Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

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?’

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 the 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—’