The Massacre of Mankind: Authorised Sequel to The War of the Worlds

1 THE HOUSE IN DAHLEM

On the night the lightning fell across the earth, Walter Jenkins was in Berlin. And from that powerful city his view of that world-wide catastrophe far exceeded my own perspective at the time, trapped as I was in the Cordon in England.

Walter had taken a rented home in a village called Dahlem, south-west of Berlin proper. I once visited the house out of curiosity, during a trip to the city in the aftermath. Dahlem is (or was before the Martians came, and will be again) an opulent place, green and leafy – indeed a corner of the Grunewald Forest laps over its boundary – a community of wide avenues and spacious villas. The house was not characteristic of the man, I remember thinking as I looked around it; in terms of material ambition his vision had never risen much above his old English suburban home in Woking. But in those final days before the return of the Martians, he said, he had chosen to move away from the ‘laboratories’ of central Berlin, where Freud and others continued to examine his prototypical disorder of the mind, his ‘gun-dread’. Here he had privacy, and space, and the quiet to think – and, crucially, the means to observe the war of worlds which he anticipated.

To that end – and long before the attacks were due – he had installed additional telephone wires, even a telegraph receiver, and wireless sets of impressive power. All this was of not negligible cost, but, as I have previously mentioned, thanks to his Narrative he was not without means – and, he seemed to have decided, if the Martians were on their way in force then soon money might not mean very much anyhow.

And the Martians were on their way: of that he was as certain as any individual outside the scientific, military and government establishments.

Of course, like all of us he based had his calculations on the date of the coming opposition of Mars: the closest approach of the planet would be on June 10, and a hypothetical schedule of firings, based on the precedents of ’07 and ’20, could be counted back from that. Even now it’s hard to recall now how total was the secrecy blanketing the astronomical project at the time: for years, for many oppositions, the authorities, fearing our panic and mindful of false alarms in the past, had done their best to hide the news from the sky from us, whether it be good or bad, and it was impossible to get confirmation of any sightings, one way or another. But Walter had resources and contacts. He listened to whispers and words and speculations from friends within the world-wide astronomical community, many of whom, being bull-headed scientists, had little time for official blankets of silence. In short, they leaked, if discreetly.

So it was that Walter eventually learned that the Martian cannon had indeed begun to fire again, as early as April 8 – that is, even before I had visited him in Berlin in May, though he had not known it at that time. It was just as in ’20 when he had learned so late of the coming of the Martian fleet.

And as Walter tried to analyse the available information, the numbers of these new blasts soon became clear. In 1907 there had been a mere ten cylinders launched from Mars; in 1920 ten times that number, a hundred falling in formation in central England – and now, the astronomers privately estimated, another tenfold increase would bring a thousand Martian ships to the earth.

Where would the Martians land, though? The cylinders seemed to be flocking in space, gathering in flotillas as latecomers joined the interplanetary armada – just as had been the case with the British invasion force. But because the Martian pilots repeatedly adjusted their trajectories while they crossed interplanetary space, almost down to the moment of landing as it turned out – the rocket-like devices flared green even as the cylinders fell across our sky, as I and others witnessed – for many days the pattern was unclear.

So Walter collected world maps of all kinds – he even had a cheap schoolroom globe – as well as astronomical tables, and a variety of mathematical manuals. Even a slide rule! Walter was a philosophical journalist, never a mathematician, but he had long ago learned that mathematics was the language of the astronomer, for numbers capture the exquisite precision of the motion of the heavenly bodies in relation to each other: even the intricate ballet of the Martian fleets as they assembled in space to fall upon the earth. And it was the pattern of those assemblings that he slowly puzzled out, alone in that German suburb, in those final days and hours, as the Martians drew closer, and the astronomers’ observations of the approaching cylinders and projections of their flight became more precise.

The core of it was simple. The Martians always landed at local midnight.

They would come out of the dark, he saw, falling into the midnight shadow of the earth. And they would come in clusters, lined up one after another and ready to fall on our world.

He imagined the view from an approaching cylinder in the first cluster, with Europe, London, Berlin, Paris and all, already carried into the light of a new day, but the Americas blanketed in the midnight dark, the great cities laid out like jewels along the coasts and on the courses of the great rivers. Blanketed in dark, and helpless as the Martians fell from the sky, hammering down on the line of midnight.

And after that, as the world turned, as the midnight line crossed the land, so the following Martian battle groups would fall, again and again.

It seems he managed to sleep a little, that last night.

On Friday May 19 he was woken by one of his telephones ringing. His clocks showed it was six in the morning in Berlin, five a.m. in London – I was in the Redoubt at Amersham with Verity, watching the cylinders cross high in the sky – and a little after midnight on the East Coast of North America.

It had begun.

‘I told you so,’ he told me he muttered to himself, a man alone in that house in the German dawn, in pyjamas and dressing gown, eyes no doubt dark with fatigue, sheets of his spidery scrawl covering tables and walls. ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’

2 ON LONG ISLAND

As midnight approached, Harry Kane thought that the atmosphere in the Bigelow mansion, was agitated. No, that was not the word. Feverish, perhaps. Or on the borders of hysterical. Everybody knew that if the Martians were to come to the earth at this opposition the landings ought to start tonight – or rather today, this new day just begun at midnight, Friday May 19. Well, if the astronomers had seen anything it hadn’t been released to the public. But even so the atmosphere was quite something.

Perhaps it was the drink, or the pills, or the rag music from the apparently tireless band, or the giddy excitement of being young and rich and utterly free to indulge yourself as you chose… Or perhaps it was the sheer privilege of having been one of the lucky few (well, lucky few hundred) to have been invited to this party, at this cusp moment when, perhaps, the world itself was about to come to an end – at least according to the gloomier prophesies in the Hearst papers…

And how to capture this wild, glittering fragility in a word, a phrase?

As I have mentioned earlier in this memoir, my good friend Harry was a journalist for the popular New York city papers, a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post in particular – and, under another name, a pulp novelist. Well, we all have to make a living. He had a nose for news, which was why, as it would turn out, he ended up at precisely the right location on that dramatic night. But he lacked, I always felt, the other half of the true reporter’s skill set, in that he struggled with the words themselves, always uncertain allies at best for poor Harry. And that distracted him, for he would stand unseeing before the jewellery heist or the train wreck or the car crash, while lexicological fragments drifted behind those handsome blue eyes. I told him once that he could have been a great writer if only he could write.

But he did have an eye for detail; when he came to write down his own account of that night he would remember that just as midnight struck the band was playing The Sheik of Araby, accompanied by a blurred chiming of the house’s many clocks.

He pushed his way through the ballroom of the Bigelow mansion, ignoring the Japanese panelling and the rich flock wallpaper and the Parisian chandeliers that adorned that brilliantly lit room, and joined the crowd jostling to get through the wide French windows and out onto the veranda and under the open sky. He would remember the drink he carried through those open doors. It was a highball, not his first, and maybe one too many; he set down the half-empty glass on an ornate occasional table.

There, as he wandered across the veranda, he took in the scene. If the Bigelow house itself looked as if it was a wing of the palace of Versailles, carved off and carried over the Atlantic to Long Island, the gardens were scarcely less spectacular. The lawns, studded with lilac trees and hawthorns and plums, many in blossom, were strung with coloured lights. The garden’s centrepiece was a swimming pool, a disc of brilliant blue light across which girls swam like dolphins – all of them in proper bathing costumes, but that would change as the night wore on and things got rowdier; it was always so. As you looked further out from the house you saw the jetty, and a couple of small boats, and the dark waters of the Sound, and the lights of Manhattan on the horizon, a misty blur.

And people drifted through this scene like pretty ghosts, drinks in hand, the women in expensive creations of beads and chiffon, the men in dress suits and patent leather shoes like Harry’s own, or – probably the Long Island natives – in white flannels and sneakers. Purple seemed to be the colour that year – or just that month or that week – and every woman wore her hair tight in a carefully shaped bob. Bigelow’s guests looked alike, Harry thought, all but indistinguishable unless you made out the carefully selected detail. Thus the convergence of fashion and money: lots and lots of money.

While he was people-watching in this way, of course, he was missing the real news of the evening. Slowly he became aware that many of those pretty faces were turned upwards, to the sky. It was only then that it occurred to Harry to look up too.

It was a clear, cloudless night, a late May night, with just a tang of chill in the air after a warm day. The lights of the party were so bright that no stars were to be seen. But Harry saw the streaks across the sky, off to the east. They came and went, splinters sporadically visible. Harry was a country boy, having grown up in upstate New York; he had seen meteor showers before, and this had something of that look. But these streaks all ran in parallel to each other, and they were crowded together, dense in the sky: evidence of coordination. And no meteor he had ever seen flashed green.

Of course he knew what this meant; it was just as the more irresponsible newspapers, including most of those he wrote for, had predicted. The Martians were coming to the earth, once again – more of them, following the group still camped out in England. Well, here they were, right on cue, sand this time, evidently not targeting England again, but heading here, the US, the East Coast. There had been much speculation that if they did come to America they would slam down in the middle of one of the great cities, Chicago or Boston or New York itself, but – so Harry judged, taking his orientation from the lights of Manhattan – they were actually coming down in an east-southeast direction; they would land on Long Island somewhere to the east of Harry’s own position, close to Sands Point.

Nevertheless, they were here.

He stood back in the shadows, keeping to himself. Harry had never been to England, had never seen a Martian or its works close to, save filtered through photography or flickering cinema images. Even now, nothing but lights in the sky. It was one thing to play with the ideas of bogeymen from the red planet – and he had written lurid potboilers about the Martian threat himself – and quite another to have it become real. He supposed the fear would come later.

To the people around him, though, the apparition seemed extraordinarily exciting; they shouted, pointed, yelped and whooped, some broke into spontaneous dancing, some even started to applaud. It was giddiness, thought Harry, as ever searching for the right word like a squirrel for a lost nut. The over-excitement of the party and too much chemical stimulation was now laced with this cosmic terror, as if sherbet had been thrown into a glass of champagne.

A girl he knew slightly grabbed his arm. ‘Dance with me, Harry! Isn’t this just the end – the end of the world party? They say Guggenheim’s here, and Eddie Cantor, and Jack Dempsey—’

‘And P.G. Wodehouse.’

‘Who? Oh, let’s dance, Harry, what’s wrong with you?’

He smiled, shook his head, gently disengaged, and let her whirl away.

He walked away from the brighter lights and down towards the jetty. Once away from the house he heard car engines gunning, vehicles driving away.

By the water he spotted a man and woman in the shade of an awning, calmer than most, watching the sky, quietly smoking. Harry hung back a moment and observed; they were two silhouettes wreathed by cigarette smoke, under a Martian sky. Harry sensed they were not a couple, and would not object to his joining them. (If vocabulary was a weakness, Harry was always sensitive of emotions.) Anyhow, he felt no awkwardness in approaching.

‘Mind if I join you?’

They turned. The woman smiled, a little distantly, and the man shrugged, but stiffly, as if in mild pain. He was in uniform, Harry saw now, and he wondered if the fellow was some military veteran.

Harry politely offered fresh cigarettes. ‘Quite a night.’

‘Thanks to the Martians, yes,’ the man said. ‘Coming down on cue, according to the astronomical timetable – though not quite where the military analysts said they would.’

Harry stuck out his hand. ‘Harry Kane, by the way. I work for the papers. The Hearst rags mostly.’

The man seemed indifferent, but he shook Harry’s hand. His grip was strong, but Harry observed how he winced as he flexed his shoulder. He was perhaps forty, dark and heavy-set; he wore the uniform of a junior Army officer. ‘Name’s Bill Woodward. Captain, if you can’t read the uniform.’

Harry took a stab, erring on the side of politeness. ‘Retired?’

‘Not quite. Sick leave.’ He tapped his shoulder. ‘Took a bullet in the Philippines six months back. Wouldn’t mind if I weren’t pretty sure that bullet was German-made. Recuperating well enough. The Army’s good enough to be paying my bills, though the place I rent, not far from here, costs no more than a hundred bucks a month – nothing like this. No family to mop my brow, as I was explaining to Miss Rafferty here.’ His voice had a southern twang, Harry thought.

Meanwhile the woman studied Harry closely. She held out her own hand and introduced herself as Marigold Rafferty. She was perhaps thirty, with a Boston accent or so Harry judged, and she wore riding habit: boots, long skirt, sensible jacket. Harry says she looked a little drab against the background of the glittering party-goers, and a sight more adult. ‘Harry Kane,’ she said. ‘I know your face, I think, but it doesn’t fit the name. You say you’re a journalist. Do you also write books, by any chance?…’

Harry coloured. ‘I’m afraid I do, Miss Rafferty—’

She snapped her fingers. ‘I knew it. Edison versus the Canal Builders – that was one of yours, wasn’t it?’

‘It’s something of a sideline. It can pay pretty well, given the serialisation rights and such. But I see myself as a serious journalist—’

‘Edisonades, eh?’ Woodward grinned. ‘Tales of the exploits of the great inventor of the lightbulb. I read a couple of those. Edison and the March of the Kaiser was my favourite. Was that one of yours?’

‘No—’

‘Always thought that one, at least, had a certain plausibility. Those Germans ain’t exactly forgiven us for taking the Philippines and Guam and Cuba from the Spaniards. Edison against the Martians, though – that’s a stretch!’ He glanced at Marigold Rafferty. ‘I did always wonder how the great man felt about his starring role in such works.’

Marigold gently punched the soldier’s good arm. ‘Come now, Bill, not only have we two just met, but we just met this poor young fellow too; let’s not guy him. Harry – or “Mr Jarvis X. Kendor”, wasn’t that your nom de plume? – if you want to know how Thomas Edison feels about starring in one of your stories, you can ask him yourself.’

‘Edison? Quite a name-drop, Miss Rafferty! I imagine he’s in New Jersey, at Menlo Park.’ This was where Edison had his research establishment at the time.

Marigold shook her head. ‘Not a bit of it. He’s right here, Mr Kane. Here on Long Island. In fact, a little earlier, he was at this very party! But he tires quickly – well, as you would; he’s pretty sturdy, but he is seventy-five years old.’

Harry shook his head. ‘Edison, here on Long Island? Why?’

Marigold said apologetically, ‘I should explain. I work at Menlo Park too; my technical background is in telephonic circuitry, but for the last couple of years I’ve been something of a personal assistant to Mr Edison himself. Mr Edison has taken the predictions of Martian returns pretty seriously at every opposition since ’07, and habitually takes himself, and his family, out to what he hopes will be a safe refuge, if they do come. Away from the immediate vicinity of New York anyhow. As it happens the company, and indeed the federal government, have been happy to support him in this.’

Woodward grinned. ‘There you are, you see, “Jarvis”. You hit on a truth in your pulp novel—’

‘I’d hesitate to call it “pulp”—’

‘Edison’s no superman but he is a pretty valuable national asset. As it happened they rented him a villa next to mine. Me, a neighbour of Thomas Edison! What are the odds, Mr Kane? What are the odds?’

‘You say the government lends a hand. Is the old man really so important?’

She shrugged. ‘You need to ask? You wrote about Edison inventing super-weapons to defeat the Martians.’

‘That was just fiction. In real life—’

‘In real life, Edison has been inventing super-weapons to defeat the Martians.’

Harry Kane could only stare.

But he thought he saw the argument; he’d worked through some of it himself. If the Martians were to invade the New York area, surely they would come down on the mainland for ease of movement, and for access to the continental interior. So Long Island, protected by the Sound, a barricade of water, might be bypassed, for a time at least. Yes, this was a sensible place to stash a national treasure like the brain of Edison.

And that was why Harry himself was there, for many of the city’s rich seemed to have come to a similar conclusion. There had been a veritable flight to the island’s resorts in the last few days, and Harry had come to observe that expensive flocking.

Harry had enough of a sense of history to understand that the recent floods of new wealth, at which journalists and writers like himself marvelled, were based on genuine economic growth in the country; you had the opening-up of huge mineral assets – silver from Nevada, copper from Montana – and you had the exhilarating expansion of modern industries such as telephones, movies and photography, electricity, cars. But in the cities, especially in Manhattan – thanks to financial speculation, and services like bond trading, the dealing of long-term secured loans – you could get rich quick perfectly legitimately. And also, of course, illegitimately; prohibition had created a major black market all by itself. And that extraordinary wealth found expression in the hedonistic, hectic culture that underpinned this very villa, this very party.

Against this background, trouble overseas meant little. So what, if the Germans had whipped up a storm of flags and guns in Europe – if they seemed to be developing ambitions for a global empire? These were remote problems that could be dealt with in the future. Even the Martian invasions of England seemed fantastical and distant – something detached from the normal processes of the world.

But now had come the drizzle of predictions of a new wave of Martian invaders. What if they had come to Boston or New York this time, not London? Harry suspected that most Americans rather looked down on the British response to the invasion of 1907, and even that of two years ago. Surely the American military would have put up a better fight than the British; surely the American character, tested, would have fared better. It was this intuition about his native culture that had prompted Harry to pen his own Edisonades, about heroic resistance and jut-jawed counter-invasions. His sales told him, and his publisher, that he had hit a nerve.

Tonight, though, Harry, picking up on the gossip and chatter, had looked for an unusual angle. If the Martians did come to America there would be a million eyewitness accounts of military manoeuvres and the defence of the cities and the fleeing masses – but who would tell the story of the privileged rich? What would they do? Long Island would be something of a refuge, he had figured, where you could watch the Martians be wiped out in Manhattan while you drank champagne… and then return to the ruins, like so many precious birds. Martians of the Jazz Age: that was the book he’d write about this some day. He’d publish under his own name too.

Now, hideously, that fantasy seemed to be coming true; and it was no comfort to Harry, that glittering night, that his story instincts had been good. Because the Martians weren’t playing ball.

Woodward glanced up at the trails in the sky. ‘I’m no expert on Mars, but I have been under artillery fire. And I don’t figure those shots are heading for Manhattan. Sure looks to me like those cylinders are heading for a spot on the Island. Here. And a spot not so far away from where we stand.’

Marigold said, ‘So much for a safe refuge. I think I’d better call Mr Edison.’

3 IN THE BIGELOW MANSION

Inside, the house was a cave of light. Harry waited with Bill Woodward, both of them smoking, while Marigold went in search of a phone to call Edison’s residence. The band was playing, right now a rather sad waltz that Harry recognised, called ‘Three O’Clock in the Morning’ – badly timed, it wasn’t yet one a.m. There were plenty of people still there, plenty of champagne and claret still to be poured, plenty of noise from the bright chorus of voices. And yet, it seemed to Harry, there was a certain brittleness about the scene. Harry accepted a mint julep from a passing waiter – but then he caught Woodward’s eye, who nodded, and Harry thought it was as if an unspoken message passed between them: We stay sober. Kane took one sip of the mint julep and set it aside.

Woodward asked softly, ‘You have a car?’

‘Not here. My house is a short walk away.’

‘I have mine here. Beat-up Dodge, but it does the job; I don’t hold with this habit of changing up every year just to keep up with the fashion in interior colour schemes… Maybe I ought to go check up on it, there was a lot of traffic a little earlier.’

‘I heard it, after midnight. A lot of drunken drivers.’ Harry found himself looking for Marigold, a little anxiously, as if the three of them had formed a bond, a unit. ‘But where were they going?’

‘If cylinders have come down on the Island, there would have been wireless broadcasts, even police messages. Phone calls from anybody nearby the landing site.’

‘So people drove out to see it.’ Harry imagined it, the beautiful people, already drunk, clutching bottles of champagne and brandy, bowling in their expensive cars along the dirt-track roads towards the Martian pits with their walls of smashed earth and wisps of green smoke rising in the American air… ‘We figured the Martians wouldn’t come to the Island because it’s a dumb place for them to land. Right? And yet they came, it seems. Why?’

‘I can think of two reasons,’ Woodward said. ‘One is just to do precisely the opposite of what we would expect, to catch us wrong-footed. A human general might think that way; you don’t walk into the other guy’s punch. But, from what I’ve read of them – which isn’t much aside for those Edisonades – I don’t think they care much what we do or think, we just can’t hurt them enough. Or we haven’t so far.

‘So my second possible reason is that it suits them. Given the accounts from England, they’re less vulnerable in that period just after landing than they were, but must still be somewhat; even a few minutes to get your weapons out of those cylinders is an opportunity for your opponent. My guess is they looked at the geography, saw the Island as a place where we’d give them no trouble for the first few minutes or hours – and then they can march on the mainland, the city, in good order. Anyhow, whyever they did it, I guess it worked. We don’t have much to oppose them on the Island. The National Guard, the police – maybe the guns from a couple of Navy boats if they can be brought in fast enough.’

‘Soldiery isn’t my line. We’re going to stop them – right?’

Woodward eyed him. ‘Look, Harry, the US Army isn’t the force you might think it is. After all, most of the fighting we’ve done since the Revolution has been small-scale stuff against the Indians out west, or in Mexico, or against the Spanish in ’98. We don’t have the kind of big conscript army you get over in Europe, the Germans, the Russians – even the British since the Martians came. The only time we had millions in uniform, they were the conscripts from North and South during the Civil War. Maybe if we’d gotten involved in that big European war in ’14 it might be different. As it is, I believe we have a hundred thousand regulars right now, plus the Guard and the state militias. And most of those are nowhere near the east coast. Or the west, come to that.’

