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

1 A TELEPHONE CALL

It was in the autumn of 1936, fourteen years after the Second War, that Carolyne Emmerson called me.

It was quite out of the blue. I had been living in Paris, more or less contentedly, with my sister-in-law Alice close by. I was continuing to work, rather slowly, on drafts of the narrative history you are reading now. Under strict military instructions – even in the age of the Federation of Federations secrecy is a habit when it comes to the Martians! – I had kept silent about my own role in the withdrawal of the invaders (by the time this memoir is published, by my sanctions-defying American publisher, I will no longer care). I was forty-eight years old, and with the poisonous plague removed from my body by a fullblood transfusion, I believed I had put my own Martian entanglement behind me.

And, I am ashamed to say, at first I did not recognise the name: Carolyne, having divorced Walter Jenkins before the Second War, had never remarried, but had eventually reverted to her maiden name. Nevertheless it was Walter she wanted to discuss with me.

‘I’m concerned for him,’ she said, her telephonic voice a whisper. ‘He’s never stopped being engaged with it all, you know. Straight after the Second War he plunged straight into the Basra conferences, and made a public ass of himself on a number of points. Now he’s wangled access to the Martian pits at Amersham, and spends his waking life there. And he’s as careless of his health as ever he is.’

‘I see the papers are using his articles again.’

‘Only for the shock value, I think. You know how the mood is changing as the opposition approaches…’

She meant the next perihelic opposition, due in 1939; another set of close approaches of Mars to the earth, more opportunities for their invasion fleets to cross – an alarming prospect if you believed the scare warmongers like Churchill. And if stories put about by the Martians followed precedent they would make their first crossing in the opposition before, in 1937, only months away. Indeed we had already passed one possible opportunity; the 1920 invasion had come two oppositions before the optimum in that particular cluster. It was disturbing that there seemed as little astronomical news available to the general public under our glorious new world order as there had been under the old. And this time the speculation was spiced by much fearful guesswork about where those Martians who had come to the earth in the twenties might be hiding. They had not been observed since the end of the Second War, but, as far as anybody knew, they were still here. It all made for a horrible lack of resolution.

‘The mood is souring,’ Carolyne whispered. ‘All this talk of the Germans and the Russians and the Americans rearming, despite the Federation treaties. And so, of course, there’s Walter all over the place, the newspapers’ pet apostle of peace! Some are even calling him a traitor to humankind.’

‘You fear for his mental stability.’

She laughed, sadly. ‘I have always feared for his mental stability. It’s not just that, Julie. I fear for his life. Since the assassination of Horen Mikaelian…’

It had happened two days before; I had been deeply shocked by the murder of that patient architect of peace and unity – a murder inflicted by those who feared a new war with the Martians, or, perhaps, longed for it.

‘Walter has already been on the BBC condemning the act. Of course I agree with him; of course he must say what he feels. But—’

I sighed. ‘But as we’ve seen ever since ’07, he will go charging into danger without a thought for his personal safety.’

‘Please go to him, Julie. See that he is safe.’

‘But, Carolyne…’ The Jenkins’ marriage was an old, longtangled mess, which poor Carolyne had survived with dignity and kindness. Yet I knew that Walter had never lost his tenderness for his estranged wife. As she had once remarked herself, you could read about it in his books. ‘It’s you he needs, not me.’

‘I cannot,’ she whispered. ‘I cannot.’

That was family for you. Of course I could not refuse to help – and I agreed, in fact, that Walter probably really was in danger given the shocking precedent of Mikaelian. Of course I would go to him. Even if it meant, I realised, the publisher of my own narrative of the Second War would have to wait even longer for a finished draft. I tried to make contact.

In the event I did not have long to wait before I received an invitation from Walter himself, over the signature of our old friend Eric Eden, to visit that Unreliable Narrator at the Martian pits at Amersham.

2 AFTERMATH

When Carolyne phoned, I admit, I was rather out of touch. After the Second War I had retained my anonymity, and since then I had distanced myself from the consequences, as much as one can from a world war. I had my own life, which I had resumed with some relief; I had gone back to America for a time, and then retreated to the battered sanity of a recovering Paris, and had spent the intervening decade trying to rebuild a disrupted career as a journalist, in addition to researching and compiling the early sections of this present memoir. I had been content to watch the recovery of a wounded world as if from without – a very Jenkins-like perspective.

Everything had been so different after the Second War! The Martian assault was over in a few days – and the immediate aftermath was as painful as ever, the clearing of the dead, the search for survivors all traumatised to one degree or another, the beginnings of reconstruction the unseemly scramble for scraps of Martian technology – and after that the longer-term problems had started. The Martians might be gone, but the banks were still not issuing loans, the stock exchanges were not trading, and in America as in London and Berlin even the bullion reserve was not secured. As global trade ground to a halt, after a couple of weeks the food shortages began, and the power cuts, and the water supply failures – even in cities that had never glimpsed a Martian – and soon after that the plagues. Then came the riots, and then the revolutions in Delhi, in the Ottoman provinces, even in France against the occupying Germans.

These early days of emergency, in fact, had been the inducement Mikaelian had used to call her parliament of the desperate to Basra.

Horen Mikaelian was an Armenian nun who at the time of the Second War had been in Paris, a refugee from persecution under the Ottomans. Her emergence as a key figure after the war was remarkable – as was her capacity for persuasion, which had fuelled the first tentative efforts to construct a new postMartian world order. Indeed, one of Mikaelian’s first achievements had been to broker a hasty armistice between the German and Russian empires. The fact that the two armies had cooperated in resisting the Martians at St Petersburg and elsewhere helped with that.

Then, with that achievement behind her, Mikaelian had called presidents and emperors and monarchs and ambassadors, and scientists and historians and philosophers, to gather in Basra, an ancient city at the heart of the world’s first civilisation (and from which the British occupying presence had been hastily withdrawn). At that first conference, emergency aid packages were immediately agreed, an international bank quickly set up to aid relief efforts, and longer-term infrastructure projects begun institutions that had later become the pillars of the Federation of Federations.

And, above all that, what had emerged from those first frantic days in Basra had been the vision of a federal model of government, a supremely flexible and resilient system which Mikaelian says struck her as the single most striking piece of genius about the post-Revolutionary American settlement – a system that Mikaelian had, in her own endearing words, ‘sold’ to the assembled leaders. At first Mikaelian’s ‘Federation of Federations’ was little more than a patchwork of agreements over trade and spheres of mutual interest, but at least all this ‘Turkish parley-voo’, as Churchill had wryly called it, might enable mankind to govern itself with a little more sanity than it had managed before.

Well, it seemed to be working. The institutions for which Mikaelian had argued, and which had seemed so utopian before – global transport networks, resources such as mineral rights held for the common good, international interventionist financial institutions (Keynes argued for that) – had quickly proved their worth. Even the somewhat sceptical and isolationist Americans had been glad of the new order when global aid poured in to alleviate the effects of devastating floods on the Mississippi in 1926-7, and again when the collapse of an overheated Wall Street almost caused a global recession. The invasion of China by Japan in 1931 had been another test for the Federation’s councils. The restored Chinese Emperor Puyi had argued eloquently for help; concerted international pressure caused the Japanese to abandon their adventure.

The old empires, meanwhile, were evolving towards a looser, more democratic form of federalism: relics of an age of conquest and despoliation, now mutating into agents of the peaceful coexistence of peoples. This was true even of the tottering Ottomans. And on a wider scale the idea of a kind of global unity was emerging.

Walter Jenkins had been invited to the first Basra summits. Age had not mellowed him. He wrote of the impressive celebrities he met – Gandhi for one, a representative of a newly independent India, and Ataturk, the Ottoman ambassador – but Walter’s principal memory seems to have been one of irritation that he had been largely outshone by one of his long-standing rivals: ‘You know the fellow, the Year Million man, with the alarming novels and scattershot predictions, forever falling out with some socialist or other, and the whiff of extra-marital scandal ever clinging about him, and his damn squeaky voice…’ We may have been all but prostrate at the feet of the Martians, but we humans continued our own petty wars regardless. Oddly that gives me a certain hope for the species. And I should note here that the efforts of ‘the Year Million man’ to lobby for a declaration of human rights to be the centrepiece of the new Federation’s constitution will long be remembered, with gratitude.

Meanwhile the Cythereans, our unwilling guests from Venus – those who had not been spirited away by the Martians when they withdrew – were the subject of international and interdisciplinary study, in reserves and zoos and biological institutions across the planet, a study the public followed avidly in the newspapers and newsreels. I suspect, in fact, that their very presence on the earth, their very strangeness, inspired a subliminal sense of unity in mankind. Some, indeed, said that we should be housing these visitors, not in reserves, but in their own embassy to the Federation of Federations. Such troubling questions, which strike at the heart of our understanding of what it means for us to be human, are for the future, perhaps.

As for myself, I had ventured to Basra, anonymously, for the great ceremonies on April 24 1925 when the Federation’s constitution had been signed. And I admit I came to London to celebrate the independence of Ireland and India in 1927, and the granting of the vote to women – at last! – in 1930…

But I always scuttled back to Paris. Something in me, I think, had been changed during the War. When I saw people around me, especially in anonymous masses, I could find it hard to see the spirit beyond the flesh and bone – as if they were no more than plastic receptacles of blood, to be moulded at will. A touch of the Jenkins Syndrome, you might say. In London I had found greater consolation, in fact, at the Tomb of the Vanished Warrior, before an empty coffin, than in the company of the living.

