The Massacre of Mankind

by Stephen Baxter

  However, by 1922, it had become clear that the Martians achieved this enormous compression of matter with the use of very powerful electrical and magnetic fields. And our investigations of these comparatively familiar technologies had advanced our own capabilities in these areas by, some would say, decades.

  Edison’s bomb was called an ‘explosively pumped flux compression generator’ – a flux bomb, to the soldiers who used it. Its purpose was simple: to produce, for but an instant, in a restricted area, extremely powerful electrical and magnetic fields.

  It achieved this by exploring a quirk of electromagnetic physics (a quirk to me! - a miracle of theorising and practical application to the physicists, I dare say). If you have a magnetic field, and surround it with a conductor – say, a band of copper wire – and then you contract that band, the magnetic flux through the conductor, contained by the wire, will stay the same strength – but its intensity, you see, the density of that power, as it is squeezed, must become much higher. It’s as simple as that, and you can demonstrate the principle with a schoolroom experiment, an electromagnet and a few bits of wire.

  Now scale it up. Wrap your conductor and your magnetic field in a few packets of high explosive. Set that off in a careful design so that the explosive forces push inwards – and the compression of the magnetic field becomes enormous, if only for an instant, before the whole thing blows itself apart . . .

  The point is, as Edison realised, that Martian machines depend on electrical fields for their operation. They have what Walter Jenkins once described as a ‘sham musculature’ comprised of discs inside a sheath of elastic. When an electric field is applied, these discs, polarised, are drawn together or pushed apart. The result is the remarkably graceful ‘limbs’ of any Martian machine, from the great legs of a fighting-machine to the finest of the manipulative tentacles of a handlingmachine – and all of it controlled by electrical and magnetic fields. And if those fields were disrupted, by a sufficiently powerful electromagnetic pulse nearby . . .

  I am told, by witnesses from Menlo Park itself, that the devices Bill Woodward brought to Harry and Marigold, packages each easily carried by a single person, could produce pulses in the tens of terawatts and the millions of amperes: that is, more powerful than a lightning strike. Thus it was, in the course of the attack on New York, humans at last turned the lightning on the Martians.

  The detonations themselves seemed overwhelming to Harry, huddling by a wall. They left him with a ringing in his ears that persisted for days.

  When he emerged from cover he found that only two of their bombs had worked. But those two had done tremendous damage to the Martians. As Harry watched, one of the great fighting-machines fell like cut timber, legs stiff as wood, and crashed down into an already ruined house. The other machines seemed paralysed, the busy excavators and handlers frozen in their tracks. The living Martians, stuck in their machines, tried to scramble out, and hooted to each other in dismay, and Harry wondered what complex messages, of fear or rage, were passing telepathically between them.

  Marigold picked up a rock. ‘They’re helpless. We can kill them before the machines recover – if they do.’

  But Woodward held her arm. ‘No. Some of the machines survived, you can see that. All it would take would be one working Heat-Ray gun . . . We’ve done what we came to do. Let’s get those civilians out of there.’

  As they left the pit, they saw more fighting-machines converging, travelling down the rubble-strewn streets to come to the aid of their fellows. Harry, Marigold and Woodward had to duck and hide as they made their escape: it was evident that despite the blow they had struck, and the detonation of similar bombs across the occupied territory, Manhattan still belonged to the Martians.

  ‘But it’s a start,’ Bill said grimly. ‘Americans fighting back, at last. A start!’

  23

  A WORLD UNDER SIEGE

  Having no better plan after the Martian triumph in Berlin, Walter Jenkins had joined the ragged crowds fleeing from the centre of the city, and out into the suburbs and beyond. From there Walter retraced his steps – and, somewhat to his own surprise, made it back to his rented house in Dahlem.

  It was still only the early afternoon of that extraordinary Saturday.

