I rubbed my face. ‘Given the way it turned out for the Incas, it might have been worth a try. But why me, Walter? What have I got to do with it?’
‘There is a logic. Look – work backwards. We need to open some kind of a dialogue with the Martians; let’s take that as a given. Now – according to Eden and others – there’s only one man, one human being, deep inside the Cordon, who is at present coming into peaceful contact with the Martians - or at least non-lethal.’
I frowned. ‘I’m surprised there’s even one. Who?’
‘Cook. Albert Cook.’
‘Your artilleryman! Why, he’s a -’ I waved a hand ‘- a musichall turn.’
‘Never in his own head,’ Walter said solemnly. ‘And to be fair to him, according to the intelligence, he has been able to establish some kind of rapport with the Martian occupiers. Remarkable! As to how he maintains these contacts, and to what purpose, Eric Eden isn’t telling me, if he knows. Now, Cook won’t listen to the military, for they wouldn’t listen to him, so he believes, when after the war he expounded his theories on how we should prepare for a future rematch. No, it has to be another, a lone, self-motivated survivor as he was. You, you see, “Miss Elphinstone”, were one of the few characters I named in my account, the account that make Cook famous, or notorious.’
‘And that’s to be the reason he will speak to me? It sounds a little flimsy. And besides, why not you yourself, Walter?’
‘Well, he might be suspicious of me. He does feel I mocked him, traduced him and his theories. Never my intention. And besides -’ He raised a scarred hand; it shook.
‘Very well. And if, through Cook, I do get close to the Martians -’
He held up his scrawls. ‘Show them these.’
This seemed faintly insane, on first hearing. I essayed, cautiously, ‘I had thought you were sketching the turbine hall. These more abstract designs -’
‘Not abstract. You don’t recognise them? More images I find it hard to get out of my mind. Here, the circle – an eternal, perfect figure, and the one the Jovians use as their sigil, lifted in their mighty clouds, plastered over the faces of their moons. The Jovians! – of course they would use the circle, with its lucid perfection, its infinite number of axes of symmetry . . .’
I had little interest in the Jovians. I pointed to another sketch. ‘But this other,’ I said. ‘I remember now.’ It was like a spiral, spread across the page, drawn with the right hand with clockwise loops – like a clock spring pulled out of shape. ‘This is the sigil the Martians made, on the surface of their own world, and on Venus -’
‘Not on Venus,’ he said pedantically, ‘but in the clouds of Venus, somehow – for the cloud-tops of that young planet are all that we can see of it. But this is not the Venusian sigil; it is my attempt to capture the mark the Martians had begun to make in Surrey.’
‘What mark? In ’07, you mean? You spoke of this before, but I remember no such device.’
‘We weren’t looking at the time,’ he said with that twisted smile. ‘What with all the running and the screaming. The design became clearer after it was over, and the war could be more carefully mapped. I have a chart here . . .’
Tucked in the pages of his book, he had folded an ordnance survey map showing London, Surrey, Middlesex, Kent – the region across which the Martians had rampaged. ‘Can you see? With these orange flags I show where the Martians came down, starting with Horsell down in the south-west, and working up through what is now the Surrey Corridor past Kingston and Wimbledon, and across London to Primrose Hill, and then to Hounslow and Hampton Court and Merrow . . .’ He took his graphite and made a faint swirling line, an open spiral connecting these points. ‘Can you see it? We always marvelled at the closeness of the landing sites of the cylinders, after a journey of forty million miles. Now, I claim, the accuracy was rather better than that. The landing pits of the cylinders are the anchor points of -’
‘A sigil! Like the one on Venus.’
‘That’s it. I believe if they had had the time they would have finished the figure – how? With earthworks, or canals, or lanes of the red weed perhaps. And then, with the earth wholly conquered, they would have created an even greater form, sprawled across the Sahara perhaps, or the Antarctic ice. A symbol of their victory, visible across interplanetary space!’
I sat back. ‘Ah! And this is the “graphic geometry” of the war that you mentioned when you spoke to us in Ottershaw, is it not?’
