“Nothing material. But they live like this, or underground. Many of them live alone, physically – there are few of them, scattered over this world – though they like to congregate. For the benefit of their young, especially.”
“They,” Walter said analytically. “You mean the Martians.”
Nathan only smiled.
“Well, it makes a certain sense.”
And Zena, apparently stranded on a slab of Mars – Mars! – stuck in the middle of the family estate, had to suppress a laugh that would have come out sounding deranged, she was sure. “Sense, Mr Jenkins? How can any of this make sense?”
Now the flying thing grounded, with surprising grace. Zena saw how the central mass, evidently a passenger, shrugged off the frame of wings, as a walker might shrug off an overcoat. The wings neatly folded themselves up, to a compact packet.
And the thing moved forward.
Zena had never seen a Martian close up, during their time on the Earth in ’07 (and nor had I). Few photographic records were made of them while alive; artists’ impressions were, according to eye witnesses, notoriously unreliable, giving no real sense of, for example, the graceful motion of their machines. Even the nearly intact specimen which would one day be pickled and put on display in the Natural History Museum had not yet been released from academic scrutiny. And besides, all the time the Martians had been on the Earth they had been oppressed by our planet’s heavy gravity, which distorted their very bodily form.
So, now, Zena had few preconceptions. She and Walter held their places as the thing scuttled closer.
It was big. Massive. The bulk of a Martian has been compared to a bear, and Zena could see that now. But it looked swollen, it was all but spherical and nearly featureless, with little of the articulation and detail of terrestrial animals. Its hairless hide was like glistening leather. It moved with surprising speed and grace, raised up on its limbs, which, sprouting from beneath the body, were more like extended hands, she thought: two clusters of long, powerful fingers, on which it scuttled like a crab. It had a mouth with a V-shaped upper lip, and large, apparently lidless eyes, almost luminous. There was no distinct face; it was as if these features were painted on a balloon. Zena – as I would, when I too came face to face with such creatures – had an odd, disorienting sense of infancy: this was like a baby’s face, hugely swollen and those lidless eyes wide with surprise.
And Zena saw now that it had a kind of plug in the side of its body, another cannula. This was its only equipment – save, Zena saw now, for a glassy object, egg-shaped, that it carried in two of its long fingers. It came to rest alongside the dangling corpse, and with a graceful flick, took the tube which hung from the body, and fixed it to its own cannula. When this arrangement was in place it gave a soft hoot, like a steam whistle, almost of satisfaction, Zena thought.
Nathan laughed.
It was an unexpected, jarring sound in a world that was still and silent. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I’m so happy. Happy to be here. Happy you’ve joined me at last, Zee-zee. It’s all so perfect. Can’t you see?”
Walter stood close to Zena. “How’s your shooting?”
“My father took me hunting. I didn’t like it, but –”
“Remember I told you what they found when they cleared out one of the cylinders? A crystalline artefact…” He pointed to the crystal egg that nestled under the Martian.
She saw it quickly. “That is how they communicate. That is how they project their dreams.”
“Perhaps.”
“And if it is destroyed, this ends. I know what to do.” She brought her gun around from its strap, cocked it, aimed.
“No!”
She jerked back, shocked. She lifted the gun away. “Mr Jenkins? What is it? This was surely what you were suggesting…”
“Of course, of course.” He ran a gloved hand through hair that had greyed during the summer of the Martians. “But it’s just that it’s such an – amputation. Think of it! The Martians seem materially poor to us; they have no art, no luxury – none that they brought to the Earth, at least. But what need of art or sticks of furniture when you live your life in the realm of the joined mind? And imagine that deep, intimate contact suddenly curtailed. You yourself so recently lost your parents, Miss Gardner. How can we inflict such a severing?” He sighed, almost wretchedly. “I once dreamed of the perfectibility of species. But even the Martians remain an incomplete form with this terrible flaw, the ghastly business of the blood. And yet, and yet! The magnificence of the vision!”
If you have read his memoir you’ll know this was typical of Walter Jenkins. Such hesitation, such contradiction, at a moment of existential crisis – the anguish of doubt!
But Zena was made of sterner stuff. “Magnificent?” She gestured at the dangling corpse. “This? May I finish it, Mr Jenkins?”
“Do it –”
She raised the gun and fired, in a single movement, before he could object again. She saw the egg shatter.
And the world shattered in turn.
Holmburgh Wood closed around her like a clenching fist, darker than ever and still more threatening, as if in sullen reaction to her act of vandalism.
They were in a clearing in the Wood, but it was only a few yards across – not miles. The canal was gone, the valley, the great house. And Zena could see the evidence of burning: huge tree trunks lay around like tremendous matchsticks, evidently smashed by a preliminary explosion then charred by a flash fire.
The only structure here was a kind of shack, as Zena thought at first, a rough cylinder perhaps five yards across and not much taller, made of plates of some silvery, battered metal.
“It’s like a broch,” she said, wondering. “Like the monuments in Scotland.”
Walter grunted. “A broch of aluminium, it seems. Evidently laboriously constructed by the Martian, from the wreck of its fighting-machine, after the lightning strike that had smashed it…”
And the Martian itself was still here. Its flying wing was vanished. Compared to what she had seen before, the Martian looked to Zena as if it had been deflated, squashed, and its leathery hide was scarred and blistered from burns; it breathed heavily, making that hooting sound with its beaked mouth. It was bleeding itself, from small wounds inflicted by shards of the smashed egg. Yet still those babyish eyes were wide as if in perpetual surprise.
Similarly, the Heidelberg-jaw boy suspended from the frame was not as he had been earlier. Hanging now from a branch, not a stand, this was just a boy, lanky, clothed in rough farm gear, drained, inverted, his face looking bruised by the blood flow. Zena knew who this was: the wretched Mervyn Chapman, gone missing weeks before. She hoped that his suffering had been brief.
But she saw – a ghastly detail – that he was suspended from the tree by bootlaces, knotted around his ankles. She remembered noticing that Nathan had lost his own laces.
“None of it was real, was it? The animals. The Neanderthals.”
“None of it. Only the Martian –”
“And the blood.” She turned at last to Nathan.
He no longer sat cross-legged and in repose. He was sprawled on the cold ground, filthy, gaunt. And a cannula in his arm steadily transferred his blood through a transparent tube to the wheezing Martian. “It’s perfect, Zee-zee,” he whispered. “Perfect and eternal. Bliss, for ever. Can you not see it?”
She still had her shotgun. She cocked it and raised it at the Martian.
With a speed that belied its bulk and apparent distress, it scuttled away, diving inside its broch. The feed line snapped, and Nathan’s blood dribbled out onto the ground.
Zena would have gone after it, but Walter grabbed her arm. “No. The fighting-machine is wrecked, but see how it has welded the panels of its shelter… It still has the resources to harm us, and Nathan. Come. You must take your brother out of here.”