The Martian in the Wood

IV

It was early March of 1908 by the time Walter freed himself sufficiently of other commitments to be able to visit Holmburgh, and Zena Gardner.

He had been staying with his brother Frank, then my fiancé, in London. And, with the rail links in the south of England still under repair, to get to Sussex he decided to take one of the German airships that at that time ran regular if expensive passenger services from London to Brighton and other destinations. Back in ’08 such journeys were still a novelty for the British, and he recorded his impressions with boyish eagerness in his daily journal.

The highlight of the trip was an entirely trivial expedition, led by one of the Hermann’s senior officers, into the interior of the great craft. Walter’s party were led first to the upper deck of the gondola, and then to a series of metal staircases that led to hatches in the ceiling. Up the party climbed. Though they had been warned to wrap up, still the cold of the upper air hit Walter immediately as they exited the heated interior of the gondola, and a couple of people turned back at that point.

Those who persisted ascended into wonderland. The craft was built around a stout metal spine that ran the length of the main envelope, and from it radial ribs supported the essentially cylindrical frame of the craft. But one only got the vaguest of impressions of this architecture, for the space was crowded with lift balloons. It was like exploring St. Paul’s, Walter thought, on a day when the dome happened to have been crammed full of hot-air balloons. The sacs were lit from inside by electric lamps, the purpose being for the crews to detect any leaks or other problems by easy visual inspection. The effect was magical, as if one were in a cloud, glowing from within.

I like to think of dear Walter, his mind as well as his body still badly scarred from his experiences of the First Martian War – he was then forty-two years old – and yet here he was clambering around the insides of an airship like a wide-eyed schoolboy.

And I like to imagine the reaction of poor Zena Gardner when his hired car brought him to Holmburgh at last: on her doorstep, the man who would narrate the most famous account of our first War of the Worlds.

It was early spring when Walter arrived at Holmburgh. Yet, he says, he immediately had a sense of something not right. It seemed too cold. The pretty flowers of late winter and early spring were nowhere in evidence. The fields were bare; the farm animals, the cattle and sheep and horses, seemed sullen, oddly perturbed. And the birds were silent too, he remembers.

Walter was made welcome at the Lodge. He says the servant, Pierce, was grave, rough-spoken but kindly, and Walter was immediately struck by his fatherly devotion to the troubled young woman who paid his wages.

When he was settled, his single bag unpacked – the plan was for him to stay at least one night – Walter and Zena sat down to a plain but nourishing afternoon tea, in a parlour whose walls were cluttered with portraits of hard-eyed ancestors. Walter, when he was less self-obsessed, could be a good listener, and it took only a little encouragement before Zena opened up to him with her account of her troubled brother and his wanderings.

“Much of your detail is quite compelling,” he told her. “During the Ice Ages there were indeed Neanderthals in Britain – in England at least, below the line of the ice sheets on which nothing can live. And though the ice came and went, and the island was depopulated and recolonised over and over, there must have been occupation by those fellows across a great depth of time.”

“But the other – the one whose blood was let – he looked more like a modern human to me, in the body at least. Which I saw naked.” She was no tender flower; Walter says she repeated this word analytically and unembarrassed.

“But the head sounds odd,” Walter said. “The sloping brow you mention. The jaw especially, the long teeth. Just last year – while we were fighting the Martians – the Germans dug up a peculiar jawbone in Heidelberg, which sounds as if it might have been a match for the feature you describe. Don’t be too impressed. Given the sketchy account in your letter, I prepared for this visit by reading the appropriate journals.” I imagine him steepling his fingers and slipping into the comfortable lecturing mode of the self-appointed expert. But he was always well informed, I’ll give him that. “It’s very easy to imagine there was more than one kind of human predecessor running around in the wilds of Europe in those days. We humans must have encountered the Neanderthals. And it’s easy to imagine interaction between the subspecies. Even cross-breeding, as one may breed domestic dogs. Or – mutual destruction.”

She nodded. “They say that chimps hunt monkeys, their cousins, for the meat.”

“That is uncomfortably true.”

“But this was different, Mr Jenkins. The Neanderthals, if that was what they were, looked like brutes killing someone – beautiful.”

