I hung back again; I could not help it. I think I might not have gone further if not for the strength of Verity beside me and if I had not been unwilling to show weakness to Bert Cook, or indeed the Martians all around us.
In the first few pits, however, there was nothing unusual to be seen – nothing, that is, but the ghastly sight of people, men, women and children cast down together for a few hours of imprisonment, before a worse fate. But these pits came in neat rows and columns, almost as if they were part of some vast game board. But I have learned since that our scientists will run experiments with similar arrangements. If they wish to test for the effects of varying combinations of factors – different mixtures of ingredients in drug trials, perhaps – they will create a matrix of combinations, set out physically in the laboratory, in a grid of the kind I saw dug into the ground.
And, Bert said, this was indeed a kind of laboratory. What they were studying was the human soul.
‘As I see it the Martians don’t ’ave families as we do. Or family ties. Oh, they give birth, they bud, but once the little beast is skedaddling around it will go to any one of the adults for succour and attention. And they don’t suckle, by the way; if the Martians were ever mammals, they ain’t now; it’s straight on the old claret for a young ’un as soon as it’s split off from the parent.’
‘Claret’ – a ghastly joke!
‘And they are loyal,’ Bert went on, ‘to each other, to the race as a whole. Well, we learned that, didn’t we? When they crossed space all that way and came again to England, they ’ad other things to achieve – they wanted to learn ’ow to beat us – but they came back for those they left behind before, or at least their bodies, for what remained.’
I nodded. ‘Walter predicted the return to England based on that very observation.’
But Bert Cook would never be interested in anything Walter Jenkins said or wrote. ‘The point is,’ he said now, ‘’ere they are, watching us. And they see that we are loyal to each other, in family groups, to our parents, our siblings – ’specially our children.’
A ghastly awareness was creeping over me. ‘And what has this to do with these rows of pits?’
‘Well, they’re testing us. Mixing folk up. I don’t know the detail. But in one corner you might have a family group. In another, strangers chucked in together, adults and kids. Those the two extremes, and everything in between. Now – you might sacrifice yourself for your kid, but would you do it for another’s child? Or one further removed, a nephew or a niece or a grandchild . . . If I offered you the chance to save two nephews in exchange for one daughter – or a dozen, I don’t know – would you do it? That’s what they’re testing for – that’s what I think, anyhow. I seen ’em come at it, day after day, chucking in new specimens, while the children weep for the mums they’ve just been ripped away from.’
‘They’re experimenting with human emotions, then,’ Verity said. ‘Experimenting with our capacity for love. And methodically.’
‘I’ll tell you what I saw once,’ he went on, more darkly. ‘Parents and one kiddie – only young, they were. The parents gave up the kiddie, when the Martian ’andling-machine came to collect; cutest little blonde girl you ever saw. Pushed ’er into the clutches of the machine, they did, jus' like that. And you know what the Martians did? They released ’em, the parents. I saw it with my own eyes. Opened up the pit, and let them climb out, and they emerged blinking and grimy and a bit bewildered, and I ’ad to tell them which way to go to get out. Laughing my ’ead off I was, they was crying so ’ard – but, crying or not, off they went. Probably still out there somewhere now, growing spuds and ’aving dinner parties.
‘Because they’re the sort the Martians want to breed. Do you see? Remember the long term goal: they don’t want to eat us all, not all at once; they want to set up a nice malleable ’erd they can control, with the minimum of fuss. Like those poor skinny wretches ’oo came from Mars in their cylinders. That’s what they want, the meek, the controllable - the selfish, disloyal sort. And that’s what they’re selecting for. Submit and you live – and breed.’
Verity shook her head. ‘That’s monstrous, Bert.’
‘Plausible, though,’ I murmured.
‘And that’s just the start,’ said Bert Cook. ‘Some day, when they’ve bred us into the strain they want . . .’ He held up his hands, as if framing the scene. ‘I got this vision of the future. People being grown in rows like plants in a vast field, all passive and waiting their turn. And the fighting-machines walking up and down the rows, just plucking them when they’re ripe.’ He laughed at us. ‘Still squeamish, are we? All this too tough for you to take? It’s not over yet. Look at what I brought you to now.’ With a dramatic flair – he had been a showman, after all, peddling his stories on stages around the world – he pointed down into yet another cage, another pit. ‘Look down there . . .’
