The tarpaulins were whisked away – and Eden saw the men around him goggle. For, arrayed on the back of each truck, were Heat-Ray cameras. Old now, battered, some visibly patched, these weapons had been retrieved and stored from the wreckage of the earlier Martian expedition. At great risk, and considerable loss of life, as Eden, drafted in as a relative expert on Martian technology, had witnessed for himself, human engineers had discovered how to work them. Now brave souls standing on the trailers swivelled the generators on the big mounts to which they had been attached. They looked like searchlights, Eden thought. And one by one they were turned towards the advancing Martians.
At the last moment Eden threw himself over a low wall and out of the way, peeking to see what happened.
The Martians slowed. It seemed to Eden that the lead machines, or their occupants, looked down at the humans, their crude vehicles, and the purloined Heat-Ray cameras, as if curious.
And then – Nothing! Eden could see the operators frantically working controls rigged up to enable them to operate the Heat-Ray projectors, controls that no longer did their bidding.
After that brief hesitation, the Martians resumed their advance in complete safety.
In a flash Eden thought he saw why this ploy – Churchill’s secret weapon – had not worked, and it occurred to him that he should have anticipated it before. But if he had warned his superiors, would he have been believed?
For all Walter Jenkins’s boasting, he, Eden, was probably the man who had seen the Martians closer than anybody else, for he had spent long days cooped up in the Horsell cylinder. And he had seen the Martians work together, and with their technologies. Like Jenkins he had come to believe that the Martians communicated through a semblance of telepathy, though in his view this was more likely to have been achieved through some subtle technology with equivalent function. As I learned later, the dissections of retrieved specimens from ’07 had turned up oddities whose functions have yet to be explained. For example, each Martian has, embedded deep in his hind brain, a peculiar mass of crystal, egg-shaped . . . One would think it mechanical if not for its location. But we know that the Martians have achieved a union of the biological and the mechanical, externally at least: their great machines are like suits they don for specific purposes. If that’s so outside their bodies, why not within too? At the very least, such evidence is suggestive.
In any event, if a Martian mind could talk direct to another Martian mind, why not to a Martian machine?
The Heat-Ray generators would not fire, it seemed, not if there was a Martian in their sights. It seemed an obvious precaution for the Martians to adopt.
‘Undone by a safety catch!’ Eden muttered to himself, behind his wall.
But the day was not yet lost, he thought. For in his visits to the laboratories where the Heat-Ray engines had been studied, he had seen other ways in which the generators could be destructive. There was still time; the Martians had not yet reached the line of the lorries with their projectors. Gathering his courage, Eden dumped his rifle and scrambled over the wall. As the position broke down people were already fleeing before the feet of the advancing Martians. But Eric Eden did not flee. He ran straight for the nearest abandoned trailer, and scrambled aboard.
The Heat-Ray generators were heavy, and it took him precious seconds to turn one, then the second – but at last he had one generator barrel pointing into the mouth of another, both of them turned away from the Martians. The human-built control box was simple – and, he saw with relief, it had a timer mechanism. He says he would have stood his ground and followed through his plan even without that stroke of luck, and I believe him, but he much preferred to inflict some damage and save his own life in the process. With the Martians closing on his position, he set the timer for thirty seconds. Then he scrambled off the trailer and, ducking, running, rolling, made for the cover of another wall, low but stout.
He saw what came next.
Ignoring Eden, if they saw him at all, the Martians made for the two Heat-Ray generators he had pushed together. As always in such cases, the Martians were more interested in retrieving their own technology than in the antics of humanity. Two machines leaned over the assemblage, as Eden watched, and he counted down the second hand on his wristwatch: ‘Four – three – two – one -’
Whatever disabling mechanism protected the Martians themselves from the Ray might not save the Heat-Ray cameras themselves: that was his hasty theory. A camera would not fire on a Martian, but, perhaps, it would fire on another camera. So Eden hoped.
