The Massacre of Mankind

by Stephen Baxter

  But that, at any rate, was the end of resistance from the air – and indeed of any organised resistance at all, though the slaughter and destruction continued for hours.

  After the War I returned to the Strand, and saw the detailed destruction inflicted there by the passage of a single fightingmachine, towering over the buildings. The Martian had inflicted a sequence of blasts, the first at Exeter Street, just off the Strand, which caused damage to the Gaiety theatre; the next close to the Strand Theatre at Catherine Street; the third and fourth in Aldwych; and then the Martian veered north, striking at the area between Aldwych and New Inn, and then the Royal Courts of Justice, and in Carey Street. Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, four centuries old, was demolished. If you visit the site today you can still see the traces of that single Martian’s few minutes of passage, decades later. All that from a single pass by a single machine. Imagine such damage, repeated and magnified across the city! But you cannot imagine the night, the screaming and fleeing people, the gas mains flaring, broken water mains gushing, the chaos and the noise and the light.

  In one extraordinary final touch, a fighting-machine came to the museum district of South Kensington. At the Natural History Museum, the roof was cut open by a careful slice of the Heat-Ray, and the pickled specimen of a Martian in the entrance hall, that grisly souvenir of the First War, was retrieved and carried away to the Middlesex pits. A longstanding duty had been fulfilled.

  And as the night fell, the Martians on the Hill began to call. ‘Ulla! Ulla!’

  It was heard across London – we even heard it in our tunnel. And if some self-proclaimed expert (not Walter Jenkins, to his credit) tells you that Martians are disembodied creatures of brain without emotion, let him listen to the recordings that were made of those cries, of victory, of vengeance, of exultation.

  ‘Ulla! Ulla!’

  In our tunnel, deep beneath the sheltering Thames, Alice and I huddled with the families of the dockyard workers and prayed for it to end.

  ‘Ulla! Ulla!’

  BOOK II

  ENGLAND UNDER THE MARTIANS

  1

  I RECEIVE A CALL IN PARIS

  At the beginning of May, 1922 – with the Martian boot having been planted firmly on the neck of England for nearly two years, and with all of educated mankind, I suspect, looking fearfully at the skies, where Mars was swimming towards its next opposition in June – I was summoned to Berlin, to visit my estranged brother-in-law Walter Jenkins.

  Summoned? Is that the correct word? Persuaded to go, perhaps, by Major Eric Eden. But it had begun with Walter himself, who had written to me from Berlin, asking for help in a scheme he had come up with to ‘deal with the Martian canker in England’. All Walter’s mail was routinely scrutinised by his doctors and the military people in Germany and England, and so this came to Eden’s attention. And he, perhaps surprisingly, saw some merit in the plan – whatever it was being kept a secret for me for now.

  It was my duty to see Walter! So even Alice told me, she who had hardly been out of our apartment in Bagnolet since we had arrived in Paris.

  If the reader has stuck with my account thus far, then you will know I am not one to take kindly to pressure from overbearing men, with which my world has always been overstocked. I took my time over whether to accept the commission – indeed I slept on it, through a still, unnaturally warm Parisian spring night. Yet I was still undecided when I woke to my morning view of the ruin of the Eiffel Tower, smashed by German shells eight years before.

  In the end I went back to Walter’s letter, and I concentrated on his own words, directed to me personally. ‘Please come . . . Of all my extended “family” it is only you, Julie, whom I feel comfortable in contacting at this time. Of course my choice is somewhat limited since my brother, your former husband, is lost behind the Martian Cordon . . .’ Which put me in my place! Still, whatever his motives, whatever his state of mind after years of analysis by Freud and his colleagues, it had been me to whom he had turned in his need.

