Max Collins: The War of the Worlds Murder

“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.

Now, Welles on his podium-smiling but perhaps a little shaky-again spoke into his microphone.

“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen-out of character to assure you that ‘The War of the Worlds’ has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be-the Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!”

In the sub-control booth, Dave Taylor had his face in his hands. Gibson noted that Houseman’s expression was as unreadable as an Easter Island statue’s.

“Starting now,” Welles was saying, “we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates, by tomorrow night, so we did the best next thing-we annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the CBS Building…. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business.”

The cast was on its feet, smiling at Orson. They had no idea what they had turned loose on America, and only knew that a mediocre show had been transformed into something special, by their gifted leader.

Who was saying, “So good-bye everybody, and remember please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight-that grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the punkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there…that was no Martian, it’s Hallowe’en.”

Welles cued Herrmann for the Tchaikovsky theme, and Dan Seymour returned to his mike to make the farewell: “Tonight the Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations coast-to-coast have brought you ‘The War of the Worlds,’ by H.G. Wells, the seventeenth in its weekly series of dramatic broadcasts featuring Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air …. Next week we present a dramatization of three famous short stories…. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.”

When the clock hit nine P.M., the OFF THE AIR sign switched on.

That was when men in blue uniforms began to stream into the studio, and the grin on Welles’s face froze, like a jack-o’-lantern’s.

Walter Gibson and Jack Houseman, along with everyone else in the control booth, watched agape in astonishment as a dozen cops, billy clubs in hand, poured into the studio, like raiders in Prohibition days rushing a speakeasy.