Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

It was time to tell her the truth. If not now, when? ‘I don’t have a bomb, Verity, but I do have the next best thing…’ And I told her, quickly, of Eden, and Porton Down, and the concoction in my blood.

I would have been consumed with resentment at this dishonesty. But Verity was made of better stuff; once she grasped the idea she immediately saw the opportunity. ‘Will you use it? Here we are at the heart of it all – Cook seems to roam around with impunity. If we could get to this blood store he speaks of—’

‘No.’ I pulled away. I turned around. Confused, distressed, I was acting on pure instinct now, but my instinct was not to poison. ‘A grim old pathogen from the heart of Africa – if we use this , are we any better than the Martians?

‘And even if we succeed, it won’t be enough. For even if we poisoned this lot, they would learn to safeguard against it, and more would come, and more… Look around, Verity! This is England, and there are beings from two other worlds here – from Mars and Venus. It is an interplanetary war, as Walter saw, and that’s how we must handle it, and no bit of petty sabotage is going to resolve it one way or another.’

‘How, then?’

In that moment – that moment of exquisite pressure, of shock and disgust and imminent peril in the very heart of the horror – my mind raced, and my thinking was, I believed, clearer than it has ever been before or since, clearer even than Walter’s, and I thought I saw it through to the end I thought I saw the solution . I carried it with me, in fact – not in the lethal sludge they had forced into my veins, but in the battered leather satchel I had brought all the way from Berlin, at poor Walter’s behest. Or rather, I saw the necessary solution in the grander ideas that had framed Walter’s project, ideas that had been used as no more than the basis of the Lie by Eden and his commanders – ideas of which even Walter seemed to have lost sight.

I faced Verity. ‘We have to get out of here.’

‘Very well. And then?’

‘And then we have to contact Eric Eden, and Marriott with his bombers… We’ve work to do, Verity. Work to do!’ It was then, I think, that I saw the green flash in the sky. Verity looked around, distracted too. A gleam of the sun showed on the rampart wall to the east.

I grabbed the girl’s shoulders. ‘Verity – what time is it?’ She checked her watch. ‘A little after five a.m.’

‘And the date?’

‘The date? Why—’

‘The confusion – I was unconscious for so long—’

‘It is Friday. May 19, I think…’

I was chilled. I remembered now, the faded diary, the old lady’s bedroom. This was the date I had computed in my addled brain, presuming I remembered June 10 right as the opposition: three weeks and a day before that astronomical encounter. And here were the fireworks, right on schedule!

Another flash in the sky, a green streak, like a crack in heaven, heading west.

I shook Verity. ‘The cylinders! Did you see that one?’

‘The next wave – it must be. And stop shaking me!’

‘Perhaps if we had been outside the Cordon we would have known, the government must have announced the sightings of the cannon fire on Mars by now…’

But she looked confused. ‘I don’t understand. The Martian cylinders – they always fall at midnight. It’s nearly sunrise—’

‘Midnight at the target site, though,’ Cook said bluntly, staring at the sky. ‘Midnight there , not ’ere. Here’s another one, look. And another! Whoosh, splat!’

And even as we spoke, and the Martians hooted languidly as they fed, more cylinders fell across the sky us, and more. They were all heading west, I saw, towards the Atlantic.

Towards America.

Where, on the east coast, in Washington and New York and Boston and Miami, it was midnight. And I knew I was right. Even if I successfully infected the Martians in England, the other nests would adapt, and the war would be lost anyhow. Our only hope, and a fragile one, lay with Walter and his ‘graphic geometry’: it lay in my mind, not my blood.

Bert Cook grinned coldly. ‘Told you.’ He raised his arms to the sky. ‘Come down, you beauties!’

On the night the lightning fell across the earth, Walter Jenkins was in Berlin. And from that powerful city his view of that world-wide catastrophe far exceeded my own perspective at the time, trapped as I was in the Cordon in England.

Walter had taken a rented home in a village called Dahlem, south-west of Berlin proper. I once visited the house out of curiosity, during a trip to the city in the aftermath. Dahlem is (or was before the Martians came, and will be again) an opulent place, green and leafy – indeed a corner of the Grunewald Forest laps over its boundary – a community of wide avenues and spacious villas. The house was not characteristic of the man, I remember thinking as I looked around it; in terms of material ambition his vision had never risen much above his old English suburban home in Woking. But in those final days before the return of the Martians, he said, he had chosen to move away from the ‘laboratories’ of central Berlin, where Freud and others continued to examine his prototypical disorder of the mind, his ‘gun-dread’. Here he had privacy, and space, and the quiet to think – and, crucially, the means to observe the war of worlds which he anticipated.

To that end – and long before the attacks were due – he had installed additional telephone wires, even a telegraph receiver, and wireless sets of impressive power. All this was of not negligible cost, but, as I have previously mentioned, thanks to his Narrative he was not without means – and, he seemed to have decided, if the Martians were on their way in force then soon money might not mean very much anyhow.

And the Martians were on their way: of that he was as certain as any individual outside the scientific, military and government establishments.

Of course, like all of us he based had his calculations on the date of the coming opposition of Mars: the closest approach of the planet would be on June 10, and a hypothetical schedule of firings, based on the precedents of ’07 and ’20, could be counted back from that. Even now it’s hard to recall now how total was the secrecy blanketing the astronomical project at the time: for years, for many oppositions, the authorities, fearing our panic and mindful of false alarms in the past, had done their best to hide the news from the sky from us, whether it be good or bad, and it was impossible to get confirmation of any sightings, one way or another. But Walter had resources and contacts. He listened to whispers and words and speculations from friends within the world-wide astronomical community, many of whom, being bull-headed scientists, had little time for official blankets of silence. In short, they leaked, if discreetly.

So it was that Walter eventually learned that the Martian cannon had indeed begun to fire again, as early as April 8 – that is, even before I had visited him in Berlin in May, though he had not known it at that time. It was just as in ’20 when he had learned so late of the coming of the Martian fleet.

And as Walter tried to analyse the available information, the numbers of these new blasts soon became clear. In 1907 there had been a mere ten cylinders launched from Mars; in 1920 ten times that number, a hundred falling in formation in central England – and now, the astronomers privately estimated, another tenfold increase would bring a thousand Martian ships to the earth.

Where would the Martians land, though? The cylinders seemed to be flocking in space, gathering in flotillas as latecomers joined the interplanetary armada – just as had been the case with the British invasion force. But because the Martian pilots repeatedly adjusted their trajectories while they crossed interplanetary space, almost down to the moment of landing as it turned out – the rocket-like devices flared green even as the cylinders fell across our sky, as I and others witnessed – for many days the pattern was unclear.