Harry didn’t like the sound of any of this. ‘Then where are they?’

‘In our garrisons on Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines: the possessions we won in the Spanish War. Keeping the Germans and others at bay. Some on the Mexican border. And a lot of the rest are out west – the old Indian country. Of course that threat has subsided now, but the Army bases are all out that way for historical reasons.’

‘Historical reasons. Holy cow! It’s a shame the Martians ain’t coming down in the wild west, then. Maybe Hopalong Cassidy could save the day.’

‘Take it easy,’ Woodward murmured gently.

‘Sorry. But the federal government must have prepared for the Martian threat. They must have got some warning from the astronomers, even if it wasn’t released to the public.’

‘Sure. But how do you plan for an attack that might hit you anywhere, on the continental US and beyond – an attack coming down from the sky? Anyhow don’t ask me. I’m injured and on leave, remember?’

‘Hey, can you hear cars? Sounds like they’re all coming back…’

4 AN EXODUS

Out front of the house, the traffic noise had got a lot louder. The driveway was, Harry supposed, one of the Bigelow mansion’s more elegant features, long and brilliantly lit by elegant electric lamps and carpeted with crisp pink gravel imported from England at huge expense, the gravel was the same stuff they had used on the Mall in London, or so rumour had it. When Woodward and Harry walked out, the driveway was still crowded with cars, Dodges and Fords and even some station wagons. There was one magnificent Rolls Royce with a green leather interior.

‘You’re salivating,’ Woodward said.

‘One day,’ Harry said. ‘One day.’

‘Keep writing those Edisonades. In the meantime, for a journalist you ain’t so smart at spotting what’s important, seems to me.’

‘Hm?’ Harry looked around. ‘Oh – you mean that empty garage over there.’

‘That’s where Dan Bigelow, our host, keeps his own car. His latest is a Daimler, I think.’

‘He’s gone, then,’ Harry said. ‘I never noticed.’

‘Did you meet him?… Nor did I. I suppose, with a party like this, the host isn’t the point. And I suppose it’s possible that as the house-owner he might have gotten the news earlier than we did.’

Harry felt chilled. ‘Wouldn’t you warn your guests?’

‘What, and risk the roads being clogged up before you made your own escape? I don’t think men like Dan Bigelow get where they are in the world without a little ruthless calculation.’ That traffic noise rose to a roar. They turned to look out at the road, which ran past the wrought-iron gates of the mansion.

More Dodges and Fords and a few grander cars were barrelling at speed along the road, coming out of the east and heading west, Harry realised, west towards the bridges, and Manhattan. ‘Party guests,’ Woodward said. ‘On their way back through.’

‘Right.’ Harry glanced at his watch; it was not yet half past one in the morning. ‘So at midnight they go pouring out to find the Martian landing site.’

‘They find it. And now—’

‘They’re back and fleeing in terror. The pits can’t be far from here, then – maybe a half hour’s fast drive east – twenty, twenty-five miles?’

‘Look out—’

Woodward pulled him back as one car took the turn into the gateway at speed, nearly clipped a post, and skidded to a halt on the pink English gravel. ‘Help me! Help me!’

Woodward and Harry were among the first of the revellers to get to the car, and among the more sober. They found that a young woman had been driving the car, inexpertly. ‘It’s his car!

Not mine! We just went for a drive! We just thought we’d go see – it was supposed to be fun!’

In the passenger seat was a man, almost as young-looking, crumpled over; his white jacket and flannels were stained with blood. A dozen pairs of hands grabbed for him, but Bill Woodward took control. With a peremptory snap he ordered everyone back – and to Harry’s bemusement they obeyed. That was military command for you.

Woodward knelt by the young man, feeling for a pulse. ‘He’s breathing. Pulse feathery. I don’t know if he’s conscious. Hold in there, son; I’ve seen men survive worse.’ He glanced around at the party-goers, who looked to Harry like curious, faintly horrified peacocks. ‘You may come forward only if you are a trained nurse, or a doctor. Only if.’

After some hesitation a young man in a slightly distressed morning suit came out of the crowd. ‘I’m a student. Will that do? I’m in my fourth year at—’

‘Shut up and take over.’

The boy came forward, knelt down, and immediately began to work with the injured man.

Woodward, with Harry, hurried around to the far side of the car. A couple of women were trying to soothe the driver, the girl. ‘I did my best! I never drove in my life!…’

‘You did fine. Was it the Martians, though?’

She nodded, dropping her head, as if it was her fault. She said that the Martians had come down near Stony Brook. ‘The whole town was there, it felt like. Looking at those darn pits. But they came out of their shells, those cylinders, the Martians, soon as they landed. Well, the Guard and the police were there, and they fired their guns. But the Martians just – the Guard and the cops, they just – burned. And the big machines rose up on those stilts of theirs, like some kind of circus act, and everybody started to run away. We all ran back for the cars. But Simpson fell, I think he twisted his ankle, and I tried to help him up. But we were in the road, and a car came, and it just hit him, it just knocked him aside, like you’d shove a baby deer out of your way, I’ll swear it was deliberate…’

‘How did you get him to the car?’

‘My dear, have some brandy, just a nip to calm your nerves.’

‘This other car. You get his number? The police will want to know about this, Martians or no Martians…’

Woodward plucked Harry’s sleeve. ‘Nothing more we can do here. Let’s get back to the house.’

They walked back up the drive, to a house that was still brightly lit. But now the guests seemed to be streaming out, word of the first refugees from the Stony Brook landings evidently having spread, and Harry heard more cars starting up and crunching over the gravel and out of the drive.

Inside the house the band was, remarkably, still playing, a jazzy number now that Harry recognised as ‘Beale Street Blues’.

Waiters and other staff circulated, there was still drink to be had if you wanted it – and some did, evidently intent on partying to the end – but there was coffee too, and Harry and Woodward both grabbed cups gratefully.

Woodward kept glancing at his watch. ‘We probably still have a few hours’ grace. In England a couple of years ago, they landed at midnight – just like here – and they seem to have waited until dawn before moving out in big numbers.’

‘Hm. But the longer we wait the harder it’s likely to be to get off the island.’

Woodward grinned. ‘“We.” Are we a team now, sport?’

‘I reckon I’d be a better driver than you with that busted shoulder of yours.’

Woodward nodded. ‘You’re probably right. You say you live close by. Your car?’

‘A Model T.’

‘Hmph. What are you, a hobbyist? We’ll take my Dodge. But—’

‘But we wait for Miss Rafferty.’

‘Marigold, yes.’

Harry glanced around. ‘Maybe we can find out what’s going on. There must be wireless sets around, away from these party rooms anyhow.’

‘You’re supposed to be a reporter. Can’t you call your news room? They should know.’

‘Hey, that’s a thought. I could even file a report.’ Woodward stood up. ‘Another day, another dollar, huh?’

It was a long night of waiting, for Harry and Woodward.

They stayed close to a radio set. There was little news coming out of the landing sites on the island. Harry considered calling his family, his parents in Iowa. He figured he’d only scare them to death to be called in the middle of the night, for no good reason.

At around three a.m., they learned from the newsroom of the Post that President Harding had announced a second Martian landing, in the hills outside Los Angeles. It had been local midnight there, just as at Long Island. America was under attack from Mars.

At around four a.m. a servant circulated through the house, calling for Woodward; there was a telephone call for him. It was Marigold Rafferty. She’d found Edison and his staff at his rented villa. After a brief discussion it had been decided to load the old man on a power-boat and take him across the Sound to Manhattan. There hadn’t been room to take everybody, and despite Edison’s vigorous protestations Marigold had got left behind. She was waiting on a ride back to the Bigelow place, but everything was very disorganised. Woodward told her they would wait for her, and Harry, despite his growing anxiety at being stuck there, nodded agreement.

Five a.m. came and went.

At six came the first reports of the Martians moving out of their pit at Stony Brook. To nobody’s surprise they were heading west, parallel to the Sound, towards Manhattan. The island’s authorities could mount only minimal resistance, and were anyhow more concerned with organising evacuations.

At ten past six Marigold Rafferty was at the door.

The three of them ran to Woodward’s car, and with Harry behind the wheel fled the residence, heading west, soon joining a slow river of cars and people funnelling down the length of the island. Glancing back, Harry saw that even now, in the gathering daylight, the Bigelow place was glowing with light. Somewhere in there, he suspected, the band was still playing.

5 I ARRIVE AT THORNBOROUGH

It had been at five a.m. (in Britain, midnight on Long Island) that Verity and I, in the Martian Cordon, had demanded of Albert Cook that we be taken to Eric Eden.

Cook responded immediately, and quite impressively. He got us out of the Redoubt, made a phone call from a concealed station to the Army contact he’d been using to negotiate his terms, and then took us to a heavily camouflaged car of his own and raced us across the Cordon. He assured us the Martians wouldn’t touch him, but I was never confident about that.

At the perimeter we were met by a couple of taciturn soldiers in unmarked camouflage gear and with dirt-blackened faces, and led to another bolt-hole. This time the Martians did not detect our passing under the Trench, or interfere with it.

On the far side, out of the Cordon, we were met by a junior Army officer – a Lieutenant Hopson waiting with a car, armoured and camouflaged, with a woman driver, a heap of blankets and flasks of coffee. Not for the first time I was impressed by the efficiency of all this, of the management of operations that spanned the Cordon from the huddling countryside outside to the zone of suppression within.

Through Cook we had asked only to be reunited with Eric Eden, who I thought of as my principal conduit to the Army’s chain of command. It was Verity, in fact, who, as we drove away, first asked where we were being taken. It was only then that we heard we were heading for Thornborough and the ‘landship base’. I don’t believe I had heard that word before: landship. When Verity asked what it meant, the officer would not reply – or could not.

So we were off again. I was content to huddle with Verity in the back, and clutch clean-smelling blankets around me, sip strong but rather stale coffee, and listen to the competent murmurings of the officer and his driver as they called ahead by wireless to their command stations.

And I tried not to look up at the sky.

Thornborough turned out to host an Army base, a couple of miles east of Buckingham – and so perhaps thirty miles northwest of Amersham, and the Martians’ Redoubt. The morning light was gathering as we were passed through the base’s fence.

It was hard to see much, for of course the Army wished to stay out of sight of the Martians. There were no electric lights, and every building, every vehicle was painted or draped with camouflage green and brown. But still the landships, pointed out by Hopson, were unmistakeable, as we drove past them and into the base itself – unmistakeable, if unclassifiable. They were rows of mounds of different sizes, the smallest perhaps twenty feet long and ten tall – I guessed immediately that these were bulky vehicles of some sort – but the largest was immense, more than a hundred feet long and with turrets at front and back perhaps three times my height. It looked like a ship, in fact, though we could not have been further from the sea. All this glimpsed in shadows and silhouettes against a brightening dawn sky, the profiles obscured by camouflage blankets and netting.

Verity’s hand crept into mine. ‘What frightful things.’

I squeezed her hand. ‘At least these monsters are on our side.’

We were escorted into the base by our tame lieutenant. The place was busy, bewilderingly so. It appeared to be disguised as a series of rambling farm buildings, all connected by tunnels of canvas and wood ply so as, I imagined, to be invisible from the air. Outdoors, in the ‘farmyard’, we saw soldiers in heavy combat gear forming up into groups of four or six or twelve, talking softly. They carried the customary tin helmets and gas masks and small arms, but, unusually, they also brought tools: bags of spanners and wrenches and the like. We were hustled inside through a doorway. Inside crudely partitioned rooms, we saw huddles of officers in discussion, and walls covered with maps, and plates of stale-looking sandwiches and cold cups of tea standing around. Meanwhile, uniformed staff literally ran between farmhouse and outhouse and stables and barns.

‘As if we’ve stepped into a wasps’ nest,’ Verity murmured to me as we were hurried through all this. ‘But the Martians aren’t coming down in England again, are they?’

‘No, they’re not, according to the astronomers and the spotters,’ Eric Eden said, approaching us – at last we had found him. Like the soldiers we’d already seen, he was in heavy combat gear, evidently preparing to take part in some mission. ‘But we’ve already heard of landings elsewhere… Come, we don’t have much time.’

He hurried us into his office – everything was in a hurry that morning – and I, exhausted already and sleepless, found it difficult to cope. I glanced around at the maps on the walls. One of them was a world map, Mercator style, with two ugly Marsorange markers pushed into the sites of New York and Los Angeles. It was now after 8 a.m. The meaning was clear.

‘That’s the point of our own operations this morning,’ Eric was saying now. ‘The fact that we’re in the middle of another wave of landings, I mean. Tonight, as a new wave of cylinders come down – and the analysts are saying they expect landings all around the planet through the next twenty hours or so – surely the British complex is the nearest the Martians have to a command and control centre. And we intend to do something about it.’

Verity nodded. ‘With those – cockroach things outside.’ He grinned. ‘The landships, yes. We’ve been saving them for a special occasion. When, if not now? And I, for my sins, am in command of the HMLS Boadicea, the nastiest cockroach of them all. So: while I’m very pleased to see you two safe and well, I’m far from impressed that you failed to fulfil your mission of the contaminated blood, Miss Elphinstone. But I’m sure the intelligence people will want to pump you dry of all you learned inside the Martian Cordon. Now if you’ll excuse me, I really must find my crew and get on—’

I grabbed his arm. ‘Eric – we came here to find you, remember – you need to listen to me.’ I can imagine how I looked to him, still in the clothes I had worn in the Cordon, grimy, perhaps blood-splashed, smelling of mud and dirt and sweat and sheer fatigue, wild-eyed – but, I like to think, determined.

‘I really don’t—’

‘Sigils,’ I said.

A junior officer called him. ‘Major Eden, we’re ready to load up…’

He made to pull himself away. ‘Julie, I have a battle to fight.’

‘And I can tell you how to win the war – or at least, to end it.’

He hesitated, clearly torn. ‘This is the Walter Jenkins stuff, isn’t it? The “messages” we were using as cover for the blood scheme. Are we back to that? All rather eccentric—’

‘Not eccentric, Eric. Look, I’m probably more sceptical than you are. But the things I saw in the Cordon… This isn’t like another war against some portion of humanity, the Germans or the Russians—’

‘Actually it’s generally been the French,’ he murmured with an irritating smile.

‘This war is interplanetary. It’s just as Walter has been saying all along – ever since the Narrative, even. And if we’re to prevail we have to think on that scale.’

‘And we do that with drawings, do we?’

‘Not the drawings, but their subject – sigils – symbols. Graphic geometry, Walter called it.’

His junior officer coughed, one communication that wasn’t terribly subtle.

But Eric hesitated for one more second, and I held his gaze. ‘All right. Barker, take the crew to the Boadicea. God knows Hetherington will be able to take you through the start-up; it’s his bloody design. I’ll be with you shortly.’

‘Sir.’ The man hurried away.

Eric beckoned us into his office. ‘You’ve got five minutes and counting, Julie.’

‘Then shut up and let me talk.’

I summarised in seconds Walter’s theories of interplanetary signalling. Eden had not been interested in thinking this through before, other than as a cover for his own scheme, but now I made him listen.

‘It’s an old idea, after all,’ I said. ‘You know there was a mania for signalling to other worlds decades before the Martians showed up and proved that there are civilisations elsewhere. People proposed digging Pythagorean triangles in the desert and setting them alight with oil to make them visible to Martian observers – that sort of thing. In the end, they were right!’

Eric, to give him credit – and with the huge distraction of the forthcoming battle no doubt foremost in his mind – seemed to be thinking it through. ‘It all seemed a lot of silly nonsense, I suppose,’ he said slowly. ‘But then, after the ’07 war, there were those luminous markings the astronomers spotted in the clouds of Venus. “Sigils”, you say – the word Jenkins used in his book, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes! This was in 1913. And at the same time, similar markings were seen on Mars. Now we interpret that as a marker of the Martians’ successful invasion of Venus. These are communications between worlds, Eric. And communications we can manipulate.’

He nodded slowly. ‘Very well. But even if I buy all that what’s it got to do with the Martians in Buckinghamshire?’

‘Everything. Do you have a map of the ’07 landings? And maps, or aerial photographs, of the ’20 landings…’

It took a minute of my five for him to retrieve relevant maps and photos from the clutter in his room, and another minute to find a thick wax pencil with which I defaced said sigils. Without needing to refer to the documents I carried, I remembered what Walter had shown me; with the pencil I connected the Martians’ landing pits, in Surrey in ’07, and in Buckinghamshire more recently – connected them with looping, sinuous swirls. I made these marks without comment, and let Eric make the last leap of induction.

He held up the ’07 map, disfigured as it was. ‘But this symbol – it is the same as the astronomers saw on Venus.’

‘Exactly. You see it. It is the Martians’ brand of ownership, like a stock handler’s, burned now into the flesh of England herself. Over and over again. That was what they were building here even in ’07. And they’re doing it again, in Bucks – Marriott for one has maps that show exactly that, if you know how to look.’ I tapped my battered leather case. ‘These are Walter’s drawings of those sigils. He wanted me to show them to the Martians as proof of our intelligence.’

‘It was only to be a cover story; I didn’t pay much attention to the detail. But this set of symbols is what you wish to manipulate – is that the idea?’

‘Yes! But it’s not the Martian sigil that’s important here… And it’s more than a handful of drawings.’ And in a few words I sketched my idea, the what and the how and the why.

Eric mused. Then he grinned. ‘It’s outrageous. It’s insane.’

‘I know. Even Walter Jenkins didn’t think this big, and that’s saying something., It might work, though. Look, I know you’ve been feeding explosives and weapons to the resistance units inside the Cordon. I met one contact– “Marriott”.’ He looked uncomfortable at that.

‘And you have hundreds of soldiers, trapped in there since the day of the invasion. I know you’re in touch with these people. What we need to do is to get to those groups, to tell them how to use those resources in a once-and-only exercise – to set their charges, to make some precise modifications on the ground—’

He eyed me. ‘You realise you’ll have to do this yourself. I can control the Army element, but you’ll have to convince them – Marriott and his kind – as you’ve convinced me. Well, halfconvinced – and then see it through. Icouldn’t do it. It’s your vision.’

I’d been expecting this, if not dreading it. ‘If I have to go back into that hell on earth—’

Verity grabbed my hand. ‘I’ll be with you.’

Eric considered. ‘What a war this is – what dilemmas you pose for me!’ He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘I’m not saying I buy all this – and at some point we’ll have to have a discussion about why you didn’t carry through your orders about the contaminated blood. But it’s worth a shot, and won’t cost much. Your five minutes is more than used up. And I’ll tell you this – if you’re to go back into the Cordon today, the only way you’re travelling is with me, in the Boadicea. I’ll take you to her via stores; you’ll need to be kitted out. I hope you’re adept at lacing up your boots on the run…’

6 AT LOS ANGELES

Accounts of what has become known as the ‘Second War’ are multitudinous, but variable in quality and authenticity – most penned, if I am a judge, by ‘observers’ who were far behind the lines, and based on eye-witness accounts, if at all, only at second and third hand. What one needs for the truth is an account set down by a witness close enough to have seen the action, yet lucky enough to have survived the carnage of those May days – and, of course, a witness honest enough to tell it as she or he saw it, without spicing up the truth for the sake of sales or selfaggrandisement.

Luckily for me and for future historians, such witnesses do exist.

One such was Cherie Gilbert, then aged 24, who, at the time of the Martian landings near Los Angeles, had been employed in Hollywood Paramount as a personal assistant for a director of the movie company. Cherie’s skills extended well beyond the clerical, and such was the chaotic nature of the industry in those days that Cherie soon found herself used in a variety of roles, some of them quite technical. She had even served as a camera operator in the shooting of Griffith’s The Kaiser’s Lover in 1921, when influenza had laid waste to the workforce.

‘And that’s why you got to come with me,’ said Homer Girdner, as, panting, he led Cherie up Mount Lee, the greenclad hill that stands above Hollywood itself, and then higher into the San Gabriel Mountains.

In L.A. it was only just after six in the morning of the Friday (it was already afternoon in England, and I was stuck in the carcass of a crawling landship, as I will describe). But the breeze, blowing off the land and towards the sea, already bore a faint tinge of burning, Cherie thought. They hadn’t climbed high enough yet to get a good view to the east. But everybody knew that was where the Martians had come down: inland, in the direction of San Bernardino. And the evidence of war was already apparent.

It was just as in New York, it turned out. At local midnight the cylinders had landed in two waves, the first fifty-odd being dummies that had smashed a lifeless cordon into the ground to prepare the landing sites of the second wave, which carried crew and their war machines. But whereas in England two years before there had been a full day between these waves, the Martians had evolved their strategy again; now in America, in New York and here in LA, the two waves had come down just an hour apart, leaving the human forces even less time to respond. This would be the pattern repeated around the planet, in the next few hours.

In Hollywood, it had seemed like everybody had stayed up to listen to scratchy accounts of the initial fighting on the radio stations. Units of the National Guard and the regular army had met the Martians as they broke out of their cylinders, to no significant effect. Then, a few hours later, at around dawn – again, just as they’d done in New York – the fighting-machines had broken out of their cordon and begun their advance.

And now, on that fine early summer morning, high in the hills, just six hours after the first Martian cylinder had landed in California, there was a smell of burning above LA.

Homer led the way up the trail, panting and sweating, his words broken by breathlessness – even though it was Cherie, she wryly noted, who was having to carry the damn camera itself, while he merely lugged a batch of film cans.

