The matron returned and briskly told me I was free to go, though I might experience symptoms such as mild nausea for a while and I should ‘go easy’. There would be no more long distance travel that day.
Otherwise I was free to wander. After so many days in company that was mostly male and exclusively military, I could think of nothing better than to escape. It was a pleasant May evening, even if it was a Monday, and I itched to walk. Marina agreed to accompany me. But my night off took some negotiating by telephone with Lieutenant Gray – I still did not have the right papers. We worked out a kind of deal. Shortly afterwards a taxi-cab pulled up outside the hospital, with a single passenger: Ted Lane. The sergeant’s brief, from Gray, was to keep a discreet watch on us for the evening: ‘That man will do anything to get out of buying a round,’ Lane grumbled. But he was cheerful enough, and I trusted his competence as much as Gray evidently did.
Since the cab was paid for, we used it to take a tour of the city, seeing the dockyard and the harbour, which, as when I had seen it before with Philip Parris, bristled with fighting ships. Then we were dropped in the Commercial Road, and took a stroll, with Gray tailing us at a discreet distance. At that it was easy to lose him in the crowd, for there was plenty of khaki about, as well as Navy blue. The other predominant colour seemed to be black. Marina told me that black was something of a fashion now. ‘As if we’re all back in Victoria’s day,’ she said gloomily.
Another striking difference from Paris or Berlin was the lack of motor traffic on the streets: a few omnibuses and ambulances, police cars and military vehicles, only a handful of taxi-cabs and private motor-cars. On the other hand there was a flood of horse-drawn traffic, which brought with it the straw and manure and an earthy reek that had been lost from the streets of Britain since before the First Martian War. It was all down to a shortage of petrol, Marina said – that and a general discouragement to use motorised vehicles, which attracted Martians.
In the city itself we saw little of the defences of Portsmouth.
I did spot searchlights and gun emplacements; I learned that there were rings of guns five and ten miles from the city centre, and others placed around the docks area, with anti-aircraft installations and lamps. And I saw the mark of Martian activities past: the careless splash of brick and concrete and glass, the brush of the Heat-Ray.
Portsmouth’s busiest shopping street looked barren compared to Berlin’s meanest, I thought. Every food store had a queue outside it, a line of patient men and women and a few children, their clothes drab and well-worn, all clutching empty baskets and pink scraps of card that proved to be ration papers.
You would see servicemen in the lines– you could tell by the shabby greatcoats they wore or by their battered military caps.
Some were evidently wounded internally rather than externally, like poor Walter. You came to recognise a kind of nervousness, a shaking, a turning away of the head.
In search of happier sights I looked for bookshops, but there was a shortage of paper, among other essentials, and I found only second-hand stores, or rows of trashy American thrillers.
Burroughs’s sagas of human heroes biffing the Martians on their home soil seemed to be selling well – alongside, ironically, a new, cheap edition of Walter’s Narrative. The only newspaper widely available was the National Bulletin, a worthless government rag started in Marvin’s final days. We stopped at a small restaurant where I ordered an omelette with mushrooms and fresh-baked bread, accompanied by sweet tea. It was plain but nourishing food. Even so the prices were exorbitantly high, I thought. Then we went in search of entertainment: not easy to find.
Most posters you saw, rather than advertising the films or the shows, were of the uplifting, instructional or hectoring kind:
VOLUNTEER!
or
A MEATLESS DAY IS A GOOD DAY
or
TAKE ONE WITH YOU!
This last below a stern portrait of Churchill.
The theatres were running sentimental shows such as revivals of ‘Tommy Atkins’ and ‘In Time of War’. The audiences thronging outside the theatre doors seemed keen enough, but it all seemed a little desperate to us, and we wandered on, arm in arm. At about nine o’clock there was a new rush of people, and I gathered that a work shift had ended. Among them were munitions workers from the new factories, all women, their hair and skin discoloured orange and yellow from the toxic materials they habitually handled. These ‘canaries’ seemed intent on drinking as much as possible as rapidly as possible, and for all the moral strictures of our new England there seemed no shortage of cheap alcohol in the city that night.