And so it proved. When one Heat-Ray was triggered, it fired at point blank range into the carcass of the other, injecting lethal energies, sublimating the hull, liquefying the many mysterious parts of the camera, perhaps shattering the arrays of crystals and mirrors within – and, at last, destroying the casing of the mysterious power generator of the Heat-Ray, that featureless sphere no larger than a cricket ball which, experts like Einstein and Soddy had argued, must somehow harness the energies of the atom.
Energies suddenly released, in a London street. Even amid the ongoing battles in the west, the detonation was heard all over London.
Two fighting-machines were smashed, broken to smithereens which wheeled through the air. Three others were damaged, two enough to disable them.
Much of what occurred during the early days of the Second War was to remain classified as secret; it was many years before I learned from Eric himself (in an airship sailing over the Arctic wastes, as I shall relate in its proper place) what he had done that day. It was the act of a franc-tireur, people would say, but in that act Eric Eden inflicted more damage on the Martians than in any other single incident that day. He himself was badly burned, but survived.
But he did not stop the Martian advance.
Once the wreckage of their fallen had been cleared away and sent back to the Middlesex pits, the surviving fightingmachines, still more than forty of them, resumed their march into London. Now, with the King’s Line breached and the Army’s last attempt at a surprise attack survived, there was nothing and nobody to stand in their way.
27
A FLIGHT ACROSS CENTRAL LONDON
My sister-in-law and I had continued to flee.
From Marble Arch we pushed our way down Oxford Street and Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus and the Strand, and then to the Embankment, myself urging my sister-in-law along - or sometimes vice versa, for it had already been a long day of flight and terror for both of us. Of detail I can remember little. The streets seemed full of people, rushing hither and thither, but all heading away from the Martian advance. It was like a tide receding across a stony shore, perhaps, the detail chaotic and unpredictable, the general drift evident. And there were so many people – for even if London had been drained in those few days of millions, millions more remained.
And meanwhile the Martians were coming. The western sky, livid red since dawn, was stained by smoke and flame, a sullen glow that seemed to be advancing closer. Already, looking that way, you would glimpse a Martian or two, a terrible machine towering above the houses and offices and shops, like a man wading across a coral reef.
As for ourselves, we still had our basic purpose in mind: to head south and east, to get to the coast – to flee to the continent, as we had the last time the Martians came. But as we reached the Embankment, I readily admit my capacity for planning was exhausted. How were we to cross the river? The water was full of shipping, boats and yachts and even barges heading steadily downstream, although a few Navy boats struggled in the other direction. None would stop for us, not if we waved gold bullion as payment. The trains and the underground were all long shut down; no driver would bring his train back towards the Martians. Even the bridges were crammed with people, though I thought that might be our best chance of further progress, even if we had to fight our way through.
But as I retreated into myself, my sister-in-law came into her own. Suddenly she took the lead, hurrying me along the river, heading west through Aldw
ych and Blackfriars - past the medieval heap of the Tower, which still bore the scars of HeatRay licks from the ’07 War - and then through the wharves and warehouses of Wapping.
And there she brought me, bemused, to the mouth of the road tunnel to Rotherhithe.
We found our way blockaded by burly men, dockyard workers, who had piled up scrap in the road entrance, and barriers thrown across the spiral stairs meant for pedestrians. One man, arms folded, stepped in front of us. ‘Tunnel’s closed.’
‘Is it?’ Alice asked, breathing hard, sweating, somewhat dishevelled, somewhat weighed down by her suitcase, but determined.
‘Ain’t choo ’eard? Martians in town.’
‘But our intention is merely to pass through. If you would stand aside -’
‘Local folk on’y. No toffs.’
I closed my eyes, wondering if it would be class war that killed me.
But Alice was unperturbed. ‘Is Fred Sampson here?’
‘’Oo?’
‘I’m sure you know him. The local union organiser. Fred and his wife Poppy, and their children -’
‘’Oo wants ’im?’
