The Massacre of Mankind: Authorised Sequel to The War of the Worlds

1 I RECEIVE A CALL IN PARIS

At the beginning of May, 1922 – with the Martian boot having been planted firmly on the neck of England for nearly two years, and with all of educated mankind, I suspect, looking fearfully at the skies, where Mars was swimming towards its next opposition in June – I was summoned to Berlin, to visit my estranged brother-in-law Walter Jenkins.

Summoned? Is that the correct word? Persuaded to go, perhaps, by Major Eric Eden. But it had begun with Walter himself, who had written to me from Berlin, asking for help in a scheme he had come up with to ‘deal with the Martian canker in England’. All Walter’s mail was routinely scrutinised by his doctors and the military people in Germany and England, and so this came to Eden’s attention. And he, perhaps surprisingly, saw some merit in the plan – whatever it was being kept a secret for me for now.

It was my duty to see Walter! So even Alice told me, she who had hardly been out of our apartment in Bagnolet since we had arrived in Paris.

If the reader has stuck with my account thus far, then you will know I am not one to take kindly to pressure from overbearing men, with which my world has always been overstocked. I took my time over whether to accept the commission – indeed I slept on it, through a still, unnaturally warm Parisian spring night. Yet I was still undecided when I woke to my morning view of the ruin of the Eiffel Tower, smashed by German shells eight years before.

In the end I went back to Walter’s letter, and I concentrated on his own words, directed to me personally. ‘Please come… Of all my extended “family” it is only you, Julie, whom I feel comfortable in contacting at this time. Of course my choice is somewhat limited since my brother, your former husband, is lost behind the Martian Cordon…’ Which put me in my place! Still, whatever his motives, whatever his state of mind after years of analysis by Freud and his colleagues, it had been me to whom he had turned in his need.

I had the resources to respond, and was without burdens. Even my sister-in-law, Alice, had slotted easily enough into the gloomy culture of a defeated Paris, and had even found worthwhile work aiding the poor of that occupied city; short of a cross-Channel invasion by the Martians she could last without me for a while. As for my own work, I was making a respectable if precarious living as a correspondent for the New York papers, with the help of much mediation from Harry Kane. I was no war reporter, but Harry said that my accounts of aspects of life in an occupied city, on everything from clumsy German policing to the Parisians’ desperate attempts at fashion and art, held a certain audience in Manhattan and Queens and New Jersey in grim fascination. But it was an eminently interruptible career, and, who knew? Perhaps I could get good material out of this fresh adventure.

You will have guessed, by the by, that I saw little chance of my actually being involved in any successful scheme to beat the beastly Martians.

I determined to respond to Walter’s request. Not long after breakfast I was packing my rucksack, and hunting for my Baedeker, and telephoning the railway companies for a ticket to Berlin. And I called a number Walter had given me, of an agent in Berlin who, I was assured, would arrange hotel accommodation for me. When my taxi-cab called Alice was barely awake, her hair tousled, her dressing gown tied tight. But we said our farewells cordially enough – she approved of my trip – before the cab drove smoothly away.

Of course if I had known then the truth of my mission – or rather the great Lie, as I came to think of it – I would probably have stayed in bed.

2 A MEETING IN BERLIN

The brand new German-built rail connection from Paris to Berlin, from the capital of a conquered nation to that of the conqueror, was direct but as yet was not terribly fast. So it was not until early the next morning that I completed my journey of six hundred miles or so, and debarked at the grand new Alfred von Schlieffen station in the west of Berlin, and named, provocatively, after the mastermind of the recent European war.

I took another taxi-cab to my hotel. The cab was as scrupulously clean as the roads we travelled. And whereas my driver in Paris had been a slovenly fellow in a soft hat and disreputable jacket, who had been rather too attentive as I had climbed in and out of his vehicle, my driver in Berlin was a woman, young, smart, with efficient hair under a peaked cap. Her conversation was a comment on the weather and a query as to whether this was my first visit to Berlin, all delivered in clipped, rather monotonic English. I half-expected her to swivel around and offer me a game of chess, like the mechanical Turk of legend.

At my hotel, another uniformed figure was eager to greet me as soon as I set foot on the pavement, and almost wrestled my rucksack out of my hands. I quickly learned that the British consul, who had arranged this domicile for me, had not spared the pennies; my hotel was the Adlon, which has the prestigious address of No. 1, Unter den Linden.

Restless after my travelling and having slept well enough on the train, I quickly took possession of my room, showered and changed, and went straight back out into the Berlin morning. I knew that Walter was waiting to see me, but I could not resist the briefest of tours.

So I marched along the Unter den Linden, joined the crowds in the Potsdamer Platz, walked up the Leipziger Strasse, and allowed myself the briefest of ventures into the Wertheim, a vast department store into which, it seemed to me, you could have crammed most of Oxford Street, if that broadway had been cut up and stacked on two or three levels. It was a week day but the crowds, affluent, noisy, and spending freely, swarmed with a kind of springtime gaiety, I thought. And there were uniforms to be seen everywhere, from the foremen and lift attendants in the Wertheim to the military costumes of many nations – including the sombre khaki tunic and flat cap of the modern British officer, a sensible ensemble and shade that stood out amid the more gaudy colours and spiked helmets of the continentals.

And among the soldier types, even here in the rich, modern, electrified heart of Berlin, I saw wounded, mostly men but not exclusively, in smart uniforms but with bandaged faces or arms, some in bath chairs – some with limbs plucked away. They made a brave sight, as such veterans always do. The war the Germans had started in 1914 continued still, despite the presence of Martians on the earth only a few hundred miles away, and had become a great grinding of flesh to the east, as the Germans pushed ever deeper into the tottering Russian empire. Or so it was said; little news was released to the public. The missing eyes and limbs of these Berlin veterans were, however, like mute reports from that remote battlefield .

It was not yet lunchtime when I dragged myself away from these spectacles and summoned another cab, which would take me to my meeting with Walter.

Driving east, we soon left behind the city’s historic core, or what passes in Berlin as such, and crossed into a more modern realm, of sprawling suburbs studded by immense factories. I glimpsed railways and rectilinear canals; it was almost Martian – no wonder Walter had been drawn here!

The address Walter had given me turned out not to be an apartment, as I had expected, but a street corner opposite a factory, a tremendous structure buttressed by brick pillars and fronted by glass, all under a curving roof; it dwarfed the handful of trees that adorned the pavement before it, and the people who came and went through its doors.

And its scale overwhelmed the man who sat on a bench on the far side of the road, wrapped in an over-large overcoat, sketching busily. This was Walter, of course. Having paid off the cabbie, I approached him tentatively. As I sat beside him he leaned towards me, but that was as much as I got in terms of signs of recognition or affection. He continued his busy sketching in bold black charcoal, but I could not make out the subject.

At length he closed the book and turned to me.

He was fifty-six years old now. In some ways he had not changed: still the unkempt mass of hair, once red from his Welsh ancestry, so his brother, my husband, had told me, but grey as steel since his experience of the First Martian War, and that peculiarly large skull, the broad brow from beneath which blue eyes peered. He wore white gloves to protect his scarred hands. His face, under a heavy layer of some medicinal cream, was immobile of expression. His eyes were odd as he looked at me, with a strange brightness, an alertness – the eyes of a hunted animal.

‘Julie. It was good of you to come all this way.’ His voice was gravelly, from the inhalation of smoke.

I cautiously touched his damaged hand. ‘I’m glad to see you too, Walter. But I don’t yet know—’

He said, bluntly, ‘I need you to go to England, you see. To fulfil my scheme. I mean, into the Cordon, the Martian zone.’

My breath caught in my throat. That was Walter for you, either a fog of prevarication or as direct as a knife in the gut.

‘They all know about it, of course. Eden. All the way up to Churchill, I’m told. Seem to think it a good idea, somewhat to my surprise.’ He studied me. ‘Does all this come as a shock?’

‘I – don’t know. Perhaps I anticipated this on some level: a warning from the subconscious, as your friend Freud would say. Given all the trouble they went to – the Ministry of War isn’t going to put me up on the Unter den Linden for nothing, is it?’

He laughed. ‘I don’t suppose so. But we do have some choice over our actions. Such as my choice to meet you here.’

‘In the open air, before a factory? Just as well it isn’t raining,’ I said tartly.

He looked at me. ‘I never thought of that. The Martians, you know, did not anticipate the rain, before they came in ’07, as they drew up their plans in their arid utopia in the sky. I sometimes think I am half-Martian myself.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said firmly. ‘You’ve been spending too much time alone. Or with the bump-feelers of Vienna, which is nearly as bad.’

He tried to smile. ‘As to the palace of industry over there – it is a turbine factory, belonging to Allgemeine ElektricitatsGesellschaft.’

‘AEG. I know of them; their shares are popular in New York, especially since the European war.’

‘A magnificent sight, though, isn’t it? This whole area, the north-east suburbs, the Fabrikstadt, the factory-city. And to me this is the jewel in the crown. Modernist, they call it. Whatever that might mean.’

I got up and walked back and forth to get a better view of the monstrosity. ‘It’s big enough to be a Zeppelin hangar. But modern? It reminds me of Rome. Some of the great secular buildings: the market-places, even the huge bath-houses.’

He nodded. ‘A shrewd comparison. Secular: not religious, not a cathedral as our forefathers built; this is the spirit of our age. Certainly it is new. As is all of Berlin. Only fifty years ago, a couple of generations, this was nothing but the capital of Prussia; now we are in the capital of Mitteleuropa. And speaking of capitals, how is Paris?’

I shrugged. ‘Unhappy. There is muttering of strikes, of a new generation of charismatic leaders to drive out the Germans and restore national pride – Communists, perhaps.’

Walter nodded. ‘I am sometimes surprised that the modern Germans who built that’ the AEG factory ‘—do not rise up and knock over the pompous princeling and his lascivious, sly son, who presume to govern them as if this were still medieval Prussia.

‘But do the Martians see any of us as civilised? Oh, they recognise our mechanical prowess, and its danger to them; even in the First War they hit powder stores and the like. But they may see our machines, our cities as the product of a kind of blind reflex; we might ourselves decide to stamp out an ant colony despite its apparent sophistication. They may not see this as a war at all. Why, they may not know the meaning of the word. You can see it.

‘From our new mountaintop eyries the astronomers have scrutinised the Martians as never before, even though the stargazers now work under global blankets of secrecy. We can see it for ourselves, a planet ordered on a global scale, its scarce resources managed by a unified civilisation – with the geometry of the canal system its finest single expression. Wallace points out that a water shortage need not be a drive for global unity so much as a source of division – he uses the British example in India, where the control of water led to the cementing of social inequality, with the water in the hands of an elite. Perhaps – but I would argue that any such conflict, any war, must lie in the deep past of Mars – the geological past!

‘You know that my idea is that the first wave, in ’07, were not soldiers at all. They were explorers – even farmers, perhaps. They came to deal with what they had seen as a wild world, a world of insensate animals – and they were armed with nothing more lethal than a farmer’s tools. Some have remarked that the Martians have not innovated since the ’07 War, as we have – with our aeroplanes, for instance. But of course the Martians would not advance their technology; their society is a million years old, and such devices as the Heat-Ray must have been perfected long ago. Adapt it for terrestrial uses, yes, as they have the flying-machine… But their strategy – surely we should have expected that to evolve. And so it has, all unforeseen by the strutting peacocks who rule us. All that nonsense of the nineteen hours!’ He glanced into the bright daylight sky. ‘And now the planets are swimming into alignment again. Another chance for them to cross that dark gulf.’

‘Umm. So what’s your big idea, Walter? What am I to do in England?’

‘Simple enough. Speak to the Martians.’

That startled me. ‘How? And why would they listen?’

‘How? With symbols, of course.’

And he hurried in before I could interrogate him over the significance of that blunt word!

‘As to why – well, there’s at least a chance they’ll be predisposed to listen. Why do you imagine this party of Martians are here in the first place? The damage they have caused to England, horrific though it may seem to us, is… incidental. It was intended only to secure their position. And after two years of occupation, they have learned of the ways of our earth – of us. Surely that is why they have come. Why, you only have to see their flying-machine pass by, a great eye over city and field—’

‘They are scouts,’ I said, seeing it.

‘That’s it. Gathering information to inform the greater invasions to come. So, you see, this lot at least, sent here to observe us, perhaps even trained to do so, may be predisposed to listen to our communications – or at least, to credit us with the capability of communicating.’

He opened his sketchbook now, and began to scribble once more as he spoke. It was a kind of reflex, I thought, as if he had forgotten I was still with him. I had imagined that he was sketching the AEG factory, but rather he was covering page after page with abstract symbols: circles, beautifully drawn, crowded in with wilder, spiral-like patterns.

I guessed, ‘So your idea is to parley? But what of the very first night they landed on Horsell Common back in ’07 – you were there, Walter – the Astronomer Royal with his white flag –’

‘Yes, with poor Ogilvy, and their reward was a dose of the Heat-Ray. But that’s not to say it’s not worth trying again. Oh, I admit it, to attempt interplanetary communication appeals to the utopian in me. I’ve been following this chap Wendigee who advocates sending wireless signals direct to Mars, to parley for peace direct. Churchill supports the scheme, you know, once he’d been given reports of my opened letters. But he sees wider possibilities. At the very least we can play for time, he thinks. Thus might a wily Inca have drawn the conquistadors into long negotiations, until the time came to slit a few throats, steal horses and guns and ships, and carry the war back to the monarchs of Spain.’

I rubbed my face. ‘Given the way it turned out for the Incas, it might have been worth a try. But why me, Walter? What have I got to do with it?’

‘There is a logic. Look – work backwards. We need to open some kind of a dialogue with the Martians; let’s take that as a given. Now – according to Eden and others – there’s only one man, one human being, deep inside the Cordon, who is at present coming into peaceful contact with the Martians – or at least non-lethal.’

I frowned. ‘I’m surprised there’s even one. Who?’

‘Cook. Albert Cook.’

‘Your artilleryman! Why, he’s a—’ I waved a hand ‘—a musichall turn.’

‘Never in his own head,’ Walter said solemnly. ‘And to be fair to him, according to the intelligence, he has been able to establish some kind of rapport with the Martian occupiers. Remarkable! As to how he maintains these contacts, and to what purpose, Eric Eden isn’t telling me, if he knows. Now, Cook won’t listen to the military, for they wouldn’t listen to him, so he believes, when after the war he expounded his theories on how we should prepare for a future rematch. No, it has to be another, a lone, self-motivated survivor as he was. You, you see, “Miss Elphinstone”, were one of the few characters I named in my account, the account that make Cook famous, or notorious.’

‘And that’s to be the reason he will speak to me? It sounds a little flimsy. And besides, why not you yourself, Walter?’

‘Well, he might be suspicious of me. He does feel I mocked him, traduced him and his theories. Never my intention. And besides—’ He raised a scarred hand; it shook.

‘Very well. And if, through Cook, I do get close to the Martians—’

He held up his scrawls. ‘Show them these.’

This seemed faintly insane, on first hearing. I essayed, cautiously, ‘I had thought you were sketching the turbine hall. These more abstract designs—’

‘Not abstract. You don’t recognise them? More images I find it hard to get out of my mind. Here, the circle – an eternal, perfect figure, and the one the Jovians use as their sigil, lifted in their mighty clouds, plastered over the faces of their moons. The Jovians! – of course they would use the circle, with its lucid perfection, its infinite number of axes of symmetry…’

I had little interest in the Jovians. I pointed to another sketch. ‘But this other,’ I said. ‘I remember now.’ It was like a spiral, spread across the page, drawn with the right hand with clockwise loops – like a clock spring pulled out of shape. ‘This is the sigil the Martians made, on the surface of their own world, and on Venus—’

‘Not on Venus,’ he said pedantically, ‘but in the clouds of Venus, somehow – for the cloud-tops of that young planet are all that we can see of it. But this is not the Venusian sigil; it is my attempt to capture the mark the Martians had begun to make in Surrey.’

‘What mark? In ’07, you mean? You spoke of this before, but I remember no such device.’

‘We weren’t looking at the time,’ he said with that twisted smile. ‘What with all the running and the screaming. The design became clearer after it was over, and the war could be more carefully mapped. I have a chart here…’

Tucked in the pages of his book, he had folded an ordnance survey map showing London, Surrey, Middlesex, Kent – the region across which the Martians had rampaged. ‘Can you see? With these orange flags I show where the Martians came down, starting with Horsell down in the south-west, and working up through what is now the Surrey Corridor past Kingston and Wimbledon, and across London to Primrose Hill, and then to Hounslow and Hampton Court and Merrow…’ He took his graphite and made a faint swirling line, an open spiral connecting these points. ‘Can you see it? We always marvelled at the closeness of the landing sites of the cylinders, after a journey of forty million miles. Now, I claim, the accuracy was rather better than that. The landing pits of the cylinders are the anchor points of—’

‘A sigil! Like the one on Venus.’

‘That’s it. I believe if they had had the time they would have finished the figure – how? With earthworks, or canals, or lanes of the red weed perhaps. And then, with the earth wholly conquered, they would have created an even greater form, sprawled across the Sahara perhaps, or the Antarctic ice. A symbol of their victory, visible across interplanetary space!’

I sat back. ‘Ah! And this is the “graphic geometry” of the war that you mentioned when you spoke to us in Ottershaw, is it not?’

‘Indeed. And when you think on it, that the one thing that unites us, ourselves and the Martians – perhaps the inhabitants of Venus – even the Jovians! Never forget the Jovians, Julie, never forget; before them we are like children squabbling at the feet of a fully armed soldier…’

But, my head full of the Martians, still I was not thinking about the Jovians just then. (I should have been! I should have been!) ‘What exactly am I to do, Walter?’

We turned to business. He had prepared a packet of drawings for me, he said – symbols, the interplanetary sigils and certain other geometric forms. He had even brought a light leather satchel for me to carry the drawings! All I had to do was to set these before the Martians, and… Well, it got a little vague after that.

It was hard to refuse him, so fragile was he. And besides, I rather grudgingly thought the plan was worth a shot. (I had yet, of course, to develop any suspicion about the true motives of Eden and those to whom he reported. That disillusionment came later.)

But the effort of discussing all this seemed to exhaust him.

‘I do miss it all, you know.’

The non-sequitur caught me off guard. ‘You miss what, Walter?’

‘My old life, before. Sometimes I look out my old work, you know. All foolish conjecturing, of course, but like the scent of a dead flower it brings back a mood, a time… My life then, the writers and thinkers with whom I corresponded and clubbed, the editors – the magazines! The Pall Mall Gazette, the National Observer, the Saturday Review. All gone now, and even the archives burned or flooded by the Martians, I imagine… I am not a strong man, I know. I remember, I remember – ah, Carolyne! Have you seen her? I do miss her…’

He went on in this manner for some time, in broken sentences, as if talking to himself, and forgetting I was there. He grasped his charcoal in one withered hand, and drew his sigils and circles over and over, striving for a perfection his damaged body could never deliver. I sat with him, but our conversation was effectively over.

3 A JOURNEY TO THE COAST

After my return to my hotel I telephoned Eric Eden – who, I had been informed, was in Paris, on some errand of his own. I told him I would undertake his commission. He had been waiting for my response. The arrangements began immediately.

As per Eden’s instructions – he was polite but specific and left me in no doubt that I must obey to the letter – I made my own way, the next day, from Berlin to Bremen. I stayed one night in a small hotel, a short walk from the rail station; there, another phone call informed me to be ready for an early start the following day, for the inception of Operation Get Julie Across the Channel.

Early indeed. I was woken before three in the morning by a smart rap on the door. A young officer in khaki and flat cap stood there smiling at me.

‘Miss Elphinstone?’

‘Guilty as charged.’

He told me I’d be given a lift aboard a long-planned naval convoy, weather conditions and whatnot being favourable – and it was time to go.

Despite the hour I was all but dressed, and seeing him stand there in his spruce, carefully ironed uniform, I was glad of it. ‘You’d better come in while I finish up.’ I collected my boots and overcoat, and the last few items to stuff into the rucksack. I checked one more time that the leather-bound packet of papers Walter had given me was safely tucked away; from now on until I encountered the Martians themselves this would never leave my person.

Waiting, the officer stood just inside the door, hands clasped before his belt-buckle, eyes averted from the particulars of a female’s hotel room. ‘My name’s Ben Gray, by the way – Second Lieutenant for my sins.’ Clipped Harrovian tones, not unlike Eden’s. Slim, dark, his well-groomed face blandly handsome behind a rather weedy moustache, he might have been twenty-five. ‘My regiment—’

‘Save the biography; it’s all the same to me, Lieutenant.’ But it seemed unfair to dislike him, like taking against a puppy.

I was done in a minute. I caught a glimpse of myself in the room’s long mirror. I kept my hair cut short, and it was serviceable after a finger-brush. With a last glance around, I led him out, closed the door and locked it behind me.

‘Leave the key in the lock,’ Gray said. ‘The manager will take care of that.’

‘And the bill –’

‘Paid for.’ He guided me towards the lift.

‘How efficient. Look, Lieutenant Gray, I’m quite capable of putting myself on a train. Indeed on a boat.’

He laughed. ‘Major Eden predicted you’d say that, almost to the letter, Miss Elphinstone. “Orders is orders” – that’s what he told me to reply.’

‘Know him well, do you?’

‘Tolerably, given he’s my senior officer, and a fair bit older. When I was stationed at Inkerman he gave us briefings on his experience in the First War. He’s a clubbable sort of chap when off duty – well, you know that, Miss.’

‘Old Harrovians together?’

He grinned, sheepish. ‘As you put it, Miss – guilty as charged.’

We reached ground level, crossed a deserted lobby, and went out into the crisp air of a morning already growing lighter, and turned for the rail station.

‘And as to why you’ve been assigned me as an escort for the day, Miss – Major Eden is crossing too, but from Brest – which is—’

‘The French military port, I know.’

‘A warship for him, a fishing tub for us. The fact is that crossing the Channel isn’t the pleasurable jaunt it might once have been, not with Martians on the prowl.’

Martians on the prowl? I was not privy to military intelligence, but I didn’t like the sound of that.

We came to Bremen’s main station, and I was surprised to see a crowd there, gathering in the subdued half-silence that seems appropriate in the small hours – and most of them, in this German station, evidently British or French. There was plenty of khaki, and the blue of Navy uniforms – mostly men, some women. But there women, children were civilians too, men out of uniform, looking sleepy-eyed and dismayed. My journalist’s eye caught details: a man hugging a little girl to his chest, both weeping; a girl of perhaps sixteen fixing a flower to the cap-badge of a sailor no older than she was; a boy of eleven or twelve standing to attention before a father who was evidently giving him orders of the ‘be a man for your mother’ sort. The predominant language seemed to be English, but there was plenty of German, even French spoken too, some attempted by tongues strong with the accents of the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne. The two years since the Martians landed had been plenty of time for fraternisation, it seemed.

It was not a large station and the crowd’s murmur, subdued as it was, seemed to fill up the space beneath the vaulting roof. ‘My sister and I have been rather tucked away in Paris. I had no idea so many troops were stationed here.’

Gray was glancing around, evidently looking for a muster point. ‘It’s more or less a continuous process, Miss. People and assets crossing back and forth. We have bases in northern Germany, and across the Low Countries and France the provinces facing the North Sea and the Channel – Southern England is a war zone after all, and our allies are generously allowing us sites for stores, training camps, hospitals, even weapons development. Anyhow I think I see our train.’ He dug papers out of his tunic pocket. ‘If you’ll follow me…’

So my journey resumed, with a short rail trip from Bremen to Germany’s North Sea shore – short, but scarcely pleasant, in a compartment so cramped it was standing room only, windows slammed shut to keep the engine smoke out, and before the sun was high it was a pit, the air stinking of sweat and thick with tobacco smoke. Well, if Second Lieutenant Ben Gray could withstand it, a man from a much gentler background than me, so could I, I told myself. After all, I had seen worse in the First War.

I did wonder how Eric Eden, a landlubber himself, was faring.

4 ABOARD THE INVINCIBLE

As it happens, as he would tell me with some relish later, Eric was having the time of his life, at that point in the morning anyhow.

Having completed a mission involving our ambiguous German allies – a mission of which I would learn later – he, along with a number of other senior Army officers, was hitching a ride aboard the HMS Invincible, which as Gray told me had sailed from Brest; in fact she had put to sea the day before. She and her sister ships would sail north through the Channel, there to join more capital ships coming down from Scapa Flow, to shield our convoy from Martian attention as we dashed across the North Sea from Germany to England.

Invincible was a battle cruiser, in the jargon. Such ships were heavily armed but bore lighter armour than the great dreadnoughts, the idea being to sacrifice resilience for mobility and speed. Indeed, at sixteen years old Invincible was the lead ship of her class, and probably the oldest and slowest of her kind – not a cheery prospect for Eden to reflect on.

But Eden, as was his wont, had not restricted himself to the officers’ cabins, as many of his peers would have. The night before sailing he had toured the mess halls giving the crew impromptu lectures on his brief but unforgettable encounter with the Martians on Horsell Common, of the kind he had given many times during his book tours, in his amusing, selfdeprecating style: how, while those around him had laid down their lives, he had been clumsy enough to have fallen ‘arse over tit’ into the great cylinder itself… English heroes don’t go in for bombast, which is where Bert Cook got it wrong, in my view. The novices aboard showed much interest in the Heat-Ray, its performances and characteristics, as well they might. The more experienced men told them grimly to wait and see.

The Invincible put to sea in the dark; Eric, sleeping soundly, missed the departure. He was roused in the small hours by bells ringing and a gruff cry: ‘All hands to breakfast!’

The evening before, Eden had been speaking to a group of stokers and other men of the engine room, and his imagination had been caught by the technicalities of their posts. Now he found himself breakfasting with them in the mess, squeezed onto benches by one of the great tables that had been set out. On such ships the various specialisms work, sleep and mess together in dedicated halls, and when the ship is underway a meal-time is a rush, an industrial process in itself, the feeding of hundreds of men of the thousand-strong crew . The meal, of bacon, scrambled eggs, toast, and potatoes boiled to mush, was surprisingly good. Eden had heard that men of the lower classes would sign up solely on account of the availability of decent food and board, and now he could believe it.

Eden’s friendly stokers had just come off a night shift. The Invincible was old enough that she still ran on coal, and the men, dressed in loose pants and vests, were sweating, black with soot and coal dust, and breathing hard. They drank sweet tea in soup bowls, great measures that they gulped down one after another.

When the meal was done, inspired by his companions, Eden cheerfully volunteered for a shift shovelling the coal. ‘I’m no expert but how hard can it be?’

The officer he spoke to was dubious, but evidently decided it would be good for morale to have a hero of the First Martian War mucking in with the rest, and he gave the nod. So, half an hour later, down in the bowels, Eric Eden found himself stripped to the waist, handed a shovel, and stationed at a sprawling hillside of black coal before the gaping man-high doors of a furnace.

He was welcomed with the usual inter-service banter: ‘Bit o’ hard work, for once, sir?’

‘We do work in the Army, you know. I’ll show you how to use a trenching tool some time…’

The labour of shifting a shovel-load of coal and chucking it through the big doors into the flames was heavy, but simple enough – if you only had to do it once. But Eden soon found himself tiring. And he quickly realised there was a rhythm to it, for the trick was not to release too much heat from the furnaces as they were fed. So it was a two-man job at each door; one would shovel and chuck with a rhythm, the other would open the door in time to catch the load, then shut it again to trap the heat. Expert crew could manage a shovel-full per second, if the two stokers worked together well.

As he worked Eden’s thoughts softened to fancy. He could feel the ship was underway, from the thrumming of the deck plates beneath his feet. He knew intellectually, of course, that it was the release of heat energy from the burning coal that powered the big Parsons steam turbines that drove the ship forward. But down in that pit it felt as if it was the labour of the stokers, toiling in synchronised rhythms like parts of the machinery themselves, that pushed that heavy boat through the waters of the Channel.

Stuck down there as he was, however, Eden saw or heard nothing of the wider picture as, in the gathering light of that morning, in a coordinated action across hundreds of miles and all along the coasts of Britain and Europe, the great ships of the Channel Fleet and the Grand Fleet put out from their bases at Brest and from Scapa Flow – the British base most out of reach of the Martians – and units of the German High Seas Fleet sailed too, in a grand coordinated operation. Safety in numbers: that was the idea behind the convoy, and the swarm of shipping I was to join was one of the largest yet to put to sea.

Not that any of this was to save us from the Martians.

5 AT THE GERMAN COAST

The Frisian coast of north Germany, between the Elbe estuary and the Dutch border, is hardly a coast at all. It is as if the land disintegrates into islands and sand bars and shallows, offering a dubious navigability that changes with the conditions of the tide and the weather. That Sunday morning, somewhere out on the ocean beyond, Eric Eden was already busily shovelling coal, and it was from this coast that I, with hundreds of troops and many other passengers, was to be taken across the North Sea.

We were transferred off the main rail line from Bremen to the line that runs along the coast, which was used to disperse us among the fishing villages and small harbours that line the coast. Travelling companions, briefly acquainted, said briefer goodbyes. Once I was off the train myself I breathed in air laden with salt and a reek of seaweed, but at least it was fresh after the train.

Then, somewhat bewildered, I was led with Gray and a dozen others to the groyne of a minuscule harbour, where the crew of a small fishing smack made ready to take us. The morning was already bright, the sky empty and clear, the sun lifting over the horizon. I looked up and down the coast; lights twinkled, not yet doused from the night. It was going to be a fine spring day once a thin mist burned off.

And out to sea, out beyond the sand bars that glistened like the backs of sleeping whales in the lapping water, I could see a veritable fleet of small craft. There were lighters, tugs, fishing smacks, steamers, and pleasure boats; and further out I could see larger vessels, like grey shapes in the light mist: colliers, freighters, ferries, tankers. Flags fluttered, no doubt celebrating many nations, but all too remote for me to make out.

At last our crew, who spoke only a rough, heavily accented German that I could not make out, gestured to us to come aboard the smack. Ben Gray tried to offer me a hand aboard; I disdained him, and in the end it was I who helped him. I was, however, the only woman aboard.

The smack stank of its regular cargo of fish even more than had the harbour. The crew wore sweaters, heavy leather coats, and shapeless hats; to a man they had thick beards. Clutching packs and bags and rolled-up blankets, with our overcoats and greatcoats tucked close around us, we passengers sat on equipment boxes, upturned baskets, even on the greasy, damp deck. We fitted in wherever we could; if we got in the way the snarls of the crew told us about it quick enough. One young private found himself sitting on a peculiar piece of wood, large, shaped, stained, and he made to throw it out of the boat. More snarls from the skipper put him right. There was a small cabin, fitted out with a couple of bunks and a tiny galley, I saw, and a couple of fellows crowded in there to leave room on the deck. I heard a crackle of static; the cabin was fitted with radio gear, of a robust military-looking type.

Once we were aboard, we cast off from the harbour and gingerly made our way out through the sand banks, propelled by oars and, after a time, with sail.

‘It’s going to be like navigating a maze,’ I said to Gray. ‘Indeed. And a maze whose plan can change with every shift of the tide, every storm. Takes an expert to know it, and not to ground the boat – at least, not to ground without meaning to… Don’t be offended by the Captain having a go at you about that bit of wood, Collins, by the way. That, you see, is a sort of detachable keel. The boat is all but flat-bottomed here as we slide over the sand banks; when we get out deeper we’ll fix the keel – how I don’t know, perhaps it’s driven through a slot in the floor – and then we’ll ride steady.’

‘Yes, sir. What was it he called me, sir?’

‘Best not to know, lad. Best not to know.’

Now I began to see more small boats like our own heading out to meet the impromptu fleet that waited to collect us, craft crowded with passengers squeezed in and silhouetted in the morning light, emerging all along the coast. ‘Reminds me of the First War,’ I murmured. ‘The evacuation from Essex.’

‘Yes, we’ve all been briefed on that,’ Gray said. ‘At least this is planned.’

‘How reassuring,’ I said. ‘And is there a reason why I’m in a small boat, instead of a berth on a passenger liner sailing out of Hamburg?’

He laughed. ‘There is a logic, actually. It’s a sort of extrapolation from what we’re learning in England. The Martians treat humans as a farmer might treat ants. When a nest gets big enough he’ll kick it, stamp it, flood it, poison it. But even so an individual ant, scuttling off, might get away with it. Do you see?’

I did and I remembered Walter’s similar parallels of humans with ants and their colonies.

‘Well, on land we’ve learned how to move about the country without alarming the Martians too much. They watch on a big scale, not the small.’

‘And so at sea as on land.’

‘That’s it. A thousand little fishing smacks might come and go without attracting the attention of the Martians, even if one of ’em had Churchill himself on board, whereas if the Lusitania sailed from Hamburg with just you on board, Collins—’

The private grinned. ‘With a few society beauties. Might be worth it, sir!’

An older man grunted. ‘Careful what you wish for, laddie. But speaking of being spotted by the Martians—’ He peered up into a morning sky of blue perfection. ‘I haven’t seen a flyingmachine yet. But you couldn’t give them a better day for spotting us if they sent one up. I mean, the North Sea’s not known for its glorious sunshine, is it, Lieutenant? Typical!’ His accent was northern, I thought, perhaps Liverpudlian. The man had stripes on his uniform arm, and a burn scar on his cheek, not unlike Walter’s injuries, though lesser. Now I considered him more closely I was unsure of his age – younger than at first glance, perhaps in his thirties.