‘I knew you’d come,’ he said now.

‘You did, did you?’

‘Come on,’ said Homer. ‘You’re the bravest guy I know. Figuratively speaking.’

‘Kind of you to say so.’

‘I mean it. It was you who kept filming on the Nero set when it caught fire for real, and everybody else had high-tailed it to the bar, and the footage you got was great. And I saw how you punched out the last actor who grabbed your butt.’

‘I almost got canned for that,’ she said ruefully, panting herself now as the trail steepened. ‘Lucky for me the make-up covered up his split lip.’

‘He deserved it. Listen, Cherie, we’re going to witness history today – hell, we’re making it. We’re the ones who are going to film the Martians as they come to LA. It will make a hell of a picture, and some day they’ll make a movie about us.’

‘I suppose we’ll be starstruck lovers, in the story.’

He had his back to her as he led the way up the trail, but she was pretty sure he blushed. Homer was a script editor with ambitions to make his own movies – hell, everybody around here had that ambition, if it wasn’t to appear in one – and she knew, too, that he had a crush on her. He said now, ‘Either way we’re going to make a pile of money.’

But Cherie was distracted, as that smell of burning from the east intensified. And she thought she heard something new now, carried on the rising morning air: a distant bellow, of triumph or rage, like a vast animal: ‘Ulla… Ulla…’

Five years back, in her home town of Madison, Wisconsin, she had watched Griffith’s Martian Summer, the tenthanniversary epic of the English war, over and over. Starring Charlie Chaplin as his trademark lovable Cockney gunner, with Mary Pickford playing the American girl he rescued and fell in love with, it had been one of the great spectacles that had drawn her to Hollywood in the first place. Somehow, now, she had the feeling that the scenes Griffith had shot of stiff, tottering fighting-machines downed by plucky Brit troops (led by even more heroic American volunteers) weren’t going to turn out much like the reality. And somehow the thought of the world coming out of this new crisis just like it had been before, with movies and money and young people in love, seemed unlikely too.

But she kept climbing. What else was there to do but see it through?

At last they reached a spot Homer thought was going to be suitable; he’d scouted it out in advance, he said. While Cherie fixed her camera on its tripod, Homer dumped his film cans and unloaded the lightweight radio receiver he’d carried in a rucksack, and began elaborately tuning around, looking for a signal. They both rummaged in the rucksack for bottled water.

And Cherie took a look at the view.

It was indeed a fine spot. Los Angeles sits in a bowl cradled by mountains to the north and east, and from up here, high in those mountains, Cherie’s lens would take it all in: she could see the brash glitter of Hollywood below, and the grey sprawl of downtown LA itself. Directly beneath her was a pretty green splash that was Pasadena, a suburb of lawns and roses and climbing geraniums – she’d long fostered a dream of moving there some day. And off to the west, beyond the cityscape and still grey with morning mist, was the calm immensity of the Pacific Ocean. But that morning the ocean was littered with ships, small boats, what looked like passenger liners, and sleek grey shapes that might be warships.

The roads out of the city seemed crowded too, though she was so far away that the grandest of automobiles looked like glittering ants. She thought she heard the screech of a train whistle, almost as eerie as those unearthly cries coming from the east. Overnight, as the precise location of the Martians’ midnight landing had at last become clear, most people she knew had announced their intentions to pack up and get away. If so, where would they go? Down into the city for sure, and then out of town – mostly north, probably, towards San Francisco using the better roads and the coastal rail tracks. She wondered if the newsreel companies would have cameras out in the train stations and along the roads to catch that great American exodus, a parallel of Long Island, indeed of London twice before.

Well, Cherie had a picture to shoot. She got her camera set up and loaded, and cranked a few frames, an establishing pan shot. And she turned to focus on Homer, squatting on the dirt ground, headphones on his ears, tinkering with his radio.

‘Shit,’ Homer said now.

She frowned. He wasn’t one to swear. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘The Martians… I’m listening to KDZF.’ He was a radio buff. She knew that was one of his favourite stations, and, run by the Automobile Club of Southern California, one of the more authoritative. ‘Also I got a couple of the police bands.’

‘What about the Martians?’

‘They cut the aqueduct. The Owens River… Once they broke out of their pit, they sent a party straight over.’

She knew about the aqueduct, a mighty canal that brought LA its water across a distance equivalent to the span between Washington, DC, and New York. A civic monument, gone, just like that. ‘They know what they’re doing, then,’ she mused. ‘They’ve cut our throats. So where are the Martians now?’

He listened again, and his eyes grew wide. He took off the ’phones, stood, looked around, and pointed east. ‘There.’

The fighting-machines casually walked over the crest of the hills, and paused, looking down on Los Angeles.

‘Jesus,’ said Homer.

‘Help me.’

‘What?’

‘Help me get the camera turned around. Feed me film. Come on, Homer, damn it! This is why we’re up here…’

As she cranked the handle she watched the Martians through the camera’s small viewfinder. She saw five, six, seven of them, spreading out along the crest of the hills. She panned and zoomed, trying to catch the essence of their motion. She knew that the British soldiers who had faced the Martians back in ’07 had compared them to ‘boilers on stilts’. To an American eye they had more the look of water towers – and in fact when making his movie ten years later Griffith had draped rough mock-ups of cowls and tentacles over genuine water towers, for cheap establishing shots. But now, as the Martians moved, she saw how inappropriate those comparisons were. Huge as they were, the fighting-machines bowled gracefully along the ground, tilting, and those marvellous legs and their nests of tentacles twisted and flexed. Seen in the grey of distance they were less like machines than lithe animals, she thought now: tall, leggy animals like giraffes, passing each other as they sought good positions.

There was a crack of thunder, coming from the bay, that made her jump. She lost the shot, the camera wavering.

Homer grabbed her shoulder and pointed. ‘Look! The ships are firing their big guns!’

Cherie saw puffs of smoke along the flanks of those low grey silhouettes on the ocean. She couldn’t make out the shells in flight, but soon she saw splashes of dirt on the hills held by the Martians. And again the great guns shouted, and again. The war had started.

Homer clenched his fist. ‘Yes! Smash those devils! See, the first volley fell short, and now the second is going long – they are bracketing the foe – and with the next shots—’

‘If they have time,’ Cherie muttered. She hastily got her camera cranking again. The Martians were adjusting their positions, And Cherie saw them wield those terrible projectors that looked so like movie cameras, but were not. Some seemed to be firing on the incoming Navy shells, which popped harmlessly in the air. And the other Martians advanced down the hillsides, apparently oblivious to the danger of the longrange naval shots which continued to crater the ground, sparsely, all around them. She said, ‘I think—’

Homer gasped. ‘Pan, for God’s sake. Pan. Look at the city. Look at the city!’

She turned, still cranking. And she saw that the Martians were firing on Los Angeles. The Heat-Ray beam, as it cut in a dead straight line through the air, was all but invisible – certainly it wasn’t caught through her crude lens, and probably not on film – but its effects were all too dramatic. The city had lain still in the morning light, but now, at scattered points, buildings simply exploded into flame, and palls of smoke threaded up into the air. After a couple of minutes Cherie thought she could hear the clang of fire bells, and, perhaps, a distant screaming. But soon individual blazes were joining up – she zoomed out instinctively to capture the panorama – whole districts were already ablaze.

‘Jesus,’ Homer said. ‘It’s like ’Frisco after the quake. And where’s the damn Army?’

‘Going the way of the damn Navy, maybe.’ She pointed out to sea. One of those grey warships was burning, listing in the water.

‘Jesus, Jesus… What’s the range of that Heat-Ray?’

‘The English thought miles, at least. And it’s accurate. Homer, were you thinking we’d get shots of the Martians marching into downtown, the National Guard bravely holding out? They don’t need to do any of that. They can just stand on the high ground and pick us off—’

Now there was another immense thunder this time than a tremendous detonation, less like footfall, and Cherie wondered if she felt the ground itself shake.

Homer pointed north, excited. Huge plumes of black smoke rose up. ‘Look at that! They’re going for the oil, the refineries!’

Again Cherie panned and zoomed.

‘Those aeroplanes they flew out of England,’ Homer said. ‘They went all around the world. Did their spotting pretty smart.’

‘Yeah,’ Cherie said. ‘They know what to hit. The city will die of thirst because they cut the aqueduct, and pretty soon we won’t be able to fight back at all because there’ll be no oil.’ She looked around. ‘And they’re moving again.’

The great machines strode through the clearing mist, heading purposefully down the slope, and now their invisible rays struck at suburbs closer by, in the lapping hills. When the Heat-Ray swept over Pasadena, Cherie turned the crank steadily as green lawns crisped and fried, and fine houses exploded like cheap props.

Homer said, ‘We need to get out of here.’

‘I’m doing what we came to do, filming until we run out of stock.’

He plucked at her sleeve. ‘Cherie—’

‘Load me up or leave me alone.’

He hesitated. Then he bent to open a fresh can.

And meanwhile, in England, I was going into battle myself.

7 HMLS BOADICEA

Closeto, His Majesty’s Landship Boadicea was magnificent. But her designers must have been insane.

That had been my overwhelming impression when I first saw her in the full morning light, as we hurried towards her with Eric Eden, commander of the craft, and the last to come on board thanks to my distraction of interplanetary communications. She was stripped of her camouflage blankets now, though her hull was painted with splashes of white, black, and light and dark green, and her form was clearly visible. She was a ship of the land indeed. Imagine a broad, low-slung body, and a command tower rising up from the heart, and heavily armoured gun turrets, two in the bow, one in the stern. The guns were Navy issue, in fact, each turret having a pair of fourinch guns on steerable platforms. And now imagine all of this lifted from the ocean and planted on the land, on a great wheeled framework – a tricycle, with two immense wheels in front and one behind. Immense, yes; each of the wheels was no less than forty feet in diameter, the height of six adult human beings standing on each others’ shoulders; the wheels alone were big enough to look like elements of a circus ride, and wrapped around by a kind of tread with thick ridges. This was the greatest of the landships, though Boadicea was in the van of a whole fleet of lesser vessels that looked like mutated variants of the basic design, all bristling with armour and guns and caterpillar tracks. The technology was still experimental, the design not fixed, and the different vehicles, as they had emerged from the proving grounds in remote, well-concealed areas of Scotland (as I would learn), were more or less hand-crafted.

As we ran up, many of the machines had already started their engines, and we were surrounded by a growl of mechanical noise, and plumes of exhaust, and engineers ran everywhere, servicing these behemoths even as they made ready to move off. It was as if we were waiting for the off at a race at Brooklands, and from the laughter and backslapping I saw among some of the crew and engineers, perhaps there was some of the competitive camaraderie of men who engage in such events.

A cold part of me wondered if the Martians would be impressed.

Eric, being Eric, observed our reactions even as we approached our ironclad. ‘Quite something, isn’t she? She’s faster on the road, of course, though she chews up the tarmac. But she makes good speed across country too, and given her size she’ll tolerate few obstacles.’

Verity, who had a practical eye, grunted sceptically. ‘Why a tricycle? I had a trike when I was a little girl. I never imagined seeing it scaled up to this monster size!’

Eric grinned. ‘The one rear wheel makes her easy to steer. Simple as that.’

‘She looks impressive,’ I gasped as we hurried to the monster. ‘But what’s to save her when the Martians offer a dose of the Heat-Ray?’

‘Ah.’ We had reached the machine now. With a gloved fist he rapped hard on the painted metal. ‘Under a shell of aluminium, we’ve got one of our most precious resources of all: Martian cylinder hull-metal. We’ve never managed to manufacture the stuff, so this is all stripped from the Martians’ own cylinders, as landed in Surrey fifteen years ago. Designed to protect a cylinder’s occupants as it comes hurtling into an atmosphere at interplanetary speeds, you see – not even the Heat-Ray can cut it, and teams in the universities and on the military ranges have spent years establishing that. Indeed the armour has already been tested in battle.’

I noted he did not say where; even now Britain’s involvement in the Russian front was a secret. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.

We came to an open port, round-cornered like a watertight door on a ship, with a short stepladder reaching to the ground. It seemed to be the only breach in the hull, save for slit windows and weapons platforms contained in sponsons, great bulges on the flank of the hull large enough to host a gunner or two. But I saw periscopes jutting out of the hull – the ‘ship’ was like a submarine in some ways, then. Eric hastily waved us aboard.

We clambered up the ladder, each of us with undone shoelaces and leather helmets not yet on our heads. Clambered up and into the belly of the machine. It was a space we were to share with the engines, I immediately discovered, which dominated that compartment, two huge, gleaming monsters that I would learn were Sunbeams, diesel engines designed for submarines. Gigantic differentials and cross-shafts spanned the rest of the interior, delivering the motive force to the tremendous wheels we had seen. Every wall and floor surface had been painted white, and the whole was brilliantly lit with electrics – I could not see a scrap of daylight. It was a complex interior of compartments and bulkheads, and gangways and ladders to the gun turrets and the bridge tower – a cramped and cluttered space, but geometric and orderly: even the rivets were white-painted. I felt like a mouse under the bonnet of a car.

And it was extraordinarily cluttered too, like a mobile ammunition store, with every wall fixed with racks that held shells for the big guns and bullets for the small arms. In underfloor lockers there were lodes of various specialised tools, as well as access to the vehicle’s mechanisms. In the few spaces remaining were heaps of other useful items, such as towing cables, water flasks, grease guns, protective clothing, hard hats, gas masks and goggles.

Then the engines started up, the noise a howl in that confined space, and the whole shook and shuddered.

‘No room for the crew!’ Verity protested, yelling over the noise.

‘We find a way,’ Eric shouted back. ‘Look, don’t worry, you’re in the best possible hands; our drivers are Stern and Hetherington themselves, and it’s all their fault!’

I could barely hear either of them. Later I would observe the crew communicating in a kind of improvised sign language, and even by slamming spanners into the pipes.

Eden yelled, ‘Now, look, you two, make yourself useful. Julie, we’re one crew member light, so get up into this sponson – there’s a door in the hull just there, see? You can be a spotter even if you can’t work the gun; we have telephone links throughout. I’ll be up on the bridge. And, Verity –’ He moved a heap of spare clothing to reveal a first aid box, painted with a red cross on white; it was alarmingly small, I thought. ‘You’re a nurse, aren’t you?’

‘Just a VAD.’

‘Better than what we had before, which was nobody. But when the action starts, just keep out of the way! Oh, and stay away from the engine. Every surface in there gets hot enough to fry bacon…’

So I clambered up into my sponson, which was a blister barely big enough for a kind of reclining chair into which I wedged myself, with the controls of a tremendous gun in front of me. With my legs up, my head bent forward on my neck, and barely able to move around the weapon, I was soon stiff and sore and increasingly uncomfortable.

Then the landship moved forward, with a crude jerk that I imagined was something to do with the gigantic gearing, and a ferocious rattling thanks to the lack of any kind of suspension.

We were underway! The crew cheered, and I clung on for dear life.

8 INTO ACTION

Our pilots, Stern and Hetherington, were, I learned later, significant figures in the short history of landship development – I suppose we were lucky to have them aboard.

Captain Albert Stern was a civilian given a volunteer commission, and Commander Tommy Hetherington of the 18^th Hussars a dashing cavalryman with a vivid imagination. The vessel we rode, it seemed, had started life as a sketch on a napkin made by Hetherington, at a dinner with Churchill at a London club. Only Churchill, one might think, could push such mad visions to actuality. But at the time our greatest war machines had still been ocean-bound, and little use against the Martians. Churchill could see, as few others did, that this was a way of bringing that great technology to land combat.

The great engineering concerns of the north of Britain had been involved, under the emergency government’s orders, in the development and construction of these beasts, from Metropolitan Cammell of Birmingham to Mirrless Watson of Glasgow. Churchill had taken a key interest in the project throughout, and had inspected training exercises on a military range in the Highlands, although many trials had taken place on the continent, I learned – and some of the smaller models had even been tried out in battle, in the bloody secrecy of the Germans’ Russian front.

As we got underway I explored ways to see out of my lumbering metal prison. The simplest were my sighting slits, gaps in the hull from which I could draw back rather stiff metal covers. These gave a view out to the sides, and a limited view ahead. I had a small periscope, too, through which I got a narrow view, front and back and to the sides.

Through these means I could see the countryside across which we rolled, and the vehicles that followed us, a fleet with ourselves at the crest: landships small and large, though none so large as us, proceeding in billows of exhaust smoke and with the soil of English fields being thrown up around their tracks, so that we left an ugly brown scar that stretched back the way we had come. The clumsy vessels reminded me of lungfish, creatures of the water crawling painfully over the land. Smaller vehicles, cars and motorcycles, darted around us, and aircraft flew overhead, bright little toys in the morning sunlight, whose noise was quite drowned out by the engine roar of the advancing land armada.

But we made progress slowly. Our own top speed off the road was only four or five miles an hour, and there were a lot of breakdowns and other delays. The cars and ’cycles could make much greater speed.

As the journey wore on I took breaks from my small prison. Every so often I needed to bend my spine back into something resembling a natural posture. And, so that she need not leave her station, I brought Verity cups of water from a spigot that ran increasingly hot as the journey wore on.

Hot – the whole of our living space was hot, noisy, oily, cramped and crowded, and we were jarred with every rabbit hole we crossed. The crew, wearing face masks and goggles, laboured at their engines, continually tending the clattering pistons and hissing valves. At least the air we breathed seemed fresh enough; I imagined there must be some circulation system to stop the build-up of exhaust gases. But I thought we might all melt in the rising temperatures, as that long morning wore on.

The crew of the landship, however, despite the heat and clamour, worked steadily. They were technical, highly trained, competent, efficient young men. Despite their khaki fatigues they had the air more of Naval officers than soldiers – indeed, they called their commander ‘Captain’. They might have been tending some tremendous power generator, perhaps, as opposed to a weapon of war. I wondered if this was a vision of the war of the future, of calm young people working their precise controls and dispensing remote death. Perhaps we were becoming like the Martians after all, I thought, who made war with a similar lack of passion.

The lavatory was a hole in the floor covered by a metal hatch. I used it once; there was no partition, but in the circumstances modesty was hardly an issue. We were dehydrated, I think, and I could not remember when we had last eaten a decent meal.

And while we lumbered through the mud, I would learn later, the Martians were devastating Los Angeles, and had landed in Melbourne, Australia.

It was with some relief that I realised we were approaching the Cordon at last. It had taken us hours to get to the perimeter – we reached it after two in the afternoon, I think.

The support vehicles fell away now, leaving only the landships, the vehicles of serious intent. I could hear a dull booming, like thunder, coming from directly ahead of us. This, I learned, was an artillery barrage; guns many miles away were targeting Martian emplacements close to the site where we were aiming to breach the Cordon perimeter, softening up the invaders before we fell on them. We were rolling into gunfire, then, and the battle had already begun, with ourselves still far from the front.

And the landscape changed. Where before we had rolled through a leafy countryside which, if untended, if lacking the sheep and cattle in the fields, was pretty much indistinguishable from how it might have been on any day in mid-May in any of the last dozen years, now the land was bare, the buildings ruined, fences knocked down, even trees smashed or burned. The ground itself was churned up by the passing of wheels, and pocked by shell craters. Here and there, too, I saw other signs of combat – a smashed gun emplacement, the metal of the guns melted like toffee – and, a gruesome sight, the white of bone, a skeletal hand protruding from the dried ground. I had not seen this hinterland of war before, as I had travelled to the Cordon through the underground passages. But in truth the Heat-Ray left few relics.

Still that shouting of shells ahead continued, a barrage that seemed to shake the earth. And through the telephone in my sponson I listened to the calm voices of Eden and his crew. Now there was none of the joshing that had characterised the camp at Thornborough; there was only the calm reading of instruments, and routine reports from the engine room, and Eden’s quiet voice counting off the distance remaining: ‘Half a mile to the wire, boys, not long now…’ I knew that men going to war would pull back into themselves, and think of their homes, of their wives and children or their own mothers. They had to be dragged back to the reality by their officers, like Eden. ‘A quarter-mile more – keep it steady – two hundred yards – I can see the sappers pulling back the barbed wire for us, and I’m tempted to chuck out a bottle of whisky for their pains, but I won’t… Here comes the trench. Now, Mr Stern, if you please, give me all she’s got!’

The engine roared, and we lurched forward – and the prow of the landship dipped as if we had fallen into an immense well!

I would have seen it better if I had been an observer outside the hull of the great ship. Of course, such an observer could not have lasted long.

To penetrate the Martian Cordon, we had first to get through the Trench, a triple ditch system deep enough to trip a fighting-machine. It was into the first such ditch that our ironclad of the land now flung herself. The trench was perhaps fifty feet deep and as many wide – but the Boadicea was a hundred feet long, and had been designed for just such purposes. She simply hurled herself over that great gash, and before she could tip into the depths her huge forward wheels engaged the far side wall. With engines screaming, with huge clods of earth being dug out by the treads – and with everybody aboard yelling encouragement – the wheels did their job, the prow rose, and she scrambled across the trench and smashed through the last barricades.

We were the spearpoint. Behind us the sappers made the breach permanent, with pontoons and bridge sections hastily flung across the trench. The lesser vehicles behind us poured across and up the ramp we had created, and closed up behind us as we advanced.

And the Martians came to meet us.

