‘Scraps of air,’ Eric said. ‘Scraps of humanity. We will not be able to move around the world – we won’t be able to organise we could not resist.’
‘It would be themassacre of mankind,’ Hopson said. ‘Just as you wrote in your Narrative, Jenkins. This would be the very massacre, at last.’
‘It won’t come to that,’ Walter insisted.
Eden was still grim-faced. ‘Well, this business of war being over, or not - I suppose we’ll know soon enough. The Martian cannons will fire at the end of March, if they mean to come again. If they do not fire, then perhaps Walter is right, that all of this business with the air is a mere experiment in colonisation, intended to do us no real harm. But if they do launch another invasion fleet -’ He looked Walter in the eye, sternly. ‘ If the Martians were to begin a programme to remove all our air how long would we have, man?’
Walter said, ‘It is difficult to estimate. The process is ultimately driven by the energy of the sun, which the plants use to process and sequester the air. We know how much sunlight energy falls on the earth per day, per hour -’
‘How long?’
‘Centuries at best. Decades at worst.’ He picked up his orange, as if absent-mindedly, and began to peel it, slice by shallow slice.
‘Crikey,’ Joe Hopson said softly.
‘What must we do?’ I asked.
Walter seemed surprised by the question. He popped a slice of orange into his mouth. ‘I told you. Negotiate.’
‘So,’ Eden said darkly, ‘we must wait for the end of March, and watch the skies. For then we’ll know, won’t we?’
10
THE EPILOGUE
During our journey westward and back towards Europe and civilisation, I was surprised to learn that Walter Jenkins planned to return to England for his first extended stay in a number of years.
And I was still more surprised when he let slip, quite casually, that he had – evidently on a whim, a nod to the past – bought back the house in Woking where he had lived with his wife Carolyne before the first Martian assault. That was his intended destination now. ‘I need to be there,’ he told me in that grave way of his, ‘on midnight of the twenty-sixth of this month – the date of the next firing, if it comes indeed. When again, history will pivot.’
He was right, and everybody knew it. As I have remarked, for months already the approach of the crucial date had seemed to fuel a world-wide paranoia, and the news of the Arctic Martians, luridly misreported as it was, only magnified that irrational fear (or maybe it was rational, I wondered in the privacy of my own heart). And Walter, bless him, thinking nothing of his own safety – and despite the fate of Mikaelian – was all for plunging straight into the maelstrom of public debate.
I decided there and then, in the lounge of the Vaterland, with Arctic desolation still peeling away beneath us, that I would accompany Walter home. In a way the whole Martian affair had all started in that pleasant house in Woking - or at least it had for Walter, who had become by default the witness for a generation; it seemed an appropriate place for the story to end - or, more correctly, for a new chapter to begin, if it came to that. But there was more to it than that. We had never been close friends – which in-laws ever are? - and yet he was family. I could hardly bear the thought of him rattling around like a ghost in his old home, alone.
And I could keep him safe in Woking. A quiet word to my old ally Eric Eden and I was assured that various irregular elements of the British Army would keep an eye on both of us, ‘until the latest Martian flap is over, one way or another.’
I dashed off a wireless-telegraph message to my sister-in-law in Paris to inform her of my plans, and asked her to tell such colleagues and friends as she felt necessary. All this before I had told Walter of my intention to come with him.
Walter was scarcely pleased when I informed him of my decision. ‘Just don’t get in the way,’ he snapped.
The house on Maybury Hill was almost as I remembered it, as we walked around the place, throwing open windows.
Though it was not far from central Woking, the house had survived the 1907 assaults, and Surrey as a whole had been comparatively spared the damage of the second wave of 1920, which had centred on Buckinghamshire and London.
Subsequent owners had maintained the character of the place well enough. Here was the dining room with the rather rickety French windows that gave onto the garden and a view towards Ottershaw, where Walter’s astronomer friend Ogilvy had lived. Here the little summer house where, Walter told me, he and Carolyne had enjoyed taking their supper in the good weather. There was furniture in all of the rooms, I noticed, of a more or less appropriate type – a dining table and chairs in the dining room, rather over-stuffed sofas in the parlour, and so forth. Yet the colours jarred, the sizes and positioning not quite right.
