Frank was still speaking, rather dully, of the changes in the air. ‘I’m no scientist, but I’ve done some simple tests. Schoolboy chemistry stuff – you know. Over the weed, where it is densest anyhow, the composition of the air differs from the norm of the atmosphere. I suspect the Martian plants are in fact removing the dominant components of our air, that is the nitrogen and oxygen, leaving an apparent excess of the rest: water vapour and carbon dioxide and so on. Also I suspect there’s a higher concentration of argon – as Rayleigh determined, argon is the next significant component in our air – but I’d need a more sophisticated chemistry set than I’ve been able to scramble together to establish that.
‘It’s a steady sequestration. I believe the nitrogen and oxygen are being fixed in some compound in the weeds’ root system, deep underground, just as some of our own plants will fix nitrogen. Whatever other purpose the weed serves – and both sorts of Martian folk can eat the weed, even if we can’t – it’s a pretty efficient air extractor! And if you imagine that action scaled up to a field, or a few acres, or square miles . . .’
I looked at him. ‘Martian folk? Both sorts? What Martian folk?’
Frank pointed downstream to the working party. ‘Let me show you.’
We made our way in that direction.
Of course it was the soldiers Ted was most interested in speaking to, and never mind Martian exotica; we had to take a short detour and meet them. And of all the sights I might have expected to see in this confiscated corner of England, I would never have guessed at German soldiers tending potatoes.
It was all rather gentlemanly. One of the chaps strolling around inspecting the others’ work turned out to be senior, though like the rest he wore a shapeless straw hat, shirtsleeves, and trousers with braces. As Frank introduced us he shook my hand, and Ted Lane’s. ‘Newcomers, eh? Welcome to the madhouse. I’m Bob Fairfield, Lieutenant-Colonel if it makes a difference any more.’ He eyed me with open speculation, and my dusty state, and I wondered what he knew of my mission – ether the cover story or the true purpose. Uneasily I began to realise that I had no idea who I could trust here.
Ted, meanwhile, stood to attention and snapped out a salute. ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Oh, at ease, Sergeant.’ Fairfield glanced at his toiling troops, earthing up rows of potato plants with rusty spades, who looked upon us with a kind of resentful curiosity. ‘Two years it’s been since the great Martian curtain came down and trapped us all in here. We must keep up discipline; I’ve always been convinced it’s the best way for the men – and as you can see, there’s plenty of work to be done. After two years we’ve long since exhausted the bully beef and beans we brought with us, and we must make do with what we can grow. I can always use an enthusiastic NCO, if you’re up for it.’
Ted glared at the privates, who looked back at him, mudstreaked and sweating and resentful. Ted grinned. ‘It’ll be a pleasure, sir.’
‘Meanwhile let me introduce you to my colleague. I’m sure it’s well known outside that a number of Germans, fighting alongside us against the Martians, were trapped in here too. Damn good allies they were during the battle, and damn good companions they’ve proved in this big green prison camp. Their most senior officer is a Feldwebelleutnant Schwesig. Let’s see if I can find him . . .’
They strolled off among the toiling men. Beyond this riverbottom field I could clearly see those others that I had seen before, the tall skinny ones, the squat hairy ones.
Frank was more interested in the potatoes. ‘Actually it was my idea. Or rather Mildred Tritton’s, and I took it to Fairfield and the rest.’
‘Mildred?’
‘Local farmer. Absolute brick; you’ll meet her soon enough. We tried to get ourselves organised from the beginning, you know. The loss of the electricity and the telephones hit us on the first night; grub was the issue by the end of the first week. So we dug old ploughshares and the like out from the back of barns, and set to work opening up fields that hadn’t been ploughed for twenty or thirty years. All back-breaking labour without machinery, of course, and we had a lack of horses too, but we got it done, and the soldier boys were a pool of muscle that needed application. We resurrected other old skills as the months went by. We had to mend our clothes because we couldn’t buy new. Some of the old dears remembered local cottage industries like straw-plaiting, and now you’ll see English privates in straw hats like Chinese coolies. As for medicine, we’ve had drops of supplies of antibiotics and various drugs, and splints and bandages and the like. Anyhow that was how we got through the first year, with stores, and hard work, and good will.’
‘And the Martians just let you do all this? Play Old MacDonald at the feet of the fighting-machines?’
He gave me an oddly furtive look – a look I would quickly come to recognise in the Cordon. ‘If they’re certain we are doing them no harm they let us be. We’re survivors, Julie. Not warriors.’
‘I’m not here to judge, Frank.’
‘Yes, but -’
‘And what of the potatoes in the river bed?’
‘A challenge of the second year. Just when we were getting somewhere with the field clearances and such, the rivers started drying up. Look – you can see how the Martian weed is choking the stream, using up all the surface water. Bad news for us and our animals, of course.
‘But look at the river-bed mud that’s exposed. That we can use. Heavy river-bottom mud, when it dries a bit, is perfect growing ground for potatoes. We had to be cautious, because it meant coming close to the skinnies where they worked at the red weed, in the rivers.’
‘The skinnies?’
He looked at me. ‘The humanoids. From the Martian cylinders.’
