‘But I believe the Martians have been more subtle yet. I believe the weed encourages chemical reactions among the elements of the air. First, thanks to some catalyst, the nitrogen is made to bond with the oxygen. So the Martians fix the oxide rather than the nitrogen alone, thus removing the oxygen too in a single reaction– the bulk of the air, captured.
‘Now, each frond of the weed won’t take very much. But what it takes it holds. I have done some tests; this version of the weed has a thick, rubbery skin that shows no signs of rotting away and releasing its stolen air any time soon. It just grows, on the ocean floor – and on the ground, and in the ground, and then it lies there, just heaping up, a compact, unbreakable store.’
‘And the Weed grows very fast,’ I said. ‘It reproduces very fast. We saw that even in the First War.’
Walter nodded. ‘You start to see it. There is probably more to the system than that. The Martians will need machinery to spread this, to encourage the growth – but they can have that machinery, quickly. In Sheen, I saw myself how one handlingmachine could manufacture another in the space of a day…
‘It is already fifteen years since the Second War – fifteen years of opportunity for the Martians to develop their system, to spread the operation. And remember, they have already rebuilt one world to suit their tastes and their needs – rebuilt Mars itself, over and over as the sun has progressively cooled. They know what they are doing. They know how to do this.’
‘And already we’re seeing the signs,’ I guessed wildly. ‘The strange weather, the storms—’
‘That’s it. There’s a permanent low pressure system over this part of the Arctic, as the air is drawn down into the ocean and the ground. As the air thins, you see, it loses its capacity to hold water vapour. And on the other hand a normal density of water vapour traps the sun’s heat; as the water vapour is lost from the air, that heat is lost too. In the short term these effects would play hell with the normal meteorological processes. We would have to expect violent storms of rain, hail, snow… Ha! I remember the storms of the June of ‘07, when the Martians first came to England… Coincidental stormbringers!
‘But that is merely a phase. As the air thinned further, if it did, we would progress beyond meteorological phenomena. Those living at the highest altitudes would suffer mountain sickness. With time such effects must progress to lower and lower heights – there would be refugee flows – but it won’t come to that.’
Eden glowered. ‘You know that, do you? Just as every French general knew that the Germans’ military build-up wouldn’t “come” to an invasion of Paris.’
Walter looked at us as if we were missing the point. ‘This is not destruction. Not war. Not under the eyes of the Jovians! That’s all over. Did you know that not a single fighting-machine has been seen in these polar wastes? Handling-machines, yes – machines for building, not smashing.Which proves that they’re here to stay. This is colonisation, not war, and ultimately it will be, it must be, of an orderly kind.’
I tried to make him see our concern. ‘But, Walter, to strip away our air—’
‘Think of it as a negotiation. Of a concrete kind, granted. They are telling us what they want. Well, we must respond by telling them what we will give them – some kind of reserve, perhaps. Even a domed colony. And we are leaving a party of scientists behind to progress that very goal. Perhaps we need a cosmic Mikaelian!’
Eden said heavily, ‘Just hypothetically, Walter – suppose the Martians’ sequestration of the air we breathe was not “orderly” after all. Suppose they don’t abandon it at some polite level. Suppose they just kept on with it. Where would that leave us?’
Walter seemed irritated to have to deal with this – what struck me as a typical hard-headed soldier’s question. ‘There is no theoretical reason why it should end until much of the atmosphere is removed. It is quite possible. Certainly the Martians could reduce it to match the pressure on Mars itself, and adjust its mix to meet their needs.’
‘And what of us? How would we survive?’
Walter eyed him. ‘How do you think? As we would on the moon, or indeed Mars itself. In shelters or caves. Shelters with factories that can make, or at least replenish, scraps of breathable air.’
‘Scraps of air,’ Eric said. ‘Scraps of humanity. We will not be able to move around the world – we won’t be able to organise we could not resist.’
‘It would be themassacre of mankind,’ Hopson said. ‘Just as you wrote in your Narrative, Jenkins. This would be the very massacre, at last.’
‘It won’t come to that,’ Walter insisted.
Eden was still grim-faced. ‘Well, this business of war being over, or not – I suppose we’ll know soon enough. The Martian cannons will fire at the end of March, if they mean to come again. If they do not fire, then perhaps Walter is right, that all of this business with the air is a mere experiment in colonisation, intended to do us no real harm. But if they do launch another invasion fleet—’ He looked Walter in the eye, sternly. ‘If the Martians were to begin a programme to remove all our air how long would we have, man?’
Walter said, ‘It is difficult to estimate. The process is ultimately driven by the energy of the sun, which the plants use to process and sequester the air. We know how much sunlight energy falls on the earth per day, per hour—’
‘How long?’
‘Centuries at best. Decades at worst.’ He picked up his orange, as if absent-mindedly, and began to peel it, slice by shallow slice.
‘Crikey,’ Joe Hopson said softly.
‘What must we do?’ I asked.
Walter seemed surprised by the question. He popped a slice of orange into his mouth. ‘I told you. Negotiate.’
‘So,’ Eden said darkly, ‘we must wait for the end of March, and watch the skies. For then we’ll know, won’t we?’
10
THE EPILOGUE
During our journey westward and back towards Europe and civilisation, I was surprised to learn that Walter Jenkins planned to return to England for his first extended stay in a number of years.
And I was still more surprised when he let slip, quite casually, that he had – evidently on a whim, a nod to the past – bought back the house in Woking where he had lived with his wife Carolyne before the first Martian assault. That was his intended destination now. ‘I need to be there,’ he told me in that grave way of his, ‘on midnight of the twenty-sixth of this month – the date of the next firing, if it comes indeed. When again, history will pivot.’
He was right, and everybody knew it. As I have remarked, for months already the approach of the crucial date had seemed to fuel a world-wide paranoia, and the news of the Arctic Martians, luridly misreported as it was, only magnified that irrational fear (or maybe it was rational, I wondered in the privacy of my own heart). And Walter, bless him, thinking nothing of his own safety – and despite the fate of Mikaelian – was all for plunging straight into the maelstrom of public debate.