‘Indeed. And when you think on it, that the one thing that unites us, ourselves and the Martians – perhaps the inhabitants of Venus – even the Jovians! Never forget the Jovians, Julie, never forget; before them we are like children squabbling at the feet of a fully armed soldier . . .’
But, my head full of the Martians, still I was not thinking about the Jovians just then. (I should have been! I should have been!) ‘What exactly am I to do, Walter?’
We turned to business. He had prepared a packet of drawings for me, he said – symbols, the interplanetary sigils and certain other geometric forms. He had even brought a light leather satchel for me to carry the drawings! All I had to do was to set these before the Martians, and . . . Well, it got a little vague after that.
It was hard to refuse him, so fragile was he. And besides, I rather grudgingly thought the plan was worth a shot. (I had yet, of course, to develop any suspicion about the true motives of Eden and those to whom he reported. That disillusionment came later.)
But the effort of discussing all this seemed to exhaust him.
‘I do miss it all, you know.’
The non-sequitur caught me off guard. ‘You miss what, Walter?’
‘My old life, before. Sometimes I look out my old work, you know. All foolish conjecturing, of course, but like the scent of a dead flower it brings back a mood, a time . . . My life then, the writers and thinkers with whom I corresponded and clubbed, the editors – the magazines! The Pall Mall Gazette, the National Observer, the Saturday Review. All gone now, and even the archives burned or flooded by the Martians, I imagine . . . I am not a strong man, I know. I remember, I remember – ah, Carolyne! Have you seen her? I do miss her . . .’
He went on in this manner for some time, in broken sentences, as if talking to himself, and forgetting I was there. He grasped his charcoal in one withered hand, and drew his sigils and circles over and over, striving for a perfection his damaged body could never deliver. I sat with him, but our conversation was effectively over.
3
A JOURNEY TO THE COAST
After my return to my hotel I telephoned Eric Eden – who, I had been informed, was in Paris, on some errand of his own. I told him I would undertake his commission. He had been waiting for my response. The arrangements began immediately.
As per Eden’s instructions – he was polite but specific and left me in no doubt that I must obey to the letter - I made my own way, the next day, from Berlin to Bremen. I stayed one night in a small hotel, a short walk from the rail station; there, another phone call informed me to be ready for an early start the following day, for the inception of Operation Get Julie Across the Channel.
Early indeed. I was woken before three in the morning by a smart rap on the door. A young officer in khaki and flat cap stood there smiling at me.
‘Miss Elphinstone?’
‘Guilty as charged.’
He told me I’d be given a lift aboard a long-planned naval convoy, weather conditions and whatnot being favourable – and it was time to go.
Despite the hour I was all but dressed, and seeing him stand there in his spruce, carefully ironed uniform, I was glad of it. ‘You’d better come in while I finish up.’ I collected my boots and overcoat, and the last few items to stuff into the rucksack. I checked one more time that the leather-bound packet of papers Walter had given me was safely tucked away; from now on until I encountered the Martians themselves this would never leave my person.
Waiting, the officer stood just inside the door, hands clasped before h
is belt-buckle, eyes averted from the particulars of a female’s hotel room. ‘My name’s Ben Gray, by the way – Second Lieutenant for my sins.’ Clipped Harrovian tones, not unlike Eden’s. Slim, dark, his well-groomed face blandly handsome behind a rather weedy moustache, he might have been twenty-five. ‘My regiment -’
‘Save the biography; it’s all the same to me, Lieutenant.’ But it seemed unfair to dislike him, like taking against a puppy.
I was done in a minute. I caught a glimpse of myself in the room’s long mirror. I kept my hair cut short, and it was serviceable after a finger-brush. With a last glance around, I led him out, closed the door and locked it behind me.
‘Leave the key in the lock,’ Gray said. ‘The manager will take care of that.’
‘And the bill –’
‘Paid for.’ He guided me towards the lift.
‘How efficient. Look, Lieutenant Gray, I’m quite capable of putting myself on a train. Indeed on a boat.’
He laughed. ‘Major Eden predicted you’d say that, almost to the letter, Miss Elphinstone. “Orders is orders” – that’s what he told me to reply.’
