Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95

by Robert Silverberg

  How long did this interlude go on? I could not say. We were rooted, fascinated, by our encounter with the other. Then the Martian turned—with the greatest difficulty—and trained its huge dark eyes on us. Wells and I exchanged wary glances. Should we finally flee? The Martian seemed to carry no weapons; but who knew what powers of the mind it might bring to bear on us? Yet it simply studied us, dispassionately, as one might study a badger or a mole that has wandered out of the woods. It was a magical moment, of a sort: beings of two disparate worlds face-to-face (so to speak) and eye-to-eye, and no hostile action taken on either side.

  The Martian then uttered a kind of clicking noise, which we took to be a threat, or a warning. “Time for us to be going,” Wells said, and we backed hastily out of the clearing. The clicking sound, we saw, had notified the Martian’s transport mechanism that it wished to be reseated in the cupola, and a kind of cable quickly came down, gathered it up, and raised it to its lofty perch. Now the Martian was in full possession of its armaments again, and I was convinced that my last moments had arrived. But no; no. The thing evinced no interest in murdering us. Perhaps it too had felt the magic of our little encounter; or it may be that we were deemed too insignificant to be worth slaughtering. In any event the great machine lumbered into life and went striding off toward the west, leaving Wells and me gaping slack-jawed at each other like two men who had just experienced the company of some basilisk or chimera or banshee and had lived to tell the tale.

  The following day, whichever one that may be. We are in London, having entered the metropolis from the south by way of the Vauxhall Bridge after a journey on foot that makes my old trampings in Provence and the Campagna and the one long ago over the Alps into Italy seem like the merest trifling strolls. And yet I feel little weariness, for all my hunger and the extreme physical effort of these days past. It is the strange exhilaration, still, that drives me onward, muddied and tattered though I am, and with my banished beard, alas, re-emerging in all its dread whiteness.

  Here in the greatest of cities the full extent of the catastrophe comes home with overwhelming impact. There is no one here. We could not be more alone were we on Crusoe’s island. The desolation is magnified by the richness of the amenities all about us, the grand hotels, the splendid town-houses, the rich shops, the theaters. Those still remain: but whom do they serve? We see a few corpses lying about here and there, no doubt those who failed to heed the warning to flee; the murderous black powder, apparently no longer lethal, covers much of the city like a horrid dark snowfall; there is some sign of looting, but not really very much, so quickly did everyone flee. The stillness is profound. It is the stillness of Pompeii, the stillness of Agamemnon’s Mycenae. But those are bleached ruins; London has the look of a vibrant city, yet, except that there is no one here.

  So far as we can see, Wells and I are the only living things, but for birds, and stray cats and dogs. Not even the Martians are in evidence: they must be extending their conquests elsewhere, meaning to return in leisure when the job is done. We help ourselves to food in the fine shops of Belgravia, whose doors stand mostly open; we even dare to refresh ourselves, guiltlessly, with a bottle of three-guinea Chambertin, after much effort on Wells’s part in extracting the cork; and then we plunge onward past Buckingham Palace—empty, empty!—into the strangely bleak precincts of Mayfair and Piccadilly.

  Like some revenant wandering through a dream-world I revisit the London I loved. Now it is Wells who feels the outsider, and I who am at home. Here are my first lodgings at Bolton St., in Piccadilly; here are the clubs where I so often dined, pre-eminent among them for me the Reform Club, my dear refuge and sanctuary in the city, where when still young I was to meet Gladstone and Tennyson and Schliemann of Troy. What would Schliemann make of London now? I invite Wells to admire my little pied-à-terre at the Reform, but the building is sealed and we move on. The city is ours. Perhaps we will go to Kensington, where I can show him my chaste and secluded flat at De Vere Mansions with its pretty view of the park; but no, no, we turn the other way, through the terrifying silence, the tragic solitude. Wells wishes to ascertain whether the British Museum is open. So it is up Charing Cross Road for us, and into Bloomsbury, and yes, amazingly, the museum door stands ajar. We can, if we wish, help ourselves to the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone and the Portland Vase. But to what avail? Everything is meaningless now. Wells stations himself before some battered pharaoh in the hall of Egyptian sculpture and cries out, in what I suppose he thinks is a mighty and terrible voice, “I am Ozymandias, King of Kings! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

  What, I wonder, shall we do? Wander London at will, until the Martians come and slay us as they have slain the others? There is a certain wonderful frisson to be had from being the last men in London; but in truth it is terrible, terrible, terrible. What is the worth of having survived, when civilization has perished?

