Marigold picked up a rock. ‘They’re helpless. We can kill them before the machines recover – if they do.’
But Woodward held her arm. ‘No. Some of the machines survived, you can see that. All it would take would be one working Heat-Ray gun… We’ve done what we came to do. Let’s get those civilians out of there.’
As they left the pit, they saw more fighting-machines converging, travelling down the rubble-strewn streets to come to the aid of their fellows. Harry, Marigold and Woodward had to duck and hide as they made their escape: it was evident that despite the blow they had struck, and the detonation of similar bombs across the occupied territory, Manhattan still belonged to the Martians.
‘But it’s a start,’ Bill said grimly. ‘Americans fighting back, at last. A start!’
23
A WORLD UNDER SIEGE
Having no better plan after the Martian triumph in Berlin, Walter Jenkins had joined the ragged crowds fleeing from the centre of the city, and out into the suburbs and beyond. From there Walter retraced his steps – and, somewhat to his own surprise, made it back to his rented house in Dahlem.
It was still only the early afternoon of that extraordinary Saturday.
By now Walter was a veteran of such situations. He made for his study, gathered up equipment, and hauled it down to a cellar used only for storing coal, firewood and a rack of wine – he even managed to drag a telephone receiver down, its cable stretched along the cellar stairs. He made one last foray aboveground for water and food. Then he retired to his improvised bunker, listening to a battery-powered wireless set, trying to make calls on the telephone, and making obsessive notes by candle-light.
Thus, through the Saturday night and into the Sunday, Walter renewed his witnessing of the Second War.
He learned that by noon of the Saturday – noon London time, that is – urgent reports had been received via the transoceanic telegraph and telephone lines of the Martians’ attack on Buenos Aires. Their strategy had followed its by-now customary course, with a landing at local midnight – that is, in the small hours of the Saturday, London time – some distance inland along the valley of the Rio de la Plata, and then at local dawn an advance on the city. The Argentinean military, an undeveloped force, was able to offer little resistance. Images later returned were particularly vivid: of the Martians smashing the huge grain elevators that lined the banks of the river, of fighting-machines standing proud over the huge La Negra slaughterhouse, of the rich elite crammed aboard the frigorificos, the giant refrigerated ships within which Argentinean beef is exported. And the poor had to fend for themselves as the poor always do. (A romantic tale, by the way, of a band of gauchos riding out and using their bolas to trip fighting-machines turned out to be just that – a tale.)
So much for the Argentine capital. But this was the last of the Martian incursions; since the first landfall on Long Island, a twenty-four-hour cycle of landings and assaults had been completed.
By midday of the Saturday, then, the earth was stitched about by pinpoint Martian attacks – knots and scrapings of fire that could surely have been seen by an observer on Mars itself – with ten landings having occurred in the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, even Australia, and comprising a thousand cylinders in all. Human attempts at organised resistance had proven all but futile, just as they had been in England in ’07 or ’20. Such innovations as the Americans’ flux bombs and the Germans’ incendiaries might have enabled humanity to take the war to the invaders a little longer, given time. But to Walter a rapid disruption of human civilisation and organisation seemed assured, and the unending domination of the earth by the Martians inevitable.
And then, everything changed.
24
THE REVENGE OF THE MARTIANS
In New York it was around nine in the morning.
Harry Kane, Marigold Rafferty and Bill Woodward sat in Battery Park, where Harry and Marigold had been camping for two nights now, and surveyed what they could see of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn where some fires still burned, the rivers still littered with wrecks. They were eating German sausages from cans looted by Woodward, and drinking coffee they had boiled up in a saucepan over an open fire. It was another fine, bright day, the weather belying the state of the city.
Marigold was using her binoculars. ‘I still see no fighting-machines. Maybe your squawk-box is telling the truth, Bill.’
Woodward had purloined an Army field-wireless kit from the corpse of a signals officer, and had been trying to follow the progress of the war. ‘Well, they are still moving. As Patton predicted, they broke out of Manhattan to the north and are already in Connecticut. Reports say they got as far as Peekskill on the Hudson, and Danbury on the Housatonic. They may not go much further north; the land is bad up there. The intelligence guys think the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts must be a target – biggest in the country, and we know they did their scouting before the landings. One group looks as if it’s considering an advance to Hartford, maybe even to Boston. There’s another group heading south-west, maybe making for Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC. The Army set a trap at a place called Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and they’ve been held up there. But—’
‘But wherever else they are, the Martians they withdrew from Manhattan.’
‘Thanks to Edison’s bombs,’ Marigold said with a grin.
Woodward nodded. ‘For sure Edison’s flux bomb is the first really effective weapon we have developed against them. And if you think about it, they reacted just as they did before, in England. I read the history. In Surrey in ’07, the first time an artillery shell knocked one of them over – I bet they weren’t expecting us even to be capable of that – they rescued their wounded, and their machine, and withdrew to their pits for a while. Just as here. We bloodied their non-existent noses and they pulled back.’
Looking into the east, Harry thought he saw something in the sky, over Brooklyn and Long Island, like a cloud perhaps, in an otherwise cloudless heaven. No, it was too dark to be a cloud, and moving too quickly. If not a cloud, then what? A Zepp?
Marigold said now, ‘Fighting-machines or not, I haven’t seen much in the way of rescue work and such.’
‘You will,’ Woodward said. ‘It takes time to move resources on this kind of scale; you got a whole city down here…’
Not one cloud but three. Black as night, solid. And they seemed to be scattering some kind of dark rain below.
Approaching fast. Not clouds at all.
‘Oh, damn.’
Marigold raised her eyes comically. ‘Harry! Not in front of the US Army.’
But Harry wasn’t about to smile. He pointed. ‘They’re coming back.’
Marigold shaded her eyes from the sun.
Bill Woodward got to his feet, fumbling for his own binoculars. ‘Flying-machines. Spotters always say they’re bigger than they look, and further away, and faster than you think.’
Marigold said, ‘They’ll be here soon enough. And that black stuff they’re scattering – it looks as if it’s pooling on the ground, like the smoke from dry ice. Swirling around the buildings.’
Harry nodded. ‘The British call it the Black Smoke. A new variant, resistant to water. You can slaughter whole populations with the stuff, easier than the Heat-Ray. But it’s only been used on a limited scale over there, this time anyhow. They want to knock us out of the fight, but not to kill us all, it seems. But, the British found out, if you resist, you get whacked.’