‘If you would kindly tell him that Mrs Elphinstone is here – Alice Elphinstone – he might remember me as “the Fabian lady” . . .’
When the message was transmitted, to my astonishment, Fred Sampson did indeed remember his ‘Fabian lady’.
For some years, I now learned, and since the deprivation under Marvin had begun to bite, Alice and others of her Fabian Women’s Group had been coming to Limehouse, Wapping and other dockyard areas to alleviate the plight of the working poor. Alice herself, with her medical connections through her deceased husband, had brought aid to Fred’s own smallest child, an asthmatic whose lungs did not prosper well in the river-side district’s damp, smoke-laden air.
As we waited at the barrier I frankly stared at Alice, as if at a stranger. ‘The “Fabian lady”? I thought they were banned.’
‘Not banned. Frowned upon, compromised – yes. I joined anyhow. One thing led to another,and here we are.’ She looked at me coldly. ‘I know you think I’m weak and foolish. That is how your brother-in-law portrayed me in his Narrative – a cruel sketch. And with George gone, after the war, that is how people perceived me.’
‘That is the way you behave!’
‘Are human beings only one thing? Yes, I was terrified that day, scared out of my wits, but that isn’t me. And I don’t care to explain myself to the likes of you – despite your bullying, Julie, for that’s what it is, even if I’ve had cause to come to appreciate your help in the years since. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’
So there you had it, an astounding personal revelation on that most astounding of days. I sometimes wonder if there was anybody Walter mentioned in his wretched Narrative who had not come away mortally offended.
Anyhow we were ushered, as polite as you please, into a road tunnel that had become, in the hours and days since the Martian landings, a shelter – a veritable town under the city, with food, latrines, a water supply – even electric lights working off a small generator. We had meant to go on, but discretion proved the better part of valour. Exhausted, bedraggled, there we stayed, safe and snug, at least for a time.
It was only later that I learned how the Martians completed their work of that terrible day.
28
THE FALL OF LONDON
The Martian vanguard, before which Eric Eden’s unit retreated, had proceeded along Western Avenue, and then through White City and Bayswater, until they came to Regent’s Park. From there they crossed the Park, and then to Primrose Hill.
As everybody knows, it was on the Hill that the Martians of 1907 had begun the building of their largest single excavation, a vast pit that had crawled with their handling-machines and excavators, before the plagues killed them all. And here too had been left a single, inert fighting-machine as a symbol of that defeat – inert, or so we believed. I had thought I saw the thing twitch, in those last days before the Martians returned to earth – and now witnesses saw it move again, turning its cowled head, defanged as it had been by the loss of its Heat-Ray camera, and trying to lift legs that had been set in a concrete plinth. Truly it can be said that Martian machinery has the quality of life, even loyalty to its masters.
And now, on the last day of March 1920, about twenty fighting-machines stood tall on Primrose Hill, from where they were visible from afar across the city – and of course, since the Heat-Ray was a line-of-sight weapon, anywhere the Martians could be seen was vulnerable to the fire. Meanwhile the rest of the machines, another twenty or so, fanned out in twos and threes towards specific targets. Targets, yes: that was to be the game for the rest of that day, and into the night. With human resistance already vanquished, the machines turned on the greatest city in the world.
And this time the damage was not random and haphazard, as it had seemed to be when that first war-party had ventured from Surrey into the city in ‘07. Now they had intelligence from that first expedition; now they had the recent scouting of their flying-machine. This time the destruction was deliberate and purposeful. Beams delivered by the raiding parties stalking across the city, or delivered direct from Primrose Hill - for the Heat-Ray has a range of some miles– destroyed our great transport links, beginning with the rail termini; Euston, King’s Cross, Charing Cross, London Bridge, Waterloo, Victoria, Paddington. Our war-making abilities were smashed, too; Chatham and Woolwich Arsenal were already wrecked from the fighting-machines’ strikes of the day before, and now the explosives factory at Silvertown was targeted, going up with glow like a sunrise – it created a bang that was heard in France. Many of our great buildings and show centres were cut down, Olympia and White City and even the Crystal Palace.