  Cold sausages and stale beer in a pub just off Russell Square. The red weed, we see, is encroaching everywhere in London as it is in the countryside. Wells is loquacious; talks of his impoverished youth, his early ambitions, his ferociously self-imposed education, his gradual accretion of achievement and his ultimate great triumph as popular novelist and philosopher. He has a high opinion of his intellect, but there is nothing offensive in the way he voices it, for his self-approbation is well earned. He is a remarkable man. I could have done worse for a companion in this apocalypse. Imagine being here with poor gloomy tormented Conrad, for example!

  A terrifying moment toward nightfall. We have drifted down toward Covent Garden; I turn toward Wells, who has been walking a pace or two behind me peering into shop windows, and suggest that we appropriate lodgings for ourselves at the Savoy or the Ritz. No Wells! He has vanished like his own Invisible Man!

  “Wells?” I cry. “Wells, where are you?”

  Silence. Calma come la tomba. Has he plunged unsuspecting into some unguarded abyss of the street? Or perhaps been snatched away by some silent machine of the Martians? How am I to survive without him in this dead city? It is Wells who has the knack of breaking into food shops and such, Wells who will meet all the practical challenges of our strange life here: not I.

  “Wells!” I call again. There is panic in my voice, I fear.

  But I am alone. He is utterly gone. What shall I do? Five minutes go by; ten, fifteen. Logic dictates that I remain right on this spot until he reappears, for how else shall we find each other in this huge city? But night is coming; I am suddenly afraid; I am weary and unutterably sad; I see my death looming before me now. I will go to the Savoy. Yes. Yes. I begin to walk, and then to run, as my terror mounts, along Southampton Street.

  Then I am at the Strand, at last. There is the hotel; and there is Wells, arms folded, calmly waiting outside it for me.

  “I thought you would come here,” he says.

  “Where have you been? Is this some prank, Wells?” I hotly demand.

  “I called to you to follow me. You must not have heard me. Come: I must show you something, James.”

  “Now? For the love of God, Wells, I’m ready to drop!” But he will hear no protests, of course. He has me by the wrist; he drags me away from the hotel, back toward Covent Garden, over to little Henrietta Street. And there, pushed up against the facade of a shabby old building—Number 14, Henrietta Street—is the wreckage of some Martian machine, a kind of low motorcar with metallic tentacles, that has smashed itself in a wild career through the street. A dead Martian is visible through the shattered window of the passenger carriage. We stare awhile in awe. “Do you see?” he asks, as though I could not. “They are not wholly invulnerable, it seems!” To which I agree, thinking only of finding a place where I can lie down; and then he allows us to withdraw, and we go to the hotel, which stands open to us, and ensconce ourselves in the most lavish suites we can find. I sleep as though I have not slept in months.

  A day later yet. It is beyond all belief, but the war is over, and we are, miraculously, free of
the Martian terror!

  Wells and I discovered, in the morning, a second motionless Martian machine standing like a sentinel at the approach to the Waterloo Bridge. Creeping fearlessly up to it, we saw that its backmost leg was frozen in flexed position, so that the thing was balanced only on two; with one good shove we might have been able to push the whole unstable mechanism over. Of the Martian in its cabin we could see no sign.

  All during the day we roamed London, searching out the Martians. I felt strangely tranquil. Perhaps it was only my extreme fatigue; but certainly we were accustomed now to the desolation, to the tangles of the red weed, the packs of newly wild dogs.

  Between the Strand and Grosvenor Square we came upon three more Martian machines: dead, dead, all dead. Then we heard a strange sound, emanating from the vicinity of the Marble Arch: “Ulla, ulla, ulla,” it was, a mysterious sobbing howl. In the general silence that sound had tremendous power. It drew us; instead of fleeing, as sane men should have done, we approached. “Ulla, ulla!” A short distance down the Bayswater Road we saw a towering Martian fighting machine looming above Hyde Park: the sound was coming from it. A signal of distress? A call to its distant cohorts, if any yet lived? Hands clapped to our ears—for the cry was deafening—we drew nearer still; and, suddenly, it stopped. There seemed an emphatic permanence to that stoppage. We waited. The sound did not begin anew.

