‘Of course they were. They were made by the same agency.’
‘The Martians?’
‘Of course the Martians! Who did not have the time to complete the construction of a similar symbol of possession of the earth back in ’07, though the work was begun.’
‘It was? A sigil on Earth? I never heard of that,’ said Eric, evidently confused ‘And the Jovian sigil -’
‘Quite different in character, obviously – the Jovians’ was a near-perfect circle -’
Frank broke in, ‘For God’s sake, Walter, can you never get to the point? What has all this to do with us, and your brains in Berlin?’
‘Everything,’ said Bert Cook. ‘For ’e’s giving us the bigger picture. Aren’t you, Walter?’
‘Bert?’ said Walter. ‘How odd to hear your voice again.’
‘How’s your poker play?’
‘And how’s your chess? You’re right, though. This is indeed the bigger picture. The context of our petty lives. For, you see, if the nebular hypothesis is to be believed, a kind of migration between the worlds is a necessity if life is to survive . . .’ As most people knew then, and understand better today, it was Kant who first suggested that the sun had once coalesced from a vast gas cloud - that was in the 1750s - and then Laplace, a great Newtonian, described how the spinning sun would cast off successive belts of dust and gas, expanding like smoke rings, toroids that would ultimately collapse into worlds. It took another century before the followers of the Scot physicist James Clerk Maxwell managed to resolve certain problems concerning the transfer of angular momentum . . .
The relevant point of the hypothesis, now universally accepted, is that the further a world is from the sun the older it must be, and the older, too, its freight of life and mind. But since life first emerged it has faced challenges. Our best physics has it that as the sun itself ages it is cooling, year on year. That is why the Martians were driven to the earth, as an Ice Age without end crept upon their planet. Some day our own world will suffer the same fate: the oceans will freeze from the coasts, the rains will diminish, the higher forms of life will die out and the lesser shrivel to sleeping spores. Whither mankind?
A mature but doomed civilisation must reach out to the younger worlds for room to live. It is the logic of Kant and Laplace; it must be so.
‘Which,’ Walter said, ‘is why the Martians must come again to our younger earth. Oh, they have made a stab at Venus – and that is the ultimate prize in the far future, for ourselves too.
Within Venus is only Mercury, younger still but a lifeless cinder.
Yes, Venus is the prize.
‘But –
‘But out on the rim sits Jupiter, largest planet of all – fully seven times as old as Mars, even. And this ancient and enormous planet may be the seat of -’
Frank grabbed the handset from Philip. ‘Into the inferno with Jupiter, Hubble and all! You wouldn’t have dragged us all together, from across the damn ocean, just to talk about Jupiter.
What is it you really have to tell us, man?’
But – typical of the man! - still Walter hesitated, as if gathering his thoughts.
And Eric Eden said, ‘We’re here to speak of the Martians, of course.’
An awkward silence! None of us knew how to respond, and Walter fell silent.
So it was Eric, again, who spoke next. ‘Actually I would say that serious military thinking argues against another invasion. After all, their first shot was a hopeless attempt. The Martians couldn’t stand the different atmospheric pressure, they couldn’t stand the difference in gravitation, our bacteria finished them up – them andtheir red weed. Hopeless from the start.’
‘But that was only a scouting mission,’ Walter whispered. ‘You have to start somewhere. Columbus in the Americas. And he thought he was in Asia! Consider how difficult it is to observe the earth from Mars . . . As seen from Mars, the earth is an inner planet – as Venus is to the earth – that is, closer to the sun. They must have known little of our world, before launching that first cylinder. And yet they knew something.’
Eric Eden frowned. ‘Prove it.’
‘I can, easily. Remember the timings of the firings of their great cannon? Ten shots in all, each fired at our midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, and each landed at local midnight. Now the Martian day is longer than ours – nearer twenty-four and a half hours – and “midnight” at the cylinders’ launch site did not coincide with that in Britain. So their timetable, for symbolic or other reasons, was keyed precisely, not to the time at the launch site -’
‘But to the time at the target,’ Eden said softly. ‘Even the launch timing! I never thought of that.’
