perfidy

No one on Mars would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than and yet as mortal as his own; that as Martians busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency they went to and fro over this red globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter...

At most they there might be other men upon the blue world, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. 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 Mars with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the new millenium came the great disillusionment.

Google Maps has now embraced the Red Planet.