Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

She would not.

So we came to the twenty-fifth.

It was a Thursday.

I was up at six, before my alarm clock sounded. I had slept poorly. I knew it would be midnight at the earliest before either of us slept again. The day itself dawned still and tranquil, belying its apocalyptic relevance.

If the Martians came the launches would begin at midnight that night – and the workings in the Arctic would presumably have to be viewed as a weapon of war,and for all Walter’s words the world would be plunged into a new hell. There had been no news from the observatories, not even via the channels Walter had the privilege to consult – but I had seen for myself in ’20 how partial and tentative those contacts were.

I washed, dressed, and brought Walter a coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs in his study. He was quietly working at a manuscript, which he put aside to eat; he grunted his thanks. I knew he would not come away to the dining room or the kitchen, not today.

I put in a quiet day of work of my own, reading, writing preliminary drafts of sections of this memoir, writing letters – I paid a few bills on the house.

In the late afternoon I went for a brief walk, down to the station for the evening papers. It had been a fine spring day in southern England; the sun was bright, the daffodils in the well-kept gardens were brilliant yellow, and early swallows swooped and dived after insects. Whenever I saw those beautiful birds I thought of Joe Hopson and his remark about swallows and Martians. If the Martians’ activities in the Arctic were perturbing the weather, well, there was no strong sign of it that afternoon at least. But it was chill enough that I wondered if there would be a touch of frost that night.

At the station I bought the Telegraph , the Daily Mail , the Times , that week’s Punch , and on a whim Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday . I scanned the headlines as I walked back home for news of the opposition; in the serious papers they were variants of ‘The World Waits’, but there was no solid news.

I had a quiet dinner; I took Walter sandwiches and soup as he requested, but he ate nothing.

About 11 p.m. I made us fresh coffee, and clambered up to the study, where I sat on a small armchair which Walter and I had lugged upstairs from the sitting-room, the room’s only significant piece of furniture aside from the desk and office chair. Walter still sat, calmly working. His desk was uncluttered: there was his calendar, a travel clock, a few piles of papers, that photograph of Carolyne in its frame, a battered china mug containing pencils – and a telephone, close by his hand. The moon was bright that night, I remember, shining through the study window, a brilliant white disc glaring from a clear sky. A full moon! An eerie omen for such a night, as the cold astronomical clock within which both Martians and humans are embedded once again brought our planets to alignment. I wondered idly if the Jovians’ great sigil, long vanished to the human eye, had left any mark on that stark surface, to be discovered by spacefaring visitors some day.

I broke the silence. ‘I take it there’s no news, then, from your astronomical pals.’

‘Not pals .’ He tapped the telephone – then, on an anxious whim, raised it to check the dialling tone. ‘The astronomical exchange, of whom I am privileged to be a priority contact. No news, no. Of course we see so much better now, but even those early shots, back in ’07 – one must remember they were clearly visible even in poor Ogilvy’s home device, up in Ottershaw – I saw them myself.’

‘An armada – or rather, a colonisation fleet. That’s what it would be this time, wouldn’t it?’

‘That would follow the pattern,’ he admitted. ‘Ten cylinders in ’07, a hundred in 1920, a thousand two years later – could it be ten thousand this time? If they came, which they won’t.’

‘There are some who say we should do more than hope for the best.’ I flipped through the papers. ‘There’s a story in here somewhere… Ah.’ The Telegraph had the most complete report. ‘Churchill’s made another speech. “No more waiting! Did we wait for Napoleon to stride arrogantly onto our pitch? No! We blocked him before he reached the field of play. Now we must find an interplanetary Nelson to take the war to the Martians. We must strike and strike hard…”’

Churchill, that old warhorse, still in the Cabinet as minister for munitions, had responded to the discovery of the Martians’ works in the Arctic by arguing that the ‘British space gun’, as he called it – that is, the Amersham pit which, in 1922, the Martians had indeed used to launch a cylinder to take them home – could be refurbished and put to use to send humans into space . As the Telegraph illustrated with a handy cutaway diagram, an abandoned Martian cylinder could be fitted out for manned travel, with compressed foods, cylinders of oxygen, water condensers, and lodes of sodium peroxide which would scrub excess carbon dioxide out of the cylinder’s contained atmosphere, and so forth. ‘Looks a bit Jules Verne to me.’

‘Lot of nonsense,’ growled Walter, not looking around. ‘What about the acceleration? Ten gravities—’

‘According to this, subjects have been tested in such conditions in centrifuges at Farnborough. With training, and perhaps suspension in viscous fluids and so forth – it says here – the experience might be survivable. Anyhow they aren’t short of volunteers.’

‘I’m not surprised by that . The world’s never been short of suicidal idiots. Still plotting a Bacillus Bomb, are they? That’s another of Winston’s bloodthirsty phrases.’

‘I believe so. The map shows likely targets…’

This was, in a way, an astounding development of the old scratched-together plan to have me carry lethal pathogens into the Martian Redoubt at Amersham. Now Churchill’s cylinder would carry a variant of some ghastly archaic plague to infect the whole of Mars.

‘The most significant known node in the canal network remains Lacus Solis – it says here. And if a bacillus were injected into the global water supply at such a commanding junction, it should spread throughout the planet.’

‘At least it is consistent with our own history,’ he growled. ‘Our European plagues shattered the populations of the Americas and elsewhere, and that was what won us empires.’

I said, in a cold tone, trying to provoke him, ‘Then Churchill’s strategy might work. The precedent shows it.’

‘But even so, would it be right ? Julie, Martian civilisation is immeasurably old, by our standards – counted perhaps in the millions of years. Who are we to smash such an edifice? We would be like the Huns at the gates of Rome. And old the Martian culture might be but perhaps it is fragile too. You know that I believe the Martians communicate with a form of telepathy. Whatever the mechanism, what are the greater implications? One oddity that few have remarked upon regarding the Martians is this – that they have no books. Or at least, none they brought to the earth. In their cylinders, no scrap of writing or anything like it: indeed, they show no sign of symbolism at all save for their great planetary sigils which, as I correctly surmised—’

‘I know you did, Walter,’ I said with a sigh.

‘My own conclusion is this. There are no books – or rather, the Martians are their own books. If you could talk direct, mind to mind – memory to memory – what need have you of a book? One could pool thoughts, pool memories, into a communal whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Nothing need ever be lost, in the vaults of those great capacious memories – as long as they survive. But you see the consequences. Murder the Martians, and you burn their libraries too – gone for all time!’