So we had enjoyed an age of hope and unity that, I knew, had raised the spirits of that utopian, Walter Jenkins, even while he grumbled endlessly about the details. An all too brief age, it seemed; already disunity and tension was on the rise, thanks to the wretched astronomical clockwork of the solar system that was bringing Mars swimming towards the earth. After two doses of invasions from Mars everybody knew this; none of us needed scare stories in the Daily Mail to remind us of it. Even if we kept back from war, in protests, riots, even minor insurrections, violence was returning to a barely healed world – and it had already taken, at the hand of some deranged protester, the life of that apostle of peace, Horen Mikaelian herself.

And here I was, about to plunge back into the maelstrom.

3 BY MONORAIL TO ENGLAND

Despite a rivalry between France and England that dates back a thousand years, the straight-line distance between their capitals has only ever been two hundred miles. And in the late autumn of 1936 it would take only two hours for me to travel from one city to another.

But, though I was not yet fifty, I felt like a relic in this new age. The new monorail was a miracle of now globally shared Martian technology, an application of their mastery of electromagnetic fields. When I was a little girl, I reminded myself as if I was some crone in a rocking chair, we didn’t yet have motor-cars – and now this. I tried not to think of the fact that my carriage, propelled by the invisible energies of electricity, was balanced on its rail on a row of single wheels beneath it, its mechanical intelligence keeping it upright like a circus unicyclist. So forgive me if I clung to the cushions of my seat as the train rocketed along, smart and silent.

I did comfort myself with the fine views. Paris itself, as I am certain most Parisians would have wanted, had been changed little by the tumultuous events of the early decades of the twentieth century – in fact the city had suffered more at the hands of the Germans than the Martians. The grand old city was a fine sight to see in the low September sunshine, as my train rode the rail on its elegant stilts, green and blue, high above the rooftops. But from the train I could not see the most significant location of all in the modern city, the embassy of the Federation of Federations itself, all glass and Martian aluminium in the Place de Fontenoy. This modest building had lobbied for acceptance into the venerable Parisian skyline, but would always be dwarfed by the Eiffel Tower, expensively restored for the 1924 Olympics.

I saw that the weather was changing, with heavy thunderclouds streaming in from the east, soon to blot out the autumn sunshine. I cursed my luck, though that was scarcely fair to the fates. Across the northern hemisphere, the climate had been worsening for a decade, with an excess of extreme events, notably storms of rain or snow or hail, and bloodyminded winds that had done nothing to help humanity’s tentative efforts to recover from the Martians’ assault. The elderly, into which category I now tentatively included myself, dreamed of what in retrospect seemed like idyllic late-Victorian times: days before the Martians, the summer days of childhood. But then, perhaps everyone feels that way about the past.

Beyond Paris my train soared across the countryside of north-west France, passing without stopping through Amiens and Boulogne – and then, in utter silence, apparently on invisible magnetic wings, we sailed over the Straits of Dover, with the sun bright above us once more and the Channel waters glittering below, and the monorail towers slim and elegant, a chain of mighty new Eiffels. During the Channel crossing coffee was served by calm bilingual stewards. That, I thought, was just showing off.

At Dover our service swept through a Crystal Palace of a new station, and then it was on, striding on more stilts over the pretty towns of Kent, with the North Downs a great wave of greenery. And very soon we came to London.

Such was our speed as we raced towards Waterloo that I only glimpsed the damage that had been done to the city by the Martians in their years of occupation, and the rebuilding since, but in places I saw what looked like Martian handling-machines and excavating-machines busily scraping and digging, with the eerie puffs of green smoke that always characterised Martian technology. Meanwhile, in the more expensive districts, in Chelsea and Kensington and along the Embankment, grand new buildings were rising up, skyscraper blocks and terraces that gleamed with Martian-manufacture aluminium. They seemed grand to me, anyhow; I had not been back to America for a time, and had not seen a restored Manhattan that Harry Kane told me ‘would make you eat your hat’. But even so London was transformed. After all, after the invasion of ’20 London had been systematically pummelled by the Martians, and had got it worse than any other city on earth, with every landmark you can think of targeted. It had been like the Great Fire, I suppose, a chance for a rebuilding. And so some modern Wren had erected a new St Paul’s on the site of the old, not a dome but a shining needle of Martian aluminium, topped by a crucifix.

And I knew that many of the new structures were as extensive underground as above, with cellars, bunkers and dormitories. The governments too were digging huge bunkers under their ministries – around the world it was so, too. Some commentators said that, fearing a Martian return, we were becoming as subterranean as the Martians themselves.

We came into Waterloo, and I was delighted to see the figure who waited for me on the platform. It was Joe Hopson, nearly forty years old now and his hair a rather startling grey, but as dapper as ever in a crisp, clean uniform. We had gone through a few ‘debriefings’ together after the Martian withdrawal, and we had kept in touch since – with Christmas cards, at least. He made to embrace me, but I recoiled, I hope subtly enough. My blood has long since been scrubbed clean, but still I find I recoil from physical contact. Instead, I mockingly gave him my best attempt at a military salute.

‘At ease, soldier,’ he said with a grin. After a brief struggle, with his old-fashioned manners warring with my sense of independence, he took the small rucksack that was as usual my only luggage. ‘Come. We have a car waiting.’

‘So you’re a captain now,’ I said. ‘If I’m reading your stripes correctly, that is.’

‘Afraid so. Didn’t get terribly far, did I? My cadet instructor at school, old One-Ear Crookswell, would be mortified. And also I’m retired – well, semi. I’m a sort of reservist now – most of us veterans are. Even on a salary, if a small one. The Second War was so brief in the end that those of us who had the luck to do the actual fighting were pretty few, and those who survived are even fewer. So it’s worth keeping us old warhorses in the stable and feeding us the odd handful of oats, so we can give the shiny new generation the benefit of our experience. Keeping our forces match fit in case the Martians decide to have another go, you see. I run into Ted Lane sometimes at such bashes, and he says he still hasn’t forgiven you.’

I pulled a face. ‘Well, he’s a right to be aggrieved.’ He was talking of the time I had slipped out of Abbotsdale with Verity Bliss to find the Buckinghamshire franc-tireurs, without so much as a word to Ted who had followed me across the North Sea in the role of protector. ‘I suppose keeping match fit, as you say, makes sense – if you think the Martians are likely to come back.’

He glanced at the sky, apparently involuntarily, which I have observed is a tic among those of us who went through those days – no doubt I share it myself. ‘Well, that’s always possible,’ he murmured. ‘And we’re coming up to another set of favourable oppositions, aren’t we?’ He looked at me. ‘I daresay you know more than I do.’

‘Sorry. I’m just a civilian, not even a foot-soldier any more. But that’s partly why I accepted Walter’s invitation to come back to Amersham – to find out what’s up, even just to see it all again – I’m researching my own account of those days, you see…’

We came to his car, emblazoned with a military flag and parked in a premium spot. I suppressed a pang of alarm that it was one of the modern designs that, like the monorail carriages, was carried on single wheels. Somehow this thing kept its balance even standing still, even as we jumped inside.

So I was whizzed across London.

When we reached the desolation that had been Uxbridge we came to barriers of various kinds, manned by police and military. I was reminded of the old Surrey Corridor.

Hopson guided me through all this with a few calm words. He had seen more of the fighting than me, and he had been a very young man at the time. He was always one of those who hid his real feelings, in his case beneath a layer of publicschool faux innocence, but every so often you would glimpse deeper depths, as if a shaft of sunlight pierced murky water.

Beyond Uxbridge, we drove to the Trench, the huge and complicated fortifications thrown up around the Martian Cordon. A way through the perimeter had been brutally cut, and I peered up at earthworks that now looked like artificial hillsides, covered by sparse grass and by rose-bay willow herb. To see all this again, empty of the soldiers and their equipment which had swarmed everywhere all those years ago, was very strange for me. Then we passed into the Cordon itself – through that cratered annulus smashed up in a few seconds when the Martians’ dummy cylinders had fallen, and still a lunar plain all these years later.

Stranger yet was to drive into the countryside beyond, through towns and villages and the undulating green of the chalk country of the Chilterns, even now comparatively unscathed. This was the region that the Martians had ‘farmed’, in the jargon of the military analysts, with trapped humanity as their stock. So you would see a village with a couple of inns open for business beside a church whose steeple was melted to slag. And I saw cattle in the fields and sheep, with that season’s healthily grown calves and lambs.

But I knew that this area, all of it within the Martian Cordon, was still under the direct military rule that had once been imposed on the whole country. For here continued a very secret process of weighing guilt: of determining who among the residents could be charged with active collaboration with the Martians. Of course it was fourteen years in the past now, and I knew that many of those guilty, or at least fearful of being found guilty, had quickly fled. The last I had heard of Albert Cook was that he was living under an assumed name in Argentina, with his partner and the daughter I had once met – Mary and Belle – and I found it hard to begrudge that brutal but clear thinker a retirement of peace. I was glad that Frank had been cleared of collaboration charges, but had since disappeared from my view – he was pursuing front line medical work in communities still recovering from the War, as far as I knew. ‘Marriott’, by the way, got an O.B.E., much to his smug satisfaction.

Thus, at last, we came to Amersham, and the Martians’ central Redoubt.

4 BACK TO THE REDOUBT

Once again I entered that mile-wide fortress.

