The Massacre of Mankind Page 4

  All this had led, in the end, to the betrayal of our old allies in 1914.

  Phillip rubbed his jaw. ‘Whatever you think of the national interest and so forth, I think a lot of us were rather ashamed to allow the Germans to inflict a mechanised war on Belgium and France, rather as we had been subject to just such an attack from Mars. No wonder the Americans were disgusted.’

  Cook grinned cynically. ‘We was too blessed busy dishing the Irish, and marching into Mesopotamia to get our ’ands on the Ottomans’ oil, to ’ave time for conscience. But as for the Germans versus the Yanks, maybe the Martians will come again and put a stop to the whole thing before it starts.’

  And there you had the paradox of Albert Cook. He was not a conventionally intelligent man, and was certainly poorly educated, but he did have a kind of cunning grasp of strategy, of the big picture. For, of course, in that last playful prediction he turned out to be right.

  Philip started the car. ‘Let’s press on. There’s a decent pub at Petersfield where we can stop for lunch . . .’

  6

  THE SURREY CORRIDOR

  It was early in the afternoon when I discovered what Philip had meant by the Surrey Corridor.

  We were passing through Guildford. Just beyond the High Street and before the junction for the London Road, we came to a barrier, like a level-crossing gate. Philip slowed as we joined the small queue of traffic before the gate, which was raised and lowered to allow each vehicle through.

  When it was our turn, a police officer came to Philip’s window. He wore a regulation uniform as far as I could see, but he had a revolver in a holster at his waist, and no collar number. George had warned us to have our papers prepared. Our documents were taken into a small cabin at the side of the road, and inspected at length. I quickly grew impatient with the wait, though Eden and Cook, with more experience of the modern England than I, sat it out stoically.

  Then came a new adventure. One by one, we three were led from the car and into the cabin. Eden and Cook were released quickly, with Cook returning to the car smiling. ‘Bobby in there ’as a copy of my book. ’Ad me sign it. Ha! Fame can be ’elpful sometimes.’

  Which was fine for them. But when my go came, I was detained. The officer in charge was a short, bristling man with a long, mournful moustache of a style I thought of as Germanic – I was to see plenty more examples in London. ‘I’m very sorry, Miss, but I have to hold you here for now.’

  I believe I managed to smile sweetly. ‘Who says so, Officer?’

  ‘Exchange.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Big records office, in the British Library.’

  ‘The Library? I’m surprised there’s room with all the books.’

  He shrugged. ‘All the books gone down to a bunker now, Miss.

  ‘I simply yelled, ‘Philip!’

  Philip Parris was a man of substance even in General Marvin’s Britain. Once he was at my side, I asked again why I was being detained.

  The moustached officer glanced at his notes. ‘Miss, in 1908 you became a member of a proscribed organisation, the Women’s Social and Political Union -’

  Philip barked laughter. ‘So that’s it! You’re a suffragette!’

  ‘I was,’ I said. Then amended to: ‘I am. What, is that a crime now?’

  ‘Actually it is, Julie. We’ll sort this out.’

  With his knowledge of the bureaucracy of the modern British state, and sheer force of character, Philip was able quickly to establish that there was no record of me having participated in such acts as bombings or assaults – neither the assassination of Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman at the unveiling of the Tomb of the Vanished Warrior, that great memorial to Heat-Ray victims, in ’08, or even the sporadic protests that had intensified after Marvin’s quasi-legal election triumph in ’11, after which the movement had been banned. In the end, after much telephone negotiation, Philip got me out of choky in return for guarantees that I would present myself at a police station in London, and that Philip himself would be a guarantor of my good behaviour.

  Though grateful to Philip I was humiliated to have to rely on the help of a man, given the circumstances.

  Thus my introduction to the new Britain. We drove on.

  Beyond Guildford, the Bentley passed smoothly along an almost empty road, and we came into the landscape where Martians had once walked.

