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"
They may come here," she said again and again.
I pressed her to take wine, and tried to reassure her.
"
They can scarcely move," I said.
I began to comfort her and myself by repeating all that Ogilvy had
told me of the impossibility of the Martians establishing themselves
on the earth. In particular I laid stress on the gravitational
difficulty. On the surface of the earth the force of gravity is three
times what it is on the surface of Mars. A Martian, therefore, would
weigh three times more than on Mars, albeit his muscular strength
would be the same. His own body would be a cope of lead to him. That,
indeed, was the general opinion. Both The Times and the Daily
Telegraph, for instance, insisted on it the next morning, and both
overlooked, just as I did, two obvious modifying influences.
The atmosphere of the earth, we now know, contains far more oxygen
or far less argon (whichever way one likes to put it) than does Mars.
The invigorating influences of this excess of oxygen upon the Martians
indisputably did much to counterbalance the increased weight of their
bodies. And, in the second place, we all overlooked the fact that
such mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed was quite able
to dispense with muscular exertion at a pinch.
But I did not consider these points at the time, and so my
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