And upstairs was Walter’s old study, with its view to the west, towards Horsell Common itself, where the very first cylinder had landed. At some point the study had been done out as a child’s bedroom, as I could see from the wallpaper – it had images of Ally Sloper, a favourite from the picture papers, clobbering Martians in their fighting-machines. The only furniture was a solid desk under the window, and a chair, and a light stand, and rows of bookcases, for now unpopulated.
Walter and I stood at the study window, and peered out at the ruins of Woking. There were the ruins, still distinguishable, of the Oriental College, of the mosque, of the rail station, the electric works. On the rail line, by the stumps of the smashed Maybury arch, the overturned wreck of a train could be seen – a detail that reminded me of Abbotsdale and the Cordon, under the Martians. The ruins, made safe but left otherwise untouched as a monument, were nevertheless being embraced by the green of earth, with grass, rose-bay willow herbs, even young pine trees growing around the debris.
‘Good enough,’ Walter said. ‘I can work here still.’
‘Did you take this place unfurnished, Walter?’
‘Indeed. Told the agent to fit it out as best he judged it.’ I tapped the desk; it appeared to have been constructed of old ship’s timbers. ‘To a budget, I can see.’
‘Better things to do than mull over sticks of furniture,’ he said. He sat in the heavy office chair behind the desk, and swivelled to and fro. ‘This will do.’
I sighed, and patted his shoulder. ‘You’re not yet a Martian, Walter. You haven’t yet discarded all your bodily wants. Will you let me help you spruce the place up a little, while I’m here?
A bit of redecoration – some furniture that actually fits the rooms . . . Believe me, if you have a decent environment to live in your work will flow a lot more easily.’
He grunted. He opened a briefcase and drew out a calendar, which he set up on the empty desk. And he placed there a photograph of Carolyne, a framed portrait – a touch that surprised me. He said, ‘Not until after the twenty-sixth.’ It was hard to argue with that.
So we settled into a brief period of domesticity.
I got a cleaner in, to manage the house and do the laundry; I shopped for the pair of us, which was not much of a chore. Walter surprised me by doing much of the cooking. His cuisine, honed by long bachelor years, was quick to prepare, quicker to eat, but nutritionally efficient. Walter had employed a servant, I recalled, before ’07. Everybody who could afford it had had one in those days - even a couple making a fairly marginal living from the husband’s income as a philosophical writer – but that seems to be a fashion that has passed, probably for the better since most of those ‘below stairs’ had been women with no other choice of employment.
Walter mostly worked upstairs in his study, putting his notes in order, writing essays perhaps – I was not privy to his drafts. At least, I realised, he was keeping to an orderly schedule, unlike his habits aboard the Vaterland where he had treated such things as sleep and food as irrelevant distractions. Whether that was my own relatively orderly influence (relatively! – most of my acquaintances see me as an agent of chaos, I think), or some memory of t
he calm of his past here with Carolyne, I cannot say. Indeed I wondered if some instinct for lost domestic tranquillity had drawn him back to this home in the first place.
In my own time I worked, and read, and had long telephone conversations with distant friends. I had coffee several times with Marina Ogilvy, widow of the astronomer, who still lived in the house with the observatory at Ottershaw, only a few miles away. And I spoke to Carolyne herself; sometimes she rang me. I urged her to come visit Walter, or at least speak to him on the phone: ‘I know you are divorced, I know it’s a burden, but still -’
She would not.
So we came to the twenty-fifth.
It was a Thursday.
I was up at six, before my alarm clock sounded. I had slept poorly. I knew it would be midnight at the earliest before either of us slept again. The day itself dawned still and tranquil, belying its apocalyptic relevance.
If the Martians came the launches would begin at midnight that night – and the workings in the Arctic would presumably have to be viewed as a weapon of war,and for all Walter’s words the world would be plunged into a new hell. There had been no news from the observatories, not even via the channels Walter had the privilege to consult – but I had seen for myself in ’20 how partial and tentative those contacts were.
