Stephen Baxter: The Massacre of Mankind

‘As to who has been gathered here, you might call it a brains trust – with myself roped in on the basis of my Narrative , and I feel as if I am the comic relief. The Buster Keaton of Martian studies. You have Einstein and Schwarzschild and Rutherford, experts on one aspect or another of the atom and its nuclear energy which we suspect the Martians tap for their power. You have Rayleigh and others speculating on novel implementations of Martian technology, and Hohmann and Tsiolkovsky analysing and predicting interplanetary trajectories. They’ve even got the chap – what’s his name? – who once wrote a facetious but provocative essay on the future of humanity, and almost by accident came up with a sort of vision of the Martian form. “The Year Million Man” – it was called something of that sort. You may have heard me speak of him before. No longer young – about my age in fact – an odd, bouncing sort of fellow, but full of ideas.

‘And you have the astronomical exchange wires buzzing with sightings from Hale in Wisconsin and Lick in California and Nice in France – though that’s now under German control all of it organised and marshalled by Lowell’s team at Flagstaff; shame the old man himself isn’t alive to see this. Even the Vatican observatory at Castel Gandolfo has pitched in…’ Philip took the handset and spoke more sharply. ‘Get to the point, Walter. Sightings of what? What are you on about? What is it they are all observing, man?’

Again my own inner tension tightened a notch, and I could see it in the faces of the others.

But Walter named a planet we were none of us expecting: Jupiter . We all stared at each other, confused. But then, Walter Jenkins was nothing if not a wounded oracle.

Jupiter!

Philip snapped, ‘Walter, damn you! What about Jupiter?’

‘Why, a sigil has been observed on its cloudy face.’

‘A sigil?’

‘A mark, luminous and sinuous – entirely contained within the feature we call the Great Red Spot, as it happens, but easily visible from the earth. Indeed Dyson in England claims to have seen similar sigils on Jupiter’s larger moons, but that is disputed.’

Eric Eden said, ‘A sigil? You mean like the marks observed some years after the War, on Mars and Venus?’

‘That’s it, yes,’ Walter said when this was relayed. ‘The Mars and Venus sigils were identical, aside from scale ’

‘Of course they were. They were made by the same agency.’

‘The Martians?’

‘Of course the Martians! Who did not have the time to complete the construction of a similar symbol of possession of the earth back in ’07, though the work was begun.’

‘It was? A sigil on Earth? I never heard of that,’ said Eric, evidently confused ‘And the Jovian sigil—’

‘Quite different in character, obviously – the Jovians’ was a near-perfect circle—’

Frank broke in, ‘For God’s sake, Walter, can you never get to the point? What has all this to do with us, and your brains in Berlin?’

‘Everything,’ said Bert Cook. ‘For ’e’s giving us the bigger picture. Aren’t you, Walter?’

‘Bert?’ said Walter. ‘How odd to hear your voice again.’

‘How’s your poker play?’

‘And how’s your chess? You’re right, though. This is indeed the bigger picture. The context of our petty lives. For, you see, if the nebular hypothesis is to be believed, a kind of migration between the worlds is a necessity if life is to survive…’ As most people knew then, and understand better today, it was Kant who first suggested that the sun had once coalesced from a vast gas cloud – that was in the 1750s – and then Laplace, a great Newtonian, described how the spinning sun would cast off successive belts of dust and gas, expanding like smoke rings, toroids that would ultimately collapse into worlds. It took another century before the followers of the Scot physicist James Clerk Maxwell managed to resolve certain problems concerning the transfer of angular momentum…

The relevant point of the hypothesis, now universally accepted, is that the further a world is from the sun the older it must be, and the older, too, its freight of life and mind. But since life first emerged it has faced challenges. Our best physics has it that as the sun itself ages it is cooling, year on year. That is why the Martians were driven to the earth, as an Ice Age without end crept upon their planet. Some day our own world will suffer the same fate: the oceans will freeze from the coasts, the rains will diminish, the higher forms of life will die out and the lesser shrivel to sleeping spores. Whither mankind?

A mature but doomed civilisation must reach out to the younger worlds for room to live. It is the logic of Kant and Laplace; it must be so.

‘Which,’ Walter said, ‘is why the Martians must come again to our younger earth. Oh, they have made a stab at Venus – and that is the ultimate prize in the far future, for ourselves too.

Within Venus is only Mercury, younger still but a lifeless cinder.

Yes, Venus is the prize.

‘ But –

‘But out on the rim sits Jupiter, largest planet of all – fully seven times as old as Mars, even. And this ancient and enormous planet may be the seat of—’

Frank grabbed the handset from Philip. ‘Into the inferno with Jupiter, Hubble and all! You wouldn’t have dragged us all together, from across the damn ocean, just to talk about Jupiter.

What is it you really have to tell us, man?’

But – typical of the man! – still Walter hesitated, as if gathering his thoughts.

And Eric Eden said, ‘We’re here to speak of the Martians, of course.’

An awkward silence! None of us knew how to respond, and Walter fell silent.

So it was Eric, again, who spoke next. ‘Actually I would say that serious military thinking argues against another invasion. After all, their first shot was a hopeless attempt. The Martians couldn’t stand the different atmospheric pressure, they couldn’t stand the difference in gravitation, our bacteria finished them up – them and their red weed. Hopeless from the start.’

‘But that was only a scouting mission,’ Walter whispered. ‘You have to start somewhere. Columbus in the Americas. And he thought he was in Asia! Consider how difficult it is to observe the earth from Mars… As seen from Mars, the earth is an inner planet – as Venus is to the earth – that is, closer to the sun. They must have known little of our world, before launching that first cylinder. And yet they knew something .’

Eric Eden frowned. ‘Prove it.’

‘I can, easily. Remember the timings of the firings of their great cannon? Ten shots in all, each fired at our midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, and each landed at local midnight. Now the Martian day is longer than ours – nearer twenty-four and a half hours – and “midnight” at the cylinders’ launch site did not coincide with that in Britain. So their timetable, for symbolic or other reasons, was keyed precisely, not to the time at the launch site—’

‘But to the time at the target,’ Eden said softly. ‘Even the launch timing! I never thought of that.’

‘Exactly. Nobody has, before me. As to the rest, consider how different our earth is to their own world, how much they must have learned, and how quickly! Their seas are shallow and cover only a third of their world; our deep oceans cover twice as much of earth. And so the oceans have become our highway of choice – on Mars, it must be the land.’

‘No wonder they were baffled by our ships, then,’ Frank said. ‘Off Tillingham, I saw them amazed by the torpedo ram that got amongst ’em.’

‘That’s it. Meanwhile, Mars is famously arid – it snows in winter, a fall that blankets the planet, but they need the canals seen by Schiaparelli and Lowell to water the land otherwise. Perhaps they have no rain! If you had never seen it, you might not even guess at the existence of such a phenomenon. And so, in poor weather, their Black Smoke would simply have washed out of the air, even before they laid it.’