Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

In the city itself we saw little of the defences of Portsmouth.

I did spot searchlights and gun emplacements; I learned that there were rings of guns five and ten miles from the city centre, and others placed around the docks area, with anti-aircraft installations and lamps. And I saw the mark of Martian activities past: the careless splash of brick and concrete and glass, the brush of the Heat-Ray.

Portsmouth’s busiest shopping street looked barren compared to Berlin’s meanest, I thought. Every food store had a queue outside it, a line of patient men and women and a few children, their clothes drab and well-worn, all clutching empty baskets and pink scraps of card that proved to be ration papers.

You would see servicemen in the lines– you could tell by the shabby greatcoats they wore or by their battered military caps.

Some were evidently wounded internally rather than externally, like poor Walter. You came to recognise a kind of nervousness, a shaking, a turning away of the head.

In search of happier sights I looked for bookshops, but there was a shortage of paper, among other essentials, and I found only second-hand stores, or rows of trashy American thrillers.

Burroughs’s sagas of human heroes biffing the Martians on their home soil seemed to be selling well – alongside, ironically, a new, cheap edition of Walter’s Narrative . The only newspaper widely available was the National Bulletin , a worthless government rag started in Marvin’s final days. We stopped at a small restaurant where I ordered an omelette with mushrooms and fresh-baked bread, accompanied by sweet tea. It was plain but nourishing food. Even so the prices were exorbitantly high, I thought. Then we went in search of entertainment: not easy to find.

Most posters you saw, rather than advertising the films or the shows, were of the uplifting, instructional or hectoring kind:

or

or

This last below a stern portrait of Churchill.

The theatres were running sentimental shows such as revivals of ‘Tommy Atkins’ and ‘In Time of War’. The audiences thronging outside the theatre doors seemed keen enough, but it all seemed a little desperate to us, and we wandered on, arm in arm. At about nine o’clock there was a new rush of people, and I gathered that a work shift had ended. Among them were munitions workers from the new factories, all women, their hair and skin discoloured orange and yellow from the toxic materials they habitually handled. These ‘canaries’ seemed intent on drinking as much as possible as rapidly as possible, and for all the moral strictures of our new England there seemed no shortage of cheap alcohol in the city that night.

Marina was amused to see them. ‘Funny how old Marvin always railed against the suffragettes. Now his successors need women to fight their war. Still haven’t given us the vote, however. Not that that means much nowadays – no elections since 1911—’

‘What about people’s rights?’

‘Responsibilities trump rights, for the time being. That’s the argument.’ She shrugged. ‘Who am I to argue? The Martians are here. ’

The canaries deserved their entertainment, but we had had enough. We summoned Lane, our patient shadow, and the three of us took a horse-drawn chaise to our hotel.

Oddly enough I felt satisfied to be back in England, grim and war-obsessed as it was. Berlin, immersed in its eternal politicking and war-making as if the Martians had never come, and Paris, obsessing over its own humiliations, seemed irrelevant now, a distraction. As Marina had said, the Martians were here , in England; here was reality, here was where the history of all mankind pivoted. And here was I, engaged. A rare burst of idealism for me, you might think! And it was not to be rewarded.

I did not sleep well. I felt somewhat nauseous, and the sites of the various injections I had itched or ached. The vagueness of my mission concerned me, and occupied my waking thoughts.

I need not have wasted the brain power. For when the military car came in the morning to bring me, Marina Ogilvy, Ben Gray and Ted Lane to a poky office in HMNB Portsmouth, Eric Eden quickly disabused me of the notion that my mission had anything to do with communication at all.

‘After all,’ Eric Eden said cheerfully as he poured us all some rather terrible coffee, ‘what would be the point, if you think about it? Would we have paused if the Tasmanians had insisted on telling us their theories of the universe as we worked them to extinction?’

Gray, Lane, Marina and I sat on uncomfortable upright chairs before a desk, behind which Eden sat at ease. This was a Royal Navy briefing room, if a small one; there were maps of seas and oceans on the walls, as well as the customary portrait of Lord Nelson – and, almost as an afterthought, a map of southern England with the Martian position overlaid in glaring red ink. The desk top was empty save for a clutter of stationery, and my own leather satchel.

Eden’s face bore scars. This was a relic of his heroism of Wormwood Scrubs, I would learn much later.

‘We used to debate all this at school,’ Gray said now. ‘The morality of empire.’

Ted Lane pulled a face . ‘Of course you did.’

Ben Gray was of that blessedly privileged class not even to know when he was being ragged.

‘To get back to the point,’ I said somewhat testily, ‘if this isn’t about communication – what, then?’ I tapped the leather satchel I had placed on the table, the packet of Walter’s sigils. ‘I’ve come a long way with this, Eric.’

He steepled his fingers. ‘Walter did believe everything he told you. And it really was his idea in the first place, the whole communications angle. We just – embellished it.’ Eden actually laughed.

I was growing angry. ‘What, then, is the truth?’

‘We haven’t been idle since 1907, you know. We being military intelligence, to which I have become at least partially attached, given the uniqueness of my experience. From the Martians’ point of view, it has always seemed to me a strategic error for them to have come, and failed. The first shot always had the best chance of success. Now we’ve had a chance to study them. Everybody knows how we’ve been able to make industrial use of some of their inventions – the aluminium smelter, for instance. But we’ve been looking into other aspects.’

My arms prickling from the injections, I was starting to intuit the truth – or rather, the Lie. ‘Other aspects like their biology?’ I prompted.

He eyed me. ‘Quite so. Everybody knows it was the germs that killed the Martians. I remember the lovely lines in Jenkins’ tome very well: “The Martians – dead ! – slain… by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” But precisely which of those humblest things? For Jenkins’s words about “putrefactive” and “disease” are the purest speculation, you know.’

‘Ah,’ Lane said with a soldier’s crafty smile. ‘And you clever beggars have been finding out which bacteria, have you? With all respect, sir.’

Eden nodded. ‘Not me in person, of course… Have you heard of a place called Porton Down, Miss Elphinstone? Hushhush Army laboratory, out in Wiltshire.’

‘I know it,’ said Ted Lane. ‘Or of it. Belonged to my lot, didn’t it? The Royal Engineers.’

‘That’s it. Set up during the Schlieffen War to look at the possibilities of chemical warfare – gassing, you know.’

Lane grunted. ‘Stinks shells. Worked in Russia.’