‘Exactly. Nobody has, before me. As to the rest, consider how different our earth is to their own world, how much they must have learned, and how quickly! Their seas are shallow and cover only a third of their world; our deep oceans cover twice as much of earth. And so the oceans have become our highway of choice – on Mars, it must be the land.’
‘No wonder they were baffled by our ships, then,’ Frank said. ‘Off Tillingham, I saw them amazed by the torpedo ram that got amongst ’em.’
‘That’s it. Meanwhile, Mars is famously arid – it snows in winter, a fall that blankets the planet, but they need the canals seen by Schiaparelli and Lowell to water the land otherwise. Perhaps they have no rain! If you had never seen it, you might not even guess at the existence of such a phenomenon. And so, in poor weather, their Black Smoke would simply have washed out of the air, even before they laid it.’
Frank the doctor asked, ‘And what of our bacteria and viruses? That was new to them too, evidently.’
‘A lacuna in their knowledge when they came, yes. I speculate they must have eliminated whole microscopic continents of such creatures deep in their past, perhaps while they were in the process of remaking their own bodies. So long ago they simply forgot such perils – as a Roman, say, would have been surprised to be savaged by a wolf at the heart of a city in Italy. But they learned, the hard way, and next time will come prepared.’
Cook leaned forward. ‘But there’s a question of intelligence, you see. Of signalling and communications. Every soldier knows that. All those Martians who came ’ere are dead. How could they have got the message back, then, about gun boats and germs, back across space to Mars?’
Walter said tensely, ‘I explored this issue in my memoir. I observed the Martians in life as closely as anyone – yes, I still maintain it is so, Major Eden! And I still argue that what I saw with my own eyes, of their ability to carry through complex communal tasks all without a word being spoken, is evidence of some kind of telepathy. A direct link, mind to mind. Why, isn’t it logical? The Martians have stripped away their bodies until they are nothing but mind. And if a Martian mind may speak to another across a pit in England -’
Cook rubbed his chin. ‘Then why not between worlds?’
Philip, the voice of common sense, guffawed. ‘Oh, this is all fanciful.’
‘So would the idea of warriors from Mars have been once, cousin,’ Walter said regretfully.
Eden objected now, ‘But if that’s so why the sigils, the markings on the faces of the worlds?’
Cook said, ‘Nothing wrong with that. Just as a Navy tub will fly the White Ensign, even though those boys talk to each other with the wireless telegraph these days, instead of with flags like ol’ Nelson in ’is day.’
‘Or perhaps,’ Eden said with an uncertain grin, ‘it’s a marker. Telling the men from Jupiter to keep off.’
‘Or vice versa,’ Walter whispered. ‘Which is the point I’ve been trying to make . . .’
As this conversation unfolded, of the mind-reading of the Martians and other exotica, I glanced at Carolyne, Walter’s former wife, who had not been addressed since the beginning of the conversation. She sat rather slumped, her face an expressionless mask – not bitter, somehow accepting.
At last Philip, sensible as ever, cut across the talk. ‘Very well, Frank, you�
��ve done scaring us. Tell us your news, man!’
‘We’ve seen the shots,’ Walter said, almost gently. ‘The shots on Mars.’
‘Ah,’ said Eric Eden softly, sounding oddly disappointed.
And there it was – at last!
The tension broke within me, as if I had received a grim but not unexpected diagnosis of illness. I remembered again how I thought I had seen that solitary fighting-machine on Primrose Hill move its head-like cowl – as if in anticipation. It had distressed me – I thought I had been seeing things . . . Perhaps it knew, through some machine telepathy of its own . . .
This was the way of it with Walter, of course. If you’ve read his Narrative you’ll know he wasn’t a man to walk in a straight line. He set off from the ruins of Woking in search of his wife, at Leatherhead, and ended up on Primrose Hill, at the greatest concentration of Martians in England. Of course! If you want to find Walter Jenkins, go where the Martians are. And as then, so it was now, with this rambling affair of second-party messages and transatlantic crossings: in the end here we all were facing the Martians once again.