Now the Redoubt was surrounded by wire fences and watch towers, and a circular connecting road. Within, amid the old Martian pits and earthworks, was a clutter of human structures, barracks, prefabricated buildings that looked like factories, or perhaps laboratories, some of them with hefty power plants of their own. There was a hospital, a pub, even a few shops. It was like a military camp, or even a small town, all built to the most modern of standards, and it almost looked cheerful in the sunlight. Yet the whole was penned in by barriers of steel and barbed wire, soldiers patrolled everywhere – and, I saw as we got out of the car, a Navy airship swam overhead, the lenses of huge cameras glinting.

I had last seen this place with Albert Cook, while the Martians were still in residence. Now there was a kind of patina of humanity over the whole thing, with metal walkways and steps and ladders, and small huts set up on the dirt, and heaps of equipment here and there. People walked around in coveralls and helmets of various hues. It all reminded me a little of some tremendous archaeological dig – Schliemann at Troy, perhaps. I tried to ignore all this, to remove the people in my mind’s eye, and to replace them with Martians and their machines.

Yes, I thought, that peculiar terracing might have been created by an excavating-machine. That mound of chalky earth, glistening with flints, might have been raw material for a handling-machine as it industriously produced its ingots of aluminium. And that flat place, cut like a cave into the wall, might have been where the Martians themselves would gather, emitting their eerie hoots, where they might have fed. Over it all would have been standing, not bored sentries, but fighting-machines.

And under all this activity, I reflected, lay deep buried the ruins of old Amersham, together with its unlucky inhabitants, smashed in an instant when the cylinders fell, a Boadicean layer of destruction.

‘All this security – better safe than sorry, I suppose,’ I murmured to Joe Hopson as we got out of the car.

‘Indeed,’ he said, as he led me, on foot now, deeper into this knot of mystery. ‘After all, we would leave behind mine fields and other booby traps. Why not the Martians? Not that anything of the kind has been discovered so far. Also there’s talk of keeping it intact, more or less, as a monument for future generations, like Woking…’

‘I wonder if that’s wise.’

This was Walter Jenkins.

He stood waiting for us. He did not look well to me, gaunt, his face shiny with some medicinal cream, his hands swathed in bandage-like gloves. But then he was seventy years old. Tentatively he shook hands with Hopson; he knew me well enough not to offer me his hand.

‘Nice to see you, Walter,’ I said dryly.

‘You wonder if what’s wise, old bean?’ Hopson asked pleasantly.

‘To make a monument of this symbol of oppression. Such things confer power. Look at the Tower of London – the corner of a Roman fort, the relic of one occupying power, later reused as a bastion by another, the Normans. Well, the Romans left of their own accord, and so did the Martians, but we never got rid of the Normans, did we? Some dictator of the future using this place as his seat, calling on the mythic authority of the vanished Martians? No thanks. Let’s fill it in and let the grass grow.’

Hopson only grinned. ‘The Normans? You Welsh are all the same. It’s been eight hundred years, you know. Live and let live.’

‘Oh, I am deadly serious,’ Walter said humourlessly.

Hopson led us deeper into the complex, progressing slowly.

I took Walter’s arm. ‘Now, play nice, Walter. You invited me here, remember. I’ve come a long way.’

Walter grinned. ‘You’re a journalist – and a chronicler of the Martians after my own heart, if not my ability.’

‘Thanks—’

‘I thought you couldn’t refuse the chance of an inside view of the Martians’ most developed complex on the earth.’

‘I suppose. But you know that Carolyne set all this up in the first place, don’t you?’

He seemed to find it difficult even to hear his wife’s name. ‘Have you seen her?’

‘Not recently. It was a phone call.’

‘Of course this,’ he said, ‘is only a waystation. A teaser.’

‘Ah. We’re talking about the Martians, are we? A safer subject? Very well. A waystation en route to what?’

‘To the place the Martians went, of course.’

I glanced at Joe Hopson, and he at me; this was evidently a revelation to Joe too. But of course the mystery of what had become of the Martians on the earth had been a source of discussion and debate, ever since the cessation of the hostilities in ’22 .

Now Walter glanced at the sky, where that airship still patrolled. ‘Looks like rain again – so much for the sunshine. But of course, that is all part of the problem. A symptom…’

‘What’s the weather got to do with it? You always had the most infuriating manner, Walter. Dribbling out your clues, your bits of information.’ We were two old relics in this museum of war, bickering as before.

‘Then I apologise. Come, then, the guided tour. If you would be good enough to stay close by, Captain Hopson, and keep flashing those credentials, we should not be impeded; the security people know me well enough here by now…’

And so we walked on, through a series of fences, and over ramps and duckboards, into the very heart of the Redoubt, where, at the very centre, a deeper shaft gaped in the earth. As we approached the sight evoked memories, deep buried, of the noise of this place: a boom, boom, the relentless noise of subterranean workings. That at least was silenced now. And a kind of pulley system had been set up on a frame over the shaft; two bored-looking soldiers stood beside it, smoking. The victory of the mundane, I thought.

Walter was watching me. ‘Intrigued? You should be. Follow me. Tread carefully, now…’

That pulley system proved to be a crude elevator. It looked rickety to me, and it had an alarmingly large wheel, implying an alarmingly large length of cable to be paid out.

Walter grinned at my discomfiture. ‘Oh, it’s tried and trusted technology. The kind of gear they use to wash windows in New York – you must have seen them, intrepid fellows with mop and bucket suspended high above Fifth Avenue… We won’t be going so deep. Only six hundred feet or so.’

Evidently this was all new to Joe Hopson too. ‘Six hundred…’

‘Come, hop aboard!’

There was a rail, to which I clung. With a nod from Walter to the military men controlling the pulley, we began our rickety descent. The disc of daylight above quickly receded, the heads of the soldiers silhouetted against a sky bright and out of reach. There were electric lamps on the gantry we rode, and I was soon grateful for them as the dark closed in.

Joe said, ‘No deeper than six hundred feet, you say.’

Walter smiled again. ‘They put a net at that level – the military – telescopic poles jammed against the walls, just in case anybody falls, though six hundred feet would doom you anyhow… The shaft as a whole is some half a mile deep.’

Now it was my turn to parrot back distances. ‘Half a mile!’

‘It is necessary for this shaft’s true purpose. Or one of them. You have any idea what that purpose is, Captain Hopson?’

Joe looked at him. ‘How wide is this thing?’

‘A little over thirty yards, as you suspect, don’t you?’

‘Mr Jenkins – is this a cannon?’

I leapt on the idea, seeing it at once. ‘Of course. That’s where the Martians went!’

‘The British party, at least,’ Walter said.

‘So they built themselves a cannon—’

Hopson said, ‘And refurbished a space cylinder or two—’

‘And shot themselves back to Mars, the way they came!’

Walter grinned. ‘The launch was observed, in fact. Visible from over much of southern England, though most people had no idea what they were seeing. Well, nor did any of us until the images were analysed, and it’s all been kept thoroughly classified ever since. Did you ever notice that even under our new united-world government, old Marvin’s DORA act of 1916 was never repealed?…’

Hopson was frowning. ‘But hang on, old bean. How deep did you say this shaft was? Half a mile? But that’s nearly not deep enough. I remember at school we read Verne’s book, Americans to the moon, you know, firing themselves out of a great cannon, and we soon calculated that the accelerations and so forth—’

‘Quite right,’ Walter said, sounding grudgingly impressed. ‘Ben, the projectile’s motion as it came flying out of the cannon mouth could be measured from images, chance observations by spotter planes and from the ground. It must have been driven out of the gun with an acceleration of about ten times the earth’s gravity – that is thirty times higher than the Martian, but not, perhaps, unsupportable, if you suspend your bulk in fluid, or brace with supporting equipment. And the cylinder continued to accelerate even after it left the muzzle of the cannon. Observers saw green flashes, and there appears to have been a tremendous plume of hydrogen emitted from the base of the craft. If the acceleration rate remained the same, a continuing thrust up to perhaps four hundred miles from the earth would have been sufficient to hurl it free of the planet. And thence, to Mars!’

Hopson seemed awed.

With a rattle of cables, the elevator was slowing, and I saw that there was a doorway, neat and circular, cut in the wall of the shaft. ‘We have almost reached our stop,’ Walter said.

I looked at him. ‘A stop at what?’

‘The city of the Martians,’ he said. ‘Be careful when you climb off the platform.’

5 THE MARTIANS’ UNDERGROUND LAIR

It was a city indeed, or a warren at least, far beneath the ground of England, now lit by electric lamps, a network of cylindrical tunnels and spheres, and with a geometry that eluded me though I was assured it had all been thoroughly mapped.

Aside from the silvery metallic fabric of the tunnel walls, I saw no Martian equipment there. But there were traces of humanity everywhere: telegraph wires taped to the walls, a chemical toilet, caches of battery torches and candles in case, I supposed, the electrical power failed – even oxygen bottles and masks.

‘But these are a mere precaution: the air stays fresh,’ Walter said. ‘There are several shafts to the surface, and a breeze flows, apparently naturally, but I have my suspicion there is technology involved somewhere in the process – something subtle, not a pump as we would use, a kind of osmosis perhaps, or a capillary action…’

We came to a big spherical chamber – one of several, I was informed. The floor was terraced with concentric horizontal platforms, like broad steps leading down from the sphere’s equator where we had entered. All this was seamlessly moulded from the same metallic substance as the walls of the tunnels. A couple of soldiers stood on guard, watching us warily, one with a field telephone at his side.