Gray said, ‘I don’t know you, Sergeant.’

‘Lane, sir. RE.’

‘You’ve seen action but not agin the Martians, I’m guessing.’

‘Russian front, sir.’

I admit I stared at the man after that frank admission, and so did others in the fishing boat. This Sergeant Lane, the blunt scarred reality of him, was like a rumour congealed into fact. So British troops really were, even now, serving alongside the Germans in the depths of the Siberian war.

Lane said now, ‘Plenty of spotting out there, sir, by Zepps and planes, though the Russkies do their best to shoot ’em down. But a spotter on a Zepp can’t see through cloud and mist.’

‘But that’s where the Martians are different, Lane. They can see through cloud layers, through mist, even in the pitch dark. I say “see”; it might not be seeing as we know it with our baby blues. The boffins have no clear idea how this is done, but there are guesses. You shine in the dark, you know, Lane: the body heat you give off is a kind of radiation, like light, invisible to our eyes, but there to be measured. Perhaps the Martians can track that. And a Marconi wireless transmission will pass through mist as if it ain’t there. Anyhow, if we do move out in the mist or in the pitch black, we’re not discommoding the Martians at all – only ourselves. So we may as well move in bright summer daylight, like this, when – if they can see us – at least we can see them.’

Lane grunted. ‘Goes against human nature, sir.’

‘Yes, Sergeant, it does. But these Martian lads aren’t human, are they?’

We inched our way out through the sand banks, and then to open sea, where at last the crew were able to fit their removable keel. After that the bilge swam with water that leaked through the keel’s attaching seam, and the men complained of wet feet and backsides.

The shore receded behind us, flat and all but featureless, turning to a dark line on the horizon. I watched it go with some trepidation; Germany was a foreign land and could never be home, and nor indeed could France, but they were a much more secure resting place than where I was going now.

We were transferred to our larger transports without significant incident. Out in deep water, somewhat to my relief, the passengers from my vessel were taken on board a kind of small river cruiser. She was called the Lady Vain. She was expensive-looking, but her smooth white paintwork had been splashed over by Navy grey, and the polished planking of her decks was scarred by the soldiers’ boots and littered with their gear. I could have done far worse, given that the fleet included herring-boats and coal-carriers!

Gray and I were admitted to a forward lounge, under the small bridge, fitted with padded seats and benches, and lined with portholes out of which we would get a good panorama of the North Sea as we sailed steadily west. Even crowded with soldiers who sat or lay sleeping on every square inch of floor space, the lounge was relatively comfortable. There was even a steward, who, after we were all boarded, came around with trays of water and fruit juice. He greeted my companion: ‘Morning, Mr Gray.’

‘I’m afraid it’s Lieutenant pro tem, Perkins.’

When he’d moved on, I said, ‘So, Lieutenant pro tem. The steward knows you, does he?’

‘Through the chap who owns the boat – has one of those big riverside villas at Marlow, you know the sort, and he’s a friend of my father. Used to go up for Henley and to play tennis.’

‘I’m sure you did.’

He winked at me, and raised a glass of fruit punch (without alcohol). ‘We’ll see enough discomfort in England. I thought I’d pull one of the few strings within my reach to make our journey a little more pleasant.’

I touched his glass with mine. ‘Right now I’m glad you did – and will be more so in ten or twelve hours, I dare say.’

For that was how long our passage was predicted to take: across the North Sea from the east Frisians, passing not far south of Dogger Bank, until we reached the Wash, where we would be transferred to another flotilla of small boats for the final step to the shore. If all went well, I might be in England, without getting my feet wet, before sun down.

But it was about lunch time when we heard the rumours that Martians had been seen.

Soon after that a sound like thunder was heard. I recognised the consternation on the faces of Gray and others, and understood its cause. For we, part of a great convoy of ships, were still in the open sea, suspended between Germany and the British Isles. And the gunfire was coming not from the west – not from the English coast, where we might have expected to encounter Martians – it came from the north, the open ocean. It was disconcerting for me to discover that none of my companions, no matter how experienced and battle-hardened, had any idea what was happening.

6 THE BATTLE OF THE NORTH SEA

On the Invincible Major Eric Eden had been fast asleep. Showered, fed, dressed in a clean uniform, he napped on a heap of blankets on the carpeted floor of an officer’s cabin, which, he told me later, even in the middle of an interplanetary war, had leather armchairs and pictures of Nelson on the wall. It was about noon, but he was exhausted after a mere half shift of feeding the maw of the boilers below. He would tell me he had even slept through the bells that summoned the men to the chaplain’s services, for the day was a Sunday.

That was when action stations were sounded, with the tinny note of a bugle.

Eden woke immediately. He had never heard the call before, but understood its portent immediately – and would have moved even if the officers around him, Navy and Army alike, had not been even quicker. Eden had no specific station. He considered going down to the coal bunkers once more; perhaps he could lend a hand. But he could not resist trying to discover what was going on. So he pushed his way out to the open deck.

He got to the rail in time to see the White Ensign being hoisted overhead. All around him was apparent chaos as the crew ran to their positions, and the big guns swivelled on their mounts, and black smoke from the funnels streaked across the sky. He spared a thought for the men of the boiler crews, toiling down below as they never had before.

Looking out to sea he saw that the Invincible was one of a neat line of ships playing follow-my-leader bow to stern, the ensigns fluttering and the black coal-smoke pouring from their funnels. Some of them were dreadnoughts, their profiles shallow in the water, with the two huge chimney stacks and the four vast gun placements fore and aft. To Eden it was a tremendous sight, the scale surprising, inspiring.

And he perceived that this great rank of ships was turning, following a huge arc scrawled across the grey sea. The sun was high in a featureless blue sky. He was suddenly disoriented. The battle group was changing course, but which way? And, more to the point, why?

Then the guns started to bark, from the ships ahead of the Invincible. He thought he saw the streak of shells, but he saw as yet no target on the horizon.

‘This’ll be fun,’ said a man at the rail next to him. He was a Navy man, a rating, but not of this crew; his cap proclaimed him as a man of the Minotaur. His accent was northern, perhaps Northumbrian.

Eden, bewildered, asked, ‘What do you mean?’

The rating looked at him for the first time. ‘You’re the Martian chap. Heard you speak.’

‘The Martian chap.’ Eden laughed softly. ‘I suppose you could say that. But I’m as bewildered here as I was in that blessed cylinder.’ He glanced at the sun. ‘What time is it?’

‘Not long after midday.’

Eden tried to remember the schedule. ‘Then we’re stuck somewhere in the middle of the ocean. We’re not expecting to run into Martians until we hit the coast… Are we? And which way are we turning? The sun’s too high; I can’t even be sure which way’s south.’

The rating pointed to his right. ‘South’s that way, where we came from. We sailed out of Brest – you remember that much—’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘We made north through the Channel. We would have rendezvoused with units of the Grand Fleet, coming down from Scapa Flow, and then escorted the passenger fleet in to the English coast.’

‘But we’re nowhere near the coast. And we’re turning – what, east? Not west, towards England.’

‘Because the Martians are out there, sir. Out of our sight still – but they’re there, to the north. I can only tell you the scuttlebutt, mind. A Zepp spotted them, a cluster of fighting machines, out in the middle of the North Sea. Where they had no right to be. Zepp himself was unlucky to be there, he was on his way home after scouting the big Martian nest in England – or lucky for us he happened to spot them. Zepp managed to get off a message before he was shot down—’

‘By the Heat-Ray?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Martians can’t swim, damn it. It makes no sense. And they brought no ships. They can’t be out in the ocean.’

‘But even a man who can’t swim,’ the rating said calmly, ‘may stand in the shallows, and wield a sword.’

Then Eden saw it. ‘Dogger Bank. Of course.’

The rating nodded grimly. ‘Only a hundred feet or so deep at the shallowest, and many miles from land. Not a bad platform from which to fight, eh? If you’re in a fighting-machine a hundred feet tall, and we know they can extend those legs of theirs even higher than that…’

The two of them speculated for a while, about how the Martians could know of the existence of the Bank. It was a parallel of my own overheard conversation on the fishing boat. If the Martians could ‘see’ through mist and fog, and in the dead of night, why not ‘see’ through a hundred feet or so of water? Perhaps those flying-machines of theirs had mapped the sea beds as efficiently as they must map the dry land. And as to how the fighting-machines could have reached the Bank – ‘They have no boats,’ Eden mused. ‘But, as you say, they could simply walk there. Under the water. It must seem quite unnatural to creatures of a world of shallow seas…’

‘Makes sense for the Germans to give us a hand, anyhow. Even the Channel’s not so deep. If the Martians can just walk to Europe…’

‘But what of today? What are the tactics? What are we trying to do, do you think?’

The rating, clearly an intelligent man and experienced, if of low rank, seemed pleased to be lecturing an officer. ‘I’ll tell you what I would do, if Admiral Jellicoe asked.’ He used a forefinger to sketch an invisible map on the palm of his hand. ‘Here’s Dogger, and your Martians. Here’s the passenger fleet that’s going to pass within easy striking range of the Heat-Ray. Well, I’d put a call out to divert the convoy south – while we, instead of steaming north-west to England, are sweeping starboard like so, to head east.’

‘Ah. Passing between the Martians on the Bank and the passenger fleet.’

‘That’s it. Give those Martians something to think about. Meanwhile the Grand Fleet coming from the north will divert east also, passing to the north of the Bank.’

Eden frowned. ‘All in a line? Instead of steaming straight at the Martians?’

‘That’s the tactics. You keep your ships together in a group, so they protect each other, and you show your flank so you can bring your guns to bear. Now, we’ll have been firing our big guns as soon as the Martians were in range, even if they’re over the horizon and too far to spot, for it’s always worth the chance of a lucky strike. After all, we’ve got a longer reach than the Martians; that Heat-Ray of theirs is strictly line of sight, while we can lob a shell miles over the horizon.’

‘Hmm. But they have the ability to strike our shells out of the sky—’

‘That’s why you have to overwhelm them; you can’t shoot down every hailstone in a storm, can you?’

‘That you can’t.’

‘Anyhow, we have to try. Can’t have ’em blockading England.’

Eden could not argue with that sentiment.

Then the Invincible’s own guns opened up.

For Eden it was as if he had suddenly been dropped into a battle zone. The ship had four twelve-inch guns and sixteen four-inch; when they all started to blaze the ship shuddered, the noise was deafening, and the cordite added to the black coal smoke from the engine stacks to wreath the ship in a choking haze. Yet still Eden clung to his place at the rail, with the rating alongside him. And Eden could see the gunfire erupting from all the ships of the group, strung out in their line to west and east.

Now the rating stood on a rail and yelled, pointing. ‘There! I can see the shells come down! We must be close to the Bank!’

Eden, peering, saw plumes of water rising up, columns that he thought might be two hundred feet high or more, rising and feathering in the air.

But now, too, he saw explosions of a different kind in the water along the flanks of the ships in the line – detonations, spouts. Of course it was the Heat-Ray, all but invisible except where it struck. When it hit the ocean it caused the very water to flash to steam, explosively, in great volumes.

‘Closer than we thought,’ the rating muttered. ‘They can see us.’

And then the Martians, standing on Dogger Bank, found their range.

A beam hit a vessel only a couple ahead of the Invincible in the line, licking it almost lovingly. Everything the beam touched flashed to flame or melted or exploded – the ship’s hull, the superstructure. Soon the ship was wrapped in smoke and steam, its armoured hull plate cracked and crumpled, its funnels gashed and falling and spewing smoke and steam. As the ship began to list – less than a minute after the first strike – Eden saw men throwing themselves desperately into the water, some only to be boiled alive if they entered the cauldron stirred by the Heat-Ray. The deck of the next ship in the line already swarmed with men trying to reach those in the water with ropes and belts, even as the battle continued.

The doomed ship’s heavy armour had given it barely any protection. And the Invincible was a battle cruiser, Eden remembered, with thickness of armour deliberately sacrificed for speed and manoeuvrability. Before the Martians, the human vessels looked horribly primitive, slow and lumbering, the smoke billowing from their stacks a symbol of their wretched crudeness. Yet each of those wallowing tubs carried over a thousand crew. Eden felt naked and exposed.

But the battle, once joined, continued. Still the shells poured down onto the Martian position. The rating had hold of a pair of binoculars now, and claimed he could see the brazen cowls of the Martians – ‘A whole flock of ’em,’ he claimed. ‘And one down! And another!’

But even as the Martians defended themselves against the incoming hail of shells, those bronze cowls twisting this way and that, one ship after another in the line was maimed by the Heat-Ray. One ship simply disappeared in a huge detonation, out of which tremendous components came wheeling, cast by the residual spin of smashed turbines. There could be no survivors of such an end, Eden realised.

The rating said grimly, ‘That’s bad, if the Martians are working it out. Hit the magazine and a ship like this will go up like a Guy Fawkes firework…’

And the Heat-Ray touched the Invincible.

Looking down, Eden saw thick armour below his position crumpling like paper in an invisible fist – as if by magic, as if from no tangible cause – and fragments, white-hot, dripped into water that boiled. Eden heard screams now, and men tumbled like toys into the water. He braced for the detonation that would kill him – but the ship, shuddering, limped on.

The Minotaur rating slapped his shoulder. ‘You any kind of doctor, sir?’

‘A nurse, maybe.’

‘Come with me, then.’

Eden found himself hurrying down a gangway to an enclosed chamber that, he quickly learned, was used as a ‘distributing station’ during battle. Here the wounded were brought as fast as they could be gathered, sorted by a kind of rough triage, and then treated by medical officers in their white coats before being carted off to rest areas deeper in the ship.

Eden was needed here. He helped as best he could, lugging the wounded, carrying supplies, even wrapping bandages tight around a splinted broken arm. The flow of the injured was relentless, bewildering. He would tell me, much later, that the experience had taught him a greater respect for battlefield medics – for Frank, for instance. Even to continue to function in such conditions, to think – to make one life-or-death decision after another, over and over – seemed heroic to him.

But it was hellish not to be able to follow the battle. There were no portholes, no way to see what was going on, but Eden could hear the explosions all around, the guns still firing, a rougher roar that was the effect of the Heat-Ray hitting the water, and bangs and shudders all around the ship, which was starting to list, ominously.

Afterwards he would have found it hard to say how long he served in that station, racked throughout by a sense of imminent doom; it might only have been minutes, or perhaps half an hour. Compared to the muddy chaos of a land battle, he had always thought of naval warfare as a rather remote, abstract affair – not like this.

Then, though the noise of the battle did not cease, he heard cheering from above decks. Eden was between patients, and curiosity burned – more than curiosity, a desire to know if he was likely to live or die. With a stab of guilt he broke away, promising himself his absence would be brief, and scrambled up a gangway to the deck.

Up there, still the air was alive with the whistle of shells, and the sea churned with the wreckage of ships. He managed to find his Northumbrian rating. ‘There!’ The man pointed across a stretch of ocean where still the shells rained. ‘There!’ he cried, over the continuing roar of the Invincible’s own guns.

And Eden saw it, a line of low shadows on the northern horizon, grey in the mist, the smoke stacks high, the guns sparking. Fire, all along the horizon; it was an astonishing sight.

‘That’s the Grand Fleet out of Scapa! The dreadnoughts! Now those Martians will be sorry, you see!’

But then the Heat-Ray found another of the battle-cruisers of the Invincible’s line. There was a vast explosion, and the ship seemed to burst, and then implode, and she was gone.

From my yacht, we heard thunder in the north, and saw flashes – they must have been dying ships. But we saw no ships, or Martians.

I learned that some thirty per cent of our convoy’s Navy escort was lost in the action, but only five per cent of the passenger ships. The loss to the Martians was unknown. This kind of loss was typical. But still the passage of people and goods across the oceans continued. I myself sailed far south of the battle zone and towards England, without incident.

7 A LANDING AT THE WASH

Once safe from the perils of the high seas our convoy broke up, with the larger cargo vessels making for the great ports of the south and east coasts, while the military vessels made for their own home ports. As for my party, we came into the Wash at last, where, close to the shore, a fleet of fishing smacks and the like was waiting to greet us, a mirror of the arrangement at the Frisian coast. With Lieutenant Gray, Sergeant Lane and a small mob of other victims, I and my rucksack were loaded once more into the foul bilge of a fishing vessel, and we had to endure another tortuous journey through the shallow sandbanks that all but choke that tremendous bay. It was evening by now, and how our skipper – a crusty old salt with a beard like Martian snow – navigated us through it all to the lights of the shore I don’t know; we heard curses and the ringing of bells coming from the dark as others of our scattered fleet ran aground. But make it we did, and I was relieved to have my feet back on solid ground once more.

We were, I discovered, in the estuary of the Great Ouse and not far from King’s Lynn. Motor-cars painted a dull military green waited here, and Gray quickly went to commandeer one to transport me onwards. Sergeant Lane had his own unit to find, but he waited with me politely while Gray tried to sort things out.

The driver, however, insisted on checking over my own papers and identification. I quickly discovered that a passport was no longer sufficient documentation to allow a subject of His Majesty to set foot on English soil, and there was something of a stand-off as Gray debated with the driver. ‘Damn it!’ he said. ‘I never thought of that.’

The driver was a woman, perhaps forty, smartly uniformed, competent, apologetic. She looked me over and grinned. ‘Well, you don’t look terribly dangerous, ma’am. I’m allowed to transport one prisoner under guard. I’ll have to check that rucksack, though. And I’ll need another warm body in the back with her – in addition to yourself, Lieutenant.’

Gray sighed. ‘Very well. Sergeant Lane?’

‘Sir?’

‘You’re volunteered. Now let’s get aboard this jalopy and make for the bright lights of King’s Lynn…’

Lane complied with a grin. ‘Better than the barracks. First round’s on me, Miss,’ he muttered to me as he clambered into the car.

We spent a night in the town, of which I saw very little.

Gray and Lane, I learned, spent some of the evening at the cinema, where they saw The Kaiser’s Lover, a Hollywood drama of the early days of the Schlieffen War, with screen stars mugging between footage of the actual events. And from the look of my companions the next morning, they appeared to have stayed up long after the show was over. As we boarded the train I teased them. ‘Gave the film a thorough critique, did we, gentlemen?’

Gray grunted. ‘Film – balderdash – I don’t remember any bally Americans saving Paris single-handed.’ The train lurched into motion and he blanched.

Lane laughed. ‘Looks like it’s not just wartime memories coming back to you, sir.’

‘Oh, hold your peace, man, and enjoy your day off.’

‘Right you are, sir.’

We headed south-west through Peterborough and Northampton towards Oxford, where we would change. Our route passed well to the north and west of the Martians’ Cordon. Though Martian forays outside the Cordon were rare, they did occur, and no part of mainland Britain was entirely immune from attack. You could see the response, the camouflage colours roughly splashed over buildings, rail tracks, even telephone lines clumsily concealed – and few vehicles moving anywhere, for the Martians targeted mechanical transport. Of course a skimpy layer of camouflage would not deter a determined Martian – they could detect the heat of a concealed engine, for instance – but their machines were few, Britain a comparatively large island, and they did not check everything, and such precautions were worthwhile.

There were stops too at places I did not recognise. One striking location was a sprawl of what appeared to be hastily thrown-up barrack blocks, hutments of wood or concrete panels or even corrugated iron, which must have been hideously uncomfortable in the summer. These blocks were set out in grid systems. The Union Jacks flying everywhere, and a perimeter of dug-in artillery pieces, made me think of a military camp; on the other hand a handful of children playing in a desultory way in a meadow close to the small rail station reminded me of a holiday village – like Caister Camp in Norfolk, where George, Alice and I had spent a brief holiday in the year before the First War.

The rail stop had no name.

‘What is this place?’

Gray was half-dozing. ‘Umm? What time is it?’ He glanced at a pocket timetable. ‘Camp A-One-43, I should think, if we’re on schedule.’

‘Camp? I see children playing.’

Lane said, ‘You have been away a while, haven’t you, Miss? This is a Winstonville – that’s what the Cockneys call ’em.’

‘Oh. A refugee camp.’

‘Rather more than that,’ Gray said. ‘It’s a functioning township, with shops and doctors’ surgeries and schools and chapels, all thrown up in the blink of an eye. One of dozens, if not more – they label them by the road-numbering system, you see…’

I was familiar with the general idea. All of this was a consequence of the unending Martian threat to London. There were still millions trapped in the capital, and a significant percentage of our national resource was spent on provisioning the Londoners, trying to enable their escape, and catering for refugees.

London had always been more than a sink of people, however. It had been at the centre of Britain’s economic activity, as a financial centre, a port, even as a manufacturing centre – the Woolwich Arsenal alone, now smashed and burned out, had been our most significant munitions factory. After the Martians struck we needed a national reorganisation, and for better or worse that was what we got. So the other ports of Britain, from Hull to Harwich, Southampton to Liverpool, were now taking cargo that had once unloaded in London, and vast new transport networks, camouflaged against Martian attack, were being thrown down. And new manufactories of all kinds were being set up across the country, with the aid of loans from the Germans and Americans and others. Huge areas of the north of England had been torn up and transformed into giant open-cast mines for the ores, readily available, that now yielded aluminium with the Martian process. But there were the usual mutterings of profiteering; even with the Martians for company, the rich got richer and the poor poorer.

The government system had been shaken up too. Much power had been devolved to regional governors under Lloyd George, now the Prime Minister. (Marvin was long gone, dead at the hands of the Martians, after a foolish advance that he, shamed by Churchill’s example, had insisted on leading in person against a Martian foray in 1921.) The royal family was still ensconced in Delhi, and from the beginning I had heard nothing but pleasure from the people that the King, at least, was safe.

‘Winstonvilles, though?’

Gray eyed me. ‘I take it you know that Churchill is Governor of London – of that region of the country, as it’s been carved up by the government in exile in Bamburgh. Not that those field guns would be much protection if a Martian were to take a dislike to one of them. He thinks in big, bold strokes, and these refugee communities are one of his ideas.’

‘A bit of a lad,’ Lane said, grinning. ‘Good old Winston.’

At Oxford we changed trains at a brand new station, in an industrial belt that now appeared to encircle the historic core of that university city. It was early afternoon, but I thought the air was odd, with a kind of electrical tang to it – like sniffing ozone at the sea side – and a peculiarly greenish tint to the air brought back unwelcome memories. I wondered what was being manufactured in these great new factories, with their Marstainted technologies.

I was relieved to board the connecting train, which would take us directly south through Southampton to Portsmouth. When we passed through Abingdon, Gray said we were about as close to the Chilterns, and the Martian Cordon, as we would get. All along the train, I saw as it followed a wide bend in the track, faces were pressed to the glass, staring out to the east in awe and trepidation. But of the Martians I saw nothing – not that day.

8 IN PORTSMOUTH

In Portsmouth at last, we were met off the train by a despatch rider with revised orders. I was to first report, not to HMNB Portsmouth, the Navy base, as I had expected, but to a military hospital outside the city. Gray accepted this change of circumstance with a kind of cheerful resignation; indeed he seemed pleased to have a grain of fresh evidence of the caprice of command.

As a car was found for me, I made my clumsy goodbyes to Sergeant Lane – his given name was Ted, he vouchsafed to me now.

‘It’s been a pleasure, Miss. But I’ll have to call my unit and find out if I’m still to make my way to Harwich. Probably another train ride, and paid for out of my own pocket. And me a veteran of the eastern front.’

‘Criminal,’ I said.

‘Ain’t it, though?’

Gray was eyeing him speculatively. ‘Well now, look, Sergeant. You know that my mission is to escort Miss Elphinstone here across London and all the way into the Martian Cordon. And you know about as much about that as I do. Why don’t you hang around for the evening? I could make a couple of phone calls, get you transferred pro tem. Unless there are duties for which you are absolutely essential elsewhere.’

Lane rubbed his chin and glanced north, the direction the Martians lay. ‘Hmm. A veteran of the eastern front, and now into the Martian pit. Not many men can say that, can they, sir?’

‘I wouldn’t imagine so.’

‘And it is your round.’

‘Let’s get Miss Elphinstone settled first…’

The Queen Alexandra hospital, a sprawl of red-brick buildings that dated to before the First Martian War, was outside the city, a short tram-ride if you hadn’t got a military chauffeur as I had. They were expecting me at reception – and I was surprised to be met there by Marina Ogilvy, wife of the astronomer at Ottershaw. It was an awkward encounter; in my surprise I struggled for a moment to recognise her.

A brisk matron took charge, and led me to a private room. Marina came with me. En route I got a glance into a ward; I saw men evidently badly burned, cocooned in bandages, or with obvious respiratory problems. This was the kind of injury you came to expect from contact with the Martians, if you survived at all. We were a long way from the front line of the Second Martian War here; this was the first set of casualties I had seen since leaving England two years before, but it would not be the last.

At my room the matron told me I faced a series of injections – ‘Your friend can stay with you.’ The area within the Martian Cordon was quarantined, I was told. Though attempts were made to maintain supplies and otherwise support those trapped, there had been reports of such war-zone horrors as cholera and the typhoid, and I was to be inoculated as best as possible. ‘And you will be given other vaccines of a more experimental nature,’ the nurse told me vaguely. ‘It’s all quite routine.’

That last was, as it turned out, my first encounter with the Lie. But I felt no alarm at the time. One trusts nurses!

After the injections were done I lay on a bed, sleeves rolled up, and while we were alone briefly, I spoke with Marina. ‘I do apologise for not recognising you back there.’

She smiled tiredly; she was a woman who had always seemed tired, in my recollection of her. ‘Oh, don’t be. It was my husband who had the famous face after all.’

‘I suppose I understand why they called on you. In the First War your husband was among the first to try to communicate peacefully with the Martians—’

‘The first in the war to lose his life, along with Professor Stent and the rest, silly fools all.’

‘Perhaps. But their motive was a good one, wasn’t it? And now here we are attempting contact again.’

‘You’re right, of course. I think I’m here to attach a kind of legitimacy to the enterprise. I’m a symbol of my husband. Silly fool,’ she said again, savagely. ‘I heard that Lady Stent, the Astronomer Royal’s widow, refused to have anything to do with it. But that may be just rumour. Few people refuse their duty these days.’

The matron returned and briskly told me I was free to go, though I might experience symptoms such as mild nausea for a while and I should ‘go easy’. There would be no more long distance travel that day.

Otherwise I was free to wander. After so many days in company that was mostly male and exclusively military, I could think of nothing better than to escape. It was a pleasant May evening, even if it was a Monday, and I itched to walk. Marina agreed to accompany me. But my night off took some negotiating by telephone with Lieutenant Gray – I still did not have the right papers. We worked out a kind of deal. Shortly afterwards a taxi-cab pulled up outside the hospital, with a single passenger: Ted Lane. The sergeant’s brief, from Gray, was to keep a discreet watch on us for the evening: ‘That man will do anything to get out of buying a round,’ Lane grumbled. But he was cheerful enough, and I trusted his competence as much as Gray evidently did.

Since the cab was paid for, we used it to take a tour of the city, seeing the dockyard and the harbour, which, as when I had seen it before with Philip Parris, bristled with fighting ships. Then we were dropped in the Commercial Road, and took a stroll, with Gray tailing us at a discreet distance. At that it was easy to lose him in the crowd, for there was plenty of khaki about, as well as Navy blue. The other predominant colour seemed to be black. Marina told me that black was something of a fashion now. ‘As if we’re all back in Victoria’s day,’ she said gloomily.

Another striking difference from Paris or Berlin was the lack of motor traffic on the streets: a few omnibuses and ambulances, police cars and military vehicles, only a handful of taxi-cabs and private motor-cars. On the other hand there was a flood of horse-drawn traffic, which brought with it the straw and manure and an earthy reek that had been lost from the streets of Britain since before the First Martian War. It was all down to a shortage of petrol, Marina said – that and a general discouragement to use motorised vehicles, which attracted Martians.

In the city itself we saw little of the defences of Portsmouth.

I did spot searchlights and gun emplacements; I learned that there were rings of guns five and ten miles from the city centre, and others placed around the docks area, with anti-aircraft installations and lamps. And I saw the mark of Martian activities past: the careless splash of brick and concrete and glass, the brush of the Heat-Ray.

Portsmouth’s busiest shopping street looked barren compared to Berlin’s meanest, I thought. Every food store had a queue outside it, a line of patient men and women and a few children, their clothes drab and well-worn, all clutching empty baskets and pink scraps of card that proved to be ration papers.

You would see servicemen in the lines– you could tell by the shabby greatcoats they wore or by their battered military caps.

Some were evidently wounded internally rather than externally, like poor Walter. You came to recognise a kind of nervousness, a shaking, a turning away of the head.

In search of happier sights I looked for bookshops, but there was a shortage of paper, among other essentials, and I found only second-hand stores, or rows of trashy American thrillers.

Burroughs’s sagas of human heroes biffing the Martians on their home soil seemed to be selling well – alongside, ironically, a new, cheap edition of Walter’s Narrative. The only newspaper widely available was the National Bulletin, a worthless government rag started in Marvin’s final days. We stopped at a small restaurant where I ordered an omelette with mushrooms and fresh-baked bread, accompanied by sweet tea. It was plain but nourishing food. Even so the prices were exorbitantly high, I thought. Then we went in search of entertainment: not easy to find.

Most posters you saw, rather than advertising the films or the shows, were of the uplifting, instructional or hectoring kind:

or

or

This last below a stern portrait of Churchill.

The theatres were running sentimental shows such as revivals of ‘Tommy Atkins’ and ‘In Time of War’. The audiences thronging outside the theatre doors seemed keen enough, but it all seemed a little desperate to us, and we wandered on, arm in arm. At about nine o’clock there was a new rush of people, and I gathered that a work shift had ended. Among them were munitions workers from the new factories, all women, their hair and skin discoloured orange and yellow from the toxic materials they habitually handled. These ‘canaries’ seemed intent on drinking as much as possible as rapidly as possible, and for all the moral strictures of our new England there seemed no shortage of cheap alcohol in the city that night.

Marina was amused to see them. ‘Funny how old Marvin always railed against the suffragettes. Now his successors need women to fight their war. Still haven’t given us the vote, however. Not that that means much nowadays – no elections since 1911—’

‘What about people’s rights?’

‘Responsibilities trump rights, for the time being. That’s the argument.’ She shrugged. ‘Who am I to argue? The Martians are here.’

The canaries deserved their entertainment, but we had had enough. We summoned Lane, our patient shadow, and the three of us took a horse-drawn chaise to our hotel.

Oddly enough I felt satisfied to be back in England, grim and war-obsessed as it was. Berlin, immersed in its eternal politicking and war-making as if the Martians had never come, and Paris, obsessing over its own humiliations, seemed irrelevant now, a distraction. As Marina had said, the Martians were here, in England; here was reality, here was where the history of all mankind pivoted. And here was I, engaged. A rare burst of idealism for me, you might think! And it was not to be rewarded.

I did not sleep well. I felt somewhat nauseous, and the sites of the various injections I had itched or ached. The vagueness of my mission concerned me, and occupied my waking thoughts.

I need not have wasted the brain power. For when the military car came in the morning to bring me, Marina Ogilvy, Ben Gray and Ted Lane to a poky office in HMNB Portsmouth, Eric Eden quickly disabused me of the notion that my mission had anything to do with communication at all.

9 A SECRET ASSIGNMENT

‘After all,’ Eric Eden said cheerfully as he poured us all some rather terrible coffee, ‘what would be the point, if you think about it? Would we have paused if the Tasmanians had insisted on telling us their theories of the universe as we worked them to extinction?’

Gray, Lane, Marina and I sat on uncomfortable upright chairs before a desk, behind which Eden sat at ease. This was a Royal Navy briefing room, if a small one; there were maps of seas and oceans on the walls, as well as the customary portrait of Lord Nelson – and, almost as an afterthought, a map of southern England with the Martian position overlaid in glaring red ink. The desk top was empty save for a clutter of stationery, and my own leather satchel.

Eden’s face bore scars. This was a relic of his heroism of Wormwood Scrubs, I would learn much later.

‘We used to debate all this at school,’ Gray said now. ‘The morality of empire.’

Ted Lane pulled a face . ‘Of course you did.’

Ben Gray was of that blessedly privileged class not even to know when he was being ragged.

‘To get back to the point,’ I said somewhat testily, ‘if this isn’t about communication – what, then?’ I tapped the leather satchel I had placed on the table, the packet of Walter’s sigils. ‘I’ve come a long way with this, Eric.’

He steepled his fingers. ‘Walter did believe everything he told you. And it really was his idea in the first place, the whole communications angle. We just – embellished it.’ Eden actually laughed.

I was growing angry. ‘What, then, is the truth?’

‘We haven’t been idle since 1907, you know. We being military intelligence, to which I have become at least partially attached, given the uniqueness of my experience. From the Martians’ point of view, it has always seemed to me a strategic error for them to have come, and failed. The first shot always had the best chance of success. Now we’ve had a chance to study them. Everybody knows how we’ve been able to make industrial use of some of their inventions – the aluminium smelter, for instance. But we’ve been looking into other aspects.’

My arms prickling from the injections, I was starting to intuit the truth – or rather, the Lie. ‘Other aspects like their biology?’ I prompted.

