by Mike Brunton
Then they got on with helping to save England.
THE MARTIANS
Before considering the Fighting Machines and their weaponry, it is worth spending time on the Martians themselves.
To human eyes the Martians were hideous in appearance, the stuff of nightmares: rotund sacs of brains with hideous, gargoyle faces and huge, unearthly, luminous eyes! They were demon-skulls on octopus-like tentacles, touching everything with inquisitive, boneless, fleshy tendrils! It was an outward appearance that could have been calculated to cause terror and revulsion in humans. Of course, it was also a form that had allowed the Martians to thrive on their home planet.
After the invasion was over, some alienists, psychologists and religious figures claimed that the deep-seated horror and visceral fear felt towards the Martians were not only the result of appearances. They believed that these feelings were an echo of a deep-seated racial memory seared into the collective unconscious of humans. In short, it was argued, by Carl Jung among others, that this was not the Martians’ first visit to Earth: human souls, collectively or individually, remembered the terror of previous encounters, even if waking minds did not. Such speculations were dismissed by researchers more interested in the tangible facts. Yet it remains the case that there was something uncanny about the Martians that made humans uneasy, even afraid. Veteran soldiers who were unbothered by ordinary enemies, men hardened by experience, were uneasy when guarding Martian wreckage during the rebuilding, even though everything was completely inert at that point.
Human scientists had few chances to study the Martians during the Invasion. They were hampered by the dangers of getting too close to the Martians, and by the military, who did not want ‘tinkers, meddlers and bumbling crackpots’ wandering about. Researchers were forced to rely mainly on second-hand sources, such as newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts of the Martians, although a few brave souls did seek out first-hand information. The Royal Society acted as a clearing house for what was discovered, and members put themselves fully, and patriotically, at the disposal of Cambridge and Roberts for the duration. Many were slain. No one who approached the Martians openly in the hopes of making peaceful and civilized contact survived the experience. The remains of the Royal Society’s Welcoming Committee, for example, were discovered in a shallow grave at Horsell Common. They were identified only through their effects; their bodies had been ill-used, and fed upon by carrion birds. Like the many anonymous corpses found at all the Martians’ landing sites, the Committee were cremated to forestall any possible pestilence. To meet the Martians, it seemed, was to meet Death.
As a result of these dangers, all serious studies of the Martians took place only after the Invasion. No Martian was taken captive by humans, so fate was a good deal kinder to them than to human prisoners of war. The Martian dead were in a poor state by the time investigations were begun thanks to three factors. Firstly, carrion birds and rats took their share. Secondly, the Martians that didn’t fill crows’ gizzards started to liquefy in very short order; extremely fast decomposition set in thanks, no doubt, to Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere and diversity of micro-organisms. Thirdly, investigators preserved the remains in their usual fashion, with embalming fluids such as alcohol and formaldehyde. These methods were not kind to Martian corpses. Only one man had the wit to preserve Martian tissues by a different method: freezing. When news of the Martian defeat came, Professor William Rutherford of Edinburgh University had the good sense to telegraph a former student, George Challenger: ‘Proceed Horsell Common and other locales. Preserve Martian remains with cardice [dry ice, solid carbon dioxide]. Will arrive soon.’ It is only thanks to his original thinking that the ‘exo-biologists’ had any Martian samples at all, and even those were not of the highest quality. Challenger managed to freeze what remained of three Martians.
When Martians’ partial remains were dissected scientists were intrigued and then puzzled by their discoveries. As far as possible, every Martian remnant was examined, and what was found led to some odd, even macabre, conclusions. Rutherford and Challenger were at the forefront of these studies.
To start with, some superficial features of Martian anatomy were considered to be bird-like. The skin was certainly as unpleasant to the touch as ‘a plucked pheasant, hung for far too long to mature’. Martian bones were very light but strong, and included chambers that appeared to be connected to the breathing sac, something that was attributed to the thinness of the Martians’ home atmosphere. That, however, was as far as the comfortable similarities went. The tentacles had bones only at their roots, with a fleshy lattice of muscles that could be locked together for rigidity when needed.
A Martian resembled nothing more than brain, below which there was an atrophied thorax surrounded by a number of tentacles. Most Martians had six tentacles, with at least two of these splitting at the end into smaller grasping ‘fingers’ for use as feelers or hands. There were exceptions to this, and corpses were discovered with as few as four tentacles and as many as nine. Even where the crows had not feasted, there was no pattern to the number of finger-feelers that any individual Martian might possess. Some feeler-tentacles ended with two fingers, others had as many as six. There was no reason to suppose that these fingers, of whatever number, were less dextrous than human hands.
