Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Nevertheless, they were here.

He stood back in the shadows, keeping to himself. Harry had never been to England, had never seen a Martian or its works close to, save filtered through photography or flickering cinema images. Even now, nothing but lights in the sky. It was one thing to play with the ideas of bogeymen from the red planet – and he had written lurid potboilers about the Martian threat himself – and quite another to have it become real . He supposed the fear would come later.

To the people around him, though, the apparition seemed extraordinarily exciting; they shouted, pointed, yelped and whooped, some broke into spontaneous dancing, some even started to applaud. It was giddiness, thought Harry, as ever searching for the right word like a squirrel for a lost nut. The over-excitement of the party and too much chemical stimulation was now laced with this cosmic terror, as if sherbet had been thrown into a glass of champagne.

A girl he knew slightly grabbed his arm. ‘Dance with me, Harry! Isn’t this just the end – the end of the world party? They say Guggenheim’s here, and Eddie Cantor, and Jack Dempsey—’

‘And P.G. Wodehouse.’

‘Who? Oh, let’s dance, Harry, what’s wrong with you?’

He smiled, shook his head, gently disengaged, and let her whirl away.

He walked away from the brighter lights and down towards the jetty. Once away from the house he heard car engines gunning, vehicles driving away.

By the water he spotted a man and woman in the shade of an awning, calmer than most, watching the sky, quietly smoking. Harry hung back a moment and observed; they were two silhouettes wreathed by cigarette smoke, under a Martian sky. Harry sensed they were not a couple, and would not object to his joining them. (If vocabulary was a weakness, Harry was always sensitive of emotions.) Anyhow, he felt no awkwardness in approaching.

‘Mind if I join you?’

They turned. The woman smiled, a little distantly, and the man shrugged, but stiffly, as if in mild pain. He was in uniform, Harry saw now, and he wondered if the fellow was some military veteran.

Harry politely offered fresh cigarettes. ‘Quite a night.’

‘Thanks to the Martians, yes,’ the man said. ‘Coming down on cue, according to the astronomical timetable – though not quite where the military analysts said they would.’

Harry stuck out his hand. ‘Harry Kane, by the way. I work for the papers. The Hearst rags mostly.’

The man seemed indifferent, but he shook Harry’s hand. His grip was strong, but Harry observed how he winced as he flexed his shoulder. He was perhaps forty, dark and heavy-set; he wore the uniform of a junior Army officer. ‘Name’s Bill Woodward. Captain, if you can’t read the uniform.’

Harry took a stab, erring on the side of politeness. ‘Retired?’

‘Not quite. Sick leave.’ He tapped his shoulder. ‘Took a bullet in the Philippines six months back. Wouldn’t mind if I weren’t pretty sure that bullet was German-made. Recuperating well enough. The Army’s good enough to be paying my bills, though the place I rent, not far from here, costs no more than a hundred bucks a month – nothing like this. No family to mop my brow, as I was explaining to Miss Rafferty here.’ His voice had a southern twang, Harry thought.

Meanwhile the woman studied Harry closely. She held out her own hand and introduced herself as Marigold Rafferty. She was perhaps thirty, with a Boston accent or so Harry judged, and she wore riding habit: boots, long skirt, sensible jacket. Harry says she looked a little drab against the background of the glittering party-goers, and a sight more adult. ‘Harry Kane,’ she said. ‘I know your face, I think, but it doesn’t fit the name. You say you’re a journalist. Do you also write books, by any chance?…’

Harry coloured. ‘I’m afraid I do, Miss Rafferty—’

She snapped her fingers. ‘I knew it. Edison versus the Canal Builders – that was one of yours, wasn’t it?’

‘It’s something of a sideline. It can pay pretty well, given the serialisation rights and such. But I see myself as a serious journalist—’

‘Edisonades, eh?’ Woodward grinned. ‘Tales of the exploits of the great inventor of the lightbulb. I read a couple of those. Edison and the March of the Kaiser was my favourite. Was that one of yours?’

‘No—’

‘Always thought that one, at least, had a certain plausibility. Those Germans ain’t exactly forgiven us for taking the Philippines and Guam and Cuba from the Spaniards. Edison against the Martians, though – that’s a stretch!’ He glanced at Marigold Rafferty. ‘I did always wonder how the great man felt about his starring role in such works.’

Marigold gently punched the soldier’s good arm. ‘Come now, Bill, not only have we two just met, but we just met this poor young fellow too; let’s not guy him. Harry – or “Mr Jarvis X. Kendor”, wasn’t that your nom de plume ? – if you want to know how Thomas Edison feels about starring in one of your stories, you can ask him yourself.’

‘Edison? Quite a name-drop, Miss Rafferty! I imagine he’s in New Jersey, at Menlo Park.’ This was where Edison had his research establishment at the time.

Marigold shook her head. ‘Not a bit of it. He’s right here , Mr Kane. Here on Long Island. In fact, a little earlier, he was at this very party! But he tires quickly – well, as you would; he’s pretty sturdy, but he is seventy-five years old.’

Harry shook his head. ‘Edison, here on Long Island? Why?’

Marigold said apologetically, ‘I should explain. I work at Menlo Park too; my technical background is in telephonic circuitry, but for the last couple of years I’ve been something of a personal assistant to Mr Edison himself. Mr Edison has taken the predictions of Martian returns pretty seriously at every opposition since ’07, and habitually takes himself, and his family, out to what he hopes will be a safe refuge, if they do come. Away from the immediate vicinity of New York anyhow. As it happens the company, and indeed the federal government, have been happy to support him in this.’

Woodward grinned. ‘There you are, you see, “Jarvis”. You hit on a truth in your pulp novel—’

‘I’d hesitate to call it “pulp”—’

‘Edison’s no superman but he is a pretty valuable national asset. As it happened they rented him a villa next to mine. Me, a neighbour of Thomas Edison! What are the odds, Mr Kane? What are the odds?’

‘You say the government lends a hand. Is the old man really so important?’

She shrugged. ‘You need to ask? You wrote about Edison inventing super-weapons to defeat the Martians.’

‘That was just fiction. In real life—’

‘In real life, Edison has been inventing super-weapons to defeat the Martians.’

Harry Kane could only stare.

But he thought he saw the argument; he’d worked through some of it himself. If the Martians were to invade the New York area, surely they would come down on the mainland for ease of movement, and for access to the continental interior. So Long Island, protected by the Sound, a barricade of water, might be bypassed, for a time at least. Yes, this was a sensible place to stash a national treasure like the brain of Edison.

And that was why Harry himself was there, for many of the city’s rich seemed to have come to a similar conclusion. There had been a veritable flight to the island’s resorts in the last few days, and Harry had come to observe that expensive flocking.

Harry had enough of a sense of history to understand that the recent floods of new wealth, at which journalists and writers like himself marvelled, were based on genuine economic growth in the country; you had the opening-up of huge mineral assets – silver from Nevada, copper from Montana – and you had the exhilarating expansion of modern industries such as telephones, movies and photography, electricity, cars. But in the cities, especially in Manhattan – thanks to financial speculation, and services like bond trading, the dealing of long-term secured loans – you could get rich quick perfectly legitimately. And also, of course, illegitimately; prohibition had created a major black market all by itself. And that extraordinary wealth found expression in the hedonistic, hectic culture that underpinned this very villa, this very party.