Walter Jenkins sat easily on a step, and we followed his lead. ‘Of course all the Martian gear has been removed – mostly by the Martians themselves, a few relics by the first humans to penetrate the place. One can only imagine how it was when the Martians themselves were here! It was rather dark to human eyes, but as you know Mars’s sunlight is dimmer than ours. And the Martians, scattered through this chamber like great leather sacks, hooting and puffing the way they did, those strange finger-tentacles working… But still one can deduce a great deal about the Martians and their society even from the basic layout of the place.’

‘Oh, really?’ I asked, in a mood to be sceptical. ‘Such as?’

‘Just compare this to any human structure you ever saw – consider what’s missing. You have the passageways, and the communal areas, and that’s it. There is nowhere for privacy, for the Martians evidently don’t desire it. And there’s no evidence of status, or hierarchy. Nobody has a grander room than anybody else. So we can deduce their social structure is flat. They must make their decisions by discussion and consensus. They share everything – why, we see no evidence of anything like private property. They are supremely loyal to each other, too. And remember, I have strong reason to believe the Martians are telepathic. They could not lie to each other. Have you considered that? Imagine how human society would be transformed by that one simple adjustment!

‘Why, even these common areas have a kind of democratic symmetry. One must sit and talk in the round. We found one exception, a chamber with a peculiarly dimpled floor. The best speculation is that this is where the young are kept, after they bud from the parents, when they are small and dependent.’

Hopson seemed to like the idea. ‘Just like being sent away to prep! Didn’t do me any harm. A Martian at Eton? Might fit right in. Well, he’d be good at table tennis.’

‘Such as, that their great cannons are clearly a secondary technology – I mean, a derived use of an existing device, rather than a fresh design. The cannon, you see, were produced by tunnel-boring equipment that was probably perfected long ago – equipment primarily designed underground habitats, like this. for the construction of I suspect that all the technologies they brought to the earth, at least in 1907, were not dedicated weapons, not machines meant for making war, but adaptations of technologies meant for other purposes. Even the Heat-Ray.’

Hopson mused, ‘Just as a man may use a flame-thrower, meant for clearing scrub, as a weapon: deadly enough if you’re in the way of it, whatever its intended purpose.’

‘That’s the idea. After all, what do we see when we look at Mars? You have the snow and the ice, the oceans, the vegetation, the canals. Nowhere do we see a Martian city. Not a single building. Not even at the most complex of nodes in the canalnetwork, like Solis Lacus.’

I saw what he meant. ‘They must have retreated underground – into warrens like this.’

‘That’s it. It’s logical, isn’t it?’

Hopson wasn’t keeping up. ‘But why would one choose to live in a warren?’

‘For protection. For breathable air, as one’s atmosphere thins and collapses. For warmth – for even when the sun dies, you know, the interiors of the planets will retain their heat, and in fact the earth more so than Mars because of its greater mass. This may be our destiny some day, when the sun becomes cold: to huddle underground, kept alive by the planet’s residual heat.’

‘But there’s nothing here,’ I mused, looking around at the blank walls. ‘Not just an absence of sunlight – what would one eat?’

‘Life in the subterranean cities would be one of technological advancement and biological simplicity,’ Walter said, rather pompously. ‘The end of the game in which the Martians are already engaged. The Martians rebuilt their world as they rebuilt themselves, in a great simplification, just as they discarded the wasteful lumber of gullet and stomach to become little more than a brain and a blood circulation system. We know they have hugely simplified their ecology – there is the red weed, and the humanoids that feed on the weed who provide blood for the Martians themselves. Everything else extirpated! Discarded! From the mightiest tree to the flies to the most insignificant of microbes – which as we know left the Martians vulnerable to infection when they first came, in ’07.’

Hopson frowned. ‘Do you admire all this? But the flies, man – swallows eat flies. Do away with the flies, and you lose the swallows. Would you want that?’

‘Not I,’ I said firmly, struck by the astuteness of the observation.

‘There might be no alternative,’ Walter said, dreamy, anxious. ‘Do you not see it? One day the Martians will surely go further yet, leaving behind altogether all this business of biology. Imagine a machine that could take rock, and raw energy from the sun or the planet’s heart, and turn that into food – for all the elements one needs can be found in the minerals, you know. The ultimate efficiency – the most exquisite simplicity – nothing but sunlight, and rock, and brains. That, I believe, is the ultimate technical goal of the Martians.’

I grunted. ‘You sound as if you envy them. Isn’t that what the psychologists said of you, Walter? That you’re half-Martian yourself? Anyhow now they’re gone – this lot at least. So where are the rest? The ones who landed in New York and Los Angeles, and Peking and Berlin… Even you must be aware of the disquiet that mysterious vanishing has caused, and continues to cause. The situation can never be resolved until we know. Do you have some new notion?’

He smiled. ‘In general terms, it was always obvious.’

I glowered; he could be infuriating. ‘Obvious, was it?’

‘Most of the earth is too hot for them. So they will have migrated to where it’s cold. And as most of them landed in the northern hemisphere—’

‘The north,’ Joe Hopson said. ‘That’s always been obvious, yes; they would seek the north, the coldest lands. But the Arctic is the roof of the world – Canada and Asia – it’s a damned big place. Are you saying they’ve been found?’

He answered mildly, ‘I’m saying there have been reports to that effect. There’s an expedition planned next year. Weather permitting. Julie, fancy a trip? There we can confirm what the Martians are doing up there – or rather, what I believe they’ve been doing…’

To the Arctic, searching for Martians! Well, I wasn’t about to say no. Would you?

6 THE VATERLAND

That winter passed slowly for me, in a daze of expectation. Then in early March 1937, I boarded the LZ-138 Vaterland, at Murmansk.

That city is about as far east as you can go in the northern Russian empire and still find something resembling civilisation.

And we would be travelling in the late Arctic winter, about as inhospitable a time and place as our dear old earth offers you, although, as Walter Jenkins never tired of pointing out, to a Martian it would be like the balmiest of summers. We privileged few, however, a multinational party, would travel in a flying hotel.

We gathered in a chilly aerodrome outside the city. Here was Walter himself, seventy-one now, frailer than ever. Joe Hopson was with me; he had kindly volunteered for the trip to serve as a general companion, assistant and guide. Like most military veterans he was a supremely competent chap, and I was glad to have him with me.

And Eric Eden was there too, aged fifty-five, now officially retired from the British Army but still serving as a paid advisor to various government departments on all things Martian – he bore his own burn scars, but he was another survivor whose presence reassured me.

All told there were fifty passengers of a dozen nationalities, most of whom were scientists unknown to me, but I had no doubt of their relevant expertise – at least as judged by some committee or other in the Federation embassy in Paris. And such a high-profile jaunt, with a lot of attendant publicity, naturally attracted the famous and the rich. It was rather fun to do some celebrity-spotting as we stood on that windy platform.

I thought I recognised our expedition leader: Otto Yulevich Schmidt, well over six feet tall, a scholar and outdoorsman famed for leading expeditions into the Russian Arctic over a decade. I was not surprised to learn that, in addition to Schmidt, there were heroes of polar exploration among our crew, such as Richard Byrd, first to fly to the North Pole. I was told that our newly crowned King Edward’s American wife was on board. Their union had been seen a symbol of a new age of transatlantic amity despite a mild controversy over her previous divorce. But I did not see Queen Wallis. There was even a rumour that the Kaiser Wilhelm III was aboard, taking part in this ambitious flight of the most prestigious of his country’s aerial vessels. If so, I never glimpsed him either.

‘Even more aggressive than his unlamented father,’ Eric murmured to me. ‘If we come within biting distance of a real, live Martian we may need to muzzle the man.’

When the time came for our boarding, however, I soon forgot my companions, for I was enthralled by our great craft itself. I first saw the Vaterland in bright morning light. Even penned in its hangar it was a tremendous sight, a huge cylinder lying flat on the concrete apron, dwarfing the buildings and service vehicles which attended it. Its great belly rested on wheels and rails, and there were huge stabilising fins on its flanks and at the tail where a vast engine block was fixed. Then came the call: ‘Airship forward!’ A kind of netting was fixed over the ship’s pale grey surface, and workers like ants dragged the vessel from its shed by hand.

As we passengers walked towards the craft – there was a sickly-sweet smell which I was told was associated with the replenishment of hydrogen – the airship became only more impressive, more towering. It was no less than a third of a mile long from bow to stern, with the capability of carrying a hundred tons of cargo, driven by its Daimler-Benz engines at a top speed of ninety miles per hour. But it was the symbolism of the craft that struck me most. A new age of global federations we might be living in, but you wouldn’t know it from a glance at the Vaterland. Everywhere were the colours of imperial Germany, strong yellow and black, and a mighty eagle, all in black, was emblazoned on the nose – that design alone must have been a hundred feet tall. And Eric pointed out to me the three great compartments which the ship carried slung under its belly. The front was the passenger gondola, the rear was for engines and fuel – but the middle section, Eric said, was essentially a bomb bay.

The passenger gondola, I observed on boarding, was split into two decks, the upper for the kitchens and stores and quarters for the crew, and the lower for our cabins and the lounges and dining rooms. There is always an enormous amount of room on a big airship. Even as we boarded, a player at a grand piano treated us to selections from Wagner. It did not take us long to find our rooms and get settled. Later I would explore the cabin’s own ingenious features: the padded walls, the fold-away bunk and table, the telephone, the electric lights.

For now, though, I hurried back to the main lounge for the takeoff.