  “Dead,” Wells said. “The last of them, I suspect. Crying a requiem for its race.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “What our guns could not do, the lowly germs of Earth have achieved—I’ll wager a year’s earnings on that! Do you think, James, that the Martians had any way of defending themselves against our microbes? I have been waiting for this! I knew it would happen!”

  Did he? He had never said a word.

  July 7, Lamb House. How sweet to be home!

  And so it has ended, the long nightmare of the interplanetary war. Wells and I found, all over London, the wrecked and useless vehicles of the Martians, with their dead occupants trapped within. Dead, all dead, every invader. And as we walked about, other human beings came forth from hiding places, and we embraced one another in wild congratulation.

  Wells’s hypothesis was correct, as we all have learned by now. The Martians have perished in mid-conquest, victims of our terrestrial bacteria. No one has seen a living one anywhere in the past two weeks. We fugitive humans have returned to our homes; the wheels of civilization have begun to turn once more.

  We are safe, yes—and yet we are not. Whether the Martians will return, fortified now against our microorganisms and ready to bend us once more to their wishes, we cannot say. But it is clear now to me that the little sense of security that we of Earth feel, most especially we inhabitants of England in the sixty-third year of the reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, is a pathetic illusion. Our world is no impregnable fortress. We stand open to the unpredictable sky. If Martians can come one day, Venusians may come another, or Jovians, or warlike beings from some wholly unknown star. The events of these weeks have been marvelous and terrible, and without shame I admit having derived great rewards even from my fear and my exertions; but we must all be aware now that we are at great risk of a reprise of these dark happenings. We have learned, now, that we are far from being the masters of the cosmos, as we like to suppose. It is a bitter lesson to be given at the outset of this glorious new century.

  I discussed these points with Wells when he called here yesterday. He was in complete agreement.

  And, as he was taking his leave, I went on, somewhat hesitantly, to express to him the other thought that had been forming in my mind all this past week. “You said once,” I began, “that you had had some scheme in mind, even before the coming of the Martians, for writing a novel of interplanetary invasion. Is that still your intent now that fantasy has become fact, Wells?”

  He allowed that it was.

  “But it would not now be,” I said, “your usual kind of fantastic fiction, would it? It would be more in the line of reportage, would you not say? An account of the responses of certain persons to the true and actual extreme event?”

  “Of course it would, of necessity,” he said. I smiled expressively and said nothing. And then, quickly divining my meaning, he added: “But of course I would yield, cher maître, if it were your intention to—”

  “It is,” I said serenely.

  He was quite graceful about it, all in all. And so I will set to work tomorrow. The Ambassadors may perhaps be the grandest and finest of my novels, but it will have to wait another year or two, I suppose, for there is something much more urgent that must be written first.

  [James’s notebooks indicate that he did not actually begin work on his classic novel of interplanetary conflict, The War of the Worlds, until the 28th of July, 1900. The book was finished by the 17th of November, unusually quickly for James, and after serialization in The Atlantic Monthly (August-December, 1901) was published in England by Macmillan and Company in March 1902 and in the United States by Harper & Brothers one month later. It has remained his most popular book ever since and has on three occasions been adapted for motion pictures. Wells never did write an account of his experiences during the Martian invasion, though those experiences did, of course, have a profound influence on his life and work thereafter.

  —The Editor.]

  CROSSING INTO THE EMPIRE

  An odd history is involved with this one. I had just finished the Henry James story; and here it was still only January of 1995, my rainy-season novel well behind me, the weather bad, time on my hands. Another short story seemed like a good idea, and, as was usual at such times, my thoughts turned to Playboy. I came up with a really lovely alternative-history background, a city that is not quite Byzantine Constantinople but has some resonances with it, and, since Playboy is published in Chicago, I interwove Chicago background into it. And sent it off to Playboy fiction editor Alice Turner, who accepted it with pleasing promptitude.