The symbols of our power were wrecked; the headquarters of the British military at Horse Guards, Whitehall, our seat of government in the ugly new block at Westminster which did not withstand the Heat-Ray any better than its elegant predecessor had. At the Bank too, the heart of Britain’s - indeed the world’s financial system was cut up. How much of the purpose of these buildings was understood by the Martians on the day has since been a matter of debate – what would a Martian know of stocks and shares? For myself I believe that save for sites with obvious functions like the Woolwich munitions factory, the Martians judged the significance of a site on the grandeur of the buildings, and the density of human activity they had seen around them; they did not need to understand a specific purpose to judge a target’s importance to us.
It went on all day. With much of London already ablaze, the targets became less prominent: the gasometers were blasted, the cathedrals broken – St Paul’s demolished at last – the Albert Hall stove in, and it was as if the Martians used the spires of the Wren churches for target practice. Even Bart’s hospital was smashed, it turned out. And there was casual massacre, the refugee boats on the river washed with fire, the crowds on the bridges incinerated, before the bridges themselves were cut, one by one.
The Martians did not have it all their own way. For much of the day gun emplacements still operated across the city – some of them, I learned later, having been set up years earlier in anticipation of a possible air war with Germany. And, I would learn, capital ships had come up the river as far as Greenwich – any further and there would be a fear of grounding – and had fired their own huge guns into the carcass of the city, seeking Martians. One or two shots hit home – the machines on the Hill were particularly vulnerable, and one fell. But each aggressor was eventually silenced by the Heat-Ray. And besides, it seems that more damage was being done to the city itself, and no doubt its inhabitants, by the almost random landing of the shells; it must have taken a stern heart to order Navy guns to fire into the centre of London.
Rather more damage was wrought, in the event, by aircraft. Towards evening, from out of the darkening sky – and as imagined in a thousand lurid coming-war fictions - German Zeppelins approached London, not in enmity but in solidarity.
Flying from occupied airfields in France, this stately flotilla was led by Heinrich Mathy in his L.31, the ‘Super Zeppelin’ – Mathy, the German hero of daring raids on Paris during the worst of the fighting there. The Zeppelins came in high, and got their bombs away, and did some damage; a couple of fightingmachines were toppled like nine-pins, and one got a three hundred-pounder in the cowl which knocked him out of the game. Also there were British craft in the air: RFC Be.2cs flying out of their bases at Hounslow and Romford, buzzing like hornets around the great carcasses of the Zepps.
But it was not long before the Martians responded. With their swivelling hoods, their manipulator arms directing the Heat-Ray cannons, they were able to mount an anti-aircraft response much more effective than any human force could have managed; they shot down the planes as easily as they had swatted artillery shells from the sky. One beam caught Mathy’s own ship as she tried to turn. The airship flashed to flame, and to the horror of those Londoners watching the show, it took the craft three or four minutes to drift to the ground, a grisly lantern. One could only think, I was told, of Mathy and his crew, roasting slowly in the sky.
I can record one more bit of heroism. Battling through the invisible lanes of the Heat-Rays, while its fellows burned and fell all around, one of our planes, a feeble Be.2c biplane, kept on going, making for that nest of monsters on Primrose Hill. It hurtled at one cowled beast as if to ram that bronze carapace, and it fired off a round of incendiary bullets before the HeatRay, inevitably, smashed it and its pilot to atoms. But those bullets got through, and one evidently penetrated some break in that cowl, and the head of that machine blossomed in flame before it fell. This was seen all over London. I learned later, and record here, that the pilot was Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson of the RFC, twenty-five years old.
The Massacre of Mankind Page 15