I sat with Eden and Hopson – Walter had retired to his room, intent on his note-taking, his endless studies. I could already hear, indeed feel, the throbbing of the great engines transmitted through the ship’s frame. The lounge was fitted out in the most modern styles, all beige colours on the walls and uplighting on the ceiling, and glass-topped tables and chairs with chrome rails. There was even a small vase with fresh flowers set on our table. It all made the dear old Lusitania, fond in my memory, seem shabby.

‘Cast off!’ came the cry.

And then we rose.

On an airship, you know, the windows are all in the walls and floor, so one can look down at the landscapes that slide silently below, while above your head the sky is shielded by the great bulk of the lift envelope. And the moments of launch offer perhaps the most spectacular views of all. The aerodrome shrank below us, the workers standing by the mooring tower and waving, turning into tiny dolls. The sprawl of Murmansk itself was soon visible to the south, and to the north the Barents Sea opened up, blue open water close to the shore but with ice floes scattered not far out. On the horizon the ice merged into a solid mass that, I knew, stretched all the way to the pole. Not far out to sea I saw a small convoy, a couple of icebreakers and some low-slung cargo ships. The Russians’ Great Northern Sea Route, a six-thousand-mile passage all along the northern coast of Eurasia, is open for only a few months of the year – mere weeks in a bad season – and it pays to set off early if you don’t want to spend a winter trapped in the ice.

Even as we lifted small aircraft jumped into the sky to see us off. Monoplanes, with hulls of glittering aluminium and the sigils of the imperial Russian air force bright on their wings, they ducked and darted around us, making what seemed impossibly tight curves.

Eric Eden was impressed. ‘Those must be reaction-engine flyers – following the principle of the Martians’ flying-machines, and a product of the German-Russian war, of course. Our

planes still use screw propellers to drag themselves through the air.’

‘Silly asses,’ muttered Hopson, puffing on an unlit pipe smoking was not allowed aboard our hydrogen-lifted craft.

‘Flies buzzing an elephant.’ But despite this languid dismissal he craned to see the feisty little craft as much as any of us.

7 A JOURNEY ACROSS THE ARCTIC

It would be a journey of some two thousand miles to our destination, which was the Taymyr Peninsula. Running at a comfortable speed we would cover this journey in around fortyeight hours. It was on the Tuesday that we set off from Murmansk; we were expected to arrive at the Taymyr some time on the Thursday.

I tended to stick to the company of my stout companions. It was generally known that I was a friend of Harry Kane, and he had recently made himself notorious by writing a trashy radio drama, produced by his wife Marigold and broadcast on the Edison Broadcasting System, about a sudden arrival of a fresh fleet of Martians in the Midwest. Well, as a new set of close oppositions were approaching, the show had caused a panic, frantic phone calls to police and Army, even a few scattered evacuations. I didn’t want to be quizzed about that scandal, and I kept my head down. Besides, the company was pleasant. In relaxed circumstances Eric Eden and I shared for the first time our reminiscences of the Martian War, aside from the times we had been thrown together; it is largely on the basis of those conversations and the notes I made that the relevant sections of the present memoir have been drafted.

We were not allowed to be bored, however.

On the Tuesday afternoon, while a magical landscape of water and ice slid beneath our prow, Otto Schmidt treated us to an off-the-cuff lecture. He was a Russian, despite his name, but he spoke to his international audience in heavily accented German. In his late forties, tall, commanding, and with a beard like Santa Claus, he looked every inch the Jules Verne heroexplorer to me, and sounded like it too. He described to us something of the history of the Russians’ inner colonisation of their own vast empire, which, I was surprised to learn, went back to the days of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth centuries, when explorers and exiles and fur trappers and religious schismatics had wandered east. By the time of Peter the Great the first towns were being established, and in the nineteenth century the establishment of the Trans-Siberian Railway was a major triumph. But it was only in the twentieth century – and after the great trauma of war against the Germans and then the Martians – that the development of the region had been accelerated, and conducted in a systematic fashion. Schmidt himself had led the first successful crossing of the Great Northern Sea Route. It was thanks to such explorations and surveys, of course, that the presence of the refugee Martians had been confirmed, and as a consequence the Russian Arctic science academy had proposed this international mission to the Federation of Federations.

Schmidt was a booming braggart, but engaging, and he had a right to be proud of all his country had achieved. And, he claimed, this was the nearest anybody had come to colonising a hostile alien planet. ‘So maybe the Russian flag will be the first to be planted on Mars!’

We applauded such sentiments politely, and I wondered what the Martians might have to say about that.

On the Wednesday afternoon we stopped at a town called Noril’sk, which is on the Yenisei river, still some five hundred miles from our final destination. Here a group of companies were mining for nickel ore. We dropped supplies of various kinds; ours was the first significant visit to the town since the winter had relented.

Eric Eden and I took the chance to slip out of the gondola and walk about the town. It was a shabby, functional place, surrounded by a stout wire fence, the buildings mere shacks of cinder blocks and mortar and prefabricated panels, the streets of bare, tamped-down dirt. There seemed to be cement mixers everywhere. There were elements of mundanity: aside from the factories there was a school, a church, a hospital, a repair shop for the few automobiles in the dirt roads – all mostly half-built. People lived and worked here, then, and raised children. There was even a small cinema; a handwritten billboard told me it was showing Cherie Gilbert’s A Martian in Hollywood. But it was a desolate place, and I was chilled to the bone despite my expensive cold-weather gear.

‘You know, I spent some time in this part of the world before the Second War,’ Eric admitted, for the first time in my hearing.

I grunted. ‘Let me guess. You were here to learn how landships fare on the tundra.’

He smoothly ignored that. ‘It’s not easy out here. Just living, I mean.’ We paused by a half-built shell of concrete and cinderbrick. ‘For a start there’s the months of darkness, when it gets so cold the mortar will freeze before you can set your brick, and even when the summer comes you get this terrible humidity, and mosquitoes everywhere. The people here are a desolate sort, either drafted in or seduced by false promises of a new life on the frontier – you know the kind of thing.’

‘Why the fence? To keep the townsfolk in?’

He grinned. ‘Or the wolves out. They call the moonlight the wolves’ sunshine, you know.’

A hooter sounded, like a ship’s, calling us back to the Vaterland. It was time to move on.

And, even as Eric and I turned away from the fence, the snow started to fall – suddenly, without warning, it seemed to me, from a clear sky. We had to cling to each other, and follow other shadowy forms, to make our way back to the airship.

‘Even here,’ muttered old Arctic hand Eric Eden. ‘Even here, at this extreme place, the ends of the earth, the weather is – odd.’

Thus, Wednesday. We travelled on overnight.

And on the Thursday morning we woke over our destination, the Taymyr peninsula.

8 AT CAPE CHELYUSKIN

After a hurried, subdued breakfast, we passengers donned our cold weather gear once more and prepared to descend from the gondola. We were ready for work; many of the scholars had brought cameras, and various other instruments in bags and cases. As we filed down the gondola’s ramp I recognised one instrument from the manufacturer’s name, stamped on its box; it was a Geiger counter, to measure radiation.

Once outside, standing with Eric and Ben, I discovered that we had come down in the middle of a military camp, over which the flag of the Russian Empire fluttered in a mercifully light breeze. I saw a cluster of buildings, and field guns and heaps of ammunition under tarpaulins, and rows of automobiles, some fitted with skis for travelling on the snow – there was even a landship, a small one, done out in white and grey Arctic camouflage.

All of this, along with an airfield large enough to host an airship the size of the Vaterland, was enclosed by a fence. And on the northern perimeter of the compound I saw a cluster of watchtowers and gates, and a battery of big Navy guns installed on pivoted mounts.

‘That way lies the ocean,’ came a voice. ‘You can smell the salt, I think. And that’s the way the guns are set. To the north, beyond the perimeter.’ It was Walter Jenkins, bundled in black furs. He wore a heavy-looking Russian fur hat, and what I could see of his face was screened by the lenses of his thick dark sunglasses, and pale skin cream. I wondered if his scarring was made more or less a discomfort in the deep cold.

‘Good morning, Walter,’ Eric Eden said dryly.

Joe Hopson clapped him on the arm. ‘It is good to see you. You mustn’t hide yourself away on the return jaunt, you hear? With four of us – well, that’s enough for bridge.’

‘Bridge?’ Walter seemed bemused.

Now Otto Schmidt called us together, the crowd of us passengers with a couple of the crew, and a squad of soldiers. He led us towards the gate on the north side. Towards the sea, then.

Walter walked with me. ‘It is not far to our destination. The Russians, having made the discovery by chance – after I had predicted it for years! – have set up shop admirably close to the site. Do you know where you are, Julie?’

‘The Taymyr Peninsula. North coast of Russia, a bit of land sticking out into the Arctic Ocean—’

‘And separating the Seas of Kara and Leptov, yes.’

We came to the mesh fence, at a heavily guarded gate. A crewman from the Vaterland had already taken the passports of the passengers in the party; a junior officer scrutinised these, and called us through. Beyond the fence, oddly, the scent of the ocean seemed much stronger.

‘But,’ Walter said, ‘what is this place in particular? Do you know? It is called Cape Chelyuskin. The extreme northern end of the peninsula…’

Now, as I looked around, I could see the ocean. Beyond a swathe of dark, hard-frozen beach, the water looked black, and further out sea ice gleamed white as bone. As we walked slowly forward, I saw a shadow in the ground before us: a circle, a pit, watched over by soldiers with automatic weapons and field wireless sets. A shaft dug down into the ground: it was just as I had witnessed at Amersham.

