The Martian in the Wood
Page 6
Give it a perihelic opposition, the closest approach of the worlds for another fifteen years –
From Zena’s point of view it was a tremendous explosion, at the very heart of the Wood, at precisely midnight. By a green glare she thought she saw trunks wheeling out, whole ancient trees uprooted, among a hail of shards and splinters and loose branches. And she saw a brilliant spot of light climb up and out of the Wood and up, up into the sky, flashing green as it went. “A meteorite in reverse,” she wrote to Walter.
On the ground, the Wood began to burn, at last.
* * *
The years have worn away since then.
The Wood was destroyed by the fire, and by the farmers. When the fire had burned out, the remnant stumps were blown out with dynamite, the ground ploughed over, the land broken up into fields. I am told the yield is poor, though, whether pastoral or arable, and workers are reluctant to stay long.
Has the Martian gone home? If it ever really existed, I find it hard to begrudge that interplanetary Crusoe a safe passage. By its lights, as Walter will explain to you, it did nothing wrong. For we are vermin to it, feedstock at best.
Zena Gardner went on to study Martian biology, in fact under Harbinger at the Pasteur. She never married. She has remained politically active. She has continued to care for her brother. Like many bereaved survivors of the Wars, she has found it hard to come to terms with the loss of her parents with no trace of their bodies ever found. She finds some comfort at the Tomb of the Vanished Soldier in London. All this I know from brief meetings when researching this account.
And she has emerged as something of a prophet. Zena is the first witness I have met who associates the Martians, not with heat, but with the cold, their true domain. “The Martians invaded the Earth in the hot summer of 1907,” she said to me in one of our talks. “I learned in the course of my studies with Professor Harbinger that we live in an interglacial period. That is, the Ice Ages are not just a thing of the past – the glaciers may come again, in the future. The forgotten enemy! And if so, perhaps then the Martians too will return, to an Earth made more like Mars.”
In fact, as everyone knows, they returned sooner than that.
Over the years I have made attempts to assemble my brother-in-law’s notes into some semblance of unity. But in the end I may have to abandon this Sisyphean task – a gift for future generations! Instead I offer the world such fragments as this, which may shed some light on a man who will always, I suspect, be a better-known chronicler of our extraordinary age than I could ever be.
For the record I am my brother-in-law’s literary executor. Walter Jenkins’ manuscript archives have been gifted to the care of the International Walter Jenkins Society, and are available for scholarly study at the University of Illinois.
-JULIE ELPHINSTONE, Paris, December 1946.
About the Author
STEPHEN BAXTER (“The best SF writer in Britain”—SFX) was born in Liverpool in 1957, and graduated with a degree in mathematics from Cambridge University. He is the author of Raft, Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, Ring, The Time Ships, Voyage, Titan, and Moonseed. All of his novels have been published in both Britain and the US, and most of them in Europe and Japan. He has won the Philip K. Dick Award, the John W. Cambell Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Lasswitz Award (in Germany) and the Seiun Award (in Japan). You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Baxter
Art copyright © 2017 by Mark Smith