Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

‘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.

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.’