Scarlet Traces: An Anthology Based on H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds

by Edited by Ian Edginton

  “I’m thinking of calling it carolinum,” Bea said. “After Charlie Newman, you see. Why not? We did discover it, in a way.”

  “And what does this have to do with those living flame-throwers?”

  “Well, it seems to be their power source, sir. What they live on. I don’t believe there is any evidence of such creatures elsewhere on the planet. Maybe we stumbled across the only lode of, of carolinum. If it did fall from space, like a huge asteroid, that would make sense. And these creatures have mutated, adapted to feed on it. On its compact energies.

  “But if the Martians know about carolinum, that could resolve a few puzzles about them.”

  Travers growled, “Puzzles? What puzzles?”

  “Well, sir, I recall the briefings we got in basic. We know the Martians live underground, in vast hives. But we’ve never seen any evidence of the heavy machinery we would need to dig out such caverns. Oh, you could do it with a heat ray, but it would take forever... This stuff, though, this carolinum.”

  “Yes?”

  “Sir, you could just dig a shaft, drop down a lump of it, and let it melt the cavern out for you. A couple of weeks later, Bob’s your uncle.” She seemed to grow excited. “Why, imagine what could be done with this, if we took it to Earth. Huge engineering feats.”

  “Digging canals?” I suggested.

  She snorted. “More than that. You could quicken the deserts. Thaw out the poles. We could rebuild the world with this stuff.”

  Travers thought that over. “Or,” he said slowly, “you could drop it on a city. Paris, say. Or Berlin.”

  Currie sighed. “You have a point, sir. Or drop a pellet into the drains of the Houses of Parliament. Not that I’d dream of it.”

  Outside, I could see as I drove on, the landscape was changing. We were entering the fringe of a battlefield. A very old battlefield. There were blackened and twisted wrecks everywhere, both Martian and human. Smashed weapons. I spotted plenty of the glassy scars the heat ray will make if it touches the sandy Martian ground. And bodies, blackened, twisted. In places piled up as if on funeral pyres. Human and squabs. I couldn’t tell how recent all this was.

  I reported this to Travers, who looked through his periscope. “Hm. The hinterland of Marineris Base. Charming spot. Well, this is what you get after forty years of siege warfare. And we’re still outside the Martian cordon we broke through, are we, Engineer?”

  “Yes, sir. And I can see energy releases up ahead,” Currie murmured. “They’re still fighting. We’ll have to break back through that crust of war machines again, fight our way to the base while trying to avoid getting shot up by our own lads...”

  “And then home in time for tea. One for the memoirs, eh?”

  I was curious. Or perhaps alarmed, as my small brain chugged through the possibilities. “Sir.”

  “Hm?”

  “This carolinum stuff. Maybe we should talk about it before we reach the Martians. I mean—what should we do about it? It’s sitting out there in the desert. I marked the location on the MEV’s maps, but—”

  “But right now,” Currie said, “since we had our antennae burned off, nobody but us knows it even exists.”

  I said hesitantly, “Sir, we could always leave it that way. I mean, what you said about bombing Paris—”

  “Indeed. We’d be in danger of waging a war we wouldn’t stop.” Travers looked at Currie. “And of course if even a scrap of such material got into the hands of the People’s Caledonian Militia, it could certainly change the balance of power in Britain, couldn’t it?”

  Currie faced him defiantly. “That it could, sir, That it could. But none of it matters now.” She laughed, bitter. “Don’t you see, sir? Because Galahad is coming. We have this lever in our hands that could change all of human history—or wreck it. But it makes no difference. Because none of us is going to live to tell the tale.”

  She was wrong about that, of course. But that’s another story.

  Travers frowned. “No matter what your source of information about this Galahad, Engineer, I don’t see how you can be so sure—”

  “Because it’s the bloody English doing it.” Tha bluidy Anglish. “They’ll wipe out the Martians, even if they have to kill their own troops into the bargain. That’s the English for you. Vicious, thorough bastards.”

