But, delay or not, it had worked; the withdrawal of the Martians seemed to prove it. We had intervened in a conflict on an interplanetary scale. We had called in the Jovians, as a bullied boy might call in a schoolmaster to save himself from a beating. It had worked.
When he came back to England a few weeks later, Walter cackled with pride at the thought of it, and the next minute all but wept at our temerity – my temerity. I think actually he was a little afraid of me. For – what had we done?
What had I done?
I had brought humanity, irrevocably, into the grave awareness of Jupiter. The Jovians are older than us, and, we must deduce, immeasurably more intelligent, immeasurably more wise. We may hope they will be like a kindly celestial uncle. But, Walter says, even if so, there is no reason to believe that what they see as benevolence will translate into what we may experience as kindness, even mercy. Thus a child weeping over a sick mother could never imagine the moral choices to be made by a battlefield doctor making triage choices.
Yet on reflection, Walter still felt we had had no choice. The Jovians might spare us; the Martians certainly would not have.
And still, on that fateful Sunday and afterwards, puzzles remained.
The hostilities everywhere withdrew. behind, along with any surviving human victims, but they seem to have taken their own native humanoids with them. Just as it had been in England in ’07, the slow, sad work of recovery began. And slowly too parties of military and scientists and various officials approached the great Martian earthworks. They were empty – the Martians gone – and stripped this time of technology, of the cylinders and all they had brought, all that had been manufactured.
Yet the question remained – we knew, as I will relate in due course, that only a fraction had left this earth – where had the Martians gone?
And then, what of our still greater neighbours? They had saved us, if indirectly – but how? It was evident that the Jovians, alerted by our crude sigils, had sent some kind of signal, some commandment, to the Martians. But how? What had been sent, what received?
In the end, the answer became obvious to anyone who looked out of her window at the right time. At that time, late in May 1922, the moon was a crescent, dwindling towards a new moon on the 26th, the Friday after the weekend of the global landings. And the moon had changed, as even the naked eye could see. In the darkened sector of the disc, a fine line could be made out: an arc, within the perimeter of the moon’s face. As the days passed, and the new moon came, the truth became apparent for all mankind to see – as our unwelcome Martian guests had evidently made out more quickly. The moon’s face bore a tremendous circle, silver, perfect, a thousand miles across. The Jovians had written their sigil on the face of the earth’s own satellite.
And it is evident for whom the symbol was intended. That great design was observed, as the moon waxed and waned, through the coming months – through a year, and then most of another. It vanished as suddenly as it had been created on April 7, 1924.
It was Walter who first computed the significance of the date. ‘It is just as the Martians timed their attacks to our day-night cycle, and they landed at our midnight,’ he said. ‘The lunar sigil persisted for two years less forty-three days. Allowing for the leap year, that comes to six hundred and eighty-seven days that the sigil was in existence…’
Which is precisely one Martian year.
BOOK IV
MARS ON EARTH
1
A TELEPHONE CALL
It was in the autumn of 1936, fourteen years after the Second War, that Carolyne Emmerson called me.
It was quite out of the blue. I had been living in Paris, more or less contentedly, with my sister-in-law Alice close by. I was continuing to work, rather slowly, on drafts of the narrative history you are reading now. Under strict military instructions – even in the age of the Federation of Federations secrecy is a habit when it comes to the Martians! – I had kept silent about my own role in the withdrawal of the invaders (by the time this memoir is published, by my sanctions-defying American publisher, I will no longer care). I was forty-eight years old, and with the poisonous plague removed from my body by a fullblood transfusion, I believed I had put my own Martian entanglement behind me.
And, I am ashamed to say, at first I did not recognise the name: Carolyne, having divorced Walter Jenkins before the Second War, had never remarried, but had eventually reverted to her maiden name. Nevertheless it was Walter she wanted to discuss with me.
‘I’m concerned for him,’ she said, her telephonic voice a whisper. ‘He’s never stopped being engaged with it all, you know. Straight after the Second War he plunged straight into the Basra conferences, and made a public ass of himself on a number of points. Now he’s wangled access to the Martian pits at Amersham, and spends his waking life there. And he’s as careless of his health as ever he is.’
‘I see the papers are using his articles again.’
‘Only for the shock value, I think. You know how the mood is changing as the opposition approaches…’
She meant the next perihelic opposition, due in 1939; another set of close approaches of Mars to the earth, more opportunities for their invasion fleets to cross – an alarming prospect if you believed the scare warmongers like Churchill. And if stories put about by the Martians followed precedent they would make their first crossing in the opposition before, in 1937, only months away. Indeed we had already passed one possible opportunity; the 1920 invasion had come two oppositions before the optimum in that particular cluster. It was disturbing that there seemed as little astronomical news available to the general public under our glorious new world order as there had been under the old. And this time the speculation was spiced by much fearful guesswork about where those Martians who had come to the earth in the twenties might be hiding. They had not been observed since the end of the Second War, but, as far as anybody knew, they were still here. It all made for a horrible lack of resolution.
‘The mood is souring,’ Carolyne whispered. ‘All this talk of the Germans and the Russians and the Americans rearming, despite the Federation treaties. And so, of course, there’s Walter all over the place, the newspapers’ pet apostle of peace! Some are even calling him a traitor to humankind.’
‘You fear for his mental stability.’
She laughed, sadly. ‘I have always feared for his mental stability. It’s not just that, Julie. I fear for his life. Since the assassination of Horen Mikaelian…’
It had happened two days before; I had been deeply shocked by the murder of that patient architect of peace and unity – a murder inflicted by those who feared a new war with the Martians, or, perhaps, longed for it.
‘Walter has already been on the BBC condemning the act. Of course I agree with him; of course he must say what he feels. But—’