He smiled. “Looks can deceive. There’s a chap, you know, I keep running into over this business of the Martians – bumptious little fellow with a damnable squeaky voice – well, a few years back he published a potboiler of a romance about travel into the future. And his hapless hero comes upon two races of devolved post-humans – not under-evolved pre-humans, as your vision suggests – in which the smarter, ugly sort similarly preyed upon the stupider but pretty sort. And the time traveller naturally sympathised with the pretty lot. Yours was an understandable reaction, Miss Gardner. But you must remember these fellows were not human, either of them, despite how they looked. As you said, one wild ape killing another – that’s closer to the scenario. Nothing but nature at work, in its mindless way.

“And speaking of wild animals, there’s lots of compelling detail too in your account of what you saw in that clearing – your scrap of Sussex savannah.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“No! Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“But I thought I saw a unicorn!”

“You reported your impressions honestly. I think it may have been – if it was anything at all – an elasmotherium. Another beast of the Ice Age. Actually a relative of the rhino, but tall, horse-like, and with a single horn. First identified in Russia. Some archaeologists believe that historical sightings of survivors might actually have given rise to the legend of the unicorn.

“But I’ll tell you the one detail I find most authentic about your account, Miss Gardner. It’s the numbers in your herds: eight, ten, twelve beasts, you said. You see, those cold centuries favoured the growth of big animals, the megafauna, because the bigger the body the more inner heat it can retain. Less surface area per pound of flesh; an elephant can withstand a chill where a mouse will shiver to death. But their fodder is poor quality and sparse, and the land can afford to support only a few such big beasts. And so, small herds. It’s demonstrated in the modern Arctic, and in the fossil record. So what you say is very convincing. Why, the Neanderthals too lived in small, isolated groups, as you witnessed. Made them resilient in the short term, but prone to extinction when a smarter, more flexible competitor came along.”

But she seemed not to believe it herself. She shook her head. “Even now, as I sit here drinking Pierce’s weak tea, I can scarcely credit it all.”

“I believe you saw something.” I imagine him sitting forward, his gloved hands clasped – gloved to protect the scarring from his burns. If Zena had shown any reaction to his poor physical condition, his notes don’t report it. “I don’t necessarily believe that what you found was some Ice Age refugium, a domain of the Neanderthals and the giant elk – it does seem incredible that so much could have survived for so long. But then, something unusual happened to that Wood of yours before any of this started, didn’t it? Which was the reason you contacted me.”

“You mean, the coming of the Martian. If it was –”

“Well, the timing is right, if what your brother saw was a rogue fighting-machine, separated from the pack, its pilot cut off from fellows who were already dying. And as everyone remembers, the summer was plagued by thunderstorms. I sometimes wonder if the earth itself, outraged, was fighting back against the alien infection!

“Now, if the lightning did strike a fighting-machine in the Wood, then the machine could have been crippled, for its ‘musculature’ is a matter of metallic discs and sheaths controlled by electromagnetism. Crippled, and stranded there ever since. Oh, it seems quite plausible to me that a Martian might have got stuck in your Wood, like Br’er Rabbit, Miss Gardner!” He smiled now. “And as for the dioramas you saw, I fancy a Martian would have liked our Ice Age. Perhaps it dreams of the glaciers…

“It is the cold, after all, that drove the Martians to our Earth in the first place. Their world is doomed by the gradual cooling of the sun, just as much as ours. Lord Kelvin has proved it; our sun’s fuel is finite, and it will dim like an exhausted hearth – Flammarion says in only thirty million years. We are already in the autumn of the solar system. Now, the Martians have performed planet-scale miracles of hydrology, to bring water from the polar regions to the relative warmth of the lower latitudes – we can see their canals through the telescopes. But the secular cooling of our star has continued relentlessly, and the most ingenious of technological minds must, at last, admit defeat – on that world, at least. And, when they looked sunward, they saw our Earth, green and moist and vibrant…”

“But it’s too hot for them,” Zena hazarded. “Now that they are here.”

“Yes! Because they are habituated to the cold, you see. Just as to their world’s lower gravity.”

She seemed to be trying to imagine it. “So there you have this Martian, stranded, alone, uncomfortable, dreaming of cool Mars, of what he’s used to… But what has that to do with us, and Neanderthals?”