‘Know him well, do you?’
‘Tolerably, given he’s my senior officer, and a fair bit older. When I was stationed at Inkerman he gave us briefings on his experience in the First War. He’s a clubbable sort of chap when off duty – well, you know that, Miss.’
‘Old Harrovians together?’
He grinned, sheepish. ‘As you put it, Miss – guilty as charged.’
We reached ground level, crossed a deserted lobby, and went out into the crisp air of a morning already growing lighter, and turned for the rail station.
‘And as to why you’ve been assigned me as an escort for the day, Miss – Major Eden is crossing too, but from Brest – which is -’
‘The French military port, I know.’
‘A warship for him, a fishing tub for us. The fact is that crossing the Channel isn’t the pleasurable jaunt it might once have been, not with Martians on the prowl.’
Martians on the prowl? I was not privy to military intelligence, but I didn’t like the sound of that.
We came to Bremen’s main station, and I was surprised to see a crowd there, gathering in the subdued half-silence that seems appropriate in the small hours – and most of them, in this German station, evidently British or French. There was plenty of khaki, and the blue of Navy uniforms – mostly men, some women. But there women, children were civilians too, men out of uniform, looking sleepy-eyed and dismayed. My journalist’s eye caught details: a man hugging a little girl to his chest, both weeping; a girl of perhaps sixteen fixing a flower to the cap-badge of a sailor no older than she was; a boy of eleven or twelve standing to attention before a father who was evidently giving him orders of the ‘be a man for your mother’ sort. The predominant language seemed to be English, but there was plenty of German, even French spoken too, some attempted by tongues strong with the accents of the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne. The two years since the Martians landed had been plenty of time for fraternisation, it seemed.
It was not a large station and the crowd’s murmur, subdued as it was, seemed to fill up the space beneath the vaulting roof. ‘My sister and I have been rather tucked away in Paris. I had no idea so many troops were stationed here.’
Gray was glancing around, evidently looking for a muster point. ‘It’s more or less a continuous process, Miss. People and assets crossing back and forth. We have bases in northern Germany, and across the Low Countries and France the provinces facing the North Sea and the Channel - Southern England is a war zone after all, and our allies are generously allowing us sites for stores, training camps, hospitals, even weapons development. Anyhow I think I see our train.’ He dug papers out of his tunic pocket. ‘If you’ll follow me . . .’
So my journey resumed, with a short rail trip from Bremen to Germany’s North Sea shore - short, but scarcely pleasant, in a compartment so cramped it was standing room only, windows slammed shut to keep the engine smoke out, and before the sun was high it was a pit, the air stinking of sweat and thick with tobacco smoke. Well, if Second Lieutenant Ben Gray could withstand it, a man from a much gentler background than me, so could I, I told myself. After all, I had seen worse in the First War.
I did wonder how Eric Eden, a landlubber himself, was faring.
4
ABOARD THE INVINCIBLE
As it happens, as he would tell me with some relish later, Eric was having the time of his life, at that point in the morning anyhow.
Having completed a mission involving our ambiguous German allies – a mission of which I would learn later - he, along with a number of other senior Army officers, was hitching a ride aboard the HMS Invincible, which as Gray told me had sailed from Brest; in fact she had put to sea the day before. She and her sister ships would sail north through the Channel, there to join more capital ships coming down from Scapa Flow, to shield our convoy from Martian attention as we dashed across the North Sea from Germany to England.
Invincible was a battle cruiser, in the jargon. Such ships were heavily armed but bore lighter armour than the great dreadnoughts, the idea being to sacrifice resilience for mobility and speed. Indeed, at sixteen years old Invincible was the lead ship of her class, and probably the oldest and slowest of her kind – not a cheery prospect for Eden to reflect on.