I only glimpsed them as I peered timidly through my periscope: the great tall legs, the bronze cowls, the projectors of the Heat-Ray being brought to bear. We drove straight at them, into that forest of legs, and even over the engine’s roar I heard exultant yells from the crew. But the Heat-Ray splashed on us from all angles. I seemed to feel it like a physical blow, each great jolt of heat, and men screamed with each punch. The great Martian hull-plates would resist the heat, but they had been fitted into the landship’s frame by imperfect human engineering and there were gaps and seams, so that where the beam hit, sprays of molten aluminium showered the interior of the craft, slicing into the clothing and the flesh of the crew. Verity was kept busy.

But despite the casualties, despite deep scoring wounds to the structure of our craft itself, still we advanced, into the teeth of the fire. Now we approached that barrier of supple, metallic legs. I abandoned my periscope and huddled over on myself – We hit with a tremendous clang. There was a scraping over our roof, and a crash and smash and a kind of explosion behind us.

A glance through my periscope, when I dared uncurl, showed me what had happened. We had scythed through the legs of not one but two fighting-machines; both had tumbled over, and the cowl of one, it seemed, had detonated on impact with the ground. Other machines quickly clustered around the fallen, as was the way of the Martians. And now I saw that armada of lesser vehicles coming up behind to engage the Martian group. Many of their crews would die today, I knew – die in the next few minutes, in fact – but they would take Martians with them.

In the midst of such a battle it may seem odd that Eric Eden yanking open the door of my compartment should make me jump, but it did. His face was blackened by smoke and soot, save for his eyes, where he had removed his goggles. And he was grinning, his teeth white. ‘That was quite a stunt, wasn’t it?’

‘Two fighting-machines at once – I’ll say.’

‘If you tried that on a soccer field you’d be penalised for taking out your man. Well. The battle is closing behind us, but we, and a few more vehicles, are pushing on. The primary purpose of the expedition is to try to disrupt the Martians’ command and control, and so we’re making straight for the central Redoubt at Amersham. But you, madam, get out here.’

I clambered out of my cell, stiffer than ever. Verity, I saw, was working frantically, treating four wounded men, all of them horribly burned, on face, neck, back, legs; all seemed groggy with morphine. A fifth man, himself limping from a burn to his leg, was helping Verity as best he could. The air was murky with smoke, and rich with the stink of cordite; the engine roared, the gears screamed.

Eden said to me, ‘I’ll give you a young officer. Lieutenant Hopson – the chap I sent to bring you in, if you remember. Smarter than he looks and he knows the Cordon, been on a number of infiltration operations before. He’ll get you to Marriott.’

‘And Verity?’

At the sound of her name, she looked up from her work, distracted. ‘Leave me here.’ And she turned away, before I could acknowledge her.

I would not see her again. In the end she gave her life on the front line. I knew few soldiers braver.

Eden tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Come, then. The sooner I can get rid of you the sooner I can regain control of my ship; Tommy Hetherington’s a marvellous chap but a touch on the reckless side…’

The great landship did not even come to a full halt before depositing myself and Hopson; it had too much momentum to be wasted on the likes of us, and we had to jump down and roll in the broken dirt. But we made it in one piece. Hopson was the first to his feet, and he dragged me to cover behind a fragment of scorched, broken wall.

Already the Boadicea was moving on, and that huge flank slid past us as if she were a great liner leaving a Liverpool dock: an extraordinary sight. As it turned out she would reach Amersham that day, leading the remnants of her land-borne flotilla, and engage the Martians. The question of whether that great incursion made any difference to the Martians’ execution of their global Second War remains controversial in the eyes of many historians. To my eyes it was worth the try, at least. But the Boadicea herself would not survive; her monumental wreck is, today, the centrepiece of a museum.

Hopson gave me a minute to breathe. Then he said, ‘Now to find this scallywag Marriott and his chums. Are you ready?’

‘Always.’

He sat up, glanced around to see if the coast was clear, and led me out into the open.

And in the hours that followed, even as we progressed across the Cordon, and the line of midnight swept across continents and oceans, more Martian fleets landed, and around the world the fighting intensified.

9 ESCAPE FROM LONG ISLAND

The Martians had begun moving in earnest from their huge pit in the ruins of Stony Brook at six in the morning, New York time. They headed relentlessly west, sweeping along the Island towards Manhattan. People had already been moving out, but that moment, when the fighting-machines and the handlingmachines erupted from the pit, was when the flight had begun in earnest, with the Martians driving before them a great wave of people in cars and trucks and on motorcycles and bicycles, and many, many on foot, heading west towards the bridges to the mainland.

And Harry Kane, stoutly waiting for Marigold Rafferty, had made a late start.

Driving Bill Woodward’s Dodge, and with Marigold tucked in the back, Harry joined the main drag heading west, but found himself slowed to a crawl from the gitgo, not so much by the traffic as by pedestrians, dusty people limping along by the dusty tracks, adults burdened with luggage and infants, miserable children tottering along on skinny legs, old folks and the disabled in bath chairs. Every time he had come to Long Island Harry had been struck by the extremes of wealth and poverty to be encountered there. Only a few hundred yards from an emblem of supreme wealth like the glowing Bigelow mansion you would come to some dirt-poor post-industrial community of broken-down factories, warehouses and jetties, maybe a dismal hotel or boarding-house and a bar – always a bar, Prohibition or not – and shack-like dwellings strung out along the road. This morning it seemed fitting that rich and poor should be fleeing together along this dirt highway, where, Harry mused, if he squinted hard he thought he could make out the tracks of the Conestogas that had first opened up the Island.

Meanwhile, most of the stores were closed that Friday morning; those that were open were mobbed, and a couple looked to have been looted. The worst hold-ups were at the few gas stations that still had stocks. They spent a half-hour stuck in a jam outside one station that was still serving, and a couple of burly guys stood by with shotguns as ragged assistants laboured to fill up one car after another from dusty red-painted pumps.

‘Wow,’ Marigold Rafferty said, peering out. ‘The free market in action, right? I wonder what prices they’re charging.’

Woodward murmured, ‘We have more than half a tank. Also there’s a spare can in back. As long as we shut the engine down when we’re stuck, we’ll have the gas to get us to Manhattan – it’s not so far after all. No, running out of gas isn’t going to be our problem.’

Harry stared glumly out of the window. At times the flow was such that the car was entirely surrounded by bodies, shuffling by. ‘This happened in England in 1907, and again in 1920.’

‘And in the European wars,’ Woodward said sternly. ‘Whether you’re a Russian peasant or some deadbeat garage hand on Long Island, I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s a German armoured truck or a Martian fighting-machine that’s coming after you, guns blazing.’

‘No sign of the police, by the way,’ Marigold said. ‘Or the Guard.’

Woodward grunted. ‘Can you blame them? If you weren’t killed in an instant with your colleagues at Stony Brook, you’d get yourself and your families out of there, and to hell with the rest.’

‘Damn. And it’s my fault. You two could have got away hours earlier. You shouldn’t have stayed for me. We didn’t even know each other twenty-four hours ago.’

Woodward laughed. ‘It’s this way on the front line. When the action cuts in and the units get mixed up, you find yourself fighting for your life alongside some guy you met twenty-four seconds ago, never mind hours.’

Marigold said, ‘I’ve never been to the front line.’

‘You have now,’ Woodward replied softly. ‘Gap in traffic; we can move.’

The sun rose steadily in the sky. And Harry, looking north towards the Sound, thought he saw the light glint from the carapaces of fighting-machines on the move. They could be striding out in the shallow water, close to the shore.

‘They’re beating the traffic,’ Woodward said sourly, when Harry pointed this out.

They approached the city around noon.

10 THE BRIDGES OF NEW YORK

Woodward’s tactic was to cut through Queens, and then cross to the island of Manhattan across the Queensboro Bridge.

But long before they got to the bridge it was apparent that driving all the way wasn’t going to be possible. For one thing everybody else had the same idea; all the traffic, wheeled and foot, was funnelling towards the few crossing-points across the East River, including Queensboro, and there was a solid, unmoving jam everywhere, long before they reached the waterfront.

And for another, Queens was in flames. Even before they got out of the car the stink of smoke was obvious, and there were ominous glows on the horizon, bright even on an early summer day.

Before they abandoned the car, Woodward put together light packs of their remaining water, beer and food, and handed out heavy driving gloves and scarves from a small trunk in the back. ‘To save your hands from the fires. Pull the scarf over your mouth to keep out the smoke… And here, take these.’ He handed out revolvers, one to each of them.

Harry inspected his. ‘A Colt Automatic.’

‘Ten years old. Kicks like a mule. Some day I’ll give ’em back to the Army. Here’s a couple of clips each.’ He eyed them. ‘I’m going to assume you both know how to handle a gun.’ He showed them the basics, reloading, the safety. ‘I got no plans to kill any Americans today. Think of it as a magic wand that you can wave when you need to get people out of the way.’

Marigold said, ‘You seem prepared.’

‘Hell, no. Making it up as I go along.’ Before he left the car he carefully locked it, and left a US Army parking permit in the window. He winked at Harry. ‘Won’t save it from a Martian Heat-Ray, but you never know, I might yet be back to collect it.’ Harry noticed that as a final preparation Woodward tucked a tyre-iron into his jacket. ‘OK, come on, we’re going to get over that damn bridge or die trying.’

So they pressed into the urban landscape of Queens, which struck Harry as a tangle of warehouses and factories and blocks of rough housing, fronting onto the river. And, today, the refugee flow from at least half the length of Long Island, all the way back to Stony Brook where the cylinders had landed, had poured into a suburb where the local population was already looking to flee. There was chaos, panic, crushing, the streets blocked by abandoned or burning vehicles, or by shoving masses of people.

They steadily made their way west towards the bank of the East River. Woodward tried to keep them away from the worst of the big blazes. You could see where the fires where, from the plumes of smoke that rose up into the sky. Both Woodward and Marigold proved smart in finding ways through, by ducking down alleys, even climbing over walls and hurrying through empty yards – once they even cut all the way through a house, through an open front door and out the back. To Harry’s relief, they avoided confrontations; better to evade than to pick a fight.

And Harry’s journalistic eye picked out details: the old woman fumbling to lock a door as smoke billowed around her; the little boy sitting with a toy wooden battleship on a stoop, crying his eyes out; a woman who seemed to be going into labour, right there in the middle of the street, with a few folk gathered around her, trying to help, and others pushing impatiently past. There was an old man who just died, clutching his chest, right in front of Harry, almost without warning, fell down and died. Harry wondered who he was. Maybe he was old enough to remember when Manhattan still had farmland, so young was New York. And now he had died on the day the city itself, it seemed, was going up in smoke. Harry was sore tempted to dig out the notebook and pencil that sat in the breast pocket of his jacket, but every time he stopped to stare Woodward or Marigold shoved him in the back. ‘Keep moving, you ass!’

And then Harry saw a glint of bronze, high in the air. It was the hood of a fighting-machine, high above Queens. Already, the Martians were here. He would tell me that the sight gave him an extraordinary thrill, as if of exhilaration; none of it seemed real, as if it were all a huge movie set. That’s youth for you.

At last they broke through to the river front, and by a miracle of Woodward’s navigation right at the entrance to the Queensboro Bridge.

Harry, coughing from the smoke, was dazzled by the sudden brilliance of the open panorama. There was the bridge, below it the river on which lay the low grey profiles of warships, and smaller specks that looked like ferries, bravely hauling off handfuls of refugees from the Island. And there ahead of him was Manhattan, a great reef of buildings that poked like broken bones at the sky. As far as he could see the air above the city was clear – no sign of smoke, not yet. Looking back, though, he could see that over in Brooklyn an immense, smoky fire burned, and Harry heard the crump of a distant explosion; he knew that Brooklyn was dense with heavy industries, refineries and shipyards, which would no doubt be targets for the Martians.

And the Queensboro Bridge itself was a solid, unmoving mass of vehicles and people.

‘The Martians haven’t crossed yet,’ Marigold said. ‘So we’re still ahead of the game… All we need to do now is get across that bridge. Shit.’

Harry grinned. ‘Hey, language! You’re not in Menlo Park now, you know.’

Woodward pressed forward. ‘Come on. And now’s the time to use your magic wands.’

He led the way, pushing through the crowd by main force, and Harry and Marigold did their best to follow. Woodward’s revolver was indeed only a back-up, a symbol; he made most of his progress through firm shoving, and snapping out orders that people obeyed without thinking – he got through, Harry thought, mostly by showing a kind of unswerving belief in his own right of way. And, inch by inch, yard by yard, they crossed that bridge.

The bridge passed over Blackwell’s Island, on which stood grey, utilitarian buildings: hospitals, a prison. As they crossed Harry saw that people were decanting there, apparently exhausted, or maybe thinking that this mid-river scrap of land might provide a safer refuge than Manhattan itself. But the island was already full, and what looked like prison guards were lined up with nightsticks and revolvers to turn people back.

Beyond the midstream island, on they went, shoving, clambering over stalled vehicles, until at last they reached the Manhattan side. People spilled off the bridge and out into the neighbouring streets, which were crowded but nothing yet to compare to the crush on the Queens side, or the bridge itself.

Woodward drew his party together. They were all three breathless, dishevelled. ‘Everybody OK? Now we go find the US Army.’ And, boldly, he led them north, along East 60^th Street.

11 CENTRAL PARK

The Army, it turned out, along with units of the National Guard and the state militia, was bivouacking in Central Park. Woodward left Harry and Marigold waiting at the corner of 59^th and Fifth Avenue while he went into the Park to find an officer and figure out what was going on.

Around Harry, Manhattan still felt like Manhattan. Traffic still flowed, if heavier and faster than usual, and with more military trucks; there were still cops at the interchanges. Harry, breathless, dishevelled, felt like a vagabond who had just wandered into the city. But even here there were people hurrying along the sidewalks with suitcases in their hands and rucksacks on their backs – little kids being dragged along, bath chairs for the elderly, just like on the Island. And they all seemed to Harry to be streaming north.

From here Harry could see the Plaza Hotel. He sighed. Marigold raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s your beef?’ He looked down at the ruin of his dress suit. ‘Look at me. I haven’t changed since I got ready for the Bigelow party, oh, twenty hours ago. I sure could use a couple of hours in one of those suites in the Plaza, a shower, a glass of champagne, a cigar, a heap of newspapers…’

Marigold, by comparison, looked at ease in her riding habit, practical and serviceable, which seemed to show barely a mark. She shrugged. ‘Good luck with that. As for the papers, we came here running from the news; we know it better than any editor in town.’

‘Ain’t that the truth?’

Harry spotted a phone box, and on impulse ran over to make a call to his parents; it felt odd to find change in his pocket – and odder still to find the lines working. His family, in the heart of the continent, were safe but concerned and following the news; Harry promised he would come home as soon as he could, and he meant it. When Marigold tried to follow his example, the line went dead. It would be many days, he would tell me, before Harry was able to make another call.

Woodward came strolling up, hands in pockets. ‘You should see what the Army has done to the Park. Jeez. I dug better latrine trenches in my first week of cadet training.’

Marigold raised her eyebrows. ‘So, are our brave troops ready to smite the foe?’

‘I wish. Patton wishes.’

‘Who?’

‘Oh, a friend of mine. For better or worse there aren’t many officers in the modern US Army with combat experience – but George has, he was involved in the Pancho Villa expedition back in ’16, and now he’s got himself in charge of the operation here, on the ground. And got himself bumped up to Major.’ He grinned. ‘Smart guy all round.’

Marigold looked distinctly unimpressed. ‘Enough of the backslapping. What is Patton going to do?’

Woodward shrugged. ‘Work out how best to use his forces to counter the imminent Martian threat, and protect the civilians. Right now he’s in a fierce debate with his commanding officers about when to blow the bridges from Brooklyn and Queens.’

Harry was astounded. ‘Like the Queensboro? But they’re all crammed with people – and aside from the ferries, that’s the only way off Long Island.’

‘Sure. But, in the eyes of the brass, that’s also the only way off for the Martians too. If we can keep them bottled up and off Manhattan—’

Marigold was growing angry. ‘Are you serious? Bottled up? Have none of you soldier boys read the briefings from England? The river won’t hold them!’

Woodward held his hands up. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger. Meanwhile, they are setting up evacuation routes off the island. You can go west to New Jersey – the trains are still running, for now, and there are the ferries and bridges – or you can head north and over the bridges to the Bronx, and out that way.’ He glanced around, and spoke more quietly. ‘Patton’s been ordered to detail some men to see to the shipment of the bullion stores off the island. Don’t spread that around.’

Harry thought it over. ‘So, they’re sending people west and north.’

‘Right. My problem with that is, that’s precisely the way the Martians are going to progress, after they’ve taken Manhattan. That’s the way to the mainland, after all.’

‘We go south, then,’ Harry said, working it out. ‘We’ll still be stuck on another damn island—’

‘But we won’t be in the war zone.’ Woodford grinned at Harry. ‘Anyhow, you’re a reporter. You’ll want to be on the spot, right? Martians in New York! It’s the story of the century. Listen. Make for Battery Park, which is about as far south as you can get. Keep away from the fires. If I can, I’ll come find you when things stabilise. If.’

Harry felt alarmingly exposed to lose Woodward, like a child abandoned by his father. ‘What about you?’

‘I’ll go back to the Park.’ He tapped his shoulder. ‘Broken wing or not, I’ve still got more fighting experience than half the bozos in there combined, and somebody needs to keep George Patton’s feet on the ground.’

Now a soldier came running from the direction of the river, looking for officers to report to, yelling about some new development. Woodward stayed with them long enough to figure out what was happening now.

So much for cutting the bridges.

The Martian fighting-machines were simply wading across the East River, in a broad crescent formation, between the Queensboro and Williamsburg bridges. The river was only some forty feet deep – no obstacle to the hundred-feet-tall Martian machines, which, as, Marigold furiously pointed out again, should have been apparent from the British briefings. And meanwhile smaller, squat handling-machines, at the feet of their tripedal big brothers, were scuttling under the water and clambering out on dry land, their aluminium chassis glistening, dripping filthy river scum, Heat-Ray projectors ready to wield.

Now, looking down 60^th Street, Harry saw them come fighting-machines, towering at last over Manhattan. Already artillery coughed from the emplacements in Central Park.

Harry and Marigold exchanged quick handshakes with Woodward, and ran west and south.

And around the world, still the cylinders fell.

12 HOW THE MARTIANS CAME TO MELBOURNE

On the morning the Second War came to Australia, so Luke Smith believes, he was fourteen years old. At the time of my writing this account Smith is an educated young man in his late twenties, trained as a lawyer, and with a passion to defend the rights of his own people. He has a clear memory of the events of those astonishing days, and when he finally overcame his own illiteracy he wrote down what he saw.

But ‘Luke Smith’ is not his name, and was not when the Martians landed. He had been separated from his family, in upstate Victoria, at a young age. Given the name of a Gospel writer, he was raised in a Christian mission until the age of ten, and was then ‘loaned’ – he remembers the specific word being used – to a sheep farmer near Bendigo. There he was abused. He is vague on specifics. The culprit may have been one of his own people. At twelve he ran away, into the bush.

And he headed south to Melbourne, a city he had heard of but had never seen. By the age of fourteen he had joined an underclass of young Aborigines in that city, despised and even more invisible in that urban setting than were his people in the countryside.

He was a clever if entirely untutored child, with a poor, rough-accented vocabulary. Still, from conversations with others, and from comments made by white folk in his hearing – I imagine they believed he would not understand – he gained an impression of the plight of his people. He seems to have formed a determination to survive, at a very young age. He learned how to live in Melbourne, which like all cities is a vast machine producing enormous amounts of waste, accessible to those clever enough.

Luke always felt he was effectively alone.

Then the Martians came.

The cylinders landed at Fairfield, north-east of Melbourne, at local midnight of Saturday 20^th May – it was Friday afternoon in England.

Luke had been sleeping in Luna Park, which is an amusement resort at St Kilda, on the shore of Port Phillip Bay, to the south-east of Melbourne itself. When he woke, some time after dawn on that fateful Saturday, the place seemed deserted. He had heard movement during the night of motor vehicles rolling – he even heard the growl of animals – but it had not disturbed him; there were such noises every night, in the Park. It was a sprawling, casually policed place, much of it on the edge of criminality anyhow, and there was a plethora of hiding places for a boy like Luke to tuck himself away and sleep in safety.

When he emerged from his hiding place, though, there was nobody around.

He walked through the Park, past the stalls and stands and attractions, some of them locked up, others simply abandoned. Even then it occurred to Luke that he could simply break into one of the abandoned food concessions. But cautious habits drew him to the garbage pails as usual. He did notice that the rats seemed bolder.

He would learn later that after the Martians had landed, following the pattern established in America, they had quickly overcome any initial resistance by the local authorities and military, and then had advanced towards the city, their main goal, at dawn. With everyone having already heard the reports from America, there had been a mass, spontaneous evacuation, mostly to the south and west. Thus, that morning, Luna Park was deserted. But Luke Smith had heard nothing of the Martian advance – indeed he knew nothing of Martians at all, when he woke that morning. Filling his belly was a more pressing concern.

After eating, following an instinct he would not later be able to understand, he left Luna Park to walk the few miles into downtown Melbourne.

He passed through the Albert Park area, making for South Melbourne and the river. His sense of direction had always been good; after a couple of years he knew the city’s geography pretty well, even if he had trouble reading the street signs. These suburbs were not entirely deserted, but almost. He saw a few people in shut-up houses, peering fearfully through northfacing windows – looking out for a menace Luke still knew nothing of. Here and there late-goers fled, mostly on foot. Electric trams stood silent on their rails, useless. A few shops had been broken into.

