‘You know, I spent some time in this part of the world before the Second War,’ Eric admitted, for the first time in my hearing.
I grunted. ‘Let me guess. You were here to learn how landships fare on the tundra.’
He smoothly ignored that. ‘It’s not easy out here. Just living, I mean.’ We paused by a half-built shell of concrete and cinderbrick. ‘For a start there’s the months of darkness, when it gets so cold the mortar will freeze before you can set your brick, and even when the summer comes you get this terrible humidity, and mosquitoes everywhere. The people here are a desolate sort, either drafted in or seduced by false promises of a new life on the frontier – you know the kind of thing.’
‘Why the fence? To keep the townsfolk in?’
He grinned. ‘Or the wolves out. They call the moonlight the wolves’ sunshine, you know.’
A hooter sounded, like a ship’s, calling us back to the Vaterland. It was time to move on.
And, even as Eric and I turned away from the fence, the snow started to fall – suddenly, without warning, it seemed to me, from a clear sky. We had to cling to each other, and follow other shadowy forms, to make our way back to the airship.
‘Even here,’ muttered old Arctic hand Eric Eden. ‘Even here, at this extreme place, the ends of the earth, the weather is – odd.’
Thus, Wednesday. We travelled on overnight.
And on the Thursday morning we woke over our destination, the Taymyr peninsula.
8
AT CAPE CHELYUSKIN
After a hurried, subdued breakfast, we passengers donned our cold weather gear once more and prepared to descend from the gondola. We were ready for work; many of the scholars had brought cameras, and various other instruments in bags and cases. As we filed down the gondola’s ramp I recognised one instrument from the manufacturer’s name, stamped on its box; it was a Geiger counter, to measure radiation.
Once outside, standing with Eric and Ben, I discovered that we had come down in the middle of a military camp, over which the flag of the Russian Empire fluttered in a mercifully light breeze. I saw a cluster of buildings, and field guns and heaps of ammunition under tarpaulins, and rows of automobiles, some fitted with skis for travelling on the snow – there was even a landship, a small one, done out in white and grey Arctic camouflage.
All of this, along with an airfield large enough to host an airship the size of the Vaterland, was enclosed by a fence. And on the northern perimeter of the compound I saw a cluster of watchtowers and gates, and a battery of big Navy guns installed on pivoted mounts.
‘ That way lies the ocean,’ came a voice. ‘You can smell the salt, I think. And that’s the way the guns are set. To the north, beyond the perimeter.’ It was Walter Jenkins, bundled in black furs. He wore a heavy-looking Russian fur hat, and what I could see of his face was screened by the lenses of his thick dark sunglasses, and pale skin cream. I wondered if his scarring was made more or less a discomfort in the deep cold.
‘Good morning, Walter,’ Eric Eden said dryly.
Joe Hopson clapped him on the arm. ‘It is good to see you. You mustn’t hide yourself away on the return jaunt, you hear? With four of us – well, that’s enough for bridge.’
‘Bridge?’ Walter seemed bemused.
Now Otto Schmidt called us together, the crowd of us passengers with a couple of the crew, and a squad of soldiers. He led us towards the gate on the north side. Towards the sea, then.
Walter walked with me. ‘It is not far to our destination. The Russians, having made the discovery by chance – after I had predicted it for years! – have set up shop admirably close to the site. Do you know where you are, Julie?’
‘The Taymyr Peninsula. North coast of Russia, a bit of land sticking out into the Arctic Ocean -’
‘And separating the Seas of Kara and Leptov, yes.’
We came to the mesh fence, at a heavily guarded gate. A crewman from the Vaterland had already taken the passports of the passengers in the party; a junior officer scrutinised these, and called us through. Beyond the fence, oddly, the scent of the ocean seemed much stronger.
‘But,’ Walter said, ‘what is this place in particular? Do you know? It is called Cape Chelyuskin. The extreme northern end of the peninsula . . .’
