I saw that the weather was changing, with heavy thunderclouds streaming in from the east, soon to blot out the autumn sunshine. I cursed my luck, though that was scarcely fair to the fates. Across the northern hemisphere, the climate had been worsening for a decade, with an excess of extreme events, notably storms of rain or snow or hail, and bloodyminded winds that had done nothing to help humanity’s tentative efforts to recover from the Martians’ assault. The elderly, into which category I now tentatively included myself, dreamed of what in retrospect seemed like idyllic late-Victorian times: days before the Martians, the summer days of childhood. But then, perhaps everyone feels that way about the past.
Beyond Paris my train soared across the countryside of north-west France, passing without stopping through Amiens and Boulogne – and then, in utter silence, apparently on invisible magnetic wings, we sailed over the Straits of Dover, with the sun bright above us once more and the Channel waters glittering below, and the monorail towers slim and elegant, a chain of mighty new Eiffels. During the Channel crossing coffee was served by calm bilingual stewards. That, I thought, was just showing off.
At Dover our service swept through a Crystal Palace of a new station, and then it was on, striding on more stilts over the pretty towns of Kent, with the North Downs a great wave of greenery. And very soon we came to London.
Such was our speed as we raced towards Waterloo that I only glimpsed the damage that had been done to the city by the Martians in their years of occupation, and the rebuilding since, but in places I saw what looked like Martian handling-machines and excavating-machines busily scraping and digging, with the eerie puffs of green smoke that always characterised Martian technology. Meanwhile, in the more expensive districts, in Chelsea and Kensington and along the Embankment, grand new buildings were rising up, skyscraper blocks and terraces that gleamed with Martian-manufacture aluminium. They seemed grand to me, anyhow; I had not been back to America for a time, and had not seen a restored Manhattan that Harry Kane told me ‘would make you eat your hat’. But even so London was transformed. After all, after the invasion of ’20 London had been systematically pummelled by the Martians, and had got it worse than any other city on earth, with every landmark you can think of targeted. It had been like the Great Fire, I suppose, a chance for a rebuilding. And so some modern Wren had erected a new St Paul’s on the site of the old, not a dome but a shining needle of Martian aluminium, topped by a crucifix.
And I knew that many of the new structures were as extensive underground as above, with cellars, bunkers and dormitories. The governments too were digging huge bunkers under their ministries – around the world it was so, too. Some commentators said that, fearing a Martian return, we were becoming as subterranean as the Martians themselves.
We came into Waterloo, and I was delighted to see the figure who waited for me on the platform. It was Joe Hopson, nearly forty years old now and his hair a rather startling grey, but as dapper as ever in a crisp, clean uniform. We had gone through a few ‘debriefings’ together after the Martian withdrawal, and we had kept in touch since - with Christmas cards, at least. He made to embrace me, but I recoiled, I hope subtly enough. My blood has long since been scrubbed clean, but still I find I recoil from physical contact. Instead, I mockingly gave him my best attempt at a military salute.
‘At ease, soldier,’ he said with a grin. After a brief struggle, with his old-fashioned manners warring with my sense of independence, he took the small rucksack that was as usual my only luggage. ‘Come. We have a car waiting.’
‘So you’re a captain now,’ I said. ‘If I’m reading your stripes correctly, that is.’
‘Afraid so. Didn’t get terribly far, did I? My cadet instructor at school, old One-Ear Crookswell, would be mortified. And also I’m retired – well, semi. I’m a sort of reservist now – most of us veterans are. Even on a salary, if a small one. The Second War was so brief in the end that those of us who had the luck to do the actual fighting were pretty few, and those who survived are even fewer. So it’s worth keeping us old warhorses in the stable and feeding us the odd handful of oats, so we can give the shiny new generation the benefit of our experience. Keeping our forces match fit in case the Martians decide to have another go, you see. I run into Ted Lane sometimes at such bashes, and he says he still hasn’t forgiven you.’