‘And this Cape,’ Walter went on, ‘happens to be the northernmost spot on the whole of the Eurasian continent. Right here, where we’re standing. The northernmost. Now do you see?’

I breathed, ‘The Martians. They came north. As far as they could.’

‘From all across Eurasia, from Berlin, St Petersburg, from Peking, even from Constantinople. As for those who landed in the Americas, it is thought that again they streamed north, and crossed into Asia by the Bering Strait – not much of an obstacle to the Martians, especially in the winter. There were a few sightings in the Canadian territories – Martians on the move! It’s odd, by the way, that they made little use of their flyingmachines.’

‘And Africa? What of the Martians of Durban?’

‘That remains a mystery. They left their pits, certainly. There are rumours of sightings in the forests of central Africa: finds of gorillas and chimpanzees, apparently drained of their blood… Some day we may send an expedition into that dark heart and find out. In South America it may be the same, though no one has yet penetrated the Amazon jungles to find out… Come now. There’s something else you must see.’

I walked towards that shadow in the ground, that pit, like the one I had explored in the heart of England, now transplanted into the hard Arctic tundra. Its shaft, a little more than thirty yards wide – the width of a Martian space cylinder – was lined, just as in Amersham, with an aluminium sheen. And, as I approached, cautiously like the rest, I could hear it, a great thump-thump-thump, like a beating heart, deep underground. It was the sound I had heard in England, all the time I was in the Martian Redoubt with Albert Cook, and unwelcome memories crawled.

‘They are here,’ I said. ‘Still here.’

Almost tenderly, Eric Eden took my gloved hand in his. ‘Buck up, old girl.’

I saw that a number of the tame experts were drawn away from the pit itself to inspect a broad trench, dug into the ground, perhaps three feet deep and twenty long, and oriented north-south. Those excitable scientists, mostly spectacles and beards and bald heads – senior academics were still largely men, in those days – were, with caution, using gloves, were reaching down into the trench and taking samples of what grew there: a plant of some kind, fleshy and crimson and covered in blisters, thick on the earth.

As Walter led me that way I saw that a number of other such trenches had been made, across this landscape and running down the narrow beach and into the sea. Walter reached down into one of the trenches and grabbed a handful of the stuff growing there, and gave me a share; it was dry to the touch and rubbery, but otherwise like seaweed. ‘No need to be delicate – there’s plenty of it around, and more of it every day. Growing in the ground, in a few spots on the surface – oh, and under the sea.’

‘How do we know that?’

He pointed to a machine that stood by the shore; it looked like a boiler on fat wheels, but it had a periscope like a submarine, and thick round portholes.

‘What’s that? Some kind of submersible?’

‘Yes, but not a conventional kind. It’s a Lake crawler – a design that drives along the sea bed – an old design that never really caught on, but which has its applications. Its brave crew, Russian scientists all, have taken that beast out onto the ocean floor, and far under the ice. And everywhere they went they found—’

‘This stuff?’ I held up my sample. ‘Is it red weed? I remember how quickly it grew, even the first batches the Martians brought to the earth in ’07.’

‘It seems to be a form of red weed, yes.’

‘But what purpose has it?’

For answer, he popped one of the blisters on the frond I was holding. I saw no gas emerge, smelled nothing. ‘To collect this,’ he said.

‘The gas in the blister? It is invisible—’

‘It is nitrous oxide. A compound of nitrogen and oxygen – the sample is just as reported by the first expeditions, and its purpose is as obvious now as then, to me at least.’

I remembered now Frank’s observations of the depletion of the air over fields of red weed in the Abbotsdale Cordon. ‘I don’t understand. Purpose, you say? What does it mean, Walter?’

‘The removal of the world’s air,’ he said simply.

9 AN UNRELIABLE PROPHET

That evening, back aboard the Vaterland, Walter discussed his ideas further, with myself, Eric, Joe Hopson. We spoke over a dinner of sandwiches and beer and a bowl of fruit. The restaurants were sparsely populated now; those scientists on board – the rest had stayed in the military base – had scattered to cabins become improvised laboratories, and were, no doubt, planning to spend the night in obsessive analysing, experimenting and theorising.

But Walter had already worked it all out.

‘Here is the problem,’ he said. ‘The problem for the Martians, that is. Those stranded here find themselves on a world quite unlike their own in a number of ways. The greater mass, the heavier gravity – there’s not much to be done about that. Ah, but what about our atmosphere? From a Martian’s point of view there’s far too much of it; their air is attenuated compared to ours, and a different mix: we have too much oxygen, too little argon, for example.’

Both Joe and Eric seemed to be struggling with these ideas. Eric said at length, ‘Are you saying that these Martian Crusoes might wish to change the air – to make it more like their own?’

‘Precisely. Why would they not? After all, Europeans have spread around this earth, from the Arctic to Australia, and everywhere we have gone we have cleared those lands of native life and made them suitable for our crops and stock animals. It even goes on here – did you know there are potatoes, plants from the Andes, growing above the Arctic Circle?’

‘Are there, by golly?’ Joe said. He seemed more impressed by that fact than anything else said so far.

‘Very well,’ I said heavily, thinking it through. ‘It’s just that the Martians are going one step further. But how could they do it? To change the air of a world—’

‘I have speculated,’ Walter said calmly. ‘I have studied the kinematics of meteorites, for example. We know that the Martians have learned to use the dropping of objects from space as a weapon of war. And, such is the energy released, every such fall blasts away a proportion of the earth’s air into space – not much, but some. And once gone it is lost forever. Well, I wondered, could one use similar impactors – giant cylinders stuffed with rocks, for example – to simply blow all our air away?’ He sighed. ‘Sadly, I think that’s impossible.’

Eden snorted. ‘Sadly! The man says sadly!’

‘We have studied such impacts since ’07, and the natural landings of meteorites even before that. No matter how large a rock you drop, you blast away some air, but only a kind of a skim.’ With one bony hand he took an orange from the fruit bowl on the table, and cut a flat slice off the rind, tangentially exposing a little of the flesh within. ‘Like this. The energy of the infall won’t reach around the curve of the world – you end up just nipping off a slice, tangential to your horizon. Do you see?’ He made a few more such cuts, leaving the orange’s flesh largely intact. ‘I calculate it would take thousands of rocks to get all the air away that way, and by rocks I mean not mere hundred-yard cylinders, but big hundred-mile-wide asteroids. And consider what a mess you’d make of the world if you tried it! No,’ he said. ‘I think they’ve been more subtle. I think they’ve come up with a tool, a biological mechanism—’

‘The red weed,’ I said.

‘Correct. But an adjusted variant, modified perhaps at the level of the germ plasm – we know the Martians are expert at shaping living things for their purposes. No doubt the assembled professors aboard this craft will figure it better than I can, but my guess is –’ He glanced at us. ‘What’s the atmosphere made of?’

‘Nitrogen, oxygen, and scraps,’ Joe Hopson said promptly. ‘That got beaten into us during stinks lessons at school.’

Eden winced. ‘Do shut up, Joe!’

‘Very well. I think it works like this,’ Walter said. ‘The first goal is to get rid of all that nitrogen and oxygen – yes? Because those are the bulk components. Now, we could think of ways to do that – in principle, at least. Nature has provided certain plants which “fix” the nitrogen from the air, that is, draw it down and render it into molecules suitable for take-up by other living things. That’s steady, but it’s slow if you leave it to the plants. But now we have the Haber process, which fixes nitrogen from the air to use in artificial fertiliser. And a single Haber manufacturing plant can remove as much nitrogen from the air, in a week, as all the oceans absorb in the growth of plankton, and so on, in a year. In fact we have on board Frederick Keeble of ICI, who as you may know was the first to identify nitrogen deficiency as a limit to agricultural growth, and it’s no coincidence that a man with such expertise is on this expedition.

‘But I believe the Martians have been more subtle yet. I believe the weed encourages chemical reactions among the elements of the air. First, thanks to some catalyst, the nitrogen is made to bond with the oxygen. So the Martians fix the oxide rather than the nitrogen alone, thus removing the oxygen too in a single reaction– the bulk of the air, captured.

‘Now, each frond of the weed won’t take very much. But what it takes it holds. I have done some tests; this version of the weed has a thick, rubbery skin that shows no signs of rotting away and releasing its stolen air any time soon. It just grows, on the ocean floor – and on the ground, and in the ground, and then it lies there, just heaping up, a compact, unbreakable store.’

‘And the Weed grows very fast,’ I said. ‘It reproduces very fast. We saw that even in the First War.’

Walter nodded. ‘You start to see it. There is probably more to the system than that. The Martians will need machinery to spread this, to encourage the growth – but they can have that machinery, quickly. In Sheen, I saw myself how one handlingmachine could manufacture another in the space of a day…

‘It is already fifteen years since the Second War – fifteen years of opportunity for the Martians to develop their system, to spread the operation. And remember, they have already rebuilt one world to suit their tastes and their needs – rebuilt Mars itself, over and over as the sun has progressively cooled. They know what they are doing. They know how to do this.’

‘And already we’re seeing the signs,’ I guessed wildly. ‘The strange weather, the storms—’

‘That’s it. There’s a permanent low pressure system over this part of the Arctic, as the air is drawn down into the ocean and the ground. As the air thins, you see, it loses its capacity to hold water vapour. And on the other hand a normal density of water vapour traps the sun’s heat; as the water vapour is lost from the air, that heat is lost too. In the short term these effects would play hell with the normal meteorological processes. We would have to expect violent storms of rain, hail, snow… Ha! I remember the storms of the June of ‘07, when the Martians first came to England… Coincidental stormbringers!