I washed, dressed, and brought Walter a coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs in his study. He was quietly working at a manuscript, which he put aside to eat; he grunted his thanks. I knew he would not come away to the dining room or the kitchen, not today.
I put in a quiet day of work of my own, reading, writing preliminary drafts of sections of this memoir, writing letters – I paid a few bills on the house.
In the late afternoon I went for a brief walk, down to the station for the evening papers. It had been a fine spring day in southern England; the sun was bright, the daffodils in the wellkept gardens were brilliant yellow, and early swallows swooped and dived after insects. Whenever I saw those beautiful birds I thought of Joe Hopson and his remark about swallows and Martians. If the Martians’ activities in the Arctic were perturbing the weather, well, there was no strong sign of it that afternoon at least. But it was chill enough that I wondered if there would be a touch of frost that night.
At the station I bought the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Times, that week’s Punch, and on a whim Ally Sloper’s HalfHoliday. I scanned the headlines as I walked back home for news of the opposition; in the serious papers they were variants of ‘The World Waits’, but there was no solid news.
I had a quiet dinner; I took Walter sandwiches and soup as he requested, but he ate nothing.
About 11 p.m. I made us fresh coffee, and clambered up to the study, where I sat on a small armchair which Walter and I had lugged upstairs from the sitting-room, the room’s only significant piece of furniture aside from the desk and office chair. Walter still sat, calmly working. His desk was uncluttered: there was his calendar, a travel clock, a few piles of papers, that photograph of Carolyne in its frame, a battered china mug containing pencils – and a telephone, close by his hand. The moon was bright that night, I remember, shining through the study window, a brilliant white disc glaring from a clear sky. A full moon! An eerie omen for such a night, as the cold astronomical clock within which both Martians and humans are embedded once again brought our planets to alignment. I wondered idly if the Jovians’ great sigil, long vanished to the human eye, had left any mark on that stark surface, to be discovered by spacefaring visitors some day.
I broke the silence. ‘I take it there’s no news, then, from your astronomical pals.’
‘Not pals.’ He tapped the telephone – then, on an anxious whim, raised it to check the dialling tone. ‘The astronomical exchange, of whom I am privileged to be a priority contact. No news, no. Of course we see so much better now, but even those early shots, back in ’07 – one must remember they were clearly visible even in poor Ogilvy’s home device, up in Ottershaw - I saw them myself.’
‘An armada – or rather, a colonisation fleet. That’s what it would be this time, wouldn’t it?’
‘That would follow the pattern,’ he admitted. ‘Ten cylinders in ’07, a hundred in 1920, a thousand two years later – could it be ten thousand this time? If they came, which they won’t.’
‘There are some who say we should do more than hope for the best.’ I flipped through the papers. ‘There’s a story in here somewhere . . . Ah.’ The Telegraph had the most complete report. ‘Churchill’s made another speech. “No more waiting! Did we wait for Napoleon to stride arrogantly onto our pitch? No! We blocked him before he reached the field of play. Now we must find an interplanetary Nelson to take the war to the Martians. We must strike and strike hard . . .”’
Churchill, that old warhorse, still in the Cabinet as minister for munitions, had responded to the discovery of the Martians’ works in the Arctic by arguing that the ‘British space gun’, as he called it – that is, the Amersham pit which, in 1922, the Martians had indeed used to launch a cylinder to take them home – could be refurbished and put to use to send humans into space. As the Telegraph illustrated with a handy cutaway diagram, an abandoned Martian cylinder could be fitted out for manned travel, with compressed foods, cylinders of oxygen, water condensers, and lodes of sodium peroxide which would scrub excess carbon dioxide out of the cylinder’s contained atmosphere, and so forth. ‘Looks a bit Jules Verne to me.’
‘Lot of nonsense,’ growled Walter, not looking around. ‘What about the acceleration? Ten gravities -’
‘According to this, subjects have been tested in such conditions in centrifuges at Farnborough. With training, and perhaps suspension in viscous fluids and so forth – it says here – the experience might be survivable. Anyhow they aren’t short of volunteers.’