  The maps that have been drawn up of the battle zone since the end of the First Martian War are familiar enough. It begins south-west of Woking, at Horsell Common, where the first cylinder landed at midnight on Friday June 14, in the year 1907. Then you have that sequence of pits, forming loose triangles, laid down by cylinder impacts over nine more summer nights, reaching up through Surrey to central London and beyond. That loose band of destruction and poison had since become known as the Corridor. Now the countryside had recovered from the scorching of the Heat-Ray, at least as far as the naked eye could see, with the green of the grass sprouting in abandoned fields evident even in the grey light of March.

  But we saw the ruins of central Woking itself, still unreconstructed, left as a kind of monument to the fallen of the War of which this brave, unremarkable town had been the epicentre. I did glimpse the shining dome of the bravely rebuilt Shah Jahan Mosque. It had become a sad joke that Woking, which had once been notorious as the site of the first crematorium in Britain, had now become nothing but a necropolis itself. We drove on.

  Phillip said, ‘Even after the clean-up all this was left undeveloped. Aside from all the physical destruction, the Martians’ use of the Black Smoke, and their vegetable infestations, the red weed, left traces thought to be toxic in the long term. So the land’s unfit for use.’

  ‘That’s the cover, right enough,’ said Albert Cook slyly.

  The closest the road came to one of the Martians’ landing sites was at Pyrford, where we saw a substantial building of corrugated iron and concrete, with barbed wire and watchtowers all around, and armed troops patrolling, and a Union Jack flying jauntily. To reach the site we would have had to pass through another gate, still more massive than the one at Guildford.

  I complained, ‘I can see nothing of the Martian pit from here.’

  ‘That’s not surprising,’ Philip said. ‘It’s the same all over. The pits have become too valuable an asset to be open to Sunday trippers and lemonade-sellers.’

  ‘More than that,’ Cook said. ‘There’s science stuff goes on in there. Like a labor’try. Scientists and inventors and military men, fiddling with Martian gear– trying to make it work for man, see.’

  Philip snorted. ‘And what would you know of all that?’

  The former artilleryman tapped his nose. ‘I ’ave my sources. And my readers, even in the ranks of the military, who agree with me on some points of strategy, they tell me stuff. We ’aven’t ’ad much trouble figuring some of how it works. The Heat-Ray, f’r example, generates a beam of a special light they call infra-red, that rattles back and forth between two little mirrors, getting stronger and stronger, until, bang, out it shoots. Coherent – that’s the word. The big parabolic mirror on the outside of the generator is for sighting, so I understand it, to gen’rate the guide-light that’s barely visible to us. And the Ray itself – fifteen hundred degrees it is, nearly ’ot enough to melt iron. Bet you never knew that.

  ‘And the flying-machine, they got that working even before the Martians’ corpses were cool. But what they can’t figure is what powers all these gadgets. They all have these little boxes inside of ’em, energy packs . . . They don’t burn coal or oil, they’re not electric batteries.’

  ‘He’s right about that,’ Philip said. ‘There are a couple of German physicists called Einstein and, um -’

  ‘Schwarzschild,’ Eden murmured.

  ‘That’s it. They have a theory that the power packs are something to do with the energy that’s evidently trapped, so they say, inside every atom. And if only you could liberate it – well, perhaps that’s what the Martians have m
anaged. If so it’s beyond our understanding, for now.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ said Cook with some glee. ‘But they’d make mighty fine bombs. Maybe you ’eard of the explosions they ’ad at Ealing and Kensington and Manchester, tinkering with those fellows. Boom! Bash! And ’alf a square mile - flattened.’

  Walter himself had witnessed this power. In his Narrative you will read how he saw the Heat-Ray camera of a fallen Martian at Shepperton flash river water to steam, and cause a great scalding wave to advance down the river – he still bears the scars of the scalding he received that day. ‘Think how long a kettle takes to boil!’ he once said to me. ‘And imagine, then, the torrent of energy which that generator must have poured into the tremendous mass of the river water . . .’

  Philip said now, ‘But even so we’re working some miracles.’ He slowed the car. ‘Take a look.’

  Glancing around, I saw that we were in the vicinity of Esher. To either side of the road stood lines of wire fencing, tall, topped with barbed wire, with here and there a manned watchtower. Buildings were dimly visible within these barriers, and people were coming and going, like spectres in the grey afternoon light, watched over by the soldiers or police on the towers. I did not know who these people were, but I saw one small girl pressed up against the fence itself, peering out, fingers meshed in the wire.