‘But that is merely a phase. As the air thinned further, if it did, we would progress beyond meteorological phenomena. Those living at the highest altitudes would suffer mountain sickness. With time such effects must progress to lower and lower heights – there would be refugee flows – but it won’t come to that.’

Eden glowered. ‘You know that, do you? Just as every French general knew that the Germans’ military build-up wouldn’t “come” to an invasion of Paris.’

Walter looked at us as if we were missing the point. ‘This is not destruction. Not war. Not under the eyes of the Jovians! That’s all over. Did you know that not a single fighting-machine has been seen in these polar wastes? Handling-machines, yes – machines for building, not smashing.Which proves that they’re here to stay. This is colonisation, not war, and ultimately it will be, it must be, of an orderly kind.’

I tried to make him see our concern. ‘But, Walter, to strip away our air—’

‘Think of it as a negotiation. Of a concrete kind, granted. They are telling us what they want. Well, we must respond by telling them what we will give them – some kind of reserve, perhaps. Even a domed colony. And we are leaving a party of scientists behind to progress that very goal. Perhaps we need a cosmic Mikaelian!’

Eden said heavily, ‘Just hypothetically, Walter – suppose the Martians’ sequestration of the air we breathe was not “orderly” after all. Suppose they don’t abandon it at some polite level. Suppose they just kept on with it. Where would that leave us?’

Walter seemed irritated to have to deal with this – what struck me as a typical hard-headed soldier’s question. ‘There is no theoretical reason why it should end until much of the atmosphere is removed. It is quite possible. Certainly the Martians could reduce it to match the pressure on Mars itself, and adjust its mix to meet their needs.’

‘And what of us? How would we survive?’

Walter eyed him. ‘How do you think? As we would on the moon, or indeed Mars itself. In shelters or caves. Shelters with factories that can make, or at least replenish, scraps of breathable air.’

‘Scraps of air,’ Eric said. ‘Scraps of humanity. We will not be able to move around the world – we won’t be able to organise we could not resist.’

‘It would be themassacre of mankind,’ Hopson said. ‘Just as you wrote in your Narrative, Jenkins. This would be the very massacre, at last.’

‘It won’t come to that,’ Walter insisted.

Eden was still grim-faced. ‘Well, this business of war being over, or not – I suppose we’ll know soon enough. The Martian cannons will fire at the end of March, if they mean to come again. If they do not fire, then perhaps Walter is right, that all of this business with the air is a mere experiment in colonisation, intended to do us no real harm. But if they do launch another invasion fleet—’ He looked Walter in the eye, sternly. ‘If the Martians were to begin a programme to remove all our air how long would we have, man?’

Walter said, ‘It is difficult to estimate. The process is ultimately driven by the energy of the sun, which the plants use to process and sequester the air. We know how much sunlight energy falls on the earth per day, per hour—’

‘How long?’

‘Centuries at best. Decades at worst.’ He picked up his orange, as if absent-mindedly, and began to peel it, slice by shallow slice.

‘Crikey,’ Joe Hopson said softly.

‘What must we do?’ I asked.

Walter seemed surprised by the question. He popped a slice of orange into his mouth. ‘I told you. Negotiate.’

‘So,’ Eden said darkly, ‘we must wait for the end of March, and watch the skies. For then we’ll know, won’t we?’

10 THE EPILOGUE

During our journey westward and back towards Europe and civilisation, I was surprised to learn that Walter Jenkins planned to return to England for his first extended stay in a number of years.

And I was still more surprised when he let slip, quite casually, that he had – evidently on a whim, a nod to the past – bought back the house in Woking where he had lived with his wife Carolyne before the first Martian assault. That was his intended destination now. ‘I need to be there,’ he told me in that grave way of his, ‘on midnight of the twenty-sixth of this month – the date of the next firing, if it comes indeed. When again, history will pivot.’

He was right, and everybody knew it. As I have remarked, for months already the approach of the crucial date had seemed to fuel a world-wide paranoia, and the news of the Arctic Martians, luridly misreported as it was, only magnified that irrational fear (or maybe it was rational, I wondered in the privacy of my own heart). And Walter, bless him, thinking nothing of his own safety – and despite the fate of Mikaelian – was all for plunging straight into the maelstrom of public debate.

I decided there and then, in the lounge of the Vaterland, with Arctic desolation still peeling away beneath us, that I would accompany Walter home. In a way the whole Martian affair had all started in that pleasant house in Woking – or at least it had for Walter, who had become by default the witness for a generation; it seemed an appropriate place for the story to end – or, more correctly, for a new chapter to begin, if it came to that. But there was more to it than that. We had never been close friends – which in-laws ever are? – and yet he was family. I could hardly bear the thought of him rattling around like a ghost in his old home, alone.

And I could keep him safe in Woking. A quiet word to my old ally Eric Eden and I was assured that various irregular elements of the British Army would keep an eye on both of us, ‘until the latest Martian flap is over, one way or another.’

I dashed off a wireless-telegraph message to my sister-in-law in Paris to inform her of my plans, and asked her to tell such colleagues and friends as she felt necessary. All this before I had told Walter of my intention to come with him.

Walter was scarcely pleased when I informed him of my decision. ‘Just don’t get in the way,’ he snapped.

The house on Maybury Hill was almost as I remembered it, as we walked around the place, throwing open windows.

Though it was not far from central Woking, the house had survived the 1907 assaults, and Surrey as a whole had been comparatively spared the damage of the second wave of 1920, which had centred on Buckinghamshire and London.

Subsequent owners had maintained the character of the place well enough. Here was the dining room with the rather rickety French windows that gave onto the garden and a view towards Ottershaw, where Walter’s astronomer friend Ogilvy had lived. Here the little summer house where, Walter told me, he and Carolyne had enjoyed taking their supper in the good weather. There was furniture in all of the rooms, I noticed, of a more or less appropriate type – a dining table and chairs in the dining room, rather over-stuffed sofas in the parlour, and so forth. Yet the colours jarred, the sizes and positioning not quite right.

And upstairs was Walter’s old study, with its view to the west, towards Horsell Common itself, where the very first cylinder had landed. At some point the study had been done out as a child’s bedroom, as I could see from the wallpaper – it had images of Ally Sloper, a favourite from the picture papers, clobbering Martians in their fighting-machines. The only furniture was a solid desk under the window, and a chair, and a light stand, and rows of bookcases, for now unpopulated.

Walter and I stood at the study window, and peered out at the ruins of Woking. There were the ruins, still distinguishable, of the Oriental College, of the mosque, of the rail station, the electric works. On the rail line, by the stumps of the smashed Maybury arch, the overturned wreck of a train could be seen – a detail that reminded me of Abbotsdale and the Cordon, under the Martians. The ruins, made safe but left otherwise untouched as a monument, were nevertheless being embraced by the green of earth, with grass, rose-bay willow herbs, even young pine trees growing around the debris.

‘Good enough,’ Walter said. ‘I can work here still.’

‘Did you take this place unfurnished, Walter?’

‘Indeed. Told the agent to fit it out as best he judged it.’ I tapped the desk; it appeared to have been constructed of old ship’s timbers. ‘To a budget, I can see.’

‘Better things to do than mull over sticks of furniture,’ he said. He sat in the heavy office chair behind the desk, and swivelled to and fro. ‘This will do.’

I sighed, and patted his shoulder. ‘You’re not yet a Martian, Walter. You haven’t yet discarded all your bodily wants. Will you let me help you spruce the place up a little, while I’m here?

A bit of redecoration – some furniture that actually fits the rooms… Believe me, if you have a decent environment to live in your work will flow a lot more easily.’

He grunted. He opened a briefcase and drew out a calendar, which he set up on the empty desk. And he placed there a photograph of Carolyne, a framed portrait – a touch that surprised me. He said, ‘Not until after the twenty-sixth.’ It was hard to argue with that.

So we settled into a brief period of domesticity.

I got a cleaner in, to manage the house and do the laundry; I shopped for the pair of us, which was not much of a chore. Walter surprised me by doing much of the cooking. His cuisine, honed by long bachelor years, was quick to prepare, quicker to eat, but nutritionally efficient. Walter had employed a servant, I recalled, before ’07. Everybody who could afford it had had one in those days – even a couple making a fairly marginal living from the husband’s income as a philosophical writer – but that seems to be a fashion that has passed, probably for the better since most of those ‘below stairs’ had been women with no other choice of employment.

Walter mostly worked upstairs in his study, putting his notes in order, writing essays perhaps – I was not privy to his drafts. At least, I realised, he was keeping to an orderly schedule, unlike his habits aboard the Vaterland where he had treated such things as sleep and food as irrelevant distractions. Whether that was my own relatively orderly influence (relatively! – most of my acquaintances see me as an agent of chaos, I think), or some memory of the calm of his past here with Carolyne, I cannot say. Indeed I wondered if some instinct for lost domestic tranquillity had drawn him back to this home in the first place.

In my own time I worked, and read, and had long telephone conversations with distant friends. I had coffee several times with Marina Ogilvy, widow of the astronomer, who still lived in the house with the observatory at Ottershaw, only a few miles away. And I spoke to Carolyne herself; sometimes she rang me. I urged her to come visit Walter, or at least speak to him on the phone: ‘I know you are divorced, I know it’s a burden, but still—’

She would not.