  “Good point, well made,” Travers mused. “But, Engineer, there’s still something I can’t work out. This Galahad business. When did you first hear about it? On the Shackleton? At RAM Rendlesham, where we mustered? Or—”

  She shook her head. “Before that, sir. At Bovington, actually. A week or so before the launch.”

  Travers nodded gravely. “When we were going through our final briefings.” He seemed to see the implication of that immediately.

  But he was an officer. It took a little longer for it to work through my thick skull.

  “Bea,” I said, “that meant you got on the Shackleton knowing you weren’t coming back.”

  She shrugged.

  “Why, Bea? Why would you do that?”

  “Because we’re mevvies. We’d trained as a team for months.” She grinned. “I couldn’t abandon you lot, could I? Face it, Simms, you couldn’t have got out of that bloody goldfish tube without me.”

  I choked up. Almost. You don’t choke up in the MEV corps.

  Travers said briskly, “Well, then, it’s up to the three of us to make it worthwhile. Whatever the future holds—whether the secret of carolinum dies with us or not—this is our day. The three of us, here together in this fine vessel of ours. And there’s still a battle to be fought. You said it, Engineer; our differences with the Martians overwhelm any squabbles between us. So what do you say? Shall we go up the blue one last time?”

  I had to grin. “Yes, sir.”

  Bea shook her head. “Bluidy Anglish.”

  “Driver, advance flat out.”

  I pressed the stick.

  The battered MEV roared as it raced across the bloodstained ground, heading straight for the Martian line.

  Travers refilled his pipe.

  Something Sweet in the Superstitions

  a curious matter, by

  I. N. J. CULBARD

  SOMETHING SWEET.

  Simon Sweet? No, not Simon. Where the hell did he get Simon from? Not Peter. Not Paul. Not Mathew, Mark, Luke, or John. Damn it. How the hell could he have forgotten his own first name?

  It had to be at least 119˚ in the shade—the desert heat had started to fry his noodle. He wished to god he hadn’t lost his hat—he had left it somewhere, he couldn’t remember where—but people lost things like hats all the time. They didn’t lose their first name.

  He’d always been bad with names, but this was ridiculous.

  Something Sweet.

  He was sitting on a rock in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains—just outside Phoenix, Arizona—when a bright flash caught his eye; sunlight winking off the metal surface of an approaching vehicle. It was a Belvedere Blue Jenson Interceptor and it had long stopped travelling on any road: it scuttled over the rocks on eight, mechanical, spidery legs, kicking up dust in its wake. The staccato sound of these motorised limbs, spearing the dirt and sediment like pneumatic jack hammers, echoed around him. Sweet watched as the Interceptor stopped on the top of a ridge, the engine cut out, and the driver opened the door. Out stepped the figure of a heavyset man wearing a black, single breasted suit, a black tie, and the unmistakable head of an ant. For a brief moment it looked like the man was wearing an oversized Halloween mask, but Sweet noticed that the elbowed antennae twitched. The ant-headed man had a cigarillo clenched between his mandibles and what Sweet took to be a genuine look of malice in his compound eyes, a look that made Sweet’s heart thrash like a fly trapped in a web. Then the ant-headed man casually unbuttoned his jacket, holding out his pinky as he did so, and reached inside.

  Was he reaching for a gun?

  Sweet jumped up and scurried along the crumbling outcrop. He didn’t care for this madne
ss and he certainly didn’t much care for getting shot neither. Shale and dust shifted underfoot as he desperately tried to keep his balance, fighting the fatigue that pulled at his aching limbs. His calf muscles felt like rocks, the tendons pulling like piano wire. He hunched his shoulders in readiness as he ran, expecting to hear a shot being fired, but the only report was that of the car door slamming shut, and a second later the engine started again.

  “You’ll never make it,” said an all too familiar voice in his head. “You might as well give up now.” It was the same voice he’d been hearing for years. The same voice that would ask, “why bother” whenever he tried, and the same voice that would say, “I told you so,” whenever he failed.