He eyed me. ‘Quite so. Everybody knows it was the germs that killed the Martians. I remember the lovely lines in Jenkins’ tome very well: “The Martians – dead! – slain… by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” But precisely which of those humblest things? For Jenkins’s words about “putrefactive” and “disease” are the purest speculation, you know.’

‘Ah,’ Lane said with a soldier’s crafty smile. ‘And you clever beggars have been finding out which bacteria, have you? With all respect, sir.’

Eden nodded. ‘Not me in person, of course… Have you heard of a place called Porton Down, Miss Elphinstone? Hushhush Army laboratory, out in Wiltshire.’

‘I know it,’ said Ted Lane. ‘Or of it. Belonged to my lot, didn’t it? The Royal Engineers.’

‘That’s it. Set up during the Schlieffen War to look at the possibilities of chemical warfare – gassing, you know.’

Lane grunted. ‘Stinks shells. Worked in Russia.’

Gray eyed him curiously.

Eden went on, ‘When the Martians returned we set Porton on the germs, with a crash programme to determine which precisely was the pathogen that killed the Martians. The whole thing was another bright idea of Churchill’s, actually, if arrived at belatedly; the man does have a certain ruthless genius.’

Lane leaned forward. ‘How could you test it, though? All them Martians from ’07 were dead.’

‘Ah, but they left their corpses behind – plenty of tissue to experiment with. Did you know that one Martian was born during the ’07 invasion? Found partly budded off its parent – dead as the rest, of course. That provided particularly sweet materials for the sample labs, I’m told. And you needn’t look at me that way, Miss Elphinstone; I doubt that the Martians are showing much pity for human infants within the Cordon right now.’

As he spoke, I could feel my injection sites itch and crawl, and I realised what had been done to me. ‘They found it, didn’t they? The boffins at Porton Down – they found the pathogen that killed the Martians.’

‘Indeed they did – with a little help from equally advanced laboratories in Germany, which, if you want to know, was the true purpose of my own recent jaunt to the continent. Don’t ask me for the Latin names, that was never my bag. But it’s a very old bug, and it’s been with us a long time – you find it in every population – must have come with us out of Africa, you see, that’s if Darwin and the rest are right about our origin there, having no doubt scythed down our man-ape ancestors before they developed immunity. Well, we can be sure that by now the Martians have fixed themselves to resist that one. So we found another. An even nastier cousin, to which the Martians had no exposure last time, but distant enough related that any protection they cooked up after the last lot will do them no good. And it works; we have enough samples of fresh Martian tissue to have proved that.’

‘And those “tests” I went through last night—’

‘It happily reproduces in the human bloodstream, but does no harm to the carrier.’

‘It’s in me. This archaic killer. You put it in me. And you want me to carry it to the Martians, under this pretence of communication.’ There was the Lie, revealed and spoken aloud. I immediately felt foolish not to have suspected it before.

And I saw that my companions, Ted Lane, Lieutenant Gray, even the down-to-earth Marina Ogilvy, shrank away from me.

My mission, in the end, was simple. I was to enter the Cordon, and get as close to the Martians as I could – with or without Cook’s help, though the artilleryman seemed the best chance.

‘We’ll only get one shot,’ Eden said. ‘And so we’ve got to target it – to make it count. Bring them all down at once. Remember, another opposition is approaching. If more cylinders are meant to come our way, we believe our chances agin them will be that much greater if the Martians in England, spotters for the fleet, are knocked out before the reinforcements – or perhaps the main forces – even get here.

‘Now, one benefit we’ve extracted from Martian technology is a blood storage system – for much of the supply on which they subsisted in their interplanetary flights in the cylinders was externally stored, you know. We use the technology ourselves, on the battlefield. We’ve every reason to believe that they’re using a similar system in their big central pit at Amersham. And that’s what you’ve got to spoil, Julie. Should take most of them down in one fell swoop, and the open sores the infection creates ought to pass it on to the rest. So you see, you need the Martians to trust you, to get all the way in to the heart of the nest. Which is where Cook is going to provide vital cover.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me all this? I mean, before squirting your venom into my veins.’

‘Because, frankly, it was judged there’d have been a high chance of you turning down the job.’

‘Am I to commit mass murder, Major Eden?’

‘Are you to save the nation, Miss Elphinstone?’

And it was as if I saw my own epitaph.

10 A NIGHT IN HAMPSHIRE

As the next stage of my journey to the Cordon in Buckinghamshire, I learned, I was to be taken through London. Though millions remained trapped there, the capital was a great hive which the military infiltrated with relative ease, beneath the attention of the Martians – mostly. And I was to join a regular expedition.

That night I was escorted out of Portsmouth, by Ben Gray and Ted Lane, to stay in a rather fine house in the country – I never learned its name, and did not ask – out in the meadows beyond Eastleigh.

The owners had either abandoned the place when the Martians returned to England, or had had their property requisitioned, and now it was used to house officers, while the grounds had been given over to respite accommodation for active troops on leave. In the years since the owners had left the property had lost a lot of its glamour, as evidenced by the muddy boot prints in the hallways, the khaki greatcoats hanging in the cloakroom, and the lack of staff save for a few injured troops, evidently given light behind-the-line duties. One poor chap who served us dinner had half his face a mask of scars.

For, yes, despite the fall from grace, we went down to dinner, of soup and rather stringy beef, served in the oldfashioned formal way, in a dining room lined with paintings of weak-chinned generations of owners. And there was wine from the cellar and port served in fine glasses, and at the end the cigars came out, a very expensive treat shipped from Cuba. Much of the conversation was light, touching on the scandalous behaviour of various film stars, perhaps for my benefit as the only civilian present and one of only three women. Gray put in anecdotes about the eccentric behaviour of Churchill in his bunker at Dollis Hill, where – so it was said – the Governor of London would host meetings of his inner cabinet in his pyjamas and dressing gown, with a goblet of brandy at his side and a budgerigar perched on top of his balding head.

Most Army officers were, after all, drawn from the privileged classes, and all this seemed normal to them. To me it was a strange evening, a poignant reminder of an England that was all but lost. And an England, I thought as I watched poor Ted Lane try to decide which bit of cutlery he was supposed to use next, from which most of the English had always been excluded.

I slept restlessly that night in a room that felt stuffy, on a mattress that felt too deep, a bed piled too high with blankets. Perhaps I was simply disturbed, as I had been since my injections in Portsmouth, by the thought of the lethal pathogens I carried in my body – as if my body itself had become a battleground. Or perhaps I had simply become too used to my relatively austere but comfortable life in Paris.

I was woken very early by sounds outside: voices barking commands or raised in laughter, a hiss of water, even a smell of what might have been cooking bacon. I pulled on a dressing gown and went to my open window.

As I have said, the grounds of the house had been given over as a rest and recuperation area for men brought back from the front. I saw them now, queuing in the low sunlight of an early May morning, at tables for an open-air breakfast of sardine and potatoes and bread and a mug of tea; they were fed from a ‘company cooker’, as they called it, like a big kitchen range on wheels. Or they gathered around communal shower centres to wash – I caught cheeky glimpses of pale flesh – and there were wagons laden with disinfectant and delousing powder through which those just back from the front had to be processed.

Some, that morning, had already been called to training. I saw one group busily burrowing into what had once been a croquet lawn, I think, disappearing into a tunnel like human moles. Others, in full kit, faced a row of targets dangling from a line, like big leathery sacks. At a snapped command from the NCO they charged en masse at the targets, yelling; they did not fire their rifles but stabbed at the sacks with their bayonets, like men taking on bears. With their big eyes and beak-like mouths and dangling tentacles, the sacks were scarecrow Martians. I learned later that, although it seemed unlikely any soldier would get to face a Martian outside its protective machines, the very physicality of bayonetting was thought to be good for a soldier’s morale. Do it often enough, make yourself muscle-weary with it, and you grow into a kind of blood lust, an unhesitating willingness to kill – and that was a good mental state for a fighting man to reach for.

As I watched there was a sudden clatter of rattles, a cry of ‘Smoke, Black Smoke!’ Everyone in hearing range dropped their gear, and fixed hooded masks over their heads, and pulled down sleeves and trouser cuffs to leave no flesh exposed. But it was only a drill.

Before the day was much older we were driven from the house and back into town to the rail station, and loaded up on a train filled with anxious troopers, novices and veterans alike, returning to their duties. We three, Lane, Gray and I, shared a compartment with a dozen of them, who crowded the seats and sat on the floor – one fellow even stretched out on the flimsylooking luggage rack overhead – and they filled the little cabin with their cigarette smoke.

We slowed as we passed another train, coming down from London, and I peered curiously. The train was splashed with paint, black and brown and green – camouflage colours. I saw troops in there, grimy and exhausted, many sleeping. Cars marked with red crosses were like mobile hospitals, and there were cars crammed with civilians too, men, women, and children, many of them as grimy as the troops, blinking in the light – and in the case of the children, staring in wonder at the green countryside, which perhaps they had never seen before.

Ted Lane, by the window, amused himself by pulling faces at the little Londoners and trying to make them smile.

I touched his arm. ‘Is it always like this?’

‘Oh, yes, Miss,’ he murmured. ‘Seven million or so trapped on the day the Martians came, I believe, and you don’t shift them in a hurry.’

Gray said, on my other side, ‘The Londoners do what they can for themselves – backyard allotments and the like. But there are whole populations left behind, some in hiding in tube tunnels and the like – and every so often they have to be shifted as the flood waters rise.’

At that time I knew nothing of London’s floods – I would see enough later.

Ted Lane was still pulling faces and waving. ‘Seven million,’ he muttered. ‘And every one of them a life to be saved.’

I felt obscurely proud of him.

Later we had a pause in our journey. The train simply stopped in open country, somewhere near Alton I think. The locomotive was shut down, and workers in khaki – they may have been military swarmed along the carriages dragging tarpaulins loosely over the roofs, and our view from the window was obscured.

Lane touched my shoulder. ‘Martian about – or so some spotter will have called in, and the message sent on to the signalmen.’

‘Probably a flying-machine,’ Gray said. ‘They come out for the odd raid, as if testing our defences. And they cut the rail links if they see them. So you conceal the tracks by splashing them with camouflage-colour paint, though that has to be renewed as it gets rubbed off by passing stock. And the trains too, the roofs of the carriages painted, a bit of tarpaulin to blur the outlines. Wouldn’t fool a human spotter, but might a Martian. And we have to be still. A moving train—’

‘Why are we whispering? The Martians might see us, but they can’t hearus.’

He grinned. ‘Natural reaction, ain’t it? Anyhow you started it.’

Of course he was right.

We were held for hours before at last we moved. In the interval we had none of us spotted a flying-machine.

11 MY RETURN TO LONDON

The train journey ended south of London, at Clapham Junction. Here our train-load of troops was exchanged with another lot, evidently fresh from the front and ready for their bit of leave, the men mostly in khaki uniforms and greatcoats, and women in the uniforms of nurses or VADs. The relieved troops were all grimy and damp-looking, their clothes and kit shapeless and well-worn, even mouldy in some cases. The dominant impression was of exhaustion. Nevertheless these hollow-eyed troops had greetings ready for their replacements. ‘Hello! Nice haircut, mate, but the Heat-Ray will give you a trim for nothing. Got a fag to spare?’

‘Look at that one, Fred. Ruddy like a raspberry and as full of juice. Them Martians will have a fine time sucking you dry, you mark my words, suck and suck and slurp!…’

I suppose it has been the way of soldiers to goad each other this way, back to the days when Caesar came with his legions, perhaps to this very spot. But I saw that while this badinage was continuing, the nurses and MOs stood with men and a few women in a worse condition: walking wounded, festooned with bandages, on crutches – there was a line of men who seemed to have lost their sight, all standing with one hand on the shoulder of the fellow in front. All looked exhausted, bewildered, shocked, and those who could see were blinking in the light. It was not a promising welcome committee. And still I was far from the Martian centre, the cause of all this.

We filtered through the station, hundreds of us, to the gulllike cries of the NCOs and MPs.

Once we were out of the station we joined a unit of troops, laden with kit, already formed up. And then we set off on foot. We walked out to St John’s Hill and turned right, towards the river. It was my first return to London since I and Alice had fled from the first advance of the Martians from Uxbridge, more than two years earlier. Falling back on my journalistic experience, I tried to keep my mind open, my reactions fresh.

To begin with, I had oddly positive impressions. I heard little but a lapping of water somewhere nearby – that puzzled me – and the singing of birds, and the quiet voices of the men as they walked along. The air smelled clear if a little stale – like a blocked drain, I thought. I saw a stretch of blue sky above. Many of the buildings had a peculiarly streaked effect on their grimy surfaces, pale stone showing under the black. The coming of the Martians had extinguished London’s smoking chimneys, and the rain had weathered away some of the grime, centuries thick, from the faces of the buildings. I wondered what was going on in the parks – if the trees and birds were flourishing, if wildlife had come in from the country. It was a Wednesday in May; I felt a burst of absurd springtime optimism.

And then – too soon! – we came to the river. But not to its old bank.

Where the water lapped, I saw from the signs, was the York Road. To our right was a small park area, sodden and flooded. And before us was the river itself, evidently spread up from its course and over the feet of the buildings. I looked out across a stretch of grey water, to the silhouettes of buildings on the far shore, their foundations drowned as on our side.

Where the cobbled road surface ducked under the water there was an improvised jetty. Here a series of rowing boats waited for us, with more standing out on the river. The NCOs spoke their orders, and we shuffled down towards the water. Once in my boat I sat cautiously at the prow, beside Gray, while Lane sorted out men to take the oars, and a rough type in a heavy waterproof leather coat sat at a tiller in the stern and glowered at us.

I murmured to Gray, ‘What is this vessel?’

He shrugged. ‘Scarcely matters, does it? Might even have been a lifeboat from one of the warships the Martians smashed up in the Pool…’ He fell silent, watchful, as the boat inched its way down the flooded street, and over what I supposed to be a drowned embankment. ‘Always the trickiest part, over the streets, there’s all sorts of hazards – was on a boat once that got spiked by a smashed lamppost, sharp as a bit of broken bone, and that was no fun.’

We joined a line of such boats. The oars lapped, and gulls wheeled overhead, cawing, perhaps seeking food. The old route of the river was easy to make out as we progressed, for I could see the spans of bridges, every one of them broken as if snipped with scissors: Battersea Bridge, Albert Bridge, Chelsea Bridge. But the far bank was as drowned as the Clapham side, or more so; the river, vast and extensive, seemed to spread far inland to the north and east, over Chelsea and Westminster. The river itself was scummy, dirty, and scattered with debris – bits of wood, the remnants of clothing, dead birds and animals. And it was littered with wrecks; the heat-twisted hulks of battleships protruded, rusted and pathetic, above the lapping water. And it smelled foul, even in the middle of the river. It was hard to believe this was the river of empire.

Gray was watching me, as if interested in my reaction. ‘More marvels for your newspaper stories, Miss Elphinstone?’

‘Hardly marvels… The flooding. Is that the work of the Martians?’

‘Not directly. Indeed I doubt the Martians, from their arid world, know enough about hydrology to have managed this deliberately. No, this is all accident and neglect; nobody is in a position to maintain the drains and the flood gates and the pumping stations. So the Thames is regaining its old banks: flooding lost lagoons at Hammersmith, Westminster, Bermondsey, the Isle of Dogs, Greenwich.’ He smiled. ‘The old rivers are coming back too, bursting out of the culverts under which we buried them. I have a friend who swam down the course of the Fleet, for a dare, from St Pancras to Blackfriars… Of course as much damage is being done underground as over.’

‘The flooded Underground tunnels.’

‘An awful lot of people sought shelter from the Martians down there, for an awful long time.’

So much damage had been done – so much suffering! I felt ashamed of my own self-absorption.

Now followed perhaps the most extraordinary part of that strange urban journey. We cut in from the river’s true bank, and rowed our way cautiously north-east – I think we followed the line of the drowned King’s Road, through Chelsea towards Belgravia. Our pilot navigated cautiously, peering to left and right and every so often calling a halt if he suspected we were to encounter some submerged obstacle. To my right the broad, placid river; to my left I thought I glimpsed the great museums of South Kensington rising pale. And ahead, the jagged ruins of General Marvin’s new Palace of Westminster protruded from the water like the skeleton of some vast aquatic mammal.

Still on the river, we passed Buckingham Palace – its roof was melted and skirted the Victoria Memorial, and our pilot seemed to make his way more confidently over the drowned St James’s Park. At last we came to Trafalgar Square, which rose up out of the water, and along with the boats that had preceded us we berthed on the Gallery steps; iron posts had been driven into the stone for the purpose. Once I had climbed out onto the steps, looking away from the water, I had a brief, odd feeling of normality, of routine, despite the khaki-clad men all around me. But a glance down Northumberland Avenue showed the waters of the swollen river, glinting in the sun between the buildings, its surface littered with unidentifiable debris.

Gray came to me. ‘Now we have lunch.’

‘A little late for that.’

‘You’re in the Army now, Miss Elphinstone; you eat when you’re fed. And then it’s a walk for us, I’m afraid.’

‘Which way?’ I knew my destination was to the west and the Cordon, eventually.

But he pointed east, along the Strand. ‘That way, along the new shore. Dry enough, if we cut up a couple of streets. The Strand, you know – a Saxon word for “beach”, and that’s no accident, for this was once the bank of the ancient river.’

‘How far?’

‘All the way to Stratford.’

‘Stratford? East, then, not west, to where the Martians are – I imagine there’s a plan.’

‘As much as the Army ever has.’

12 FROM ALDWYCH TO STRATFORD

So that extraordinary day continued. We walked, but I am used to that, and was glad of the exercise after days of travel on boat and train. We headed along the Strand – where, as I have previously remarked, I had the opportunity to inspected the war wreckage of landmarks familiar to me – and then through Aldwych and around the London Wall to Aldgate, and then on up the Whitechapel Road to Stepney and Bow. As we progressed the scouts would peel off to the locations of telephone equipment, left by those who had come this way before; they checked the gear and made hasty reports. The engineers suspected that the Martians could detect our wireless transmissions, and could track us that way – but they could not detect our telephone calls.

As we walked, though we saw little evidence of fire, we passed tremendous craters in the ground – as if great bombs had fallen. The Heat-Ray will incinerate a human in a flash, and demolish a building – but such is the density of energy it delivers that the fires it sets, in urban situations anyhow, tend to blow themselves out. So London had been spared the great firestorm that many had predicted when the Martians brought the Heat-Ray back to the city.

But what the Martian assaults had done, by breaking the skin of modern London, had been to reveal the medieval bones and guts lying beneath. I was fascinated to learn that the Martians’ destruction of the Guildhall had revealed the remains of a Roman amphitheatre beneath, a structure long hypothesised but its existence never confirmed. Gray told me that even as the Martians still strutted over London in the present, archaeologists came to study what was exposed of the past. ‘Makes you proud, doesn’t it? That we still have such a perspective, even in this… Do the Martians seek abstract knowledge? If not, then that separates us from them.’

Now I saw that the men around me, on a murmur from their officers, were raising handkerchiefs and scarves to their faces, and Gray quietly advised me to do the same. He pointed to a churchyard, not far off the road. The church itself had been smashed, and the ground around churned up too.

‘The graveyards?’

‘In some of the older churches there are plague pits. Best to be cautious.’

We walked on.

You might ask where were the Londoners in this, those millions who still remained. Hiding– that’s the short answer. I learned that the surviving population had learned to stay back from the main thoroughfares, and inhabited the great warrens of back streets, especially in the East End rookeries – that was if they hadn’t found shelter underground, in the sewers or railway tunnels that were not yet flooded. Thus they avoided the Martians, with their Heat-Ray, and their harvesting.

And they did what they could to keep themselves alive, and not just on the rations the emergency government managed to provide; they foraged in the wrecks of stores, where tinned goods and so forth could still be found, and they grew vegetables, even kept chickens and a few pigs, in gardens and allotments and the smaller parks.

The government kept an eye on the population. A system of ration cards was one way of ensuring every man, woman and child was logged in a great register somewhere. The police still functioned, after a fashion, augmented by Special Constables; crime levels were lower than you might have expected – because, it was said, the rations doled out were more nutritious than the diet of many East End Londoners before the Martians came. And people were put to work, on one project or another: on salvage work, or maintaining the surviving sewers, for example, as I was to discover for myself.

Hidden the people were, but as we walked, occasionally children would peek out from an alley or the doorway of an abandoned shop, with grimy, rat-like faces, and big eyes. The soldiers threw them bits of chocolates , even a few cigarettes. ‘For your mum and dad!’ The children would grab the treasures and scuttle back into the shadows.

‘Poor little mites,’ Gray said neutrally. ‘After years of this they don’t know whether to fear us or the Martians.’

Ted Lane growled, ‘I had family living around here – came to London to make their fortunes, if you can believe it – all evacuated now. A summer’s day like this isn’t so bad, but the winter’s a misery. Nobody dares burn a fire, see, for fear of the Martians seeing the smoke. The sooner we put a stop to this business the better.’

‘No one will disagree with you there, Sergeant,’ said Ben Gray.

We reached Stratford, an area I did not know well. It seemed to me that the stroke of the Heat-Ray must have been heavy here. The streets were mere mounds of rubble in rows, with the names picked out by hand-painted wooden signs, if at all. In some places the damage was such that the very cobbles had been smashed and lifted. But life persisted, as it always does, and green sprouted in the lee of the broken walls. I remember particularly rose bay willow-herbs standing proud in the wreckage of parlours and kitchens.

We came to a manhole cover.

The file broke up from its rough marching formation, and the NCOs gave brisk orders to the men to disperse – to find cover in the safer of the surrounding buildings, to take a sip of water from their canteens and to have a fag. ‘If you’ve any tanks that need emptying, do it now. Then we’ll be going down the rat-hole one at a time, so get ready.’

It was the work of a moment for a couple of men, hastily volunteered, to brush the cover clear of debris, and to get it lifted. Beneath, I saw rusty rungs leading down into the dark.

I faced Lane and Gray, who were both grinning at me. ‘Is that -?’

‘A sewer,’ Gray said. ‘A marvel of Victorian engineering.’

Lane sniffed. ‘And a couple of winters’ rain will have sluiced it nice and clean.’

‘There is that.’

I glared at them. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

They glanced uneasily at each other.

‘Well,’ Lane said hesitantly, ‘I suppose we thought – if you’d known—’

‘What, I would have had a fit of vapours? Just as Major Eden decided I had to be tricked into my mission. Oh, for God’s sake—’ I pushed my way to the open manhole mouth, grabbed an electric torch from a startled corporal, and looked down into the pit. ‘Tell me where this goes.’

Lane explained, as best he understood it himself. This great drain was part of the Bazalgette system, devised and built in Victoria’s reign to clean up London. Once London’s drains, all along the course of the river, had flowed more or less direct into the Thames by the shortest route. It was when the filth and stench had driven even the Parliamentarians indoors – the water was foul well upstream of Westminster by then – that it had been determined something must be done.

‘So,’ Lane said, sketching maps in the dirt. ‘Bazalgette drove great transverse “intercept” sewers from west to east, running parallel to the river’s course and cutting across all the other big north-south conduits. The idea being, you see, that the flow of water should be diverted east, so that the big discharges into the river itself would come much further downstream – further than Westminster anyhow. One of these transverse channels runs from Chiswick eastward. But the big one, the high level sewer, runs from Hampstead to Hackney to Stratford – to here.’

I glanced at the unassuming manhole, and then westward. ‘So if you plod upstream, so to speak—’

‘You’ll get all the way to Hampstead, deep underground and out of sight of any snooping Martian. And from there it’s only a few miles to Uxbridge and the Cordon. And then – well, you’ll see when we get there. It’s a circuitous route we’ve followed, I know, to go east afore heading west again, but it’s the safest passage we have.’

‘Anyhow, that’s the good news,’ Gray said wryly. ‘The bad news is the day is too far advanced for us to make it all the way to the Trench today.’

‘The Trench?’

‘You’ll see.’

I glanced around at the ruins. ‘There’s barely an intact roof to cover us. Where will we spend the night?’

And Lane and Gray glanced at each other, and at the manhole at our feet.

Albert Cook would have approved, I thought grimly. Londoners running in their own sewers – just as he foresaw during the First War. And yet, despite my bravado before these overbearing men, I felt a deep dread at descending into the clammy dark – indeed, a dread that had gathered as I had worked my way, step by step, closer to the heart of the Martians’ dark empire on the earth.

13 INTO THE SEWER

In the sewer, just under the manhole, there was an equipment cache: sets of leather waders like an angler’s, and gauntlets, and protective caps for the head, rather like a pilot’s. There was an immediate fear among the men that there wouldn’t be enough of the stuff to go around, a fear that proved all too justified, but as the stock was broken out Ted Lane made sure I got a set.

Once we were kitted out it took some time to get us all down that hole, one at a time – there were dozens in the party. It was a vivid experience for me when it was my turn, with Lane below me and Gray coming after. I remember how greasy the rungs of the ladder were, perhaps some measure against rust. As I descended I looked up at the diminishing circle of day, which by that time was already fading, and wondered what kind of landscape I would see when next I emerged into the light.

Then I was in the water, which was thick and muddy. By the light of electric torches we moved away from the manhole. The tunnel in which I found myself had a profile like an egg-shape, perhaps to give it structural strength. The bricks seemed to sweat, glistening with damp. I could feel shingle on the floor, through the thickness of the waders and my shoes. We were walking against the current, but the water was not quite waist-high, and the current was no more than a gentle push. And I was relieved it was nothing but water, as far as I could see, with none of the horrors I had imagined: no waste, no dead rats – or worse, live ones.

Even so it was tiring, and we soon fell silent as we plodded into the dark, one step after another, with only the pools of light cast by the torches of those ahead visible, their distorted shadows making them seem hulking, like inhuman forms. We did not speak much, though at first a few noisy fellows whooped to get an echo. And the jokers had a go: ‘Just think, lads. One quick rainstorm and we’ll all be flushed out like turds, all the way to the North Sea!’ But they soon shut up.

I could not track the time, with one gloved hand gripping my torch and the other skimming the greasy wall for balance. It was one of those experiences when you simply have to put your head down and endure, for counting the seconds won’t make it go by any faster, and you’re better off trying to forget where you are, what you are doing – who you are, if you can.

So I got through it, as did we all.

It was a huge relief when the walls opened out around us, and we came to a more open chamber. It was a cylindrical cave, the walls and flat roof more roughly finished than those of the sewer itself, and I surmised that this place was more recently built – constructed, indeed, since the Martians had arrived. The walls had been cut back at an angle so there were places where you could sit and lift your feet out of the water, or even lie down if you were lucky. This peculiar architecture was sustained by pillars of clay that had been left uncut to support the roof above us.

There we were, arrayed on the brick ledges like toys in a shop’s store room, with candles under-lighting our faces and the shallow water casting shimmering reflections on the brick roof. Talking softly, we broke out water and food and blankets from our packs. I was obscurely fascinated by the details of the men’s equipment, up so close: their uniforms, the greenish khaki, a woollen tunic, trousers, puttees, boots with iron toecaps and heels, the peaked cap – and the contents of the their kit-bags: each man had a toothbrush, soap, towel, spare bootlaces, a mess tin and fork, a razor – even a sewing kit – along with reading matter, mail from home, photographs and locks of their children’s hair… A mouth-organ or two. And probably French letters, tucked discreetly away.

The toilet was just an offshoot of the tunnel, a little way out of sight in either direction – more easily managed by men than women, but I found a way. We were in a sewer, after all.

‘A strange place to stay the night,’ I said to my companions, as Lane broke a chocolate bar and shared it with us. ‘But I have been more uncomfortable.’

‘And it’s as safe a spot as you’ll find anywhere within fifty miles of here,’ Lane murmured. ‘You want to try kipping in a trench in Siberia.’

‘I wonder where we’ll all be this time tomorrow.’

Gray said, ‘I know where we’re supposed to be, which isn’t always the case, and that’s good enough for now.’ He wriggled down and pulled his cap over his face.

I lay down too and made myself as comfortable as I could. I did not expect to sleep, not in such circumstances – deep in a sewer, under occupied London, with the men snoring all around me. But the echoes off the brick walls and the water and the breaths of my fellows merged into a kind of susurrus, broken by the plinking of water drops somewhere, and I was neither warm nor cold. Physically worn out, emotionally drained by the experiences of the day, I drifted gently to sleep.

I woke once to the sound of someone whimpering, off in the candlelight. It sounded like a child. There was a gruff rumble, a murmured, ‘Yes, Sarge,’ and then silence.

14 EMERGENCE

The next morning we completed our subterranean journey under London and surfaced, blinking in the dawn light, in the ruins of Hampstead. There was no time to sight-see.

We were hastily bundled aboard a small fleet of motoromnibuses, waiting in a rough, shell-cratered car park that might once had been the yard of a school now a blackened ruin. The vehicles were nothing but London buses, I saw, their company markings roughly covered over with camouflage paint, the dull green and brown and black that were the colours of England that summer. They did have peculiar flaring fins attached to the engine compartment at the front.

I was still more surprised to find Eric Eden waiting for me on one of the buses, somehow spruce in a clean-looking uniform. He grinned. ‘Beat you here – don’t ask me how! I’m glad to see you’re healthy and in one piece given your travels so far, Miss Elphinstone. We had to send you by the most secure route, uncomfortable though it may have been; I am a less valuable shipment.’ He eyed me now. ‘And I take it you are – I mean, the special package has been no burden?’

He meant, of course, the tainted blood that coursed in my veins. ‘Oh, everything is tickety-boo,’ I snapped back.

We boarded promptly and the bus rolled away, one of a small convoy on an otherwise empty road– heading west, I saw, from the angle of the rising sun, towards the lair of the Martians. Here, I learned, the scouts had assured the officers that there were no Martian patrols nearby, and it was comparatively safe to dash across this last bit of open ground. Eden sat with me on a scuffed leather seat, with Gray and Lane sitting behind. The rest of our group, groaning theatrically, slumped down in their seats, broke out water flasks, and started cadging cigarettes from each other.

Ted Lane, an NCO himself, watched this display with amused contempt. ‘Look at ’em, all grumbling and groaning. You wouldn’t think they’d all just come from eight hours’ lovely kip safe in that rat-hole, and a slap-up breakfast on top of that.’

Eden laughed. ‘Well, they can grumble about me all they want when my back’s turned, as long as they follow orders. And as long as we’ve got the right quality. In a set-up like this you need a mix. You want your fighters, but also men who have been miners, navvies, gangers on the railways – that sort, with practical skills. And a well-trained sapper is worth his weight in gold, of course.’

For me, from the beginning, this long journey had been one step in the dark after another, all the way from the bright daylight of Berlin. I asked now, ‘What “set-up”, Eric?’

Eden said, ‘Well, this foray is a little unorthodox. You understand that we’ve established a number of muster points around the Trench itself – in anti-clockwise order from here, St Albans to the north, then Aylesbury and Reading to the west, Windsor to the south.’

‘The Trench?’

He grinned. ‘You’ll see.’

After only a short journey further west, the troopers grew restless, pointing ahead. When I looked through the paintsmeared windows I saw a rise in the ground, spanning the horizon, like a ridge, or a line of sand dunes.

‘Eric. What is this place?’

‘Put all your preconceptions aside, Julie. Like nowhere else on the earth.’

15 IN THE TRENCH

Maps of the Martians’ territory in England, as they possessed it at that stage in the Second War, are now readily available and familiar – not then! So you can imagine it as seen from above, from a Zeppelin, or a falling Martian cylinder. It would have looked like a tremendous archery target, I suppose, or a dartboard. At the bull, you had the main group of Martian pits in the ruins of the Buckinghamshire town of Amersham, a complex now being busily extended which had come to be called the Redoubt. From that centre, draw a circle of radius ten miles or so, to encompass Uxbridge to the south-east, and panning anti-clockwise to Watford, Hemel Risborough, Marlow, Maidenhead and Hempstead, Princes Slough. Use a thick pencil, for that was the line of destruction wrought by the fall of the ‘dummy’ cylinders at midnight of March 29, 1920, and the perimeter of the zone we came to call the Cordon.

Within that circle, the earthly kingdom of the Martians. And outside the circle, two years later, had been constructed the most significant human response to the Martian incursion, called, laconically, the Trench. It was another great band around the perimeter of your dartboard: a band of people and machines and watch-towers and weapons. Of course it was not a perfect containment – Eric’s own encounter with the Martians of Dogger Bank was proof of that – but it was the best we could do. And it was to the Trench that I was brought now.

Off the buses, we were met by a couple of NCOs, who formed us up into a rough column. We walked in our file the last hundred yards or so to that great earthen rampart I had seen, and then we climbed. It had not been a dry winter and the ground, not yet bound by the new grass, was as muddy as you might expect, but there were paths to follow, of wooden duckboards pushed into the ground. Overhead there was a persistent buzz of aircraft, the hornet whines of aeroplanes or the deeper thrum of Zepp engines; the Cordon was continuously, if cautiously, patrolled from the air.

Eden walked beside me. ‘Don’t worry about the mud. You’ll get used to that. And now, as we top this ridge, prepare for a marvel…’

It opened out slowly.