And Luke saw, a couple of times, a sight he had never witnessed before: the dead bodies of white folk.

He crossed the Yarra by the Queens Bridge. Now he was in a grid of streets, the expensive part of the city. In those days Melbourne was still was a young town, and later he would learn something of its history: the Gold Rush money on which it had been founded, the banking crash of ’93 that was still talked of in hushed tones three decades later. With an instinct driven by a never-assuaged hunger he made for the Queen Victoria Market, a sprawling development with craft and clothing stalls crammed in among the food vendors. Luke knew this place; on market days it was crowded with a miscellany of folk, from gowned academics from the colleges to black-robed Italian grandmothers pushing carts. Rough types came for the petty thieving; Luke had often come here for the waste, and a bit of begging if he had to. Today, as elsewhere, the place was mysteriously deserted. But the bins behind the stalls offered rich pickings, of cold meat, stale bread, half-eaten sugary cakes. Luke considered finding a bag and filling it; he might never have a chance like this again. But the ability to run away was his key survival skill, and you couldn’t do that if you were burdened. He decided he would come back to the market later, and fill his belly when he needed to – if his luck held.

In the meantime, he was free, even of hunger.

On a whim, he made his way a short distance across town, to Swanston Street, and the State Library of Victoria. He knew that this was a building full of books, and he even had a dim idea of what books were for, even if his own reading was barely enough to pick out his own name. What interested him about the Library was the tremendous dome that topped it – supposedly, he had heard people say, the largest concrete dome in the world. Later he would learn that that hadn’t been quite true, a local’s boast. But still, this boy who ate from garbage cans and slept in the corners of an amusement park liked the idea that he could stand here and just look at something that couldn’t be bettered anywhere in the world. It is an image I like: the ragged Aborigine boy, in the deserted street of that white folks’ city, illiterate, unwashed, abused and ignored, standing on that sloping lawn before the pillars of the front portico – alone, and yet inspired by a monument to knowledge.

That was when the Martian fighting-machine appeared, looming over the Library, there at the heart of Melbourne.

Luke would later be surprised how little fear he experienced. But then for a boy from the outback, everything about the city was astonishing: the great buildings of the business district, so tall they looked as if they might topple over at any moment. Even the Ferris wheel at Luna Park, as tall as a Martian and even more massive, was more alarming than a fighting-machine at first glance.

For a moment the Martian simply stood there, as if gazing down at the boy, as he gazed up at it. But then glittering tentacles writhed about its cowled superstructure, and it wielded a device like a heavy cannon. Luke had seen guns before. He turned and ran, fast and hard. But he was curious enough to glance over his shoulder.

The Heat-Ray made the library’s dome explode in a hail of concrete shrapnel, and the incineration of the precious books began with a tremendous flare of flame.

Luke had overheard white folk talking of their justification for taking his ancestors’ land and driving them towards extinction. When the Europeans had landed in Australia it had been a terra nullius, they said, a land belonging to no one, a land as empty in law as if the native people did not exist at all. And the victory of the Europeans had been the result of a war of steel against stone. Now, thought Luke, even as he ran, whatever that tremendous machine was – he wondered if it might be Japanese, for he had heard the gentlefolk of Melbourne expressing fears at the territorial ambitions of those foreigners – now this country was seeing the waging of a new war: not steel against stone, but heat against steel.

He ran and ran, laughing.

13 IN PEKING

If Luke Smith slept through the invasion of Australia, when the Martians came to Peking – they landed a couple of hours after Australia – at first Tom Aylott didn’t believe that there was an extraterrestrial threat at all. ‘That was China for you in the Twenties,’ he told me years later in Sydney, when I met him after the launch of his own book on those times. ‘You wouldn’t have thought it could get any madder. But then…’

He had been shaken awake at around six a.m. by a friend, a Chinese student called Li Qichao. ‘You come! War! You see!’

Li, an ardent disciple of Sun Yat-Sen and a visionary of a future Chinese democracy, was barely twenty-one. A bright, ambitious boy from the country, his education disrupted, he had come to the city to learn as much as he could of the realities of power and diplomacy. While waiting for destiny to call he survived by means of various part-time clerical posts – and he had fallen in with Tom Aylott.

But he was prone to be excitable, and Tom tried to turn over. ‘Yeah, yeah. Wake me when the house is on fire, Qichao…’

Tom himself was only twenty-two, but he was making a name for himself as an energetic correspondent for The Times of London. That morning Tom was having trouble surfacing from another riotous night with other young westerners in the bars of the Legation Quarter, as it was known, an area within the walls of the Inner City itself that had long been claimed as a protectorate by western governments and companies.

And after all, in those days war was no novelty in China. The Boxer Rebellion against foreign meddling, had been only twenty years in the past; the last Qing Emperor, a boy called Puyi, had abdicated just ten years before; there had been a breakdown of order in the country since the death of the first strong-man President, Yuan Shikai, in 1916. Peking was still the residence of the internationally recognised Beiyang government, but in practical terms much of the country was in the hands of one warlord faction or another, or else prostrate under foreign control.

But here was Li shaking Tom vigorously, with his English disintegrating as it often did under stress. ‘War coming, Tom!’ he insisted. ‘War coming!’

And now Tom thought he could hear it: a distant crump of explosions, the sound of running feet, women and men shouting – and the wail of frightened children, a sound that was all too familiar in Peking.

Tom’s first thought was: story.

He forced himself fully awake. He was already in his shirt, underwear and socks; he grabbed his pants, jacket and shoes. Despite Li’s protestations he used the small bathroom – his bladder was too full to allow any other course.

‘You come! Fighting close!’

‘Sure, Qichao, sure,’ he called over his shoulder while buttoning up. ‘Who is it this time? The Zhili, the Fengtian – where the hell is my Kodak? The Kuomintang, even?’

Li grinned, wildly excited – as, Tom was already mature enough to reflect, only the very young can be stirred by the coming of war. ‘Come see!’

So they dashed out of the apartment, into a daylight already so bright it made Tom wince. And they ran directly south, towards the walls of the Inner City.

The heart of Peking, Tom told me, was a place of nested rectangles, each with its walls. You had the Inner City, a domain of aristocrats, officials, soldiers – with, in recent decades, the grudgingly admitted foreigners in the Legation Quarter – and within that the Imperial City with its extensive water gardens, and within that in turn the Forbidden City itself, protected by a moat and three sets of walls. There was also an Outer City appended to the south wall of the Inner, a tremendous annex stuffed with enormous temples. Of course since the fall of the Qing even the Forbidden City was forbidden no more, but every foreign visitor knew that the best view of Peking, and the countryside beyond, was from the city walls.

And it was onto those walls that Tom and Li climbed now. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of cordite, and a coarser stink of burning, and as he breathed deep from the climb Tom found himself coughing.

They soon made the top of the wall. The city from up here was always an odd sight, almost a sylvan scene rather than urban in the western sense, with the green of trees punctuated here and there by the egg-yolk yellow of the domes of palaces and temples.

Peking itself seemed at peace, but the countryside was not.

When Tom and Li looked east, into the rising sun, they saw the fighting-machines, silhouetted, their slim shadows long before them. It was a sight Tom immediately recognised from images of the British landings. Tom says he was struck by the sheer animal-like grace of the great machines, as are many observers on their first encounters with Martian technology. It was remarkable to see them suddenly superimposed onto this Chinese landscape, a world away from England.

And there were many of them, the machines marching in what looked like a grand crescent, heading for the city. Li tried to count them: ‘One, two, three, four… eight, nine, ten, eleven… many.’

There were attempts being made to resist the Martians’ advance, Tom saw. Weapons fire sparked around their footfalls, and shells burst close to their hooded carapaces. That was no surprise; Tom imagined that aside from the Germans’ front in Russia, this must be one of the most militarised places on the planet. And he wondered if the warlords were cooperating, for once, against this common enemy.

Even if so, they were doing no good. Just as was seen around the world that day, the Martians applied the lessons they had learned in England about the danger of our artillery, and simply shot the shells out of the air. Tom could see military vehicles, cavalry units on stocky horses from north China – even men riding camels from the Gobi – all scattering at the feet of the advancing Martians. And here and there men and animals and vehicles were incinerated in silent bursts of flame: moths before welding-torches, Tom thought, appalled.

Meanwhile, behind the machines a kind of corridor of smoke was rising, as the countryside the Martians had already crossed began to burn.

‘We must get out of here,’ Tom said. But he raised his camera and captured hasty images.

‘Magnificent sight.’

Tom glanced at his friend; Li’s face was shining. ‘You sound as if you are enjoying this.’

‘China flat on her back,’ Li Qichao said. ‘Foreigners everywhere. Russians want Mongolia. British want Tibet. Japanese want Manchuria. Americans – Americans just sell stuff. Government a joke, country full of warlords. And yet, and yet,China still a great country. Even Martians see that!’

‘They’re attacking you, and you see it as an endorsement?’

‘New age starts,’ Li said. ‘I, I will go east and south, find the Kuomintang. Sun Yat-Sen. It is said the Emperor will join us.’

‘What Emperor? Puyi? He’s just a kid.’

‘Let Martians drive out foreigners. Then Chinese drive out Martians. We survived Genghis Khan. Will survive this. And then…’

But already the Heat-Ray, with a range of miles, was licking at Peking, and buildings in the outer suburbs were flashing to flame.

Tom closed up his camera. ‘OK, Qichao. But for now let’s just make sure we live to see some of that future.’

Li grinned. ‘Come!’

They made their way around the wall parapet, away from the Martian advance, as the destruction of the city began in earnest.

14 THE MARTIAN INVASION OF MANHATTAN

The dawn of Saturday in Peking was around midday of Friday in New York. And through that long Friday afternoon Harry Kane and Marigold Rafferty watched the Battle of Manhattan unfold.

From Battery Park the end point of their flight south, it was hard to imagine a better view, Harry thought – if ‘better’ was a word to use on such a day. The Park itself was on a rise, and to get an even more favourable viewing platform they had managed to break into the Park’s Monroe Tower. Dating back to 1910, such towers had been set up all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts at a time when German aggression had appeared to threaten the US itself, as well as to breach the long-held Monroe Doctrine of non-interference by European powers in the Americas. The Towers, intended for spotting warships at sea, had seen no use in anger, and had quickly become obsolete as aeroplane surveillance technology had advanced. But the Battery Park Tower offered an unparalleled viewpoint over south Manhattan, and had become a popular tourist spot. Of course that morning it was locked up; it had been the work of a moment to break in, and it took only a little longer for the two of them to scramble up a spiral stair to the spotting platform, an electric elevator being out of action.

And there was Lower Manhattan laid out before them, a great reef with its excrescence of tremendous buildings – like trees in a forest, Harry thought idly, competing for the light. The complex fretwork of docks and wharves around the island’s shore added still more organic character. It was magnificent, Harry thought, the windows of the buildings sparking in the sun, the elegant, rectilinear simplicity of the street plan – the sheer vigour of it all, the newness – though you could see even from up here the extremes of wealth and poverty, the towering palaces a short walk away from the darker warrens of a deprived polyglot population.

But now an interplanetary war had come to Manhattan. The fighting, in fact, had begun even as the Martians waded across the East River, dozens of them coming across from all along the Brooklyn shore. The Navy tried to hold a line at the river. A handful of destroyers bore down on the wading fighting-machines, but even before they closed the Heat-Rays had wielded their invisible energies; the ships, their hulls melting, their stores of fuel and armaments exploding, were turned to helpless hulks.

One, however, a slim ghost with four funnels spewing smoke, somehow survived to slide under the legs of the great machines. The Martians had been packed so dense that once she was among them the Fox could barely fail to find a target.

It somehow did not surprise Harry that Marigold kept a small set of binoculars, like opera glasses, in her jacket pocket. Now she studied the distant action. ‘I think that’s the Fox. Oh, so brave – she’s firing! Aiming for the machines’ cowls – got one! Two! And another!…’

Even with the naked eye Harry saw fighting-machines stagger and fall, each like a man shot in the eye – and each casualty took others out of the fight, he realised, for, just as had been observed since the Martians’ first incursion into England, when one Martian fell, its fellows would retrieve it. But the Fox had only minutes to make her mark on the war before multiple Heat-Ray projectors were brought to bear, and she exploded in a flash.

Harry had his notebook out now and scribbled notes and impressions. ‘From the Thunder Child to the Fox, a line of brave fighting ships that have stood up to the Martians…’

‘Men and women, not ships,’ Marigold said heavily. ‘Make sure you write that down. More than a hundred souls on that lost vessel alone. At least it will have been quick, I suppose.’

And now, with the brief naval battle won, the remaining Martians had landed on Manhattan’s eastern shore unimpeded.

As they began to make their way into the island’s interior, they were like skeletal figures looming over the buildings – like medieval visions of death, Harry thought. And they deployed their scythe, the Heat-Ray. Buildings simply shattered, collapsing in clouds of glass and brick and smashed concrete, plumes of smoke and dust blossoming. Harry was too far away to see the fate of individual people; surely it was only in his imagination that he heard the screams. Now battle was joined by the military forces on land. Harry saw and heard the big guns in Central Park open up, and the clatter of small-arms fire; he imagined Woodward and his buddy Patton leading brave charges against the advancing machines. On the river, too, the remaining big battleships brought their guns to bear again.

‘But it’s not enough,’ Marigold said, pointing. ‘Look, more Martians are coming over the river, even now… I’ve been trying to count them. There are so many, and they move to and fro, like shadows.’

‘And don’t forget the handling-machines,’ Harry said grimly. ‘We won’t even see them from up here.’

‘Nevertheless you can see there are distinct formations…’

She was right, Harry thought, watching carefully, trying to be analytical. One large battle group was already towering over Central Park, where, it seemed, much of the city’s armed forces were still concentrated. More were moving northwards, just as Woodward had predicted, forming up onto a great crescent, no doubt in search of easy pickings on the mainland, in upstate New York and beyond.

And another large group was splitting off on the south side of the pack. They scattered along the streets below Central Park – the 57^th to 53^rd, perhaps. They quickly formed into a crescent, with the bow leading and trailing flanks. This was the classic fighting-machine formation the Martians had deployed fifteen years earlier, against London – and now, no doubt, this dreadful day and night, a formation they were using in their assaults on human communities all around the world. And even as they walked they deployed the Heat-Ray almost casually. Many of the towers of central Manhattan loomed even over the fighting-machines, but the beams swept the faces of the great buildings, as if mining the walls of a canyon. Concrete and steel buckled and smashed and melted, and glass rained down. Harry could see the people fleeing now, in the streets; he saw them not as individuals but as swarms, like ants before men with flamethrowers.

So they marched through downtown, heading straight for the Monroe Tower, or so it seemed.

Harry grunted. ‘So much for our theory that they wouldn’t come this way.’

Marigold said, ‘They have the machines to spare, I guess. At least we’ll get a good view.’

She sounded remarkably unafraid, Harry thought. And yet he himself felt little fear; perhaps it was simply exhaustion after a night without sleep and the slog of the evacuation, or perhaps his capacity for fear was overwhelmed by the remarkable spectacle he saw unfolding before him.

Now one pack of machines veered off to the Martians’ left, some making for the navy yards on the East River, others pushing into the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. There were no tall buildings there. The Martians towered, the Heat-Ray played easily, and whole blocks were blown apart by the fire.

Meanwhile a central group had reached the financial district. Harry himself saw the destruction of City Hall, and with the smashing of the seat of the city’s government, he supposed, organised resistance, what there was of it, would begin to crumble. The Woolworth Building, still the world’s tallest building nearly a decade after it was completed – nearly seven times as tall even as a fighting-machine – seemed to attract particular attention. Marigold loaned Harry her binoculars so he could see handling-machines swarming up the sides of the building, rapidly reaching its upper levels, where they began the demolition of the building floor by floor, working their way downwards, so that rubble cascaded down into the streets below.

‘It almost looks beautiful as it falls,’ Harry said. ‘Like an opening flower.’

‘They seem to have targeted it. Maybe they could see the Woolworth from Mars. They might think it has some military function.’

‘I’ve drunk coffee in there,’ Harry mourned.

‘We’ll build it again – bigger and better.’

But, after all he had seen that day, Harry wasn’t so sure.

Now the lead Martians were already approaching the southern shore, and the big military forts at the mouth of the harbour, Fort Tompkins on the New Jersey shore and Fort Hamilton on the Brooklyn firepower to the fight. But side, were adding their own Harry saw that yet another detachment of fighting-machines had walked down the Brooklyn shore and were already lashing at Hamilton with their Heat-Rays – and the weapons had the range to take on Fort Tompkins too. One fighting-machine, Harry saw, had waded out to Liberty Island, and climbed up onto the dry land. For a moment, perhaps a third the height of the statue, it rested there, and it appeared to look around at the battles underway on land and sea. Harry heard its eerie cry: ‘Ulla!’ Then, evidently having decided the statue was not worth the trouble of demolishing, it waded away.

Marigold touched Harry’s arm. ‘We must go. They’ll be here soon.’

‘Ulla! Ulla!…’

Harry imagined that same cry echoing all around the world, that terrible evening. Dazed, he allowed Marigold to take his hand and lead him to the stairs to ground level.

15 WALTER JENKINS IN DAHLEM

Eighteen hours after the Martians had first fallen on Long Island, Walter Jenkins was still at his self-constructed monitoring station in Dahlem – by his clock it was after eleven p.m. He had been sleepless for more than twenty-four hours already. He assuaged hunger and thirst with flasks of coffee and packs of biscuits, assembled before the vigil had started. And yet, he hoped, his concentration and powers of analysis had not faltered.

Walter thought he was seeing the strategy. As the cylinders had continued to fall, a rain of aluminium and fire around the world, his attention had turned from the astronomical to the geographic, from the reaches of interplanetary space to the ground. He referred frequently now to a big Mercatorprojection world map on which he had marked, in vivid red ink, the fall of each cluster as it was reported in. It was clear by now, of course, that the Martians were making landfall at local midnight, wherever they fell. He pictured those cylinders still out in space, hanging over the earth as it turned beneath them, like a stream of bullets from some tremendous machine-gun.

But those volleys had clearly been planned to land, not simply according to a geographical pattern, but at key human targets. The Martians seemed to be making for all the world’s major inhabited landmasses, from Asia to Australia. And in each assault they came down close to a key city. The first wave of dummy cylinders would smash down to sterilise the terrain, and within six hours their battle groups were out, mounting large-scale, coordinated, lightning-strike assaults on the cities and their supporting facilities, fuel stores, transport links. And, by means of this brutal decapitation of human society – wrecking capital accumulated by an industrial civilisation across centuries – it seemed the Martians might be striving to win their war quickly.

Yet it was a war Walter knew that mankind could not afford to lose. For, with the whole world smashed as England had been over the last two years – with stores depleted, manufacturing capacity gone, governments dissolving – we would not get another chance. The massacre of mankind as an independent species would be completed in this generation. And for the children of the future – like the wretches in the Martians’ cylinders – only a million years of slavery.

Walter concentrated on the immediate situation. The first landings had been scattered, at New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Peking, Bombay – one per midnight band. Now, though, in the last hour – and even as he had listened to wireless reports of the devastation of Peking – the pattern had changed, with no less than three targets at the same longitudinal meridian being selected: St Petersburg in Russia, the Ottoman capital Constantinople, and Durban in South Africa – the latter the first Martian footfall in that continent. And given the operational pattern so far, Walter could predict to the hour when the major assaults on those centres would begin: at six in the morning, local time.

Then, through his window, Walter saw a flash of green light, in the darkened sky. He glanced at a clock. In Berlin, it was midnight.

16 A SHADOW PLAY

‘Ulla! Ulla!…’

In a strange, lonely dawn, Emre heard that eerie cry echo over Constantinople, even drowning out the muezzin calls.

Emre Sahin was, by inclination and training, a soldier, but a decade before, in the wars against the Balkan League, a Greek cannonball had neatly detached his left leg and the lower part of his right. He had been just twenty years old at the time. Now Emre had become an accidental journalist, and he would leave one of the more compelling accounts of the Martians’ action in Constantinople, for the benefit of myself and other historians.

But as it happened, in the days before the Martians came, Emre, anticipating the ending of Ramadan a few days hence, had been preparing a shadow-puppet play.

Emre had always enjoyed the end of Ramadan: the threeday celebration that followed a month of fasting, when family would visit to exchange gifts of sweets and tobacco and perfume and porcelain, and there would be happy gatherings in the coffee houses, and in the open spaces there would be a bayram, a fair with amusements for the children. And Emre, after his injury, had got in the habit of mounting shadow plays: his own adaptations of traditional stories for his nephews and nieces and their neighbourhood friends, and bawdy shows for the adults. His art was simple but his storytelling good, and the work gave him and his family a good deal of pleasure. And it had been a key part of how he had rebuilt his life.

Emre had perforce come to spend much of his time in the home of his parents, deep in the heart of that ramshackle part of Constantinople south of the Golden Horn which foreigners then called by the archaic name Stamboul. Life after the injury was difficult, of course. But there were consolations. Emre was blessed with loyal brothers and one sister, all older than he was, and a rising generation of nieces and nephews. That was how the writing began; as well as making up shadow plays, he assisted the children with their own writing exercises, and wrote out the stories he made up for them. Some of these he placed with a Stamboul newspaper, whose editor encouraged him to do more. His mother, who had survived her husband, probably thought it a foolish endeavour and a waste of time – but then her crippled son, largely bedridden, now had nothing but time, and why not let him waste it?

