I followed them to my study, and found lying on my writing-table still, with the selenite paper weight upon it, the sheet of work I had left on the afternoon of the opening of the cylinder. For a space I stood reading over my abandoned arguments. It was a paper on the probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the civilising process; and the last sentence was the opening of a prophecy: ‘In about two hundred years,’ I had written, ‘we may expect –’ The sentence ended abruptly. I remembered my inability to fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone by, and how I had broken off to get my Daily Chronicle from the newsboy. I remembered how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I had listened to his odd story of ‘Men from Mars.’
I came down and went into the dining room. There were the mutton and the bread, both far gone now in decay, and a beer bottle overturned, just as I and the artilleryman had left them. My home was desolate. I perceived the folly of the faint hope I had cherished so long. And then a strange thing occurred. “It is no use,” said a voice. “The house is deserted. No one has been here these ten days. Do not stay here to torment yourself. No one escaped but you.”
I was startled. Had I spoken my thought aloud? I turned, and the French window was open behind me. I made a step to it, and stood looking out.
And there, amazed and afraid, even as I stood amazed and afraid, were my cousin and my wife – my wife white and tearless. She gave a faint cry.
“I came,” she said. “I knew – knew –”
She put her hand to her throat – swayed. I made a step forward, and caught her in my arms.
Chapter X
The Epilogue
I cannot but regret, now that I am concluding my story, how little I am able to contribute to the discussion of the many debatable questions which are still unsettled. In one respect I shall certainly provoke criticism. My particular province is speculative philosophy. My knowledge of comparative physiology is confined to a book or two, but it seems to me that Carver’s suggestions as to the reason of the rapid death of the Martians is so probable as to be regarded almost as a proven conclusion. I have assumed that in the body of my narrative.
At any rate, in all the bodies of the Martians that were examined after the war, no bacteria except those already known as terrestrial species were found. That they did not bury any of their dead, and the reckless slaughter they perpetrated, point also to an entire ignorance of the putrefactive process. But probable as this seems, it is by no means a proven conclusion.
Neither is the composition of the Black Smoke known, which the Martians used with such deadly effect, and the generator of the Heat-Rays remains a puzzle. The terrible disasters at the Ealing and South Kensington laboratories have disinclined analysts for further investigations upon the latter. Spectrum analysis of the black powder points unmistakably to the presence of an unknown element with a brilliant group of three lines in the green, and it is possible that it combines with argon to form a compound which acts at once with deadly effect upon some constituent in the blood. But such unproven speculations will scarcely be of interest to the general reader, to whom this story is addressed. None of the brown scum that drifted down the Thames after the destruction of Shepperton was examined at the time, and now none is forthcoming.
The results of an anatomical examination of the Martians, so far as the prowling dogs had left such an examination possible, I have already given. But everyone is familiar with the magnificent and almost complete specimen in spirits at the Natural History Museum, and the countless drawings that have been made from it; and beyond that the interest of their physiology and structure is purely scientific.
A question of graver and universal interest is the possibility of another attack from the Martians. I do not think that nearly enough attention is being given to this aspect of the matter. At present the planet Mars is in conjunction, but with every return to opposition I, for one, anticipate a renewal of their adventure. In any case, we should be prepared. It seems to me that it should be possible to define the position of the gun from which the shots are discharged, to keep a sustained watch upon this part of the planet, and to anticipate the arrival of the next attack.
In that case the cylinder might be destroyed with dynamite or artillery before it was sufficiently cool for the Martians to emerge, or they might be butchered by means of guns so soon as the screw opened. It seems to me that they have lost a vast advantage in the failure of their first surprise. Possibly they see it in the same light.
Lessing has advanced excellent reasons for supposing that the Martians have actually succeeded in effecting a landing on the planet Venus. Seven months ago now, Venus and Mars were in alignment with the sun; that is to say, Mars was in opposition from the point of view of an observer on Venus. Subsequently a peculiar luminous and sinuous marking appeared on the unillumined half of the inner planet, and almost simultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar sinuous character was detected upon a photograph of the Martian disk. One needs to see the drawings of these appearances in order to appreciate fully their remarkable resemblance in character.