The ridge flattened out into a parapet reinforced with more duckboards. I found I stood on the lip of a tremendous ditch, a furrow in the ground. The inner face of the ridge before us was very steep – it cut down from the perimeter at an angle a lot sharper than forty-five degrees – and it must have been fifty feet deep, a cut into the English ground. Netting and wire had been flung down this great dug-out face, to stabilise it in case of rain I imagined, and there were rope ladders and rope-and-pulley arrangements reaching down the artificial cliff. When I peered down into the trench to its very base, I saw people, all in khaki, making their way along a kind of narrow roadway, a path walled by sandbags and floored by duckboards. I would learn that the inhabitants called this deepest crease the ‘gully’. Beyond that tangled lane a wall of earth rose up on the far side, mirroring my own side by riddled with detail, with walkways and ladders and shelters. That far side of the ditch did not slope so steep as my side, and was broken up into terraces that spanned its length, to left and right as far as I could see, with shelves and steps everywhere. The vertical face had been dug into, to create rough caves, quite neat troglodytic apartments, faced by corrugated iron or wooden planks; the smartest even appeared to have glass windows. Here and there I saw the bright paint of red crosses. And at the upper rim of this great complex, facing into Martian country, there was a parapet of more sandbags and wooden spotting huts, with searchlights and what looked like Navy guns, and soldiers staring steadfastly away from us, to the west, into the Martian territory. Glancing to left and right, I could see that this remarkable structure, this huge inhabited ditch, went on to left and right, sweeping to the horizon roughly to north and south – we had come on it from the east – with the slightest of curves visible in the distance, suggesting a vast closed circle spanning the land ahead of me. It reminded me of some relic of prehistory, a Saxon dyke perhaps, on a tremendous scale. But no nation of the Stone Age or the Iron Age had made this; I saw marks like the scraping of huge claws where digging machines had been used to gouge it out. Men and women moved like maggots everywhere. A chorus of voices rose up, like the crowd in some strange amphitheatre.

‘There,’ Eden said to me, grinning. ‘Can you see the logic?’ He pointed forward. ‘That way, to the west, are the Martians, and that’s where they come from when they attack. So we built our cabins and stores into the east-facing walls, so there’s some shelter when the attacks come, and made the west-facing walls steep so it’s hard to clamber out, even for a fighting-machine. The Trench goes on in a great circle all around the Martian Cordon, an integrated system more than sixty miles long which is the distance from London to Hastings, say – actually the best part of two hundred miles of digging, for actually there are three such systems, one inside the other. We call them the “ditches.”’

‘Three.’

‘Connected by a series of tunnels – you’ll get used to tunnels here. This is actually the rear ditch, for supplies, training, medical support – you see the aid centres in the opposite wall. The middle ditch is for reserve troops, and the third, the innermost, is the front line. Anyhow that’s the thinking, a kind of amalgam of the sort of trench-working we learned about agin the Boers, and developed by the Germans during the Schlieffen War.’

Lane grinned. ‘And it works, does it? We can’t do much about their flying-machines. But a fighting-machine, now – even a hundred-foot giant might trip over a fifty-feet ditch.’

‘That’s the idea, Sergeant. Make ’em think at least, eh?’

I was still staring at the far wall, the swarming military humanity there – the detail of the workings, the shelters, the ladders and steps and galleries. ‘It’s like a cut-open termite nest.’

Ben Gray shook his head. ‘Reminds me of the Amalfi coast, the sheer cliffs down to the beautiful sea, a town cut into a cliff face… Have you ever been to Italy, Miss Elphinstone? A rather more attractive populace there than a bunch of muddy Army types, though! Well, we’d better get on with it, we’re holding up the line…’

Already I heard the NCOs calling to the newcomers: ‘All right, lads, that’s enough sight-seeing, and it’s down you go. Old ladies and officers take the pulley lifts. The rest of you use the rope ladders; they aren’t so bad, and the worst danger is getting your fingers stomped on by the lout coming down after you. But if you’re a sportsman you’ll take the slide.’

A woman’s voice called, ‘I’ll show you boys how it’s done!’ It was a QA, a Queen Alexandria’s nurse, I saw, in cape and skirt. She grabbed a bit of sacking, evidently left there for the purpose, sat down on it, slid on her backside over the crest – and then plummeted down the ditch face on a kind of slippery track, polished, I supposed, by the hundreds of backsides that had gone before hers. She whooped as she slithered, and finished with an undignified tumble at the bottom. But she got up laughing, and bowed to acknowledge the applause that broke out.

I was told we were to spend one night in the Trench before moving on in the morning, at seven a.m.

As I was attached to Eric Eden – a major, and something of a folk hero to troops facing Martians on the modern front line – I was privileged to be given a berth in a shelter on the ditch’s second terrace up. The three officers who regularly shared this place called it a ‘tamboo’: English Army slang is full of Indian words.

Close to I discovered the shelter was built on a frame of railway sleepers, the better, I supposed, to withstand blasts or landslips. It had a stove of its own, electric light run from a generator somewhere nearby, a table, chairs, bunk-beds, pictures pinned to the walls, a telephone – it even had a scrap of carpet on the floor. The washing facility and lavatory were basic, and connected to some system of sewage that alone must have been a miracle of engineering.

They had but a single room to share, but the officers posted here, all calm young fellows, seemed used to having women ‘day pupils’, as they put it – yes, it did have the flavour of a public school lark about it – and they set up a system of curtains and so forth to give me privacy. Their conversation was banter, or Trench gossip, and all the officers were ‘muffs’. They were very young men, and a little silly despite their experiences of war. It would not be quite true to say that they were perfect gentlemen around me. That evening, after a dinner of bully beef, potatoes and greens served by a batman, and when the drink came out, a decent whisky, and the cards and the cigars, they rather forgot themselves and there was fruity talk about the nurses, and so on. But I, that bit older, with my short hair and trousers, did not seem to attract their attention in that way.

They did have an old Marvin wireless receiver, the worse for wear but serviceable, and we listened to the news from the government station. It Bulletin read out in gramophone, which they wound up to play sentimental songs from musical-theatre shows I had not seen.

I got a little restless as the evening wore on, and when Eden checked in on me about nine o’clock I swallowed my pride somewhat and requested his permission to go for an explore. He frowned, and I am sure he would have preferred me to stay was little more than the National sonorous tones. And they had a where I was, under his nose. But to my relief he put a call in on the telephone, asking if Sergeant Lane was free.

Then Eden bade me goodnight, and left. It was an informal parting. I was not to know that it would be months before I saw him again, in a transformed world.

Ted Lane turned up outside the tamboo not five minutes later. He carried an electric lantern and a torch, and I saw he had a candle stuck in his pocket, in case, I supposed, all else failed – the kind of instinctive planning that gives you the measure of the man.

‘I’m sorry to drag you away from your free time, Ted.’

‘Not at all, Miss. Mind your step, now…’

We clambered down a ladder; he insisted on going first in case I fell.

I would not claim that the late spring twilight made the bottom of that ditch a magical place. That could hardly apply to a gully where a couple of dogs, whimsically called Lloyd and George, ran after rats with the inhabitants placing penny bets on their success, or where a ‘sanitary man’, an older soldier with a pronounced limp, worked his way along the duckboards, emptying brimming latrines into sump holes and spraying them with creosote and chloride of lime. But the lanterns hung prettily from the terraced wall rising steeply above me, giving it something of the look of Amalfi, as Gray, better travelled than I have ever been, had perceived. As the light faded, even the searchlights that raked the darkling sky, looking for Martian flying-machines above or fighting-machines on the march across the ground, had an oddly jaunty air, I thought.

Heaps of stores sat in boxes and crates, waiting for sorting. I saw that some had come from Germany, and some from America – our transatlantic cousins were staunch allies in a pinch, disapprove of our accommodation with the Kaiser as they might. There was a kind of library, heaps of battered, muchread editions that included some classics and quality literature, not all of it William le Queuex and other of the lowbrow entertainments you might have imagined – Ford Madox Ford was a particular favourite, I had time to observe. And there was a post office marked by red and white flags; there were, I learned, several deliveries a day, the mail from home being considered a cheap but essential boost to morale.

We passed medical stations – ‘casualty clearing stations’, they were called. If you were injured in combat, you would be taken first to an aid post in the front-line ditch, and then sent back through a communication tunnel to this, the support ditch. Here, there would be a kind of triage process: you could be treated in situ; you could be shipped out to hospitals in places like Windsor or Aylesbury – or, of course, you could be patched up and sent back into the fight. We did not see many badly injured that night; with some days since the last contact with the Martians, we were told, those who needed better treatment had already been removed.

We came across groups of enlisted men in the gully, sitting together outside their shelters, patching clothing or writing letters and talking softly, even music from singing by one fellow with a mouth-organ, and a better performance it was too than my pet officers’ gramophone records. Those gully promenaders were mostly men, women being largely confined to the medical posts as nurses, or as cooks or clerks or drivers or in other support roles, even construction work – anywhere save the front line – and the men seemed inhibited by my presence. But they opened up to Ted Lane, especially when he offered them cigarettes. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told me when I commented on this largesse; ‘I got a packet from the Major for the purpose; I wouldn’t be wasting my own.’

So I learned something of the structure of this strange society. Of course the basic military hierarchy was in place here. As one man explained it to me at Lane’s prompting, ‘You got your privates, which is us poor slobs, and you got your NCOs lording it over us, no offence, Sarge, and you got your officers lording it over them, and then your staff officers, and you got your generals above them. And every one of us complains about the sheer bleeding incom-petence o’ all the rest above and below, and it’s a wonder anything ever gets done around here.’

‘But it never does, Sid!’ someone called.

However, I learned, cutting across this familiar ladder of rank were the specialisms. The Trench system itself had mostly been constructed by recruits with appropriate civilian experience, by agricultural workers, and ‘navvies’ and ‘gangers’ from the railways, and bricklayers and carpenters and concretemixers, all under the command of the Royal Engineers. I learned new bits of language. An electrical worker was a ‘sparkie’, the ‘toshers’ kept the rudimentary sewage system working, and every man had a ‘banjo’, a shovel, for the times when the rains came and threatened to flood or collapse the whole affair, and it was a case of everyone digging to save the day. Even on this calm night, I could see the work of maintaining the system continuing, with workers labouring at the drainage of that lowest walkway, or at the revetting of the walls, or repairing sandbag parapets.

Yet the unity was something of an illusion, I would learn. There were many colonial troops serving on the Trench, especially Indian, and the latter had had to be kept apart from the British regulars, because of taunts of the ‘It’s your turn now, sahib!’ kind. Meanwhile Ted politely steered me away from some less salubrious districts of that great circular city – such as a place they called ‘Plug Street’, semi-officially sanctioned brothels.

I tried to gather my impression of the place. ‘This whole great earthwork is like – what? Like one vast body, this Trench curled like Ourobouros around the Martian canker, and these soldiers toiled like antibodies in the bloodstream to keep the whole intact and healthy.’

Ted Lane pulled a face. ‘That’s a bit poetic for me, Miss. It’s the best we can do, that’s all. We have to try to contain the Martians. It’s that or let them rampage around the countryside as they choose.’

As I thought it over that night, I did wonder about the wisdom of the stratagem. If these Martians had come here to learn about us – to learn the craft of war against humans, in order to complete their failed conquest of the earth – then here we were providing them with a kind of idealised training ground, as we sat there and threw the best we had at them, and let them learn how to counter it. But then, what else were we to do? As Lane had said, we couldn’t simply wave them through.

I was to remember these reflections on the Martians’ potential adaptability the next morning.

On the way back to my tamboo I saw a man tending a row of pea plants, growing out of the earth under shoved-aside duckboards. This was a Tommy garden, as they called it. When your eye got attuned, you saw them all over the face of the Trench, splashes of homely green.

16 A TUNNEL UNDER THE TRENCH

I slept well enough; by this stage in my odyssey I was too exhausted not to. But I was woken once in the night, by the firing of a single gun somewhere on the earthwork, an artillery piece that coughed over and over, and then the whistle of the shells fading in the night, the crump of explosions. I had no idea what strategic purpose could be served by rounds from a lone gun. It seemed madness to me, and perhaps so it was.

I’d been told I would be roused by a bugle. In the event Ben Gray came in the dark and shook me awake. ‘Get dressed. I’ll get your pack.’

I stirred reluctantly. Beyond the curtains of the tamboo’s windows, I saw greyish daylight, and I could hear shouting, running footsteps. ‘What time is it?’

Gray was gathering my gear and stuffing it without ceremony into my rucksack. ‘Early. Not yet four a.m.’

I pushed my way out of my bunk. The young officers were already gone; a half-drunk bottle of whiskey and scattered playing cards stood on the table. ‘But we aren’t meant to be travelling until seven a.m.’

Gray looked me in the eye. ‘The Martians have decided not to follow our plan. Now get your boots on, empty your bladder, and meet me outside. That’s an order.’

‘Where’s Eric Eden?’

‘Fighting the Martians. Now come on.’

Outside the tamboo, boots and hat on, rucksack over my shoulders – I had lingered long enough to make sure Walter’s packet of sigil sketches was safe in there, for as far as Ted Land and Gray and others knew, to deliver the sketches to the Martians was still the plan – at first I stood astounded by the sight before me. In the grey dawn light, the great ditch swarmed with activity.

On the far wall, the steeper eastern face, I saw people clambering up or down the ladders, even scaling the stabilising netting, the main priority seeming to be to get off the face and to shelter. Lodes of materiel were suspended from the pulley cables, apparently abandoned. In the deep gully, and all across the terracing of my inhabited western face, people ran, some without their proper uniforms – some even barefoot – grabbing weapons and ammunition packs as they went, and dashing to their stations. Lanterns shone everywhere, and searchlights mounted on the parapets raked over this great linear hive of activity. There was a barrage of noise too, whistles, bugle calls, shouts, though the human sounds were dwarfed by the great scale of the ditch.

But now I heard the crack of an artillery gun, a huge pounding that shook the earth. All around me people stopped in their tracks, and looked up at the lightening sky. I twisted my head, and looked up too, up, up past the terraces and the rows of tamboos.

And I saw it loom over the parapet of the western face, coming out of the Cordon: a cowled hood, a flash of bronze, tentacular appendages clutching what might have been a heavy camera.

‘Down!’ That was my own cry, I think; next thing I knew I had shoved Gray down and lay half-across him with my hand on the back of his neck. That was the veteran in me. Yet even now the journalist in me longed for a Kodak, to capture the sight!

And the Heat-Ray spat. I saw the thread of it, the characteristic pale distortion of its guide-light in the air. It swept over the sheer eastern face, and where it touched, climbing men and women and bundles of materiel flashed to flame and vanished, human beings popping like pockets of flammable gas.

I was distracted by the sound of guns barking now, coming from behind our lines. Shells flew over our heads. In ’07 the Martians had come to an England where the most advanced weaponry on land was horse-drawn guns. Now we had motorised artillery, and were able to respond much more rapidly. But while some of the shells splashed against the face of the Trench itself, creating peculiar angled craters and adding to the din of noise, none reached the Martian itself. Then, like a man stepping cautiously into a stream, the Martian folded its great legs, and pivoted, and stepped down into the gully itself. Once all three feet were down, it swivelled its cowl this way and that. Now that ghastly beam raked the gully itself, and the inner face of the Trench. I saw structures detonate and collapse across the wall, and people running like ants from a kettle of water. It all came back to me; I had seen such scenes before, in ’07 and indeed in ’20. I wished with all my heart at that moment that having escaped the Martians twice I had not been so foolish as to return to give them a third go.

Gray grabbed my hand and pulled me away, heading for a ladder downward. ‘Miss Elphinstone – Julie – we go now.’

‘Where?’

‘Into the tunnels, of course!’

Our port of call was what looked like a manhole cover, set in the duckboards of the gully. Of course Ted Lane was waiting for me there, with a party of soldiers – only a handful of men, armed with pistols, rifles and shovels.

I inspected the cover. ‘That looks it came off a sewer, like the one we climbed down at Stratford.’

‘It probably did. Let’s get on with it.’

Lane and one of the soldiers hauled the cover aside, to reveal a shaft with iron handles set in the walls, just like Stratford. That was where the similarity ended, though, as I discovered as I followed Lane down, with Gray right behind me. The tunnel we entered was deeper even than the great sewer had been, and faced with sapper-applied concrete, not neat Victorian brick. Electric lights had been fixed to the walls, along with cables and wires and copper pipes. And where the sewer had been half-flooded, this tunnel was all but dry, with only a smear of damp mud at its lowest arc. All this, of course, had been constructed since the landing of the Martians.

At the bottom of the shaft, Lane grabbed a steel combat hat from a stack and crammed it on my head. Without further ado, we ran for it.

The tunnel was straight and true, as far as I could see it, heading dead west. It was awkward work to run in there, for the rough-finished roof was too low for comfort standing up, even for shorter folk than me.

At least we seemed comparatively safe in here, out of reach of the Heat-Ray, and the clamour of the guns was muffled. But we were burrowing underground at the feet of the Martians, like big rats, just as Bert Cook had predicted. Indeed, as we scurried through that tunnel I thought the soldiers ahead of me had a pale, rat-like air. I felt an intensification of the deep dread that had not left me since I began this journey – for I was like a plague rat myself, scurrying off some ship into a crowded medieval port, my blood foul with disease.

Lane called back, ‘We’re passing under the Trench now. This passage goes on, at about this depth, all the way under the broken ground where the Martian cylinders landed—’

The soldier ahead of him called back, ‘And tough work that was. Those blessed cylinders smashed up the very bedrock when they fell. You try digging all that out by hand while them Martians stomp about up top – it was enough to chill the blood.’

Ted Lane said, ‘Pity you didn’t make it big enough for a normal person while you were at it, mate, I keep banging my nut.’

‘Huh. That’s doing no harm, unless it’s to my precious wall.’ Gray called forward, ‘Shall we save our breath, lads?’ At length the NCO who was leading the sappers ahead of us held up his hand, and slowed. ‘Rest area.’

We had come to a place where the concrete walls were wider, if only marginally; there was room to sit, a water tank with a spigot. On the floor I saw crushed cigarette stubs, what looked like empty food tins, and a covered hole for a toilet. The men stopped, dropping their kit with grunts of relief.

I, with Lane, walked through this area and just past it into the tunnel beyond, to make room for the rest. Gray, behind me, hung back, in the middle of the rest place. All of us were ducking our heads. I describe this quite precisely because our disposition at that moment was to determine life and death for all of us.

It had been only minutes since the alarm had roused us, but I for one was shaking and breathless and needed the rest. ‘Just a breather, lads,’ the NCO said. ‘I know we just started, but it was all of a rush, and now’s the time if you’ve got a boot on backwards or your corset’s too tight—’

The tunnel wall imploded.

I saw it come in from my right hand side, the concrete wall shattering into a hail of blocks and rubble and dust that slammed across the tunnel and into the far wall. The noise was tremendous; my ears rang with it, and the grit got in my eyes – I suppose it was a miracle the electric supply kept working, so any of it was visible – but I saw how a couple of men, caught in this lethal wash, splashed like bags of crimson paint against unyielding concrete. Despite my experiences in the First War, I had never witnessed such immediate and violent death before, not close to.

The surviving soldiers reacted immediately, and faster than I did. Ted Lane grabbed me around the waist and pulled me back into the tunnel. Gray and the sappers formed up in rows, across the width of the rest area, with revolvers and rifles drawn. The NCO was yelling orders, and Lane was shouting in my ear as he pulled me backwards, but I could hear nothing but a muffled roar.

And then I saw the Martian. Long tentacles came through first – I say ‘tentacles’; they were metallic limbs, multiply jointed and flexible, with every appearance of life despite their surface artificiality. These limbs pulled at the broken tunnel wall, widening the aperture. Then through came one leg, two, long, insectile, powerful. And then a broad body, like an upended saucer – like a crab but made of some metallic material – it was pulled into the tunnel by those limbs. A third leg through, a fourth, a fifth. And riding that eerie carriage I saw a thing like a sack of leather, glistening wet and pulsing, with a scatter of concrete dust sticking to the moist flesh – very like the targets I had seen used for bayonet practice in the grounds of the house in Hampshire, but alive, visibly so, pulsing and quivering like an organ, like a great lung dug out of a chest. It was a handling-machine, of the kind I had seen innocently manufacturing aluminium in the Surrey Corridor, with, on its back, a Martian. Later I would learn that this was the first time a handling-machine had been seen used in this way, as a weapon in direct conflict. But Walter Jenkins had foreseen it: as he told me in Berlin, the Martians weren’t likely to modify their machines, perfected as they were by a million years of use, but they were certainly capable of inventing new ways to use them.

And cradled in the limbs of this machine, as it clambered free of the hole it had made in the wall – ‘Heat-Ray!’ I tried to yell the warning, but could not hear even my own voice. ‘Heat-Ray!’

The men stood their ground and fired. I could barely hear their shots; I saw the bullets splash off the metallic hide of the machine, but they could not reach the living Martian. Lane pulled me back further, and I did not resist; I had no weapons and could contribute nothing to the fight. And the Martian wielded its Heat-Ray, at last. One man gone! Two! I heard their despairing cries as they died, and I could feel the waves of heat, intense, shocking.

But the soldiers were not done yet. Gray grabbed the NCO by the shoulder, and I saw him show the man something he held in his left hand, a pellet small and dark. It was a grenade, I guessed. The NCO hesitated for a second. Then he moved back, yelling at his men until they followed him away from the rest area.

Gray waited until the beast had clambered fully into the tunnel. It was a big machine which barely passed the walls…

Gray stood his ground and faced the thing from Mars…

He detonated his grenade…

In that confined space the shockwave knocked us like nine pins, back along the tunnel. Whether the explosion damaged the handling-machine fatally I cannot say, but I saw the roof collapse, and a rush of earth and rock like a dark waterfall smashed down on machine, Martian and all. As far as I could tell Ben Gray made no effort to get away. He must have been almost under the handling-machine when the explosion came.

And I saw the roof over my own head cracking.

‘Out! Out!’ That was the cry on Lane’s lips, and on the sappers’ – I could not see their NCO. So we ran along that tunnel, away from the Trench and under the Cordon and on towards the lair of the Martians; we ran through pulses of dust as sections of the tunnel collapsed; we ran when the lights failed at last, ran through the dark by the flickering light of battery torches.

Perhaps I was struck by a falling slab. I do not remember the end of that terrible journey. I had Lane, I suppose, to thank for saving my life.

The next I remember I was lying in on green grass, a pale summer sky above.

England, I thought. This is England. With such horror buried in the ground.

Ted Lane sat with me, looking down, his face smeared with pale dust, and a darker, crimson stain on his chin. He smiled when he saw my eyes open, and helped me sit up. I was in a meadow. Daisies nodded, irreverent. Looking around, I saw I had not been the only casualty of our flight; men in khaki lay scattered around me, their companions tending them. They were grey, dusty masses dumped incongruously on the green sward.

To my left I saw broken ground, a kind of rampart, dirt and rock crudely piled up like a stalled wave. It was the Martian perimeter, I realised with a kind of wonder, or the inner edge of that smashed ground. Where we had emerged, where our tunnel mouth was, I could not tell. But I was inside now; that was clear.

But when I looked the other way, deeper into the Cordon, I saw Martians, fighting-machines, three of them, huge in the mist of distance. They picked their way to and fro across the ground like beachcombers collecting shells – their motions seemed peculiarly coordinated, even choreographed, and I thought of Walter’s speculations of Martian telepathy. There was no sign of any human reaction or resistance. It was an almost casual vision, as if this was quite normal.

And I heard a car horn.

When I turned I saw a Rolls, bright yellow, bouncing over the grass. It made a sharp turn and skidded to a halt. The driver leaned out, doffed a leather cap and goggles, and grinned at me. A new scar on his face was livid.

It was Frank, my former husband.

‘Parp, parp!’ he called. My ears were ringing; I could barely hear him. ‘But you never were one for Grahame, were you, Julie? Never mind. Welcome to Darkest England. Anyone need a lift?’

17 INSIDE THE CORDON

Frank told me that when word had got to him that I was on the way in, he had insisted on meeting me in person, ahead of a better equipped force, and here he was. And, if he was to drive me off to some shelter, Ted Lane insisted on accompanying me.

So Lane and I sat in the car side by side, covered in dust and mud, even splashed with blood. I felt extraordinary, grotesque, as if I did not belong. My ears rang too, adding to the sense of unreality. We left the surviving sappers with promises of transport as soon as it could be arranged. Still, I felt my heart would break as we drove away from those men, all so young, so many injured, who had seen their companions die in order that I should fulfil my own mission: a mission of whose nature they could have no clear idea.

Frank told us there was a medical bag in the back of the car. We found it, opened it, drank from a flask of water, wiped our faces and hands, and applied antiseptic to our cuts. Concrete dust scattered from my hair when I shook my head. ‘I must a look a sight.’

‘You look just fine, Miss,’ Ted Lane told me.

It was still very early morning; the countryside was bright and innocent. ‘Is this real, Ted? Was that real? The handlingmachine, the men who fell – Ben Gray—’

He took my hand. ‘It will pass. It always does. But we’re not out of the woods, Miss. This is Martian country. Put it aside for later. Like in a box, tucked deep inside.’

‘Is that how you—’

‘Keep thinking, Miss. Just keep thinking.’

I nodded.

Frank did not look around. I had been married to him; I knew he would understand, without needing details until I was ready. He, for one, was concentrating on the job, of driving.

And meanwhile the Rolls fair rattled along a potholed road, leading us away from the heaped-up war zone behind us – and into a scene that was astonishing for its mundanity, all things considered, given what I had gone through to get this far. This was the English countryside, and on that early May day it was clad in that thick moist sun-drenched green you see nowhere else in the world. I glimpsed dogwood hedges, and houses of ancient-looking stone, and poppies and pimpernels, and thought I saw a yellowhammer, sat on a low twig and lording it over the world. Compared to Berlin – compared to London – it all seemed so old, and unplanned too, with field boundaries that might go back to Celtic times or earlier, buildings that might once have been barns or woodsmen’s shelters now turned into garden stores or gazebos for a new generation of commuters. This was what you got when you had centuries of peace, so many slumbering generations. I had a sudden sense of age, of continuity, from Wat Tyler through Shelley to Darwin, to mention three of my own heroes – an England with a history that had nothing to do with these Martians – and I had a sudden determination that she had to be saved.

But if you looked closer things were far from ordinary. There was no other traffic to be seen on the road along which we sped, for a start. Here and there one would see wreckage – cars driven off the road and abandoned to rust. The most startling sight of that sort, which we saw from a level crossing, was a smashed train. It looked to me as if the locomotive’s boiler had been disrupted by the caress of a Heat-Ray, and then there had been a derailment. The train lay along the line that had carried it; passenger coaches were smashed to matchwood, and freight coaches lay on their backs, rusting wheels in the air, like tremendous cockroaches, upended. It was not the train’s destruction that affected me so much as the fact that it had never been cleared away.

A little later we passed at speed through an area that looked, from afar, as if it had been burned out, for a black dust, like soot, lay over everything, the road itself, the houses, the fields. I would learn from a grim-faced Frank that this was the aftermath of a Black Smoke attack. In the First War the Martians had rendered whole swathes of Surrey lifeless with the stuff. But that substance, evolved on an arid Mars, had been too easily laid by water and rendered into harmless dust. The Martians had tweaked the design – the stuff they had now was still more deadly – and the poison lingered, even in the English damp. The Martians had used that deadly substance sparingly in this war, Frank said, only as a ‘punishment measure’ when they encountered resistance. It was not their aim to exterminate us, after all.

And then, to add to the oddness of the day, there was the peculiar way in which Frank continually inspected the sky.

I noticed detail: the way his shirt collar was worn, the elbows of his jacket rather crudely patched with scraps of leather. That was not Frank’s style; he was a professional man who preferred smartness. And his manner had changed; those upward glances told of a furtiveness, an inner tension. It was only later that he told me in detail of his experiences with the Army during the Martian landings – experiences that inevitably left scars. Still, looking over his shoulder, I could see my exhusband was enjoying the way the car handled.

‘And since when did you own a Rolls Royce?’ I demanded of him. My voice felt muffled in my own shock-blown ears, but I ignored the effect.

‘Ah, if only I did,’ he replied. ‘Not mine; it belongs to the Dowager Lady Bonneville – the big cheese in this neck of the woods, you’ll meet her – or more strictly it passed to her after the death of her husband some years back. Part of a collection.’

We were coming into a small village, unprepossessing, a row of shut-up shops and workers’ cottages surrounded by fields. But it had a rail station, surrounded by rather boxy villas. The rail line itself was lost in green weeds.

‘The widow kept the cars under wraps, so to speak, for some months. The Martians smashed up just about every vehicle they could see in the first hours or days, but these beauties were kept out of sight. Now, of course, they’re proving remarkably useful – although one always has to be discreet.’ We pulled up before a rather dilapidated station-house. ‘Give me a hand.’ He bundled out of the car, glancing again at the sky.

I followed him, as did Ted, sweating, blood smeared on his face and dust staining his crumpled uniform, staying steadfastly at my side.

I saw that the rear wall of the station house had been cut away, to be replaced by a hanging tarpaulin. Frank pulled on a rope, and the tarpaulin lifted, like a stage curtain. ‘Help me, man.’ Ted hurried over to take another length of rope, and I helped too, and we all pulled away.

The tarpaulin lifted to reveal a gutted interior. The window for ticket sales was still there, and a door to a lavatory gaped open, but otherwise the station house had become an impromptu garage. Half of it was occupied by one more vehicle, a small tractor, and there were tool sets, oily rags, and cans of oil and petrol lying around.

Frank waved us out of the way, briskly drove in the Rolls, and hustled out, dragging the tarpaulin down after him.

‘Abracadabra,’ he said dryly. ‘As if it had never been. Looks rather strange, I know, but I think we can rely on the Martians not being au fait just yet with the fine particulars of latenineteenth-century English railway architecture. It’s footslogging it from here to Abbotsdale, I’m afraid, but it’s not very far. Well – nowhere is very far from anywhere else in the Cordon, it’s only twenty miles across, as you’ll know…’

We walked on along the road, heading roughly north, and up a slight incline. I soon wearied. We were in the Chilterns, a landscape of chalk, of steep rises and hidden valleys: a country where a hill to climb is never far away, as I and my leg muscles were to discover in the days to come. But the peaceful quiet did us both good, I think, Ted and I, after our extreme experiences. Indeed, after the shock, the sudden violence, this ordinarylooking country didn’t seem real, not to me.

Ordinary-looking country. Not really, as seen from the car, and less so now as we walked through it and saw the detail. The roadside hedges were untrimmed, bramble and holly both growing wild everywhere. A number of cottages we passed were evidently abandoned, some broken open or burned out. In places phone wires were down and lay where they had fallen. One poignant relic, for me, was a poster affixed to a tilted telephone pole for an agricultural show that would have been held in the autumn of 1920 – that season had come and gone, the show had never been held, but the poster, weather-faded, clung on.

Frank had brought his pack from the car, and he dug out water flasks. As we walked, Ted and I both drank thirstily.

Ted, coming to himself, was growing more observant, more curious in his practical way. ‘Where do you get your petrol?’

‘Stores from before the invasion.’ He pointed to the sky where an aeroplane whined, a distant wasp. ‘And we get drops. But the Martians have a good kill rate of the aircraft, unfortunately; we can’t rely on that. There’s a strict rationing system, for everything – you’ll see. Eventually we’ll run out.’ He glanced at me. ‘But maybe something will turn up before we get to that crisis, eh? They told me you were coming, but not what you’re up to…’

I had known that some communication was possible with the interior of the Cordon; it was no great surprise to find Frank expecting me. I had always had a vague idea that as soon as I found Frank I would blurt it all out to him – even the deeper truth of my mission, the blood and the lie – and rely on his judgement and strength of character, rely on his help.

But now that I was here, walking through this Cordon of his, with its patrolling Martians and stashed cars and so forth, I found myself peculiarly uneasy. In France I had lived in a country under occupation, and I had seen how individual lives and choices were distorted by that brute fact, how society itself was pulled out of shape. These were uneasy, nebulous thoughts – they made me uncomfortable even with Frank – but the upshot was that I decided to keep the secret of my true mission a little longer, until I understood what I had walked into.

We turned a corner, and came upon a tumbled cart with broken wheel, and the skeleton of a horse, the mighty bones jumbled in the traces. The bones had been picked clean; there was no smell, and it was a rather abstract sight.

Frank pointed. ‘You can see the leg that got broken, and the bullet-hole in the skull where the driver put the animal out of its misery.’

Ted looked at him. ‘What of human remains?’

‘You come across some,’ Frank said. ‘In the ditches, in abandoned houses we break into for supplies – all under the mandate of the Vigilance Committee, you understand. We bury them decently. The Vicar at Abbotsdale comes out to say the words, and he keeps a note of names and dates, if they’re known. Usually it’s starvation and sickness that takes them… If it’s the Martians, you see, there’s no trace left. Come along – not far now – soon we’ll be seeing our farmed fields.’

18 THE POTATO FIELDS

We came to a stream. The road crossed this by a small stone bridge, and here we stood and stared, curiously. The water was a mere trickle, and it ran over a bed that was choked with dense crimson vegetation.

‘I remember this red stuff from ’07,’ I said.

‘I think we all do,’ Ted Lane said. ‘The red weed… But I thought that got killed off with the Martians.’