  I had the resources to respond, and was without burdens. Even my sister-in-law, Alice, had slotted easily enough into the gloomy culture of a defeated Paris, and had even found worthwhile work aiding the poor of that occupied city; short of a cross-Channel invasion by the Martians she could last without me for a while. As for my own work, I was making a respectable if precarious living as a correspondent for the New York papers, with the help of much mediation from Harry Kane. I was no war reporter, but Harry said that my accounts of aspects of life in an occupied city, on everything from clumsy German policing to the Parisians’ desperate attempts at fashion and art, held a certain audience in Manhattan and Queens and New Jersey in grim fascination. But it was an eminently interruptible career, and, who knew? Perhaps I could get good material out of this fresh adventure.

  You will have guessed, by the by, that I saw little chance of my actually being involved in any successful scheme to beat the beastly Martians.

  I determined to respond to Walter’s request. Not long after breakfast I was packing my rucksack, and hunting for my Baedeker, and telephoning the railway companies for a ticket to Berlin. And I called a number Walter had given me, of an agent in Berlin who, I was assured, would arrange hotel accommodation for me. When my taxi-cab called Alice was barely awake, her hair tousled, her dressing gown tied tight. But we said our farewells cordially enough - she approved of my trip - before the cab drove smoothly away.

  Of course if I had known then the truth of my mission – or rather the great Lie, as I came to think of it – I would probably have stayed in bed.

  2

  A MEETING IN BERLIN

  The brand new German-built rail connection from Paris to Berlin, from the capital of a conquered nation to that of the conqueror, was direct but as yet was not terribly fast. So it was not until early the next morning that I completed my journey of six hundred miles or so, and debarked at the grand new Alfred von Schlieffen station in the west of Berlin, and named, provocatively, after the mastermind of the recent European war.

  I took another taxi-cab to my hotel. The cab was as scrupulously clean as the roads we travelled. And whereas my driver in Paris had been a slovenly fellow in a soft hat and disreputable jacket, who had been rather too attentive as I had climbed in and out of his vehicle, my driver in Berlin was a woman, young, smart, with efficient hair under a peaked cap. Her conversation was a comment on the weather and a query as to whether this was my first visit to Berlin, all delivered in clipped, rather monotonic English. I half-expected her to swivel around and offer me a game of chess, like the mechanical Turk of legend.

  At my hotel, another uniformed figure was eager to greet me as soon as I set foot on the pavement, and almost wrestled my rucksack out of my hands. I quickly learned that the British consul, who had arranged this domicile for me, had not spared the pennies; my hotel was the Adlon, which has the prestigious address of No. 1, Unter den Linden.

  Restless after my travelling and having slept well enough on the train, I quickly took possession of my room, showered and changed, and went straight back out into the Berlin morning. I knew that Walter was waiting to see me, but I could not resist the briefest of tours.

  So I marched along the Unter den Linden, joined the crowds in the Potsdamer Platz, walked up the Leipziger Strasse, and allowed myself the briefest of ventures into the Wertheim, a vast department store into which, it seemed to me, you could have crammed most of Oxford Street, if that broadway had been cut up and stacked on two or three levels. It was a week day but the crowds, affluent, noisy, and spending freely, swarmed with a kind of springtime gaiety, I thought. And there were uniforms to be seen everywhere, from the foremen and lift attendants in the Wertheim to the military costumes of many nations – including the sombre khaki tunic and flat cap of the modern British officer, a sensible ensemble and shade that stood out amid the more gaudy colours and spiked helmets of the continentals.

  And among the soldier types, even here in the rich, modern, electrified he
art of Berlin, I saw wounded, mostly men but not exclusively, in smart uniforms but with bandaged faces or arms, some in bath chairs – some with limbs plucked away. They made a brave sight, as such veterans always do. The war the Germans had started in 1914 continued still, despite the presence of Martians on the earth only a few hundred miles away, and had become a great grinding of flesh to the east, as the Germans pushed ever deeper into the tottering Russian empire. Or so it was said; little news was released to the public. The missing eyes and limbs of these Berlin veterans were, however, like mute reports from that remote battlefield .

  It was not yet lunchtime when I dragged myself away from these spectacles and summoned another cab, which would take me to my meeting with Walter.