I pulled a face. ‘Well, he’s a right to be aggrieved.’ He was talking of the time I had slipped out of Abbotsdale with Verity Bliss to find the Buckinghamshire franc-tireurs, without so much as a word to Ted who had followed me across the North Sea in the role of protector. ‘I suppose keeping match fit, as you say, makes sense – if you think the Martians are likely to come back.’
He glanced at the sky, apparently involuntarily, which I have observed is a tic among those of us who went through those days – no doubt I share it myself. ‘Well, that’s always possible,’ he murmured. ‘And we’re coming up to another set of favourable oppositions, aren't we?’ He looked at me. ‘I daresay you know more than I do.’
‘Sorry. I’m just a civilian, not even a foot-soldier any more. But that’s partly why I accepted Walter’s invitation to come back to Amersham – to find out what’s up, even just to see it all again - I’m researching my own account of those days, you see . . .’
We came to his car, emblazoned with a military flag and parked in a premium spot. I suppressed a pang of alarm that it was one of the modern designs that, like the monorail carriages, was carried on single wheels. Somehow this thing kept its balance even standing still, even as we jumped inside.
So I was whizzed across London.
When we reached the desolation that had been Uxbridge we came to barriers of various kinds, manned by police and military. I was reminded of the old Surrey Corridor.
Hopson guided me through all this with a few calm words. He had seen more of the fighting than me, and he had been a very young man at the time. He was always one of those who hid his real feelings, in his case beneath a layer of publicschool faux innocence, but every so often you would glimpse deeper depths, as if a shaft of sunlight pierced murky water.
Beyond Uxbridge, we drove to the Trench, the huge and complicated fortifications thrown up around the Martian Cordon. A way through the perimeter had been brutally cut, and I peered up at earthworks that now looked like artificial hillsides, covered by sparse grass and by rose-bay willow herb. To see all this again, empty of the soldiers and their equipment which had swarmed everywhere all those years ago, was very strange for me. Then we passed into the Cordon itself - through that cratered annulus smashed up in a few seconds when the Martians’ dummy cylinders had fallen, and still a lunar plain all these years later.
Stranger yet was to drive into the countryside beyond, through towns and villages and the undulating green of the chalk country of the Chilterns, even now comparatively unscathed. This was the region that the Martians had ‘farmed’, in the jargon of the military analysts, with trapped humanity as their stock. So you would see a village with a couple of inns open for business beside a church whose steeple was melted to slag. And I saw cattle in the fields and sheep, with that season’s healthily grown calves and lambs.
But I knew that this area, all of it within the Martian Cordon, was still under the direct military rule that had once been imposed on the whole country. For here continued a very secret process of weighing guilt: of determining who among the residents could be charged with active collaboration with the Martians. Of course it was fourteen years in the past now, and I knew that many of those guilty, or at least fearful of being found guilty, had quickly fled. The last I had heard of Albert Cook was that he was living under an assumed name in Argentina, with his partner and the daughter I had once met – Mary and Belle – and I found it hard to begrudge that brutal but clear thinker a retirement of peace. I was glad that Frank had been cleared of collaboration charges, but had since disappeared from my view – he was pursuing front line medical work in communities still recovering from the War,
as far as I knew. ‘Marriott’, by the way, got an O.B.E., much to his smug satisfaction.
Thus, at last, we came to Amersham, and the Martians’ central Redoubt.
4
BACK TO THE REDOUBT
Once again I entered that mile-wide fortress.
Now the Redoubt was surrounded by wire fences and watch towers, and a circular connecting road. Within, amid the old Martian pits and earthworks, was a clutter of human structures, barracks, prefabricated buildings that looked like factories, or perhaps laboratories, some of them with hefty power plants of their own. There was a hospital, a pub, even a few shops. It was like a military camp, or even a small town, all built to the most modern of standards, and it almost looked cheerful in the sunlight. Yet the whole was penned in by barriers of steel and barbed wire, soldiers patrolled everywhere – and, I saw as we got out of the car, a Navy airship swam overhead, the lenses of huge cameras glinting.
