. Estimated in the last two hours, three million people have moved out along the roads to the north...”

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.

Grandfather and Luke and the three other farmers let loose a volley of shotgun fire, but the water tower they attacked did not even seem to notice. The tower itself, with the Grovers Mill water supply therein, was safely out of firing range.

The remaining twenty minutes of the broadcast abandoned the “news bulletin” approach as Welles, playing Professor Pierson, recounted his adventures as one of earth’s lone survivors. The traditional conclusion as written by H.G. Wells was reached—the Martians defeated by “the humblest thing that God in his wisdom had put upon this earth,” bacteria—and Bernard Herrmann directed his orchestra in a dramatic crescendo, finally utilizing the power of the composer/conductor.

Houseman, becoming more and more aware of the chaos they had unleashed, had sent Welles a note on the subject.

This may have influenced Welles, who—having had to cut seven minutes on the fly—somehow managed to scribble a rewrite of his closing speech, even as he performed the bulk of the final section of the show, solo.