Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

You will have guessed, by the by, that I saw little chance of my actually being involved in any successful scheme to beat the beastly Martians.

I determined to respond to Walter’s request. Not long after breakfast I was packing my rucksack, and hunting for my Baedeker, and telephoning the railway companies for a ticket to Berlin. And I called a number Walter had given me, of an agent in Berlin who, I was assured, would arrange hotel accommodation for me. When my taxi-cab called Alice was barely awake, her hair tousled, her dressing gown tied tight. But we said our farewells cordially enough – she approved of my trip – before the cab drove smoothly away.

Of course if I had known then the truth of my mission – or rather the great Lie , as I came to think of it – I would probably have stayed in bed.

The brand new German-built rail connection from Paris to Berlin, from the capital of a conquered nation to that of the conqueror, was direct but as yet was not terribly fast. So it was not until early the next morning that I completed my journey of six hundred miles or so, and debarked at the grand new Alfred von Schlieffen station in the west of Berlin, and named, provocatively, after the mastermind of the recent European war.

I took another taxi-cab to my hotel. The cab was as scrupulously clean as the roads we travelled. And whereas my driver in Paris had been a slovenly fellow in a soft hat and disreputable jacket, who had been rather too attentive as I had climbed in and out of his vehicle, my driver in Berlin was a woman, young, smart, with efficient hair under a peaked cap. Her conversation was a comment on the weather and a query as to whether this was my first visit to Berlin, all delivered in clipped, rather monotonic English. I half-expected her to swivel around and offer me a game of chess, like the mechanical Turk of legend.

At my hotel, another uniformed figure was eager to greet me as soon as I set foot on the pavement, and almost wrestled my rucksack out of my hands. I quickly learned that the British consul, who had arranged this domicile for me, had not spared the pennies; my hotel was the Adlon, which has the prestigious address of No. 1, Unter den Linden.

Restless after my travelling and having slept well enough on the train, I quickly took possession of my room, showered and changed, and went straight back out into the Berlin morning. I knew that Walter was waiting to see me, but I could not resist the briefest of tours.

So I marched along the Unter den Linden, joined the crowds in the Potsdamer Platz, walked up the Leipziger Strasse, and allowed myself the briefest of ventures into the Wertheim, a vast department store into which, it seemed to me, you could have crammed most of Oxford Street, if that broadway had been cut up and stacked on two or three levels. It was a week day but the crowds, affluent, noisy, and spending freely, swarmed with a kind of springtime gaiety, I thought. And there were uniforms to be seen everywhere, from the foremen and lift attendants in the Wertheim to the military costumes of many nations – including the sombre khaki tunic and flat cap of the modern British officer, a sensible ensemble and shade that stood out amid the more gaudy colours and spiked helmets of the continentals.

And among the soldier types, even here in the rich, modern, electrified heart of Berlin, I saw wounded, mostly men but not exclusively, in smart uniforms but with bandaged faces or arms, some in bath chairs – some with limbs plucked away. They made a brave sight, as such veterans always do. The war the Germans had started in 1914 continued still, despite the presence of Martians on the earth only a few hundred miles away, and had become a great grinding of flesh to the east, as the Germans pushed ever deeper into the tottering Russian empire. Or so it was said; little news was released to the public. The missing eyes and limbs of these Berlin veterans were, however, like mute reports from that remote battlefield .

It was not yet lunchtime when I dragged myself away from these spectacles and summoned another cab, which would take me to my meeting with Walter.

Driving east, we soon left behind the city’s historic core, or what passes in Berlin as such, and crossed into a more modern realm, of sprawling suburbs studded by immense factories. I glimpsed railways and rectilinear canals; it was almost Martian – no wonder Walter had been drawn here!

The address Walter had given me turned out not to be an apartment, as I had expected, but a street corner opposite a factory, a tremendous structure buttressed by brick pillars and fronted by glass, all under a curving roof; it dwarfed the handful of trees that adorned the pavement before it, and the people who came and went through its doors.

And its scale overwhelmed the man who sat on a bench on the far side of the road, wrapped in an over-large overcoat, sketching busily. This was Walter, of course. Having paid off the cabbie, I approached him tentatively. As I sat beside him he leaned towards me, but that was as much as I got in terms of signs of recognition or affection. He continued his busy sketching in bold black charcoal, but I could not make out the subject.

At length he closed the book and turned to me.

He was fifty-six years old now. In some ways he had not changed: still the unkempt mass of hair, once red from his Welsh ancestry, so his brother, my husband, had told me, but grey as steel since his experience of the First Martian War, and that peculiarly large skull, the broad brow from beneath which blue eyes peered. He wore white gloves to protect his scarred hands. His face, under a heavy layer of some medicinal cream, was immobile of expression. His eyes were odd as he looked at me, with a strange brightness, an alertness – the eyes of a hunted animal.

‘Julie. It was good of you to come all this way.’ His voice was gravelly, from the inhalation of smoke.

I cautiously touched his damaged hand. ‘I’m glad to see you too, Walter. But I don’t yet know—’

He said, bluntly, ‘I need you to go to England, you see. To fulfil my scheme. I mean, into the Cordon, the Martian zone.’

My breath caught in my throat. That was Walter for you, either a fog of prevarication or as direct as a knife in the gut.

‘They all know about it, of course. Eden. All the way up to Churchill, I’m told. Seem to think it a good idea, somewhat to my surprise.’ He studied me. ‘Does all this come as a shock?’

‘I – don’t know. Perhaps I anticipated this on some level: a warning from the subconscious, as your friend Freud would say. Given all the trouble they went to – the Ministry of War isn’t going to put me up on the Unter den Linden for nothing, is it?’

He laughed. ‘I don’t suppose so. But we do have some choice over our actions. Such as my choice to meet you here.’

‘In the open air, before a factory? Just as well it isn’t raining,’ I said tartly.

He looked at me. ‘I never thought of that. The Martians, you know, did not anticipate the rain, before they came in ’07, as they drew up their plans in their arid utopia in the sky. I sometimes think I am half-Martian myself.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said firmly. ‘You’ve been spending too much time alone. Or with the bump-feelers of Vienna, which is nearly as bad.’

He tried to smile. ‘As to the palace of industry over there – it is a turbine factory, belonging to Allgemeine ElektricitatsGesellschaft.’

‘AEG. I know of them; their shares are popular in New York, especially since the European war.’

‘A magnificent sight, though, isn’t it? This whole area, the north-east suburbs, the Fabrikstadt, the factory-city. And to me this is the jewel in the crown. Modernist , they call it. Whatever that might mean.’