I had last seen this place with Albert Cook, while the Martians were still in residence. Now there was a kind of patina of humanity over the whole thing, with metal walkways and steps and ladders, and small huts set up on the dirt, and heaps of equipment here and there. People walked around in coveralls and helmets of various hues. It all reminded me a little of some tremendous archaeological dig – Schliemann at Troy, perhaps. I tried to ignore all this, to remove the people in my mind’s eye, and to replace them with Martians and their machines.
Yes, I thought, that peculiar terracing might have been created by an excavating-machine. That mound of chalky earth, glistening with flints, might have been raw material for a handling-machine as it industriously produced its ingots of aluminium. And that flat place, cut like a cave into the wall, might have been where the Martians themselves would gather, emitting their eerie hoots, where they might have fed. Over it all would have been standing, not bored sentries, but fightingmachines.
And under all this activity, I reflected, lay deep buried the ruins of old Amersham, together with its unlucky inhabitants, smashed in an instant when the cylinders fell, a Boadicean layer of destruction.
‘All this security - better safe than sorry, I suppose,’ I murmured to Joe Hopson as we got out of the car.
‘Indeed,’ he said, as he led me, on foot now, deeper into this knot of mystery. ‘After all, we would leave behind mine fields and other booby traps. Why not the Martians? Not that anything of the kind has been discovered so far. Also there’s talk of keeping it intact, more or less, as a monument for future generations, like Woking . . .’
‘I wonder if that’s wise.’
This was Walter Jenkins.
He stood waiting for us. He did not look well to me, gaunt, his face shiny with some medicinal cream, his hands swathed in bandage-like gloves. But then he was seventy years old. Tentatively he shook hands with Hopson; he knew me well enough not to offer me his hand.
‘Nice to see you, Walter,’ I said dryly.
‘You wonder if what’s wise, old bean?’ Hopson asked pleasantly.
‘To make a monument of this symbol of oppression. Such things confer power. Look at the Tower of London – the corner of a Roman fort, the relic of one occupying power, later reused as a bastion by another, the Normans. Well, the Romans left of their own accord, and so did the Martians, but we never got rid of the Normans, did we? Some dictator of the future using this place as his seat, calling on the mythic authority of the vanished Martians? No thanks. Let’s fill it in and let the grass grow.’
Hopson only grinned. ‘The Normans? You Welsh are all the same. It’s been eight hundred years, you know. Live and let live.’
‘Oh, I am deadly serious,’ Walter said humourlessly.
Hopson led us deeper into the complex, progressing slowly.
I took Walter’s arm. ‘Now, play nice, Walter. You invited me here, remember. I’ve come a long way.’
Walter grinned. ‘You’re a journalist – and a chronicler of the Martians after my own heart, if not my ability.’
‘Thanks -’
‘I thought you couldn’t refuse the chance of an inside view of the Martians’ most developed complex on the earth.’
‘I suppose. But you know that Carolyne set all this up in the first place, don’t you?’
He seemed to find it difficult even to hear his wife’s name. ‘Have you seen her?’
‘Not recently. It was a phone call.’
‘Of course this,’ he said, ‘is only a waystation. A teaser.’
‘Ah. We’re talking about the Martians, are we? A safer subject? Very well. A waystation en route to what?’
‘To the place the Martians went, of course.’
I glanced at Joe Hopson, and he at me; this was evidently a revelation to Joe too. But of course the mystery of what had become of the Martians on the earth had been a source of discussion and debate, ever since the cessation of the hostilities in ’22 .
Now Walter glanced at the sky, where that airship still patrolled. ‘Looks like rain again – so much for the sunshine. But of course, that is all part of the problem. A symptom . . .’
‘What’s the weather got to do with it? You always had the most infuriating manner, Walter. Dribbling out your clues, your bits of information.’ We were two old relics in this museum of war, bickering as before.
‘Then I apologise. Come, then, the guided tour. If you would be good enough to stay close by, Captain Hopson, and keep flashing those credentials, we should not be impeded; the security people know me well enough here by now . . .’