  By now Walter was a veteran of such situations. He made for his study, gathered up equipment, and hauled it down to a cellar used only for storing coal, firewood and a rack of wine – he even managed to drag a telephone receiver down, its cable stretched along the cellar stairs. He made one last foray aboveground for water and food. Then he retired to his improvised bunker, listening to a battery-powered wireless set, trying to make calls on the telephone, and making obsessive notes by candle-light.

  Thus, through the Saturday night and into the Sunday, Walter renewed his witnessing of the Second War.

  He learned that by noon of the Saturday – noon London time, that is - urgent reports had been received via the transoceanic telegraph and telephone lines of the Martians’ attack on Buenos Aires. Their strategy had followed its by-now customary course, with a landing at local midnight – that is, in the small hours of the Saturday, London time - some distance inland along the valley of the Rio de la Plata, and then at local dawn an advance on the city. The Argentinean military, an undeveloped force, was able to offer little resistance. Images later returned were particularly vivid: of the Martians smashing the huge grain elevators that lined the banks of the river, of fighting-machines standing proud over the huge La Negra slaughterhouse, of the rich elite crammed aboard the frigorificos, the giant refrigerated ships within which Argentinean beef is exported. And the poor had to fend for themselves as the poor always do. (A romantic tale, by the way, of a band of gauchos riding out and using their bolas to trip fighting-machines turned out to be just that – a tale.)

  So much for the Argentine capital. But this was the last of the Martian incursions; since the first landfall on Long Island, a twenty-four-hour cycle of landings and assaults had been completed.

  By midday of the Saturday, then, the earth was stitched about by pinpoint Martian attacks – knots and scrapings of fire that could surely have been seen by an observer on Mars itself – with ten landings having occurred in the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, even Australia, and comprising a thousand cylinders in all. Human attempts at organised resistance had proven all but futile, just as they had been in England in ’07 or ’20. Such innovations as the Americans’ flux bombs and the Germans’ incendiaries might have enabled humanity to take the war to the invaders a little longer, given time. But to Walter a rapid disruption of human civilisation and organisation seemed assured, and the unending domination of the earth by the Martians inevitable.

  And then, everything changed.

  24

  THE REVENGE OF THE MARTIANS

  In New York it was around nine in the morning.

  Harry Kane, Marigold Rafferty and Bill Woodward sat in Battery Park, where Harry and Marigold had been camping for two nights now, and surveyed what they could see of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn where some fires still burned, the rivers still littered with wrecks. They were eating German sausages from cans looted by Woodward, and drinking coffee they had boiled up in a saucepan over an open fire. It was another fine, bright day, the weather belying the state of the city.

  Marigold was using her binoculars. ‘I still see no fightingmachines. Maybe your squawk-box is telling the truth, Bill.’

  Woodward had purloined an Army field-wireless kit from the corpse of a signals officer, and had been trying to follow the progress of the war. ‘Well, they are still moving. As Patton predicted, they broke out of Manhattan to the north and are already in Connecticut. Reports say they got as far as Peekskill on the Hudson, and Danbury on the Housatonic. They may not go much further north; the land is bad up there. The intelligence guys think the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts must be a target - biggest in the country, and we know they did their scouting before the landings. One group looks as if it’s considering
an advance to Hartford, maybe even to Boston. There’s another group heading south-west, maybe making for Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC. The Army set a trap at a place called Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and they’ve been held up there. But -’

  ‘But wherever else they are, the Martians they withdrew from Manhattan.’

  ‘Thanks to Edison’s bombs,’ Marigold said with a grin.

  Woodward nodded. ‘For sure Edison’s flux bomb is the first really effective weapon we have developed against them. And if you think about it, they reacted just as they did before, in England. I read the history. In Surrey in ’07, the first time an artillery shell knocked one of them over – I bet they weren’t expecting us even to be capable of that – they rescued their wounded, and their machine, and withdrew to their pits for a while. Just as here. We bloodied their non-existent noses and they pulled back.’

