Stephen Baxter: The Martian in the Wood

She still had her shotgun. She cocked it and raised it at the Martian.

With a speed that belied its bulk and apparent distress, it scuttled away, diving inside its broch. The feed line snapped, and Nathan’s blood dribbled out onto the ground.

Zena would have gone after it, but Walter grabbed her arm. “No. The fighting-machine is wrecked, but see how it has welded the panels of its shelter… It still has the resources to harm us, and Nathan. Come. You must take your brother out of here.”

“Yes.” She focussed on Nathan, who still smiled as if in a dream. She tied off the dripping feed from his vein, swathed his arm in a bandage to protect the cannula until it could be properly removed, and tried to get him to his feet.

Walter called, “I can help if you wish. But –”

“You should bring Mervyn, if you can. The Chapmans need their son back.”

She had Nathan now, his arm draped over her shoulder. He smiled still, as he had at the side of his Martian canal. She looked around for the paint trail she had made.

Then, one step at a time, calm, determined, purposeful, she brought them all out of Holmburgh Wood.

As is the way with all things Martian, it seems to me, the story was never wrapped up to everybody’s satisfaction.

Save, possibly, for the Martian in the Wood itself, as I shall relate.

Nathan Gardner’s return from the Wood, along with the corpse of the Chapman boy, caused something of a sensation. Nathan was whisked away to hospital, with the police in hot pursuit as they began their efforts to unravel the presumed murder of Mervyn Chapman. Nathan was of course a suspect, as the only human being known to have been venturing in the Woods about the time of Chapman’s death. Indeed, as I recorded, the wretched boy had been strung up by Nathan’s own bootlaces. The fragmentary but honest accounts of Zena and Walter were taken with a copper’s healthy pinch of salt: it is ironic that Walter once again found himself classed as an unreliable narrator when it came to the goings-on of a Martian.

There was an investigation, but it was not thorough. The police and other agencies were at the time horribly stretched by the ongoing effort to recover from the Martian assault, and poor Mervyn’s was just one more ghastly death among many, if a late and unusual one. The police did strive to find evidence for themselves, by venturing once more into the Wood. The locals laughed at hearing the whistles of “another lost bobby”.

In the end it was impossible for the most ingenious prosecutor to prove that Nathan had murdered Mervyn; there was no physical evidence, no signs of a struggle or blood on Nathan’s clothes – only that ghastly detail of the bootlaces. The fact that Zena was able to send the family lawyers into battle for her brother was a big help. As for murder by a Martian, I had a sense in those days that people didn’t want to think about such scenarios; the Martians and their incursion were something to be sorted out and tidied away.

By the midsummer of ’08 the police had given up, and the case was dropped. Suicide was implied. Of course Rab Chapman was unhappy with the outcome. In the summer Zena had to move Nathan to relatives in London, for his own safety – Walter helped with that.

And life went on.

As autumn drew in, the harvest from the tenant farms was poor once again, the wheat and other produce swollen but dry and without texture, the meat of the animals stringy and flavourless, the cows’ milk sour. The year ended in another still, cold, snowless winter.

Around the solstice Zena thought she heard activity coming from the Wood, its very heart. Heard a kind of hammering. Saw a green glow, eerie and unearthly.

The spring produce grew bad once again, and it was another poor year for the lambing.

In April Rab Chapman led a number of the farmers into the Wood, in force this time. It turned out they had got hold of grenades, from some cache abandoned in Surrey during the military’s retreat from the Martians and purloined through the black market. One man came out with his hand blown off, the stump tied off with a leather belt. The Wood was unharmed.

The second anniversary of the Martian landings in Surrey came and went without incident. The farmers grumbled their way through another bad year; some drifted away for good.

That autumn brought a revived national awareness of the Martian threat. Close oppositions of Mars come in clusters and with varying distances, for obscure astronomical reasons to do with the fact that the orbits of the planets are not perfect circles – but clearly the closer the approach of the planets the easier it is to cross the gulf between them. The closest encounter of the current cluster, called a “perihelic” opposition, was not in fact ’07 when the invasion of Surrey came, but in 1909 – on September 24, in fact. As that date approached there was much speculation, irresponsible and otherwise, about whether the Martians would use the encounter to come over and have another go.

Like every other sensible person in Britain, when the day came Zena found herself watching the sky.

But her gaze was drawn to the Wood, that black mass on her horizon, and she thought of the Martian in there watching the sky as she was. Two species joined in astronomy. And joined in another way: the Martian, isolated from its fellows by the destruction of the crystal egg, was as alone as she was, in this house without a family.

She was rewarded in this vigil, but not as she had expected.

Later, Walter Jenkins explained it all to me. He is one for being wise after the event.

To cross space, a Martian, we know, needs protection and a means of propulsion. The invaders in ’07 came in cylindrical hulls, powered by expulsion from a vast cannon on the surface of Mars. Well, then, imagine constructing a smaller cylinder from the shell of a wrecked fighting-machine. Make it big enough for a single passenger, just one Martian, together with whatever supplies it needs to survive the journey. Give it a Heat-Ray engine as the basis of some propulsion system – and in the War Walter himself had seen how much energy such engines contain, when one of them, downed, had flash-boiled a long stretch of the River Thames at Shepperton, an incident that left Walter himself parboiled and scarred for life.

Give it a perihelic opposition, the closest approach of the worlds for another fifteen years –

From Zena’s point of view it was a tremendous explosion, at the very heart of the Wood, at precisely midnight. By a green glare she thought she saw trunks wheeling out, whole ancient trees uprooted, among a hail of shards and splinters and loose branches. And she saw a brilliant spot of light climb up and out of the Wood and up, up into the sky, flashing green as it went. “A meteorite in reverse,” she wrote to Walter.

On the ground, the Wood began to burn, at last.

The years have worn away since then.

The Wood was destroyed by the fire, and by the farmers. When the fire had burned out, the remnant stumps were blown out with dynamite, the ground ploughed over, the land broken up into fields. I am told the yield is poor, though, whether pastoral or arable, and workers are reluctant to stay long.

Has the Martian gone home? If it ever really existed, I find it hard to begrudge that interplanetary Crusoe a safe passage. By its lights, as Walter will explain to you, it did nothing wrong. For we are vermin to it, feedstock at best.

Zena Gardner went on to study Martian biology, in fact under Harbinger at the Pasteur. She never married. She has remained politically active. She has continued to care for her brother. Like many bereaved survivors of the Wars, she has found it hard to come to terms with the loss of her parents with no trace of their bodies ever found. She finds some comfort at the Tomb of the Vanished Soldier in London. All this I know from brief meetings when researching this account.