Verity looked more closely than I did at what lay in the pit, but then she had been a VAD, a nursing assistant, and had seen worse before than I ever had. I could not look for long; it was a glimpse, a vivid horror.
The woman was young, I would judge, no older that twenty-five. She was naked from the waist up; her lower body was covered by a coarse blanket; she lay on her back in the shadow of the pit. A man sat beside her, looking at us warily, resentfully – almost possessively. And the thing that grew out of the side of her belly was a head - a recognisable human head – it looked like the head of a child of perhaps nine or ten. A crumpled face, eyes closed, a sketch of a nose, no hair on the scalp. Fingers, long and skeletal, were gathered around the mouth like blades of grass around a rock. Its mouth had a pointed upper lip, like the letter V. That was all I saw, before I had to turn away.
Verity asked, with eerie calm, ‘Who is he? The man with her.’
Cook shrugged. ‘Doctor of some kind – or pretending to be. It’s another kind who gets spared; if you show yourself to be a doctor or a nurse, or with those sort of skills, they’ll spare you, for a time anyhow. What better than to ’ave a sheep playing the vet for the rest of the ’erd? This isn’t the only experiment they’ve run. On reproduction, I mean. They’re interested in all that. They like to examine the stages of a pregnancy.’ Mercifully he went into no detail. ‘And the children growing up too. Take a few kiddies away from their parents and set ’em in a pit on their own. Maybe they want to see whether we would grow feral. Would we work out our own pack structure, like wolves? Would we work out a language, or do we ’ave to be taught it? . . . I suppose that’s what they’re interested in. Whether we’re more or less biddable.’
Verity said, ‘This, though -’
‘Gen’rally they don’t last long,’ said Bert Cook, almost casually. ‘The bud seems to drain the mother’s body of too much blood, too fast. I say bud. I say mother. Not sure whether those terms are the right ones, I ain’t no Huxley.
‘Some say the Martians were like us – once. Ain’t that so? ’Umans, or ’uman-shaped – like the wretches they bring with ’em to eat during the voyage. But they evolved away, or rather sculpted themselves away from that form. Eugenics, the betterment of a stock by surgery or fiddling with the germ plasm – I don’t know, all I know is what I read, and I don’t even understand ’alf of that.’
‘And now they’re trying it on us,’ Verity said, joining us, her face closed with disgust and rage. ‘Seeing if we can be made Martian, like them.’
I whispered, ‘Whatever it is, I wish -’
‘You could end it? Myself also. Put an end to this House of Pain!’
Cook said coldly, ‘You still ain’t seeing it clearly. The Martians, you know, would say they are doing us a favour. Lifting us up, as if we made a chimp smart as a college perfessor. And who’s to say, by their lights, they are wrong? And – pain? What of it? You clever-clogs keep telling me the Martians are above us mere mortals. Perhaps, with their ’eads detached from their bodies, they are above pain as above pleasure. And what need they care of the pain they inflict on us? Any
more’n we care about the pain of the animal in the slaughterhouse – or the tree we cut down.’ He grinned at me, mocking. ‘And, seeing this, do you still think you’ll be able to communicate with ’em? Still think they’ll be impressed by you being able to prove Pythagoras’s theorem, or whatnot?’
I saw that even an imagination as dark as Bert Cook’s had not guessed at the truth of my mission, at what I carried in my veins – even now, as I completed these last few steps of my long journey, seven hundred miles from the bright civilisation of Berlin to this, the centre of evil – no, not of evil - of the unbearable inevitability of science, and intelligence, and Darwin’s chill logic.
But perhaps Bert was right. By the Martians’ lights and perhaps in the view of our own descendants of the far future, they who would have to deal with the cooling of the sun, and the freezing of the earth, as the Martians have done their world the Martians’ ghastly treatment of the young mother in the pit, our own first step to a greater evolution, was the noblest gift they could have given us.