All Martians had two eyes and stereoscopic vision at least as good as human sight and probably a great deal better. The eyes were much bigger than a human’s, and had a crystalline outer shell. The size was an adaptation to the lower light levels of Mars, although there was the possibility that the Martians were natural cave dwellers or nocturnal. The eye-shell provided protection against the harsh Martian atmosphere. By comparison, the mouth was rudimentary with some individuals having bony ridges while others sported hideous fangs but no tongue, and did not appear to be much more than an opening into a gullet but without a recognizable digestive tract. There was a complex of airway valves and pipes, which explained how the Martians produced their musical hooting calls. This certainly explained the fearsome, ululating war cries of the War Machines.
It was possible to estimate the functions of some Martian organs: the Martians’ internal gills were obviously respiratory as were the air-sacs inside their bones, and a large fluid pump situated nearby was identified as a heart with some kidney and liver functions as well. What was surprising was that no two Martians were the same when examined: the corpses did not have a uniform body plan for their organs.
Eventually it was realized that all Martians grew around the main gill sac, heart pump and filter complex, and brain stem. All other organs, including the tentacles, had ‘budded’ off this central assembly. They did not possess any kind of identifiable digestive tract; the Martians appeared to rely entirely on intravenous feeding. Around half the Martian corpses examined had what was dubbed a ‘proboscis’ in the roof of the mouth (for want of a better term) for extracting blood and nutrients from other creatures. The corpses lacking this structure always had a complicated pipework mechanism found near the bodies, an entirely artificial method of feeding. This method of eating was undoubtedly efficient from the Martians’ point of view, but made them little better than blood-sucking ticks in the eyes of their human enemies. It also rendered them vulnerable to all manner of blood-borne diseases, which had been with mankind for untold millennia. The Martians were, perhaps, fortunate to invade a temperate zone rather than the Tropics, where fatal diseases were rife. On the other hand, they were unlucky to land close to London. While the city was undoubtedly cleaner than it had been, thanks to Bazalgette’s vast sewer system, it was still a haven for many serious infections including cholera, typhus and tuberculosis, not to mention incurable and fatal (at the time) sexually transmitted diseases, such as syphilis.
The Martians had only the organs they needed for survival and to carry out their work. The dead pilots found in Handling Machines had more feelers than the pilots of War Machines, while those few Martians who had been found within the Cylinders had n
ew limbs growing to suit their intended missions on Earth. Martians were differentiated by task, with physically different individuals having different duties. It was not possible to identify which, if any, Martians had been in command of their expeditionary forces based on their physical appearance.
As far as the investigators could determine, exactly the right numbers of Martians were budding new limbs for the positions that needed to be filled. It was not a great leap to propose that the Martians had conscious control over their physical forms, and could change their body plans at will. This explained why growing limbs had a great many more nerve connections from the brain stem than active, full-grown limbs. Martians could grow limbs and organs by thinking about them. The Martian brain was heavy and complex, outweighing the human brain many times over. This implied that the Martians were far more advanced in terms of brain capacities than had been suspected during the Invasion. It was also considered possible that the Martians were growing teeth to make themselves look more ferocious to their enemies.
The more adventuresome thinkers among the investigators speculated that the Martians might be telepathic, able to communicate instantly with each other by the power of thought alone. This possibility was elegantly demonstrated using two Martian brains within a ‘Faraday cage’. By electrically stimulating a lobe of one dead Martian’s brain, a faint electrical echo was generated in the corresponding lobe of the second dead Martian’s brain, even though the two bodies were not in physical contact. This was considered to be sufficient proof that Martian mentalities were linked in some fashion, and that they could probably have communicated fully had both subjects been alive. Being able to know another Martian’s thoughts in the heat of battle would have been a tremendous advantage. A Martian only had to think to have a message understood; the British passed messages by runners and gallopers, or by using semaphore and telegraph. No estimate as to the range of Martian telepathy was ever made, but it was felt that all the landing sites on Earth were in communication with each other. It was not considered fanciful that the Martians might also have reached their fellows on Mars by telepathy.
One worry about the Martians’ mental powers caused disquiet: could they hear human thoughts? There was no proof that the Martians were able to sense human minds or understand them if they could. This was shown by the fact that humans had managed to surprise and confound the Martians in battle. This would not have been possible if the Martians were able to read human minds. They would have been entirely forewarned of all human actions. It seems likely that the Martians were in mental control of their humanoid servitors, possibly through an artificial mechanism. Many of the servitor corpses showed signs of brain tampering, and some had strange lace-like wires inside their skulls.
One other aspect of the Martians’ anatomy caused some amazement. One corpse showed signs of ‘pregnancy’, with a Martian infant growing inside it. Given that no sexual organs were ever identified it was assumed that these children, or scions, of the Martians were identical to their parents. However, the future parent and baby were poorly preserved, making a comparison impossible. No birth canal was ever identified, leaving scientists puzzled as to whether Martians were egg-laying or gave birth to live young. This gave the writers of speculative fiction a chance to invent all kinds of lurid notions, such as the Martian newborns bursting from their dying parents, or even very slowly chewing their way out (a fiction conveniently ignoring some Martians’ lack of teeth). Later investigators have concluded that a birth sac simply dropped off a parent when the scion was ready to be ‘born’, with no more drama than a seed pod falling from a tree. Live young, though, implied colonization as well as conquest.