He could hardly be a roving reporter. But he soon discovered he could journey in time, with the help of books his family bought or borrowed for him. He wrote topical pieces on aspects of the city’s history, and later graduated to better-paid work for guide books for the foreigners who swarmed through Constantinople: thanks to the oil, visitors in recent years so eager to prove themselves friends to the Ottomans and not foes. The Schlieffen War had seemed likely to destabilise the Ottoman empire almost as much as it had the Russian, but it seemed to Emre that in recent years the situation had grown calmer. The Sultan had been restored, to no great enthusiasm. The British insisted on their ‘protectorates’, to ensure access to the Suez canal, and to the oil of Mesopotamia, but otherwise kept themselves to themselves. The Germans, meanwhile, had proven themselves useful allies at least in the short term – fighting to fend off Russia’s ambitions to own Constantinople itself. Allies in the short term: perhaps you could hope for no more than that.

But now, in the middle of this complex swirl of history and ambition, the Martians had landed.

Constantinople was almost unique in the Second War in that the first landing of the Martians’ invasion party fell within the bounds of the city itself, landing in that more modern part of the city north of the Golden Horn known dismissively by the locals as Frengistan – ‘Foreigner Town’. Hotels, business centres and embassies had been flattened indiscriminately, and few of the surviving Turks mourned.

Soon, though, the Martians had been ready to move. They advanced through the districts of Pera and Galata, and then the fighting-machines simply waded through the waters of the Golden Horn north of the new German-built Galata Bridge, and into the old city. Centuries before, the ancient Roman city walls had been no defence against the Turks with their gunpowder weapons; now they proved no obstacle to the Heat-Ray. It is to be wondered if the Martians sensed anything of the antiquity of the quarters into which they probed, the glittering legs of the fighting-machines towering over the dusty houses and bazaars, and the ancient, glittering mosques. But then, I suppose, to a race as antique as the Martians, even Constantinople is as evanescent as a traveller’s pitched tent.

It was unfortunate that Emre was left behind during the flight.

The Martians’ advance into Stamboul was a shock to the inhabitants; communications in much of the empire, even the older parts of the capital, were still primitive in 1922. An alarm had been sounded, the local police running from house to house and ringing bells. One of Emre’s brothers, dragging his children behind him, had come to the door to collect their mother.

And Emre, in his room at the back of the house – a wounded soldier too stubborn and proud to call out – stayed where he was. So it was that when the Martians came to his neighbourhood, Emre was entirely alone.

The first he saw of them was a kind of slim pillar passing his window. He realised later that he had seen the leg of a fighting-machine, picking its way through the dilapidated neighbourhood as an adult might step cautiously across a carpet strewn with toys.

Emre had a vehicle of his own, a kind of low cart made for him by one of his brothers – practical, but hated by Emre, for it was like a beggar’s chariot. Still, now he used his strong arms to lift himself down from his bed and onto the cart, and rolled through the deserted house to the front door.

Something was coming down the street.

Emre saw a thing like a swollen metallic spider, so huge it all but filled the narrow street, side to side, but its five limbs carried it over the cobbles with uncanny grace. As it passed, tentacular limbs probed into the houses to either side, the open doors and windows. And what Emre thought was a sack of leather was riding on its back. This was the controlling Martian. It was thus in some parts of the world, where the Martians sent in their handling-machines to explore densely inhabited neighbourhoods, in advance of destroying them – or perhaps in search of feedstock, a fate that, fifteen years before, had so nearly had befallen Walter Jenkins and the curate in the ruined house in Sheen.

The Martian seemed to spot Emre. It stopped, freezing to an eerie stillness. Emre too waited, sitting on his cart, as the Martian sat on its own machine. They were strange mirror images, Emre thought, each dependent for movement on a mechanical aid.

Afterwards, Emre would always wonder how the encounter would have worked out, if not for the child.

It was a boy, barefoot, aged no more than five or six – Emre wasn’t sure if he knew him – somehow left behind in the evacuation. Now he stumbled from a doorway. He looked around, and then started running towards Emre, presumably the only adult he had seen all morning.

Emre reacted quickly. He waved his arms. ‘Get back!’

But the Martian was almost as fast. Emre saw from the corner of his eye as a metallic limb held out a cylinder – it was a Heat-Ray projector – and swept it through the air like a wand. Walls exploded, windows shattered, wooden frames burst into sudden flame.

And the near-invisible beam brushed the child.

Emre was not the only Turk to encounter Martians that day. After the invasion of England in 1907 the great Islamic empire had studied the Martians as a potential enemy, for, among much other damage, they had destroyed the Shah Jahan mosque in Woking. Even now a brave young officer called Mustafa Ataturk was leading a force in defence of the ancient and glorious Ayasofya – and later this heroism would be a platform for Ataturk, rehabilitated under the Sultanate and encouraged by the Federation of Federations, to achieve great things on a world stage. The old city itself was resilient; it had survived invasions, the fall of empires, earthquakes, fires, and in recent decades coups and counter-coups. It would survive even an invasion from another world.

But at that moment Emre knew none of this. He was alone against the Martians – but not powerless. Emre had been crippled for ten years, but he was only thirty years old, and still strong in his upper arms. Enraged by the wanton destruction of the child, paddling at the road’s cobbles, he used all his strength to hurl himself at the Martian. Perhaps he could smash a hole in that great fleshy lump in the top of the machine before he was killed.

But the Martian coolly regarded him, from lidless eyes. Then it turned and receded from his view, effortlessly outrunning him, before Emre had to give up, exhausted.

It was some time before Emre had the courage to seek out the remains of the child. And he found a strange shadow play.

So rapidly had the Heat-Ray passed – and perhaps it was on some reduced setting for the safe use by its controlling Martian in such an enclosed space – that it had incinerated the child entirely, but had merely scorched the surface of a wall behind. And so a kind of inverted shadow of the child remained, caught running in its final moment, as if painted on the darkened wall.

17 ABOVE DURBAN

‘Ulla! Ulla!…’ The Martian cry was heard around the world, in the Americas, in Australia, in Asia – and in Africa.

It was in the early morning of that Saturday, high above Durban on a foothill of the Drakensberg Mountains – and with the Martian walking machines still ravaging the city below – that Gopal Tilak came upon the Zulu woman. She sat alone, a small pile of belongings at her side, the morning light on her rather expressionless face.

I met Gopal Tilak much later, when I visited the ruins of Bombay, only to happen, by chance, upon this eyewitness to the destruction of Durban. By the time I met him Gopal had become a prominent lawyer advising a newly independent Indian government on the proper application of the human rights legislation imposed by the Federation of Federations in Basra. In the calm environs of a very English tea shop on the outskirts of Bombay, Gopal would tell me of that dreadful morning, and his accidental meeting in the foothills.

He had judged the woman to be perhaps thirty years old, more than ten years younger than himself. She did not seem to have noticed him coming. The world was quiet, up there; the detonation of the buildings and the screams of the people of the city were whispers on the wind. He could still make out, however, rising from a dozen places, the ugly, discordant cry of the Martians: ‘Ulla…’

He coughed, so as not to alarm her; the sound seemed magnified.

She turned her head, glanced at him, turned away with no apparent interest.

He said to her, in English, ‘May I join you?’

She looked at him again and shrugged. ‘I do not own hill.’

‘Quite so.’ In fact, he knew, the native folk were allowed to own land in only seven per cent of the territory of the Union of South Africa. And here he was thinking like a lawyer, even now; on such a morning as this, surely it was only common humanity that mattered.

Moving stiffly, he sat beside her. He wore a suit, dusty now and the tie long loosened, and his patent leather shoes, meant for carpeted city offices rather than rough hikes, were badly scuffed. He was not unfit, he played tennis and a little cricket, but he was new to the way of life of the refugee. This woman, he instinctively felt, presumably after a life of toil, was more sturdy than he.

‘I have water,’ he said.

‘I too.’ She looked at him again. ‘We can share if one is short. Water is scarce just here.’

‘Thank you. And food? I have some biscuits…’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Though I should be, I suppose, it is a long time since I ate.’ He carried a satchel; long emptied of books and other weighty objects, now it held little but the identity papers which had to be carried throughout the British Empire, a few biscuits, a flask of water. He took the flask, sipped from it, and offered it to the woman. ‘I was on a train coming into Durban. I have been advising on employment rights for the Indian population here. I have been trying to leave this country since the news of the Martian attacks in America. I wished to travel home, to Bombay. But the Martians fell there some hours ago. And now the Martians are in Durban too!’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I am a lucky man. Before we reached the city my train stopped, the crew wished to turn back. But I need to get to the coast, to the ships…’

‘You walked.’

‘Yes,’ he said. He hesitated. ‘My name is Gopal Tilak.’

She nodded. She said her name was Nada, and a surname that he would later not recollect.

‘“Nada.” Is that an unusual name?’

She shrugged. ‘My mother, worker on a farm. The farmer’s wife, she give me name. Nada. Name from a book. Means “nothing” in some tongues. Thought that was funny. Later I read book.’

‘You speak English—’

‘Afrikaans better.’

‘You read and write.’

‘And count. Family workers on farm, in the country. I work in a company in the city. Exports diamonds.’

Diamonds, and the gold of the Transvaal, Gopal reflected: the huge mineral wealth of this country that flowed out into the world, mostly benefiting the British who owned the mining rights.

She said now, ‘When Martians came—’

‘You decided to walk home? Just like me. It’s just that we’re walking in opposite directions.’

She looked at him. ‘Know Durban?’

‘Not well. My work mostly took me inland, to the towns, the villages. That’s where most of the problems are in this strange stitched-together country, of Afrikaners, Indians – and Zulus like yourself.’

‘Zulus here first. Now, everything taken away.’

‘I know,’ he said with some passion. ‘Ten years ago, more, I worked with Mohandas Gandhi. Do you know of him? Englishtrained lawyer who led campaigns for the rights of the Indians here. Passive resistance – that was his tool; we call it satyagraha in our language. You just down tools and refuse. But even as we won our small victory, a much greater injustice was being legislated into existence – I mean, the institutionalised discrimination against the native majority.’

He regretted his rather complex language, but she seemed to understand. ‘Gandhi? Where now?’

‘Went back to the Raj, to advance the rights of our countrymen on our own soil.’

‘In Bombay?’

‘I hope not.’ He closed his eyes then, and tried to imagine Bombay as it must be now. Gopal came from a well-to-do family from Delhi, but as a young man he had moved to Bombay for the commercial possibilities of a city that had grown huge under the British, and he had grown to love it: the sprawling old quarters, the giant cotton mills of the industrial zones, even the great administrative buildings of the British. And then there was the scent of it, of the spices of cooking, of the sandalwood burned at the festivals. Well, more than sandalwood would be burning in Bombay this terrible morning.

‘Can’t fight Martians,’ Nada said now. ‘Just wait until go away. What was word?’

‘What word? Oh – satyagraha.’

She repeated it with relish, syllable by syllable. ‘Satyagraha. Wait until go away. Then take land back.’

She was right, Gopal thought. But even if the Martians could be beaten, they would leave human affairs everywhere stirred up, as if with a giant spoon. Nothing would be the same, anywhere in the world, he supposed.

Nada stood. ‘Now I go home.’

He stood with her. They scrupulously shared out the water they carried between them, then shook hands rather gravely, and she walked away, deeper into the hills.

Gopal waited until the Martians’ main attack seemed to be over. Then he worked his way towards the outskirts of Durban.

As it happened the Martians themselves withdrew before Gopal reached the city. And he was intrigued to learn later, so he would one day tell me, that they had been seen heading north, a great ambulatory army of them, making steadily, it seemed, for the forested heart of Africa.

18 OUTSIDE ST PETERSBURG

‘Ulla! Ulla!…’

Heard in every continent, that day, from east to west, and south to north – from southernmost Africa to the far north of Russia…

‘Ulla! Ulla!…’

At midnight the Martians had landed at Tosno, some thirty miles south-east of St Petersburg. In retrospect Andrei Smirnov would reflect that the day Martians came to Mother Russia ought to have been strange enough. But, for him, it got stranger.

In his barracks in the city, Rifleman Andrei Smirnov had happened to be awake, and had seen for himself the cylinders pass across the sky, streaks of light like so many green shootingstars. Most of the men in the barracks, sleeping as best they could, had missed it. Even when the word got around, and those who woke were told the strange news, most of them didn’t care. Martians were England’s problem; Germans were Russia’s.

The city, Russia’s capital, sat on a fat isthmus between Lake Ladoga to the east, and the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic to the west. In this eighth year of a long war the German divisions had pushed through Finland and come on the city from the north, evidently intent on taking the capital at last, in a bold and demoralising coup. The Imperial Army had responded well. The Germans had been held north-west of the city, a line that had since solidified in miles of trenchworks and wire and artillery emplacements, backed up by rougher ditches and wooden barricades assembled by civilian squads. But they were German invaders stuck like a knife deep in the belly of Russia, and they had been there for years.

This particular night the men in Smirnov’s unit, on a rest rotation, had been holed up in what had been a school hall a few streets behind the Pushkin Theatre. They were far behind the lines, deep inside the city itself, on the southern bank of the Neva, the river that bisected St Petersburg. And when morning came the men, summoned by the bugle, formed up in a yard where no children had played for many months. Outside the barracks, a sense of urgency was apparent. Smirnov became aware of church bells ringing, rousing the population. They soon learned that Smirnov’s unit was being mustered, not to go north to meet the Germans, but south to face Martians. Smirnov could feel the fear sweep along the lines, like the passing of a ghost.

Andrei Smirnov was a conscript soldier, one of many millions – some said as many as five million – mobilised since the Germans’ declaration of war. He had seen little action, even since being posted here, to St Petersburg itself. Was he to be spared a German bullet, only to face an interplanetary death?

As it turned out, not that particular day.

A lieutenant, in a crisp staff officer’s uniform, walked along the lines, briefly inspecting the men. He stopped by Smirnov, tapped him on the shoulder and beckoned him away. ‘You’ll do. This way.’

In a moment Smirnov’s life had changed, and he was set on path that would lead me, one day, to write to him about his memories of this day. For now he was just confused, and wary, for no soldier likes novelty; novelty gets you in trouble, or dead. Smirnov looked over to his corporal, but the man shrugged. Smirnov had no choice but to follow the lieutenant.

The lieutenant looked him up and down. ‘Your name?’ Smirnov told him.

‘Can you ride a motorcycle?’

‘Yes, sir, I—’

‘I am an aide to General Brusilov.’

Automatically Smirnov stiffened to a kind of attention.

The lieutenant handed Smirnov a packet of papers, and a small white flag. ‘Here are your orders. You are to take a message to the Germans. Am I keeping you awake, soldier?’

‘No, sir. I mean – sorry, sir. The Germans, sir?’

‘You may have heard of them. Ugly sausage-eaters with pointy hats.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Naturally we’ve been trying to get through to them by other means, telegraph, wireless. We do need to communicate from time to time. Probably the wireless will work. You are something of a last resort.’

‘Very well, sir.’ He stood waiting for details.

The lieutenant, who didn’t look much older than Smirnov, waved his arms impatiently. ‘What are you waiting for, man, a push?’

‘But how should I—’

‘Ride through the city to the German lines, and wave that bloody flag before the Germans shoot your balls off, and make them read the letters. All right?…’

Of course it wasn’t as simple as that.

The first part of the assignment was easy enough. On his requisitioned motorcycle, he took a direct route north-west through the most picturesque part of the city, through Palace Square, across the Neva – from the bridge he had a fine view of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the oldest building in the city, now a prison, and scarred, like so many of the city’s landmarks, by the Germans’ shelling. But that morning the streets were filling, with confused and frightened civilians; more than once he had to gun his engine and wave to clear a path. Evidently the news was out that the Martians had landed to the south, and of course one would have an impulse to flee – but where to? The north was the obvious route, but the Germans were to the north, they had not magically gone away, and a German bullet would kill you just as effectively as the Martians’ magical Heat-Ray. The driving got easier as he reached the north-west suburbs, nearer the front line, and passed along streets that were much more badly damaged, and all but deserted.

Once outside the city proper, he first had to produce his packet of papers when he got to the rear trenches of the Russian line.

He was stopped by a sentry, then taken to a corporal, and then another lieutenant, who read a covering letter with apparent amusement. He looked Smirnov over. ‘Sooner you than me carrying this, on such a fine morning. I’ll assign a couple of men to cover you – and, corporal, find him a bloody big stick to wave his flag on, will you?’

So Smirnov found himself disarmed, and sent out through a string of communications trenches to the front line. Then it was up a short ladder and out of the trenches – after the muddy enclosure, out in the sunlight so suddenly, it felt like being born – and he was led out by scouts through a gap in the wire.

After that he was on his own, marching through churned-up mud, waving a flag that seemed ever more pathetically small the further out he got. He had been to the front before but had not been beyond the trenches.

‘Halt.’

The word was in Russian, coarsely accented. A man stood before him, in grey field uniform, mud-splashed as Smirnov’s was. Smirnov did not know German insignias well enough to be able to read his rank. His heart hammered. But he said cordially, ‘Good morning.’

The man laughed. ‘And to you.’

‘You speak Russian?’

The German sighed. ‘I studied it at university. And my reward is this, a conversation with an idiot, in a position where I am likely to get my head blown in by one of your snipers at any moment.’

‘As I by yours.’

‘That’s true. But you started it. What do you want?’

‘Nothing. I come with a gift.’ Smirnov held out his pack of papers, now slightly mud-splashed. ‘This is for your commanding officer.’

‘Ah. A message from the famous General Brusilov, no doubt.’

‘As a matter of fact, yes.’

‘Who are you, his boyfriend?’

‘Just a messenger.’

The German took the papers, and eyed him shrewdly. ‘I think we both know what this is about. And what do you think Brusilov has to say, private?’

Oddly,Smirnov hadn’t thought that through. ‘If I were the General, I would suggest that you Germans lower your arms and join us in a fight against a common foe.’

The German nodded. ‘Just so. Because it will take them mere minutes to burn their way through your peasant army. Together at least we may slow them a little longer – is that the calculation?’

‘I’m just the messenger.’

The German considered the papers. ‘If it were up to me,’ he said, ‘I would join you, for two reasons. One is our common humanity. And second—’

‘Yes?’

‘We have heard – it is only rumour, here on the line – that the cylinders have fallen close to Berlin, too.’

‘Ah.’

‘Germans and Russians, two mighty hosts. If joined together, perhaps even the Martians would find us formidable opponents. Do you think?’

‘Maybe.’

The German looked over Smirnov’s shoulder. ‘Russia is unimpressive. It is only – what, sixty years? – since serfdom was abolished in your land. Sixty years! Your Tsar still rules—’

‘He answers to the Duma now. The convention of 1917—’

‘Is that the one where they locked up all the Bolsheviks?’ Smirnov’s grasp of politics was poor. ‘Who?’

‘Never mind. And as for your army, you have millions of men in arms, but they are poorly trained, poorly equipped…’

‘So poor are we that our city is not yet named “Wilhelmsburg”, as your Kaiser boasted it would be years ago.’

The German laughed. ‘I give you that. Even if we fight together, the Martians may defeat us. Then what?’

Smirnov grinned. ‘Then we retreat, as before Napoleon. No conqueror in history has taken the whole of Russia. It is impossible. As the Martians too will find.’

‘Hah! Well, I must take your letter to my commander, who will give it to his commander, and then to the generals, who are probably speaking by field telephone to Brusilov already… I look forward to marching down the Nevsky Prospekt side by side with you, my friend.’

‘What is your name?’

‘Voigt. Hans Voigt.’

‘I am Andrei Smirnov. Farewell, Hans Voigt.’

‘Farewell, Andrei.’

They saluted each other, each in their styles, turned on their heels, and parted.

19 THE ADVANCE FROM THE ELBE

By the time of Smirnov’s meeting, the Martians had indeed fallen on Berlin, or close to it.

Walter Jenkins, huddled in his nest of communications gear and charts, maps and calculations, took some time to establish that the Martians had come down on the north bank of the Elbe, near the town of Dessau, some forty miles south-west of the city itself. Walter did not drive – he had always felt, he said, that his nerves were not up to it – but, having been a refugee once, he travelled with a motorist’s pocket atlas of local roads tucked into his overcoat pocket. A glance at this was sufficient to show that the Martians’ obvious line of attack on central Berlin would be a straight advance to the north-east – which would bring them close to Dahlem, or even through it, and other suburbs at this south-western corner of the conurbation.

Therefore Walter had to flee.

He did not leave in a panic, as he might once have done; he always said he remembered the lessons of his time with Albert Cook fifteen years earlier, when the two of them had sought to cross a Martian-infested Surrey. Having tidied away his notes in a stout fireproof box, he donned his coat and cloth cap and heavy walking boots, and he filled his pockets with bread and cheese, and matches, an electric torch, a pocket knife – and a pack of cigarettes with which to win friends. He had his pocket atlas, and a German phrase book to back up his own faulty grasp of the language. And he had a notebook and pencils; he never travelled without a means of recording his adventures, or more specifically his inner musings.

