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

of the entire human race, except for his own, in utter scorn. I wish I could talk to him. Yes, or to
Watson."
She was able to smile at that. "You have always laughed at Dr. Watson when he is unable to follow
your own reasoning."
"Yes, I have had my fun with him, but his mind has a good, sound scientific organization, and again and
again he has proved his great courage and depend-ability. Now," he said, rising. "I must go to the
tele-graph office, but you may expect me back shortly. By the way, I sent Billy on a holiday to his
mother in Yorkshire. Where is your maid?"
"I let her go home to Cheltenham for the weekend."
"Then I hope she stays there, well away from Lon-don. But let us think of ourselves for a moment or
two." He went to take his violin from its case. "Before I go, how about a little night music?"
She sat and listened happily as he played a Paganini melody, then a wilder, more haunting strain.
"What is that?" Martha asked.
"I learned it from a gypsy. It was all he could pay for my help when he was falsely accused of picking
pockets. I think it is beautiful."
Again he changed key and mood. She sat up straight and alert.
"I remember that, my dearest," she said. "You played it long ago, at the Trevor house at Donnithorpe.
I heard you from outside the window. Who composed it?"
"I did," he told her, smiling in his turn. "Once I had ambitions to play sweet music, to be thanked and
renowned for it. But as you know, I took another way of life, and am content not be so greatly
celebrated for my labors."
He returned the violin to its case and went out on his errand.
That night, and on Sunday morning while the church bells rang, Holmes interviewed refugees from the
towns in Surrey. In shaky voices they told him of troops wiped out wholesale by the flashing reflector
devices that by now were called the heat-ray, and of gigantic machines like "boilers on stilts," on the swift
move everywhere below London. By Sunday noon, Holmes gathered that whole communities had been
effortlessly destroyed and that military forcesтАФhorse, foot and artillery had proved helpless against those
stalking, merciless fighting-machines. Back in his sitting room that afternoon, he made two copies of all
he had learned and his own estimate of the desperate situation.
"And I have had no further word from either Watson or Challenger," he said to Martha. "Small
wonderтАФthe telephone service seems completely disrupted by a great flood of calls. Well, I shall leave
one copy of my notes here."
He stuck them to the mantelpiece with a jacknife. Martha winced as the point of the blade drove into
the varnished wood, but he did not seem to notice.
"The third cylinder's arrival has been reported," he went on. "It fell last night, again in Surrey.
Apparently they are able to concentrate their landfalls within a few miles of each other and consolidate a
position from which to operate."
 "At least they have not come to London," offered Martha, though with no great optimism.
"But it takes no great deductive reasoning to see that this hopelessly one-sided war of the worlds will
move toward us," he replied. "They are well aware that this is the largest city, the largest center of
population on earth, and they mean to capture it."
"But London," she said. "Great, powerful London. How can London fall to them?"
"That, my dear Martha, you and I shall not be here to witness. Both Billy and your maid have
gone to safe distances, and so shall we go. Pack some things, my dear, while I do the
same."
"Yes, yes," she agreed quickly, "but where shall we go?"
"If you approve, we shall take our own holiday up at Donnithorpe, where we have not been
for almost twenty-five years. You told me that your uncle is now landlord of the inn there, and my old
friend Trevor is justice of the peace, like his father before him."
Yet again he went to the post office, where he read more tersely wired reports of Martians on