As far as anyone could tell, the Martians were a unified military and colonization force during the Invasion, and did not need separate formations or units for specific missions. The ‘basic unit’ was the individual Martian, controlling a Fighting or Handling Machine. Each Cylinder carried eight Fighting and Handling Machines, along with a full complement of Martians to crew them. Judging from the number of corpses recovered, they were operating some kind of watch or ‘shift’ system involving four operators per machine. This may explain why the Martians’ machines never appeared to stop: every six hours or so a new operator could take over and carry on. This practice implies superb engineering and reliability for the machines. The Martians didn’t allow for regular maintenance during the Invasion, and only repaired battle damage.
Despite superficial appearances, the Martians were not all identical. Autopsies after the Invasion showed that the Martians had a malleable body plan quite unlike that of humans; even their internal organs varied, as did the frightfulness (to human eyes) of their external appearance. It appeared that they could grow limbs, organs and even teeth as needed for a particular task or effect. All the Martian corpses found within Handling Machines, for example, possessed extra manipulator limbs compared to the pilots of Fighting Machines. The bipedal servitor creatures found aboard the cylinders and in the Martian landing camps appear to have been no more than field rations for their Martian overlords. No tools or weapons were ever found near their corpses, and Martian machinery did not have controls arranged to suit their body plan. They were not used as ‘foot soldiers’ by the Martians either, even though infantry would have been useful in winkling out defenders in cities. Earth scientists are still debating whether or not the Red Weed was an accidental transfer from Mars or some kind of biological weapon. It rapidly covered the ground like a horrible infestation of brambles, and choked many rivers and watercourses in Southern England for many weeks, but seemed unable to cope with brackish or salty water. It spread up the Thames as far as Oxford, causing a minor panic among the evacuated British government ministers when it arrived. Sheep and cattle that ate it fell ill, but insects and lower creatures found its repulsive tendrils delicious. Eventually the Weed succumbed to earthly blights and only a few specimens remain in the collection at Kew, carefully isolated from contact with terrestrial species.
THE MARTIAN SERVITORS
A second species was found in the Martian Cylinders and buried at the landing sites. These grotesque, spindly ‘servitors’ or ‘thralls’ of the Martians were humanoid in appearance, although taller than humans. Given that very little Martian machinery was adapted for use by the servitors’ hands, ‘servitor’ was possibly not the right term to use. Even as the servitors’ purpose in the Martians’ plans became clear, investigators shied away from terms like ‘food creatures’, ‘resources’ or even ‘cattle’. The servitors were too disturbingly human to be comfortably classed alongside farm animals as nourishing meals.
On examination, the servitors were found to be distinctly primate in anatomy. Scientists had no trouble in identifying all the internal organs, which were entirely analogous to those of earthly creatures. As might be expected the lungs were of prodigious complexity and size, something attributed to the thin air of Mars. The servitors’ eyes were also large and appeared to be very sensitive. This was also considered to be an adaptation to their home world’s conditions. All the servitors had undergone exactly the same brain surgery or modification before they died, as far as could be told from their remains. Holes had been drilled into every skull at the temples, and in some cases these holes were in the process of healing. While the brains were usually too rotted to allow exact analysis of what had been done, the creatures had apparently been lobotomized. In some of the servitors, elaborate metal lacework was found within the skulls, apparently wrapped around and through the brain. When three human corpses were discovered at the Brookwood site with head wounds and similar wires laced inside their skulls, there was horrified (but probably accurate) speculation that this was a mechanism for mind control.
It was obvious that the servitors had not died in battle; a few had been wounded by artillery shells and then treated. All of them had been drained of blood as they died. Thanks to eyewitness accounts, it was known that these creatures had been food for the Martians: rations brought from Mars
to sustain the invaders before they started to ‘live off the land’. The Martians either sucked or transfused the lifeblood of their servitors directly into their own veins. Given the remarkable similarity in anatomy between the servitors and primates, it is likely that these creatures were primates, kidnapped long ago from Earth. Once there, selective breeding made them a species of compliant humanoid cattle for the Martians to exploit. This might also explain the Martians’ certainty that they could take human blood as an intravenous foodstuff: they had a millennia-old taste for something very similar. Feeding from humans must have been partly to blame for their eventual destruction, simply because the Martians had no immunity to the Victorian wealth of human infections. Perhaps Martian arrogance also contributed to their downfall, a belief that they would conquer come what may, and that nothing could stand in their way.
Before the first week was over, the War Office ordered recruiting posters to be printed for the long war that was anticipated against the Martians. This appeal to British manhood, and the bizarre threat to the purity of British womanhood, was one of many posters printed and then pulped. Once again, the horror of the Martians was ‘dentally enhanced’ by the artist to drive home the message.
OTHER MARTIAN LIFE: THE ‘RED WEED’