Bert Cook grinned coldly. ‘Told you.’ He raised his arms to the sky. ‘Come down, you beauties!’
BOOK III
WORLDS AT WAR
1
THE HOUSE IN DAHLEM
On the night the lightning fell across the earth, Walter Jenkins was in Berlin. And from that powerful city his view of that world-wide catastrophe far exceeded my own perspective at the time, trapped as I was in the Cordon in England.
Walter had taken a rented home in a village called Dahlem, south-west of Berlin proper. I once visited the house out of curiosity, during a trip to the city in the aftermath. Dahlem is (or was before the Martians came, and will be again) an opulent place, green and leafy – indeed a corner of the Grunewald Forest laps over its boundary – a community of wide avenues and spacious villas. The house was not characteristic of the man, I remember thinking as I looked around it; in terms of material ambition his vision had never risen much above his old English suburban home in Woking. But in those final days before the return of the Martians, he said, he had chosen to move away from the ‘laboratories’ of central Berlin, where Freud and others continued to examine his prototypical disorder of the mind, his ‘gun-dread’. Here he had privacy, and space, and the quiet to think – and, crucially, the means to observe the war of worlds which he anticipated.
To that end – and long before the attacks were due - he had installed additional telephone wires, even a telegraph receiver, and wireless sets of impressive power. All this was of not negligible cost, but, as I have previously mentioned, thanks to his Narrative he was not without means – and, he seemed to have decided, if the Martians were on their way in force then soon money might not mean very much anyhow.
And the Martians were on their way: of that he was as certain as any individual outside the scientific, military and government establishments.
Of course, like all of us he based had his calculations on the date of the coming opposition of Mars: the closest approach of the planet would be on June 10, and a hypothetical schedule of firings, based on the precedents of ’07 and ’20, could be counted back from that. Even now it’s hard to recall now how total was the secrecy blanketing the astronomical project at the time: for years, for many oppositions, the authorities, fearing our panic and mindful of false alarms in the past, had done their best to hide the news from the sky from us, whether it be good or bad, and it was impossible to get confirmation of any sightings, one way or another. But Walter had resources and contacts. He listened to whispers and words and speculations from friends within the world-wide astronomical community, many of whom, being bull-headed scientists, had little time for official blankets of silence. In short, they leaked, if discreetly.
So it was that Walter eventually learned that the Martian cannon had indeed begun to fire again, as early as April 8 – that is, even before I had visited him in Berlin in May, though he had not known it at that time. It was just as in ’20 when he had learned so late of the coming of the Martian fleet.
And as Walter tried to analyse the available information, the numbers of these new blasts soon became clear. In 1907 there had been a mere ten cylinders launched from Mars; in 1920 ten times that number, a hundred falling in formation in central England – and now, the astronomers privately estimated, another tenfold increase would bring a thousand Martian ships to the earth.
Where would the Martians land, though? The cylinders seemed to be flocking in space, gathering in flotillas as latecomers joined the interplanetary armada – just as had been the case with the British invasion force. But because the Martian pilots repeatedly adjusted their trajectories while they crossed interplanetary space, almost down to the moment of landing as it turned out – the rocket-like devices flared green even as the cylinders fell across our sky, as I and others witnessed – for many days the pattern was unclear.
So Walter collected world maps of all kinds – he even had a cheap schoolroom globe – as well as astronomical tables, and a variety of mathematical manuals. Even a slide rule! Walter was a philosophical journalist, never a mathematician, but he had long ago learned that mathematics was the language of the astronomer, for numbers capture the exquisite precision of the motion of the heavenly bodies in relation to each other: even the intricate ballet of the Martian fleets as they assembled in space to fall upon the earth. And it was the pattern of those assemblings that he slowly puzzled out, alone in that German suburb, in those final days and hours, as the Martians drew closer, and the astronomers’ observations of the approaching cylinders and projections of their flight became more precise.