‘So it did, last time,’ Frank said. ‘The Martians seem to have found a way to make the stuff immune to whatever earthly cankers did for it before, just as they evidently toughened up their own blood. Now here it is, surging into life wherever there’s open water, or even heavy ground if the water table is high…’

Curious, I clambered down from the bridge for a closer look. I stood in mud that gave under my boots, and the weed sprawled and flourished around me. In that English stream bed I saw fronds and vesicles and stems and what seemed to be seed pods, all in that rich crimson, a deeper red than blood. In form it was reminiscent of cactus plants, with bulbous, prickly lobes sprouting from deep root systems.

Much speculation had been vented on this biological novelty since the fall of the Martians in ’07. Lankester of the Natural History Museum, for example, opined that a cactus-like morphology was what one might expect to be characteristic of an arid world like Mars, where plants must extract and conserve what little water is available: digging deep with long roots, storing the treasure in vessels with leathery skins defiant of evaporation, and with prickles to drive off thirsty Martian animals – or humanoids. Now, not for the first time in my life, I discovered that comforting theories are one thing, but the reality of the alien, close to, is quite another, for the strangeness seems to drive out the analysis.

And certainly the weed seemed to have more about it than merely being niggardly of water. It was vigorous stuff. When I crouched for a closer look, I could see it growing. I mean that literally, I could see the leaves stretch and spread, the air blisters grow. How to describe that eerie development? It was like watching an accelerated film, perhaps. It did not fit with my experiences of earthly life; it was faster than the imperceptible growth and movement of the vegetable world, slower than the fast oxygen-fuelled motions of the animal. Something in between.

‘Unearthly,’ I said aloud.

‘Indeed,’ Frank replied. He reached down a hand. ‘You’d better come out of there.’

When I stood up, I felt oddly giddy, I gasped for breath, and was grateful for his hand as I stepped back up onto the bridge.

Frank said, ‘It’s different when you see it on the ground, isn’t it? The Vicar I mentioned fancies himself as something of a naturalist. Once he collected beetles, he told me.’

I smiled, though I still felt queasy. ‘A follower of Darwin, then.’

‘Now he has widened his field of study. Where the Martian plants grow, he says, the red creepers and the weed, our native flora and fauna cannot compete. The green plants that once colonised this river bed, and on land the earthworms and the ladybirds and the flies and the spiders, and the birds who used to feed on them – all dying back. We are seeing extinction in action, he says. He references a French fellow named Cuvier, which means little to me. For all the strutting of the fighting-machines and the sinister shadows of their flyers, this is the real stranglehold that Mars is imposing on the earth.’

I took deep breaths. ‘And the air? Why is it I feel as if I’ve run an Olympic steeplechase?’

‘I’ve done some study on that myself, after my surgery was plagued by patients who complained of breathlessness after working the river-bed fields.’

‘What river-bed fields?’

Ted Lane looked down the shallow valley of this stream. ‘Perhaps like those.’

Glancing that way, I made out a number of figures toiling in the mud or the shallow water, perhaps a quarter-mile away. I thought some were soldiers, from the baggy clothes they wore and a faint sense of discipline about them – and the fact that one or two of their number did not work but strolled about watching the work of others, as NCOs and officers will. But there were other, more enigmatic forms among them – different sorts of people, I thought, a taller, slender sort, and a squat, hunched-over variety whose bent backs appeared to bristle with hair. The oddest thing about those fellows, dimly glimpsed from a distance, was that they didn’t seem to be wearing clothes at all… Curiosity sparked in me, even as a lingering sense of unreality deepened. After the tunnel, the whole day was like a dream.

Frank was still speaking, rather dully, of the changes in the air. ‘I’m no scientist, but I’ve done some simple tests. Schoolboy chemistry stuff – you know. Over the weed, where it is densest anyhow, the composition of the air differs from the norm of the atmosphere. I suspect the Martian plants are in fact removing the dominant components of our air, that is the nitrogen and oxygen, leaving an apparent excess of the rest: water vapour and carbon dioxide and so on. Also I suspect there’s a higher concentration of argon – as Rayleigh determined, argon is the next significant component in our air – but I’d need a more sophisticated chemistry set than I’ve been able to scramble together to establish that.

‘It’s a steady sequestration. I believe the nitrogen and oxygen are being fixed in some compound in the weeds’ root system, deep underground, just as some of our own plants will fix nitrogen. Whatever other purpose the weed serves – and both sorts of Martian folk can eat the weed, even if we can’t – it’s a pretty efficient air extractor! And if you imagine that action scaled up to a field, or a few acres, or square miles…’

I looked at him. ‘Martian folk? Both sorts? What Martian folk?’

Frank pointed downstream to the working party. ‘Let me show you.’

We made our way in that direction.

Of course it was the soldiers Ted was most interested in speaking to, and never mind Martian exotica; we had to take a short detour and meet them. And of all the sights I might have expected to see in this confiscated corner of England, I would never have guessed at German soldiers tending potatoes.

It was all rather gentlemanly. One of the chaps strolling around inspecting the others’ work turned out to be senior, though like the rest he wore a shapeless straw hat, shirtsleeves, and trousers with braces. As Frank introduced us he shook my hand, and Ted Lane’s. ‘Newcomers, eh? Welcome to the madhouse. I’m Bob Fairfield, Lieutenant-Colonel if it makes a difference any more.’ He eyed me with open speculation, and my dusty state, and I wondered what he knew of my mission – ether the cover story or the true purpose. Uneasily I began to realise that I had no idea who I could trust here.

Ted, meanwhile, stood to attention and snapped out a salute. ‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Oh, at ease, Sergeant.’ Fairfield glanced at his toiling troops, earthing up rows of potato plants with rusty spades, who looked upon us with a kind of resentful curiosity. ‘Two years it’s been since the great Martian curtain came down and trapped us all in here. We must keep up discipline; I’ve always been convinced it’s the best way for the men – and as you can see, there’s plenty of work to be done. After two years we’ve long since exhausted the bully beef and beans we brought with us, and we must make do with what we can grow. I can always use an enthusiastic NCO, if you’re up for it.’

Ted glared at the privates, who looked back at him, mudstreaked and sweating and resentful. Ted grinned. ‘It’ll be a pleasure, sir.’

‘Meanwhile let me introduce you to my colleague. I’m sure it’s well known outside that a number of Germans, fighting alongside us against the Martians, were trapped in here too. Damn good allies they were during the battle, and damn good companions they’ve proved in this big green prison camp. Their most senior officer is a Feldwebelleutnant Schwesig. Let’s see if I can find him…’

They strolled off among the toiling men. Beyond this riverbottom field I could clearly see those others that I had seen before, the tall skinny ones, the squat hairy ones.

Frank was more interested in the potatoes. ‘Actually it was my idea. Or rather Mildred Tritton’s, and I took it to Fairfield and the rest.’

‘Mildred?’

‘Local farmer. Absolute brick; you’ll meet her soon enough. We tried to get ourselves organised from the beginning, you know. The loss of the electricity and the telephones hit us on the first night; grub was the issue by the end of the first week. So we dug old ploughshares and the like out from the back of barns, and set to work opening up fields that hadn’t been ploughed for twenty or thirty years. All back-breaking labour without machinery, of course, and we had a lack of horses too, but we got it done, and the soldier boys were a pool of muscle that needed application. We resurrected other old skills as the months went by. We had to mend our clothes because we couldn’t buy new. Some of the old dears remembered local cottage industries like straw-plaiting, and now you’ll see English privates in straw hats like Chinese coolies. As for medicine, we’ve had drops of supplies of antibiotics and various drugs, and splints and bandages and the like. Anyhow that was how we got through the first year, with stores, and hard work, and good will.’

‘And the Martians just let you do all this? Play Old MacDonald at the feet of the fighting-machines?’

He gave me an oddly furtive look – a look I would quickly come to recognise in the Cordon. ‘If they’re certain we are doing them no harm they let us be. We’re survivors, Julie. Not warriors.’

‘I’m not here to judge, Frank.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘And what of the potatoes in the river bed?’

‘A challenge of the second year. Just when we were getting somewhere with the field clearances and such, the rivers started drying up. Look – you can see how the Martian weed is choking the stream, using up all the surface water. Bad news for us and our animals, of course.

‘But look at the river-bed mud that’s exposed. That we can use. Heavy river-bottom mud, when it dries a bit, is perfect growing ground for potatoes. We had to be cautious, because it meant coming close to the skinnies where they worked at the red weed, in the rivers.’

‘The skinnies?’

He looked at me. ‘The humanoids. From the Martian cylinders.’

‘I remember, from ’07…’

‘All we found last time was drained corpses. This time—’

Despite my overwrought state, this news evoked wonder. ‘Alive? Men from Mars?’

‘Not men. And not just from Mars, either, it seems.’

I had to see for myself. Boldly, I walked down the river course, past the soldiers, towards those toiling others.

Others. They plucked and dragged and gathered the red weed, the leaves and sacs and pods and cactus-like growths, leaving the deeper roots intact. Much of this harvest they lay out on the river bank, as if to dry it. Some of it they tucked into their mouths, munching placidly as they worked.

I had not concentrated on the task; some queer dread in me recoiled from looking too hard at those performing it. Now I made myself face them.

There were two sorts, both basically human – or humanoid, to use that odd, distancing word. The two kinds kept to their own groups.

One kind were tall, skinny indeed – taller than me at six feet or more, with odd round heads and big eyes over small faces, and pinched mouths; their faces were oddly babyish. Naked they were, and all but sexless, the males with shrunken organs, the females breasts that were almost flat. Many wore bandages of a crude kind on their legs and arms – even, in one case, a splinted arm. Nude, pale, hairless, they looked fragile, and the work, light as it was, seemed an effort for them. They seemed quite incurious about me and Frank, and the sweating soldiers just yards away.

‘They all seem to be adults,’ I remarked to Frank, in a whisper – oddly I felt shy before these creatures even as I gawped at them.

‘Yes, but there have been children born here,’ he said. ‘Since the landings in ’20, I mean. They’ve been glimpsed. Of course we’ve had a few human babies too… That one,’ he pointed at one female, ‘appears to be carrying. Shows quickly on such an attenuated frame.’

‘Many of them are injured.’

He nodded. ‘Their bones are brittle, as you’d expect – meant for a lighter gravity than ours. They evidently have medicine of a sort, but it’s crude. I’ve seen them at it. As if to set an arm is a habit so old it has become a matter of instinct, like a bird building a nest – not knowledge, or learning. D’ye see? I’d like to know if their skeletons are of the same siliceous sort discovered in the debris of the ’07 landings. Of course none survived that trip, consumed en route between planets; we only found the remains, drained of blood. While this stock—’

‘Are here to breed.’

‘Yes. So we see a Martian ecology being established on the earth, Julie. There is the red weed; the humanoids consume that as our cattle consume the grass; and, just as we in turn consume the cattle—’

I shuddered. ‘Do you think they understand how they are being used?’

‘Perhaps. But so much of what they do seems instinctive, as I said; perhaps they have been slaves so long—’

‘Natural selection has shaped them to the fate.’

‘It may be,’ he said bleakly.

As I watched the Martian humanoids toil I wondered if this was the future for Abbotsdale – for all humanity. Would we too evolve into slavery, until we forgot the slavery itself?

‘But those others,’ Frank said, walking on, ‘do not seem so adapted to their indenture.’

He meant the other sort of humanoids – perhaps a dozen of them, as there were a dozen of the skinny sort. These were shorter – not very short, they wouldn’t have seemed out of place from that point of view in the poorer districts of London – and where the skin of the tall ones had been pale to the point of translucent, these were brownish, under a thick coat of body hair. Where the others’ eyes seemed too large for the day and they turned habitually from the sun, these had small black eyes, and I would see them blunder into each other, as if the bright light of an English May day was not sufficient for them. And while they did not seem as stocky as a human, their bones not as robust, they were certainly heavier than the tall ones.

‘Barely adapted at all,’ Frank said. ‘As if they have been newly acquired.’

‘Newly? What do you mean?’

‘Well, look at them,’ he said gently. ‘The tall ones are from Mars – I think we can agree to that. So they are suited to the lower gravity and the dimness of the more remote sun.’

‘Big eyes and fragile bones.’

‘That’s it. Whereas this new lot, of which specimens were not retrieved from the ’07 wrecks, seem adapted to a brighter daylight than ours, and a gravity that may be only a little lighter than our own, not as weak as the one-third of Mars. And that coat of body hair—’

‘It almost looks aquatic.’

‘My thought exactly,’ he said. ‘Like a water mammal, an otter or a seal.’

‘Not much water on Mars.’

‘No. But I don’t think this lot are from Mars. It’s a miracle they are able to subsist on the red weed, as the skinny ones do – or perhaps that’s just another example of the Martians’ biological manipulation.’

These toiling others, the hair on their legs caked in mud, looked back at us with a kind of furtive boldness. And I thought I heard them mutter to each other in an odd, high-pitched, almost gurgling sing-song. It occurred to me that I had not heard the tall humanoids utter a word to each other, and did not even know if they were capable of it; perhaps language had been bred out of them too by their monstrous masters.

‘Then if not from Mars – where, Frank?’

‘They’re from Venus,’ Frank said flatly. ‘The Martians went to that planet, and brought them here to the earth. I think they’re from Venus, Julie. Here in England!’

19 A DINNER PARTY

On arrival at Abbotsdale the first order of business was to organise transport to rescue our party of stranded sappers. Horses and carts were briskly dispatched; Ted Lane rode back with them.

Abbotsdale, meanwhile, I quickly discovered, was an odd place. Well, how could it not be?

I thought I could read the pre-Martian history of the village, such as it was, in the ruin of an ancient abbey that had no doubt given the place its name, a manor house, two venerable farmhouses which might have been eighteenth-century, and a couple of lanes of cottages built on what had been common land until only a few decades back – the cottages, I learned, had once housed brickmakers who had worked on the common, and whose trade was now being eagerly researched and recovered – and a scattering of more modern houses built here for commuting businessmen, as a kind of backwash from the nearby railway line. Sprinkle the dish with a couple of pubs, a school in ugly London brick, and a brace of nineteenth-century churches faced with flint, the architectural motif of the area, and you had a typical village of middle England of the time and the place.

Save that now Abbotsdale was a Martian colony. You could see it in the red weed that had infiltrated even into the heart of the village, and climbed all over one of the old churches like some gruesome ivy.

And, I thought from the off, you could see it in the faces of the people trapped there.

Frank had been given permission to move into one of the old cottages by the common, the middle one of a terrace – it was actually called ‘The Brickmaker’s Cottage’ – and he quickly sorted out spare rooms for myself and Ted Lane to sleep in.

I unpacked such gear as I had in my small pack. Frank found a sensible trouser suit for me, borrowed from a fellow villager, which almost fit. There was no running water – the wells in the village, long abandoned, had been laboriously dug out, but you had to pump it up. I put my clothes in to soak. I felt I could have enjoyed a long, deep, hot bath myself to soak out the concrete dust, the traces of cordite, the scent of blood and fear. But there wasn’t enough hot water. I found the domestic routine oddly comforting, reassuring. Fragments of normality, assembling themselves around me after the vast shock of Ben Gray’s terrible death, and all the rest.

There was no power, of course, no electric light, but the evening was mild, and light enough that a candle’s glow was sufficient for me to see to brush my hair before dinner. Dinner, yes! For that evening we newcomers were been invited to sup in the home of Mildred Tritton.

I was shown briefly around Mildred’s farmhouse. It was more than comfortable, I found, having shrugged off the loss of modern amenities like electricity and gas that had arrived so recently in its own long history; there was a big kitchen range, for instance, greedily burning wood. One room had been given over as a local library, where what books the villagers had had about them when the Cordon came down were brought and shared, with an accounts book as a kind of ledger of loans. Beside a bookshelf I found a Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin within which was stored mail; I was to learn that there were fairly regular aerial drops of mail into the Cordon – and, indeed, of Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits.

There was quite a guest list for dinner, I learned as we sat down: a mayor or two, a priel of town councillors, a senior bobby with his jacket unbuttoned, the Vicar whose broken spectacles had been fixed by a bit of tape, Frank who had become the local doctor. Bob Fairfield German friend, the Feldwebelleutnant already forgotten – local potentates all. The most significant absentees, with places set for them at the farmhouse’s long table, were the Dowager Lady Bonneville, lady of the manor, but she sent a boy with a note to say that her gout was troubling her, and the postmaster, a fellow called Cattermole, who sent no note, and whose empty place, I noticed, went unremarked.

The meal was a kind of buffet, essentially cold meat – rabbit – and potatoes, washed down with a couple of bottles of the village’s diminishing communal stock of wine, and there was some chatter about how a Zepp might be persuaded to drop a crate or two to replenish the cellars – but none of that Teutonic hock, thank you! – and our tame German soldier laughed politely. But anyhow the consensus seemed to be that if any luxury were to be dropped it ought to be cigarettes; the lack of tobacco was a persistent theme of the conversation.

The guests talked business of a sort, of progress on various communal projects. I spoke a little to Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield. He was interested in details of the Trench and other military works, of which he had heard by wireless, but none of which, of course, he had seen for himself, having been stranded inside the Cordon since the day the Martians had landed.

Ted Lane seemed to be doing all right in this company. His Mersey accent alone was a curiosity here. For myself I felt oddly bewildered, oddly out of place – as if none of this was real – as if the only reality, in fact, was that peculiarly empty place at the table where the postmaster should have been sitting.

At dessert, Mrs Tritton somewhat bossily rearranged our seating places to mix up the conversation, and I found myself was there with his whose name I had sitting next to the hostess herself, as I struggled to fork down stewed summer fruit.

There had been mention of a blood bank which Frank was maintaining with the help of his friend Verity Bliss, who turned out to be a VAD. ‘Now Mrs Tritton brought this up. ‘You must call by in the morning, my dear,’ she told me. ‘We all make our donations – you get such a feeling of satisfaction to know you may help save someone’s life…

‘You’ll find things aren’t so bad here – well, I suppose you’re as stuck here as the rest of us, aren’t you? I was surprised how many of the soldiers are the urban sort – maybe I should have expected it. They have had trouble fitting in. Some of them, you know, they’ve seen men killed, but slaughter a sheep or a cow in front of them… Of course we have these Martians stomping around. Oddly, they seem to be amused to watch the soldiers when they drill, as if we’re clever animals. Like trained monkeys…

‘And it’s still England, of course. In some ways it’s been something of a pleasure to discard some of the new ways and go back to our roots. There’s no government interference – no income tax! And with no foreign imports we’ve been thrown back on the way it was for our grandfathers. Why, we’ll probably start speaking the old dialect again…’

As Mildred rambled on in this way, and as I half-listened to other conversations at the table, I gathered glimpses of life within the Cordon. There was a regular trickle of suicides; not everyone was so jolly, it seemed, as these dinner-party guests. There could be visitors, some welcome – like doctors, parachuted in from outside or sent through the Trench as I had come – and some not. There had even been adventurers, mostly from overseas, out to ‘bag a Martian’ as one might bag a lion in the Congo. They were rarely seen again. And crime and punishment, ever necessary, was run on a ‘common sense’ basis, according to Mildred, in the absence of the usual ‘chain of command’ of the police and the courts. Later I heard of a case of a man, a would-be rapist, left staked out for the Martians. I had no way of verifying the story; it struck me as authentic… ‘Do you hunt?’

The non sequitur threw me; I had no chance to reply. ‘You must come,’ she said. ‘Especially in the winter. There’s nothing like it. You’re up in the morning mists, and off on the gallop. The cries of the hounds echoing, and then the hard riding, the eager horse under you – and then back home, hot and exercised, for a bath, a nap, and an evening of convivial conversation at a decent dinner party…’ She seemed lost in memories. Then she grinned. ‘Better than life as a clerk in some office, eh?’

As soon as I could I made my apologies, pleading tiredness – which was half the truth, at least.

But Frank caught me on the way out. ‘Well, now you’ve met the Vigilance Committee, or most of ‘em.’

‘Local worthies, all self-selected. Not much democracy, I imagine?’

‘Somebody has to do it, Julie. Implement the rationing, for instance. There were cases of cannibalism, you know, in the aftermath of the First War. Can’t have that. Oh! I recognise that expression. I can see your scepticism. Typical reaction from you, Julie! I can’t admit there aren’t a few of us who don’t enjoy the chance to lord it over the rest. I’m just doing my best. But you must try to fit in.’

‘“Fit in”?’

And he urged me to visit Verity in the morning for my blood donation; she had been given the use of one of the pubs to run the operation, for it had a cool cellar.

‘A blood bank,’ I said mildly. ‘I’m surprised it’s a priority in a population as small as this. It’s not a war zone – not an active one…’

He mumbled something about needing to cope with infrequent but traumatic injuries, then rather stumbled to a halt. Maybe he saw the suspicions gathering in my head before I was sure of them myself. ‘Just do it,’ he said, more harshly. ‘It’s rather the rule. We have to live with these people, Julie. We have no choice.’

‘I need to see Albert Cook,’ I said bluntly. ‘Frank, it’s vitally important.’

‘So is survival.’ And he returned to the party.

20 VERITY BLISS

The next morning I called early at the blood bank pub, the White Hart – open for business in the legal hours, a sign claimed, but no beer!

Verity Bliss was there, opening up and giving the step a perfunctory sweep. She wore a kind of coverall, sturdy and practical in drab green, perhaps a farm worker’s garment. Her hair was cut even shorter than mine.

She eyed me frankly. I introduced myself, offered a hand which was shaken.

She said, ‘Your ex-husband told me you were here – warned me you might be coming to see me.’ She smiled, but it was a wary expression. ‘He said I needed to drag you from your bed if you didn’t volunteer.’

‘I thought it was expected. What one does in this village.’

She looked at me openly. I immediately sensed there was a communication between us, under the surface. ‘Look – no matter what our blessed Vigilance Committee says, whether you donate or not is up to you.’

‘Why don’t you show me this blood bank?’

She thought that over, and nodded.

The pub’s cellar was reached by a trapdoor and shallow wooden steps; Verity turned on an oil lamp which gave flickering light. With walls of flint, and I guessed that the use of those glistening nodules here was a sign of age and not affectation, the place was indeed cool, even in midsummer. Much of the space was given over to racks that looked as if they might have once held wine bottles. Now they held flasks, slim, tall – each about the size of a wine bottle, in fact, but without the neck – and fashioned of a silvery metal.

I plucked one from the shelf and hefted it. ‘Heavier than it looks.’

‘Aluminium. Each holds more than a pint of blood.’

I glanced around. ‘There must be hundreds here.’

‘There’s more in other stores. Army issue, for battlefield use, left behind like the soldiers when the Cordon came down. They are derived from Martian technology; they are like Dewar flasks of an advanced kind – based on systems they used to store humanoid blood in their space cylinders.’ She took the flask from me and turned it, showing a scribbled date, identity of donor, blood type. ‘We’re careful how we store it, and use it.’

I looked at her in the dim light. ‘My brother said all this blood is needed in case of traumatic accidents. Happens a lot around here, does it?’

She said frankly, ‘What do you think?’

‘And how often must people donate, to build up such a store from such a small community? Once a month? More frequently?’

‘Depends on the age of the donor, their health—’

‘What happened to Mr Cattermole?’

‘Who? Oh, the postmaster. Don’t know him very well. What about him?’

‘He didn’t show up for dinner last night. His place was set; he sent no message. Next time – is this how it works? – there won’t be a place set for him at all.’

We were eye to eye. She hesitated, then said at last, ‘You’re seeing it quicker than most.’

‘The Martians must feed,’ I said gently.

‘Yes.’

‘How does it work?’

‘They come among us and they – pluck – as you may pluck a strawberry as you cross a field, and pop it in your mouth. You can run and hide, but—’

‘You can’t outrun a fighting-machine.’

‘That’s it.’

‘And the blood?’

‘It was Frank’s idea, actually. That’s what they’re after, in the end. If we see them come, if we leave a stack of the donations in their way, it can distract them. Not always—’

‘I imagine they prefer the fresh stuff. They did bring living humanoids in their cylinders, to top up their stored supply.’

‘Yes,’ she said. She looked away, as if ashamed. ‘We’ve worked out a kind of mode of living, you see – there’s a certain rationality to it, for a live human can produce a pint of blood a month forever, if you keep her alive, and I sense the Martians understand that – it’s not communication, exactly—’

‘You’re cooperating with them.’ I had snapped; I was moved to touch her arm. ‘I didn’t mean to be harsh. You do what you must to survive.’

‘Yes. And the blood store has saved lives.’

‘But this place,’ I said. ‘The village. Mildred Tritton spoke to me last night of fox-hunting! As if—’

‘I know.’

‘They’re too damn comfortable. Even Frank, perhaps – compromised,at least.’

She faced me squarely. ‘Will you give the blood?’

I thought about it, thought about what coursed in my veins. Perhaps one donation would be enough to complete my mission, if the Martians took my blood as part of this grisly propitiation.

But I found I was not ready. I found I was not ready to commit that dread act, not yet.

And I was deeply reluctant to participate, even dishonestly, in Frank’s scheme of submission to the Martian lords. My head was in a spin. I was reminded of France, in a way – of the compromise of occupation, of men who betrayed their own brothers to save themselves, of women I knew who had gone with German soldiers for the sake of a handful of military rations. This, though, a blood sacrifice – a literal one – so that one could go on living at the feet of the Martians – and Frank was complicit in it. Well, he was a doctor, not a soldier; he had to heal those before him. But – fox hunting! Somehow I did not feel I could confide in him, about my deeper mission, any of it.

I looked at Verity. ‘We just met. But I feel as if I can trust you more than my own ex-husband.’

She shrugged. ‘Frank’s a good man. But that’s families for you.’

‘Have you heard of a man called Albert Cook?’

She pulled a face. ‘Everyone’s heard of him.’

‘Do you know how I could find him?’

‘No.’

‘Very well. Are there franc-tireurs?’

She stared back at me.

‘I mean, those who resist—’

‘I know what it means,’ she snapped. ‘Yes.’

‘I need to find them, I think.’

She was immediately suspicious. She had survived in this place two years; she had a right to suspicion. ‘Why do you need to find franc-tireurs?’

‘I have a mission.’

And I told Verity Bliss a partial truth. I told her of my cover mission, the wretched drawings by Walter, the scheme to make a meaningful contact with the Martians, one lot of sapient beings talking to another – Walter’s wistful project so cynically subverted by Eden and those who commanded him. I told nothing of the deeper truth, though I suspected I would be asking this woman to risk a great deal for me, and guilt stabbed even as I told these lies of omission.

‘Will you help me?’

She hesitated a long time before answering. Then she said, ‘There is a man called Marriott. I’ll see what I can do.’

21 A BICYCLE RIDE

She set up a meeting with ‘Marriott’ by the end of the day. ‘How did you manage that?’

‘Would you believe carrier pigeons? The Martians aren’t aware of them.’

I wasn’t sure I did believe it. This was a countryside full of secrets.

We set off the next day. I had no idea if we would return to Abbotsdale or not. I took the practical clothes I had travelled here in, complete with military-issue boots, and my rucksack with some essentials, and Walter’s leather satchel tucked under my jacket. Verity took a small bag with a few essentials, and a kind of belt containing basic medical gear, for use on campaign. I felt guilty not to tell Ted Lane I was going, but this was my mission, not his.

As for not telling Frank – I was ambivalent. Put it like that. I did not entirely disrespect his position here, but it would not have been mine. We were divorced, you will remember all; we had differences of character profound enough for that.

We cycled, Verity Bliss and I, on the back roads and the lanes, that sunny spring morning. It was a Sunday, and I heard distant church bells; evidently these, and the flocking of the human sheep to their services, did not disturb the Martians. But I remembered Albert Cook’s bleak prophecy, as recorded in Walter’s Narrative, of how in the domain of the Martians we would live in cages ‘full of psalms and hymns and piety’.

The exercise did me good, I think, a loosener after days of sterner travel, and the horror of the tunnels which still haunted me. But even in the bright daylight, with the birds singing as they had, I suppose, for a million years, in such a countryside on such spring days, Verity kept a wary eye out, and I learned to also.

‘You’d think a ruddy great fighting-machine would be an obvious landmark,’ she said. ‘That you would see them before they see you. Not necessarily. It’s motion that catches your eye, and when they’re not moving they can have an eerie stillness about them. You might see a slender form from the corner of your eye; you think it a steeple, a flagpole, a wireless mast. No!’

‘Mars is said to be a dusty world, and far from the sun so the light is dim,’ I said. ‘To come to a world like this – to a day like this – must be a glory of light and colour.’

‘Or a dazzle, as a ski run is for us. Perhaps they wear sunglasses. Ha! That would be a sight to see.’

Verity said that the Martians generally didn’t interfere with cyclists, not identifying that most democratic of vehicles with war-making capabilities. ‘One can hardly carry a field gun on a safety cycle. Best not to go too fast, however. Speed seems to be another trigger for their attention.’

‘Not much chance of that,’ I said, gasping as we came to yet another rise.

‘They are motivated to keep us alive, the Martians. Most of us anyhow. That is the horrible price we pay. But that latitude gives us an opportunity, just a chink. We must move around, we must do things – we must farm to feed ourselves and gather fuel to keep warm, and so forth. And we can use that freedom to move to serve our own purposes.’ She tapped her temple. ‘No matter how acute a Martian’s eyes, he cannot see inside here, can he?’

In the end, we found Marriott by lunch time.

Having set off from one inn in Abbotsdale, Verity brought me to another, set on the crest of a hill on the road that runs south out of Amersham towards Wycombe. I thought it had been a coaching inn once; like many of the older buildings in the area, the inns and the churches, it was walled with flint nodules. I could see where a sign-board had been smashed off its bracket.

Outside, two men sat on a bench, lounging in the sun, dressed in grimy work clothes and flat caps, and with tankards on the bench at their sides. As we rode up the hill, they called out bawdy encouragement. ‘Can you make it, love? Look at those thighs a-pumpin’, Toby! You need a hand?’ And they made lewd grasping motions with their fingers.

Verity glanced at me. ‘Ignore them.’

I shrugged. But I saw that the liquid in the tankards was clear, like water; whatever they were drinking wasn’t beer.

I took in the countryside. We were remarkably close to the heart of the Martian occupation here. From this height I could even glimpse the periphery of the Redoubt, the big main pit they had dug into the ruins of Amersham. It was a brown scar visible beyond the spring greenery. This was to our north-east as I saw it; to the north-west I made out an extensive but shallow flood from which trees and field boundaries and a few buildings protruded, running up a valley away from the Martian camp. I imagined the Martians’ rough earthworks had damaged the local drainage, and such floods must be common.

As we dismounted the two men outside the inn got to their feet, staggering a bit, and comically doffed their caps to us. They were perhaps thirty, I thought, both tough-looking, their hair crudely cut and dirt smeared around their necks, and if their manner was drunken their eyes were oddly clear. Something wasn’t right about them, I could see that.

One of them approached me. ‘Welcome to the Flyin’ Fox, missus. I’m Jeff and he’s Toby.’

The other sniggered. ‘No, you clown, I’m Jeff and you’re Toby.’

‘I’ll give you a hand with yon jalopy.’ He made a grab with his left hand for my handlebars – and with his right for my backside. ‘Oops!’

Palm had barely made contact with buttock before I had got hold of his index finger, swivelled around, twisted the finger and forced him down on one knee, his arm bent backwards.

‘Ow! Pax! Pax! I didn’t mean no ’arm!’

Verity said calmly, ‘I think you can let him go, Julie.’ I saw that she’d set her bicycle on its stand, and stood with her jacket pulled back to reveal a glimpse of the service revolver in its holster at her waist.

The other man stood with his hands raised. ‘Let’s all calm down.’ The country burr was still there but the drunken slur was gone.

I gave my miscreant’s finger one last vicious twist, then let him go.

He got to his feet shaking his hand and tucking it under his armpit. ‘I didn’t mean no ’arm. Just keeping watch and playing a part, is all.’

‘“Playing a part”? Thought so.’ I got hold of one of the tankards and poured the clear liquid onto the ground. ‘Pure water? Even an idiot like you can’t get drunk on water – Jeff, or Toby.’

‘Neither,’ he snarled, ‘and you don’t need to know.’

Verity let her jacket drop. ‘It’s all cover, Julie, in case the Martians are watching.’

‘That’s it,’ said my assailant. ‘They got used to seeing us drunk, see, at a place like this. Rolling around and even laughing at ’em, when they come and stand over us. So long as you stay out of reach of them tentacles and nets… I don’t suppose they’s so smart as to be able to tell a true drunk from a faker.’

‘Got carried away in the performance, did you?’

‘What’s wrong with that? And where did you learn to ’urt a man like that?’

‘Paris, if you must know. I was caught up in the flight from London in the last lot, the First War, with my sister-in-law. We had to fight our way past men like you. After the War I learned how to look after myself properly.’

‘Didn’t mean no ’arm—’

‘You deserved what you got,’ Verity snapped. ‘Now, Marriott’s expecting us.’ She pushed past the men and led me without further ado into the cool shadows of the inn.

22 ‘MARRIOTT’

The man we knew only as ‘Marriott’ was in the inn’s cellar. The Martians, of course, knew or cared nothing of human names, but I suppose the secrecy that surrounds such operations becomes a habit.

He was dark of complexion and dark haired, short, perhaps fifty, and he had a pronounced London accent. He poured us tea, made with hot water from a Dewar flask.

