Chapter 6 - The Heat Ray in The Chobham Room
Forty people have been destroyed by the Martian weapon around the crater and many others are ripped of their lives by the spread of fire from the ray. It appears to combust all that is able to be ignited. The narrator then makes a suggestion, a theory, that some sort of parabolic mirror was used to reflect and intensify invisible light in order to form this unseen weapon of terror, terror that has now caused many others to die from the pandemonium.
War of The Worlds
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own… Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
H.G Wells (1898)