Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

And then something changed.

The fall of Black Smoke stopped abruptly.

The flying-machines broke formation. Huge dishes in the sky, they swept around in wide curves, and receded as quickly as they had come, growing smaller, vanishing into the mists of morning – gone in seconds.

The last of the Black Smoke, dispersing, blew harmlessly out over the water.

Harry felt a surge of emotion, of relief; he would say he had not understood the depths of his fear until it receded. But he felt utter bafflement at still being alive.

‘What just happened?’

At the same time it was around three p.m. in Berlin. And Walter Jenkins, huddled in the cellar of his house, was immediately aware of a change in the Martians’ behaviour. It was a silencing of their movements, he said, a kind of slithering withdrawal. That cry, ‘ Ulla! ’, heard all over the planet that terrible day, now seemed more plaintive – and receding.

He pushed aside his improvised barricades of empty barrels and broken furniture, and – heart thumping, for he could not be sure of his deductions – he emerged into the light of a German midday. Other people stood by, in the wrecked street, dusty, bewildered, some injured – all watching. And Walter saw the fighting-machines, tall and graceful, receding steadily from the city – heading north. All this in his first glance.

In that moment I think he guessed what must have been done – what I must have done – emulating my own intuitive leap. Well, it had started out as his idea, even if I had thought it through in the end. And he even guessed correctly at the timing of its completion: about noon British time.

He hurried home to his cellar to try to verify his theories, praying that the telephone would be working.

Of course it was all guesswork, in the end – about how the Jovians might respond. Educated guesswork, though.

When the Martians invaded Earth and Venus, had the Jovians set up the circle sigils in their own clouds and moons as a warning to the squabbling races that Jupiter must remain inviolate? And, worse, to ensure their own future survival, must the Jovians fight a future war to dislodge the destructive, meddling, expansive Martians from this earth, and even from Venus? We had to assume so.

My intent, when I imagined creating those great signals of dirt and explosive, was that with one bold gesture we would proclaim this earth an ally of Jupiter , in that epochal combat to come. And evidently, in response, the Jovians gave the Martians some warning, or instruction, and the invaders had no choice.

My signal was a created at noon, London time. The Martians did not withdraw until 2 p.m., roughly. Why the delay of two hours? – a lag which caused many of us intense anxiety as we lived through it, as I can testify.

Walter, so he told me later, would have predicted some such pause. Jupiter is some five times further from the sun than the earth; the distance between the planets is never much less than some four hundred million miles at the closest, never further than six hundred million miles at the furthest. It would take a ray of light, then, never less than thirty-four minutes to cross from the earth to Jupiter, and thirty-four minutes back again. Einstein has proved that nothing in this universe can travel faster than a ray of light – and therefore any Jovian response to our signal, our violent scrawling of Jovian signals in the English dirt, could not have been expected to come in much less than an hour after we had created the signal. Whether God could surpass the speed of light I will never know, but even the Jovians have limitations!

But, delay or not, it had worked; the withdrawal of the Martians seemed to prove it. We had intervened in a conflict on an interplanetary scale. We had called in the Jovians, as a bullied boy might call in a schoolmaster to save himself from a beating. It had worked.

When he came back to England a few weeks later, Walter cackled with pride at the thought of it, and the next minute all but wept at our temerity – my temerity. I think actually he was a little afraid of me. For – what had we done?

What had I done?

I had brought humanity, irrevocably, into the grave awareness of Jupiter. The Jovians are older than us, and, we must deduce, immeasurably more intelligent, immeasurably more wise. We may hope they will be like a kindly celestial uncle. But, Walter says, even if so, there is no reason to believe that what they see as benevolence will translate into what we may experience as kindness, even mercy. Thus a child weeping over a sick mother could never imagine the moral choices to be made by a battlefield doctor making triage choices.

Yet on reflection, Walter still felt we had had no choice. The Jovians might spare us; the Martians certainly would not have.

And still, on that fateful Sunday and afterwards, puzzles remained.

The hostilities everywhere withdrew. behind, along with any surviving human victims, but they seem to have taken their own native humanoids with them. Just as it had been in England in ’07, the slow, sad work of recovery began. And slowly too parties of military and scientists and various officials approached the great Martian earthworks. They were empty – the Martians gone – and stripped this time of technology, of the cylinders and all they had brought, all that had been manufactured.

Yet the question remained – we knew, as I will relate in due course, that only a fraction had left this earth – where had the Martians gone ?

And then, what of our still greater neighbours? They had saved us, if indirectly – but how? It was evident that the Jovians, alerted by our crude sigils, had sent some kind of signal, some commandment, to the Martians. But how? What had been sent, what received?

In the end, the answer became obvious to anyone who looked out of her window at the right time. At that time, late in May 1922, the moon was a crescent, dwindling towards a new moon on the 26 th, the Friday after the weekend of the global landings. And the moon had changed , as even the naked eye could see. In the darkened sector of the disc, a fine line could be made out: an arc, within the perimeter of the moon’s face. As the days passed, and the new moon came, the truth became apparent for all mankind to see – as our unwelcome Martian guests had evidently made out more quickly. The moon’s face bore a tremendous circle, silver, perfect, a thousand miles across. The Jovians had written their sigil on the face of the earth’s own satellite.

And it is evident for whom the symbol was intended. That great design was observed, as the moon waxed and waned, through the coming months – through a year, and then most of another. It vanished as suddenly as it had been created on April 7, 1924.

It was Walter who first computed the significance of the date. ‘It is just as the Martians timed their attacks to our day-night cycle, and they landed at our midnight,’ he said. ‘The lunar sigil persisted for two years less forty-three days. Allowing for the leap year, that comes to six hundred and eighty-seven days that the sigil was in existence…’

Which is precisely one Martian year.

It was in the autumn of 1936, fourteen years after the Second War, that Carolyne Emmerson called me.

It was quite out of the blue. I had been living in Paris, more or less contentedly, with my sister-in-law Alice close by. I was continuing to work, rather slowly, on drafts of the narrative history you are reading now. Under strict military instructions – even in the age of the Federation of Federations secrecy is a habit when it comes to the Martians! – I had kept silent about my own role in the withdrawal of the invaders (by the time this memoir is published, by my sanctions-defying American publisher, I will no longer care). I was forty-eight years old, and with the poisonous plague removed from my body by a fullblood transfusion, I believed I had put my own Martian entanglement behind me.