  Up ahead was a steeper incline and the rock face was smooth. Would the ant-headed man be able to make it up there? Sweet glanced over his shoulder and saw that the Interceptor, with its spidery legs making shorter work of the terrain than he could on foot, was rapidly gaining on him. He reached the incline and managed to get purchase with his dirt-caked fingers, but the leather soles of his shoes slipped. He kicked them off, peeled off his eight-diamond socks, tucked them into his shoes and pushed them into the pockets of his sport coat. The pockets tore away at the seams. Without even thinking about how much he had paid for the ensemble, he threw the shoes to one side and started climbing.

  At the top of the incline, the heat of the sun on the rocks made him hop from bare foot to bare foot as he looked down to see the car approaching. It stopped at the base of the incline. The ant-headed man leaned out of the window and pointed up at Sweet— not with a gun, but with stubby little fingers, shouting something that Sweet couldn’t quite make out because his heart was beating so loud in his ears. Sweet turned and ran along the elevation.

  There were several stacked boulders ahead and, beyond that, a break where he could work his way back down the other side. He could see the wilderness stretching into a heat haze. But every step from here on out was a painful reminder that in a panicked moment of self preservation, he’d thrown away his shoes—like an idiot. His penance was now a long, painful walk.

  Sweet was burning up and nausea was beginning to set in as he navigated his way along the rocks.

  In the distance he could see a shape in the haze, something that looked out of place with the rest of its surroundings, looked like it might be a building—the ghost of a house. After a few hundred yards hopping and skipping whenever his feet caught something sharp, he could see that it was in fact a single storey cottage with a steeply pitched catslide roof. It had whitewashed clapboard sidings and a red panelled front door. To the side of it was a garage.

  The heat was bearing on him. He slipped off his jacket and placed it over his head, but that just made him warmer and it felt heavy. He dropped the jacket as he staggered towards the house, energy draining from his body with every step. A sharp pain in one toe reminded him to pay closer attention to where he was going, but everything was becoming a blur. His throat was so dry it hurt to swallow, and it hurt to blink. What had set him on this path? What had brought him to this place? Had he done something wrong? Had he hurt somebody? Robbed somebody? Killed somebody? What dumb stupid selfish thing had he done, and why? Money? Love? Nothing really mattered right now except the distance he could put between him and that ant-headed thing, and all he wished for now was a cool glass of water…

  When he eventually reached the garage door, he found it slightly ajar. He looked inside. There were pegboards displaying a variety of power tools on each of the walls, and in the far corner was a door—closed—which presumably led into the house. Elevated on a jack ramp in the centre of the garage was a cricket-green Oldsmobile ’98 with the hood open. There was a beat-up old red toolbox on the floor. Next to this was a wooden chair, freckled with white paint, and beside that a workbench laden with various tools and tins of oil and, most important of all, what looked to be a glass of water. All told, the coast appeared to be clear—and Sweet stepped into the welcoming shade, pulling the rickety garage door closed behind him. For now, at least, the sun was off his back.

  The concrete floor, with its blossomed oil stains, was cool underfoot. He looked to the house door and then at the glass of water. Someone could come out of that door at any moment and then what? How would he explain himself? What was he doing here? He made a beeline for the water, picked up the glass in trembling hands and drank. It felt like every part of him could breathe again. The coolness radiated within him and the tension flooded out of him. In his mind’s eye, chill ocean waves lapped along a dry sandy shore and he fell hard into the water’s embrace, dizzy with rapturous relief, floating out into the blissful swell. Away, away—

  “Pass me the wrench.”

  The sound of the voice almost made Sweet choke. He looked around, but he couldn’t see anybody. Was he hearing voices now?

  “On the worktop,” the voice said, “can you see it?”

  Sweet looked over at the workbench where he saw a large yellow handled adjustable wrench with BusyBee written on the side in black letters. He put the glass down and picked up the wrench.

  “Over here,” said the voice, and Sweet looked down. A pair of legs wearing dark brown pleat-fronted trousers and black shoes were sticking out from under the car. An arm, with sleeves of a dark blue shirt rolled up to the elbow, was reaching up. The fingers were like knotted wooden twigs covered in grease and oil. “I would come out an’ say hello, only Mrs Gibson is expectin’ her car ship-shape and I said it would be ready by three. An’ besides, my hands are—you wouldn’t wanna shake ’em.”