Marina was amused to see them. ‘Funny how old Marvin always railed against the suffragettes. Now his successors need women to fight their war. Still haven’t given us the vote, however. Not that that means much nowadays – no elections since 1911 -’
‘What about people’s rights?’
‘Responsibilities trump rights, for the time being. That’s the argument.’ She shrugged. ‘Who am I to argue? The Martians are here.’
The canaries deserved their entertainment, but we had had enough. We summoned Lane, our patient shadow, and the three of us took a horse-drawn chaise to our hotel.
Oddly enough I felt satisfied to be back in England, grim and war-obsessed as it was. Berlin, immersed in its eternal politicking and war-making as if the Martians had never come, and Paris, obsessing over its own humiliations, seemed irrelevant now, a distraction. As Marina had said, the Martians were here, in England; here was reality, here was where the history of all mankind pivoted. And here was I, engaged. A rare burst of idealism for me, you might think! And it was not to be rewarded.
I did not sleep well. I felt somewhat nauseous, and the sites of the various injections I had itched or ached. The vagueness of my mission concerned me, and occupied my waking thoughts.
I need not have wasted the brain power. For when the military car came in the morning to bring me, Marina Ogilvy, Ben Gray and Ted Lane to a poky office in HMNB Portsmouth, Eric Eden quickly disabused me of the notion that my mission had anything to do with communication at all.
9
A SECRET ASSIGNMENT
‘After all,’ Eric Eden said cheerfully as he poured us all some rather terrible coffee, ‘what would be the point, if you think about it? Would we have paused if the Tasmanians had insisted on telling us their theories of the universe as we worked them to extinction?’
Gray, Lane, Marina and I sat on uncomfortable upright chairs before a desk, behind which Eden sat at ease. This was a Royal Navy briefing room, if a small one; there were maps of seas and oceans on the walls, as well as the customary portrait of Lord Nelson – and, almost as an afterthought, a map of southern England with the Martian position overlaid in glaring red ink. The desk top was empty save for a clutter of stationery, and my own leather satchel.
Eden’s face bore scars. This was a relic of his heroism of Wormwood Scrubs, I would learn much later.
‘We used to debate all this at school,’ Gray said now. ‘The morality of empire.’
Ted Lane pulled a face . ‘Of course you did.’
Ben Gray was of that blessedly privileged class not even to know when he was being ragged.
‘To get back to the point,’ I said somewhat testily, ‘if this isn’t about communication - what, then?’ I tapped the leather satchel I had placed on the table, the packet of Walter’s sigils. ‘I’ve come a long way with this, Eric.’
He steepled his fingers. ‘Walter did believe everything he told you. And it really was his idea in the first place, the whole communications angle. We just – embellished it.’ Eden actually laughed.
I was growing angry. ‘What, then, is the truth?’
‘We haven’t been idle since 1907, you know. We being military intelligence, to which I have become at least partially attached, given the uniqueness of my experience. From the Martians’ point of view, it has always seemed to me a strategic error for them to have come, an
d failed. The first shot always had the best chance of success. Now we’ve had a chance to study them. Everybody knows how we’ve been able to make industrial use of some of their inventions – the aluminium smelter, for instance. But we’ve been looking into other aspects.’
My arms prickling from the injections, I was starting to intuit the truth – or rather, the Lie. ‘Other aspects like their biology?’ I prompted.
He eyed me. ‘Quite so. Everybody knows it was the germs that killed the Martians. I remember the lovely lines in Jenkins’ tome very well: “The Martians – dead! – slain . . . by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” But precisely which of those humblest things? For Jenkins’s words about “putrefactive” and “disease” are the purest speculation, you know.’
‘Ah,’ Lane said with a soldier’s crafty smile. ‘And you clever beggars have been finding out which bacteria, have you? With all respect, sir.’