The cellar, which smelled faintly of damp, was lit by smoky candles that looked home-made, and most of it was taken up by the clutter you might have expected: stands with empty beer barrels, pipes and tubes, cartons and kegs, and a few bottles of spirit on a rack. But there were a few incongruous items: a stack of rifles, boxes of ammunition – even what looked like a machine gun. Maps had been pinned to the walls: good quality, ordnance survey. These had been extensively marked up in pencil, red and white, and stretches had been shaded blue, marking the flooded areas perhaps. And there was a kind of wireless receiver, on a side table by one wall.

Marriott sat in an office chair at a desk wide and handsome – a desk that had no place down here – we sat on stools that must once have graced the bar above. There were papers heaped up on the desk, held in place with paperweights of flint.

‘I’m sorry about the lads,’ Marriott said when Verity briefly recounted our welcome. ‘All part of the cover, of course.’ He waved a hand. ‘You can see why an inn is so useful. Even the Martians know that people come to such places at all hours. And an inn has a cellar, like this one, where we can get up to all sorts of mischief out of the Martians’ sight. But it’s all fakery upstairs, as – what did they give their names as?’

‘Jeff and Toby.’ Verity seemed restless; she got up from her stool and roamed around, peering to see the maps in the dim light, to read labelling on the boxes and crates.

‘That’ll do,’ Marriott said. ‘But we ran out of beer on the second or third night. Ha! Didn’t take us long to drink the place dry. And of course we don’t have power or even running water. But we get by.’ He grinned, self-satisfied in his little underground kingdom.

I was quickly deciding that I did not like this man, no matter how brave he proved to be, how noble his motives. With the aim of puncturing him a little, I ignored this speech and turned to Verity. ‘How did you get in contact with these characters?’

‘They approached me,’ she murmured. ‘Wish I could read these labels better… Since the first days, when Abbotsdale and its folk settled down to a routine, I have always felt – restless.’

‘It’s a foul business,’ Marriott said, pushing his way back into the conversation. ‘Living as we do with the Martians, and accepting – sacrifices. Better than the alternative, I suppose, when the Martians just swoop down like something out of Bram Stoker and take a fellow. But still it’s all a brutal affair, and a daily demonstration of our humiliation. Yes, humiliation.’

‘Hence this operation,’ I said.

He beamed his pride. ‘It’s not much for now, although as it happens we have something of a spectacular planned for tomorrow. But one does what one can. And, yes, we’re always on the look-out for new recruits. One gets a sense – a certain look – if a person isn’t content to be one of the cattle.’

‘Which is how you spotted Verity.’

‘That’s it.’

Verity was inspecting a revolver. ‘I imagine much of this is a relic of the first days of the invasion.’

‘Mostly from what the Army units trapped inside the Cordon had with them – there’s a lot more out there, you can imagine, in one cache or another. That’s where the ammo comes from too, most of it. They’ve tried air drops from the outside—’

‘The Martians shoot them down,’ Verity told me. ‘They seem to be able to tell when there’s weapons or ammunition and such.

They let through drops of medicines and clothes and food – most of the time, anyhow; they seem to err on the side of caution. These crates – it is dynamite, isn’t it?’

‘Not military – there was a store here before for quarrying and demolition and such-like. Even the farmers used the odd stick to clear deep tree roots, I’m told.’ He grinned. ‘We’ve been quietly spiriting the stuff here since the invasion.’

Verity frowned. ‘Which was over two years ago.’ She looked at the crates, again trying to read the labels.

‘Think this stack is a lot? We’ve got more of it stashed all over, right up against the walls of the pits in some cases. We had a quarryman on the team, and he showed us how to lay the charges so you get the result you want. Like sculpture, he described it, like sculpting the landscape, the very earth, and we all listened to him.’

‘Hmm,’ Verity said. ‘And did he train you on how to keep dynamite?’

He ignored her. ‘All we need is the word.’

‘You seem to have got organised quickly,’ I said, at the risk of flattering Marriott.

‘That we did. And that was all thanks to Captain Tolchard – an Army man, among those who got stuck here. Older chap he was, in his fifties; but he’d had some training in franc-tireur methods, back when they were still organising in case of an invasion by the Germans. Hard to think how it used to be, ain’t it? All the things we were scared of that never came to pass, save for the biggest thing of all. Anyhow he got things organised sharpish so we could resist the Martians instead. He made sure we got the weapons and so on squirreled away fast. And he found a lot of willing followers; many of us had been in the Fyrd or had served before.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Who, Tolchard? Taken by the Martians, would you believe.

Just bad luck, that’s all. I saw him myself, a man like Tolchard he fought the Boers, you know – running like a rat before the catcher, just like a rat, before he got scooped up by one of those tentacle things—’

‘So now you’re in charge.’

‘For my sins. I was in the Fyrd myself, a second lieutenant.’

‘What did you do for a living?’

‘Bank manager, in Cheapside. Branch of the London & Country.’ He stroked his desk. ‘Was out this way for a drive in the country, just a few days out was the plan, never been here before, this part of the world. Since my wife died, well, I hadn’t been out much, but it was set to be a fine few days. And then the Martians came, and that was that – I was stuck. Just luck, really.’

‘A bank manager, though.’

‘Not much need for those skills in here! But I got this desk from a branch in Great Missenden – well, it was going to waste.

Got to have a good environment to work in, you know.’ He tapped his head. ‘Lots of planning to be done, and somebody’s got to do it.’

Verity said, ‘Those boxes of dynamite… These came from Somerset West, I can see that much, which is a factory in South Africa. I’m no expert, Marriott, but I’ve been around soldiers for the last two years – I can’t find a date, but the boxes look weathered– they must be a good deal older than two years – do you turn these boxes?’

He waved a hand and said sternly, ‘I have professional soldiers in this cadre and I leave all that to them, and I’d recommend you do the same.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Perhaps you should come over here and sit down with your friend, and tell me what it was you wanted of me.’

She was clearly infuriated to be so patronised, and seemed reluctant to give up her pressing about the dynamite, but she nodded. ‘Tell him, Julie.’

‘I need to find Albert Cook.’

He scowled. ‘That traitor.’

‘Look, it doesn’t matter why. The Abbotsdale folk have got their heads down. But you must know where Cook is. It’s evident you have a wider knowledge of the country.’ I got up and walked around the desk to the big maps stuck to the wall behind him. The light was dim, but I could make out the names and places on the big, highly detailed ordnance maps. ‘We got these maps parachuted in special,’ he said with some pride.

I pointed. ‘Here’s Amersham – here’s Abbotsdale – here we

are.’ The Cordon itself, the Martians’ devastated perimeter, was a thick circular band shaded with pencil. ‘And these red spots—’

‘The subsidiary pits, as we think of them. Where the cylinders came down away from the Cordon at the edge, and away from the Redoubt, the big central group at Amersham.’ I had not seen maps of the occupied zone as detailed as this, but it was reminiscent of patterns I had seen before, in Berlin.

Just as Walter had in Berlin with his old map of Surrey and London, now with the forefinger of my right hand, following the inner pit markers, I traced one loop, two, in a scrawled clockwise spiral, an integrated pattern that must have been twenty miles across, all contained within the dark band of the Cordon. It was, I saw, the same pattern Walter had discerned in the Surrey landings of ’07, and on much the same scale. I asked Marriot, ‘And these lines you’ve marked that connect the pits—’

‘Canals, we call ’em, but that’s our joke – Martians, see – they’re digging gullies between the pits. No water in ’em, however. No idea what they’re for.’

But I saw, inspecting his maps; the Martians were connecting their impact scars with lines and loops to make a sigil of just the kind Walter had discerned in the ’07 landscape, and had predicted now. He was right.

Marriott got out of his chair and stood by me; he smelled faintly of cigar smoke and body odour. ‘Yes, we know this landscape very well, after two years.’

Verity said, ‘And you’ve had the word, have you? You mentioned a “spectacular”coming up tomorrow.’

‘A particular opportunity we spotted. There’s a kind of flood, a dam the Martians created for themselves, where a small charge might do a lot of damage – yes, we’ve had the go-ahead to try it. Don’t do anything without orders, we’re soldiers in here and not a rabble, just as Captain Tolchard left us.’

I broke in, ‘Look – all I’m interested in is Cook. Do you know where he is or not?’

I could see pride and caution war in the man’s small face.

‘Yes,’ he conceded at last. ‘Yes, I know where he is. Tell you something. He’s no friend to mankind, that I can see – from what’s said of him. But at least he’s his own man, I suppose.’ Verity said, ‘Unlike the folk at Abbotsdale, you mean.’

‘Yes – not just sitting around, munching on home-grown spuds and ordering people about. Here,if you’re comfortable, if you’re well fed, what with the government and the rest cut out of the picture – it suits some folk, doesn’t it? So what if every now and then one of you disappears, plucked as if by some choosy god?’

I faced Marriott. ‘I’m asking again. Will you help me find Cook?’

‘Tell you what – help us tomorrow, and the day after that we’ll get you to Cook. How does that sound?’

I exchanged a glance with Verity. We had no right to demand, I saw. ‘Very well. But help you how? Shall we lug a few boxes of dynamite for you? As Jeff or Toby found out earlier, we’re stronger than we look.’

But Verity put her hand on my arm. ‘No,’ she said firmly.

‘Let’s leave that to the experts.’

23 WITH THE FRANC-TIREURS OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE

We spent a not uncomfortable night at the inn. We two had to share an upstairs room that must once have been let out to travellers; it had its own wash stand, though the taps did not run, and there was a chamber pot under the bed. I slept well enough.

Oddly, in this period of my life I rarely had trouble sleeping.

It was as if I had grown weary of being afraid, if you can imagine it. I saw it in my mother, when she knew she was dying of a lung condition. Nobody can be afraid all the time; it recedes to the back of your head, and your awareness fills up with the stuff of the mundane world, of the day. Besides, the bit of exercise I had had on the bicycle that day had helped wear me out. It is odd that veterans of those years often speak nostalgically of the cleanness of the English air, with human industry all but shut down across swathes of the southern counties.

In the morning, I woke relieved to find that nobody from Abbotsdale had tracked us down – not Frank, not Ted Lane. The scheme was still on, then. Over a breakfast of rabbit and potato, washed down with a decent nettle tea, we learned of Marriott’s plan – and we found that during the night he’d revised it, to include our active participation.

He brought up his maps from the cellar to the inn’s lounge to show us. In fact I had already glimpsed the scene of the action which Marriott indicated now; it was that flooded area I had seen to the west of Amersham. Marriott’s pale bank manager’s finger traced the lines on the map. ‘This is the course of the Misbourne. Very minor, as rivers go; it rises in Great Missenden, here, and flows east-south-east down the valley through the old part of Amersham, and eventually it joins the Colne near the Western Avenue bridge, here. Or it used to.

When the Martians came down on Amersham, all unknowing, they created a kind of dam with the earth their landings threw up.’

I remarked, ‘And we know that the Martians are rather innocent regarding water, which is a lesser element on their world, and long mastered.’

‘You’re right. That’s the intelligence.’ Marriott indicated a pencil shading. ‘The extent comes and goes with the rain and the seasons, but the result of the damming has been a flood, a permanent one, which has reached right back up the valley of the Misbourne, to beyond Little Missenden, here. And here is where the accidental dam lies right across the old river course.’

This was at a village called Mantles Green, near the junction of the Wycombe road, on which our inn stood, and the main road that ran through that part of Amersham towards Uxbridge. Verity nodded. ‘I get it. And that’s where you plan to plant your dynamite.’

‘Not I, but my men… We’ll smash the dam. As you say, Miss Elphinstone, the Martians are innocents when it comes to wild water. That dam has trapped behind it a great weight of water – which has, of course, three times the weight it would have on Mars. I am sure they do not realise the implication, which is why they have left their accidental blockage unguarded and without any deliberate reinforcement. Even though, downstream, squatting in the ruins of Amersham and sprawling east towards Little Chalfont, you have the Martians’ citadel – their headquarters in England, as far as anybody can tell.’ Verity nodded. ‘I can see why you’ve had the approval to proceed. You could indeed do a lot of damage to the Martians,’

and she glanced at ‘Toby’ and ‘Jeff’, ‘while risking not much.’ One of the fellows, the one who had grabbed me, looked offended; the other, a more cheerful sort, blew her a kiss. Marriott said, ‘The Martians are suspicious of any moving vehicle, we know that. But if you take it calm they might not go at you straight away, at least. Which is where you two might be useful.’

Verity snorted. ‘As cover?’

‘Well, it seems to be a fact that the Martians can distinguish between men and women…’

That was true enough, and a puzzle to the scientists who pointed to the sexlessness of the Martians themselves. ‘And they seem to know that an attack is more likely to come from a body of men than of women, or a mixed group.

You’ll be two couples out for a joy ride, you see? Might buy us that bit more time. Especially if you act a bit merry, full of champagne, like…’

That was the scheme. As Marriott went over details with his men, Verity drew me aside.

I murmured, ‘Seems to me we can’t honourably refuse. Not if we want them to help us with Cook. And it’s not actually a bad idea.’

Verity, with more military experience than me, was more sceptical. ‘True. But, stringing along with this pack of idiots, a bank manager and a couple of lecherous pot-men – we’ll do well to get out of this with our skins in one piece. Most likely the only harm we’ll do to the Martians will be if they split their sides laughing at us… Do Martians laugh?’

‘Scientific opinion is divided,’ I said with mock gravity. ‘I’m worried about that dynamite too. Look, just follow my lead…’

Within half an hour they had the cars ready – two of them. And what cars they were! I had been impressed by the Rolls with which Frank had picked me up after my passage under the perimeter. Now I recognised a recent-model Mercedes, and another Rolls, a Silver Ghost. But both these cars had been disfigured by having slabs of iron or steel welded and strapped to the body work, and the front windows had been knocked out and replaced by more steel plate with a fine slit for the driver to see through. And I could see that a box of dynamite had been stashed in the trunk of the Rolls.

Needless to say all three of the men looked inordinately pleased as we looked upon these toys.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Marriott said, almost bashfully. ‘What a way to treat these lovely cars! Especially the Ghost. We had to cut up a lot of old boilers to get the plate for all this.’

Verity snorted. ‘Why bother? The Heat-Ray would cut through this lot in a second.’

‘Ah, but that’s a second more than you’d have otherwise. We go whizzing by the fighting-machines, at their very feet.’ He mimed driving, wrenching at the wheel. ‘The Martians fire the beam – sizzle! We take a lick, but live to fight another day, or another minute anyhow, and the armour has done its job. Whiz!

Sizzle!’

He was a bank manager, standing in the morning sunshine, playing at soldiers like a small boy. But I was not one to mock him for it, for, even if he wasn’t riding with us, he was showing more pluck than anybody I had met inside the Cordon, aside from Verity.

He said now, ‘You’d be better to ride with Jeff in the Rolls.’

By ‘Jeff’ he meant the bottom-pincher. ‘You’ll see the Merc has a lot of clutter in the back. We hope to make a gun turret that will rotate, for the Maxim, you see—’

‘We’ll ride in the Merc,’ Verity said firmly.

‘Are you sure? But—’

‘The Mercedes.’

Marriott shrugged, and instructed his men.

We shook hands one last time, and with some feeling. Then we clambered into our respective vehicles, Toby driving the Merc in the lead, with myself and Verity riding in the car with him, and Jeff in the Rolls following behind with its cargo of dynamite. It was this accidental disposition which would save my life and Verity’s – that and her foresight.

So we set off.

It was a surreal journey, the first half-mile or so, that drive along an empty road through a deceptively peaceful scrap of English countryside. The roofs had been left open, so that any passing Martian could make out we innocent holiday-makers, and at least we got the sunlight. But the very smell of the car’s interior was unusual, the customary fragrance of an expensive, well-valeted car, of polished leather and carpet cleaner, replaced by a more industrial stench of welded steel, and the tang of cordite. I fretted a little that we had had to leave behind most of our few belongings in the inn – though Verity had her small first-aid pack at her waist, and her revolver tucked into the back of her trousers. And I had Walter’s messages tucked safe in a pocket of my jacket.

We hadn’t even reached the flood water before it all began to unravel.

Toby saw it first. ‘Martian!’ he hissed.

We could all see the fighting-machine, striding boldly over the open country ahead of us, off to the north-west. It was the sheerest bad luck; he must have been coming back from a patrol, and happened upon us. But there was no doubt he saw us; he immediately increased his speed, using that strange loose-limbed gait to bowl along across the green towards us.

Toby immediately slammed his pedal to the floor, and the car lurched forward. ‘Only chance is to get there before him,’ he shouted. ‘If we get those charges laid – even if we just throw the crate out of the Rolls –’

Verity and I shared a glance of horror; this sounded like foolhardy madness to us. Better to abandon the car and take cover in a ditch than this flight towards our enemy! But we had no choice in the matter; we were not behind the wheel. And, glancing back, I saw that Jeff in the Rolls was following us, indeed more than matching our pace.

So we tore down the hill, and now I could see ahead of us the rough earthwork of the Martians’ accidental dam, a mound two years old and thick with the bulbous growths of the red weed. The water behind, stretching off to our left up the valley, deceptively placid, was itself Martian and earth life mixed choked with red and green, together. I saw no Martians moving there, and had lost sight of the fighting-machine that had spotted us.

But he had not lost sight of us.

I thought I heard a crack like an electric spark, smelled an electric tang – perhaps I smelled the plasma that the Heat-Ray makes of the air as it passes through. That was how close it came, but it missed us, by a fraction. The Heat-Ray’s range is measured in miles, but its targeting is a matter of machinery, not miracles; even the Martians could miss.

That errant bolt of energy had, however, slammed into the road surface behind us. I glanced back and saw a crater, bits of tarmac and bedrock still cart-wheeling in the air – and the Rolls following, with Jeff inside his box of steel, about to tumble into that new pit, with the dynamite crate in the back.

Verity yelled, ‘Hold on!’ And she ducked down, her arms over her head.

We pieced it together later. Verity had always known the danger, but had despaired of getting through to Marriott when we spoke to him in his cellar. Later guilt racked her, but that’s all hindsight; he would not have listened.

Dynamite is not stable. It is three parts in four nitroglycerine, which is itself a strong explosive. Over time the dynamite will ‘sweat’; it leaks its nitroglycerine, which will gather in the bottom of a containing box. That was why Verity had asked Marriott if he turned his boxes; an old hand will turn such a store repeatedly. Worse, the nitroglycerine can crystallise on the outside of the dynamite sticks, leaving the whole assemblage still more sensitive to shock or friction. Most manufacturers will tell you that dynamite has a shelf life of no more than a year, under good storage conditions. In that cellar Verity had found boxes at least two years old and probably more; and the storage conditions were anything but proper.

She told me later that even before the operation at the dam, if Marriott and his lumpen assistants had ever dropped a crate in that cellar – I watched the Rolls tip into the crater – My memory of what followed is not clear.

The blast swept along the road and lifted up our car like a toy. I remember even in that instant a flash of concern about our driver Toby, but we worked out later that he, crumpled in the wreck of the car, must have been dead in an instant.

And Verity and I were both thrown through the roof and out into the air, and bumped and banged as we flew helplessly in that cloud of debris. We both came down in the flood water lucky!

I hit the water with a hard slap, and my fall was cushioned by the bed of vegetation which lay beneath the murky surface, some of it green and yellow, the colours of earth, much of it that ugly crimson that is the palette of Mars. At first I did not struggle. Bewildered, I suppose shocked, I almost welcomed the softness of the swollen vesicles and thick leaves under me, as if I was being cupped in some vast hand. I could see the surface above me, the sun’s distorted figure – and even then I thought I saw the slim form of the fighting-machine, looking down on me through the air with a dispassionate calm, as a biologist might look at a tadpole wriggling in a pond. I took a breath, or tried to – I suppose the air had been knocked out of me by the detonation – and the water was like a cold soup pushing into my throat, dense, suffocating, and now fear sparked, and at last I fought.

My chest convulsed, but I could not empty myself of the water, and only dragged in more. I struggled against the grip of the red weed, but as in a nightmare the harder I fought the tighter it gripped me.

I stopped fighting. I was going to die there – I knew it for a certainty. I tried to relax, to submit. I remember that I did not pray, and nor did memories and regrets flood me, as I have been told is common in such situations – instead I hoped only that the pain would be brief.

And then I saw him before me.

Him – he looked human, despite the sleek hair that coated his nude body, and the webbing that stretched between the fingers of the hands that reached for me, and the bubbles of air that leaked from the flaps of skin at the side of his throat – were they gills? And, though the hair covered his groin, his chest, yet I knew, somehow, he was male. He descended before me, upright in the water, swimming with the merest flick of his hands, his webbed feet. Even then I thought I saw a glint of gold at his chest: a cross shape – a crucifix?

He took my face in his hands – cold fingers.

And he kissed me. I felt his lips on mine – cold again – and then air, thick, hot, poured into my mouth. It made me cough, and the liquid pulsed up out of me, into his own mouth; but somehow he kept those lips locked onto mine while I heaved and convulsed. Meanwhile I was aware of his strong hands pulling away the weed that bound me, frond by frond.

Suddenly I was free. He grabbed me under the armpits, flicked his feet once, and, with his lips still locked onto mine, we surged up into the light and the air, and I knew no more.

24 AN AWAKENING

As I drifted upwards to consciousness, just as I had been lifted into the light from the murky flood, the world as it formed around me seemed normal, familiar: I was in a room with a door, windows. I woke in a bed, to the sound of rain on a roof. In the distance, thunder – not guns, not the detonations that accompanied a Martian advance, just a storm. But I clung to sleep, and the absence of responsibility.

When I woke again the light was brighter but softer. Still the rain hissed, but the thunder was gone, the storm passed over. I became aware now that I was in an unfamiliar nightgown, all frills and tucks and more ornamental than comfortable, and that the sheets in which I lay were rather musty.

I turned over, and saw a figure sitting by the window, looking out. ‘Verity?’

She turned, smiling. ‘You’re awake. You turned once or twice, and muttered. I didn’t want to disturb you. No, stay there.’ She came across, and I saw that she had one arm strapped against her body by a clumsily applied bandage. The first aid kit she had worn at her belt was open on a bedside table, amid dusty clutter: a clock that looked as if it hadn’t worked since the nineteenth century, ugly ornaments, faded photographs in a silver frame. She pressed a hand to my forehead, stuck a thermometer in my mouth, took my pulse, and listened to my chest with a lightweight stethoscope. Then she handed me a glass of water, which I drank gratefully. ‘Don’t worry, it’s fresh – I set buckets out in the rain.’

‘I should be nursing you.’ My throat was scratchy, my voice hoarse when I spoke, and there was a vague ache about my chest. ‘What’s that, a broken arm?’

‘I managed to crack a bone, but you were the one who was underwater. If not for the Cytherean who saved you—’

I remembered the incident in a flash now. ‘Yes. He – was it a he?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘A Cytherean?’

‘A man from Venus. That’s what the educated types are calling them. I heard as much from the BBC, on a crystal set.’

‘Almost an angelic figure, he seemed, in all that murk.’ Another shard of memory. ‘And he wore a crucifix, Verity!’

She smiled. ‘Yes. Seems to be something of a fad among them. I blame the Vicar at Abbotsdale. They are semi-aquatic creatures – well, that’s obvious. Ideally suited to serve as swimming-pool lifeguards, I should think.’ She touched her bad arm with her other hand, wincing. ‘Not so cute when it comes to fixing broken bones, however. After all our skeletal structures vary – it seems that the very fabrics of our bones differ.’

She was right about that. Studies on ’07 specimens had already shown that on Mars the humanoids have siliceous skeletons, perhaps because silicon is one of the most common elements in the rock and dust of that arid surface. By contrast the Cythereans’ bone structure has a reliance on strong forms of carbon – long molecules, which give the bones a kind of springiness. Not so optimised for walking upright in heavy gravity, but ideal if you’re flipping away through the water like a seal.

‘The Cythereans have their own medicinal remedies, which involve a lot of licking and chewing and packing in mud. But I wasn’t so confident that all that would work on my busted fin. So I resorted to more familiar techniques, a splint, a bandage. I had Charlie set the bone for me.’

‘Charlie?’

‘The fellow who saved you – the one with the crucifix. I have a feeling he’s spent more time with humans than some of the others.’

‘Why “Charlie”?’

She grinned. ‘No doubt he has a name among his own kind. I called him for Charles Daniels, who won all those swimming medals in the ’04 Olympics – do you remember? Perhaps not; the Games were in St Louis, and my sister and I travelled over with our father for a summer jaunt—’

‘You had that humanoid set your arm?’

‘It was rough handling, I admit. As if a bright orangutan did it – more strength than kindness. But he got the idea – they are more bright than the great apes, if less so than humans – and once it was set the pain eased and I was able to fix a splint and bandage.’

‘Good grief, Verity, it would have been bad enough if those buffoons from the inn had had to do it.’

‘Both of them are dead now,’ she said simply. ‘The explosion – the dynamite – do you remember? You’ve been out for more than twenty-four hours.’

I glanced at the grey skies visible through the window. ‘Long enough for a change in the weather.’ I did remember, but not clearly; the jigsaw was jumbled in my head and we would piece together the sequence of events, as I have set it down here, later. ‘People from Venus, though!’

She smiled. ‘Even given the fix we’re in – marvellous, isn’t it? Would you like to see them?’ She stood up. ‘It’s about time for a late lunch. We’ve fallen on our feet with this house. It was evidently abandoned when the Misbourne flood rose – we’re on a sort of island here, as you’ll see. There’s a fair stock of tinned meat and such in the pantries, and we’ve the rainwater to drink, so that’s safe. I stoked a fire in the living room so there’s hot water, and I rinsed out your clothes – they should be dry by now… Would you like me to help you to the bathroom? I have had to keep you clean already, of course. Don’t be shy! I am a nurse – well, sort of…’

I slept again, woke again.

Once fully awake, or so I thought, I fretted about time. After all, as Walter had warned me, the next opposition was due in the summer – the next wave of Martian cylinders might already be in space. Surely I needed to complete my mission before the landings. But I had no idea of the present date, let alone when the Martians might fall.

I got out of bed, a little groggily, and hunted for a calendar. No luck, but there was a diary, and I flicked through its pages, ignoring spidery elderly-lady notes about nieces’ birthdays and the anniversaries of various dead relatives, trying to think it through. How would Walter have worked it out? You had the opposition, the closest approach of the planets, in June, and the landings, if they happened at all, would be three weeks and a day before that… But when was the opposition, exactly? I thought it was June 10, but I wasn’t sure. And what was today, what was the date?… There was nothing in the room, no wireless set, that might let me find out.

I started to feel ill again, faint. I made my way back to my bed, determined to ask Verity for the date when I awoke again. But I forgot, I forgot.

I woke once more, nagged by another anxiety. I got out of bed and rummaged through my stuff until I found, sitting on a dresser, Walter’s drawings in their leather packet, which had proven waterproof as well as robust; they were safe. I slept again.

25 THE VILLA OF THE CYTHEREANS

I woke again, later in the day, feeling much refreshed.

It was a relief to shed a nightgown that felt as if it had recently been used by a lady several decades older than me, to climb out of sheets so musty that the dust I raised when I turned over started me sneezing. But I can’t blame Verity for not trying to change a bed for me with her broken arm – and, it seems, her ‘Cythereans’, while willing to help, would not venture into the house. And it was a relief to wash, with Verity’s help, to dress in my own clothes.

Then I sat with her on a small veranda, gulping down Indian tea we found in a sealed caddy – delicious treat! – and corned beef and tinned peaches. The veranda itself, a paved area bounded by waist-high pillars and a couple of concrete lions, was the kind of pretentious but unremarkable feature you might have associated with such a property, a late addition to what I judged to have been originally some kind of gatehouse or lodge for a larger estate.

The whole was quite ordinary – or would have been if not for the Misbourne flood. On our doors and walls you could see the stains of surges, and you could smell a kind of rotting dampness throughout the house, the carpets and rugs uniformly mouldy. But the house was set on a slight rise, as many old properties are, so that when the flood had risen much of the house itself was left on an island, set in a shallow lake from which protruded hedgerows and telegraph poles, and the upper floors of other, less favoured properties. It was a strange, wistful, oddly peaceful scene, as if from a romance of some distant future when our civilisation had decayed and its remnants were slowly subsiding into a life-choked marsh.

But the colours of that landscape were odd – peculiarly Martian, as it turned out. The open water was uniformly choked by the red weed, which spread across its surface as would water lilies, while the ground, relatively uncolonised, retained the green of the earth, of the grass and the trees. Red lakes and oceans, green continents: just as the astronomers tell us they see of Mars.

And if the landscape was unearthly, so were its inhabitants. As we sat there, for the rest of that day and into the evening, with faded blankets on our laps, eating tinned fruit and drinking tea, Verity and I watched the Cythereans at play. They would swim languidly, or rest, rolling on their backs with their hairy bellies tipped up to the clouds. And then they would dart away, flashing down into the water and emerging with a mouthful of the red weed. It was evident to me immediately that they had the power and quickness and acuity of senses of the natural hunter, but there was nothing palatable for them to hunt in the murky waters of the earth. Only the red weed, which had been brought with them in the cylinders from Mars, would fill their stomachs. But, oh! – what a sight it was to see those lean bodies flash through the water, so very like seals when they were swimming, but with those eerily human faces on their sleek, streamlined heads. The young, too, for there were a handful of those, darted with abandon, and when their tiny forms surfaced with some prize from their play-hunting, a vole or a halfdrowned rat, they would laugh with glee and clap their hands, and the two of us clapped with them – they were very like human children. When they rested they would gather in small groups, in couples or bands of three or four. The children would snuggle with their parents, or they would clamber up on their backs and bellies; the very smallest suckled at their mothers’ small breasts, and with teeth sharp enough for the hunting that must have nipped painfully. I was tempted to label these groups as families, but the experts will tell you that one should not anthropomorphise. Those who have not seen Cythereans in the wild cannot know how graceful they are in their unfettered, uncontained state – how elegant at play. And if I use the word ‘play’, it is because that is how they seemed to me, with every motion, every gentle interaction having a sense of fun, just as you will see with otters and seals and perhaps dolphins, the intelligent aquatic mammals of the earth.

Verity, having been a prisoner in the Cordon for two years, knew far more about her fellow captives than I did – and, of course, more than anybody else outside the Cordon. In the years since we have had time to study the Cythereans more fully, both in the wild and in captivity (in those nations where the imprisonment of evidently intelligent beings as laboratory specimens is tolerated), and it is the Swedish physical-chemist Arrhenius who has led a multidisciplinary study into the nature of these creatures, and of their origins.

To begin with, we can be sure that the ‘Cythereans’ we saw in the Cordon were indeed from Venus. The most convincing evidence for me is the anatomical. The strength of a Cytherean’s skeleton is only a little less than a human’s, thus evidently adapted to Venus’s marginally lighter gravity. By comparison the skeletal structure of the Martian humanoids, adapted to a gravity of a third of earth’s, is enfeebled to the point of delicate. Nature makes us no more robust than we need to be. Meanwhile Venus is closer to the sun, and the brilliance of the daylight seems reflected in the smallness of the Cytherean eye, and a certain resistance of the skin to the sun’s rays. Conversely again, Mars is half as far again from the sun as the earth. To us, Mars would be twilit; the Martian humanoids have big receptive eyes and are easily dazzled.

(The commonality of the hominid form across the worlds remains a puzzle, by the way. Some argue for a convergence of form to similar environments, just as a dolphin, a seabound mammal, has come to resemble a shark, which is a fish. Others posit older migrations, long preceding the Martians to the earth; perhaps the Jovians – or even the inhabitants of lesser but still older worlds, Saturn or Uranus or Neptune – have visited our young planets before, and left a kind of imprint of design. But the deeper differences, even of the use of different structural materials for the skeletons, seems to argue against that. A wistful mystery! Are we interplanetary cousins, or not?)

Venus, according to Arrhenius, is warm and dripping wet: a world of swamps, full of water in the sky, on the land. It is not a world so much as a vast lagoon. The surface temperature is probably twenty or thirty degrees hotter than the Congo, and the humidity six times the earth’s. This heat creates immense stacked clouds, piling up miles above the surface and laden with water vapour. We cannot see through the clouds to the surface of the world, and the Cythereans can never see the stars. But Venus is a bright world; the sky must shine uniformly when it is day.

The Cythereans are ideally adapted to their world. Their aquatic modifications are more than superficial – more than the webbed fingers and toes, the neatly streamlined coat of hair. They have strong voluminous lungs which can store air even when collapsed under the pressure of a weight of deep water. They have gills, which I had observed on my first encounter with Charlie. And, more subtly yet, they have three hearts, one to circulate the blood around the body and two supplementary organs which keep the blood flowing through the gills, where oxygen is extracted from the water to feed the blood. I am told the octopus on the earth has a similar adaptation.

So thick is Venus’s cloud bank that the heat must be spread uniformly from equator to pole – and, say some of Arrhenius’s followers, so must the vegetation types be uniform. On a world without geographic or seasonal variation, evolutionary innovation, they say, must be deterred. Venus may be a world of simpler, duller types than our own – fern swamps inhabited by slow-moving herbivores, perhaps, across a changeless world. But others point to the evident intelligence of the Cythereans themselves – they are perhaps as intelligent as Neanderthal Man, some have opined. They are hunters and tool-makers, though the latter behaviour is inhibited by the available raw material; on Venus, stones that might have made Mousterian hand-axes are buried beneath miles of rotting vegetation in the swamp. Some commentators have suggested that they are essentially aesthetes: their intellect focused not on the striving that characterises humanity, but on the sheer athletic pleasure of the swim, and the competition and company of others.