‘I’m not surprised by that. The world’s never been short of suicidal idiots. Still plotting a Bacillus Bomb, are they? That’s another of Winston’s bloodthirsty phrases.’
‘I believe so. The map shows likely targets . . .’
This was, in a way, an astounding development of the old scratched-together plan to have me carry lethal pathogens into the Martian Redoubt at Amersham. Now Churchill’s cylinder would carry a variant of some ghastly archaic plague to infect the whole of Mars.
‘The most significant known node in the canal network remains Lacus Solis – it says here. And if a bacillus were injected into the global water supply at such a commanding junction, it should spread throughout the planet.’
‘At least it is consistent with our own history,’ he growled. ‘Our European plagues shattered the populations of the Americas and elsewhere, and that was what won us empires.’
I said, in a cold tone, trying to provoke him, ‘Then Churchill’s strategy might work. The precedent shows it.’
‘But even so, would it be right? Julie, Martian civilisation is immeasurably old, by our standards – counted perhaps in the millions of years. Who are we to smash such an edifice? We would be like the Huns at the gates of Rome. And old the Martian culture might be but perhaps it is fragile too. You know that I believe the Martians communicate with a form of telepathy. Whatever the mechanism, what are the greater implications? One oddity that few have remarked upon regarding the Martians is this – that they have no books. Or at least, none they brought to the earth. In their cylinders, no scrap of writing or anything like it: indeed, they show no sign of symbolism at all save for their great planetary sigils which, as I correctly surmised -’
‘I know you did, Walter,’ I said with a sigh.
‘My own conclusion is this. There are no books – or rather, the Martians are their own books. If you could talk direct, mind to mind – memory to memory – what need have you of a book? One could pool thoughts, pool memories, into a communal whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Nothing need ever be lost, in the vaults of those great capacious memories – as long as they survive. But you see the consequences. Murder the Martians, and you burn their libraries too
– gone for all time!’
I coughed, rudely. ‘But these big-brained librarians of yours came to the earth – our earth – and slaughtered us, and drank the blood of our children.’
‘Perhaps we need men like Churchill when we must make war, and we must think the unthinkable. But it was you who found a way to make the peace, Julie – not Churchill . . .’
You must imagine the two of us, arguing in that odd little room with its rather dim lights and rather ill-judged furniture, and its window looking out over the ruins to Horsell Common, where history had been made - and here was the man who first wrote that history, with some degree of eloquence. I scarce believed a word he said, but they were such beautiful words. ‘They will not come,’ declared the Unreliable Narrator now. ‘The Jovians have ensured that. But – and I’m with Haldane on this – I’m not one to argue for an over-reliance on the Jovians to look after us forever. The Jovians intervened once in our affairs, and the Martians’, like a deus ex machina – like the Old Testament God with His floods and plagues. We cannot rely on such help in the future; we should not. We cannot bow down before these temporal deities. We ought to stand on our own two feet - perhaps Mikaelian’s marvellous Federation is a first hopeful step -’
‘How long, then, Walter? Always assuming the Martians give us the time . . . How long before we reach some level of perfection?’
For answer he dug out a manuscript from the pile before him: dog-eared and yellowed, and stained perhaps by spilled coffee, yet he handled this relic with tenderness. ‘This is the very paper on which I had been working, in this study, on the afternoon when the first cylinder opened over on Horsell Common. I remember I had a selenite paperweight; I wonder what became of that? It was a paper on the probable development of Moral Ideas with the advancement of the civilising process. When I had to abandon it – I remember I broke off in mid-sentence to get my Chronicle from the newsboy, and he spoke to me of “dead men from Mars” - I was in the midst of a paragraph of prediction. I never went back to the work. I look at it now – how young I was! How ignorant! I was no prophet. And yet, you know, in my dim groping, it seems to me I hit on certain perceptions. Now I have finished that last paragraph. Call it sentimental. Oh, I will never attempt to have the paper published, but . . .’
The Massacre of Mankind Page 49
