It was a city indeed, or a warren at least, far beneath the ground of England, now lit by electric lamps, a network of cylindrical tunnels and spheres, and with a geometry that eluded me though I was assured it had all been thoroughly mapped.
Aside from the silvery metallic fabric of the tunnel walls, I saw no Martian equipment there. But there were traces of humanity everywhere: telegraph wires taped to the walls, a chemical toilet, caches of battery torches and candles in case, I supposed, the electrical power failed - even oxygen bottles and masks.
‘But these are a mere precaution: the air stays fresh,’ Walter said. ‘There are several shafts to the surface, and a breeze flows, apparently naturally, but I have my suspicion there is technology involved somewhere in the process – something subtle, not a pump as we would use, a kind of osmosis perhaps, or a capillary action . . .’
We came to a big spherical chamber – one of several, I was informed. The floor was terraced with concentric horizontal platforms, like broad steps leading down from the sphere’s equator where we had entered. All this was seamlessly moulded from the same metallic substance as the walls of the tunnels. A couple of soldiers stood on guard, watching us warily, one with a field telephone at his side.
Walter Jenkins sat easily on a step, and we followed his lead. ‘Of course all the Martian gear has been removed – mostly by the Martians themselves, a few relics by the first humans to penetrate the place. One can only imagine how it was when the Martians themselves were here! It was rather dark to human eyes, but as you know Mars’s sunlight is dimmer than ours. And the Martians, scattered through this chamber like great leather sacks, hooting and puffing the way they did, those strange finger-tentacles working . . . But still one can deduce a great deal about the Martians and their society even from the basic layout of the place.’
‘Oh, really?’ I asked, in a mood to be sceptical. ‘Such as?’
‘Just compare this to any human structure you ever saw – consider what’s missing. You have the passageways, and the communal areas, and that’s it. There is nowhere for privacy, for the Martians evidently don’t desire it. And there’s no evidence of status, or hierarchy. Nobody has a grander room than anybody else. So we can deduce their social structure is flat. They must make their decisions by discussion and consensus. They share everything – why, we see no evidence of anything like private property. They are supremely loyal to each other, too. And remember, I have strong reason to believe the Martians are telepathic. They could not lie to each other. Have you considered that? Imagine how human society would be transformed by that one simple adjustment!
‘Why, even these common areas have a kind of democratic symmetry. One must sit and talk in the round. We found one exception, a chamber with a peculiarly dimpled floor. The best speculation is that this is where the young are kept, after they bud from the parents, when they are small and dependent.’
Hopson seemed to like the idea. ‘Just like being sent away to prep! Didn’t do me any harm. A Martian at Eton? Might fit right in. Well, he’d be good at table tennis.’
‘Such as, that their great cannons are clearly a secondary technology – I mean, a derived use of an existing device, rather than a fresh design. The cannon, you see, were produced by tunnel-boring equipment that was probably perfected long ago – equipment primarily designed underground habitats, like this. for the construction of I suspect that all the technologies they brought to the earth, at least in 1907, were not dedicated weapons, not machines meant for making war, but adaptations of technologies meant for other purposes. Even the Heat-Ray.’
Hopson mused, ‘Just as a man may use a flame-thrower, meant for clearing scrub, as a weapon: deadly enough if you’re in the way of it, whatever its intended purpose.’
‘That’s the idea. After all, what do we see when we look at Mars? You have the snow and the ice, the oceans, the vegetation, the canals. Nowhere do we see a Martian city. Not a single building. Not even at the most complex of nodes in the canalnetwork, like Solis Lacus.’
I saw what he meant. ‘They must have retreated underground – into warrens like this.’
‘That’s it. It’s logical, isn’t it?’
Hopson wasn’t keeping up. ‘But why would one choose to live in a warren?’
‘For protection. For breathable air, as one’s atmosphere thins and collapses. For warmth – for even when the sun dies, you know, the interiors of the planets will retain their heat, and in fact the earth more so than Mars because of its greater mass. This may be our destiny some day, when the sun becomes cold: to huddle underground, kept alive by the planet’s residual heat.’