‘I remember, from ’07 . . .’
‘All we found last time was drained corpses. This time -’
Despite my overwrought state, this news evoked wonder. ‘Alive? Men from Mars?’
‘Not men. And not just from Mars, either, it seems.’
I had to see for myself. Boldly, I walked down the river course, past the soldiers, towards those toiling others.
Others. They plucked and dragged and gathered the red weed, the leaves and sacs and pods and cactus-like growths, leaving the deeper roots intact. Much of this harvest they lay out on the river bank, as if to dry it. Some of it they tucked into their mouths, munching placidly as they worked.
I had not concentrated on the task; some queer dread in me recoiled from looking too hard at those performing it. Now I made myself face them.
There were two sorts, both basically human – or humanoid, to use that odd, distancing word. The two kinds kept to their own groups.
One kind were tall, skinny indeed – taller than me at six feet or more, with odd round heads and big eyes over small faces, and pinched mouths; their faces were oddly babyish. Naked they were, and all but sexless, the males with shrunken organs, the females breasts that were almost flat. Many wore bandages of a crude kind on their legs and arms – even, in one case, a splinted arm. Nude, pale, hairless, they looked fragile, and the work, light as it was, seemed an effort for them. They seemed quite incurious about me and Frank, and the sweating soldiers just yards away.
‘They all seem to be adults,’ I remarked to Frank, in a whisper – oddly I felt shy before these creatures even as I gawped at them.
‘Yes, but there have been children born here,’ he said. ‘Since the landings in ’20, I mean. They’ve been glimpsed. Of course we’ve had a few human babies too . . . That one,’ he pointed at one female, ‘appears to be carrying. Shows quickly on such an attenuated frame.’
‘Many of them are injured.’
He nodded. ‘Their bones are brittle, as you’d expect – meant for a lighter gravity than ours. They evidently have medicine of a sort, but it’s crude. I’ve seen them at it. As if to set an arm is a habit so old it has become a matter of instinct, like a bird building a nest - not knowledge, or learning. D’ye see? I’d like to know if their skeletons are of the same silice
ous sort discovered in the debris of the ’07 landings. Of course none survived that trip, consumed en route between planets; we only found the remains, drained of blood. While this stock -’
‘Are here to breed.’
‘Yes. So we see a Martian ecology being established on the earth, Julie. There is the red weed; the humanoids consume that as our cattle consume the grass; and, just as we in turn consume the cattle -’
I shuddered. ‘Do you think they understand how they are being used?’
‘Perhaps. But so much of what they do seems instinctive, as I said; perhaps they have been slaves so long -’
‘Natural selection has shaped them to the fate.’
‘It may be,’ he said bleakly.
As I watched the Martian humanoids toil I wondered if this was the future for Abbotsdale – for all humanity. Would we too evolve into slavery, until we forgot the slavery itself?
‘But those others,’ Frank said, walking on, ‘do not seem so adapted to their indenture.’
He meant the other sort of humanoids – perhaps a dozen of them, as there were a dozen of the skinny sort. These were shorter – not very short, they wouldn’t have seemed out of place from that point of view in the poorer districts of London – and where the skin of the tall ones had been pale to the point of translucent, these were brownish, under a thick coat of body hair. Where the others’ eyes seemed too large for the day and they turned habitually from the sun, these had small black eyes, and I would see them blunder into each other, as if the bright light of an English May day was not sufficient for them. And while they did not seem as stocky as a human, their bones not as robust, they were certainly heavier than the tall ones.
‘Barely adapted at all,’ Frank said. ‘As if they have been newly acquired.’
‘Newly? What do you mean?’
‘Well, look at them,’ he said gently. ‘The tall ones are from Mars – I think we can agree to that. So they are suited to the lower gravity and the dimness of the more remote sun.’
‘Big eyes and fragile bones.’
‘That’s it. Whereas this new lot, of which specimens were not retrieved from the ’07 wrecks, seem adapted to a brighter daylight than ours, and a gravity that may be only a little lighter than our own, not as weak as the one-third of Mars. And that coat of body hair -’
‘It almost looks aquatic.’
‘My thought exactly,’ he said. ‘Like a water mammal, an otter or a seal.’
‘Not much water on Mars.’
‘No. But I don’t think this lot are from Mars. It’s a miracle they are able to subsist on the red weed, as the skinny ones do – or perhaps that’s just another example of the Martians’ biological manipulation.’
These toiling others, the hair on their legs caked in mud, looked back at us with a kind of furtive boldness. And I thought I heard them mutter to each other in an odd, high-pitched, almost gurgling sing-song. It occurred to me that I had not heard the tall humanoids utter a word to each other, and did not even know if they were capable of it; perhaps language had been bred out of them too by their monstrous masters.
‘Then if not from Mars – where, Frank?’
‘They’re from Venus,’ Frank said flatly. ‘The Martians went to that planet, and brought them here to the earth. I think they’re from Venus, Julie. Here in England!’
19
A DINNER PARTY
On arrival at Abbotsdale the first order of business was to organise transport to rescue our party of stranded sappers. Horses and carts were briskly dispatched; Ted Lane rode back with them.