  We slowed beside a factory complex. Troops were patrolling the wire here, and Philip made sure a kind of badge was visible behind his windscreen as we paused. We all gazed out.

  And, at the centre of a small compound of huts and pits and heaps of clay, I saw a Martian machine.

  I recognised it at once, from the reconstructions in the museums of New York. It was a handling-machine, a crab-like vehicle that sat on five stiff, stationary legs, and with articulated tentacles working before it. It had no rider. Compared to the dioramas in the museums, which included model Martians riding the things like pilots, it looked as if it had had its brain scooped out.

  Beside the handling-machine was a crude-looking apparatus, an upright cylinder above which a kind of receptacle tipped back and forth. With graceful if unearthly swipes of its tentacular limbs, the machine fed dirt into the cylinder through the tipping device at the top. A white powder filtered out of the base of the cylinder, to flow down a channel to a boxy receiver, from which puffs of green smoke rose into the air – Martian green, an eerie shade that brought back vivid memories to me, if not the others.

  Even as we watched, another tentacle snaked out of the handling-machine to withdraw a silvery ingot from the receiving device.

  But this eerie industry was only the centrepiece. Around the central drama of the clay and the ingots and the green smoke, lines of people supported the operation. Shuffling they were, in bland prison-like uniforms and soft shoes, men, women and children. They brought dirt to the handling-machine, and took ingots away, and performed other such menial tasks, all under the supervision of armed guards.

  Philip, Cook and Eden did not mention the people. They enthused about the gadgetry, what they saw of it as the car crawled past. ‘It is manufacturing aluminium, of course,’ Philip said expansively. ‘That superb material, strong and lightweight as no other metal. . . We only began manufacturing on an industrial scale, with the Hall process, a dozen years before the Martians came. And we needed a plant with the power of a Niagara Falls, and an input of aluminium-rich bauxite, to achieve such results. But the metal is abundant in the earth’s crust. The Martians could produce aluminium from ordinary English clay!

  ‘I was keen that you should see this, Julie. You are family, after all. And this is how I have made my, our fortune . . . And I’ve Walter to thank for it; he showed me an early draft of that book of his about the War, and while everybody else oohed and aahed about the fighting and so on, I picked up a few clues about what was likely to be the real legacy of the Martians for us– I mean their manufacturing capabilities - and got my counters on the game board ahead of the crowd . . . Some, of course, dream of the military application of the Martian technologies -’

  Cook snickered. ‘As the Russians are finding out right now.’

  ‘And others, like cousin Walter, dream of commerce between the worlds. But I tell you now that this humble gadget, the Martian aluminium-smelter, will do more to transform the fortunes of this country than any of that.’

  I considered what I had seen. ‘But these fences – the guns – the people working here. Who are they? Criminals?’

  ‘You know there are a lot of French refugees in England now. Belgians too. Some of them cause trouble: attacks on German business interests, and so forth. And we do have our own home-grown saboteurs -’

  ‘Saboteurs? What, even the children? Is this a concentration camp, Philip?’

  He had the grace to look embarrassed. He said only, ‘This isn’t South Africa.’ He drove us smoothly away.

  And Bert Cook laughed. ‘I bet Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald are in that camp somewhere, fighting for the top bunk like true socialists!’

  A little further north we passed the burned-out ruins of Wimbledon, to our right. Here the road had been raised onto a kind of viaduct, for the land was flooded extensively – as I was to learn, a result of the choking of the Thames by the Martians’ red weed. Thirteen years after the vanquishing of the Martians, this damage had yet to be corrected.

  A hangar-like building stood bold not far from Wimbledon itself, surrounded by levees and embankments. This was the site of another of the ’07 cylinders, the sixth to fall. And here I saw work parties, toiling knee-high in the shallower water at drainage ditches – or, in one place, working in what might have been a paddy field. All of these were watched over by armed police. The low sun glittered on the water. It was almost a beautiful sight, save for the black blemishes of the toiling human figures.

  Albert Cook said quietly, ‘I was ’ereabouts, on Putney Hill. Defying the Martians. Apparently the ’ouse I was in has got a plaque on the side now, saying so.’