In any event, what Bert Cook said to me now was: ‘I think it’s time you saw the end of it.’
34
THE DRIPS
So we were brought to the very centre of that mile-wide pit. From here the bordering rampart could be seen all around, and the sun, I saw, was soon to rise over the wall to the east – it was still very early. Before us the great fallen cylinders protruded from the earth like megaliths; it was a Martian Avebury. We were close to that tremendous central shaft in the ground, too. From where we were I could see the excavating-machines toiling under the lip of the pit, widening and smoothing the walls. And I could hear a great pulse sounding from deep underground – boom, boom, boom – like a tremendous engine, or a beating heart. It was the backdrop to everything that followed.
And there, in a shallow arena, the Martians sat together. They were out of their machines, and resting on a carpet of their red weed. They were flattened balls, as if deflated, their skin creased. I imagined that was an effect of our earth’s heavy gravity. I saw those strange faces clear and close to – the immense dark eyes, the lack of a brow ridge, the V-shaped lip, the lack of a chin – unless you’ve seen it in life you cannot imagine the animation of that face. And the brow huge and sweating, not unlike the brow of Walter Jenkins, I thought! Occasionally one would pluck at a vesicle of the weed or a fatter cactus-like growth, lift it with those long, bony fingers and push it into its mouth. They regarded each other with those immense dark eyes. And they hooted and honked, sounding like brokendown steam engines. Huge, flaccid, ugly, they would have been almost comical, I think, if not for the equipment arrayed around them.
That equipment:
Imagine a series of hanging brackets, like scaffolds, with a handling-machine settled at the base of each. A human being hung from each of these scaffolds, by the feet, inverted, the arms loosely strapped to the sides. These captives did not struggle, but they were conscious throughout. Later anatomical examinations proved it: the Martians used electricity to render their selected specimens flaccid, incapable of physical resistance, but it seems clear they were awake through most of it – and, probably, capable of sensing pain. All of them happened to be adults, and for that I am forever grateful; the images burned in my memory might have been so much worse yet, if children had been among the victims. Dangling people, then. Eyes closed, their faces flushed with blood – their hair loose and fallen, the skirts of the women draped in an undignified way. Some were well dressed, in fact; it made no difference now.
And a tube, crimson, protruded from the side of the neck of each of these victims– the left side, I remember vividly attached to a valve set in the jugular vein or carotid artery. Each tube snaked down to a rack among the group of Martians. These tubes, and the racks they were lodged in, had peculiar markings which Keynes, expert on blood transfusion, has since speculated might be related to human blood types; a Martian may prefer, or be compelled to take, human blood of a particular type, and the tubes were coded as necessary.
For this was the feeding, of course. The last stage in the process was simple, technically. Using the long fingers of those strange hands, a Martian would take one of the tubes, insert it into a kind of cannula attached to its own flesh, and turn a tap, so that the blood ran directly from a human being into its own body. There were even young in the Martian circle; the juniors, like the adults in every particular except their size, had their own miniature cannulas fixed to the flesh, and I saw one adult, almost gently, use her long fingers to adjust the feed tube to the inlet on the flesh of a confused infant. It seemed almost touching.
‘Sometimes they’ll feed in a kind of frenzy,’ Cook murmured in my ear. ‘Then they can’t get the victims in quick enough, handling-machines or no handling-machines. Your Martian needs a lot of blood through ’im, from time to time. Why? I’m no sawbones, but I’d say it’s the need to flush out the waste from the bloodstream. How else are they to do it? Never seen a Martian on a lavatory - I bet you never thought about that, did you? Or sometimes they just bleed the victims out into big refrigerated stores, like blood banks.
‘And other times, like this, it’s more leisurely, sort of inbetween. Like a tea party, don’t you think?’ He laughed. ‘Almost polite. Sometimes they’ll empty you in one feed. Or sometimes they’ll turn you right way up and hang you in a kind of store, and keep you for later. Eventually you’re used up, of course.’
I said bleakly, ‘And then?’