Abbotsdale, meanwhile, I quickly discovered, was an odd place. Well, how could it not be?
I thought I could read the pre-Martian history of the village, such as it was, in the ruin of an ancient abbey that had no doubt given the place its name, a manor house, two venerable farmhouses which might have been eighteenth-century, and a couple of lanes of cottages built on what had been common land until only a few decades back – the cottages, I learned, had once housed brickmakers who had worked on the common, and whose trade was now being eagerly researched and recovered – and a scattering of more modern houses built here for commuting businessmen, as a kind of backwash from the nearby railway line. Sprinkle the dish with a couple of pubs, a school in ugly London brick, and a brace of nineteenth-century churches faced with flint, the architectural motif of the area, and you had a typical village of middle England of the time and the place.
Save that now Abbotsdale was a Martian colony. You could see it in the red weed that had infiltrated even into the heart of the village, and climbed all over one of the old churches like some gruesome ivy.
And, I thought from the off, you could see it in the faces of the people trapped there.
Frank had been given permission to move into one of the old cottages by the common, the middle one of a terrace – it was actually called ‘The Brickmaker’s Cottage’ – and he quickly sorted out spare rooms for myself and Ted Lane to sleep in.
I unpacked such gear as I had in my small pack. Frank found a sensible trouser suit for me, borrowed from a fellow villager, which almost fit. There was no running water – the wells in the village, long abandoned, had been laboriously dug out, but you had to pump it up. I put my clothes in to soak. I felt I could have enjoyed a long, deep, hot bath myself to soak out the concrete dust, the traces of cordite, the scent of blood and fear. But there wasn’t enough hot water. I found the domestic routine oddly comforting, reassuring. Fragments of normality, assembling themselves around me after the vast shock of Ben Gray’s terrible death, and all the rest.
There was no power, of course, no electric light, but the evening was mild, and light enough that a candle’s glow was sufficient for me to see to brush my hair before dinner. Dinner, yes! For that evening we newcomers were been invited to sup in the home of Mildred Tritton.
I was shown briefly around Mildred’s farmhouse. It was more than comfortable, I found, having shrugged off the loss of modern amenities like electricity and gas that had arrived so recently in its own long history; there was a big kitchen range, for instance, greedily burning wood. One room had been given over as a local library, where what books the villagers had had about them when the Cordon came down were brought and shared, with an accounts book as a kind of ledger of loans. Beside a bookshelf I found a Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin within which was stored mail; I was to learn that there were fairly regular aerial drops of mail into the Cordon – and, indeed, of Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits.
There was quite a guest list for dinner, I learned as we sat down: a mayor or two, a priel of town councillors, a senior bobby with his jacket unbuttoned, the Vicar whose broken spectacles had been fixed by a bit of tape, Frank who had become the local doctor. Bob Fairfield German friend, the Feldwebelleutnant already forgotten - local potentates all. The most significant absentees, with places set for them at the farmhouse’s long table, were the Dowager Lady Bonneville, lady of the manor, but she sent a boy with a note to say that her gout was troubling her, and the postmaster, a fellow called Cattermole, who sent no note, and whose empty place, I noticed, went unremarked.
The meal was a kind of buffet, essentially cold meat – rabbit - and potatoes, washed down with a couple of bottles of the village’s diminishing communal stock of wine, and there was some chatter about how a Zepp might be persuaded to drop a crate or two to replenish the cellars – but none of that Teutonic hock, thank you! – and our tame German soldier laughed politely. But anyhow the consensus seemed to be that if any luxury were to be dropped it ought to be cigarettes; the lack of tobacco was a persistent theme of the conversation.
The guests talked business of a sort, of progress on various communal projects. I spoke a little to Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield. He was interested in details of the Trench and other military works, of which he had heard by wireless, but none of which, of course, he had seen for himself, having been stranded inside the Cordon since the day the Martians had landed.
&nbs
p; Ted Lane seemed to be doing all right in this company. His Mersey accent alone was a curiosity here. For myself I felt oddly bewildered, oddly out of place – as if none of this was real – as if the only reality, in fact, was that peculiarly empty place at the table where the postmaster should have been sitting.
At dessert, Mrs Tritton somewhat bossily rearranged our seating places to mix up the conversation, and I found myself was there with his whose name I had sitting next to the hostess herself, as I struggled to fork down stewed summer fruit.
There had been mention of a blood bank which Frank was maintaining with the help of his friend Verity Bliss, who turned out to be a VAD. ‘Now Mrs Tritton brought this up. ‘You must call by in the morning, my dear,’ she told me. ‘We all make our donations – you get such a feeling of satisfaction to know you may help save someone’s life . . .
‘You’ll find things aren’t so bad here – well, I suppose you’re as stuck here as the rest of us, aren’t you? I was surprised how many of the soldiers are the urban sort – maybe I should have expected it. They have had trouble fitting in. Some of them, you know, they’ve seen men killed, but slaughter a sheep or a cow in front of them . . . Of course we have these Martians stomping around. Oddly, they seem to be amused to watch the soldiers when they drill, as if we’re clever animals. Like trained monkeys . . .
The Massacre of Mankind Page 25