‘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 managed. 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.