Of all the worlds that the intelligences on Mars could see and study, only our own warm Earth was green with vegetation, bright with water, and possessed a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility. Nor could they go to Mercury, nearest planet to the sun it has no air, and the temperature at its equator is that of molten lead. Their nearest world was giant Jupiter, where there are titanic cliffs of lava and ice with hydrogen flaming at the tops, where the atmospheric pressure is terrible - thousands of pounds to the square inch. The Martians considered Saturn, an attractive world with its many moons and beautiful rings of cosmic dust, but its temperature is close to 270 degrees below zero, and ice lies 15,000 miles deep on its surface. They couldn't go to Neptune or Uranus, twin worlds in eternal night and perpetual cold, both surrounded by an unbreathable atmosphere of methane gas and ammonia vapor. They could not go to Pluto, outermost of all the planets, so cold that its atmosphere lies frozen on its surface. The inhabitants of this dying planet looked across space with instruments and intelligences of which we have scarcely dreamed, searching for another world to which they could migrate. At night, temperatures drop far below zero even at its equator. Mars is more than 140 million miles from the sun, and for centuries it has been in the last stages of exhaustion. Yet, across the gulf of space on the planet Mars, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded our Earth with envious eyes, slowly and surely drawing their plans against us. No one would have believed, in the middle of the 20th century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's.And now, fought with the terrible weapons of super-science, menacing all mankind and every creature on Earth, comes. The Second World War involved every continent on the globe, and men turned to science for new devices of warfare, which reached an unparalleled peak in their capacity for destruction. ![]() In the First World War, and for the first time in the history of man, nations combined to fight against nations using the crude weapons of those days.
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