  Looking into the east, Harry thought he saw something in the sky, over Brooklyn and Long Island, like a cloud perhaps, in an otherwise cloudless heaven. No, it was too dark to be a cloud, and moving too quickly. If not a cloud, then what? A Zepp?

  Marigold said now, ‘Fighting-machines or not, I haven’t seen much in the way of rescue work and such.’

  ‘You will,’ Woodward said. ‘It takes time to move resources on this kind of scale; you got a whole city down here . . .’

  Not one cloud but three. Black as night, solid. And they seemed to be scattering some kind of dark rain below.

  Approaching fast. Not clouds at all.

  ‘Oh, damn.’

  Marigold raised her eyes comically. ‘Harry! Not in front of the US Army.’

  But Harry wasn’t about to smile. He pointed. ‘They’re coming back.’

  Marigold shaded her eyes from the sun.

  Bill Woodward got to his feet, fumbling for his own binoculars. ‘Flying-machines. Spotters always say they’re bigger than they look, and further away, and faster than you think.’

  Marigold said, ‘They’ll be here soon enough. And that black stuff they’re scattering - it looks as if it’s pooling on the ground, like the smoke from dry ice. Swirling around the buildings.’

  Harry nodded. ‘The British call it the Black Smoke. A new variant, resistant to water. You can slaughter whole populations with the stuff, easier than the Heat-Ray. But it’s only been used on a limited scale over there, this time anyhow. They want to knock us out of the fight, but not to kill us all, it seems. But, the British found out, if you resist, you get whacked.’

  Marigold said grimly, ‘New York resisted. And here’s our reward.’

  And Harry Kane felt true fear, for the first time in the war – perhaps in his life, he would say. All he had experienced so far, in the midst of the fury, had left him oddly untouched within. Somehow he had always believed he would come through this intact, no matter what happened to those around him. As if he were invulnerable and immortal. The coming of the flyingmachines changed all that. Perhaps all young people have to shed such illusions. For Harry, the Black Smoke, an approaching wall, was like the advance of death itself, implacable, unavoidable.

  Harry thought he was doomed, the earth itself lost. He was wrong about that.

  For I had fulfilled my own mission.

  25

  A PLAYER OF THE GAME

  On the Friday afternoon, after debarking inside the Martian Cordon from the landship Boadicea with Lieutenant Hopson, I had quickly got in touch with Marriott once more, and through him his network of resistance fighters. Meanwhile, following Eric, the surviving underground telephone lines into the Cordon had been fizzing with new instructions to the troops stranded there.

  I had never been sure if Marriott believed my account as to why I wished him to use his stock of explosives in one great earth-shaping exercise. He may have had his pompous side but he was a hard-headed, practical man, and determined to take the fight to the Martians as best he could, and good for him; now he cavilled at the fact that this operation would not be hitting the Martians directly. But I think, paradoxically, he liked to be given an assignment from authorities to which he still believed himself accountable, and loyal. He relished the thought of such a technically complex set-up, part of an operation that included many of the regular troops trapped inside the Cordon with him. And, more than that, he liked the sheer symbolism of it. After all - what a gesture!

  A communication to be seen from space!

  Whatever he was feeling, after I persuaded him to my cause, Marriott and his scattered army immediately got to work. It took them much of the rest of the Friday to plan it – I had found him late - and much of the Saturday to move the explosive caches into place, all across the Cordon, all beneath the gaze of the Martians. Still, all was ready by the morning of the Sunday. After some final checks, and with a last coordination with the military authorities, Marriott, by phone, sent the messages to his franc-tireurs to detonate at noon.

  So it came to pass. All across the Cordon - and even within the Amersham Redoubt itself - the Martian earthworks were disrupted by a series of blasts, carefully placed. It could never be complete, never perfect – there was not the time, and the explosives were placed under conditions of extreme peril, whether by regulars or the franc-tireurs. Nevertheless, the stratagem was effective. Aerial photos taken before and after the blasts show it clearly.