But Eden, as was his wont, had not restricted himself to the officers’ cabins, as many of his peers would have. The night before sailing he had toured the mess halls giving the crew impromptu lectures on his brief but unforgettable encounter with the Martians on Horsell Common, of the kind he had given many times during his book tours, in his amusing, selfdeprecating style: how, while those around him had laid down their lives, he had been clumsy enough to have fallen ‘arse over tit’ into the great cylinder itself . . . English heroes don’t go in for bombast, which is where Bert Cook got it wrong, in my view. The novices aboard showed much interest in the Heat-Ray, its performances and characteristics, as well they might. The more experienced men told them grimly to wait and see.
The Invincible put to sea in the dark; Eric, sleeping soundly, missed the departure. He was roused in the small hours by bells ringing and a gruff cry: ‘All hands to breakfast!’
The evening before, Eden had been speaking to a group of stokers and other men of the engine room, and his imagination had been caught by the technicalities of their posts. Now he found himself breakfasting with them in the mess, squeezed onto benches by one of the great tables that had been set out. On such ships the various specialisms work, sleep and mess together in dedicated halls, and when the ship is underway a meal-time is a rush, an industrial process in itself, the feeding of hundreds of men of the thousand-strong crew . The meal, of bacon, scrambled eggs, toast, and potatoes boiled to mush, was surprisingly good. Eden had heard that men of the lower classes would sign up solely on account of the availability of decent food and board, and now he could believe it.
Eden’s friendly stokers had just come off a night shift. The Invincible was old enough that she still ran on coal, and the men, dressed in loose pants and vests, were sweating, black with soot and coal dust, and breathing hard. They drank sweet tea in soup bowls, great measures that they gulped down one after another.
When the meal was done, inspired by his companions, Eden cheerfully volunteered for a shift shovelling the coal. ‘I’m no expert but how hard can it be?’
The officer he spoke to was dubious, but evidently decided it would be good for morale to have a hero of the First Martian War mucking in with the rest, and he gave the nod. So, half an hour later, down in the bowels, Eric Eden found himself stripped to the waist, handed a shovel, and stationed at a sprawling hillside of black coal before the gaping man-high doors of a furnace.
He was welcomed with the usual inter-service banter: ‘Bit o’ hard work, for once, sir?’
‘We do work in the Army, you know. I’ll show you how to use a trenching tool some t
ime . . .’
The labour of shifting a shovel-load of coal and chucking it through the big doors into the flames was heavy, but simple enough – if you only had to do it once. But Eden soon found himself tiring. And he quickly realised there was a rhythm to it, for the trick was not to release too much heat from the furnaces as they were fed. So it was a two-man job at each door; one would shovel and chuck with a rhythm, the other would open the door in time to catch the load, then shut it again to trap the heat. Expert crew could manage a shovel-full per second, if the two stokers worked together well.
As he worked Eden’s thoughts softened to fancy. He could feel the ship was underway, from the thrumming of the deck plates beneath his feet. He knew intellectually, of course, that it was the release of heat energy from the burning coal that powered the big Parsons steam turbines that drove the ship forward. But down in that pit it felt as if it was the labour of the stokers, toiling in synchronised rhythms like parts of the machinery themselves, that pushed that heavy boat through the waters of the Channel.
Stuck down there as he was, however, Eden saw or heard nothing of the wider picture as, in the gathering light of that morning, in a coordinated action across hundreds of miles and all along the coasts of Britain and Europe, the great ships of the Channel Fleet and the Grand Fleet put out from their bases at Brest and from Scapa Flow – the British base most out of reach of the Martians – and units of the German High Seas Fleet sailed too, in a grand coordinated operation. Safety in numbers: that was the idea behind the convoy, and the swarm of shipping I was to join was one of the largest yet to put to sea.
Not that any of this was to save us from the Martians.
5
AT THE GERMAN COAST
The Frisian coast of north Germany, between the Elbe estuary and the Dutch border, is hardly a coast at all. It is as if the land disintegrates into islands and sand bars and shallows, offering a dubious navigability that changes with the conditions of the tide and the weather. That Sunday morning, somewhere out on the ocean beyond, Eric Eden was already busily shovelling coal, and it was from this coast that I, with hundreds of troops and many other passengers, was to be taken across the North Sea.
The Massacre of Mankind Page 17
