‘Think you can manage this? It’s the latest fruit of Mr Edison’s ingenuity.’
‘Edison? What are we going to do, throw light bulbs at them?’
Marigold said, ‘Oh, rather more than that. Menlo managed to produce fifty of these, and ship them over. Mostly untested, probably half won’t go off at all. But if even a fraction of them work we’ll have struck a mighty blow. After all we think there are only around two hundred and fifty fighting-machines in the area, so taking out even one—’
Harry sat up and reached for a cylinder. ‘Show me.’ Marigold slapped his hand, ‘Whoa! Hold your horses, Hopalong, there’s high explosive in there.’
Bill grinned again. ‘We’ve got work to do. Get up, empty your bladder, eat something – I have a flask of coffee—’
‘You have coffee. In the middle of the end of the world?’
‘Not that yet.’
By 7 a.m., led by Bill Woodward, the three of them had infiltrated the Lower East Side. It wasn’t difficult. There was no power, no traffic moved in the rubble-choked streets, and in some blocks fires burned unchallenged. Martian fighting-machines stood around the precinct like prison watchtowers, but just as in the Cordon in England, it seemed that individual humans were allowed to move to and fro without hindrance, so long as they offered no threat to the Martians.
No visible threat.
Bill led them to a site – Harry believed it was on Allen Street, but it was hard to be sure so extensive was the damage – where the Martians had already begun the construction, in the light of that first morning of occupation, of one of their characteristic redoubts. The excavating-machines had dug a great crater in layers of shattered masonry, cutting through broken-open cellars and stores, even gouging into the granite keel of Manhattan itself. Fighting-machines stood over the pit, some of them empty of their drivers, and busy handling-machines had already begun their efficient processing of American dirt and rock into fine aluminium ingots. In the shadows individual Martians lurked, shuffling in their heavy, leathery way, and hooting to each other as they avoided the morning sunlight – they were creatures of a colder world than ours. Ruins looked down on this scene, gaunt and eyeless.
And at the centre of the pit were people: men, women and children, perhaps thirty of them, sitting in a huddle. They seemed unconfined, but Harry had no doubt that had they tried to escape they would have been struck down quickly. Instinctively he began to pen character sketches in his head. Most of them looked as if they had been inhabitants of the wretched tenements that had stood here, tired-looking women, grimy men, wide-eyed, shoeless children. But there was one soldier, apparently wounded, as helpless as the rest, and a woman in the uniform of a nurse. One mother was trying to speak to the nurse, as if asking for help for the child sleeping on her lap. But the nurse covered her ears and turned her head away.
The rebels peered at this scene from behind a broken wall.
Woodward growled, ‘Livestock to be consumed. Americans! Well, not today. Here’s the plan…’
The tactics were simple. Woodward and Harry would take the three bombs to a hole in the ground Woodward had spotted, close to a cluster of machines, probably a blown-open cellar. The bombs themselves would be ignited simultaneously by a wireless signal, sent by Woodward. And while the Martians were hopefully paralysed and confused, Marigold, on the opposite side of the great pit, would call to the prisoners and lead them to freedom.
That was the plan. They quickly got everything into position.
Then, with a feral grin, Woodward counted down. ‘Three, two, one—’
It almost worked.
What Edison and his whiz-kids in Menlo Park had come up with was a new kind of bomb. It came out of research into Martian technology, at least of a secondary kind. I suspect Harry never understood it fully, but then, neither do I.
It was, and is, believed that the Martians’ energy cells – used to power the Heat-Ray, for example – are based on the extraction of energy from the nuclei of atoms. Einstein and others have shown that in principle the compression of matter to sufficiently high densities will cause it to fuse to a secondary state of greater density, a different elemental combination, with tremendous energy being liberated in the process. It is as if, says Einstein, some of the very mass of the fuel has been transformed to energy. This process itself was not well understood before the Second War, and indeed is still not under our control; investigations into the phenomena dating back to the aftermath of the First Martian War caused terrible accidents, in Ealing, South Kensington and elsewhere.
However, by 1922, it had become clear that the Martians achieved this enormous compression of matter with the use of very powerful electrical and magnetic fields. And our investigations of these comparatively familiar technologies had advanced our own capabilities in these areas by, some would say, decades.
Edison’s bomb was called an ‘explosively pumped flux compression generator’ – a flux bomb, to the soldiers who used it. Its purpose was simple: to produce, for but an instant, in a restricted area, extremely powerful electrical and magnetic fields.
It achieved this by exploring a quirk of electromagnetic physics (a quirk to me! – a miracle of theorising and practical application to the physicists, I dare say). If you have a magnetic field, and surround it with a conductor – say, a band of copper wire – and then you contract that band, the magnetic flux through the conductor, contained by the wire, will stay the same strength – but its intensity, you see, the density of that power, as it is squeezed, must become much higher. It’s as simple as that, and you can demonstrate the principle with a schoolroom experiment, an electromagnet and a few bits of wire.
Now scale it up. Wrap your conductor and your magnetic field in a few packets of high explosive. Set that off in a careful design so that the explosive forces push inwards – and the compression of the magnetic field becomes enormous, if only for an instant, before the whole thing blows itself apart…
The point is, as Edison realised, that Martian machines depend on electrical fields for their operation. They have what Walter Jenkins once described as a ‘sham musculature’ comprised of discs inside a sheath of elastic. When an electric field is applied, these discs, polarised, are drawn together or pushed apart. The result is the remarkably graceful ‘limbs’ of any Martian machine, from the great legs of a fighting-machine to the finest of the manipulative tentacles of a handlingmachine – and all of it controlled by electrical and magnetic fields. And if those fields were disrupted, by a sufficiently powerful electromagnetic pulse nearby…
I am told, by witnesses from Menlo Park itself, that the devices Bill Woodward brought to Harry and Marigold, packages each easily carried by a single person, could produce pulses in the tens of terawatts and the millions of amperes: that is, more powerful than a lightning strike. Thus it was, in the course of the attack on New York, humans at last turned the lightning on the Martians.
The detonations themselves seemed overwhelming to Harry, huddling by a wall. They left him with a ringing in his ears that persisted for days.
When he emerged from cover he found that only two of their bombs had worked. But those two had done tremendous damage to the Martians. As Harry watched, one of the great fighting-machines fell like cut timber, legs stiff as wood, and crashed down into an already ruined house. The other machines seemed paralysed, the busy excavators and handlers frozen in their tracks. The living Martians, stuck in their machines, tried to scramble out, and hooted to each other in dismay, and Harry wondered what complex messages, of fear or rage, were passing telepathically between them.