‘But there’s nothing here,’ I mused, looking around at the blank walls. ‘Not just an absence of sunlight – what would one eat?’
‘Life in the subterranean cities would be one of technological advancement and biological simplicity,’ Walter said, rather pompously. ‘The end of the game in which the Martians are already engaged. The Martians rebuilt their world as they rebuilt themselves, in a great simplification, just as they discarded the wasteful lumber of gullet and stomach to become little more than a brain and a blood circulation system. We know they have hugely simplified their ecology – there is the red weed, and the humanoids that feed on the weed who provide blood for the Martians themselves. Everything else extirpated! Discarded! From the mightiest tree to the flies to the most insignificant of microbes – which as we know left the Martians vulnerable to infection when they first came, in ’07.’
Hopson frowned. ‘Do you admire all this? But the flies, man - swallows eat flies. Do away with the flies, and you lose the swallows. Would you want that?’
‘Not I,’ I said firmly, struck by the astuteness of the observation.
‘There might be no alternative,’ Walter said, dreamy, anxious. ‘Do you not see it? One day the Martians will surely go further yet, leaving behind altogether all this business of biology. Imagine a machine that could take rock, and raw energy from the sun or the planet’s heart, and turn that into food – for all the elements one needs can be found in the minerals, you know. The ultimate efficiency – the most exquisite simplicity – nothing but sunlight, and rock, and brains. That, I believe, is the ultimate technical goal of the Martians.’
I grunted. ‘You sound as if you envy them. Isn’t that what the psychologists said of you, Walter? That you’re half-Martian yourself? Anyhow now they’re gone – this lot at least. So where are the rest? The ones who landed in New York and Los Angeles, and Peking and Berlin . . . Even you must be aware of the disquiet that mysterious vanishing has caused, and continues to cause. The situation can never be resolved until we know. Do you have some new notion?’
He smiled. ‘In general terms, it was always obvious.’
I glowered; he could be infuriating. ‘Obvious, was it?’
‘Most of the earth is too hot for them. So they will have migrated to where it’s cold. And as most of them landed in the northern hemisphere -’
‘The north,’ Joe Hopson said. ‘That’s always been obvious, yes; they would seek the north, the coldest lands. But the Arctic is the roof of the world – Canada and Asia – it’s a damned big place. Are you saying they’ve been found?’
He answered mildly, ‘I’m saying there have been reports to that effect. There’s an expedition planned next year. Weather permitting. Julie, fancy a trip? There we can confirm what the Martians are doing up there – or rather, what I believe they’ve been doing . . .’
To the Arctic, searching for Martians! Well, I wasn’t about to say no. Would you?
6
THE VATERLAND
That winter passed slowly for me, in a daze of expectation. Then in early March 1937, I boarded the LZ-138 Vaterland, at Murmansk.
That city is about as far east as you can go in the northern Russian empire and still find something resembling civilisation.
And we would be travelling in the late Arctic winter, about as inhospitable a time and place as our dear old earth
offers you, although, as Walter Jenkins never tired of pointing out, to a Martian it would be like the balmiest of summers. We privileged few, however, a multinational party, would travel in a flying hotel.
We gathered in a chilly aerodrome outside the city. Here was Walter himself, seventy-one now, frailer than ever. Joe Hopson was with me; he had kindly volunteered for the trip to serve as a general companion, assistant and guide. Like most military veterans he was a supremely competent chap, and I was glad to have him with me.
And Eric Eden was there too, aged fifty-five, now officially retired from the British Army but still serving as a paid advisor to various government departments on all things Martian – he bore his own burn scars, but he was another survivor whose presence reassured me.
All told there were fifty passengers of a dozen nationalities, most of whom were scientists unknown to me, but I had no doubt of their relevant expertise - at least as judged by some committee or other in the Federation embassy in Paris. And such a high-profile jaunt, with a lot of attendant publicity, naturally attracted the famous and the rich. It was rather fun to do some celebrity-spotting as we stood on that windy platform.