Philip was angry, reasonably enough. ‘You have such news, Walter, and you yattered on about Jupiter -’
‘But it’s as Bert said,’ Walter replied, his voice faint. ‘You have to see the bigger picture.’
‘Oh, to Hades with your bigger picture, you pompous ass,’ Frank protested. ‘When? When did the firing start? On February 27? Because if they kept to the same timetable as last time that’s when they’d had to have fired, with an opposition on April 21 -’
Cook snarled. ‘And if it’s so, the governments have kept it quiet after all -’
‘No,’ Walter said softly. ‘Earlier than that. The strategy’s evidently different this time, although it’s not yet obvious how. The guns started firing earlier – nine days – on February 18.’
Frank was as furious as his cousin by now. ‘You’re saying now that they started to fire in February! Why, that means the landings must be close – what, days away, no more? And it is only now you warn us, with this farce of messages across the Atlantic?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Walter said, still more quietly. ‘You must understand that the information I have is partial, gathered in shards and scraps - the security is heavy here, and it was difficult for me to get in touch with you at all - then it took time for you to come together. I suppose I might have planned it better. I did my best, Frank, to give you this warning. I did my best.’
Oddly enough, I believed him.
And Cook, the military man, picked up on the key detail. ‘You said guns, Jenkins. The guns started firing. Not gun.’
‘That’s it. More than one this time, Bert. More than one gun, on Mars.’
We looked at each other in horror, we veterans of the First War.
Walter continued to speak, his voice frail and faint, dogged. ‘We think we saw the casting of the new weapons – just as, in retrospect, we glimpsed the casting of the first at the opposition of 1894, when the workers at Nice and Lick saw an anomalous glaring on the surface. They had one cannon last time. Now it’s ten. Ten we’ve seen to fire, anyhow. A belt of them in low latitudes, spread around the planet.
‘We’ve been able to map it against Schiaparelli’s scheme of the canals. Perhaps you know that the canals are tremendous affairs, some thousands of miles long – and they meet, in groups of three or four or five, with geometric precision, in junction places, “nodes” as Lowell called them, or “oases”. The greatest of them all is a node called Solis Lacus, the Lake of the Sun – a sort of nerve centre for the whole planet, I suspect, from which any point can be reached. But there are others, at Trivium Charontis, Ceraunius, the Cyane Fons. These junctions of transport network may be like our cities.’
Philip the industrialist said, ‘And so centres of population, of manufacture. And if you’re seeking to build an interplanetary cannon -’
Cook nodded. ‘All right. Ten cannon instead of one. Last time it was ten shots -’
‘This time there were a hundred, Bert. Ten from each gun. Last time a flotilla; this time a veritable fleet.’
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘But what about the oppositions? Why come now, four years before the next minimum approach?’ I could hear a complaining whine in my voice, I admit. Like everybody else in those days, I would watch the skies at every opposition with Mars, even the most unfavourable. But I knew that the next most likely date for an attack was two years hence. Not now! It’s not fair! That was how I, quite unreasonably, reacted.
But Walter was reason itself, in his fashion. ‘But last time they came in ’07, two years before that minimum. Perhaps they planned, and abandoned, a follow-up shot for the perihelic optimum at ’09. We’ll never know, of course. There’s no reason to suppose they haven’t expanded their capabilities to exploit less and less favourable oppositions – why not?’
Cook nodded grimly. ‘Well, at least we’ll be prepared this time, if we can get the guns up before they open their shells – and if we can predict where they’ll fall.’
‘But they may not land in any kind of neat sequence,’ Walter said. ‘Oh, there will be constraints of graphic geometry.’
It was a remark that baffled me at the time – but it turned out to be key to the whole issue, as I will relate in its proper place.