  Sweet placed the wrench in the grasp of the reaching hand.

  “You have a name?” the voice asked.

  “I’m… Sweet.”

  “Just Sweet?” the voice asked.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Well, Sweet, my name’s William T. Hunnicut. But you can call me Bill. All my friends call me Bill. My guess would be you’ve been having a very bad day, am I right?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Take a load off, son,” said Hunnicut, and without hesitation, Sweet sat down in the wooden chair and sank back against the garage wall. There was something comforting about Mister Hunnicut, or Bill as he’d insisted Sweet call him; something reassuring in the tone of his voice.

  “If you want more water, there’s a pail by the back door,” said Hunnicut’s voice from under the car, but Sweet was too exhausted to get back up again. “You a long way from home, young man?”

  “Truth be told, I’m a little lost and a lot confused.”

  “The heat’ll do that to ya’.”

  “I think someone is chasing me.”

  “The heat’ll do that to ya’ too,” Hunnicut laughed.

  “No,” Sweet said earnestly, “I mean, I know they are.”

  “What’d they look like?” Hunnicut asked.

  “Like something you wouldn’t believe. Like if I described… it, you’d think I was crazy.”

  “Try me,” Hunnicut said.

  “I’m not crazy,” Sweet said, “even if I have lost my mind.”

  “You haven’t lost your mind, son,” Hunnicut laughed, “you just misplaced it on account o’ the heat.”

  “Like a hat?”

  “Like a hat. Now… think back, where did you last leave it?”

  SOMETHING SWEET.

  Something beginning with L.

  The printer had done a lousy job and the first name on Sweet’s business card was blurred. He’d only had a hundred printed and managed to get a seventy percent discount for the error. “You’ve gotta take what you can get,” as a wiseass once said.

  It was a hot day in May, and the ants had come out to play.

  Sweet knocked on the front door of a ranch-style house in the cookie-cutter suburban Phoenix neighbourhood of Sun City. Identical houses with identical immaculate lawns and identical white picket fences lined a street that curved out of view. Sun City was laid out in concentric circles—golf courses linin
g the outer perimeter, then houses, and various amenities at the centre. It had been built as a retirement community for ‘snowbirds’, retirees who’d migrated from the cold north to the Valley of the Sun because, as the locals liked to say, “you don’t have to shovel sunshine.” Sweet’s father was one such bird, but he died just before he could sign the paperwork and roost. Sweet, however could see other opportunities in Sun City. There was money to be made here, people with disposable incomes. He liked to think of himself as the spider and Sun City as his web, full of potential customers, or ‘prospects’ as was the parlance of his trade.

  The home owner was a recent widow, Gloria Mann. Her husband, Leonard Mann, who was at least forty years her senior, had died just one day shy of a hundred years old—close but no cigar—and left his grieving widow a considerable sum of money. As a wiseass once told Sweet, “Always read the obituaries.” The wiseass had also been quick to point out that there wasn’t all that much difference between a conman and a salesman. The conman had their Mark; salesman had their Prospect—and it wasn’t stealing if you could convince a person to give you their money of their own free will. Hadn’t Gloria Mann done just that? Hadn’t she convinced old “Lenny, darling” to leave her all his money? They were husband and wife, sure, but she couldn’t possibly have married an old fart like that for love, could she? It wasn’t difficult for Sweet to see it that way and it was thinking like that that helped him sleep at night because although he saw himself as a consummate and honest salesman, in his heart of hearts he knew. He knew.

  There stood an ermine white Corvette Stingray in the driveway of this particular home, the sun shining off its hardtop like the glare off a bald man’s pate. The owner, Sweet thought to himself, probably only bought American. This was going to be a tough sell, and it wouldn’t help his case that he parked his Tahoe Green Studebaker out front neither. He usually would park at least a block away. Sweet was in the business of selling British domestic vacuum cleaners, door to door, and if people saw he had an American car… well, something about geese and gander sprang to mind and on top of that, if truth be told, he wasn’t that good at his job. But “you’ve gotta take what you can get.”