Now, as I looked around, I could see the ocean. Beyond a swathe of dark, hard-frozen beach, the water looked black, and further out sea ice gleamed white as bone. As we walked slowly forward, I saw a shadow in the ground before us: a circle, a pit, watched over by soldiers with automatic weapons and field wireless sets. A shaft dug down into the ground: it was just as I had witnessed at Amersham.
‘And this Cape,’ Walter went on, ‘happens to be the northernmost spot on the whole of the Eurasian continent. Right here, where we’re standing. The northernmost. Now do you see?’
I breathed, ‘The Martians. They came north. As far as they could.’
‘From all across Eurasia, from Berlin, St Petersburg, from Peking, even from Constantinople. As for those who landed in the Americas, it is thought that again they streamed north, and crossed into Asia by the Bering Strait – not much of an obstacle to the Martians, especially in the winter. There were a few sightings in the Canadian territories – Martians on the move! It’s odd, by the way, that they made little use of their flyingmachines.’
‘And Africa? What of the Martians of Durban?’
‘That remains a mystery. They left their pits, certainly. There are rumours of sightings in the forests of central Africa: finds of gorillas and chimpanzees, apparently drained of their blood . . . Some day we may send an expedition into that dark heart and find out. In South America it may be the same, though no one has yet penetrated the Amazon jungles to find out . . . Come now. There’s something else you must see.’
I walked towards that shadow in the ground, that pit, like the one I had explored in the heart of England, now transplanted into the hard Arctic tundra. Its shaft, a little more than thirty yards wide – the width of a Martian space cylinder – was lined, just as in Amersham, with an aluminium sheen. And, as I approached, cautiously like the rest, I could hear it, a great thump-thump-thump, like a beating heart, deep underground. It was the sound I had heard in England, all the time I was in the Martian Redoubt with Albert Cook, and unwelcome memories crawled.
‘They are here,’ I said. ‘Still here.’
Almost tenderly, Eric Eden took my gloved hand in his. ‘Buck up, old girl.’
I saw that a number of the tame experts were drawn away from the pit itself to inspect a broad trench, dug into the ground, perhaps three feet deep and twenty long, and oriented north-south. Those excitable scientists, mostly spectacles and beards and bald heads – senior academics were still largely men, in those days – were, with caution, using gloves, were reaching down into the trench and taking samples of what grew there: a plant of some kind, fleshy and crimson and covered in blisters, thick on the earth.
As Walter led me that way I saw that a number of other such trenches had been made, across this landscape and running down the narrow beach and into the sea. Walter reached down into one of the trenches and grabbed a handful of the stuff growing there, and gave me a share; it was dry to the touch and rubbery, but otherwise like seaweed. ‘No need to be delicate – there’s plenty of it around, and more of it every day. Growing in the ground, in a few spots on the surface – oh, and under the sea.’
‘How do we know that?’
He pointed to a machine that stood by the shore; it looked like a boiler on fat wheels, but it had a periscope like a submarine, and thick round portholes.
‘What’s that? Some kind of submersible?’
‘Yes, but not a conventional kind. It’s a Lake crawler – a design that drives along the sea bed - an old design that never really caught on, but which has its applications. Its brave crew, Russian scientists all, have taken that beast out onto the ocean floor, and far under the ice. And everywhere they went they found -’
‘This stuff?
’ I held up my sample. ‘Is it red weed? I remember how quickly it grew, even the first batches the Martians brought to the earth in ’07.’
‘It seems to be a form of red weed, yes.’
‘But what purpose has it?’
For answer, he popped one of the blisters on the frond I was holding. I saw no gas emerge, smelled nothing. ‘To collect this,’ he said.
‘The gas in the blister? It is invisible -’
‘It is nitrous oxide. A compound of nitrogen and oxygen – the sample is just as reported by the first expeditions, and its purpose is as obvious now as then, to me at least.’
I remembered now Frank’s observations of the depletion of the air over fields of red weed in the Abbotsdale Cordon. ‘I don’t understand. Purpose, you say? What does it mean, Walter?’
‘The removal of the world’s air,’ he said simply.