‘And then you're no more use.’ He grinned coldly. ‘The crows are allies of the Martians, at least. You two ladies ’ave done well – thought you’d pass out or run away long before this. So, now what? Going to give ’em your geometry lesson?’
‘Let us talk,’ I said, and walked away from him with Verity.
Her face was pinched with anger and disgust. ‘If I had a Zeppelin and an immense bomb, I would drop it and erase all trace of this blemish. It doesn’t belong on our earth.’
It was time to tell her the truth. If not now, when? ‘I don’t have a bomb, Verity, but I do have the next best thing . . .’ And I told her, quickly, of Eden, and Porton Down, and the concoction in my blood.
I would have been consumed with resentment at this dishonesty. But Verity was made of better stuff; once she grasped the idea she immediately saw the opportunity. ‘Will you use it? Here we are at the heart of it all – Cook seems to roam around with impunity. If we could get to this blood store he speaks of -’
‘No.’ I pulled away. I turned around. Confused, distressed, I was acting on pure instinct now, but my instinct was not to poison. ‘A grim old pathogen from the heart of Africa – if we use this, are we any better than the Martians?
‘And even if we succeed, it won’t be enough. For even if we poisoned this lot, they would learn to safeguard against it, and more would come, and more . . . Look around, Verity! This is England, and there are beings from two other worlds here – from Mars and Venus. It is an interplanetary war, as Walter saw, and that’s how we must handle it, and no bit of petty sabotage is going to resolve it one way or another.’
‘How, then?’
In that moment – that moment of exquisite pressure, of shock and disgust and imminent peril in the very heart of the horror - my mind raced, and my thinking was, I believed, clearer than it has ever been before or since, clearer even than Walter’s, and I thought I saw it through to the end I thought I saw the solution. I carried it with me, in fact – not in the lethal sludge they had forced into my veins, but in the battered leather satchel I had brought all the way from Berlin, at poor Walter’s behest. Or rather, I saw the necessary solution in the grander ideas that had framed Walter’s project, ideas that had been used as no more than the basis of the Lie by Eden and his commanders - ideas of which even Walter seemed to have lost sight.
I faced Verity. ‘We have to get out of here.’
‘Very well. And then?’
‘And then we have to contact Eric Eden, and Marriott with his bombe
rs . . . We’ve work to do, Verity. Work to do!’ It was then, I think, that I saw the green flash in the sky. Verity looked around, distracted too. A gleam of the sun showed on the rampart wall to the east.
I grabbed the girl’s shoulders. ‘Verity – what time is it?’ She checked her watch. ‘A little after five a.m.’
‘And the date?’
‘The date? Why -’
‘The confusion – I was unconscious for so long -’
‘It is Friday. May 19, I think . . .’
I was chilled. I remembered now, the faded diary, the old lady’s bedroom. This was the date I had computed in my addled brain, presuming I remembered June 10 right as the opposition: three weeks and a day before that astronomical encounter. And here were the fireworks, right on schedule!
Another flash in the sky, a green streak, like a crack in heaven, heading west.
I shook Verity. ‘The cylinders! Did you see that one?’
‘The next wave – it must be. And stop shaking me!’
‘Perhaps if we had been outside the Cordon we would have known, the government must have announced the sightings of the cannon fire on Mars by now . . .’
But she looked confused. ‘I don’t understand. The Martian cylinders – they always fall at midnight. It’s nearly sunrise -’
‘Midnight at the target site, though,’ Cook said bluntly, staring at the sky. ‘Midnight there, not ’ere. Here’s another one, look. And another! Whoosh, splat!’
And even as we spoke, and the Martians hooted languidly as they fed, more cylinders fell across the sky us, and more. They were all heading west, I saw, towards the Atlantic.
Towards America.
Where, on the east coast, in Washington and New York and Boston and Miami, it was midnight. And I knew I was right. Even if I successfully infected the Martians in England, the other nests would adapt, and the war would be lost anyhow. Our only hope, and a fragile one, lay with Walter and his ‘graphic geometry’: it lay in my mind, not my blood.
The Massacre of Mankind Page 33