At any rate, whether we expect another invasion or not, our views of the human future must be greatly modified by these events. We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of mankind. It may be that across the immensity of space the Martians have watched the fate of these pioneers of theirs and learned their lesson, and that on the planet Venus they have found a securer settlement. Be that as it may, for many years yet there will certainly be no relaxation of the eager scrutiny of the Martian disk, and those fiery darts of the sky, the shooting stars, will bring with them as they fall an unavoidable apprehension to all the sons of men.
The broadening of men’s views that has resulted can scarcely be exaggerated. Before the cylinder fell there was a general persuasion that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further. If the Martians can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet within its toils.
Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But that is a remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.
I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about me empty and desolate. I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle, children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and wretched, in the darkness of the night.
I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have
seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day….
And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.
What Survives of Us
S.A. Westerley
I was there the day we picked the last of them up. I’m not going to lie, it was pretty rough. No. Rough doesn’t cover it. I don’t know what word would but it was bad. Anyone who was there would be able to tell you how bad it was but none of them will really be able to describe it. Sure, the Retrieval is ancient history now but at the time….it was…so…vivid? No. Immediate? Real? Huge? See I don’t have the words. None of us did really. At best we laughed it off. No, honestly. We made up jokes.
That day has entered popular idiom, at least the part of it I remember the most has. You won’t know it, but you’ll know the phrase for sure. I guess it’s gallows humour but it was a phrase we all picked up on, all the pilots and security and…we weren’t laughing at what we’d seen, what we’d been through, what we’d heard…we just…we knew how we meant it anyway.
‘Oh come on man, don’t leave the speakers up’, you’ll have heard the phrase, it’s what you tell some asshole whose telling you his life story, half cut and without any due encouragement. We use that phrase all the time, it’s too useful not to.
‘Woah, woah, come on! Speakers up man!’, it’s what everyone says, anyone my age or younger, whenever somebody you know is getting a bit too frank or open with you, or when you’re seeing something you’d sooner avoid, your pal admitting he’s got a thing for your Mom or your roomie coming out of the bathroom without a towel wrapped round all the parts that ought to be hidden.
I guess people don’t know what the original reference point is when they’re saying it. And why the hell would they? To them it must just be another reference to some dirty joke they never actually heard or some foul and depraved act they don’t really understand. To them all it means is ‘I don’t want to hear it’, ‘I don’t want to know’. That’s enough. I guess I wouldn’t want them to know any more than that. My speakers are down. Unless you’re really curious.
Ok, so…yeah, I was there. I was just a junior shuttle pilot, I’d never even been to Earth, little colonial kid that I was. Point of fact, it was more or less my first trip out of orbit. But they needed all the ships and pilots they could get. Anything that could fly they flew out there. It still never could have been close to enough.
The fact we were heading to Earth, like actual Earth, system centre, was pretty overwhelming to a lot of the younger pilots like me, despite all that had changed. Earth was a big deal to us, even then. Point of fact, even now we still speak of Earth. It’s been so much a part of our lives, of our history, that it’s difficult to process that it’s gone. Or that there’s no one left there to speak of it first hand.
Just like the open speakers it survives in idiom…‘The good solid Earth’, ‘Give me one Earthly reason’, ‘What on Earth?’, ‘Why on Earth should that be?’ as if there were only one world, as if that first world our ancestors knew was all there is. Nothing’s there now. Nothing and no one. Nothing’s been there for a long time.
It was a long slow apocalypse. Slow enough for folks to deny it, to kid themselves it wouldn’t arrive, or that they’d be gone before it did.
The Earthers saw the last days coming but what could really be done, in the circumstances? Where else was there to go but the one world they had ever known? Those that could afford it arranged passage, tried to make lives for themselves elsewhere in the solar system, what might once have been their great wealth as privileged Earthers becoming suddenly worthless in the face of the new reality. My parents used to talk of Earth as this mythical place, something to be aspired to, someplace I was pretty sure I could never afford to live. But things turned round pretty quick. At first we were excited by the refugees, sophisticated Earthers bringing their fashions and wealth out to the colonies. My parents offered to let a room just in the hopes of getting a refugee in to tell them stories of what they still called ‘back home’. But that was no kind of a solution. Not to a global problem. It was obvious that pretty soon they’d all have to leave. Every last Earther. Out to the already crowded colonies. No one had thought how we’d make room for them all. The colonies were a lot smaller then. There was a lot of opposition too. There were colonists who’d left Earth for hard ethical reasons and didn’t want its soft, decadent ways following them out here.
