Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition) — page 80: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

78 sheet rubber, created arms that ac- tually pulsated—through the use of rubber tubing in them—and painted the whole thing lobster red. It was a startler all right—something right out of your worst nightmare. Gemora is a short-statured man who could fit into the contraption too, _ so we hired him to operate it. When he got inside he moved around on his knees, holding his arms hunched out. His hands came just to the elbows of the Martian’s formidable-looking ten- tacles. Then we showed only one fleeting glimpse of the creature in the final picture! All that effort, money and time for a few seconds on the screen. Why? Naturally there was an argu- ment on how much the Martian was to be shown in the finished picture. But we decided that a hint of horror is often more effective than a large dose. And anyway, would you have wanted to know this thing intimately? Our greatest special-effects problem in the production was building and operating the warlike Martian ma- chines which land on Earth to destroy its inhabitants. We came close to electrocuting our crew in designing this one. We went back to the original Wells book for inspiration. My first edition is illustrated with scenes of a huge, disklike object on giant stilts. However, Wells’ conception of the machines was mechanical. In this era we decided ours should be electrical. I wish we’d never seen the illustra- tions of the stiltlike legs at all! We'd have saved a lot of grief. For the original plan, worked out by the spe- cial-effects people, was to have the machines—which were to be minia- tures—trest on three pulsating beams of static electricity serving as legs. The idea was to use a high-voltage eletrical discharge of some one mil- ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION lion volts fed: down to the legs from wires suspended from an overhead rig on the sound stage. A high velocity blower was used from behind to force the sparks down the legs. We made tests under controlled conditions on our special-effects stage and they were spectacular. I couldn’t have been more delighted. But there was one great problem. It was dangerous to generate a million volts on a regular sound stage. It would be too easy for the sparks to jump to damp dust, dirt, metal, or what have you. It could have killed someone, perhaps set the studio on fire. So after the test opening scene we reluctantly gave up the electrical legs for the machine, although a great deal of hard work had already been ex- pended on them. It was in actuality as dangerous as we had wanted it to be on the screen ! The Martian machine and its de- structive rays, although looming large on the screen, in reality was scaled down to one sixth real size when we filmed it. We built three miniature machines, forty-two inches in diameter and made out of copper to maintain the reddish hue always identified with Mars, the red planet. They were flat, semi-disk shaped objects. We gave them three distinc- tive features, a long cobra neck which emitted a disintegrating ray, an elec- trical TV camera type scanner on the end of a snakelike metal coil which emerged from the body of the ma- chine, and wing-tip flame throwers. Each machine was operated by fif- teen hair-fine wires connected to a device on an overhead track. By means of these wires we carried the electrical controls to make the cobra neck, the scanning eye and other por- tions operate properly. EOmMmichoo AA SaO)