‘Oh, really?’ I asked, in a mood to be sceptical. ‘Such as?’
‘Just compare this to any human structure you ever saw – consider what’s missing. You have the passageways, and the communal areas, and that’s it. There is nowhere for privacy, for the Martians evidently don’t desire it. And there’s no evidence of status, or hierarchy. Nobody has a grander room than anybody else. So we can deduce their social structure is flat. They must make their decisions by discussion and consensus. They share everything – why, we see no evidence of anything like private property. They are supremely loyal to each other, too. And remember, I have strong reason to believe the Martians are telepathic. They could not lie to each other. Have you considered that? Imagine how human society would be transformed by that one simple adjustment!
‘Why, even these common areas have a kind of democratic symmetry. One must sit and talk in the round. We found one exception, a chamber with a peculiarly dimpled floor. The best speculation is that this is where the young are kept, after they bud from the parents, when they are small and dependent.’
Hopson seemed to like the idea. ‘Just like being sent away to prep! Didn’t do me any harm. A Martian at Eton? Might fit right in. Well, he’d be good at table tennis.’
‘Such as, that their great cannons are clearly a secondary technology – I mean, a derived use of an existing device, rather than a fresh design. The cannon, you see, were produced by tunnel-boring equipment that was probably perfected long ago – equipment primarily designed underground habitats, like this. for the construction of I suspect that all the technologies they brought to the earth, at least in 1907, were not dedicated weapons, not machines meant for making war, but adaptations of technologies meant for other purposes. Even the Heat-Ray.’
Hopson mused, ‘Just as a man may use a flame-thrower, meant for clearing scrub, as a weapon: deadly enough if you’re in the way of it, whatever its intended purpose.’
‘That’s the idea. After all, what do we see when we look at Mars? You have the snow and the ice, the oceans, the vegetation, the canals. Nowhere do we see a Martian city. Not a single building. Not even at the most complex of nodes in the canalnetwork, like Solis Lacus.’
I saw what he meant. ‘They must have retreated underground – into warrens like this.’
‘That’s it. It’s logical, isn’t it?’
Hopson wasn’t keeping up. ‘But why would one choose to live in a warren?’
‘For protection. For breathable air, as one’s atmosphere thins and collapses. For warmth – for even when the sun dies, you know, the interiors of the planets will retain their heat, and in fact the earth more so than Mars because of its greater mass. This may be our destiny some day, when the sun becomes cold: to huddle underground, kept alive by the planet’s residual heat.’
‘But there’s nothing here,’ I mused, looking around at the blank walls. ‘Not just an absence of sunlight – what would one eat?’
‘Life in the subterranean cities would be one of technological advancement and biological simplicity,’ Walter said, rather pompously. ‘The end of the game in which the Martians are already engaged. The Martians rebuilt their world as they rebuilt themselves, in a great simplification, just as they discarded the wasteful lumber of gullet and stomach to become little more than a brain and a blood circulation system. We know they have hugely simplified their ecology – there is the red weed, and the humanoids that feed on the weed who provide blood for the Martians themselves. Everything else extirpated! Discarded! From the mightiest tree to the flies to the most insignificant of microbes – which as we know left the Martians vulnerable to infection when they first came, in ’07.’
Hopson frowned. ‘Do you admire all this? But the flies, man – swallows eat flies. Do away with the flies, and you lose the swallows. Would you want that?’
‘Not I,’ I said firmly, struck by the astuteness of the observation.
‘There might be no alternative,’ Walter said, dreamy, anxious. ‘Do you not see it? One day the Martians will surely go further yet, leaving behind altogether all this business of biology. Imagine a machine that could take rock, and raw energy from the sun or the planet’s heart, and turn that into food – for all the elements one needs can be found in the minerals, you know. The ultimate efficiency – the most exquisite simplicity – nothing but sunlight, and rock, and brains. That, I believe, is the ultimate technical goal of the Martians.’
I grunted. ‘You sound as if you envy them. Isn’t that what the psychologists said of you, Walter? That you’re half-Martian yourself? Anyhow now they’re gone – this lot at least. So where are the rest? The ones who landed in New York and Los Angeles, and Peking and Berlin… Even you must be aware of the disquiet that mysterious vanishing has caused, and continues to cause. The situation can never be resolved until we know. Do you have some new notion?’
He smiled. ‘In general terms, it was always obvious.’
I glowered; he could be infuriating. ‘Obvious, was it?’
‘Most of the earth is too hot for them. So they will have migrated to where it’s cold. And as most of them landed in the northern hemisphere—’
‘The north,’ Joe Hopson said. ‘That’s always been obvious, yes; they would seek the north, the coldest lands. But the Arctic is the roof of the world – Canada and Asia – it’s a damned big place. Are you saying they’ve been found?’
He answered mildly, ‘I’m saying there have been reports to that effect. There’s an expedition planned next year. Weather permitting. Julie, fancy a trip? There we can confirm what the Martians are doing up there – or rather, what I believe they’ve been doing…’
To the Arctic, searching for Martians! Well, I wasn’t about to say no. Would you?
6
THE VATERLAND
That winter passed slowly for me, in a daze of expectation. Then in early March 1937, I boarded the LZ-138 Vaterland, at Murmansk.
That city is about as far east as you can go in the northern Russian empire and still find something resembling civilisation.
And we would be travelling in the late Arctic winter, about as inhospitable a time and place as our dear old earth offers you, although, as Walter Jenkins never tired of pointing out, to a Martian it would be like the balmiest of summers. We privileged few, however, a multinational party, would travel in a flying hotel.
We gathered in a chilly aerodrome outside the city. Here was Walter himself, seventy-one now, frailer than ever. Joe Hopson was with me; he had kindly volunteered for the trip to serve as a general companion, assistant and guide. Like most military veterans he was a supremely competent chap, and I was glad to have him with me.
And Eric Eden was there too, aged fifty-five, now officially retired from the British Army but still serving as a paid advisor to various government departments on all things Martian – he bore his own burn scars, but he was another survivor whose presence reassured me.
All told there were fifty passengers of a dozen nationalities, most of whom were scientists unknown to me, but I had no doubt of their relevant expertise – at least as judged by some committee or other in the Federation embassy in Paris. And such a high-profile jaunt, with a lot of attendant publicity, naturally attracted the famous and the rich. It was rather fun to do some celebrity-spotting as we stood on that windy platform.