  That morning the Martians’ earthworks, as imaged at eight thirty a.m. by spotter planes, had undeniably sketched a set of sigils, some miles long, incomplete but near-perfect copies of that sinuous marking humans had first perceived on the faces of Venus and of Mars, after the Martians’ invasion of the younger planet – and, later, through the scholarship of Walter Jenkins, had been made out in the unfinished pattern of pits the Martians had dug into the ground of Surrey in the year 1907. This was the Martians’ brand of conquest. But in the afternoon, by the time the dust and smoke had cleared, the sigils had been disrupted, blasted apart – and they had been replaced by circles, on all scales, far from perfect but the intent clear. At noon on Sunday, then, we humans replaced that Martian brand upon the earth, not with a symbol of our own – but with a Jovian sigil, that figure of infinite symmetry which the astronomers had seen burn in the clouds of Jupiter itself.

  And a couple of hours later the Martians began to respond. In Battery Park, meanwhile, in those last moments, as the flying-machines loomed, the three companions stood in a line and held hands, Bill and Harry to either side of Marigold.

  Marigold said, ‘Old Bigelow will never know what he started when he invited the three of us to that party – was it only on Thursday night? It seems a different world.’

  ‘Do you regret it?’ Woodward asked. ‘Resisting, I mean. The flux bombs. We probably could have got out of here . . .’

  ‘Hell, no,’ Harry said.

  Marigold smiled. ‘Ditto,’ she said firmly. ‘And, you know . . .’

  And then something changed.

  The fall of Black Smoke stopped abruptly.

  The flying-machines broke formation. Huge dishes in the sky, they swept around in wide curves, and receded as quickly as they had come, growing smaller, vanishing into the mists of morning – gone in seconds.

  The last of the Black Smoke, dispersing, blew harmlessly out over the water.

  Harry felt a surge of emotion, of relief; he would say he had not understood the depths of his fear until it receded. But he felt utter bafflement at still being alive.

  ‘What just happened?’

  26

  SILENCE FALLS

  At the same time it was around three p.m. in Berlin. And Walter Jenkins, huddled in the cellar of his house, was immediately aware of a change in the Martians’ behaviour. It was a silencing of their movements, he said, a kind of slithering withdrawal. That cry, ‘Ulla!’, heard all over the planet that terrible day, now seemed more plaintive – and receding.

  He pushed aside his improvised barricades of empty barrels and broken furniture, and - heart thumping, for he could not be sure of his deductions �
� he emerged into the light of a German midday. Other people stood by, in the wrecked street, dusty, bewildered, some injured – all watching. And Walter saw the fighting-machines, tall and graceful, receding steadily from the city – heading north. All this in his first glance.

  In that moment I think he guessed what must have been done – what I must have done – emulating my own intuitive leap. Well, it had started out as his idea, even if I had thought it through in the end. And he even guessed correctly at the timing of its completion: about noon British time.

  He hurried home to his cellar to try to verify his theories, praying that the telephone would be working.

  Of course it was all guesswork, in the end – about how the Jovians might respond. Educated guesswork, though.

  When the Martians invaded Earth and Venus, had the Jovians set up the circle sigils in their own clouds and moons as a warning to the squabbling races that Jupiter must remain inviolate? And, worse, to ensure their own future survival, must the Jovians fight a future war to dislodge the destructive, meddling, expansive Martians from this earth, and even from Venus? We had to assume so.

  My intent, when I imagined creating those great signals of dirt and explosive, was that with one bold gesture we would proclaim this earth an ally of Jupiter, in that epochal combat to come. And evidently, in response, the Jovians gave the Martians some warning, or instruction, and the invaders had no choice.

  My signal was a created at noon, London time. The Martians did not withdraw until 2 p.m., roughly. Why the delay of two hours? - a lag which caused many of us intense anxiety as we lived through it, as I can testify.