9
AN UNRELIABLE PROPHET
That evening, back aboard the Vaterland, Walter discussed his ideas further, with myself, Eric, Joe Hopson. We spoke over a dinner of sandwiches and beer and a bowl of fruit. The restaurants were sparsely populated now; those scientists on board – the rest had stayed in the military base - had scattered to cabins become improvised laboratories, and were, no doubt, planning to spend the night in obsessive analysing, experimenting and theorising.
But Walter had already worked it all out.
‘Here is the problem,’ he said. ‘The problem for the Martians, that is. Those stranded here find themselves on a world quite unlike their own in a number of ways. The greater mass, the heavier gravity – there’s not much to be done about that. Ah, but what about our atmosphere? From a Martian’s point of view there’s far too much of it; their air is attenuated compared to ours, and a different mix: we have too much oxygen, too little argon, for example.’
Both Joe and Eric seemed to be struggling with these ideas. Eric said at length, ‘Are you saying that these Martian Crusoes might wish to change the air – to make it more like their own?’
‘Precisely. Why would they not? After all, Europeans have spread around this earth, from the Arctic to Australia, and everywhere we have gone we have cleared those lands of native life and made them suitable for our crops and stock animals. It even goes on here – did you know there are potatoes, plants from the Andes, growing above the Arctic Circle?’
‘Are there, by golly?’ Joe said. He seemed more impressed by that fact than anything else said so far.
‘Very well,’ I said heavily, thinking it through. ‘It’s just that the Martians are going one step further. But how could they do it? To change the air of a world -’
‘I have speculated,’ Walter said calmly. ‘I have studied the kinematics of meteorites, for example. We know that the Martians have learned to use the dropping of objects from space as a weapon of war. And, such is the energy released, every such fall blasts away a proportion of the earth’s air into space – not much, but some. And once gone it is lost forever. Well, I wondered, could one use similar impactors – giant cylinders stuffed with rocks, for example – to simply blow all our air away?’ He sighed. ‘Sadly, I think that’s impossible.’
Eden snorted. ‘Sadly! The man says sadly!’
‘We have studied such impacts since ’07, and the natural landings of meteorites even before that. No matter how large a rock you drop, you blast away some air, but only a kind of a skim.’ With one bony hand he took an orange from the fruit bowl on the table, and cut a flat slice off the rind, tangentially exposing a little of the flesh within. ‘Like this. The energy of the infall won’t reach around the curve of the world – you end up just nipping off a slice, tangential to your horizon. Do you see?’ He made a few more such cuts, leaving the orange’s flesh largely intact. ‘I calculate it would take thousands of rocks to get all the air away that way, and by rocks I mean not mere hundred-yard cylinders, but big hundred-mile-wide asteroids. And consider what a mess you’d make of the world if you tried it! No,’ he said. ‘I think they’ve been more subtle. I think they’ve come up with a tool, a biological mechanism -’
‘The red weed,’ I said.
‘Correct. But an adjusted variant, modified perhaps at the level of the germ plasm – we know the Martians are expert at shaping living things for their purposes. No doubt the assembled professors aboard this craft will figure it better than I can, but my guess is –’ He glanced at us. ‘What’s the atmosphere made of?’
‘Nitrogen, oxygen, and scraps,’ Joe Hopson said promptly. ‘That got beaten into us during stinks lessons at school.’
Eden winced. ‘Do shut up, Joe!’
‘Very well. I think it works like this,’ Walter said. ‘The first goal is to get rid of all that nitrogen and oxygen – yes? Because those are the bulk components. Now, we could think of ways to do that – in principle, at least. Nature has provided certain plants which “fix” the nitrogen from the air, that is, draw it down and render it into molecules suitable for take-up by other living things. That’s steady, but it’s slow if you leave it to the plants. But now we have the Haber process, which fixes nitrogen from the air to use in artificial fertiliser. And a single Haber manufacturing plant can remove as much nitrogen from the air, in a week, as all the oceans absorb in the growth of plankton, and so on, in a year. In fact we have on board Frederick Keeble of ICI, who as you may know was the first to identify nitrogen deficiency as a limit to agricultural growth, and it’s no coincidence that a man with such expertise is on this expedition.