“Or rather visions of Neanderthals,” Walter said. “Miss Gardner, as I will describe in my forthcoming memoir, during the Martian War I observed the Martians in life as closely as anyone – yes, I still maintain it is so, despite certain critics. And I argue that the evidence I saw with my own eyes of their ability to carry through complex communal tasks, all without a word being spoken, is evidence of some kind of telepathy. A direct link, mind to mind. Why, isn’t it logical? The Martians have stripped away their bodies until they are nothing but mind. And as to how a Martian mind may contact, even influence others …

“Everybody knows that the Martians came to the Earth in cylinders, ten shots from the cannon on Mars. And the cylinders were cluttered with junk which they removed from the interiors after landing, to assemble into their various machines, and so forth. But, we have discovered since their demise, there are a few components that were not used for such a purpose – indeed, for which a purpose has yet to be identified.

“From the Wimbledon cylinder we retrieved a crystalline ovoid – it looks like an egg, like some eccentric antiquarian ornament – that was taken to the Royal College of Science for analysis. Crystalline and clear, and filled with elusive patterns of light, that you can see, just, if you turn it this way and that. Glimpses, of somewhere else… What’s it for? I’m better placed to guess than most.

“We know that the Martians use machines to replace many of the functions of their bodies: locomotion, manipulation, even feeding, it seems. Perhaps the Martians similarly have devices that can think for them – or at least that aid their own thinking, and its broadcast.

“Why not? If a Martian can speak to another Martian across a few feet, perhaps with some amplification it can reach to its fellow in a fighting-machine closing on London, or even shout back home to its companions on Mars! For the invaders must have had some way of reporting back what they found on the Earth, and we saw no sign of heliographs, or even of the remote-signalling electric devices of the kind Marconi has demonstrated. Why not mind to mind, with a little help, eh?”

Zena thought that over. “So you have a Martian alone in Holmburgh Wood –”

“Alone and desperately lonely,” Walter said. “For we have clear evidence that Martians are social beasts. I and many others saw the Martians come back for a fallen comrade, in the heat of battle. It is logical that it should be so. There can only be few of them, as individuals, and they must be loyal to each other – for they have no family. Freud, you know, speculates about the effect of their peculiar reproductive method on their psychology –”

“They bud, like polyps.”

“That’s it. No sex! No wonder old Sigmund is so intrigued.” He leaned forward. “Now, consider the picture. Of a Martian, isolated, perhaps consumed by a superhuman loneliness of an intensity we cannot imagine – and it is communicating those emotions, or trying to, by the power of the mind, with some technological enhancement. And a communication that perhaps can be picked up, if dimly, even by minds so coarse as ours. Think of it! It is as if it has built a signalling tower in that Wood of yours. Is it any wonder that humans, common beasts that we are, are dazzled by the light? Perhaps even a leakage of that intensity has blighted the feebler living things of the Earth around – the farmers’ wretched crops, their animals. And if you were wandering through a Martian’s dreams, perhaps it is no wonder you report distortions of space and time.”

She pondered this hypothesis. “And the Neanderthals and the unicorns, the Ice Age images?”

Walter shrugged. “It dreams of its own cold world. Perhaps that is stirring deep old memories of our own. Of the ice, of the lost beasts alongside which we ourselves evolved: these dreams are your brother’s, and yours, not the Martian’s. Or perhaps there are greater minds at play. Consider the Wood itself: the ancient trees never cut nor coppiced, their raddled trunks caked with moss and parasitic plants, and with that gnarling and twisting that comes only with great age. The whole somehow integrated, as if the trees were nerve cells in some hideous brain of wood and moss and vegetation. A mind, restless, oppressive, resentful! Or perhaps the truth is stranger still.

“Look – I believe that our analysis of the Martians is sometimes distracted by the obvious, by technology we can recognise if not resist. The Martians are not of this world, you know. They come from a place where things are not as they are here. And perhaps their consciousness, muddled with ours, is having effects that are stranger, and stronger, than we think.”

“Well, if it is so, what must we do?”

He smiled, a distorted expression on that heat-damaged face. “Good question, and to the point. There are times when life reduces to its essentials. I spent much of the Martian War trying to find my wife – or that’s what I thought I was doing. I got rather muddled on the way…”

Zena thought that over. “We must go back to the Wood and save my brother.”

“Exactly! I suggest we start first thing in the morning.”