Marigold said grimly, ‘New York resisted. And here’s our reward.’
And Harry Kane felt true fear, for the first time in the war – perhaps in his life, he would say. All he had experienced so far, in the midst of the fury, had left him oddly untouched within. Somehow he had always believed he would come through this intact, no matter what happened to those around him. As if he were invulnerable and immortal. The coming of the flyingmachines changed all that. Perhaps all young people have to shed such illusions. For Harry, the Black Smoke, an approaching wall, was like the advance of death itself, implacable, unavoidable.
Harry thought he was doomed, the earth itself lost. He was wrong about that.
For I had fulfilled my own mission.
25
A PLAYER OF THE GAME
On the Friday afternoon, after debarking inside the Martian Cordon from the landship Boadicea with Lieutenant Hopson, I had quickly got in touch with Marriott once more, and through him his network of resistance fighters. Meanwhile, following Eric, the surviving underground telephone lines into the Cordon had been fizzing with new instructions to the troops stranded there.
I had never been sure if Marriott believed my account as to why I wished him to use his stock of explosives in one great earth-shaping exercise. He may have had his pompous side but he was a hard-headed, practical man, and determined to take the fight to the Martians as best he could, and good for him; now he cavilled at the fact that this operation would not be hitting the Martians directly. But I think, paradoxically, he liked to be given an assignment from authorities to which he still believed himself accountable, and loyal. He relished the thought of such a technically complex set-up, part of an operation that included many of the regular troops trapped inside the Cordon with him. And, more than that, he liked the sheer symbolism of it. After all – what a gesture!
A communication to be seen from space!
Whatever he was feeling, after I persuaded him to my cause, Marriott and his scattered army immediately got to work. It took them much of the rest of the Friday to plan it – I had found him late – and much of the Saturday to move the explosive caches into place, all across the Cordon, all beneath the gaze of the Martians. Still, all was ready by the morning of the Sunday. After some final checks, and with a last coordination with the military authorities, Marriott, by phone, sent the messages to his franc-tireurs to detonate at noon.
So it came to pass. All across the Cordon – and even within the Amersham Redoubt itself – the Martian earthworks were disrupted by a series of blasts, carefully placed. It could never be complete, never perfect – there was not the time, and the explosives were placed under conditions of extreme peril, whether by regulars or the franc-tireurs. Nevertheless, the stratagem was effective. Aerial photos taken before and after the blasts show it clearly.
That morning the Martians’ earthworks, as imaged at eight thirty a.m. by spotter planes, had undeniably sketched a set of sigils, some miles long, incomplete but near-perfect copies of that sinuous marking humans had first perceived on the faces of Venus and of Mars, after the Martians’ invasion of the younger planet – and, later, through the scholarship of Walter Jenkins, had been made out in the unfinished pattern of pits the Martians had dug into the ground of Surrey in the year 1907. This was the Martians’ brand of conquest. But in the afternoon, by the time the dust and smoke had cleared, the sigils had been disrupted, blasted apart – and they had been replaced by circles, on all scales, far from perfect but the intent clear. At noon on Sunday, then, we humans replaced that Martian brand upon the earth, not with a symbol of our own – but with a Jovian sigil, that figure of infinite symmetry which the astronomers had seen burn in the clouds of Jupiter itself.
And a couple of hours later the Martians began to respond. In Battery Park, meanwhile, in those last moments, as the flying-machines loomed, the three companions stood in a line and held hands, Bill and Harry to either side of Marigold.
Marigold said, ‘Old Bigelow will never know what he started when he invited the three of us to that party – was it only on Thursday night? It seems a different world.’
‘Do you regret it?’ Woodward asked. ‘Resisting, I mean. The flux bombs. We probably could have got out of here…’
‘Hell, no,’ Harry said.
Marigold smiled. ‘Ditto,’ she said firmly. ‘And, you know…’
And then something changed.
The fall of Black Smoke stopped abruptly.
The flying-machines broke formation. Huge dishes in the sky, they swept around in wide curves, and receded as quickly as they had come, growing smaller, vanishing into the mists of morning – gone in seconds.
The last of the Black Smoke, dispersing, blew harmlessly out over the water.
Harry felt a surge of emotion, of relief; he would say he had not understood the depths of his fear until it receded. But he felt utter bafflement at still being alive.
‘What just happened?’
26
SILENCE FALLS
At the same time it was around three p.m. in Berlin. And Walter Jenkins, huddled in the cellar of his house, was immediately aware of a change in the Martians’ behaviour. It was a silencing of their movements, he said, a kind of slithering withdrawal. That cry, ‘Ulla!’, heard all over the planet that terrible day, now seemed more plaintive – and receding.
He pushed aside his improvised barricades of empty barrels and broken furniture, and – heart thumping, for he could not be sure of his deductions – he emerged into the light of a German midday. Other people stood by, in the wrecked street, dusty, bewildered, some injured – all watching. And Walter saw the fighting-machines, tall and graceful, receding steadily from the city – heading north. All this in his first glance.
In that moment I think he guessed what must have been done – what I must have done – emulating my own intuitive leap. Well, it had started out as his idea, even if I had thought it through in the end. And he even guessed correctly at the timing of its completion: about noon British time.
He hurried home to his cellar to try to verify his theories, praying that the telephone would be working.
Of course it was all guesswork, in the end – about how the Jovians might respond. Educated guesswork, though.
When the Martians invaded Earth and Venus, had the Jovians set up the circle sigils in their own clouds and moons as a warning to the squabbling races that Jupiter must remain inviolate? And, worse, to ensure their own future survival, must the Jovians fight a future war to dislodge the destructive, meddling, expansive Martians from this earth, and even from Venus? We had to assume so.
My intent, when I imagined creating those great signals of dirt and explosive, was that with one bold gesture we would proclaim this earth an ally of Jupiter, in that epochal combat to come. And evidently, in response, the Jovians gave the Martians some warning, or instruction, and the invaders had no choice.
My signal was a created at noon, London time. The Martians did not withdraw until 2 p.m., roughly. Why the delay of two hours? – a lag which caused many of us intense anxiety as we lived through it, as I can testify.
Walter, so he told me later, would have predicted some such pause. Jupiter is some five times further from the sun than the earth; the distance between the planets is never much less than some four hundred million miles at the closest, never further than six hundred million miles at the furthest. It would take a ray of light, then, never less than thirty-four minutes to cross from the earth to Jupiter, and thirty-four minutes back again. Einstein has proved that nothing in this universe can travel faster than a ray of light – and therefore any Jovian response to our signal, our violent scrawling of Jovian signals in the English dirt, could not have been expected to come in much less than an hour after we had created the signal. Whether God could surpass the speed of light I will never know, but even the Jovians have limitations!