Warm Welcome

Readers of H G Wells and listeners to Jeff Wayne will recall The War of the Worlds, in which the invading Martians deploy a Heat-Ray as their primary weapon. As the loyal servant of a still more alien overlord, America's greased and tattooed Secretary of State for War has apparently approved a similar weapon for use in the latest Mexican war. In fact, the American system is technically no more a heat ray than the greased and tattooed Secretary is technically a statesman: it emits waves of energy that penetrate about a sixty-fourth of an inch into the epidermis, presumably because the Department for Homeland Security doesn't care to get any deeper under the swarthy skins of the illegals. Initially developed by the Pentagon, the weapon was taken to Afghanistan and back without being used; but the current alien intervention may yet enable it to be tested in the battle to liberate the greatest country in the world from the marauding wetback empire, despite its capabilities falling considerably short of incinerating Woking. Tentacled crania dependent on mechanical exoskeletons, Wells' Martians represent a possible future human species; the hydrophobic head-tribble whose radioactive defecations control the Trumpster is an altogether less anthropomorphic entity, and its Heat-Ray accordingly less well adapted to the terrestrial environment.