  After that we spoke little until we approached London itself.

  7

  IN LONDON

  Philip brought the Bentley to an extensive car park outside Waterloo Station. The station itself had been rebuilt as a sprawling pile fronted by an edifice of concrete and marble – it reminded me of nothing so much as the Brandenburg Gate writ large.

  We were to stay two nights in London; we made arrangements to meet the day after next, for our excursion back to Surrey to meet Frank and Carolyne. Philip, he reminded me, had to bring me to the London police headquarters, relocated to the Barbican, to prove I was no anarchist. Eden and Cook left for the hotel Philip had arranged for us at the Elephant and Castle – and to which our luggage, save for my rucksack, had been directed.

  And, with some time before my appointment, Philip and I decided to walk.

  As we left the car park I found myself staring up at a tremendous poster of Brigadier-General Brian Marvin himself, arms folded, his gaze fixed sternly on mine:

  IN SOUTH AFRICA I FOUGHT THE BOERS: NATIONAL HUMILIATION!

  AT SHEPPERTON I FOUGHT THE MARTIANS: ENGLAND PROSTRATE!

  NEVER AGAIN! VOLUNTEER NOW!

  Philip joined me. ‘Doesn’t get any better-looking with age, does he?’

  ‘I’m surprised nobody’s improved it. Given him a better moustache, for example.’

  Philip laughed. ‘Oh, nobody would dare . . .’

  I mused on the oddities of humanity – of Philip Parris in particular. He was self-evidently a good man, competent, and a support to his friends. He had enough intelligence and detachment to see the corruption of the regime under which he now lived – even its absurdity. And yet he had not turned a hair when faced with the aluminium-factory camp in the Corridor. We are all complex, I suppose, and none of us consistent.

  We walked through the train station itself, an echoing hall, half of which was fenced off by wooden panels. Within was the usual chaos of porters and passengers and portmanteaus, with wreaths of steam ever
ywhere, and the shriek of whistles. But I was puzzled by the half-complete aspect. ‘Why all the rebuilding? I don’t remember any Martian War damage here.’

  ‘Ah, this is another of Marvin’s grandiose dreams. Better communications, that was the promise: more road and rail links, the better to move the guns and men around if the Martians had another go – and he’s done that, to some extent. But he does have a weakness for the grandiose design. Vast naval canals joining Clyde to Forth to Grangemouth: warships sailing down Loch Lomond! That’s the plan; so far, there’s barely a scratch in the Scottish turf. And then there’s the tunnel under the Channel. They actually started one in Gladstone’s day, you know. Again, barely a scratch - and nor has work begun on the big rail links to the London termini that will be necessary. But we’ve got the station! The frontage, anyhow.’

  I smiled. ‘It’s just as Walter said of Bert Cook. All dreams and no action.’

  Philip winked. ‘He’d be a good fit in Marvin’s cabinet then, along with old warhorses like Churchill, and all those tycoons from the railways and the coal mines . . .’

  There was a W.H. Smith’s near the exit from the station, and I glanced over its stock with professional curiosity. In contrast to the vibrant American press, here on offer there were only what looked like dreary official government rags, and a couple of pro-Marvin tub-thumpers like the Daily Mail. The Mail itself had been the first to resume publication after the Martian War, and had never let its readers forget it: ‘Even The Martians Could Not Silence Us!’ I wondered if there was an underground press.

  We crossed Waterloo Bridge, itself heavily repaired after the damage of the War. At this time of day the smoke pall hung as heavy over London as it ever did, and from here, suspended over the eternal river, I could see Westminster, where the palace, wrecked by the Heat-Ray, was gone – even the Clock Tower demolished – to be replaced by a looming fortress of concrete and glass.

  Philip grunted. ‘Behold our rulers. The Mother of Parliaments replaced by a bunker – ugh! And over in the City, around Bank, the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England, Mansion House - the seat of global finance, similarly secured. You still get the swarms of commuters coming in from the suburbs in the morning, and trickling out in the evening, day by day. But they all carry papers and passes, and Black Smoke masks or revolvers depending on which drill is on that day . . .’