‘But I believe the Martians have been more subtle yet. I believe the weed encourages chemical reactions among the elements of the air. First, thanks to some catalyst, the nitrogen is made to bond with the oxygen. So the Martians fix the oxide rather than the nitrogen alone, thus removing the oxygen too in a single reaction– the bulk of the air, captured.
‘Now, each frond of the weed won’t take very much. But what it takes it holds. I have done some tests; this version of the weed has a thick, rubbery skin that shows no signs of rotting away and releasing its stolen air any time soon. It just grows, on the ocean floor – and on the ground, and in the ground, and then it lies there, just heaping up, a compact, unbreakable store.’
‘And the Weed grows very fast,’ I said. ‘It reproduces very fast. We saw that even in the First War.’
Walter nodded. ‘You start to see it. There is probably more to the system than that. The Martians will need machinery to spread this, to encourage the growth – but they can have that machinery, quickly. In Sheen, I saw myself how one handlingmachine could manufacture another in the space of a day . . .
‘It is already fifteen years since the Second War – fifteen years of opportunity for the Martians to develop their system, to spread the operation. And remember, they have already rebuilt one world to suit their tastes and their needs – rebuilt Mars itself, over and over as the sun has progressively cooled. They know what they are doing. They know how to do this.’
‘And already we’re seeing the signs,’ I guessed wildly. ‘The strange weather, the storms -’
‘That’s it. There’s a permanent low pressure system over this part of the Arctic, as the air is drawn down into the ocean and the ground. As the air thins, you see, it loses its capacity to hold water vapour. And on the other hand a normal density of water vapour traps the sun’s heat; as the water vapour is lost from the air, that heat is lost too. In the short term these effects would play hell with the normal meteorological processes. We would have to expect violent storms of rain, hail, snow . . . Ha! I remember the storms of the June of ‘07, when the Martians first came to England . . . Coincidental stormbringers!
‘But that is merely a phase. As the air thinned further, if it did, we would progress beyond meteorological phenomena. Those living at the highest altitudes would suffer mountain sickness. With time such effects must progress to lower and lower heights – there would be refugee flows – but it won’t come to that.’
Eden glowered. ‘You know that, do you
? Just as every French general knew that the Germans’ military build-up wouldn’t “come” to an invasion of Paris.’
Walter looked at us as if we were missing the point. ‘This is not destruction. Not war. Not under the eyes of the Jovians! That’s all over. Did you know that not a single fighting-machine has been seen in these polar wastes? Handling-machines, yes – machines for building, not smashing.Which proves that they’re here to stay. This is colonisation, not war, and ultimately it will be, it must be, of an orderly kind.’
I tried to make him see our concern. ‘But, Walter, to strip away our air -’
‘Think of it as a negotiation. Of a concrete kind, granted. They are telling us what they want. Well, we must respond by telling them what we will give them – some kind of reserve, perhaps. Even a domed colony. And we are leaving a party of scientists behind to progress that very goal. Perhaps we need a cosmic Mikaelian!’
Eden said heavily, ‘Just hypothetically, Walter – suppose the Martians’ sequestration of the air we breathe was not “orderly” after all. Suppose they don’t abandon it at some polite level. Suppose they just kept on with it. Where would that leave us?’
Walter seemed irritated to have to deal with this – what struck me as a typical hard-headed soldier’s question. ‘There is no theoretical reason why it should end until much of the atmosphere is removed. It is quite possible. Certainly the Martians could reduce it to match the pressure on Mars itself, and adjust its mix to meet their needs.’
‘And what of us? How would we survive?’
Walter eyed him. ‘How do you think? As we would on the moon, or indeed Mars itself. In shelters or caves. Shelters with factories that can make, or at least replenish, scraps of breathable air.’
The Massacre of Mankind Page 48
