Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

And under all this activity, I reflected, lay deep buried the ruins of old Amersham, together with its unlucky inhabitants, smashed in an instant when the cylinders fell, a Boadicean layer of destruction.

‘All this security – better safe than sorry, I suppose,’ I murmured to Joe Hopson as we got out of the car.

‘Indeed,’ he said, as he led me, on foot now, deeper into this knot of mystery. ‘After all, we would leave behind mine fields and other booby traps. Why not the Martians? Not that anything of the kind has been discovered so far. Also there’s talk of keeping it intact, more or less, as a monument for future generations, like Woking…’

‘I wonder if that’s wise.’

This was Walter Jenkins.

He stood waiting for us. He did not look well to me, gaunt, his face shiny with some medicinal cream, his hands swathed in bandage-like gloves. But then he was seventy years old. Tentatively he shook hands with Hopson; he knew me well enough not to offer me his hand.

‘Nice to see you, Walter,’ I said dryly.

‘You wonder if what’s wise, old bean?’ Hopson asked pleasantly.

‘To make a monument of this symbol of oppression. Such things confer power. Look at the Tower of London – the corner of a Roman fort, the relic of one occupying power, later reused as a bastion by another, the Normans. Well, the Romans left of their own accord, and so did the Martians, but we never got rid of the Normans, did we? Some dictator of the future using this place as his seat, calling on the mythic authority of the vanished Martians? No thanks. Let’s fill it in and let the grass grow.’

Hopson only grinned. ‘The Normans? You Welsh are all the same. It’s been eight hundred years, you know. Live and let live.’

‘Oh, I am deadly serious,’ Walter said humourlessly.

Hopson led us deeper into the complex, progressing slowly.

I took Walter’s arm. ‘Now, play nice, Walter. You invited me here, remember. I’ve come a long way.’

Walter grinned. ‘You’re a journalist – and a chronicler of the Martians after my own heart, if not my ability.’

‘Thanks—’

‘I thought you couldn’t refuse the chance of an inside view of the Martians’ most developed complex on the earth.’

‘I suppose. But you know that Carolyne set all this up in the first place, don’t you?’

He seemed to find it difficult even to hear his wife’s name. ‘Have you seen her?’

‘Not recently. It was a phone call.’

‘Of course this ,’ he said, ‘is only a waystation. A teaser.’

‘Ah. We’re talking about the Martians, are we? A safer subject? Very well. A waystation en route to what?’

‘ To the place the Martians went, of course. ’

I glanced at Joe Hopson, and he at me; this was evidently a revelation to Joe too. But of course the mystery of what had become of the Martians on the earth had been a source of discussion and debate, ever since the cessation of the hostilities in ’22 .

Now Walter glanced at the sky, where that airship still patrolled. ‘Looks like rain again – so much for the sunshine. But of course, that is all part of the problem. A symptom …’

‘What’s the weather got to do with it? You always had the most infuriating manner, Walter. Dribbling out your clues, your bits of information.’ We were two old relics in this museum of war, bickering as before.

‘Then I apologise. Come, then, the guided tour. If you would be good enough to stay close by, Captain Hopson, and keep flashing those credentials, we should not be impeded; the security people know me well enough here by now…’

And so we walked on, through a series of fences, and over ramps and duckboards, into the very heart of the Redoubt, where, at the very centre, a deeper shaft gaped in the earth. As we approached the sight evoked memories, deep buried, of the noise of this place: a boom, boom , the relentless noise of subterranean workings. That at least was silenced now. And a kind of pulley system had been set up on a frame over the shaft; two bored-looking soldiers stood beside it, smoking. The victory of the mundane, I thought.

Walter was watching me. ‘Intrigued? You should be. Follow me. Tread carefully, now…’

That pulley system proved to be a crude elevator. It looked rickety to me, and it had an alarmingly large wheel, implying an alarmingly large length of cable to be paid out.

Walter grinned at my discomfiture. ‘Oh, it’s tried and trusted technology. The kind of gear they use to wash windows in New York – you must have seen them, intrepid fellows with mop and bucket suspended high above Fifth Avenue… We won’t be going so deep. Only six hundred feet or so.’

Evidently this was all new to Joe Hopson too. ‘Six hundred …’

‘Come, hop aboard!’

There was a rail, to which I clung. With a nod from Walter to the military men controlling the pulley, we began our rickety descent. The disc of daylight above quickly receded, the heads of the soldiers silhouetted against a sky bright and out of reach. There were electric lamps on the gantry we rode, and I was soon grateful for them as the dark closed in.

Joe said, ‘No deeper than six hundred feet, you say.’

Walter smiled again. ‘They put a net at that level – the military – telescopic poles jammed against the walls, just in case anybody falls, though six hundred feet would doom you anyhow… The shaft as a whole is some half a mile deep.’

Now it was my turn to parrot back distances. ‘Half a mile !’

‘It is necessary for this shaft’s true purpose. Or one of them. You have any idea what that purpose is, Captain Hopson?’

Joe looked at him. ‘How wide is this thing?’

‘A little over thirty yards, as you suspect, don’t you?’

‘Mr Jenkins – is this a cannon ?’

I leapt on the idea, seeing it at once. ‘Of course. That’s where the Martians went!’

‘The British party, at least,’ Walter said.

‘So they built themselves a cannon—’

Hopson said, ‘And refurbished a space cylinder or two—’

‘And shot themselves back to Mars, the way they came!’

Walter grinned. ‘The launch was observed, in fact. Visible from over much of southern England, though most people had no idea what they were seeing. Well, nor did any of us until the images were analysed, and it’s all been kept thoroughly classified ever since. Did you ever notice that even under our new united-world government, old Marvin’s DORA act of 1916 was never repealed?…’

Hopson was frowning. ‘But hang on, old bean. How deep did you say this shaft was? Half a mile ? But that’s nearly not deep enough. I remember at school we read Verne’s book, Americans to the moon, you know, firing themselves out of a great cannon, and we soon calculated that the accelerations and so forth—’

‘Quite right,’ Walter said, sounding grudgingly impressed. ‘Ben, the projectile’s motion as it came flying out of the cannon mouth could be measured from images, chance observations by spotter planes and from the ground. It must have been driven out of the gun with an acceleration of about ten times the earth’s gravity – that is thirty times higher than the Martian, but not, perhaps, unsupportable, if you suspend your bulk in fluid, or brace with supporting equipment. And the cylinder continued to accelerate even after it left the muzzle of the cannon. Observers saw green flashes, and there appears to have been a tremendous plume of hydrogen emitted from the base of the craft. If the acceleration rate remained the same, a continuing thrust up to perhaps four hundred miles from the earth would have been sufficient to hurl it free of the planet. And thence, to Mars!’