I thought I recognised our expedition leader: Otto Yulevich Schmidt, well over six feet tall, a scholar and outdoorsman famed for leading expeditions into the Russian Arctic over a decade. I was not surprised to learn that, in addition to Schmidt, there were heroes of polar exploration among our crew, such as Richard Byrd, first to fly to the North Pole. I was told that our newly crowned King Edward’s American wife was on board. Their union had been seen a symbol of a new age of transatlantic amity despite a mild controversy over her previous divorce. But I did not see Queen Wallis. There was even a rumour that the Kaiser Wilhelm III was aboard, taking part in this ambitious flight of the most prestigious of his country’s aerial vessels. If so, I never glimpsed him either.
‘Even more aggressive than his unlamented father,’ Eric murmured to me. ‘If we come within biting distance of a real, live Martian we may need to muzzle the man.’
When the time came for our boarding, however, I soon forgot my companions, for I was enthralled by our great craft itself. I first saw the Vaterland in bright morning light. Even penned in its hangar it was a tremendous sight, a huge cylinder lying flat on the concrete apron, dwarfing the buildings and service vehicles which attended it. Its great belly rested on wheels and rails, and there were huge stabilising fins on its flanks and at the tail where a vast engine block was fixed. Then came the call: ‘Airship forward!’ A kind of netting was fixed over the ship’s pale grey surface, and workers like ants dragged the vessel from its shed by hand.
As we passengers walked towards the craft - there was a sickly-sweet smell which I was told was associated with the replenishment of hydrogen - the airship became only more impressive, more towering. It was no less than a third of a mile long from bow to stern, with the capability of carrying a hundred tons of cargo, driven by its Daimler-Benz engines at a top speed of ninety miles per hour. But it was the symbolism of the craft that struck me most. A new age of global federations we might be living in, but you wouldn’t know it from a glance at the Vaterland. Everywhere were the colours of imperial Germany, strong yellow and black, and a mighty eagle, all in black, was emblazoned on the nose – that design alone must have been a hundred feet tall. And Eric pointed out to me the three great compartments which the ship carried slung under its belly. The front was the passenger gondola, the rear was for engines and fuel – but the middle section, Eric said, was essentially a bomb bay.
The passenger gondola, I observed on boarding, was split into two decks, the upper for the kitchens and stores and quarters for the crew, and the lower for our cabins and the lounges and dining rooms. There is always an enormous amount of room on a big airship. Even as we boarded, a player at a grand piano treated us to selections from Wagner. It did not take us long to find our rooms and get settled. Later I would explore the cabin’s own ingenious features: the padded walls, the fold-away bunk and table, the telephone, the electric lights.
For now, though, I hurried back to the main lounge for the takeoff.
I sat with Eden and Hopson – Walter had retired to his room, intent on his note-taking, his endless studies. I could already hear, indeed feel, the throbbing of the great engines transmitted through the ship’s frame. The lounge was fitted out in the most modern styles, all beige colours on the walls and uplighting on the ceiling, and glass-topped tables and chairs with chrome rails. There was even a small vase with fresh flowers set on our table. It all made the dear old Lusitania, fond in my memory, seem shabby.
‘Cast off!’ came the cry.
And then we rose.
On an airship, you know, the windows are all in the walls and floor, so one can look down at the landscapes that slide silently below, while above your head the sky is shielded by the great bulk of the lift envelope. And the moments of launch offer perhaps the most spectacular views of all. The aerodrome shrank below us, the workers standing by the mooring tower and waving, turning into tiny dolls. The sprawl of Murmansk itself was soon visible to the south, and to the north the Barents Sea opened up, blue open water close to the shore but with ice floes scattered not far out. On the horizon the ice merged into a solid mass that, I knew, stretched all the way to the pole. Not far out to sea I saw a small convoy, a couple of icebreakers and some low-slung cargo ships. The Russians’ Great Northern Sea Route, a six-thousand-mile passage all along the northern coast of Eurasia, is open for only a few months of the year – mere weeks in a bad season – and it pays to set off early if you don’t want to spend a winter trapped in the ice.
