"Manly Wade Wellman - Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wellman Manly Wade)

could spare time from these duties and his personal affairs he visited Enmore Park to gaze into the crystal
and make careful notes of what he saw. Challenger spent far more time in obser-vation. He dodged his
wife's inquiries and put aside the treatise which he had been writing, to sit long hours in the study, his
great head draped to shut out the interfering light.
The two jointly gathered increasingly clear, con-sistent impressions of the top of the city, wide and
long and apparently of considerable height, set upon a level expanse of reddish soil with sparse lawnlike
vegetation that extended to the bluffs on the horizon. That city bore something of the aspect of a fort,
with its solid construction, its few openings for entrance or exit, and its location in open country as though
to make a secret approach impossible. Neither Holmes nor Chal-lenger could estimate the number of the
inhabitants, but they seemed to appear by dozens, even by scores. On the green-fluffed plain around
their massive dwel-ling moved metal vehicles of varying sizes and com-plexities.
"I am baffled," confessed Challenger at one point. "We are like African savages, intelligent enough in
their own culture, but unable to understand a train or a steamship."
"Yet African savages, if trained and educated can understand and operate such mechanisms,"
said Holmes. "Your comparison may be too optimistic."
"Then what comparison would you offer?" inquired Challenger.
"I defer answering that until I am more certain," said Holmes. He smiled inwardly. He saw no
point in risking Challenger's wrath by implying that Challenger might, by comparison to the Martians, be
an animal inferior in both physical and mental develop-ment.
Challenger returned to his study of the scene. "The smallest and most agile of their machines seem to
be unpiloted," he said. "I would suspect that they are intelligent mechanisms, possessed of their own
powers to act."
"Some of them may well be of that class," agreed Holmes. "Yet they may be operated, at a distance,
by thought processes of their operators."
The scene in the crystal faded as they talked, then reappeared, with no mechanisms visible. The
bulbous, tentacled beings moved here and there on roof or lawn, walking on their handlike tufts of
tentacles or assum-ing wings and flying above the roofs. Several of the flyers observed the glittering
points on the masts or soared away out of sight, on missions difficult to guess. Challenger talked more
than Holmes. His manner was that of a classroom lecturer, expounding propositions to students who
must pass examinations on the sub-ject. At last he shifted the crystal very painstakingly, to get a view
well to one side. He almost shouted in excitement.
"Mars is a planet with only the smallest amount of water to be detected on its surface," he burst out,
al-most as though Holmes had suggested the contrary. "Of course, there has been all the idle talk
about canals, ever since 1877. The notion sprang up because Schiaparelli professed to have seen
canaliтАФhe em-ployed his native Italian. The word means simply channels. But various arbitrary fools,
presuming to encroach on the outer fringes of scientific thought, have mistranslated and babble
about 'canal,' as though they were true waterways."
"Yet there may be some truth in their mistransla-tion," said Holmes. "A canal, I take it, is an artificial
engineering device. And just what sort of waterway is the one we now see in the crystal?"
For a stream was visible, at a point in the plain well to the left of the buildings. A curious bridge
spanned it.
"I wonder about it," Challenger admitted. "Perhaps it is an artificial canal, as you seem to suggest. But
it could never have been seen by even the most powerful telescope on earth, and can hardly be related
to Schiaparelli's purported discoveries."
Holmes frowned. "Yet what we are seeing may well relate to the strange disturbances, possibly signs
of gigantic construction, which were detected on Mars at the opposition of 1894."
"I paid little attention to that," Challenger confessed in a tone of embarrassment. "My attention was
occu-pied with an impudent challenge to my theory ofтАФwell, no matter for that."
"If 1894 was a year of construction activity upon Mars, may that not have been the time that our
crystal was somehow sent to earth?" said Holmes.