Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

So Walter collected world maps of all kinds – he even had a cheap schoolroom globe – as well as astronomical tables, and a variety of mathematical manuals. Even a slide rule! Walter was a philosophical journalist, never a mathematician, but he had long ago learned that mathematics was the language of the astronomer, for numbers capture the exquisite precision of the motion of the heavenly bodies in relation to each other: even the intricate ballet of the Martian fleets as they assembled in space to fall upon the earth. And it was the pattern of those assemblings that he slowly puzzled out, alone in that German suburb, in those final days and hours, as the Martians drew closer, and the astronomers’ observations of the approaching cylinders and projections of their flight became more precise.

The core of it was simple. The Martians always landed at local midnight.

They would come out of the dark, he saw, falling into the midnight shadow of the earth. And they would come in clusters, lined up one after another and ready to fall on our world.

He imagined the view from an approaching cylinder in the first cluster, with Europe, London, Berlin, Paris and all, already carried into the light of a new day, but the Americas blanketed in the midnight dark, the great cities laid out like jewels along the coasts and on the courses of the great rivers. Blanketed in dark, and helpless as the Martians fell from the sky, hammering down on the line of midnight.

And after that, as the world turned, as the midnight line crossed the land, so the following Martian battle groups would fall, again and again.

It seems he managed to sleep a little, that last night.

On Friday May 19 he was woken by one of his telephones ringing. His clocks showed it was six in the morning in Berlin, five a.m. in London – I was in the Redoubt at Amersham with Verity, watching the cylinders cross high in the sky – and a little after midnight on the East Coast of North America.

It had begun.

‘I told you so,’ he told me he muttered to himself, a man alone in that house in the German dawn, in pyjamas and dressing gown, eyes no doubt dark with fatigue, sheets of his spidery scrawl covering tables and walls. ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’

As midnight approached, Harry Kane thought that the atmosphere in the Bigelow mansion, was agitated. No, that was not the word. Feverish, perhaps. Or on the borders of hysterical. Everybody knew that if the Martians were to come to the earth at this opposition the landings ought to start tonight – or rather today, this new day just begun at midnight, Friday May 19. Well, if the astronomers had seen anything it hadn’t been released to the public. But even so the atmosphere was quite something.

Perhaps it was the drink, or the pills, or the rag music from the apparently tireless band, or the giddy excitement of being young and rich and utterly free to indulge yourself as you chose… Or perhaps it was the sheer privilege of having been one of the lucky few (well, lucky few hundred) to have been invited to this party, at this cusp moment when, perhaps, the world itself was about to come to an end – at least according to the gloomier prophesies in the Hearst papers…

And how to capture this wild, glittering fragility in a word, a phrase?

As I have mentioned earlier in this memoir, my good friend Harry was a journalist for the popular New York city papers, a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post in particular – and, under another name, a pulp novelist. Well, we all have to make a living. He had a nose for news, which was why, as it would turn out, he ended up at precisely the right location on that dramatic night. But he lacked, I always felt, the other half of the true reporter’s skill set, in that he struggled with the words themselves, always uncertain allies at best for poor Harry. And that distracted him, for he would stand unseeing before the jewellery heist or the train wreck or the car crash, while lexicological fragments drifted behind those handsome blue eyes. I told him once that he could have been a great writer if only he could write.

But he did have an eye for detail; when he came to write down his own account of that night he would remember that just as midnight struck the band was playing The Sheik of Araby , accompanied by a blurred chiming of the house’s many clocks.

He pushed his way through the ballroom of the Bigelow mansion, ignoring the Japanese panelling and the rich flock wallpaper and the Parisian chandeliers that adorned that brilliantly lit room, and joined the crowd jostling to get through the wide French windows and out onto the veranda and under the open sky. He would remember the drink he carried through those open doors. It was a highball, not his first, and maybe one too many; he set down the half-empty glass on an ornate occasional table.

There, as he wandered across the veranda, he took in the scene. If the Bigelow house itself looked as if it was a wing of the palace of Versailles, carved off and carried over the Atlantic to Long Island, the gardens were scarcely less spectacular. The lawns, studded with lilac trees and hawthorns and plums, many in blossom, were strung with coloured lights. The garden’s centrepiece was a swimming pool, a disc of brilliant blue light across which girls swam like dolphins – all of them in proper bathing costumes, but that would change as the night wore on and things got rowdier; it was always so. As you looked further out from the house you saw the jetty, and a couple of small boats, and the dark waters of the Sound, and the lights of Manhattan on the horizon, a misty blur.

And people drifted through this scene like pretty ghosts, drinks in hand, the women in expensive creations of beads and chiffon, the men in dress suits and patent leather shoes like Harry’s own, or – probably the Long Island natives – in white flannels and sneakers. Purple seemed to be the colour that year – or just that month or that week – and every woman wore her hair tight in a carefully shaped bob. Bigelow’s guests looked alike, Harry thought, all but indistinguishable unless you made out the carefully selected detail. Thus the convergence of fashion and money: lots and lots of money.

While he was people-watching in this way, of course, he was missing the real news of the evening. Slowly he became aware that many of those pretty faces were turned upwards, to the sky. It was only then that it occurred to Harry to look up too.

It was a clear, cloudless night, a late May night, with just a tang of chill in the air after a warm day. The lights of the party were so bright that no stars were to be seen. But Harry saw the streaks across the sky, off to the east. They came and went, splinters sporadically visible. Harry was a country boy, having grown up in upstate New York; he had seen meteor showers before, and this had something of that look. But these streaks all ran in parallel to each other, and they were crowded together, dense in the sky: evidence of coordination. And no meteor he had ever seen flashed green.

Of course he knew what this meant; it was just as the more irresponsible newspapers, including most of those he wrote for, had predicted. The Martians were coming to the earth , once again – more of them, following the group still camped out in England. Well, here they were, right on cue, sand this time, evidently not targeting England again, but heading here , the US, the East Coast. There had been much speculation that if they did come to America they would slam down in the middle of one of the great cities, Chicago or Boston or New York itself, but – so Harry judged, taking his orientation from the lights of Manhattan – they were actually coming down in an east-southeast direction; they would land on Long Island somewhere to the east of Harry’s own position, close to Sands Point.