Stapledon has even speculated that, so fecund and moist and warm is Venus, there may be other varieties of Cythereans, on scraps of dry land in that watery sphere perhaps, or even flying in the clouds, which are thick and dense and perhaps rich with aerial game – and if so, those happy flyers may have been beyond the reach of the Martian hunters when they came.

However, as I was to observe myself, some characteristics of the Cythereans’ behaviour and their physical adaptations are reminiscent not of hunters but of prey animals. Their pregnancies are brief compared to ours; the babies emerge active and alert and fast-growing – ready to swim, and flee the predators attracted by the scent of birthing fluid, perhaps. And then there is the fear they will sometimes display before manifestations of the large: they will cower from Zeppelins, flee even from the shadows of gasometers. Perhaps great beasts like tyrannosaurs or Owen’s pliosaurs patrol the swampy lands and oceans of that world. And perhaps it has been fear and flight that has driven their evolution to intelligence, rather than aggression: a need for cooperation with each other, perhaps, as was so evident in my brief witnessing of them.

Certainly the Cythereans became prey when the Martians invaded.

As Verity pointed out, ‘Of course every adult Cytherean on the earth must have been brought by the Martians in their cylinders. Can you see how many of them are wounded? The fur hides it unless it’s a grievous injury, but there are lumps and contusions and badly healed scars, and some have their ears bitten, or even fingers missing: injuries they brought with them from the cylinders – so we think, anyhow.’

‘Injuries inflicted by the Martians?’

‘Perhaps not directly.’ She faced me. ‘Imagine how it was! The Martian humanoids seem shaped by their slavery – they seem to have evolved to its conditions, so long have they been suppressed. Not so the Cythereans, squat, strong, stocky, and used to freedom – and with a will to live. If you were in that pen on the cylinder, suspended in interplanetary space – when the Martians came to bring out the next one for the crew’s supper treat – would you not fight to survive? The battles in the dark of space, to stay at the back of the pack, must have been brutal and desperate.’

‘Even so, some evidently lived to reach the earth.’

‘And perhaps that was the plan all along,’ Verity said. ‘The Cythereans probably have a better chance of surviving on our earth than the spindlier Martian humanoids. So they have been released, to breed and for the hunting in the future.’

I smiled. ‘Like rabbits in Australia.’

‘That’s the idea.’ She looked out at the Cythereans at play. ‘But it’s to be hoped that they don’t prove as much of a pest as the rabbits, or the prospects for them on this earth – well, they won’t get much of a welcome.’

As the light of day slowly faded, the cubs napped, snuggling against their mothers. And the adults started pairing off. It was an unplanned process, a languid swimming to and fro, a matter of jostling, nudging with the nose, a caress with a webbed hand. Then, not yards from their neighbours – and within full sight of us – the coupling began. The most basic method was face to face in the water, with the male and female clinging to each others’ upper torsos to give anchorage, while the male thrust and the female pushed back. Sometimes they would go front to back, the male on top, the female’s face lifted above the water so she could breathe noisily, and with an absent expression on her small face. And sometimes, before or after, even instead of a full coupling, they would play, exploring with their hands and mouths.

I dared not look at Verity.

She laughed at me. ‘You get used to the sight. They are quite without shame.’

‘Are we to regard them as animals, then, for all their cleverness? Animals have no shame because they can’t conceive of it.’

‘Not animals. They have a kind of language, you know – you hear it in the night sometimes when the world is quiet, a kind of continuous babbling, like a brook. Perhaps it’s just that they haven’t had thousands of years of priests telling them that their bodies and their natural functions are sinful.’

‘And what of Charlie’s crucifix?’

‘As I said, you can thank the Vicar at Abbotsdale for that,’ she murmured. ‘He has become rather obsessed by such speculations. Are the Cythereans fallen, or not, as we are? And what of the Martians? Was there a Martian Messiah, a Cytherean Christ? Or must the message of our Jesus, Christ the Man, be taken to these other worlds? Not trivial questions, you will agree. So the Vicar tried to engage with the Cythereans on that topic. I saw him wade out into the muck of a mill-pond to give Charlie that crucifix! He liked the sparkly bauble, I suppose.’ She looked out at the water, the shadowy shapes still gently paired, and winked at me. ‘Between us, I think our good Vicar was rather too interested in the Cythereans’ healthy sexuality than is good for him. Come on, I’m exhausted just watching them…’

Exhausted perhaps, but I was also charmed. I admit that I always felt a certain repulsion at the sight of a Martian humanoid – not so much from the physical form as the evidently evolved abjectness of the race. The Cythereans were new to that game, and in them I saw something of the Noble Savage, I thought. But that is only my partial and prejudiced perception. The Cythereans were animals – people– with a cultural and biological heritage of their own, indeed as the Martians had once been, and had no need of my approval. But I offer these reflections honestly, for what they are worth.

We returned to the house. We banked down the stove on which we’d boiled the rainwater for our tea, and made our toilet, and retired to bed.

I think I slept well enough, once again. I don’t recall that we’d made any specific plans for the next day. We had food enough, even tea, and we were both getting over the trauma of our arrival, and myself the strain of the days of travel even before that. I think we had vaguely intended to stay at least a day or two, to gather our strength and plot our next step – which would have involved getting off the island and out of the Misbourne flood, for a start.

Whatever we had intended, it never came to pass. For we were both woken in the small hours by the Cythereans’ unearthly screams.

26 A HARVESTING

In our borrowed night gowns, we met in the gloom of the landing.

Verity said, ‘You heard it.’

‘Yes. We dress and leave.’

‘Agreed.’

I hurried back to my room. Last night, lucky for me, I had been compos mentis enough to lay out my travelling clothes, a bag to hand mostly packed – it was a shoulder bag I had found, for I had left my beloved rucksack in Marriott’s inn. I threw on my clothes, crammed the rest of my gear into the bag, pulled on my boots, and even so I was out later than Verity, despite her broken arm.

We hurried downstairs and through the kitchen – even in that moment of peril I snatched the tea caddy from the table and shoved it in my pocket – and we emerged on our veranda, where we had spent the last evening. This faced west, and the sky was clear, still grey before the dawn light came, and the swampy flood water lay before us, its surface eerily still where the red weed lay on it in great lily-like sheets. And not a sight of the Cythereans, and their screams were no longer to be heard. It was as if they had never existed.

‘Gone!’ I said. ‘But I suppose they had even less packing to do than us—’

‘No.’ She pointed with her good arm, into the murk. ‘Look! There’s one.’

I saw a swimming form, just under the surface, darting with remarkable speed and with scarcely a visible motion of hands or feet. This figure raced towards us, and then reared up out of the water, droplets spraying all around. I saw that it was Charlie, the crucifix still sparkling on his chest, just as before. Even as he rose he yelled, a weird ululation, and, in mid-air at the peak of his leap, he tapped his temple with his fist, and pointed beyond us, pointed to the east. Then he flopped on his back, hit the water, and vanished.

‘Head,’ Verity murmured. ‘He was trying to say – head. He’s warning us. For that is the Cythereans’ word for—’

Then the long shadow cast by the dawn light swept over us, and I saw its detail spread across the mere in front of me: the peculiar shape of the cowl, the three long legs, the blunt gun, the dangling net within which something squirmed.

Head. What is a Martian, but a disembodied head? The Cythereans had it right, I thought. And they had it right to flee.

Now the fighting-machine itself rose up above the house, gaunt and black against the dawn sky. We could only stand and stare. It was in a mood for collecting rather than killing, I saw; people had already been gathered up into its net where they lay like so many fishes, one on top of the other, some lying passive, others struggling, pulling at the net as if to climb out of there or to rip it open. I could hear their voices, sobs and cries and yells of rage, from high in the air, faint.

And now I saw there was another net, dangling below the hood itself a hundred feet in the air, just below the seat of the controlling Martian. Not a feature I recognised from previous images of the fighting-machines, it looked like a lobe of spittle, from a drooling mouth.

I had a hunch about that second net. I tried to hold my nerve as the thing bent towards us, and one long tentacle uncoiled from the hood, metallic, glinting, supple, like no mechanical device made by human hands.

Verity raged, ‘Stupid! Lazy! I’ve been here long enough to know. We should have kept watch, as the Cythereans must have; we should have taken it in turns. Well, no point running now. Unless you’d prefer the Heat-Ray to the exsanguination—’

I grabbed her hand. ‘No. Wait,.’

The tentacle descended further, as the Martian machine bent down with a kind of eerie grace; top-heavy as it was, it never looked like toppling. That tentacle! It was only yards over our heads now. I could see the rings that made up its articulated structure, the gaps between; there were faint puffs of green smoke as it reached for us. Its sinuous gestures looked almost tender.

And I peered again at that lesser net that dangled from the hood. Now was the time to throw the dice. I yelled, as loud as I could, ‘Cook! Albert Cook!’

Verity stared at me, astonished.

‘Albert Cook!’

The tentacle stopped, ten fighting-machine itself seemed feet above our skulls. The frozen. Even those already caught in its net seemed distracted now; I saw them shift and squirm, curiosity working – and perhaps they had a grain of hope, which my calls did not deserve to evoke.

That second net, the spittle-drop, began to descend, silently, smoothly, on a lengthening cable. Soon I could see that a single man rode in it, and not cast in like a landed fish; he sat in a cushioned seat, like the pilot of a biplane in his cockpit. He wore peculiar garments, what looked like an expensive leather coat, a white wig like a judge’s, and a heavy gold medallion like a mayor’s around his neck.

As he came closer, he could see my face, and I could see his.

‘You!’ I said.

‘You!’ said the artilleryman.

27 A FIGHTING-MACHINE’S PILOT

‘What are you doing ’ere?’

I shouted up, ‘I might ask you the same question.’ Verity must have been as terrified as I was to be so close to the Martian machine – feet away! And up close, as anyone with experience of active Martian technology will tell you, there was an ineffable sense of life about it, even though at rest it was more still than any living thing. Yet Verity stood there with one hand on hip, her bad arm in its sling, defiant. ‘Julie, aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?’

Cook glared down at her. ‘Don’t get lippy with me. I know you. You’re with that crew at Abbotsdale, aren’t you?’

‘What if I am?’

‘You want to be more respectful. Or else, the next time I’m a striding across the country on my fine steed ’ere, I might attract ’is attention to you, rather than make ’im look the other way.’

‘I don’t believe you have that much control – though you’ve evidently sold your soul for that seat.’

He shrugged; he seemed genuinely indifferent to that barb. ‘Believe as you like. You, though,’ and he turned again on me. ‘I ’aven’t seen you since –when was it? That dead astronomer’s gaff, before the cylinders started falling again. Came to find me, did you?’

‘Yes,’ I said bluntly, and that layer of truth held up, at least. ‘I’ve got a message.’

‘Who for?’

‘The Martians. You evidently have some kind of – relationship with them.’

He grinned at that. ‘Well, given as ’ow they ’aven’t killed me yet, or sucked out my blood, I suppose you could say that. A message? From ’oo?’

‘From Walter Jenkins.’

And from a grin, his face twisted immediately into a snarl. ‘That liar.’

I tried to suppress a laugh, incongruous as it might seem in such a situation. Here was a man dangling from the cowl of a Martian killing machine, and he was still smarting at the slights he perceived Walter had delivered him in the pages of a book, years ago. ‘Are you that petty, Bert? Even now? Even here? Maybe we deserve to lose this war if we’re all so small as that.’

‘Oh, we deserve to lose the war all right – or most people do. Walter Jenkins does, anyhow. He’s such a weak fool. All that stuff about utopias, and a cleansing of society, before “moral advancement” becomes possible. Can’t you see, this is what ’e longed for? And other comfortable fools like ’im. An apocalypse to smash everything up. Well, I’m not so soft. I don’t look beyond the destruction and dream of golden cities full of, full of fairness. I embrace the apocalypse. It’s not a phase, it’s a destination. It’s an end. Ilive in it. I inhabit it.’ He grinned. ‘I’m ’ere, now, ain’t I? Look at me!’

I couldn’t deny it. ‘But will you help me? I’ve come a long way for this, Bert – all the way from Berlin, if you want to know. To see you. And we’ve known each other for – what, fifteen years?’

‘Well, that’s true.’ He grinned again, his mood mercurial as ever, and adjusted his judge’s wig. ‘This is a step up from those days, though, ain’t it? Fine. You want to talk, we’ll talk. Do you know West Wycombe, the caves?’

‘I do,’ Verity said.

‘Very well. Go there. You’ll be on Shanks’s pony, for I can’t offer you a lift. This Martian’s hardly a London cabbie.’ His joke seemed to amuse him, and he cackled. ‘I’d cut across country if I was you, and keep to the ’edgerows.’ He jerked a thumb at the fighting-machine above him. ‘The lads are ’ungry, and they’re on the prowl for fresh blood – well, as you’ve seen. That’s why we came ’ere. Them fish-men like the flood, nice big stretch of open water for them to frolic about in. Easy pickings, and there’s always a fat old beggar amongst ’em who’s got too slow to swim away…’ He glared at us. ‘How did you get ’ere, anyhow?’

I looked at Verity. ‘Can’t be any harm telling him. Marriott won’t try it again for a while. Bert, we came because the local franc-tireurs thought they could blow the dam and flood the Redoubt, the big Martian pit.’

He glanced around with a soldier’s eye, sizing up the landscape from his elevated vantage. ‘’Adn’t thought of that. Not a bad idea, if it ’ad worked. What went wrong? Well, it doesn’t matter. You’re right, though, they won’t get close again, the Martians will figure out what they were trying to do and will keep a watch.’ He tapped his head. ‘Smarter than us, they is, and you always ’ave to remember it. Just expect them to out-think every step you take, and you won’t waste your time.

‘As for you, keep to the shadows, as I say. Watch out for the fighting-machines. And when you get to West Wycombe, wave an ’andkerchief or something and call out that Bert sent you. Got that? My Mary is a crack shot, or getting to be.’

‘Mary?’

‘You’ll see – if you live.’ He glanced at a wristwatch. ‘Oh, and keep the noise down. Baby’ll be having ’er afternoon nap by the time you get there.’

Iglanced at Verity, who shrugged. ‘The day could hardly get any stranger,’ she said.

‘Meanwhile, I got work to do. Them ’uman rabbits won’t chase themselves.’ He grinned, an uncomplicated, unpleasant expression. He had a tool, a heavy, rusted spanner, tucked under his seat; he rapped with this on the cable from which his net cage hung. ‘Piccadilly, driver, and don’t spare the ’orses!’

The cable reeled in, silently, smoothly, and he was whisked into the air. I remember him vividly in that seat, evidently purloined from some crashed aircraft, with his absurd garb, that legal wig, grinning down at us as he rose, until he was a detail against the tremendous structure of Martian technology above us.

And then the fighting-machine walked on, the cowl lifting, one great leg passing mere yards over our heads. The folk in the basket at the machine’s back grew agitated, and began to call to us. Hands even reached through the net. Perhaps they imagined we had somehow been negotiating with Cook for their release. It made no sense, of course, yet had I been trapped in that net of death I too would have begged and pleaded for my life.

In only moments the machine was too far away for us to hear their calls.

28 IN THE WEST WYCOMBE CAVES

We headed roughly south-west, passing villages like Holmer Green and Hughenden and Naphill, before coming down into West Wycombe, which is on the main road west out of High Wycombe. We took Cook’s advice and avoided the main roads and open country; we skirted fields, stuck to the shadows of hedgerows, passed through clumps of trees. We made a hasty lunch of canned meat and rainwater in the shade of an ancient oak.

Our walk that day must have been seven or eight miles; it took us until mid-afternoon, and felt longer. We were both fit enough, but I was still recovering from my near-drowning, I suppose, and I think Verity’s arm hurt her more than she cared to admit, especially when we had to scramble or climb over walls. We got through it.

The caves themselves were not hard to locate. West Wycombe Hill is a local landmark, topped with a mausoleum and a church whose tower was once capped by a golden ball – it had been visible for miles around. Verity said she thought it was a folly, a relic of somebody’s Grand Tour to Venice. But when we came to it that day the church was tumbled and scarred, a ruin no doubt created by a careless swipe of the Heat-Ray, and the tower was a jagged splinter with the golden sphere vanished.

Anyhow all this was irrelevant unless we could get inside those caves safely.

The caves, I would learn, were another relic of a couple of centuries past. During a series of crop failures the local family, the Dashwoods, had showed uncharacteristic heart by employing local villagers to quarry chalk from the hill. The material was used to construct the road from West Wycombe into the main town – and, being a mercurial sort, the current Dashwood had made something of a monument of the resulting holes in his hillside…

We found a sort of courtyard. It was open to the sky but walled, with the doorway that was evidently the entrance to the caves themselves set in a flint facade with stained glass windows. The setting, eccentric, had something of the feel of an old ruined abbey, with the roof collapsed and the interior open to the rain. We came into this place with the caution you would imagine. We waved white handkerchiefs and kept our hands in the air, and we walked in the bright afternoon sunlight, keeping away from the shadows. We even called ahead: ‘Bert sent us! We’re friends of Albert Cook! Mary! We’re women and unarmed!’ The last word being a lie.

Even so, as we reached the middle of the courtyard, a rifle shot cracked out. We could not help but flinch, but we stood our ground, for my part making a supreme effort not to bolt.

Verity was made of sterner stuff. ‘We’re alone,’ she called. ‘Just the two of us. It’s true what we said, Mary. We met Bert—’

‘Dead, is he? Rifled his pockets?’

‘Not that,’ I said. ‘He found us – he was riding a fighting-machine.’

Verity managed a grin. ‘The Buffalo Bill of Mars.’

‘That sounds true enough.’

‘Can we come forward, then? Really, we mean no harm. Julie here has known Bert a long time. She’s in the Jenkins book too! Mary, we know you’ve a child to protect. Bert warned us you’d be cautious, and rightly so.’

She hesitated. ‘All right, then. Keep your hands where I can see ’em. One bad move and I’ll plug you. If anyone follows you trying to catch me on the hop I’ll plug them, and then you. I got all the angles covered here.’

Verity nodded. ‘Bert has trained you well, I can see that. We’re coming in now.’

We crossed the courtyard and got to the door. There was Mary, short, dark, solid-looking, dressed in a kind of coverall of dark blue serge. Behind her I saw a candle-lit tunnel, arched. She had been wielding a rifle, but now she propped that against the wall behind her, and held a revolver: a better weapon in close quarters and another sign of a bit of training. ‘Don’t come close. Turn around. Hands against the wall. And drop your packs, I’ll look in those too.’

I glanced at Verity, and she at me, and we turned around as ordered.

Verity sighed. ‘I have a revolver in a holster at my waist. You’ll find that.’

‘So you lied.’

‘Wouldn’t you? Safety’s on, though, but it’s loaded. More ammo in my pack.’

‘Fine.’ She rummaged in Verity’s pack, and took the pistol and ammunition.

‘May I have it back when I leave?’

‘Have to see what Bert says. If you leave.’

Somewhere, echoing, I heard a baby’s cry – an incongruous sound when you are braced against a wall having a conversation about guns.

‘I’ll take you to the Hall.’

I asked, ‘The what?’

‘You’ll find out. Walk ahead, side by side, where I can see you, there’s candles and lanterns lit. I’ll holster my gun but I got it right here and I’ve been practicing.’

‘You don’t need to worry,’ Verity insisted.

‘It’s you who should be doing the worrying. Go ahead, now,’ she said, as if commanding a pair of horses.

So we went ahead.

If you think about it, a cave is a natural shelter from a Martian. I would learn later that across the country systems of natural caves had been exploited by the authorities to provide concealment from the flying-machines, and cover in case of any Martian advance. And though the Martians routinely sent their machines to probe buildings, even cellars and such, they rarely went into caves.

It is a blind spot in their behaviour. The Martians, it is suspected, do not understand cave systems. Caves in middle England are ‘solutional’: that is, the product of running water acting on rock that is already in place. On Mars such spectacular effects of plentiful water, so obvious on the earth, are comparatively unknown. Save for the odd volcanic formation, caves must be an exotic mystery on Mars – but not on the earth, indeed not in Buckinghamshire.

Cook’s cave, of course, was not natural, but it was not the rough quarry I had expected. For the most part we followed a neat tunnel, with flat floor and vertical walls rising up to an arched roof over our heads. As Mary had said, the way was well lit with candles and smoky oil lamps; the light was good enough for me to see the marks of individual picks in the walls – the signatures of workers already two hundred years dead, I supposed.

This tunnel opened out into a couple of chambers, one of which had subsidiary passages going on out of sight, like a maze. Then we turned a sharp right, into another, still larger chamber. This cave turned out to be called, locally, the ‘Hall’. And here it was that Cook and this Mary had made their home, their nest.

There was no bed, but a mattress heaped with sheets and blankets lay on crates – I imagined the labour of hauling down a decent bedstead. A robust table and chairs looked like the foldout military types people brag about being meant for use on campaign. Clothing hung from coat racks or rested in open trunks. There seemed to be no facility for cooking, and I would learn there was a kitchen range closer to the entrance to the caves, where a chimney had been improvised. Water stood in buckets, and I would learn there was a kind of chemical toilet. It would take some labour to survive down here, I realised at once, lugging water in and waste out. Cook must think the concealment worth it.

The heating came from a stove fed by bottled gas, with a kind of vent set in the wall above to carry away the waste fumes. As, so we would be told, we were three hundred feet underground at the cave’s deepest point, I had, and still have, no idea how Cook had managed to arrange for this bit of ventilation – perhaps via some natural crevice. But he had been in the horse artillery, I remembered; such men develop practical skills.

Clearly a great deal of care had been taken to secure this place, both, I supposed, against the hostility of humans who might not love Cook, and the Martians who could do no more than tolerate him. And the reason for all this care and attention to detail became obvious. A small child sat in a cot, in the middle of the chamber, raised up above the cold floor. The little girl could not have been one year old, but when she saw us approach she grabbed the bars of her cot and tried to stand.

‘Oh, how adorable.’ Verity took a reflexive step forward.

‘You keep off of her.’ That was Cook.

I turned, startled; he could have been only paces behind us as we came down the corridor. Now he stood at the entrance behind us, dimly lit, revolver in his hand.

Verity raised the hand that was free of the sling. ‘Look – I’m not a nurse, but I’m a VAD, trained as such. You know what that means, Bert. And I’ve had to learn fast about the care of children and infants since I got stuck in Abbotsdale.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with her,’ Mary said defensively.

‘But it can’t do any harm to let me look.’ Verity glanced around at the cave. ‘Are you down here all the time? I mean, I don’t suppose she sees much of the sunshine – or of doctors. There might be vitamin supplements which—’

‘You leave us be!’

Cook was more placating; he holstered his revolver and walked forward. ‘Now, Mary, don’t take on. I don’t believe she means any ’arm.’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘For she’s only here by accident. It’s me who’s been trying to get to see you, Bert – and I’ve come on quite a journey to do that, if you want to know. Poor Verity’s just been dragged along in my wake, so to speak.’

Verity grinned. ‘Nice way to speak of someone who helped save your life.’

‘You know what I mean.’

Cook rubbed Mary’s back. ‘If she wants to look Belle over – well, let ’er, she might do some good. People are there to be exploited; if they volunteer for the purpose, then use them.’

I shared a glance with Verity. I had not expected to find he had a secret family, but that remark about ‘exploited’ was the authentic Bert Cook.

‘But not just now, eh?’ He began to strip off his garb, the coat, the legal wig, the mayor’s chain. ‘Mary, isn’t it time for ’er feed? You see to that, and I’ll rustle up some supper.’

Somewhat resentfully, Mary took the baby from her cot, and walked past us, deeper into the cave complex and out of sight. The baby, wide-eyed, stared at us as she passed in Mary’s arms.

Bert Cook tried to be a host, in his own extraordinary way. ‘Sit there,’ he said, pointing to the fold-out table. ‘Now, if I turn my back to rustle up some grub, can I trust you two not to pull any stunts?’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Bert,’ I said wearily as I sat down. ‘You know me, at least. None of us are story-book heroes.’

‘Very well,’ he said, though he sounded cautious. ‘And I suppose I should remember my manners. We don’t ’ave guests for dinner very often, as you can imagine.’ He cackled. ‘The odd rat, but Mary sees to them with a spade or a broom.’ He started digging out packets of food and tin plates from one of the trunks as he spoke. ‘Funny sort of place, isn’t it? The caves. Read up on ’em once I acquired ’em. Chap who dug ’em out supposedly ran satanic rituals down ’ere. Nah, I don’t believe it; ’e was a traveller, a rake, a bit of flash; I think ’e was cocking a snook. Good story though, eh? And besides, what could be more devilish than the Martians? And they’re no legend.

‘Are you thirsty? The water in the buckets is clean. As for grub, it’s bacon and spuds and beans.’ He leered at me. ‘From the farmers. They pay me to keep the fighting-machines away. Leave offerings, like. ’Course, some are more compliant than others. We get it all cooked up, we do it in batches on the range – that’s out by the door – we cook when it seems safe, then scoff it cold. And a mug of tea.’ He set a kettle on the gas stove. ‘Your brother-in-law did feed me that night in Maybury, all those years ago, in the middle of the First War. Albert Cook pays ’is debts.’

So we sat and ate cold meat and bread in the cave. The food made us calm and relatively companionable, as a shared meal always will – a bit of common humanity. I even made them a gift of the caddy of Indian tea I had taken from the villa.

I asked tentatively, ‘How did you come to this, Bert? And Mary. Why do you hide away?’

‘Wouldn’t you? If you did what I do.’

‘I’m not sure what it is you do, Bert.’

He turned a knife, casually, but point first at Verity’s chest. ‘She knows. If I let you go, you’ll skedaddle off back to Abbotsdale and tell all them soldiers and nobs where I am, and maybe they’ll tell the authorities outside, the soldiers and the government, and next thing you know they’ll be flushing me out like a rat. And that won’t do, will it?’ He eyed her, more calculating. ‘The only option being for me not to let you skedaddle out of ’ere at all – ain’t it?’

Verity looked at him with contempt and, I thought, some courage. ‘I’m not going back to Abbotsdale – not for now. I’m going to stick with Julie, and she wants to go on into the Martian pit – don’t you?’

In fact we’d never discussed such plans, not so bluntly, Verity and I, not since we’d been thrown together.

Bert raised his eyes at that. ‘And?’

‘And she thinks you can get her in there. Because you come and go, Bert, you come and go.’

I forced a smile. ‘Come on, Bert. Tell us the tale. There’s nothing you like better than to talk about yourself, I know that much.’

He looked at me, startled, and a disarming grin spread across his face. ‘You know me better’n I know myself, I think. Ha! Very well, then. But if you ever write it down—’ and now he pointed the knife at me ‘—make sure you have it true, this time.’

I promised I would, and it’s a promise I have endeavoured to keep in these pages.

29 THE ARTILLERYMAN’S TALE

‘I was ’ere when the cylinders fell. Two years back. You know that much, I was with your ’usband Frank, then, with the sojers who’d been sent to greet ’em. When everybody else ran away from the Cordon, I ran in. Because I knew that’s where the Martians would be, where the drama was going to be staged.

‘In the beginning it was just like ’07 over again.’ He sounded nostalgic, as if those terrible days after the collapse of humanity in the south of England had been the finest of his life – and perhaps they were. ‘Just like ’07. Refugees on the roads going this way and that with their babbies and old folk and carts of luggage, but most of ’em too dim to ’ave grasped that we already were in a big cage with invis’ble bars that cut across every single road you might try. I saw the soldiers fighting back, and generally they put up a better show than in ’07 – they were brave enough, and we ’ad learned something from that matinee performance, but it made no difference in the end.

‘But while they was running around, I was watching, and listening, and calculating. Straight away I could see what the Martians was up to – well, they started with the same routine last time. They was knocking out the soldiers and the rail lines and the telegraph lines and the cars on the road and anything else that might pose a threat – they did the same in ’07, they understand that we organise, see, they know we’re civilised to a degree, even if we’re a rung or three below them but they were letting the people go free. Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it? We know what they want us for. And if you came on a flock of sheep with a machine gun, what would you do? Why, you’d knock out the gun and settle down to a feast of mutton, that’s what. And that’s exactly what the Martians were doing.’

‘Hunting us down,’ Verity said.

‘’Unting now. Farming in the future, perhaps.’

Verity and I exchanged glances at that chill remark. ‘And I ’id out as the days went by, and I watched ’em do it.

How they’d swoop down in their fighting-machines on some sheep-fold like Abbotsdale, and they’d scoop up the slow and the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and drop ’em in those nets of theirs, for the consumption of, later. And I watched the people who skedaddled at their feet, turning their backs on those ’oo had been taken. As if they’d never existed. For that’s a way to cope with it, see, if the other fellow is taken and not you, and you go on living, to pretend like ’e never were at all. People become accustomed, like. As if they were being trained.’

And I remembered the dinner party in the farmhouse in Abbotsdale, when Mildred Tritton had told me country-life anecdotes, and we had all ignored an empty place at the table. ‘You’re right, Bert,’ I said. ‘Though I hate to admit it.’

‘And not for the first time, eh?’ He grinned. ‘Well, now, I sees all this, the ’ealthy sheep running and leaving the lame sheep behind, but all of them sheep, and I thinks, these folks is worthless, miserable, pointless. The stock is improved if they’re cut out of the blood line. In a way they’re doing their duty to the race by letting themselves be culled. Do you see? But not me – not men like me. I was roaming around, alone, trying to figure the angles. How I could profit from the set-up.’

‘Profit?’ Verity sounded disgusted.

He shrugged. ‘They was going to die anyway. Well, one day I got my chance. I was foraging in a village outside Chesham, not much more than a pub and a farmhouse –when ’ere they come, the fighting-machines, one, two, three of them bowling along with their keep-nets dangling – quite a sight of an autumn afternoon!…’

As he told us this story he continued to eat his meal, cutting up the bacon and mixing it with cold spud, steadily consuming his food with the discipline of the habituated soldier.

‘Well, I saw them – a ’andful of sheep – they was bolting down into this inn’s cellar, and pulling down the delivery ’atch behind them. So I dashed over and got my fingers under the ’atch – just! – and begged for ’em to let me squeeze in. It was a crowd down there, and they was pushing and shoving and complaining. Well, they let me in, I got inside and I was near the top of the pile, by the ’atch, and through a crack – it was one of those big metal lids – I could see a fighting-machine bowling down the road, heading towards Chesham. Well, thought I – Bert, ’ere’s a chance.

‘And I pushed open that lid, and I ’opped out onto the road, and I took off my ’at and waved at the machine and the Martian who rode it, and I yelled and pointed. Who knows what the Martian made of it! But ’e saw me, and bent down – and for a moment I was braced for the Heat-Ray myself, or the caress of a tentacle – and the fellows in the ’ole behind me were pulling and banging at the lid to get it closed again, but I kept it propped. Well, I suppose the Martian saw the easy meat inside that cellar. So ’e bent down, and opened that lid with a metal tentacle, delicate as a surgeon—’

Verity couldn’t hide her disgust. ‘You gave up your fellow humans to the Martians.’

‘You can put it like that. But they’d ’ave died anyway. D’ye see? If not that day, then the next, or the next. For the Martians only take a tithe – even then I think they were trying to keep breeding populations intact. Better off dead, that sort.

‘That was ’ow it started, see. The Martians can see a lot from up on ’igh, in their aircraft and their fighting-machines. Oh yes, a lot. But this isn’t their world, not yet. And a man on the ground, with a trained eye, can spot a lot more. Places people are ’iding, for instance.’

‘A man such as you,’ I said. ‘You became a scout for the Martians.’

‘You can’t talk to a Martian,’ he said. ‘Least ways, I don’t know ’ow. But you can – communicate. I do this for you, you leave me be, and the next day I’ll do it again: that sort of show. I started to wear my gear, the chain and the wig and so on – colourful rubbish I found – for the Martians must ’have trouble telling us one from the other, I reasoned, so let me make it easy for ’em to spot me. And when they saw me they would know they could rely on me to root out a nest or two for them, no trouble. Eventually they fixed up for me – well, you’ve seen it my spotting seat on a cable so I can travel with ’em. Took some guts to climb into it the first time, I can tell you.’

Verity said coldly, ‘But if you are obvious to the Martians, you must also be to the people in the regions you cover.’

‘That’s so – but I try to be discreet – all you ever ’eard of me is rumour, I bet?’

I said, ‘But it’s rumour that’s spread outside the Cordon, Bert. Which is why I’m here in the first place. You ought to take care. Somebody might take a pot-shot at you in your sling. And if the authorities ever got hold of you—’

He just laughed. ‘You know as well as I do, Julie Elphinstone, that the only authorities that count on this world, now and for the future, are the Martians.’ The kettle began to whistle. He turned and yelled, ‘Mary! Tea!’

She came through briskly, and poured hot water into a big battered pot, sluiced it around and served us tea in tin mugs.

Verity watched Mary with a kind of disgust. She said now, ‘And what relation are you to the great survivor? A trophy?’