The core of it was simple. The Martians always landed at local midnight.
They would come out of the dark, he saw, falling into the midnight shadow of the earth. And they would come in clusters, lined up one after another and ready to fall on our world.
He imagined the view from an approaching cylinder in the first cluster, with Europe, London, Berlin, Paris and all, already carried into the light of a new day, but the Americas blanketed in the midnight dark, the great cities laid out like jewels along the coasts and on the courses of the great rivers. Blanketed in dark, and helpless as the Martians fell from the sky, hammering down on the line of midnight.
And after that, as the world turned, as the midnight line crossed the land, so the following Martian battle groups would fall, again and again.
It seems he managed to sleep a little, that last night.
On Friday May 19 he was woken by one of his telephones ringing. His clocks showed it was six in the morning in Berlin, five a.m. in London – I was in the Redoubt at Amersham with Verity, watching the cylinders cross high in the sky - and a little after midnight on the East Coast of North America.
It had begun.
‘I told you so,’ he told me he muttered to himself, a man alone in that house in the German dawn, in pyjamas and dressing gown, eyes no doubt dark with fatigue, sheets of his spidery scrawl covering tables and walls. ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’
2
ON LONG ISLAND
As midnight approached, Harry Kane thought that the atmosphere in the Bigelow mansion, was agitated. No, that was not the word. Feverish, perhaps. Or on the borders of hysterical. Everybody knew that if the Martians were to come to the earth at this opposition the landings ought to start tonight – or rather today, this new day just begun at midnight, Friday May 19. Well, if the astronomers had seen anything it hadn’t been released to the public. But even so the atmosphere was quite something.
Perhaps it was the drink, or the pills, or the rag music from the apparently tireless band, or the giddy excitement of being young and rich and utterly free to indulge yourself as you chose . . . Or perhaps it was the sheer privilege of having been one of the lucky few (well, lucky few hundred) to have been invited to this party, at this cusp moment when, perhaps, the world itself was about to come to an end – at least according to the gloomier prophesies in the Hearst papers . . .
And how to capture this wild, glittering fragility in a word, a phrase?
As I have mentioned earlier in this memoir, my good friend Harry was a journalist for the popular New York city papers, a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post in particular – and, under another name, a pulp novelist. Well, we all have to make a living. He had a nose for news, which was why, as it would turn out, he ended up at precisely the right location on that dramatic night. But he lacked, I always felt, the other half of the true reporter’s skill set, in that he struggled with the words themselves, always uncertain allies at best for poor Harry. And that distracted him, for he would stand unseeing before the jewellery heist or the train wreck or the car crash, while lexicological fragments drifted behind those handsome blue eyes. I told him once that he could have been a great writer if only he could write.
But he did have an eye for detail; when he came to write down his own account of that night he would remember that just as midnight struck the band was playing The Sheik of Araby, accompanied by a blu
rred chiming of the house’s many clocks.
He pushed his way through the ballroom of the Bigelow mansion, ignoring the Japanese panelling and the rich flock wallpaper and the Parisian chandeliers that adorned that brilliantly lit room, and joined the crowd jostling to get through the wide French windows and out onto the veranda and under the open sky. He would remember the drink he carried through those open doors. It was a highball, not his first, and maybe one too many; he set down the half-empty glass on an ornate occasional table.
There, as he wandered across the veranda, he took in the scene. If the Bigelow house itself looked as if it was a wing of the palace of Versailles, carved off and carried over the Atlantic to Long Island, the gardens were scarcely less spectacular. The lawns, studded with lilac trees and hawthorns and plums, many in blossom, were strung with coloured lights. The garden’s centrepiece was a swimming pool, a disc of brilliant blue light across which girls swam like dolphins – all of them in proper bathing costumes, but that would change as the night wore on and things got rowdier; it was always so. As you looked further out from the house you saw the jetty, and a couple of small boats, and the dark waters of the Sound, and the lights of Manhattan on the horizon, a misty blur.