‘But we know,’ Walter went on, ‘that even last time the cylinders did not simply drop from the sky. We know they must have slowed at least, to avoid being smashed against the ground like so many falling meteorites. Most observers saw green flashes as they fell – I did myself. Tsiolkovsky and others speculate this is some kind of motor, a rocket perhaps, which slowed and directed a cylinder’s trajectory.’
‘That’s a nasty thought,’ Cook said softly. ‘So we can’t predict anything from the dates of the launch. They could land anywhere, any time they liked.’
‘That’s it,’ Walter said. ‘And though they fired off ten cylinders per night, there’s nothing to stop them joining up in space. We can only wait and watch. There’s a global network of spotter ’scopes watching the skies, international and highly secret. We might have a few hours’ notice, at best.’ He sighed. ‘But to me their destination is obvious, and I’ve made my case as forcefully I can to the authorities. They must return to England.’
The six of us absorbed that dread but oddly authoritative warning in a brief silence. I think I had expected it – the Martian on the Hill! Even so it was a shock.
Eden said, ‘Walter, I still don’t see it all. As I understand the way you’ve explained it, they came to Britain last time because we had been first into the Industrial Revolution – yes? London the largest city. All of which you could see from Mars. And if you believe, as the Martians seem to, that we must be a unified civilisation, as they may be, then you come to the World Capital for a quick decapitation. Fine. But, look, they could land anywhere on the earth. Why England again?’
‘Because of what I saw at Shepperton. Bert, I thought you saw it too. When Marvin’s guns downed a fighting-machine, and the battle was done, the others came back for it, and carried it back to the pit at Horsell. You know, it’s easy to speak of the Martians as evil and unethical and so forth. We should not judge their ethics on the way they behave towards us, for we are vermin – farm animals at best – to them. No, we must judge them on how they behave to each other. They talk, they cooperate - they come back for their fallen. And that’s why they’ll come back to England.’
I thought with a shudder of the pickled specimen of a Martian, on display in the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum in Kensington. I myself had viewed it many times.
At last Philip said, ‘So this is why you called us.’
‘I am aware have called some of you, Julie, back from places of relative safety.’
But I was already thinking ahead, planning. I would call on my sister-in-law, she with whom I had fled the Martians last time. ‘Never mind that. You did the right thing, Walter,’ I said as firmly as I
could.
Eden glanced at Cook. ‘I think I’ll go back to my old regiment, at the Inkerman barracks. What about you, Bert?’
Cook’s eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, if the Martians come again I know just where I want to be.’
Frank stiffened. ‘And I’ll get my wife and son to safety, and I thank you for that, Walter. But as to myself – if the Martians do come, I will have my duty as a doctor and a soldier, of the Fyrd at least.’
‘Of course you will,’ I said coldly.
Walter whispered, ‘And – Carolyne?’
She looked up. ‘Now you think of me?’
‘Always. You know that I – before - that I had counted you among the dead . . .’
‘Oh, Walter -’
‘Philip?’
Walter’s cousin looked up. ‘I’m here.’
‘I must ask you to care for her, as you did before -’
‘Oh, you fool, Walter.’ Carolyne snatched the telephone handset, and yelled into it, ’You bloody fool!’ And she slammed it down into its cradle.
Marina Ogilvy took her hands.
Philip shook his head. ‘You’re right, he is a fool. And so indirect. Always was. But I wonder if all of this – never mind the babble about Jupiter – was all, really, about saving you, Carolyne.’
I said cautiously, ‘He does love you. He always did.’
‘I know,’ said Carolyne bleakly. ‘I read about it in his book.’
10
TO STANMORE AND LONDON
We all stayed over in Ottershaw that night.
Marina took one more call from Walter, in the small hours, and then she woke the rest of us. He was able to confirm the likely date of the landings. It would be at midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, the morning of Monday March 29. The logic made some sense; the landing would be four weeks, four days after the final gun firing, just as with the sequence of 1907. Still there had been no public announcement.
Monday, then. Our meeting at Ottershaw had been on the Thursday. We had little time. On the Friday morning, after a breakfast and hurried farewells, we scattered to our various destinations.
The Massacre of Mankind Page 6