Mary slammed a mug down on the table and slapped Verity across the face, hard. ‘Don’t you speak to me like that, you stuck-up cow. You don’t know nothing about me – nothing. What do you think I am, some tart?’

Verity, shocked, held her face. ‘I didn’t mean…’ But she let it tail off, for I suspect that that was exactly what she had meant.

Mary pointed at Bert. ‘He saved my life. I was with friends – we’re from Chorleywood, we was workers in the munitions factory, and we was on a couple of days out in the car, I grew up around here, see. And we woke up one morning and the Martians had come, and we was stuck, and when the petrol was gone, well, we was like vagabonds. We lasted for a bit – nobody helped us, nobody, but the soldiers made comments, like yours. About what we could do if we wanted a share of their rations. You know. Then down came a Martian one day, and we scattered and the Heat-Ray was firing, and I lost my friends, and I was under the Martian and I thought I was a goner. And then he came.’

‘I managed to distract it,’ Bert said. ‘Led it to a barn full o’ farming folk. Come, Mary, sit down, let’s eat; don’t let ’er bother you.’

‘He saved me,’ Mary said stubbornly. ‘Where the government and the Army and that lot did nothing. I didn’t have to come with him, but I did.’

Bert grinned. ‘Couldn’t get rid of ’er.’

‘And now here we are, like this. Living. With a baby. Some day we’ll get it properly done – I mean, married. But for now we’re surviving. As to the rights and wrongs of what he does, I don’t know. But I don’t see many others being brave and bold about these Martians, do you?’

‘No,’ admitted Verity. ‘And I’m sorry. I jumped to conclusions. We’re all doing what we can to stay alive, that’s all. I hope you’ll let me look at little Belle for you.’

For a moment we ate in silence.

Then, cautiously, I essayed, ‘But if you’re right, Bert – what’s your long game? If we never can get rid if these Martians—’

‘Ah, but that’s what I don’t accept, see. Never ’ave. I just don’t think we’re going to do it with guns and Zepps and such. The government’s no use in ’ere, nor the Army. And now there’s another opposition due, and I just bet there’s more cylinders on the way – why, given the dates, they might be ’anging in the sky above us now, for all the gov’ment tells us – and pretty soon it will be as if a Cordon’s being thrown around the whole blessed world.’ He belched and picked a bit of bacon from his teeth. ‘And where will we be then – eh? It’ll be just the Martians, and us, and we’ll be a world of rabbits. That’s what we are – not sheep, not rats like I used to think – rabbits. For what are rabbits but vermin when they’re in the vegetable patch, but you’ll pot the odd one for supper, won’t you?’

‘Then you’re a rabbit too, Bert.’

‘True. But I’m the smart rabbit. The rabbit who’s got close in with them, who’s seen ’ow they work their machines, the fighting-machines and the handling-machines. I’m the rabbit who’s learning, about them. And soon enough I’ll find others of a like mind, and we’ll come and go in the very face of the Martians, until one day – bang. We’ll make our move, all unexpected.’ His voice was softening, his expression growing dreamy.

Mary scoffed, fondly. ‘He does like to dream. Should see him playing at fighting-machines with little Belle – Zip! Sizzle! Stamp! It’s a fair spectacle.’

And, looking around at that hole in the ground, I wondered if Bert Cook was any closer to realising such dreams than when my brother-in-law had given him up as a fool and a fantasist on Putney Hill, in the First War. But that wasn’t my concern.

I leaned forward. ‘Bert, I want you to get me into the Redoubt. The big Martian nest.’

30 A STRANGE NEGOTIATION

Cook regarded me steadily.

I pressed him, ‘Can you do it?’

‘Yes,’ he said bluntly. ‘Why do you want to go there?’ I told him the surface lie. ‘It’s Walter’s idea. My brother-inlaw—’

‘Him again.’

‘He thinks there are ways to communicate with the Martians. Well, you’ve proved that, in your way. I’ve brought images to show them – drawings Walter made himself. They might mean something to the Martians. And even if not, if we can show we’re at least intelligent enough to try to speak to them, then perhaps they will spare us.’

He forked up more spud. ‘Waste of time,’ he said around the mouthful. ‘A sheepdog communicates with its master, but it’s still just a dog. Spouting poetry wouldn’t get it sent to Eton or Harrow! – just back out into the fields. Walter Jenkins always was a dreamy idiot.’

‘But it was he who suggested you, Bert. Knowing of your exploits in here. You’re the one man who might build a bridge, make it work – or give us the chance to try, at least. The world’s at stake, Bert. The future. You might think Walter a fool. But isn’t it worth a try, at least?’

‘Hmm. What do you think, Mary?’

She shrugged. ‘I want to know – what’s in it for us?’

He nodded, and eyed me.

I was at a loss. ‘I don’t see what I can offer you that means anything. Money, treasures—’

‘One thing.’ He glanced across to the passage leading to where the baby slept.

I guessed, ‘You’re concerned about Belle? Her future?’

‘Concerned she might not ’ave a future.’ He looked at me intently. ‘Listen. I ain’t seen it with ’umans yet, but it’ll come. But I seen ’em with the fish-men.’

‘The Cythereans? Seen what?’

‘When the Martians hunt. They’re not simple predators. A Martian isn’t a lion. He won’t go just for the weakest of the group, and let the strongest get away. He’s husbanding, see. Some day ’e wants to be a farmer, a herdsman, not a ’unter.’

Verity said, ‘You mean they want to domesticate the Cythereans. Domesticate us.’

‘Look what they did to their own stock, the human types from Mars! Not a flicker of defiance left in any of them wretched creatures. That is what they want in the long run.’

I nodded. ‘And so with the Cythereans—’

‘They cull the weakest. You may as well, easy pickin’s. But they cull the strongest too.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘That’s what I seen, and I’ve worked it out. Don’t want that powerful blood being passed on down the line, see. Selective breeding. So they watch, see ’oo fights back the ’ardest, is the most ingenious escaper.’

I began to see it. ‘And when it comes to us—’

‘I think they’ll be more systematic, like, in the future. Maybe they’ll pit us against each other, make us fight like dogs or cocks – like gladiators. How about that? Those Martians with their big eyes around the pit, ’ooting and braying and laying bets on the winner, for all I know. What a spectacle! Or maybe they’ll set us to ’unting each other down. Either case they’ll keep the winners fattened up as long as they’re entertaining or useful, but they won’t let them breed. Eliminating the strong from the blood lines, see. Now, to the present: of the ’uman pack in this great Buckin’-hamshire warren, ’oo will they see as the strongest?’

‘Ah.’ Verity nodded. ‘You’ve certainly brought yourself to their attention. You fear they’ll let you live, but they’ll extinguish your blood-line. Which is why you’re hiding your baby down in this hole on the ground. It’s not just from people. You fear for Belle.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ He looked me square in the face. ‘I’ll do what you ask. But in return I want you to promise me that you, ’ooever is backing you, will get Mary and Belle safely out of ’ere.’

If anywhere is safe, I thought.

Mary grabbed his hand. ‘No, Bert! Not without you.’

‘I’ll survive,’ he said with that grin of his. ‘You know me. But this—’ He gestured at me. ‘What a gift, to drop into our laps! And if we can get our little girl safe…’

Verity and I talked it over in private, briefly.

‘That’s Bert Cook for you,’ I said. ‘Likes to make everyone dance to his tune. But there’s a certain truth to his speculations, don’t you think? A brutal rationalism. There always was; Walter saw it in him.’

‘But I wonder how the military and the politicians will regard him. The traitor who seems to have exposed hundreds to the Martians… What charges could be brought if they got their hands on him? They’d probably have to invent a whole new category of law. Crimes against the species.’

‘Verity, do you think we should do this? Deal with Cook, I mean.’

‘If it will get you into the Redoubt.’ She smiled. ‘And it’s in the little girl’s interests to get her out of here.’

‘Agreed.’

We went back to Cook and Mary. Verity asked bluntly, ‘Bert, do you have access to a telephone?…’

Of course he did.

It took twenty-four hours to set up.

The scheme involved a Zeppelin flight over the Cordon area, close to where we were, while Bert set up a diversion in the north, hopefully to distract the attention of the Martians. A squad of marines would drop from the Zepp, retrieve Mary and Belle from the caves, and lift them away. That was the arrangement. It took most of those twenty-four hours before Cook was happy with the promises he’d received, including a personal assurance from Churchill himself.

Of course neither Cook, nor Mary, nor even Verity knew the true purpose of it all – knew of the weapon I carried in my veins. No doubt Mr Churchill was aware, but he didn’t drop it into the conversation.

For our second night in the caves, as he had the first night, Cook offered us heaps of blankets, and suggested we tried to nap. I for one did not sleep.

We left the caves at midnight. It was, I would learn later, May 19, a Friday. Cook assured us it was safer for us to come upon the Redoubt in the small hours, for the Martians were calmer at the dawn than at other times of the day. We carried weapons in the countryside, but would stash them in a ditch before we reached the Martian base. I had with me, however, Walter’s pictures, in their battered leather case, carried all the way from Berlin.

So we walked through the silent dark towards the pit of the Martians. With every step closer I felt a gathering dread, as I had been travelling for twelve, thirteen days already. And in the silence and the dark I thought I could feel the agent in my blood, the poison. If the Martians were a canker in the earth, there was a canker in my own blood, as if my body were a mirror of the whole infected planet.

We arrived at the Redoubt a little before four a.m. Albert Cook grinned at us in the grey light, and it was as if he had read my thoughts. ‘You’ve ’eard of Darkest Africa. Welcome to Darkest England, ladies.’

31 INTO THE REDOUBT

The Martian city at Amersham was in essence a tremendous earthwork perhaps a mile across. Its beginning had been the infall of three cylinders close together, whose overlapping impact craters had since been greatly extended and deepened by the patient work of the Martians’ excavating-machines. Now it was one vast bowl surrounded by an earthen rampart, which we climbed, Verity and I, with Bert Cook at our side. And at the crest, we stood on a frozen wave of broken tarmac and brick and shards of glass, and we looked into the Redoubt.

It was the space cylinders that first drew my eye. They were like great tilted pillars stuck in the ground: three Pisas of heatscarred metal, in the grey dawn light. And even from here I could see, at the very centre of the earthwork, a shadow in the earth, enigmatic, dark. I knew this was a deep shaft, visible to spotter planes, that the Martians were cutting straight down into the ground. Similar efforts had been started in the pits they had excavated during the First War, especially at Horsell Common, site of their first landing, and on Primrose Hill.

That was the essential layout – the three great cylinders, each perhaps a hundred yards long and stuck in the ground at the corners of a rough equilateral triangle, and the vast pit at the centroid of that triangle. Fighting-machines stood tall and inert, at rest looking a little like the water towers you see in some American states – dozens of them, in loose groups. And, all around these tremendous monuments, the Martians and their machines worked, glistening and rustling in the gathering light, emitting soft hoots, and hisses where the green smoke escaped from limbs and apertures.

Even from here I could see people – what looked like a crowd of them – sitting passively on English soil, or in the foundations of ruined houses. Perhaps they were recent captives, yet to be processed.

‘Don’t move,’ Cook said softly.

My attention snapped back to my own situation. Now I saw that a handling-machine had, all but silently, clambered up the inner face of the rampart on which we stood.

The machine stopped dead before us. It had five articulated legs, as they all do, and long manipulative tentacles composed of the usual metal rings, and a set of fine specialised tools fixed to its front. I wondered what delicate task it had been pursuing. The Martian riding it was the usual leathery sack, from a distance rather like a bear curled up to hibernate – but there was no fur on that glistening hide, and those gruesomely long, bony fingers were folded beneath the carcase. Evidently we were being inspected.

And so I faced the Martian. I had seen pictures; I had read accounts, including my brother-in-law’s. I had not been so close to any Martian before, save for the pickled specimen they had put on display in the Natural History Museum – and save for the beast that had attacked us in the perimeter tunnel, and even then there had been no time for cold contemplation. It gazed back at me with those huge, oddly bright eyes, from that enormous smooth head with the huge eyes, the disturbing, beakless mouth – a head fully four feet across. I knew there was a logic in this strange morphology. From ape to Neanderthal to human you can see a progression, a growth of the forebrain, a regression of the protective brow that shelters the eyes, a shrinking of the jaw and the great muscles used to chew coarse food. In this Martian those trends had been progressed to their limit. But it was not evolutionary logic that struck me in those moments of encounter. That strange round head with its small features, that pinched mouth, the eyes widened as if in perpetual surprise, oddly gave it the look of a monstrous infant, which shard of familiarity made it all the more repulsive.

I have always regarded myself as rational, but a wave of intense antipathy broke over me at that moment. I longed to destroy this thing, to expel it; it was a thing that did not belong on our earth, and I wanted it gone, down to the very cells of my being. More than disgust, it was a deep visceral revulsion – and a stab of savage despair too.

Verity’s good hand grasped mine. ‘Welcome to hell,’ she murmured.

Cook grunted, ‘And call me Virgil. Ha! Two snobs like you don’t expect a bloke like me to start quoting classic literature, do you? Just keep still. ’E wants to check you over, that’s all. Oi, pretty boy. It’s me!’ He held up the mayoral chain around his neck. ‘Good old Bert! You know me. Go on, you tell your bosses… They do it all by thought, you know. Reading minds.’

I said softly, hardly daring to move, ‘You believe that, do you?’

He snorted. ‘Not a question of believe. It’s obvious if you watch ’em for a bit, as I’ve done.’

Now, with grace but sudden speed, one of the machine’s handling tentacles uncurled towards us.

‘’Old still! I warned you – they’re checking you over! ’Old still!’

I was first. I stood there while the arm swept over me, its tip, its cold flank, running over my body. Its motions were smooth, clean, mechanical. I cannot believe it searched me merely by touch; perhaps it relied on some effect analogous to Roentgen rays to perform a deeper inspection. In only a second it was done, and I breathed again. Then it was on to Verity, and she held my hand tight, especially when the Martian probed her broken arm with its splint.

Then, with sudden abruptness, the machine backed away, turned, and walked off with its usual liquid grace, returning to whatever task it had abandoned to come to us.

Bert said, ‘There you are. Told you they’d check you up. I come up ’ere every now and again to let ’em ’ave a look and make sure they don’t forget ’oo I am. And I told you to leave your weapons behind. For if you hadn’t, they’d have been found and it would have been the drips for all of us.’

‘The drips?’ I asked.

‘You’ll see. Now, come on.’

He led us down the inner face of the perimeter rampart. The low, multi-legged Martian machine had passed down this rough slope easily, but we bipedal humans had to pick our way more cautiously.

On the floor of the Redoubt we walked forward, through a scene of industry. All around us excavating-machines, big, mole-like, dug into the earth and shaped it into pits and galleries, tunnels and canals around that deep central shaft. These secondary dimples were huge excavations in themselves, in some of which, amid puffs of green smoke, I saw handlingmachines working on the familiar process of the extraction of aluminium from the clay of the earth, as well as less recognisable tasks. And in other pits I saw machines working on the construction of other machines, handlers and excavators, working in pairs like surgeons, or midwives. In one great cavity I even saw them assembling a fighting-machine, the heavy handlers crawling over the great bronzed cowl, the articulated legs laid out in sections.

Martians and their machines moving everywhere, in the low dawn light, in near silence.

Unexpectedly Cook made us pause. ‘Wait a minute. They won’t interfere with us unless we do something stupid. Just look… Sometimes I stand on spots like this and sort of ’alf-close my eyes, so it gets dim and indistinct. It’s all industry, I suppose, but it ain’t like ’uman industry, is it? Just stand ’ere and take it in. Think of it not as a kind of factory or a quarry, but as a landscape…’

I stood, and tried to set aside my fear – and that instinctive loathing of all things Martian – and tried to see it as he had suggested.

It has long been remarked that all Martian machines have a certain living quality, thanks to their ingenious electric musculature, in sharp contrast to our own crude arrangements of wheels and gears and levers and rods. Now I saw that quality evident all around me. Excavating-machines ploughed in a group through the broken earth, as dolphins will plough through the waves of the oceans; and a herd of handlingmachines, of all sizes, gathered together, crossed an open area, en route from one task to another, the dawn light glistening from their metal hides as if from the backs of migrant beasts. And I saw a brace of fighting-machines on the move, off in the distance beyond the far rampart of the pit, tall, elegant, striding through the dusty air. Over it all hung the faint tinge of green, of the smoke that was emitted by Martian machines on the moves from joints and fixtures, and from the pits they dug in the ground.

‘I’ve never been to Africa,’ Cook murmured now. ‘Not even to Boer country. But I’ve seen pictures. When I look at it like this, I don’t see industry. I see a kind of savannah. They’re like animals on the move, big and small, individuals or in herds.’

‘Yes,’ Verity said, sounding surprised. ‘You’re right. I see it now. It all has that quality of life. The handlers like hornybacked herbivores, the fighting-machines like great giraffes perhaps – no! They are too aggressive for that.’

‘Like tyrannosaurs,’ I suggested. ‘Striding across some Cretaceous plain.’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘See, I’ve read the books, or some of ’em,’ Cook said. ‘Some say there must ’ave been animals on Mars, once. Because you wouldn’t get ’umanoids, and then Martians, just showing up on a world without a whole zoo, plants and animals and such, evolving together. And others say that’s all gone now, because Mars is too dried out. The Martians ’ave ’ad to turn the whole world into one big city, or a factory, where there’s nothing but the canals and the machines and the pumping ’ouses, I suppose. Like the ’ole of Mars is a giant Birmingham – ha!

‘But what about the animals? Well, in my lifetime I’m seeing animals being replaced by machines. I trained in the ’orse artillery, and now the nags are being swapped out for motor wagons, for better or worse. A lot of us miss ’aving the beasts at our side. And maybe the Martians feel the same, see, and they’ve done something about it. Maybe they’ve got a few old bones in the museums, up there, a few of the last specimens, as we’d ’ave. But they’ve gone further, see. A motor lorry ain’t much like an ’orse – an ’orse doesn’t ’ave wheels for a start. But Martian machines ’ave legs, like animals…’

‘I see what you’re getting at,’ Verity said now. ‘Maybe the Martians modelled their machines more closely on their animals than we ever did.’

‘That’s it,’ said Cook. ‘As if we made mechanical ’orses and elephants and such.’

‘So what we’re seeing is a kind of diorama – it’s how Mars used to be. Impressionistically, at least. And it’s this way because the Martians, for all their apparent brutality, didn’t want to lose their own past. How – romantic.’ She sounded reluctant to say the word.

It was a fetching thought, and I grinned at the old artilleryman. ‘Bert Cook, you do have quite an imagination, don’t you?’

But he retreated into his shell of customary resentment. ‘Got no education to speak of – no respect from the toffs. But, ho yes, I always ’ad imagination. I imagined all this back in ’07, when the rest of you thought we was done with the Martians. I kept thinking. Now then – you two come with me and I’ll show you things that will beggar your imagination.’

We walked on.

He led us to the cage of the Cythereans first.

32 PRISONERS OF THE MARTIANS

It was not much of a cage, in fact. To hold their captives from Venus, the Martians had dug out a kind of tank, a shallow cylinder lined with some rubbery, impermeable material, and filled with water that was stained faintly crimson, the colour of the Martian weed. A handling-machine stood by, motionless, like a guard, but without a controlling Martian riding it. A containing net of a silvery mesh was stretched over the pit, and firmly fixed by a solid band anchored to the ground. This mesh was hexagonal, the holes the size of pennies, perhaps – enough to let in the sun and the rain, not enough to allow out a Cytherean, nothing larger than a digit on those webbed hands. But we could see the Cythereans, and they could see us, with their small black eyes set in those smooth faces.

My life had been saved by a Cytherean, and I had spent some time with them, but I could scarcely claim to be an expert in their psychology. But their mood was not hard to read. Most of the wretched creatures just lay in the water, floating, on their backs; some, heartbreakingly, had infants basking on their bellies. One big male swam back and forth, back and forth, a couple of firm strokes with hands and feet taking him from one side of his enclosure to the other, but no further. It was as you might see a tiger pace in a too-small cage in a zoo. And another adult, a female, was working at the net, picking at it with her fingers, gnawing at it.

Cook grunted. ‘She’ll get nothing but a broken tooth for ’er trouble. Can’t blame her for trying, though – I would.’

‘The water is stained red,’ I observed. ‘Are they given food?’

Cook shrugged. ‘You get that where you dump a Cytherean in clean water, I think – as you get greenish slime in a stagnant pond. They aren’t ’eld for long before they’re hoiked out and taken to the blood bank, or the drips.’ He did not elaborate on these terms. ‘The Martians can’t be bothered to feed ’em, but they like to get value out of their catch; they don’t want them burning up all that lovely juice in their veins. This lot will probably be gone by tomorrow, one way or another, and a fresh batch chucked in. Before they take ’em the Martians will pass a shock through the water – a kind of electric shock I think – it makes ’em malleable, but they’re still awake.’

Verity the VAD grimaced. ‘Are they aware of what becomes of them? Do they experience pain?’

Cook shrugged. ‘They aren’t ’eld for long,’ he repeated.

I shook my head. ‘I hope none of these are from Misbourne.’

‘Makes no difference,’ Cook said brutally. ‘Nothing we can do for them – never was. Come on now…’ And he led us on, deeper into the Martian complex.

In the next pit there were people.

One must be analytical about it. One must describe what one saw, not how one felt about it.

In general terms, you must imagine, the arrangement was similar to the holding of the Cythereans: the pit in the ground, the mesh net enclosing it anchored by a peripheral band fixed to the earth. This pit held no water, of course, and it had been dug deeper. Again an empty handling-machine stood by, like a prison guard.

And as we peered down, we saw faces looking back up at us, like coins at the bottom of a fountain: human faces this time, pale, dirty, some defiant, some fearful, some tear-streaked. I believe there were about a dozen people in that pit. Such was the arrangement of shadow, and so grimy were the occupants, that I could see little of their bodies. Only the faces stood out in my vision – and in my memory now, as I think back on it.

When they saw us approach, silhouetted against the dawn sky, I supposed, as seen from their point of view, they became agitated, naturally enough, and the calling started. ‘You – who are you?’

‘Can you help us?’ Some of the voices were quite cultured. ‘Please take my little girl, she’s only three…’ I saw the child held up into the light.

‘Don’t worry,’ Cook murmured to us. ‘They can’t reach you. The Martians dug this deep – they learned. We ’umans are wilier than Cythereans, and are more ingenious at doing damage. So they put the mesh out of reach of those clever monkey fingers.’

Verity seemed to have retreated into a shell of brittle selfcontrol. ‘It’s not myself that I’m concerned about, Cook. There are children in there.’

He looked at her, and laughed. ‘Well, you need to toughen up. There’s nothing we can do. And they won’t suffer. It’s the same as the Venus-men; they won’t be ’eld long. They’ll get the same treatment – paralysed, if not stunned, and pulled out like big floppy fish.’

I glared at him. ‘How can you be so heartless, Bert? Even you.’

‘What choice is there—’

‘Hey, it’s Cook! You monster, you betrayed us! Let’s do it, lads—’

And now there was a kind of surge from the depths of the pit. I saw one man, two, swarm at the earthen walls, and a third man climbed over the backs of his fellows and managed to reach the mesh, where he clung on. It was a rehearsed move, I think, and the rage at Cook was the trigger to try it. That third man, the climber, was rough-shaven, grimy – but I thought he seemed fine-featured, with a scholarly aspect: I may be snobbish, for looks are deceptive, but he looked like a thinker, a lawyer, a teacher, a writer. Yet that face was twisted in gut hatred, and I imagined he would tear open Bert Cook with his bare hands if he got the chance. But he could do nothing but shout insults from beneath the mesh.

The guardian handling-machine, alerted, rumbled forward. But Cook, nimbly, got in the way of the machine, standing between it and the pit. He dug a handful of black stones out of his jacket pocket, and began hurling them into the pit, aiming them at the climbing man. ‘Back in the ’ole, you brute. Back, I say!’ Some of his shots bounced off the mesh, others fell harmlessly into the dark – but one caught the climber fair in the forehead and he fell back, howling. Once again the yells of rage came, and more of those entreaties too, growing ever more desperate as Cook drew us away, and we passed out of their sight.

Verity grabbed my hand, squeezing it too tight for comfort.

Cook was grinning, evidently pleased with himself. ‘There’s more yet. You ’aven’t seen it all.’

‘Those pebbles you threw,’ I said to him.

‘Not pebbles.’

‘Can I see?’

He glanced around, as if to be sure no Martian was about, then dug his hand into the pocket again. The stones he withdrew were black, gleaming, shaped.

‘Flints,’ I said.

‘Not just any ol’ flint. Look at them. Look at that edge…’

Verity took one. ‘That’s been knapped.’ She looked at Cook. ‘By you?’

‘Not by me. I tried it – after all, flint is lying around in the ground in this peculiar part of the country – and all I did is smash my thumb. Maybe some day. No, I swiped these from the museum.’

‘The museum?’ I looked again. ‘These are ancient, then. Prehistoric. Hand-axes and arrow heads.’

‘That’s the idea. Tried it one day, carrying one in, under the noses of the Martians… They’ll stop you with a weapon, something obvious. Even a bow and arrow, once, a kid’s thing from a toy store, tried that just to see – they took it off me. But the stones, see, the shaped stones. They don’t recognise those for what they are.’

‘As tools,’ I said, wondering. ‘As weapons from the Stone Age. The only tools we had for almost all of our history.’

‘Huh. More recent than that. My Mary’s mum was a local girl, and Mary says ’er grandfather had tales of when ’e was a boy, and even then the workers, the woodsmen and such, would think nothing of picking up a flint, breaking off a slice and knapping it, if they wanted some job done quick and didn’t ’ave a knife to hand. One old fellow even shaved with them, so it was said.’

‘But the Martians don’t recognise them,’ Verity said. ‘Not as artefacts.’

I nodded. ‘Perhaps they have retained something of their own past, in the forms of their machines, the odd artificial ecology they make up. But they’ve forgotten their own Stone Age—’

‘If they ever had one, on Mars, if the geology permitted it,’ Verity said. ‘And you, Bert. There you were loudly complaining there was nothing to be done about the plight of the human victims here. And yet you’re chucking them flint blades, under the eyes of the Martians!’

‘It’s little enough,’ he said. He seemed almost embarrassed by the revelation. ‘It won’t cut that metal netting stuff – I know, I’ve tried, nothing we ’ave will cut it.’

‘Then I’m confused,’ I said. ‘What use is it, then?’

Verity said patiently, ‘The flint won’t cut metal. But it would cut human flesh, Julie.’

And I saw it.

‘Better way out,’ the old artilleryman said. ‘For them that’s got the guts to take it. Or to save your kids. Them that’s got the guts. I’m setting ’em a kind of test, see.’

I found this hard to absorb – maybe I am not as imaginative as Cook was, or indeed Walter. ‘You’re doing a good thing, then, Bert,’ I said.

‘’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.’

33 A LABORATORY

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.’

Verity said, ‘This, though—’

‘Gen’rally they don’t last long,’ said Bert Cook, almost casually. ‘The bud seems to drain the mother’s body of too much blood, too fast. I say bud. I say mother. Not sure whether those terms are the right ones, I ain’t no Huxley.

‘Some say the Martians were like us – once. Ain’t that so? ’Umans, or ’uman-shaped – like the wretches they bring with ’em to eat during the voyage. But they evolved away, or rather sculpted themselves away from that form. Eugenics, the betterment of a stock by surgery or fiddling with the germ plasm – I don’t know, all I know is what I read, and I don’t even understand ’alf of that.’

‘And now they’re trying it on us,’ Verity said, joining us, her face closed with disgust and rage. ‘Seeing if we can be made Martian, like them.’

I whispered, ‘Whatever it is, I wish—’

‘You could end it? Myself also. Put an end to this House of Pain!’

Cook said coldly, ‘You still ain’t seeing it clearly. The Martians, you know, would say they are doing us a favour. Lifting us up, as if we made a chimp smart as a college perfessor. And who’s to say, by their lights, they are wrong? And – pain? What of it? You clever-clogs keep telling me the Martians are above us mere mortals. Perhaps, with their ’eads detached from their bodies, they are above pain as above pleasure. And what need they care of the pain they inflict on us? Any more’n we care about the pain of the animal in the slaughterhouse – or the tree we cut down.’ He grinned at me, mocking. ‘And, seeing this, do you still think you’ll be able to communicate with ’em? Still think they’ll be impressed by you being able to prove Pythagoras’s theorem, or whatnot?’

I saw that even an imagination as dark as Bert Cook’s had not guessed at the truth of my mission, at what I carried in my veins – even now, as I completed these last few steps of my long journey, seven hundred miles from the bright civilisation of Berlin to this, the centre of evil – no, not of evil – of the unbearable inevitability of science, and intelligence, and Darwin’s chill logic.

But perhaps Bert was right. By the Martians’ lights and perhaps in the view of our own descendants of the far future, they who would have to deal with the cooling of the sun, and the freezing of the earth, as the Martians have done their world the Martians’ ghastly treatment of the young mother in the pit, our own first step to a greater evolution, was the noblest gift they could have given us.

In any event, what Bert Cook said to me now was: ‘I think it’s time you saw the end of it.’

34 THE DRIPS

So we were brought to the very centre of that mile-wide pit. From here the bordering rampart could be seen all around, and the sun, I saw, was soon to rise over the wall to the east – it was still very early. Before us the great fallen cylinders protruded from the earth like megaliths; it was a Martian Avebury. We were close to that tremendous central shaft in the ground, too. From where we were I could see the excavating-machines toiling under the lip of the pit, widening and smoothing the walls. And I could hear a great pulse sounding from deep underground – boom, boom, boom – like a tremendous engine, or a beating heart. It was the backdrop to everything that followed.

And there, in a shallow arena, the Martians sat together. They were out of their machines, and resting on a carpet of their red weed. They were flattened balls, as if deflated, their skin creased. I imagined that was an effect of our earth’s heavy gravity. I saw those strange faces clear and close to – the immense dark eyes, the lack of a brow ridge, the V-shaped lip, the lack of a chin – unless you’ve seen it in life you cannot imagine the animation of that face. And the brow huge and sweating, not unlike the brow of Walter Jenkins, I thought! Occasionally one would pluck at a vesicle of the weed or a fatter cactus-like growth, lift it with those long, bony fingers and push it into its mouth. They regarded each other with those immense dark eyes. And they hooted and honked, sounding like brokendown steam engines. Huge, flaccid, ugly, they would have been almost comical, I think, if not for the equipment arrayed around them.

That equipment:

Imagine a series of hanging brackets, like scaffolds, with a handling-machine settled at the base of each. A human being hung from each of these scaffolds, by the feet, inverted, the arms loosely strapped to the sides. These captives did not struggle, but they were conscious throughout. Later anatomical examinations proved it: the Martians used electricity to render their selected specimens flaccid, incapable of physical resistance, but it seems clear they were awake through most of it – and, probably, capable of sensing pain. All of them happened to be adults, and for that I am forever grateful; the images burned in my memory might have been so much worse yet, if children had been among the victims. Dangling people, then. Eyes closed, their faces flushed with blood – their hair loose and fallen, the skirts of the women draped in an undignified way. Some were well dressed, in fact; it made no difference now.

And a tube, crimson, protruded from the side of the neck of each of these victims– the left side, I remember vividly attached to a valve set in the jugular vein or carotid artery. Each tube snaked down to a rack among the group of Martians. These tubes, and the racks they were lodged in, had peculiar markings which Keynes, expert on blood transfusion, has since speculated might be related to human blood types; a Martian may prefer, or be compelled to take, human blood of a particular type, and the tubes were coded as necessary.

For this was the feeding, of course. The last stage in the process was simple, technically. Using the long fingers of those strange hands, a Martian would take one of the tubes, insert it into a kind of cannula attached to its own flesh, and turn a tap, so that the blood ran directly from a human being into its own body. There were even young in the Martian circle; the juniors, like the adults in every particular except their size, had their own miniature cannulas fixed to the flesh, and I saw one adult, almost gently, use her long fingers to adjust the feed tube to the inlet on the flesh of a confused infant. It seemed almost touching.

‘Sometimes they’ll feed in a kind of frenzy,’ Cook murmured in my ear. ‘Then they can’t get the victims in quick enough, handling-machines or no handling-machines. Your Martian needs a lot of blood through ’im, from time to time. Why? I’m no sawbones, but I’d say it’s the need to flush out the waste from the bloodstream. How else are they to do it? Never seen a Martian on a lavatory – I bet you never thought about that, did you? Or sometimes they just bleed the victims out into big refrigerated stores, like blood banks.

‘And other times, like this, it’s more leisurely, sort of inbetween. Like a tea party, don’t you think?’ He laughed. ‘Almost polite. Sometimes they’ll empty you in one feed. Or sometimes they’ll turn you right way up and hang you in a kind of store, and keep you for later. Eventually you’re used up, of course.’

I said bleakly, ‘And then?’

‘And then you’re no more use.’ He grinned coldly. ‘The crows are allies of the Martians, at least. You two ladies ’ave done well – thought you’d pass out or run away long before this. So, now what? Going to give ’em your geometry lesson?’

‘Let us talk,’ I said, and walked away from him with Verity.

Her face was pinched with anger and disgust. ‘If I had a Zeppelin and an immense bomb, I would drop it and erase all trace of this blemish. It doesn’t belong on our earth.’

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!’