Eden nodded. ‘Not me in person, of course . . . Have you heard of a place called Porton Down, Miss Elphinstone? Hushhush Army laboratory, out in Wiltshire.’
‘I know it,’ said Ted Lane. ‘Or of it. Belonged to my lot, didn’t it? The Royal Engineers.’
‘That’s it. Set up during the Schlieffen War to look at the possibilities of chemical warfare – gassing, you know.’
Lane grunted. ‘Stinks shells. Worked in Russia.’
Gray eyed him curiously.
Eden went on, ‘When the Martians returned we set Porton on the germs, with a crash programme to determine which precisely was the pathogen that killed the Martians. The whole thing was another bright idea of Churchill’s, actually, if arrived at belatedly; the man does have a certain ruthless genius.’
Lane leaned forward. ‘How could you test it, though? All them Martians from ’07 were dead.’
‘Ah, but they left their corpses behind – plenty of tissue to experiment with. Did you know that one Martian was born during the ’07 invasion? Found partly budded off its parent – dead as the rest, of course. That provided particularly sweet materials for the sample labs, I’m told. And you needn’t look at me that way, Miss Elphinstone; I doubt that the Martians are showing much pity for human infants within the Cordon right now.’
As he spoke, I could feel my injection sites itch and crawl, and I realised what had been done to me. ‘They found it, didn’t they? The boffins at Porton Down – they found the pathogen that killed the Martians.’
‘Indeed they did – with a little help from equally advanced laboratories in Germany, which, if you want to know, was the true purpose of my own recent jaunt to the continent. Don’t ask me for the Latin names, that was never my bag. But it’s a very old bug, and it’s been with us a long time – you find it in every population – must have come with us out of Africa, you see, that’s if Darwin and the rest are right about our origin there, having no doubt scythed down our man-ape ancestors before they developed immunity. Well, we can be sure that by now the Martians have fixed themselves to resist that one. So we found another. An even nastier cousin, to which the Martians had no exposure last time, but distant enough related that any protection they cooked up after the last lot will do them no good. And it works; we have enough samples of fresh Martian tissue to have proved that.’
‘And those “tests” I went through last night -’
‘It happily reproduces in the human bloodstream, but does no harm to the carrier.’
‘It’s in me. This archaic killer. You put it in me. And you want me to carry it to the Martians, under this pretence of communication.’ There was the Lie, revealed and spoken aloud. I immediately felt foolish not to have suspected it before.
And I saw that my companions, Ted Lane, Lieutenant Gray, even the down-to-earth Marina Ogilvy, shrank away from me.
My mission, in the end, was simple. I was to enter the Cordon, and get as close to the Martians as I could – with or without Cook’s help, though the artilleryman seemed the best chance.
‘We’ll only get one shot,’ Eden said. ‘And so we’ve got to target it – to make it count. Bring them all down at once. Remember, another opposition is approaching. If more cylinders are meant to come our way, we believe our chances agin them will be that much greater if the Martians in England, spotters for the fleet, are knocked out before the reinforcements – or perhaps the main forces - even get here.
‘Now, one benefit we’ve extracted from Martian technology is a blood storage system – for much of the supply on which they subsisted in their interplanetary flights in the cylinders was externally stored, you know. We use the technology ourselves, on the battlefield. We’ve every reason to believe that they’re using a similar system in their big central pit at Amersham. And that’s what you’ve got to spoil, Julie. Should take most of them down in one fell swoop, and the open sores the infection creates ought to pass it on to the rest. So you see, you need the Martians to trust you, to get all the way in to the heart of the nest. Which is where Cook is going to provide vital cover.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me all this? I mean, before squirting your venom into my veins.’
‘Because, frankly, it was judged there’d have been a high chance of you turning down the job.’
‘Am I to commit mass murder, Major Eden?’
‘Are you to save the nation, Miss Elphinstone?’
And it was as if I saw my own epitaph.