  It was always gratifying to sell a story to Alice; but at the very time that she was saying yes to this one, I heard from Janet Berliner, whom I had known years before as Janet Gluckman when she lived in California. She was working with the magician David Copperfield on an anthology of stories of miracles and wonders: did I care to participate? And it struck me that I had just written the perfect David Copperfield story. He is famous, after all, for astonishing disappearance illusions—he will disappear an entire jet airplane, for example, or even the complete Statue of Liberty. Pretty impressive, but what about a whole city? That might be beyond even his skills. But not mine: I had just caused the mighty capital of a great empire to vanish from its moorings and reappear in modern-day Chicago. I wanted that story to be in his book.

  But I had just sold it to Playboy, which had long been my favorite story market. Withdrawing a story that Alice Turner had accepted was, well, one of the two most disagreeable kinds of withdrawal I could imagine. While I was pondering what to do, though, a second story leaped unbidden into my mind—the story that follows this one. And in an astonishingly few number of days it was written. “Listen,” I told Alice, “I’ve just had another story come out of nowhere, and I see another place where I think ‘Crossing into the Empire’ would fit. Suppose I send you the new story and if you like it you can buy that one in place of ‘Crossing’ and send ‘Crossing’ back to me, okay?”

  It was a strange way for a writer to do business, but Alice and I had never had a very orthodox editor-writer relationship. I sent her “The Second Shield,” she liked it well enough to buy it, and I was free to offer “Crossing into the Empire” for the Copperfield book, Beyond Imagination, where it duly appeared in December, 1996. If you had told me, forty years ago, that I would sell two stories to Playboy the same week and then would pull one of them back to offer to someone else I would have had a very hard time believing you. But, then, there’s a lot that has happened to me over the past forty years that my younger self would have difficulty believin
g.

  ——————

  Mulreany is still asleep when the Empire makes its midyear reappearance, a bit ahead of schedule. It was due to show up in Chicago on the afternoon of June 24, somewhere between five and six o’clock, and here it is only eight goddamned o’clock in the morning on the twenty-third and the phone is squalling and it’s Anderson on the line to say, “Well, I can’t exactly tell you why, boss, but it’s back here already, over on the Near West Side. The eastern border runs along Blue Island Avenue, and up as far north as the Eisenhower Expressway, practically. Duplessis says that this time it’s going to be a fifty-two-hour visitation, plus or minus ninety minutes.”

  Dazzling summer sunlight floods Mulreany’s bedroom, high up above the lake. He hates being awake at this hour. Blinking, grimacing, he says, “If Duplessis missed the time of arrival by a day and a half, how the hell can he be so sure about the visitation length? Sometimes I think Duplessis is full of shit.—Which Empire is it, anyway? What are the towers in the Forum like?”

  “The big square pointy-topped pink one is there, with two slender ones flanking it, dark stone, golden domes,” Anderson says.

  “Basil III, most likely.”

  “You’re the man who’d know, boss. How soon do we go across?”

  “It’s eight in the morning, Stu.”

  “Jesus, we’ve only got the fifty-two hours, and then there won’t be another chance until Christmas. Fifty-one and a half, by now. Everything’s packed and ready to go whenever you are.”

  “Come get me at half past nine.”

  “What about nine sharp?” Anderson says hopefully.

  “I need some time to shower and get my costume on, if that’s all right with you,” Mulreany says. “Half past nine.”

  It’s the Empire of Basil III this time, no question about that. What has arrived is the capital city from the waterfront all the way back to the Walls of Artabanus and even a little strip of the Byzantine Quarter beyond—the entire magnificent metropolis, that great antique city of a hundred palaces and five hundred temples and mosques, green parks and leafy promenades, shining stone obelisks and eye-dazzling colonnades. The Caspian Sea side of the city lines up precisely along South Blue Island Avenue, with the wharves and piers of the city harbor high and dry, jutting from the eastern side of the street. The longest piers reach a couple of blocks beyond Blue Island where it crosses Polk, stretching almost to the southbound lanes of the Dan Ryan Expressway, which seems to be the absolute boundary of the materialization zone. A bunch of fishing boats and what looks like an imperial barge have been taken along for the ride this time, and sit forlornly beached right at the zone’s flickering edge, cut neatly in half, their sterns visible here in Chicago but their bows still back in the twelfth century. The whole interface line is bright with the customary shimmering glow. You could walk around the outside edge of the interface and find yourself in the Near West Side, which has been intruded upon but not harmed. Or you could go straight ahead into that glowing field of light and step across the boundary into the capital of the Empire.