Quickly, one after the other, one, two, three, four of the armoured
Martians appeared, far away over the little trees, across the flat
meadows that stretched towards Chertsey, and striding hurriedly
towards the river. Little cowled figures they seemed at first, going
with a rolling motion and as fast as flying birds.

Then, advancing obliquely towards us, came a fifth. Their armoured
bodies glittered in the sun as they swept swiftly forward upon the
guns, growing rapidly larger as they drew nearer. One on the extreme
left, the remotest that is, flourished a huge case high in the air,
and the ghostly, terrible Heat-Ray I had already seen on Friday night
smote towards Chertsey, and struck the town.

At sight of these strange, swift, and terrible creatures the crowd
near the water's edge seemed to me to be for a moment horror-struck.
There was no screaming or shouting, but a silence. Then a hoarse
murmur and a movement of feet--a splashing from the water. A man, too
frightened to drop the portmanteau he carried on his shoulder, swung
round and sent me staggering with a blow from the corner of his
burden. A woman thrust at me with her hand and rushed past me. I
turned with the rush of the people, but I was not too terrified for
thought. The terrible Heat-Ray was in my mind. To get under water!
That was it!

"Get under water!" I shouted, unheeded.

I faced about again, and rushed towards the approaching Martian,
rushed right down the gravelly beach and headlong into the water.
Others did the same. A boatload of people putting back came leaping
out as I rushed past. The stones under my feet were muddy and
slippery, and the river was so low that I ran perhaps twenty feet
scarcely waist-deep. Then, as the Martian towered overhead scarcely
a couple of hundred yards away, I flung myself forward under the
surface. The splashes of the people in the boats leaping into the
river sounded like thunderclaps in my ears. People were landing
hastily on both sides of the river. But the Martian machine took no
more notice for the moment of the people running this way and that
than a man would of the confusion of ants in a nest against which his
foot has kicked. When, half suffocated, I raised my head above water,
the Martian's hood pointed at the batteries that were still firing
across the river, and as it advanced it swung loose what must have
been the generator of the Heat-Ray.

In another moment it was on the bank, and in a stride wading
halfway across. The knees of its foremost legs bent at the farther
bank, and in another moment it had raised itself to its full height
again, close to the village of Shepperton. Forthwith the six guns
which, unknown to anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind the
outskirts of that village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near
concussion, the last close upon the first, made my heart jump. The
monster was already raising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the
first shell burst six yards above the hood.

I gave a cry of astonishment. I saw and thought nothing of the
other four Martian monsters; my attention was riveted upon the nearer
incident. Simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the
body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time to
dodge, the fourth shell.

The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood bulged,
flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh
and glittering metal.

"Hit!" shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer.

I heard answering shouts from the people in the water about me. I
could have leaped out of the water with that momentary exultation.

The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did
not fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer
heeding its steps and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now
rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living
intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain and splashed to
the four winds of heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate
device of metal whirling to destruction. It drove along in a straight
line, incapable of guidance. It struck the tower of Shepperton
Church, smashing it down as the impact of a battering ram might have
done, swerved aside, blundered on and collapsed with tremendous force
into the river out of my sight.

A violent explosion shook the air, and a spout of water, steam,
mud, and shattered metal shot far up into the sky. As the camera of
the Heat-Ray hit the water, the latter had immediately flashed into
steam. In another moment a huge wave, like a muddy tidal bore but
almost scaldingly hot, came sweeping round the bend upstream. I saw
people struggling shorewards, and heard their screaming and shouting
faintly above the seething and roar of the Martian's collapse.

For a moment I heeded nothing of the heat, forgot the patent need
of self-preservation. I splashed through the tumultuous water,
pushing aside a man in black to do so, until I could see round the
bend. Half a dozen deserted boats pitched aimlessly upon the
confusion of the waves. The fallen Martian came into sight
downstream, lying across the river, and for the most part submerged.

Thick clouds of steam were pouring off the wreckage, and through
the tumultuously whirling wisps I could see, intermittently and
vaguely, the gigantic limbs churning the water and flinging a splash
and spray of mud and froth into the air. The tentacles swayed and


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