But we couldn’t just leave them, could we? We had to do something.
When I was in that fleet…I mean, man, I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since. Swear on my life, every part of everywhere you could look was ships and ships and then more ships. Every size, every shape and purpose; commercial, medical, heavy haulage, maintenance, pleasure cruisers, police, warships. It felt good to be human, for a brief glimmer, before you realized the scale of the job, the size of the Earth, the billions of people waiting, desperate, hopeless and helplessly alone.
The sea of people I saw as we came into land, that first overwhelming image, will never leave my mind. I guess I couldn’t have seen individual faces but it still feels as if I did, each and every one of them staring into me, asking, imploring me that they should be the one to get out.
Some of the older guys in my crew seemed pretty relaxed. They read or they dozed as the refugees were allocated ships. It was a long process and it paid to have something to distract you. If I looked at the screen all I could see was bodies. But in that human sea where you’d think you couldn’t make out any individual detail at all, that was all I could make out. A woman clutching a spare dress, so she could look her best when she arrived. A child fighting to hold a glass case steady, constantly buffeted by the contact of older, taller people who threatened to overturn it, an overturning that would have cast out the pet lizard basking oblivious at the heart of it onto the cold hard ground. Someone had brought a pile of books. They would have taken up a whole passenger’s worth of space. There was no way those books could ever have been taken. Any fool could see that. And all the data contained in them could have been, probably would have been, stored some other way. But it was clung to doggedly just the same. It was one more thing the Earthers had to at least try to save.
Coordinators clung to the outer doors of each of the shuttle crafts, pointing and waving and gesturing, fighting to be heard over the sonic soup of shouts and tears and pleading. Just behind them security complements would mirror the gestures, emphasising them with guns and stun rods in their outstretched arms. I wish we hadn’t needed them. But we did.
* * *
The shuttles had external microphones fitted so the co-ordinators could let us know when to ready the engines or how close we were to full, that kind of thing, or so we could hear for ourselves if they’d been overwhelmed and that great surge of humanity needed our electronic doors shutting fast on it. We tried to co-ordinate our take offs. We had been warned that the minute one shuttle went the crowds would just surge to the others. There was too much risk to human life, the officials had said, as if that made a difference by then, and too much of a risk that one or more shuttles, swamped by the press of bodies, mightn’t have been able to take off, dooming the handful of lucky passengers and crew alike. We hadn’t come here to make more corpses. So we kept them waiting. Ships that had been full for hours kept the queues in front of them patiently h
anging on, clinging to their bundled clothing and parcels and pets and what little hope they had left when all the shuttle crews knew what we were shortly going to be doing to them. We didn’t have a choice.
Inside the cab that soup of noise was most all I could hear, even with my ‘phones clamped on my ears. The instruments beeped and chattered but it was their lights I registered, the hiss and crackle of radio static was all but inaudible over the sound of the desperate sea of humanity outside. I kept itching to dial the volume of it down, but I needed to hear our coordinator, to know when he was ready for us to leave.
Eventually we stared to hear the last of the ships declaring themselves full. Over our speaker system we heard our co-ordinator tell us the same. We got ready to start the engines. Security teams sat ready to force the refugees back.
In some places they promised the Earthers another convoy, another fleet of shuttles within hours or days, just to keep them passive, just to keep them from surging forward in a panic and overwhelming us as we took off. But the Earthers knew, most of them anyway. They must have.
So the screams, when we heard them, we knew must be as genuine as any death scream anyone ever heard. The engines couldn’t drown them out. The onboard chatter, the crying and the shouting of the refugees that filled every spare foot of our ship, none of them could drown it out.
We just hadn’t thought to take down the microphones, still in place on the outside of the ship. It seems such a stupid oversight, a joke almost. It would have been too much of a warning to the refugees, I guess, but still, it never even crossed the minds of our crew. It was a common mistake, crews from most of the sites did exactly the same thing. Common enough that it’s become an idiom.
I can’t describe the screams and I hope you couldn’t imagine them if you tried. Tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of human beings who have lived their lives, worked at their jobs, studied and learned and loved and grown and raised their children for something, for some good reason, they were all of them sure of it, for every moment that they had lived out those dead end lives full of ambition and hope, watching the last justification for their lives disappear into space.
Alien Invasion Page 86