Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

‘’S much as I can do.’

‘You do have a heart—’

‘Don’t spread it around.’

‘ I wouldn’t have seen it.’

He looked at me coldly. ‘The Martians can’t see it either, but maybe they will, eventually, and that little game will be up. They’re trying to understand us. They’re experimenting. You say you’re ’ere to talk with the Martians. Well, then, you need to see what they’re up to – all of it. Then you’ll know what’s what. And that’s what I’m going to show you now.’

He led us to a part of the compound littered with quite deep circular pits. Over each stretched the metal mesh, and beside each a handling-machine stood on guard, a motionless, tireless sentry. And I heard now a kind of whimpering, a weary crying – not from one voice, but from many.

I hung back again; I could not help it. I think I might not have gone further if not for the strength of Verity beside me and if I had not been unwilling to show weakness to Bert Cook, or indeed the Martians all around us.

In the first few pits, however, there was nothing unusual to be seen – nothing, that is, but the ghastly sight of people, men, women and children cast down together for a few hours of imprisonment, before a worse fate. But these pits came in neat rows and columns, almost as if they were part of some vast game board. But I have learned since that our scientists will run experiments with similar arrangements. If they wish to test for the effects of varying combinations of factors – different mixtures of ingredients in drug trials, perhaps – they will create a matrix of combinations, set out physically in the laboratory, in a grid of the kind I saw dug into the ground.

And, Bert said, this was indeed a kind of laboratory. What they were studying was the human soul.

‘As I see it the Martians don’t ’ave families as we do. Or family ties. Oh, they give birth, they bud, but once the little beast is skedaddling around it will go to any one of the adults for succour and attention. And they don’t suckle, by the way; if the Martians were ever mammals, they ain’t now; it’s straight on the old claret for a young ’un as soon as it’s split off from the parent.’

‘Claret’ – a ghastly joke!

‘And they are loyal,’ Bert went on, ‘to each other, to the race as a whole. Well, we learned that, didn’t we? When they crossed space all that way and came again to England, they ’ad other things to achieve – they wanted to learn ’ow to beat us – but they came back for those they left behind before, or at least their bodies, for what remained.’

I nodded. ‘Walter predicted the return to England based on that very observation.’

But Bert Cook would never be interested in anything Walter Jenkins said or wrote. ‘The point is ,’ he said now, ‘’ere they are, watching us. And they see that we are loyal to each other, in family groups, to our parents, our siblings – ’specially our children.’

A ghastly awareness was creeping over me. ‘And what has this to do with these rows of pits?’

‘Well, they’re testing us. Mixing folk up. I don’t know the detail. But in one corner you might have a family group. In another, strangers chucked in together, adults and kids. Those the two extremes, and everything in between. Now – you might sacrifice yourself for your kid, but would you do it for another’s child? Or one further removed, a nephew or a niece or a grandchild… If I offered you the chance to save two nephews in exchange for one daughter – or a dozen, I don’t know – would you do it? That’s what they’re testing for – that’s what I think, anyhow. I seen ’em come at it, day after day, chucking in new specimens, while the children weep for the mums they’ve just been ripped away from.’

‘They’re experimenting with human emotions, then,’ Verity said. ‘Experimenting with our capacity for love. And methodically .’

‘I’ll tell you what I saw once,’ he went on, more darkly. ‘Parents and one kiddie – only young, they were. The parents gave up the kiddie, when the Martian ’andling-machine came to collect; cutest little blonde girl you ever saw. Pushed ’er into the clutches of the machine, they did, jus’ like that. And you know what the Martians did? They released ’em , the parents . I saw it with my own eyes. Opened up the pit, and let them climb out, and they emerged blinking and grimy and a bit bewildered, and I ’ad to tell them which way to go to get out. Laughing my ’ead off I was, they was crying so ’ard – but, crying or not, off they went. Probably still out there somewhere now, growing spuds and ’aving dinner parties.

‘Because they’re the sort the Martians want to breed. Do you see? Remember the long term goal: they don’t want to eat us all, not all at once; they want to set up a nice malleable ’erd they can control, with the minimum of fuss. Like those poor skinny wretches ’oo came from Mars in their cylinders. That’s what they want, the meek, the controllable – the selfish, disloyal sort. And that’s what they’re selecting for. Submit and you live – and breed.’

Verity shook her head. ‘That’s monstrous, Bert.’

‘Plausible, though,’ I murmured.

‘And that’s just the start,’ said Bert Cook. ‘Some day, when they’ve bred us into the strain they want…’ He held up his hands, as if framing the scene. ‘I got this vision of the future. People being grown in rows like plants in a vast field, all passive and waiting their turn. And the fighting-machines walking up and down the rows, just plucking them when they’re ripe.’ He laughed at us. ‘Still squeamish, are we? All this too tough for you to take? It’s not over yet. Look at what I brought you to now.’ With a dramatic flair – he had been a showman, after all, peddling his stories on stages around the world – he pointed down into yet another cage, another pit. ‘ Look down there…’

Verity looked more closely than I did at what lay in the pit, but then she had been a VAD, a nursing assistant, and had seen worse before than I ever had. I could not look for long; it was a glimpse, a vivid horror.

The woman was young, I would judge, no older that twenty-five. She was naked from the waist up; her lower body was covered by a coarse blanket; she lay on her back in the shadow of the pit. A man sat beside her, looking at us warily, resentfully – almost possessively. And the thing that grew out of the side of her belly was a head – a recognisable human head – it looked like the head of a child of perhaps nine or ten. A crumpled face, eyes closed, a sketch of a nose, no hair on the scalp. Fingers, long and skeletal, were gathered around the mouth like blades of grass around a rock. Its mouth had a pointed upper lip, like the letter V. That was all I saw, before I had to turn away.

Verity asked, with eerie calm, ‘Who is he? The man with her.’

Cook shrugged. ‘Doctor of some kind – or pretending to be. It’s another kind who gets spared; if you show yourself to be a doctor or a nurse, or with those sort of skills, they’ll spare you, for a time anyhow. What better than to ’ave a sheep playing the vet for the rest of the ’erd? This isn’t the only experiment they’ve run. On reproduction, I mean. They’re interested in all that. They like to examine the stages of a pregnancy.’ Mercifully he went into no detail. ‘And the children growing up too. Take a few kiddies away from their parents and set ’em in a pit on their own. Maybe they want to see whether we would grow feral. Would we work out our own pack structure, like wolves? Would we work out a language, or do we ’ave to be taught it?… I suppose that’s what they’re interested in. Whether we’re more or less biddable.’