So we came to the twenty-fifth.

It was a Thursday.

I was up at six, before my alarm clock sounded. I had slept poorly. I knew it would be midnight at the earliest before either of us slept again. The day itself dawned still and tranquil, belying its apocalyptic relevance.

If the Martians came the launches would begin at midnight that night – and the workings in the Arctic would presumably have to be viewed as a weapon of war,and for all Walter’s words the world would be plunged into a new hell. There had been no news from the observatories, not even via the channels Walter had the privilege to consult – but I had seen for myself in ’20 how partial and tentative those contacts were.

I washed, dressed, and brought Walter a coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs in his study. He was quietly working at a manuscript, which he put aside to eat; he grunted his thanks. I knew he would not come away to the dining room or the kitchen, not today.

I put in a quiet day of work of my own, reading, writing preliminary drafts of sections of this memoir, writing letters – I paid a few bills on the house.

In the late afternoon I went for a brief walk, down to the station for the evening papers. It had been a fine spring day in southern England; the sun was bright, the daffodils in the well-kept gardens were brilliant yellow, and early swallows swooped and dived after insects. Whenever I saw those beautiful birds I thought of Joe Hopson and his remark about swallows and Martians. If the Martians’ activities in the Arctic were perturbing the weather, well, there was no strong sign of it that afternoon at least. But it was chill enough that I wondered if there would be a touch of frost that night.

At the station I bought the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Times, that week’s Punch, and on a whim Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday. I scanned the headlines as I walked back home for news of the opposition; in the serious papers they were variants of ‘The World Waits’, but there was no solid news.

I had a quiet dinner; I took Walter sandwiches and soup as he requested, but he ate nothing.

About 11 p.m. I made us fresh coffee, and clambered up to the study, where I sat on a small armchair which Walter and I had lugged upstairs from the sitting-room, the room’s only significant piece of furniture aside from the desk and office chair. Walter still sat, calmly working. His desk was uncluttered: there was his calendar, a travel clock, a few piles of papers, that photograph of Carolyne in its frame, a battered china mug containing pencils – and a telephone, close by his hand. The moon was bright that night, I remember, shining through the study window, a brilliant white disc glaring from a clear sky. A full moon! An eerie omen for such a night, as the cold astronomical clock within which both Martians and humans are embedded once again brought our planets to alignment. I wondered idly if the Jovians’ great sigil, long vanished to the human eye, had left any mark on that stark surface, to be discovered by spacefaring visitors some day.

I broke the silence. ‘I take it there’s no news, then, from your astronomical pals.’

‘Not pals.’ He tapped the telephone – then, on an anxious whim, raised it to check the dialling tone. ‘The astronomical exchange, of whom I am privileged to be a priority contact. No news, no. Of course we see so much better now, but even those early shots, back in ’07 – one must remember they were clearly visible even in poor Ogilvy’s home device, up in Ottershaw – I saw them myself.’

‘An armada – or rather, a colonisation fleet. That’s what it would be this time, wouldn’t it?’

‘That would follow the pattern,’ he admitted. ‘Ten cylinders in ’07, a hundred in 1920, a thousand two years later – could it be ten thousand this time? If they came, which they won’t.’

‘There are some who say we should do more than hope for the best.’ I flipped through the papers. ‘There’s a story in here somewhere… Ah.’ The Telegraph had the most complete report. ‘Churchill’s made another speech. “No more waiting! Did we wait for Napoleon to stride arrogantly onto our pitch? No! We blocked him before he reached the field of play. Now we must find an interplanetary Nelson to take the war to the Martians. We must strike and strike hard…”’

Churchill, that old warhorse, still in the Cabinet as minister for munitions, had responded to the discovery of the Martians’ works in the Arctic by arguing that the ‘British space gun’, as he called it – that is, the Amersham pit which, in 1922, the Martians had indeed used to launch a cylinder to take them home – could be refurbished and put to use to send humans into space. As the Telegraph illustrated with a handy cutaway diagram, an abandoned Martian cylinder could be fitted out for manned travel, with compressed foods, cylinders of oxygen, water condensers, and lodes of sodium peroxide which would scrub excess carbon dioxide out of the cylinder’s contained atmosphere, and so forth. ‘Looks a bit Jules Verne to me.’

‘Lot of nonsense,’ growled Walter, not looking around. ‘What about the acceleration? Ten gravities—’

‘According to this, subjects have been tested in such conditions in centrifuges at Farnborough. With training, and perhaps suspension in viscous fluids and so forth – it says here – the experience might be survivable. Anyhow they aren’t short of volunteers.’

‘I’m not surprised by that. The world’s never been short of suicidal idiots. Still plotting a Bacillus Bomb, are they? That’s another of Winston’s bloodthirsty phrases.’

‘I believe so. The map shows likely targets…’

This was, in a way, an astounding development of the old scratched-together plan to have me carry lethal pathogens into the Martian Redoubt at Amersham. Now Churchill’s cylinder would carry a variant of some ghastly archaic plague to infect the whole of Mars.

‘The most significant known node in the canal network remains Lacus Solis – it says here. And if a bacillus were injected into the global water supply at such a commanding junction, it should spread throughout the planet.’

‘At least it is consistent with our own history,’ he growled. ‘Our European plagues shattered the populations of the Americas and elsewhere, and that was what won us empires.’

I said, in a cold tone, trying to provoke him, ‘Then Churchill’s strategy might work. The precedent shows it.’

‘But even so, would it be right? Julie, Martian civilisation is immeasurably old, by our standards – counted perhaps in the millions of years. Who are we to smash such an edifice? We would be like the Huns at the gates of Rome. And old the Martian culture might be but perhaps it is fragile too. You know that I believe the Martians communicate with a form of telepathy. Whatever the mechanism, what are the greater implications? One oddity that few have remarked upon regarding the Martians is this – that they have no books. Or at least, none they brought to the earth. In their cylinders, no scrap of writing or anything like it: indeed, they show no sign of symbolism at all save for their great planetary sigils which, as I correctly surmised—’

‘I know you did, Walter,’ I said with a sigh.

‘My own conclusion is this. There are no books – or rather, the Martians are their own books. If you could talk direct, mind to mind – memory to memory – what need have you of a book? One could pool thoughts, pool memories, into a communal whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Nothing need ever be lost, in the vaults of those great capacious memories – as long as they survive. But you see the consequences. Murder the Martians, and you burn their libraries too – gone for all time!’

I coughed, rudely. ‘But these big-brained librarians of yours came to the earth – our earth – and slaughtered us, and drank the blood of our children.’

‘Perhaps we need men like Churchill when we must make war, and we must think the unthinkable. But it was you who found a way to make the peace, Julie – not Churchill…’

You must imagine the two of us, arguing in that odd little room with its rather dim lights and rather ill-judged furniture, and its window looking out over the ruins to Horsell Common, where history had been made – and here was the man who first wrote that history, with some degree of eloquence. I scarce believed a word he said, but they were such beautiful words. ‘They will not come,’ declared the Unreliable Narrator now. ‘The Jovians have ensured that. But – and I’m with Haldane on this – I’m not one to argue for an over-reliance on the Jovians to look after us forever. The Jovians intervened once in our affairs, and the Martians’, like a deus ex machina – like the Old Testament God with His floods and plagues. We cannot rely on such help in the future; we should not. We cannot bow down before these temporal deities. We ought to stand on our own two feet – perhaps Mikaelian’s marvellous Federation is a first hopeful step—’

‘How long, then, Walter? Always assuming the Martians give us the time… How long before we reach some level of perfection?’

For answer he dug out a manuscript from the pile before him: dog-eared and yellowed, and stained perhaps by spilled coffee, yet he handled this relic with tenderness. ‘This is the very paper on which I had been working, in this study, on the afternoon when the first cylinder opened over on Horsell Common. I remember I had a selenite paperweight; I wonder what became of that? It was a paper on the probable development of Moral Ideas with the advancement of the civilising process. When I had to abandon it – I remember I broke off in mid-sentence to get my Chronicle from the newsboy, and he spoke to me of “dead men from Mars” – I was in the midst of a paragraph of prediction. I never went back to the work. I look at it now – how young I was! How ignorant! I was no prophet. And yet, you know, in my dim groping, it seems to me I hit on certain perceptions. Now I have finished that last paragraph. Call it sentimental. Oh, I will never attempt to have the paper published, but…’

‘Read it to me,’ I said quietly.

He picked up the sheet. ‘“In about two hundred years, we may expect—”’

The telephone rang.

Walter stared at it, as if frozen.

I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was a little after midnight.

Still Walter did not stir.

After three rings, I crossed the room and took the handset. ‘Yes? Yes – he is here…’ And I took the message. ‘Walter – it is Carolyne.’

He looked at me blankly.

‘She says she arranged this with Eric Eden, arranged for your astronomical exchange to call her first, not you. To help you manage the news, you see.’

Walter picked up the photograph of Carolyne, and touched the face behind the glass. ‘And the Martians?’

I listened to Carolyne’s quiet, calm voice.

‘They did not fire, Walter. The cannon did not fire, on Mars.’

‘I was right, then.’

‘You were right.’

‘It’s over. The end of the War of the Worlds. Now the Union of the Peoples can begin…’ He seemed to run down, like an unwound clock. ‘Carolyne.’ He touched that photograph once more. ‘Once I counted her, as she counted me, among the dead.’

‘She’s here, Walter.’

He bowed his head. And he took the phone from my hands.