And so we walked on, through a series of fences, and over ramps and duckboards, into the very heart of the Redoubt, where, at the very centre, a deeper shaft gaped in the earth. As we approached the sight evoked memories, deep buried, of the noise of this place: a boom, boom, the relentless noise of subterranean workings. That at least was silenced now. And a kind of pulley system had been set up on a frame over the shaft; two bored-looking soldiers stood beside it, smoking. The victory of the mundane, I thought.
Walter was watching me. ‘Intrigued? You should be. Follow me. Tread carefully, now . . .’
That pulley system proved to be a crude elevator. It looked rickety to me, and it had an alarmingly large wheel, implying an alarmingly large length of cable to be paid out.
Walter grinned at my discomfiture. ‘Oh, it’s tried and trusted technology. The kind of gear they use to wash windows in New York – you must have seen them, intrepid fellows with mop and bucket suspended high above Fifth Avenue . . . We won’t be going so deep. Only six hundred feet or so.’
Evidently this was all new to Joe Hopson too. ‘Six hundred . . .’
‘Come, hop aboard!’
There was a rail, to which I clung. With a nod from Walter to the military men controlling the pulley, we began our rickety descent. The disc of daylight above quickly receded, the heads of the soldiers silhouetted against a sky bright and out of reach. There were electric lamps on the gantry we rode, and I was soon grateful for them as the dark closed in.
Joe said, ‘No deeper than six hundred feet, you say.’
Walter smiled again. ‘They put a net at that level – the military – telescopic poles jammed against the walls, just in case anybody falls, though six hundred feet would doom you anyhow . . . The shaft as a whole is some half a mile deep.’
Now it was my turn to parrot back distances. ‘Half a mile!’
‘It is necessary for this shaft’s true purpose. Or one of them. You have any idea what that purpose is, Captain Hopson?’
Joe looked at him. ‘How wide is this thing?’
‘A little over thirty yards, as you suspect, don’t you?’
‘Mr Jenkins – is this a cannon?’
I leapt on the idea, seeing it at once. ‘Of course. That’s where the Martians went!’
‘The British party, at least,’ Walter said.
‘So they built themselves a cannon -’
Hopson said, ‘And refurbished a space cylinder or two -’
‘And s
hot themselves back to Mars, the way they came!’
Walter grinned. ‘The launch was observed, in fact. Visible from over much of southern England, though most people had no idea what they were seeing. Well, nor did any of us until the images were analysed, and it’s all been kept thoroughly classified ever since. Did you ever notice that even under our new united-world government, old Marvin’s DORA act of 1916 was never repealed? . . .’
Hopson was frowning. ‘But hang on, old bean. How deep did you say this shaft was? Half a mile? But that’s nearly not deep enough. I remember at school we read Verne’s book, Americans to the moon, you know, firing themselves out of a great cannon, and we soon calculated that the accelerations and so forth -’
‘Quite right,’ Walter said, sounding grudgingly impressed. ‘Ben, the projectile’s motion as it came flying out of the cannon mouth could be measured from images, chance observations by spotter planes and from the ground. It must have been driven out of the gun with an acceleration of about ten times the earth’s gravity – that is thirty times higher than the Martian, but not, perhaps, unsupportable, if you suspend your bulk in fluid, or brace with supporting equipment. And the cylinder continued to accelerate even after it left the muzzle of the cannon. Observers saw green flashes, and there appears to have been a tremendous plume of hydrogen emitted from the base of the craft. If the acceleration rate remained the same, a continuing thrust up to perhaps four hundred miles from the earth would have been sufficient to hurl it free of the planet. And thence, to Mars!’
Hopson seemed awed.
With a rattle of cables, the elevator was slowing, and I saw that there was a doorway, neat and circular, cut in the wall of the shaft. ‘We have almost reached our stop,’ Walter said.
I looked at him. ‘A stop at what?’
‘The city of the Martians,’ he said. ‘Be careful when you climb off the platform.’
5
THE MARTIANS’ UNDERGROUND LAIR
The Massacre of Mankind Page 46