10
A NIGHT IN HAMPSHIRE
As the next stage of my journey to the Cordon in Buckinghamshire, I learned, I was to be taken through London. Though millions remained trapped there, the capital was a great hive which the military infiltrated with relative ease, beneath the attention of the Martians – mostly. And I was to join a regular expedition.
That night I was escorted out of Portsmouth, by Ben Gray and Ted Lane, to stay in a rather fine house in the country – I never learned its name, and did not ask – out in the meadows beyond Eastleigh.
The owners had either abandoned the place when the Martians returned to England, or had had their property requisitioned, and now it was used to house officers, while the grounds had been given over to respite accommodation for active troops on leave. In the years since the owners had left the property had lost a lot of its glamour, as evidenced by the muddy boot prints in the hallways, the khaki greatcoats hanging in the cloakroom, and the lack of staff save for a few injured troops, evidently given light behind-the-line duties. One poor chap who served us dinner had half his face a mask of scars.
For, yes, despite the fall from grace, we went down to dinner, of soup and rather stringy beef, served in the oldfashioned formal way, in a dining room lined with paintings of weak-chinned generations of owners. And there was wine from the cellar and port served in fine glasses, and at the end the cigars came out, a very expensive treat shipped from Cuba. Much of the conversation was light, touching on the scandalous behaviour of various film stars, perhaps for my benefit as the only civilian present and one of only three women. Gray put in anecdotes about the eccentric behaviour of Churchill in his bunker at Dollis Hill, where – so it was said - the Governor of London would host meetings of his inner cabinet in his pyjamas and dressing gown, with a goblet of brandy at his side and a budgerigar perched on top of his balding head.
Most Army officers were, after all, drawn from the privileged classes, and all this seemed normal to them. To me it was a strange evening, a poignant reminder of an England that was all but lost. And an England, I thought as I watched poor Ted Lane try to decide which bit of cutlery he was supposed to use next, from which most of the English had always been excluded.
I slept restlessly that night in a room that felt stuffy, on a mattress that felt too deep, a bed piled too high with blankets. Perhaps I was simply disturbed, as I had been since my injections in Portsmouth, by the thought of the lethal pathogens I carried in my body – as if my body itself had become a battleground. Or perhaps I had simply become too used to my relatively austere but comfortable life in
Paris.
I was woken very early by sounds outside: voices barking commands or raised in laughter, a hiss of water, even a smell of what might have been cooking bacon. I pulled on a dressing gown and went to my open window.
As I have said, the grounds of the house had been given over as a rest and recuperation area for men brought back from the front. I saw them now, queuing in the low sunlight of an early May morning, at tables for an open-air breakfast of sardine and potatoes and bread and a mug of tea; they were fed from a ‘company cooker’, as they called it, like a big kitchen range on wheels. Or they gathered around communal shower centres to wash – I caught cheeky glimpses of pale flesh – and there were wagons laden with disinfectant and delousing powder through which those just back from the front had to be processed.
Some, that morning, had already been called to training. I saw one group busily burrowing into what had once been a croquet lawn, I think, disappearing into a tunnel like human moles. Others, in full kit, faced a row of targets dangling from a line, like big leathery sacks. At a snapped command from the NCO they charged en masse at the targets, yelling; they did not fire their rifles but stabbed at the sacks with their bayonets, like men taking on bears. With their big eyes and beak-like mouths and dangling tentacles, the sacks were scarecrow Martians. I learned later that, although it seemed unlikely any soldier would get to face a Martian outside its protective machines, the very physicality of bayonetting was thought to be good for a soldier’s morale. Do it often enough, make yourself muscle-weary with it, and you grow into a kind of blood lust, an unhesitating willingness to kill - and that was a good mental state for a fighting man to reach for.
As I watched there was a sudden clatter of rattles, a cry of ‘Smoke, Black Smoke!’ Everyone in hearing range dropped their gear, and fixed hooded masks over their heads, and pulled down sleeves and trouser cuffs to leave no flesh exposed. But it was only a drill.
The Massacre of Mankind Page 20