He washed his face, splashing cold water to try to induce wakefulness. Part of him regretted now his lack of sleep for so long. He scribbled a quick note to the villa’s owners and left it on the kitchen table, weighed down by an empty coffee mug. Then he glanced around once more with some regret at his maps and calculations and logs.

An outside observer would have thought him leisurely over these preparations. It will always be a puzzle to me how conscious Walter was or not of his own decision-making at such times – for, of course, every hour wasted brought peril closer to his door.

It was seven a.m. by the time he emerged from the house, under a clear, brightening sky. He locked the door carefully behind him, pocketing one key and hiding a spare on a lintel. Then he dug his bicycle out of its shelter at the side of the villa, near the potting sheds. This was a Raleigh, a solid English make which he had had imported at considerable expense; only two days before he had oiled the chain and checked the tyres.

Here was Walter Jenkins, caught for the second time in his life between an advancing Martian force and a vulnerable human city.

It was already an hour since, to the south-east – if they had kept to the timetable that they had used around the world – the Martians had left their pit, and they must already have been on the move; already humans must be dying as they flung themselves in the face of that advance. If he were rational, he knew, he would get out of the way altogether – head west or east, to Wustermark or Schonefeld perhaps. But if Freud and his disciples had taught Walter one thing about himself, it was that whatever drove him at times like this was deeper than the rational. Once he had walked straight into a London he believed the Martians still occupied. Fifteen years later, so it must be again.

In that German dawn, curiosity and dread warred in him; not for the first time, curiosity won. To the heart of Berlin!

He told me he grinned as he climbed aboard that bicycle, and pedalled away.

He headed towards the Rheinstrasse, one of the great highways that leads to the centre of the city.

Long before he got to the junction with the main road he was panting, his legs and backside aching. When the Martians had first come to England he had been forty-one years old; now he was in his late fifties and he felt a lot more used up. But he pedalled grimly, sweating inside his heavy coat.

He saw nothing unusual about the morning, at first. Cars and motor-cycles passed in an orderly fashion, and people came and went, many of them in smart office clothing. He was passing through a suburb of commuters; people would travel by motor-car, tram and bus to jobs in the offices and department stores in the centre of the city. He saw no schoolchildren heading for their classes – but then this was a Saturday; Walter was not sure of the local routine, but maybe lessons had been suspended. Perhaps the alarm had not yet spread. Perhaps the Kaiser’s government was still giving out reassuring messages: Work as usual! – the menace will be contained.

He came upon the first soldiers at the junction with the Rheinstrasse.

Vehicles, trucks and armoured cars and motor-cycles, and a few small artillery pieces, had been gathered at the side of the road. Landsers – German tommies in grey greatcoats – stood around smoking and talking quietly, while field wireless sets crackled. In a small park opposite, others were digging, hastily constructing a complicated earthwork. Walter got off his bicycle to see better; it would be a star-shaped formation surrounded by a trench, with machine guns placed at the corners, and a big Howitzer at the centre.

Walter approached a couple of men beside a batteredlooking artillery piece, drawn by a couple of patient horses. Walter chose these men because they weren’t smoking; now he produced the pack he had brought for this very purpose. In his clumsy German, he asked, ‘You are going to meet the Martians? I heard they landed near Dessau.’

One of the men took Walter’s cigarette with no apparent interest in conversation. The other was a corporal, smaller, darker, more shrewd-looking. He said, ‘That’s what we heard. Waiting for more units to get their backsides out of bed and form up here, and then we advance. Air cover as well, we’re promised that.’

‘They’re on the move, then. The Martians.’

‘Out of the Dessau pit, yes.’ The German word he used for ‘pit’ was Adlerhorst, ‘eagle’s nest’. ‘We already put up some resistance at Brueck, Treuenbritzen. Quite a force coming, apparently. Nobody knows quite how many. The scouts were too busy running away to count, probably. But it’s said that some of the Martians have peeled off to head for Brandenburg and Potsdam.’

There was a droning noise, high in the sky. Walter glanced up to see a brace of high-flying aeroplanes, heading back the way he had come: scouts, perhaps. ‘Soon there will be better information.’

‘Yes.’

‘Stop them before they get to the city. That the plan?’

He eyed Walter, taking in the residual burn-scars on his face. ‘You English?’

‘Is it obvious? My German is poor, I know.’

‘You seen anything of the Martians over there?’

‘Some. Especially the first lot.’ He gestured at his face. ‘I got this fleeing from their advance. But I was never a fighting man.’

‘Even so,’ said the corporal, ‘even so, to see them up close… No doubt I’ll have the privilege before the day is out.’

‘They are overwhelming.’

Again a glint of shrewd intelligence in the man’s eye; this was a veteran who would take nothing for granted, and not underestimate his interplanetary enemy. ‘What about you? Where will you go?’

‘Into the city.’

The corporal eyed him, then shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

There was a revving of engines, a stirring among the men. Walter had seen enough of the military to understand; somewhere orders had been issued and received.

The corporal nipped out his cigarette and stored the stub behind his ear. ‘Thanks for the smoke. Now you’d better get out of here before my lieutenant requisitions your bicycle.’

20 TO THE CAPITAL

It was only a few miles from Dahlem to central Berlin.

But Walter made slow progress. As he neared the centre the roads were increasingly crowded, with motor-cars, buses, even a few horse-drawn vehicles – and pedestrians, fewer officeworker types by this time, more of them with the familiar look of refugees, families on the move with children, old folk, suitcases. Walter was forced to dismount and push his cycle through the crush. Just as in London in 1907, there were boys selling newspapers, literally hot off the press, bearing the latest news of the coming of the Martians. Every so often, too, an official car would come by, military or police or government, perhaps a black Mercedes with official flags fluttering, and the civilian traffic would squeeze out of the way. There were soldiers everywhere, and police – in short, Walter reflected dryly, a plethora of uniforms.

If the Dahlem commuters had not quite fully grasped the significance of the day, by now Berlin was waking fully to the implication of the extraplanetary force that was approaching. And yet – so far at least – there was none of the sense of the breakdown of society that Walter had observed in London coming so quickly in those dreadful June days of ’07. Perhaps he should not have been surprised. Of course, if the Martians came, they would come to Berlin! And of course the Germans would be ready. To Walter’s astonishment, a cleaning truck came by, toiling along the gutter, brushes whirling. On such a day! That was Berlin for you.

But even as the truck passed he heard a sound like distant thunder – coming from the east, surely the sound of guns, big ones – and then came a stink of burning. The crowds stirred.

There was a greater sense of urgency as the pedestrians pushed on, the motor-cars began to bunch up at blockages and sounded their horns, and soldiers and police shouted commands.

Walter reached Potsdamer Platz, which he thought of as Berlin’s equivalent of Piccadilly Circus. Here the traffic was chaotic, the pavements even more crowded. But the brilliant electric advertising panels still glowed brightly in the May morning, and many of the shops and department stores were open, Walter saw, somewhat bemused.

And then, quite unexpectedly, Walter glimpsed a fighting machine. Faintly misty in the air it was, rising above the buildings to the north and east of his position. He saw its bronze cowl, unmistakeable, glinting bright in the flat sunlight – there and gone, moving out of sight as its animal grace took it away. A brace of aeroplanes tore over the city in that direction, very high.

Electrified, Walter began to battle his way north: where the Martians were, that was where he wanted to be.

21 WITH THE MARTIANS IN BERLIN

Walter reached the Ebertstrasse, which runs along the eastern edge of the Tiergarten, the city park. Here, Walter found, people were mostly heading south, more urgently now, and he had to battle to make way – and, after a hundred yards, regretfully, he finally had to abandon his bicycle.

In the park itself – to Walter’s recollection mainly memorable before that day for its extensive collection of VERBOTEN signs – civilians had been excluded, and soldiers laboured at trenchworks and artillery emplacements. Walter thought he recognised anti-aircraft weapons, even big naval guns, as well as field artillery pieces. But he had no time to pause and study this frantic build-up as he pushed on against the flow.

He tried to understand how it was he had seen the Martian machine off to the north-east. He had been running ahead of their advance from the south-west. In the two advances they had made on London, in 1907 and 1920, they had driven more or less directly into the heart of the city. But the fighting-machines were fast, and it was evident that the Martians had become more flexible in their tactics – and indeed, it would be shown retrospectively that the Martians’ tactics varied around the planet in this war, in part for differences of geography and human resistance, in part, perhaps, through sheer experimentation. Perhaps this assault group which might number hundreds of machines – had split into packs, which were now probing into central Berlin from west, east, even north, as well as directly from the south. This would bring chaos to any planned evacuation of the city, if all possible escape routes were cut off… And if surrounded, Berlin would be turned into a ghetto by the Martians, and a gruesome larder. Some fate for the capital of Prussia, Germany and Mitteleuropa!

But such thoughts were for the future. For now the great narrator continued to drive himself straight towards the centre of events.

He reached the Unter Den Linden near the Brandenburg Gate. And here, to Walter’s surprise, people marched. Walter saw no old folk here, no children, no invalids in bath chairs; these were not refugees. And nor were they military or police; Walter made out only a handful of uniforms, shining brass helmets, standing back from the crowd warily. These marchers were the ordinary folk of the city, mostly young, male and female alike; they were heading steadily east along the great avenue, they carried the flags of Prussia and Germany, as well as crude weapons, poles and clubs, and they sang as they marched, Germany’s anthem, which shared the melody of Britain’s own: ‘Heil dir im Siegerkranz, / Herrscher des Vaterlands! / Heil, Kaiser, dir!…’

Walter consulted his traveller’s atlas and understood. At the eastern end of the Unter Den Linden, over a short bridge onto Museum Island, lay the Stadtschloss, the Kaiser’s city palace. Was Wilhelm in residence today? With Berlin under threat, of course he was. And where else would the people gather but at the palace of the conqueror of France and Russia? It was just as the crowds came to Buckingham Palace on great days in Britain.

‘Fühl in des Thrones Glanz / Die hohe Wonne ganz, / Liebling des Volks zu sein! / Heil Kaiser, dir!…’

On impulse Walter joined the marching throng, heading east towards the palace. The sun was high now, morning mist having burned off to leave a clear and bright day, and, over the heads of the crowd, beyond the rows of leafy trees, the palace was already visible, a blocky mass on the horizon. Walter had always thought he had a side susceptible to persuasion, especially when under stress; he had never forgotten how he had fallen under the spell of Bert Cook, as, on Putney Hill, that undistinguished artilleryman had laid out his plans to defeat the Martians single-handed. Now Walter had to try hard not to lose himself in this marching, singing crowd, in their mass defiance – their mass delusion, he thought, as if a little shouting and a few thousand waved fists might deter an interplanetary invasion.

And then a Martian rose up beyond the palace.

It was clearly visible, silhouetted against the sky, towering over the building like a man standing over a doll’s house. And then another, and another, and more beyond, which Walter saw as shadowy, complex pillars. Cowled heads turned this way and that, as if looking around, curious.

As the Martians were spotted, there were shouts, and cries of dismay – and, yes, more yells of defiance, even insults. The procession stumbled to a halt, the crowd compressing, pushing.

Meanwhile the lead Martian manipulated a cylinder – even so far away, Walter seemed to see every detail, the tentacular appendages cradling the instrument and positioning it carefully. Of course Walter could see nothing of the Heat-Ray itself, at this distance. The heart of the palace exploded, a shower of brick and glass and marble.

More fighting-machines stepped in their eerie triple-legged way through the burning ruin, waded easily through the shallow strait that separated Museum Isle from the mainland – and then strode boldly, and with remarkable speed, straight down the Unter Den Linden.

The crowd broke, lost its shape, turned into a mass of individuals fleeing or fighting to flee. The uniformed soldiers and police who had been supervising them turned and ran too. At last, Walter thought, pushing his way out of the crush, at last this was the social liquefaction he had seen before, the inevitable collapse of all human organisation before the overwhelming might of the Martian machines. But even now one or two resisted the receding tide; they sheltered behind trees and aimed weapons at the struggled to improvise barricades debris.

But the Martians came on, with appalling, overwhelming speed, bowling through the crowd. People were scattered and crushed just by the touch of those mobile, electrified limbs. And the Heat-Ray projectors played, deployed with unerring accuracy and ruthlessness: people flashed and burned, gone in an instant. It was not the slaughtered whose screams Walter heard now, but the screams of the injured, those whom the Heat-Ray beams had touched more carelessly, scorching off a limb, turning a back to a crisped cinder. And now came toofamiliar smells, the stink of roasted flesh, of burned brick, of melting tarmacadam where the Heat-Rays touched the road surface.

The guns in the Tiergarten started to speak at last, a rumbling thunder, and bangs from the big Navy weapons shook the very ground. Walter could see the shells rise, threading through the air. One smashed the bronze face of a Martian; the machine staggered and fell – a few in the fleeing crowd saw this and yelled in triumph – and two of its neighbours gave up the pursuit of the human crowd to bend over it, like soldiers solicitous over a fallen colleague. But as always most of the shells were shot out of the sky by the Heat-Ray, far short of their targets. Worse, errant shells were landing in the fleeing crowd, even as the Martians scythed through that mass of humanity – the Germans were killing more of their own than the Martians.

‘Bows and arrows against the lightning,’ Walter says he murmured to himself. ‘You were right, Bert.’ But they had to try, he realised, the Germans now like the English before them – and, through this last dreadful night, like the Americans and Chinese and Russians and Turks – they had to try. And Walter advancing Martians, or from fencing and other himself, so the deep-buried survivor part of him pressed now, had to save his own much-abused skin.

He joined the crowd pressing back down the Unter Den Linden, heading west once more. If he could get past the Brandenburg Gate, which loomed before him now, he might yet reach the Tiergarten. There the crowd was fanning out, he could see, keeping away from the military emplacements, making for the shade of the trees. Walter had hidden from Martians before, underwater, in wrecked houses; he could do it again.

But the crowd was dense, and going too slowly – and the Martian machines, scattering all before them, were coming up behind much too quickly. Walter pushed at the backs of those ahead of him, squirming through the crush.

And now a new noise erupted, coming from beyond the Gate, directly before Walter, a kind of thunder bellowing down from the sky. People screamed, ducked, scattered: ‘Is it the Martians?’

‘More of them?’ Walter, his progress blocked, scrambled for shelter under a chestnut tree, whose upper branches were already singed by a lick of the Heat-Ray. There he huddled, his knees against his chest. That towering noise still poured down from the sky.

And then Walter saw them, through the branches of his tree: aeroplanes, human machines, not Martian.

The centre of the group was an immense bomber, it must have been forty feet long, with four pulsing propeller engines; its course, parallel to the avenue below, was so low it seemed it must clip the top of the Brandenburg Gate, and as it passed over Walter’s head the noise from those engines battered at the ground in heavy, thrumming waves. This behemoth had a retinue of smaller planes, fighters, much faster, that darted high in the air or close to the ground, already deploying weapons with a clatter of automatic fire. Later, Walter would learn that the bomber he saw was a Gotha V, capable of reaching ten thousand feet; the fighters were the nimble, robust craft called Albatros – planes that had once, he recalled, crossed the Channel to strike at the Martians in London.

All this was itself strange to Walter, and terrifying. The best British planes were still wood and fabric biplanes, mere kites; German air power had developed out of all recognition in the great crucible of the Russian war. Now it was not the desolate plains of Russia over which these craft flew, but the heart of the capital.

Walter had to see it all, of course. He came out of what little shelter the chestnut tree afforded him, and pushed his way to the edge of the fleeing crowd. He saw the fighters duck nimbly through the air, their weapons clattering as they launched themselves at the hoods or limbs of the Martian machines – but their bullets appeared only to bounce off the sturdy bronze hoods of the Martians’ carapaces, and one by one they were touched by the Heat-Ray, almost gently it seemed, and their fragile structures crumbled, crisped and burned, and fell from the air.

But now the big bomber rose up – Walter saw it – and disgorged a load of munitions that rained heavy on the pack of Martians. The Martians fought back; the Heat-Ray projectors swivelled and snapped, and bombs popped out of existence, disintegrating harmlessly long before they reached their targets – but so plentiful was the load of the bomber that some of the munitions got through. The hoods of two Martians, three, four, exploded in dazzling flame. The crowds cheered deliriously. Walter saw more than one fighting-machine spin and topple, smoke pouring from the carapaces, and the ugly writhe of tentacles as the living occupants struggled to free themselves from the inferno. And as fireballs burst around their feet, more Martians staggered and fell, their forward march disrupted at last.

Walter would learn that the bombs used that day were incendiary weapons, D-class Elektron fire bombs, with casings of magnesium and Martian-manufacture aluminium that burned at a thousand degrees: another product of the eastern front, and tested on hapless Russian flesh. Well, the seals and linkages even of Martian machines were not immune to such temperatures. And even as the first bomber passed on, its load discharged, a deep thrumming announced the approach of a second craft, heading for the line of the Unter Den Linden as had the first.

But, as Walter watched, a handling-machine scurried through a fast-scattering crowd to the foot of the Brandenburg Gate. Somehow this machine had dashed ahead of its fellows, even as the taller fighting-machines had been targeted by the aircraft. Now, without hesitation, the handling-machine swarmed up one of the Gate’s pillars, like an outsized beetle clambering over a model, and Walter could clearly see the Martian riding the machine, a pulsing grey sack. With apparent ease the machine reached the plinth, and reared up alongside the crowning sculpture, the goddess in her chariot pulled by its four horses. And the Martian raised a bulky cylinder: a Heat-Ray projector.

When the second bomber came over, it seemed to fly straight into the path of the heat beam. One wing was sliced away, and fuel tanks began to detonate inside its structure, even as the great craft’s momentum carried it on, lumbering over the heads of the crowd. And it began to fall, twisting as its one remaining wing grabbed at the air. The gathered Martians trained their Heat-Rays, and the craft burst apart, raining hot shrapnel on the crowd.

Before the last remnants of the bomber reached the ground, Walter was gone and running, past the Gate, away from the triumphant Martian machines and the scattering crowd, and into the shadows of the Tiergarten.

22 A NEW YORK EDISONADE

In Manhattan, as night had fallen on that very long Friday, though they descended from the Monroe Tower, in the end Harry and Marigold had not dared venture far from Battery Park. The two of them found what appeared to be an abandoned gun emplacement, a grassy pit. Here they huddled under their coats; they drank water and ate the biscuits they had brought. At least the night was not cold, and Harry thought he slept a little, though the drifting smoke made him cough.

Once he got up and clambered out of the pit to see the progress of the war. The night was almost pitch dark, and he wondered if smoke obscured the sky, rather than cloud. Much of Lower Manhattan was blacked out, though here and there a building still shone brightly, an isolated jewel – a hospital, perhaps, with its own electrical generator. A hulk was burning on the river, perhaps one of the great, brave battleships slowly dying, casting gaudy reflections from the water.

And on the Brooklyn shore, illuminated by the light of fires which burned unchallenged, he saw fighting-machines at work. They moved cautiously through the ruins now, as if more circumspect. Every so often he could see a slim silhouette bend down, almost gracefully, and those metallic limbs reach out to pluck something from the ground – something wriggling, something screaming perhaps. Just as it had been in England before, here were the Martians harvesting Americans for their grisly repast.

He wondered what the hell else was going on around the world, this terrible night.

He returned with heavy heart to the gun emplacement, huddled against Marigold’s warmth, and tried to sleep.

He was shaken awake. Suddenly it was daylight. A blackened face loomed over him, grinning.

Harry struggled, but a hand was clamped over his mouth. Beyond, Harry saw Marigold, sitting up, pulling at her tousled hair.

Cautiously, the hand was removed from his mouth. ‘Bill Woodward?’

‘The very same.’

‘I – what time is it?’

‘About six in the morning, Harry; you were sleeping pretty deep.’

‘Six. On Saturday?’

‘Yeah, it’s Saturday. I guess we’re all exhausted.’

‘You went off to Central Park, the Army units…’

‘I spent the day killing Martians. Or trying to. We took a pasting,’ he said grimly. ‘They outnumbered us, two hundred to twenty thousand. But we made damn sure they knew we’re here. And the evacuation’s proceeding, maybe we saved a few lives. The radio says Babe Ruth got out safely.’

‘Well, that’s something!’

‘And then, towards the end of the day, we had a delivery.

Parachute drop. Very brave, very risky.’

‘A delivery? Of what?’

Marigold leaned over. ‘From Menlo Park, Harry.’ Harry saw now that Bill had dragged a kind of cart with him, covered by a green Army blanket. Bill pulled back the blanket to reveal three metal cylinders. He reached over and hefted one of these; perhaps a foot wide, four feet long, wrapped in leather. It looked as if it might be an engine component, or some heavy gun.

‘Think you can manage this? It’s the latest fruit of Mr Edison’s ingenuity.’

‘Edison? What are we going to do, throw light bulbs at them?’

Marigold said, ‘Oh, rather more than that. Menlo managed to produce fifty of these, and ship them over. Mostly untested, probably half won’t go off at all. But if even a fraction of them work we’ll have struck a mighty blow. After all we think there are only around two hundred and fifty fighting-machines in the area, so taking out even one—’

Harry sat up and reached for a cylinder. ‘Show me.’ Marigold slapped his hand, ‘Whoa! Hold your horses, Hopalong, there’s high explosive in there.’

Bill grinned again. ‘We’ve got work to do. Get up, empty your bladder, eat something – I have a flask of coffee—’

‘You have coffee. In the middle of the end of the world?’

