Stephen Baxter: The Massacre of Mankind

I rolled my eyes at my companions. ‘Never mind about the Martians just now, Walter. How is your new treatment regime going?’

‘Well, it doesn’t hurt as much.’

Harry laughed out loud at that.

I said, ‘Walter, I’m sorry to hear of your troubles. I do sympathise. You probably know I left Britain after the ’11 election, when Marvin and his strutting bully-boys came to power – soldiers in khaki marching behind King George’s coronation coach… I would not wish to be in their hands, as you have been… But you have called for a reason.’

‘I have become desperate to get in touch. Not just with you, but with Frank, Carolyne… I could think of no other way but through you, Julie. I could not trace you in New York, so I asked Major Eden to bring a personal message. I hope you will help me, Julie. I hope you will see the sense of it. You have always been—’

‘A girl of “quality”, as you said in your memoir?’

‘Sorry about that. Look – my suggestion is that you go back to England. There is still time. Take a steamer – I have the resources to pay. Gather the family, and I will make another call. Perhaps near Woking – the house I shared with Carolyne is long sold, but—’

‘What is it, Walter? Tell me something .’ So began for me an extraordinary journey, one which took me from the lobby of the world’s tallest building in New York to the foot of a Martian fighting-machine in London – and beyond!

For he would say only: ‘I have grave news from the sky.’

When I looked for a steamer, I found the Lusitania happened to be readying for a passage. It didn’t take long to arrange tickets for myself, and for Eric Eden and Albert Cook, both of whom decided to cut short their American tour, with apologies to Professor Schiaparelli, after hearing Walter’s dark hints. Their whole lives had been shaped by the Martian War; of course they would come.

Not that I was keen to make the journey at the time. And my brave hero Harry Kane was even less so. ‘England ain’t a place to be an American these days,’ he told me. ‘Brad Green,’ who was a long-standing and hard-drinking European correspondent at the Post , ‘says that when you open your mouth and let out a Yankee drawl, you’re as likely as not to be hauled over by some cop. And meanwhile they got German troopers on guard outside Buckingham Palace. Now where’s the sense in that?’

‘That’s politics for you.’

He grunted. ‘ I blame the Martians. You know, I think for a lot of us on this side of the pond your Martian War was a kind of a big splash at the time, and there were false alarms and panics and such here – but when it was all over, well, it was like some remote natural disaster, a volcano blowing its top in Yorkshire or someplace.’

‘Do you even know where Yorkshire is?’

‘You were crowded off the front page next time there was a jumper off the Brooklyn Bridge. And it didn’t stop the Kaiser marching his tin soldiers all over the map of Europe, did it? But for you Brits – sometimes it feels like you never got over it.’

I had to nod. ‘Surprisingly perceptive. So you’re not going to let my brother-in-law buy you a week on a cruise ship?’

‘Some other time, sweet cheeks.’

We said a perfunctory farewell – but as it turned out it would be a very long time indeed before I saw Harry Kane again.

Two days after Walter’s call it was time to go. It didn’t take long for me to pack. I have travelled light since that dreadful early morn in June of ’07, when I was staying with my brother George and his wife Alice in their house at Stanmore, and he, a surgeon, came home from a call-out to Pinner full of news of the Martian advance. He bundled us onto the chaise, promising to meet us at Edgware station after he had roused the neighbours. It was quite an adventure for us, and recorded at second-hand passably accurately by Walter in his Narrative – for we ran into his brother, my future husband Frank, and as a result we were brought under the scrutiny of the wider world. But it is typical of Walter’s carelessness with detail that he did not trouble to complete that part of his narrative with a report of the loss of George Elphinstone, my brother, who we never saw again.

I joined Cook and Eden at the wharf. The RMS Lusitania was a floating hotel, with electric elevators, and a telephone in every cabin. The ‘Greyhound of the Sea’ would fair whip us across the ocean; we should land in less than six days. Of course at that time there was no faster way to do it; the great Zeppelins no longer flew the transatlantic routes, and it was only a year since Alcock and Brown had fluttered across the Atlantic, the first to do so in a fuel-laden variant of the war aeroplanes that had evolved so quickly on the eastern front of the Schlieffen War.

I was irked at the beginning of the show for we had to stay an extra day in dock while the harbour managers arranged the formation of a convoy, twenty or so ships with ourselves as the largest passenger boat, a number of merchantmen, and a brace of US Navy destroyers equipped with sounding gear and depth charges to see off any threat from the ‘U-Boats’. Since the early weeks of the Schlieffen War in 1914, no American ship had been so much as scratched by a German torpedo, but it says a lot for the tensions between the precautions were deemed convenience for us; the convoy would make for Southampton rather than the Lusitania ’s usual port of Liverpool, and would deliver us closer to London.

During the crossing I spent much of my time in the onboard library, while Eric Eden habituated the gymnasium and Cook the First Class Lounge, with its stained glass windows and marble pillars and delicate, fluttering women. There was much black humour among the passengers. We were lucky, it was said, that our convoy didn’t include the White Star’s Titanic , thought by many to be a cursed ship since she was almost wrecked by an iceberg on her maiden voyage – saved only by hull armour of high-quality Martian-grade aluminium.

As soon as we landed at Southampton, squads of the Border Control Police in their black uniforms came on board, accompanied by a handful of regular soldiers in khaki. We three British citizens, with our papers in order and checked while still on board the Lusitania , were allowed off briskly, while – just as Harry would have expected – Americans and other foreigners were kept back for closer scrutiny. Once off the ship, the bulky luggage of my two gentleman fellow-travellers was sent on ahead to our hotel in London.

Then, outside the passenger terminal, we three were met by Philip Parris. Philip was Walter Jenkins’s cousin. Then in his fifties, he was a bulky, jowly individual, his grey-black hair plastered to his scalp by pomade, habitually dressed in a heavy suit that generally featured sombre black tie and waistcoat adorned with thick watch-chain. He looked every inch the man of business, the man of substance – and the competent kind to whom a man like Walter Jenkins would entrust the welfare of three transatlantic waifs such as ourselves, just as he had once entrusted his wife’s safety during the chaos of the Martian War, while he followed the Martians around the English countryside as a fly follows a horse. I remember in his memoir Walter dismissing Philip as a brave enough man but not one to respond quickly to danger. Ha! Sooner at my side a man like Parris than one like Jenkins.

Philip led us briskly to the car park, and told us his plan. He would take us to London for the convenience of the hotels, then drive us back out to Woking later, for Walter’s family meeting in a couple of days’ time. ‘I trust you had no troubles with the busy-bodies of the Border Control.’