  Driving east, we soon left behind the city’s historic core, or what passes in Berlin as such, and crossed into a more modern realm, of sprawling suburbs studded by immense factories. I glimpsed railways and rectilinear canals; it was almost Martian – no wonder Walter had been drawn here!

  The address Walter had given me turned out not to be an apartment, as I had expected, but a street corner opposite a factory, a tremendous structure buttressed by brick pillars and fronted by glass, all under a curving roof; it dwarfed the handful of trees that adorned the pavement before it, and the people who came and went through its doors.

  And its scale overwhelmed the man who sat on a bench on the far side of the road, wrapped in an over-large overcoat, sketching busily. This was Walter, of course. Having paid off the cabbie, I approached him tentatively. As I sat beside him he leaned towards me, but that was as much as I got in terms of signs of recognition or affection. He continued his busy sketching in bold black charcoal, but I could not make out the subject.

  At length he closed the book and turned to me.

  He was fifty-six years old now. In some ways he had not changed: still the unkempt mass of hair, once red from his Welsh ancestry, so his brother, my husband, had told me, but grey as steel since his experience of the First Martian War, and that peculiarly large skull, the broad brow from beneath which blue eyes peered. He wore white gloves to protect his scarred hands. His face, under a heavy layer of some medicinal cream, was immobile of expression. His eyes were odd as he looked at me, with a strange brightness, an alertness – the eyes of a hunted animal.

  ‘Julie. It was good of you to come all this way.’ His voice was gravelly, from the inhalation of smoke.

  I cautiously touched his damaged hand. ‘I’m glad to see you too, Walter. But I don’t yet know -’

  He said, bluntly, ‘I need you to go to England, you see. To fulfil my scheme. I mean, into the Cordon, the Martian zone.’

  My breath caught in my throat. That was Walter for you, either a fog of prevarication or as direct as a knife in the gut.

  ‘They all know about it, of course. Eden. All the way up to Churchill, I’m told. Seem to think it a good idea, somewhat to my surprise.’ He studied me. ‘Does all this come as a shock?’

  ‘I – don’t know. Perhaps I anticipated this on some level: a warning from the subconscious, as your friend Freud would say. Given all the trouble they went to – the Ministry of War isn’t going to put me up on the Unter den Linden for nothing, is it?’

  He laughed. ‘I don’t suppose so. But we do have some choice over our actions. Such as my choice to meet you here.’

  ‘In the open air, before a factory? Just as well it isn’t raining,’ I said tartly.

  He looked at me. ‘I never thought of that. The Martians, you know, did not anticipate the rain, before they came in ’07, as they drew up their plans in their arid utopia in the sky. I sometimes think I am half-Martian myself.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said firmly. ‘You’ve been spending too much time alone. Or with the bump-feelers of Vienna, which is nearly as bad.’

  He tried to smile. ‘As to the palace of industry over there – it is a turbine factory, belonging to Allgemeine ElektricitatsGesellschaft.’

  ‘AEG. I know of them; their shares are popular in New York, especially since the European war.’

  ‘A magnificent sight, though, isn’t it? This whole area, the north-east suburbs, the Fabrikstadt, the factory-city. And to me this is the jewel in the crown. Modernist, they call it. Whatever that might mean.’

  I got up and walked back and forth to get a better view of the monstrosity. ‘It’s big enough to be a Zeppelin hangar. But modern? It reminds me of Rome. Some of the great secular buildings: the market-places, even the huge bath-houses.’

  He nodded. ‘A shrewd comparison. Secular: not religious, not a cathedral as our forefathers built; this is the spirit of our age. Certainly it is new. As is all of Berlin. Only fifty years ago, a couple of generations, this was nothing but the capital of Prussia; now we are in the capital of Mitteleuropa. And speaking of capitals, how is Paris?’

  I shrugged. ‘Unhappy. There is muttering of strikes, of a new generation of charismatic leaders to drive out the Germans and restore national pride – Communists, perhaps.’