And people drifted through this scene like pretty ghosts, drinks in hand, the women in expensive creations of beads and chiffon, the men in dress suits and patent leather shoes like Harry’s own, or – probably the Long Island natives – in white flannels and sneakers. Purple seemed to be the colour that year – or just that month or that week - and every woman wore her hair tight in a carefully shaped bob. Bigelow’s guests looked alike, Harry thought, all but indistinguishable unless you made out the carefully selected detail. Thus the convergence of fashion and money: lots and lots of money.
While he was people-watching in this way, of course, he was missing the real news of the evening. Slowly he became aware that many of those pretty faces were turned upwards, to the sky. It was only then that it occurred to Harry to look up too.
It was a clear, cloudless night, a late May night, with just a tang of chill in the air after a warm day. The lights of the party were so bright that no stars were to be seen. But Harry saw the streaks across the sky, off to the east. They came and went, splinters sporadically visible. Harry was a country boy, having grown up in upstate New York; he had seen meteor showers before, and this had something of that look. But these streaks all ran in parallel to each other, and they were crowded together, dense in the sky: evidence of coordination. And no meteor he had ever seen flashed green.
Of course he knew what this meant; it was just as the more irresponsible newspapers, including most of those he wrote for, had predicted. The Martians were coming to the earth, once again – more of them, following the group still camped out in England. Well, here they were, right on cue, sand this time, evidently not targeting England again, but heading here, the US, the East Coast. There had been much speculation that if they did come to America they would slam down in the middle of one of the great cities, Chicago or Boston or New York itself, but – so Harry judged, taking his orientation from the lights of Manhattan – they were actually coming down in an east-southeast direction; they would land on Long Island somewhere to the east of Harry’s own position, close to Sands Point.
Nevertheless, they were here.
He stood back in the shadows, keeping to himself. Harry had never been to England, had never seen a Martian or its works close to, save filtered through photography or flickering cinema images. Even now, nothing but lights in the sky. It was one thing to play with the ideas of bogeymen from the red planet - and he had written lurid potboilers about the Martian threat himself - and quite another to have it become real. He supposed the fear would come later.
To the people around him, though, the apparition seemed extraordinarily exciting; they shouted, pointed, yelped and whooped, some broke into spontaneous dancing, some even started to applaud. It was giddiness, thought Harry, as ever searching for the right word like a squirrel for a lost nut. The over-excitement of the party and too much chemical stimulation was now laced with this cosmic terror, as if sherbet had been thrown into a glass of champagne.
A girl he knew slightly grabbed his arm. ‘Dance with me, Harry! Isn’t this just the end – the end of the world party? They say Guggenheim’s here, and Eddie Cantor, and Jack Dempsey -’
‘And P.G. Wodehouse.’
‘Who? Oh, let’s dance, Harry, what’s wrong with you?’
He smiled, shook his head, gently disengaged, and let her whirl away.
He walked away from the brighter lights and down towards the jetty. Once away from the house he heard car engines gunning, vehicles driving away.
By the water he spotted a man and woman in the shade of an awning, calmer than most, watching the sky, quietly smoking. Harry hung back a moment and observed; they were two silhouettes wreathed by cigarette smoke, under a Martian sky. Harry sensed they were not a couple, and would not object to his joining them. (If vocabulary was a weakness, Harry was always sensitive of emotions.) Anyhow, he felt no awkwardness in approaching.
‘Mind if I join you?’
They turned. The woman smiled, a little distantly, and the man shrugged, but stiffly, as if in mild pain. He was in uniform, Harry saw now, and he wondered if the fellow was some military veteran.
Harry politely offered fresh cigarettes. ‘Quite a night.’
‘Thanks to the Martians, yes,’ the man said. ‘Coming down on cue, according to the astronomical timetable – though not quite where the military analysts said they would.’
Harry stuck out his hand. ‘Harry Kane, by the way. I work for the papers. The Hearst rags mostly.’