‘Not that yet.’

By 7 a.m., led by Bill Woodward, the three of them had infiltrated the Lower East Side. It wasn’t difficult. There was no power, no traffic moved in the rubble-choked streets, and in some blocks fires burned unchallenged. Martian fighting-machines stood around the precinct like prison watchtowers, but just as in the Cordon in England, it seemed that individual humans were allowed to move to and fro without hindrance, so long as they offered no threat to the Martians.

No visible threat.

Bill led them to a site – Harry believed it was on Allen Street, but it was hard to be sure so extensive was the damage – where the Martians had already begun the construction, in the light of that first morning of occupation, of one of their characteristic redoubts. The excavating-machines had dug a great crater in layers of shattered masonry, cutting through broken-open cellars and stores, even gouging into the granite keel of Manhattan itself. Fighting-machines stood over the pit, some of them empty of their drivers, and busy handling-machines had already begun their efficient processing of American dirt and rock into fine aluminium ingots. In the shadows individual Martians lurked, shuffling in their heavy, leathery way, and hooting to each other as they avoided the morning sunlight – they were creatures of a colder world than ours. Ruins looked down on this scene, gaunt and eyeless.

And at the centre of the pit were people: men, women and children, perhaps thirty of them, sitting in a huddle. They seemed unconfined, but Harry had no doubt that had they tried to escape they would have been struck down quickly. Instinctively he began to pen character sketches in his head. Most of them looked as if they had been inhabitants of the wretched tenements that had stood here, tired-looking women, grimy men, wide-eyed, shoeless children. But there was one soldier, apparently wounded, as helpless as the rest, and a woman in the uniform of a nurse. One mother was trying to speak to the nurse, as if asking for help for the child sleeping on her lap. But the nurse covered her ears and turned her head away.

The rebels peered at this scene from behind a broken wall.

Woodward growled, ‘Livestock to be consumed. Americans! Well, not today. Here’s the plan…’

The tactics were simple. Woodward and Harry would take the three bombs to a hole in the ground Woodward had spotted, close to a cluster of machines, probably a blown-open cellar. The bombs themselves would be ignited simultaneously by a wireless signal, sent by Woodward. And while the Martians were hopefully paralysed and confused, Marigold, on the opposite side of the great pit, would call to the prisoners and lead them to freedom.

That was the plan. They quickly got everything into position.

Then, with a feral grin, Woodward counted down. ‘Three, two, one—’

It almost worked.

What Edison and his whiz-kids in Menlo Park had come up with was a new kind of bomb. It came out of research into Martian technology, at least of a secondary kind. I suspect Harry never understood it fully, but then, neither do I.

It was, and is, believed that the Martians’ energy cells – used to power the Heat-Ray, for example – are based on the extraction of energy from the nuclei of atoms. Einstein and others have shown that in principle the compression of matter to sufficiently high densities will cause it to fuse to a secondary state of greater density, a different elemental combination, with tremendous energy being liberated in the process. It is as if, says Einstein, some of the very mass of the fuel has been transformed to energy. This process itself was not well understood before the Second War, and indeed is still not under our control; investigations into the phenomena dating back to the aftermath of the First Martian War caused terrible accidents, in Ealing, South Kensington and elsewhere.

However, by 1922, it had become clear that the Martians achieved this enormous compression of matter with the use of very powerful electrical and magnetic fields. And our investigations of these comparatively familiar technologies had advanced our own capabilities in these areas by, some would say, decades.

Edison’s bomb was called an ‘explosively pumped flux compression generator’ – a flux bomb, to the soldiers who used it. Its purpose was simple: to produce, for but an instant, in a restricted area, extremely powerful electrical and magnetic fields.

It achieved this by exploring a quirk of electromagnetic physics (a quirk to me! – a miracle of theorising and practical application to the physicists, I dare say). If you have a magnetic field, and surround it with a conductor – say, a band of copper wire – and then you contract that band, the magnetic flux through the conductor, contained by the wire, will stay the same strength – but its intensity, you see, the density of that power, as it is squeezed, must become much higher. It’s as simple as that, and you can demonstrate the principle with a schoolroom experiment, an electromagnet and a few bits of wire.

Now scale it up. Wrap your conductor and your magnetic field in a few packets of high explosive. Set that off in a careful design so that the explosive forces push inwards – and the compression of the magnetic field becomes enormous, if only for an instant, before the whole thing blows itself apart…

The point is, as Edison realised, that Martian machines depend on electrical fields for their operation. They have what Walter Jenkins once described as a ‘sham musculature’ comprised of discs inside a sheath of elastic. When an electric field is applied, these discs, polarised, are drawn together or pushed apart. The result is the remarkably graceful ‘limbs’ of any Martian machine, from the great legs of a fighting-machine to the finest of the manipulative tentacles of a handlingmachine – and all of it controlled by electrical and magnetic fields. And if those fields were disrupted, by a sufficiently powerful electromagnetic pulse nearby…

I am told, by witnesses from Menlo Park itself, that the devices Bill Woodward brought to Harry and Marigold, packages each easily carried by a single person, could produce pulses in the tens of terawatts and the millions of amperes: that is, more powerful than a lightning strike. Thus it was, in the course of the attack on New York, humans at last turned the lightning on the Martians.

The detonations themselves seemed overwhelming to Harry, huddling by a wall. They left him with a ringing in his ears that persisted for days.

When he emerged from cover he found that only two of their bombs had worked. But those two had done tremendous damage to the Martians. As Harry watched, one of the great fighting-machines fell like cut timber, legs stiff as wood, and crashed down into an already ruined house. The other machines seemed paralysed, the busy excavators and handlers frozen in their tracks. The living Martians, stuck in their machines, tried to scramble out, and hooted to each other in dismay, and Harry wondered what complex messages, of fear or rage, were passing telepathically between them.

Marigold picked up a rock. ‘They’re helpless. We can kill them before the machines recover – if they do.’

But Woodward held her arm. ‘No. Some of the machines survived, you can see that. All it would take would be one working Heat-Ray gun… We’ve done what we came to do. Let’s get those civilians out of there.’

As they left the pit, they saw more fighting-machines converging, travelling down the rubble-strewn streets to come to the aid of their fellows. Harry, Marigold and Woodward had to duck and hide as they made their escape: it was evident that despite the blow they had struck, and the detonation of similar bombs across the occupied territory, Manhattan still belonged to the Martians.

‘But it’s a start,’ Bill said grimly. ‘Americans fighting back, at last. A start!’

23 A WORLD UNDER SIEGE

Having no better plan after the Martian triumph in Berlin, Walter Jenkins had joined the ragged crowds fleeing from the centre of the city, and out into the suburbs and beyond. From there Walter retraced his steps – and, somewhat to his own surprise, made it back to his rented house in Dahlem.

It was still only the early afternoon of that extraordinary Saturday.

By now Walter was a veteran of such situations. He made for his study, gathered up equipment, and hauled it down to a cellar used only for storing coal, firewood and a rack of wine – he even managed to drag a telephone receiver down, its cable stretched along the cellar stairs. He made one last foray aboveground for water and food. Then he retired to his improvised bunker, listening to a battery-powered wireless set, trying to make calls on the telephone, and making obsessive notes by candle-light.

Thus, through the Saturday night and into the Sunday, Walter renewed his witnessing of the Second War.

He learned that by noon of the Saturday – noon London time, that is – urgent reports had been received via the transoceanic telegraph and telephone lines of the Martians’ attack on Buenos Aires. Their strategy had followed its by-now customary course, with a landing at local midnight – that is, in the small hours of the Saturday, London time – some distance inland along the valley of the Rio de la Plata, and then at local dawn an advance on the city. The Argentinean military, an undeveloped force, was able to offer little resistance. Images later returned were particularly vivid: of the Martians smashing the huge grain elevators that lined the banks of the river, of fighting-machines standing proud over the huge La Negra slaughterhouse, of the rich elite crammed aboard the frigorificos, the giant refrigerated ships within which Argentinean beef is exported. And the poor had to fend for themselves as the poor always do. (A romantic tale, by the way, of a band of gauchos riding out and using their bolas to trip fighting-machines turned out to be just that – a tale.)

So much for the Argentine capital. But this was the last of the Martian incursions; since the first landfall on Long Island, a twenty-four-hour cycle of landings and assaults had been completed.

By midday of the Saturday, then, the earth was stitched about by pinpoint Martian attacks – knots and scrapings of fire that could surely have been seen by an observer on Mars itself – with ten landings having occurred in the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, even Australia, and comprising a thousand cylinders in all. Human attempts at organised resistance had proven all but futile, just as they had been in England in ’07 or ’20. Such innovations as the Americans’ flux bombs and the Germans’ incendiaries might have enabled humanity to take the war to the invaders a little longer, given time. But to Walter a rapid disruption of human civilisation and organisation seemed assured, and the unending domination of the earth by the Martians inevitable.

And then, everything changed.

24 THE REVENGE OF THE MARTIANS

In New York it was around nine in the morning.

Harry Kane, Marigold Rafferty and Bill Woodward sat in Battery Park, where Harry and Marigold had been camping for two nights now, and surveyed what they could see of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn where some fires still burned, the rivers still littered with wrecks. They were eating German sausages from cans looted by Woodward, and drinking coffee they had boiled up in a saucepan over an open fire. It was another fine, bright day, the weather belying the state of the city.

Marigold was using her binoculars. ‘I still see no fighting-machines. Maybe your squawk-box is telling the truth, Bill.’

Woodward had purloined an Army field-wireless kit from the corpse of a signals officer, and had been trying to follow the progress of the war. ‘Well, they are still moving. As Patton predicted, they broke out of Manhattan to the north and are already in Connecticut. Reports say they got as far as Peekskill on the Hudson, and Danbury on the Housatonic. They may not go much further north; the land is bad up there. The intelligence guys think the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts must be a target – biggest in the country, and we know they did their scouting before the landings. One group looks as if it’s considering an advance to Hartford, maybe even to Boston. There’s another group heading south-west, maybe making for Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC. The Army set a trap at a place called Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and they’ve been held up there. But—’

‘But wherever else they are, the Martians they withdrew from Manhattan.’

‘Thanks to Edison’s bombs,’ Marigold said with a grin.

Woodward nodded. ‘For sure Edison’s flux bomb is the first really effective weapon we have developed against them. And if you think about it, they reacted just as they did before, in England. I read the history. In Surrey in ’07, the first time an artillery shell knocked one of them over – I bet they weren’t expecting us even to be capable of that – they rescued their wounded, and their machine, and withdrew to their pits for a while. Just as here. We bloodied their non-existent noses and they pulled back.’

Looking into the east, Harry thought he saw something in the sky, over Brooklyn and Long Island, like a cloud perhaps, in an otherwise cloudless heaven. No, it was too dark to be a cloud, and moving too quickly. If not a cloud, then what? A Zepp?

Marigold said now, ‘Fighting-machines or not, I haven’t seen much in the way of rescue work and such.’

‘You will,’ Woodward said. ‘It takes time to move resources on this kind of scale; you got a whole city down here…’

Not one cloud but three. Black as night, solid. And they seemed to be scattering some kind of dark rain below.

Approaching fast. Not clouds at all.

‘Oh, damn.’

Marigold raised her eyes comically. ‘Harry! Not in front of the US Army.’

But Harry wasn’t about to smile. He pointed. ‘They’re coming back.’

Marigold shaded her eyes from the sun.

Bill Woodward got to his feet, fumbling for his own binoculars. ‘Flying-machines. Spotters always say they’re bigger than they look, and further away, and faster than you think.’

Marigold said, ‘They’ll be here soon enough. And that black stuff they’re scattering – it looks as if it’s pooling on the ground, like the smoke from dry ice. Swirling around the buildings.’

Harry nodded. ‘The British call it the Black Smoke. A new variant, resistant to water. You can slaughter whole populations with the stuff, easier than the Heat-Ray. But it’s only been used on a limited scale over there, this time anyhow. They want to knock us out of the fight, but not to kill us all, it seems. But, the British found out, if you resist, you get whacked.’

Marigold said grimly, ‘New York resisted. And here’s our reward.’

And Harry Kane felt true fear, for the first time in the war – perhaps in his life, he would say. All he had experienced so far, in the midst of the fury, had left him oddly untouched within. Somehow he had always believed he would come through this intact, no matter what happened to those around him. As if he were invulnerable and immortal. The coming of the flyingmachines changed all that. Perhaps all young people have to shed such illusions. For Harry, the Black Smoke, an approaching wall, was like the advance of death itself, implacable, unavoidable.

Harry thought he was doomed, the earth itself lost. He was wrong about that.

For I had fulfilled my own mission.

25 A PLAYER OF THE GAME

On the Friday afternoon, after debarking inside the Martian Cordon from the landship Boadicea with Lieutenant Hopson, I had quickly got in touch with Marriott once more, and through him his network of resistance fighters. Meanwhile, following Eric, the surviving underground telephone lines into the Cordon had been fizzing with new instructions to the troops stranded there.

I had never been sure if Marriott believed my account as to why I wished him to use his stock of explosives in one great earth-shaping exercise. He may have had his pompous side but he was a hard-headed, practical man, and determined to take the fight to the Martians as best he could, and good for him; now he cavilled at the fact that this operation would not be hitting the Martians directly. But I think, paradoxically, he liked to be given an assignment from authorities to which he still believed himself accountable, and loyal. He relished the thought of such a technically complex set-up, part of an operation that included many of the regular troops trapped inside the Cordon with him. And, more than that, he liked the sheer symbolism of it. After all – what a gesture!

A communication to be seen from space!

Whatever he was feeling, after I persuaded him to my cause, Marriott and his scattered army immediately got to work. It took them much of the rest of the Friday to plan it – I had found him late – and much of the Saturday to move the explosive caches into place, all across the Cordon, all beneath the gaze of the Martians. Still, all was ready by the morning of the Sunday. After some final checks, and with a last coordination with the military authorities, Marriott, by phone, sent the messages to his franc-tireurs to detonate at noon.

So it came to pass. All across the Cordon – and even within the Amersham Redoubt itself – the Martian earthworks were disrupted by a series of blasts, carefully placed. It could never be complete, never perfect – there was not the time, and the explosives were placed under conditions of extreme peril, whether by regulars or the franc-tireurs. Nevertheless, the stratagem was effective. Aerial photos taken before and after the blasts show it clearly.

That morning the Martians’ earthworks, as imaged at eight thirty a.m. by spotter planes, had undeniably sketched a set of sigils, some miles long, incomplete but near-perfect copies of that sinuous marking humans had first perceived on the faces of Venus and of Mars, after the Martians’ invasion of the younger planet – and, later, through the scholarship of Walter Jenkins, had been made out in the unfinished pattern of pits the Martians had dug into the ground of Surrey in the year 1907. This was the Martians’ brand of conquest. But in the afternoon, by the time the dust and smoke had cleared, the sigils had been disrupted, blasted apart – and they had been replaced by circles, on all scales, far from perfect but the intent clear. At noon on Sunday, then, we humans replaced that Martian brand upon the earth, not with a symbol of our own – but with a Jovian sigil, that figure of infinite symmetry which the astronomers had seen burn in the clouds of Jupiter itself.

And a couple of hours later the Martians began to respond. In Battery Park, meanwhile, in those last moments, as the flying-machines loomed, the three companions stood in a line and held hands, Bill and Harry to either side of Marigold.

Marigold said, ‘Old Bigelow will never know what he started when he invited the three of us to that party – was it only on Thursday night? It seems a different world.’

‘Do you regret it?’ Woodward asked. ‘Resisting, I mean. The flux bombs. We probably could have got out of here…’

‘Hell, no,’ Harry said.

Marigold smiled. ‘Ditto,’ she said firmly. ‘And, you know…’

And then something changed.

The fall of Black Smoke stopped abruptly.

The flying-machines broke formation. Huge dishes in the sky, they swept around in wide curves, and receded as quickly as they had come, growing smaller, vanishing into the mists of morning – gone in seconds.

The last of the Black Smoke, dispersing, blew harmlessly out over the water.

Harry felt a surge of emotion, of relief; he would say he had not understood the depths of his fear until it receded. But he felt utter bafflement at still being alive.

‘What just happened?’

26 SILENCE FALLS

At the same time it was around three p.m. in Berlin. And Walter Jenkins, huddled in the cellar of his house, was immediately aware of a change in the Martians’ behaviour. It was a silencing of their movements, he said, a kind of slithering withdrawal. That cry, ‘Ulla!’, heard all over the planet that terrible day, now seemed more plaintive – and receding.

He pushed aside his improvised barricades of empty barrels and broken furniture, and – heart thumping, for he could not be sure of his deductions – he emerged into the light of a German midday. Other people stood by, in the wrecked street, dusty, bewildered, some injured – all watching. And Walter saw the fighting-machines, tall and graceful, receding steadily from the city – heading north. All this in his first glance.

In that moment I think he guessed what must have been done – what I must have done – emulating my own intuitive leap. Well, it had started out as his idea, even if I had thought it through in the end. And he even guessed correctly at the timing of its completion: about noon British time.

He hurried home to his cellar to try to verify his theories, praying that the telephone would be working.

Of course it was all guesswork, in the end – about how the Jovians might respond. Educated guesswork, though.

When the Martians invaded Earth and Venus, had the Jovians set up the circle sigils in their own clouds and moons as a warning to the squabbling races that Jupiter must remain inviolate? And, worse, to ensure their own future survival, must the Jovians fight a future war to dislodge the destructive, meddling, expansive Martians from this earth, and even from Venus? We had to assume so.

My intent, when I imagined creating those great signals of dirt and explosive, was that with one bold gesture we would proclaim this earth an ally of Jupiter, in that epochal combat to come. And evidently, in response, the Jovians gave the Martians some warning, or instruction, and the invaders had no choice.

My signal was a created at noon, London time. The Martians did not withdraw until 2 p.m., roughly. Why the delay of two hours? – a lag which caused many of us intense anxiety as we lived through it, as I can testify.

Walter, so he told me later, would have predicted some such pause. Jupiter is some five times further from the sun than the earth; the distance between the planets is never much less than some four hundred million miles at the closest, never further than six hundred million miles at the furthest. It would take a ray of light, then, never less than thirty-four minutes to cross from the earth to Jupiter, and thirty-four minutes back again. Einstein has proved that nothing in this universe can travel faster than a ray of light – and therefore any Jovian response to our signal, our violent scrawling of Jovian signals in the English dirt, could not have been expected to come in much less than an hour after we had created the signal. Whether God could surpass the speed of light I will never know, but even the Jovians have limitations!

But, delay or not, it had worked; the withdrawal of the Martians seemed to prove it. We had intervened in a conflict on an interplanetary scale. We had called in the Jovians, as a bullied boy might call in a schoolmaster to save himself from a beating. It had worked.

When he came back to England a few weeks later, Walter cackled with pride at the thought of it, and the next minute all but wept at our temerity – my temerity. I think actually he was a little afraid of me. For – what had we done?

What had I done?

I had brought humanity, irrevocably, into the grave awareness of Jupiter. The Jovians are older than us, and, we must deduce, immeasurably more intelligent, immeasurably more wise. We may hope they will be like a kindly celestial uncle. But, Walter says, even if so, there is no reason to believe that what they see as benevolence will translate into what we may experience as kindness, even mercy. Thus a child weeping over a sick mother could never imagine the moral choices to be made by a battlefield doctor making triage choices.

Yet on reflection, Walter still felt we had had no choice. The Jovians might spare us; the Martians certainly would not have.

And still, on that fateful Sunday and afterwards, puzzles remained.

The hostilities everywhere withdrew. behind, along with any surviving human victims, but they seem to have taken their own native humanoids with them. Just as it had been in England in ’07, the slow, sad work of recovery began. And slowly too parties of military and scientists and various officials approached the great Martian earthworks. They were empty – the Martians gone – and stripped this time of technology, of the cylinders and all they had brought, all that had been manufactured.

Yet the question remained – we knew, as I will relate in due course, that only a fraction had left this earth – where had the Martians gone?

And then, what of our still greater neighbours? They had saved us, if indirectly – but how? It was evident that the Jovians, alerted by our crude sigils, had sent some kind of signal, some commandment, to the Martians. But how? What had been sent, what received?

In the end, the answer became obvious to anyone who looked out of her window at the right time. At that time, late in May 1922, the moon was a crescent, dwindling towards a new moon on the 26^th, the Friday after the weekend of the global landings. And the moon had changed, as even the naked eye could see. In the darkened sector of the disc, a fine line could be made out: an arc, within the perimeter of the moon’s face. As the days passed, and the new moon came, the truth became apparent for all mankind to see – as our unwelcome Martian guests had evidently made out more quickly. The moon’s face bore a tremendous circle, silver, perfect, a thousand miles across. The Jovians had written their sigil on the face of the earth’s own satellite.

And it is evident for whom the symbol was intended. That great design was observed, as the moon waxed and waned, through the coming months – through a year, and then most of another. It vanished as suddenly as it had been created on April 7, 1924.

It was Walter who first computed the significance of the date. ‘It is just as the Martians timed their attacks to our day-night cycle, and they landed at our midnight,’ he said. ‘The lunar sigil persisted for two years less forty-three days. Allowing for the leap year, that comes to six hundred and eighty-seven days that the sigil was in existence…’

Which is precisely one Martian year.