  Walter nodded. ‘I am sometimes surprised that the modern Germans who built that ’ the AEG factory ‘- do not rise up and knock over the pompous princeling and his lascivious, sly son, who presume to govern them as if this were still medieval Prussia.

  ‘But do the Martians see any of us as civilised? Oh, they recognise our mechanical prowess, and its danger to them; even in the First War they hit powder stores and the like. But they may see our machines, our cities as the product of a kind of blind reflex; we might ourselves decide to stamp out an ant colony despite its apparent sophistication. They may not see this as a war at all. Why, they may not know the meaning of the word. You can see it.

  ‘From our new mountaintop eyries the astronomers have scrutinised the Martians as never before, even though the stargazers now work under global blankets of secrecy. We can see it for ourselves, a planet ordered on a global scale, its scarce resources managed by a unified civilisation – with the geometry of the canal system its finest single expression. Wallace points out that a water shortage need not be a drive for global unity so much as a source of division – he uses the British example in India, where the control of water led to the cementing of social inequality, with the water in the hands of an elite. Perhaps – but I would argue that any such conflict, any war, must lie in the deep past of Mars – the geological past!

  ‘You know that my idea is that the first wave, in ’07, were not soldiers at all. They were explorers – even farmers, perhaps. They came to deal with what they had seen as a wild world, a world of insensate animals – and they were armed with nothing more lethal than a farmer’s tools. Some have remarked that the Martians have not innovated since the ’07 War, as we have – with our aeroplanes, for instance. But of course the Martians would not advance their technology; their society is a million years old, and such devices as the Heat-Ray must have been perfected long ago. Adapt it for terrestrial uses, yes, as they have the flying-machine . . . But their strategy – surely we should have expected that to evolve. And so it has, all unforeseen by the strutting peacocks who rule us. All that nonsense of the nineteen hours!’ He glanced into the bright daylight sky. ‘And now the planets are swimming into alignment again. Another chance for them to cross that dark gulf.’

  ‘Umm. So what’s your big idea, Walter? What am I to do in England?’

  ‘Simple enough. Speak to the Martians.’

  That startled me. ‘How? And why would they listen?’

  ‘How? With symbols, of course.’

  And he hurried in before I could interrogate him over the significance of that blunt word!

  ‘As to why – well, there’s at least a chance they’ll be predisposed to listen. Why do you imagine this party of Martians are here in the first place? The damage they have caused to England, horrific though it may seem to us, is . . . incidental. It was intended only to secure their position. And after two years of occupation, they have learned of the ways of our earth – of us. Surely that is why they h
ave come. Why, you only have to see their flying-machine pass by, a great eye over city and field -’

  ‘They are scouts,’ I said, seeing it.

  ‘That’s it. Gathering information to inform the greater invasions to come. So, you see, this lot at least, sent here to observe us, perhaps even trained to do so, may be predisposed to listen to our communications – or at least, to credit us with the capability of communicating.’

  He opened his sketchbook now, and began to scribble once more as he spoke. It was a kind of reflex, I thought, as if he had forgotten I was still with him. I had imagined that he was sketching the AEG factory, but rather he was covering page after page with abstract symbols: circles, beautifully drawn, crowded in with wilder, spiral-like patterns.

  I guessed, ‘So your idea is to parley? But what of the very first night they landed on Horsell Common back in ’07 - you were there, Walter - the Astronomer Royal with his white flag –’

  ‘Yes, with poor Ogilvy, and their reward was a dose of the Heat-Ray. But that’s not to say it’s not worth trying again. Oh, I admit it, to attempt interplanetary communication appeals to the utopian in me. I’ve been following this chap Wendigee who advocates sending wireless signals direct to Mars, to parley for peace direct. Churchill supports the scheme, you know, once he’d been given reports of my opened letters. But he sees wider possibilities. At the very least we can play for time, he thinks. Thus might a wily Inca have drawn the conquistadors into long negotiations, until the time came to slit a few throats, steal horses and guns and ships, and carry the war back to the monarchs of Spain.’