The man seemed indifferent, but he shook Harry's hand. His grip was strong, but Harry observed how he winced as he flexed his shoulder. He was perhaps forty, dark and heavy-set; he wore the uniform of a junior Army officer. ‘Name’s Bill Woodward. Captain, if you can’t read the uniform.’
Harry took a stab, erring on the side of politeness. ‘Retired?’
‘Not quite. Sick leave.’ He tapped his shoulder. ‘Took a bullet in the Philippines six months back. Wouldn’t mind if I weren’t pretty sure that bullet was German-made. Recuperating well enough. The Army’s good enough to be paying my bills, though the place I rent, not far from here, costs no more than a hundred bucks a month – nothing like this. No family to mop my brow, as I was explaining to Miss Rafferty here.’ His voice had a southern twang, Harry thought.
Meanwhile the woman studied Harry closely. She held out her own hand and introduced herself as Marigold Rafferty. She was perhaps thirty, with a Boston accent or so Harry judged, and she wore riding habit: boots, long skirt, sensible jacket. Harry says she looked a little drab against the background of the glittering party-goers, and a sight more adult. ‘Harry Kane,’ she said. ‘I know your face, I think, but it doesn’t fit the name. You say you’re a journalist. Do you also write books, by any chance? . . .’
Harry coloured. ‘I’m afraid I do, Miss Rafferty -’
She snapped her fingers. ‘I knew it. Edison versus the Canal Builders – that was one of yours, wasn’t it?’
‘It’s something of a sideline. It can pay pretty well, given the serialisation rights and such. But I see myself as a serious journalist -’
‘Edisonades, eh?’ Woodward grinned. ‘Tales of the exploits of the great inventor of the lightbulb. I read a couple of those. Edison and the March of the Kaiser was my favourite. Was that one of yours?’
‘No -’
‘Always thought that one, at least, had a certain plausibility. Those Germans ain’t exactly forgiven us for taking the Philippines and Guam and Cuba from the Spaniards. Edison against the Martians, though – that’s a stretch!’ He glanced at Marigold Rafferty. ‘I did always wonder how the great man felt about his starring role in such works.’
Marigold gently punched the soldier’s good arm. ‘Come now, Bill, not only have we two just met, but we just met this
poor young fellow too; let’s not guy him. Harry – or “Mr Jarvis X. Kendor”, wasn’t that your nom de plume? – if you want to know how Thomas Edison feels about starring in one of your stories, you can ask him yourself.’
‘Edison? Quite a name-drop, Miss Rafferty! I imagine he’s in New Jersey, at Menlo Park.’ This was where Edison had his research establishment at the time.
Marigold shook her head. ‘Not a bit of it. He’s right here, Mr Kane. Here on Long Island. In fact, a little earlier, he was at this very party! But he tires quickly – well, as you would; he’s pretty sturdy, but he is seventy-five years old.’
Harry shook his head. ‘Edison, here on Long Island? Why?’
Marigold said apologetically, ‘I should explain. I work at Menlo Park too; my technical background is in telephonic circuitry, but for the last couple of years I’ve been something of a personal assistant to Mr Edison himself. Mr Edison has taken the predictions of Martian returns pretty seriously at every opposition since ’07, and habitually takes himself, and his family, out to what he hopes will be a safe refuge, if they do come. Away from the immediate vicinity of New York anyhow. As it happens the company, and indeed the federal government, have been happy to support him in this.’
Woodward grinned. ‘There you are, you see, “Jarvis”. You hit on a truth in your pulp novel -’
‘I’d hesitate to call it “pulp” -’
‘Edison’s no superman but he is a pretty valuable national asset. As it happened they rented him a villa next to mine. Me, a neighbour of Thomas Edison! What are the odds, Mr Kane? What are the odds?’
‘You say the government lends a hand. Is the old man really so important?’
The Massacre of Mankind Page 34