Even as we lifted small aircraft jumped into the sky to see us off. Monoplanes, with hulls of glittering aluminium and the sigils of the imperial Russian air force bright on their wings, they ducked and darted around us, making what seemed impossibly tight curves.
Eric Eden was impressed. ‘Those must be reaction-engine flyers - following the principle of the Martians’ flying-machines, and a product of the German-Russian war, of course. Our
planes still use screw propellers to drag themselves through the air.’
‘Silly asses,’ muttered Hopson, puffing on an unlit pipe smoking was not allowed aboard our hydrogen-lifted craft.
‘Flies buzzing an elephant.’ But despite this languid dismissal he craned to see the feisty little craft as much as any of us.
7
A JOURNEY ACROSS THE ARCTIC
It would be a journey of some two thousand miles to our destination, which was the Taymyr Peninsula. Running at a comfortable speed we would cover this journey in around fortyeight hours. It was on the Tuesday that we set off from Murmansk; we were expected to arrive at the Taymyr some time on the Thursday.
I tended to stick to the company of my stout companions. It was generally known that I was a friend of Harry Kane, and he had recently made himself notorious by writing a trashy radio drama, produced by his wife Marigold and broadcast on the Edison Broadcasting System, about a sudden arrival of a fresh fleet of Martians in the Midwest. Well, as a new set of close oppositions were approaching, the show had caused a panic, frantic phone calls to police and Army, even a few scattered evacuations. I didn’t want to be quizzed about that scandal, and I kept my head down. Besides, the company was pleasant. In relaxed circumstances Eric Eden and I shared for the first time our reminiscences of the Martian War, aside from the times we had been thrown together; it is largely on the basis of those conversations and the notes I made that the relevant sections of the present memoir have been drafted.
We were not allowed to be bored, however.
On the Tuesday afternoon, while a magical landscape of water and ice slid beneath our prow, Otto Schmidt treated us to an off-the-cuff lecture. He was a Russian, despite his name, but he spoke to his international audience in heavily accented German. In his late forties, tall, commanding, and with a beard like Santa Claus, he looked every inch the Jules Verne heroexplorer to me, and
sounded like it too. He described to us something of the history of the Russians’ inner colonisation of their own vast empire, which, I was surprised to learn, went back to the days of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth centuries, when explorers and exiles and fur trappers and religious schismatics had wandered east. By the time of Peter the Great the first towns were being established, and in the nineteenth century the establishment of the Trans-Siberian Railway was a major triumph. But it was only in the twentieth century - and after the great trauma of war against the Germans and then the Martians – that the development of the region had been accelerated, and conducted in a systematic fashion. Schmidt himself had led the first successful crossing of the Great Northern Sea Route. It was thanks to such explorations and surveys, of course, that the presence of the refugee Martians had been confirmed, and as a consequence the Russian Arctic science academy had proposed this international mission to the Federation of Federations.
Schmidt was a booming braggart, but engaging, and he had a right to be proud of all his country had achieved. And, he claimed, this was the nearest anybody had come to colonising a hostile alien planet. ‘So maybe the Russian flag will be the first to be planted on Mars!’
We applauded such sentiments politely, and I wondered what the Martians might have to say about that.
On the Wednesday afternoon we stopped at a town called Noril’sk, which is on the Yenisei river, still some five hundred miles from our final destination. Here a group of companies were mining for nickel ore. We dropped supplies of various kinds; ours was the first significant visit to the town since the winter had relented.
Eric Eden and I took the chance to slip out of the gondola and walk about the town. It was a shabby, functional place, surrounded by a stout wire fence, the buildings mere shacks of cinder blocks and mortar and prefabricated panels, the streets of bare, tamped-down dirt. There seemed to be cement mixers everywhere. There were elements of mundanity: aside from the factories there was a school, a church, a hospital, a repair shop for the few automobiles in the dirt roads – all mostly half-built. People lived and worked here, then, and raised children. There was even a small cinema; a handwritten billboard told me it was showing Cherie Gilbert’s A Martian in Hollywood. But it was a desolate place, and I was chilled to the bone despite my expensive cold-weather gear.
The Massacre of Mankind Page 47
