At the station I bought the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Times, that week’s Punch, and on a whim Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday. I scanned the headlines as I walked back home for news of the opposition; in the serious papers they were variants of ‘The World Waits’, but there was no solid news.
I had a quiet dinner; I took Walter sandwiches and soup as he requested, but he ate nothing.
About 11 p.m. I made us fresh coffee, and clambered up to the study, where I sat on a small armchair which Walter and I had lugged upstairs from the sitting-room, the room’s only significant piece of furniture aside from the desk and office chair. Walter still sat, calmly working. His desk was uncluttered: there was his calendar, a travel clock, a few piles of papers, that photograph of Carolyne in its frame, a battered china mug containing pencils – and a telephone, close by his hand. The moon was bright that night, I remember, shining through the study window, a brilliant white disc glaring from a clear sky. A full moon! An eerie omen for such a night, as the cold astronomical clock within which both Martians and humans are embedded once again brought our planets to alignment. I wondered idly if the Jovians’ great sigil, long vanished to the human eye, had left any mark on that stark surface, to be discovered by spacefaring visitors some day.
I broke the silence. ‘I take it there’s no news, then, from your astronomical pals.’
‘Not pals.’ He tapped the telephone – then, on an anxious whim, raised it to check the dialling tone. ‘The astronomical exchange, of whom I am privileged to be a priority contact. No news, no. Of course we see so much better now, but even those early shots, back in ’07 – one must remember they were clearly visible even in poor Ogilvy’s home device, up in Ottershaw – I saw them myself.’
‘An armada – or rather, a colonisation fleet. That’s what it would be this time, wouldn’t it?’
‘That would follow the pattern,’ he admitted. ‘Ten cylinders in ’07, a hundred in 1920, a thousand two years later – could it be ten thousand this time? If they came, which they won’t.’
‘There are some who say we should do more than hope for the best.’ I flipped through the papers. ‘There’s a story in here somewhere… Ah.’ The Telegraph had the most complete report. ‘Churchill’s made another speech. “No more waiting! Did we wait for Napoleon to stride arrogantly onto our pitch? No! We blocked him before he reached the field of play. Now we must find an interplanetary Nelson to take the war to the Martians. We must strike and strike hard…”’
Churchill, that old warhorse, still in the Cabinet as minister for munitions, had responded to the discovery of the Martians’ works in the Arctic by arguing that the ‘British space gun’, as he called it – that is, the Amersham pit which, in 1922, the Martians had indeed used to launch a cylinder to take them home – could be refurbished and put to use to send humans into space. As the Telegraph illustrated with a handy cutaway diagram, an abandoned Martian cylinder could be fitted out for manned travel, with compressed foods, cylinders of oxygen, water condensers, and lodes of sodium peroxide which would scrub excess carbon dioxide out of the cylinder’s contained atmosphere, and so forth. ‘Looks a bit Jules Verne to me.’
‘Lot of nonsense,’ growled Walter, not looking around. ‘What about the acceleration? Ten gravities—’
‘According to this, subjects have been tested in such conditions in centrifuges at Farnborough. With training, and perhaps suspension in viscous fluids and so forth – it says here – the experience might be survivable. Anyhow they aren’t short of volunteers.’
‘I’m not surprised by that. The world’s never been short of suicidal idiots. Still plotting a Bacillus Bomb, are they? That’s another of Winston’s bloodthirsty phrases.’
‘I believe so. The map shows likely targets…’
This was, in a way, an astounding development of the old scratched-together plan to have me carry lethal pathogens into the Martian Redoubt at Amersham. Now Churchill’s cylinder would carry a variant of some ghastly archaic plague to infect the whole of Mars.
‘The most significant known node in the canal network remains Lacus Solis – it says here. And if a bacillus were injected into the global water supply at such a commanding junction, it should spread throughout the planet.’
‘At least it is consistent with our own history,’ he growled. ‘Our European plagues shattered the populations of the Americas and elsewhere, and that was what won us empires.’
I said, in a cold tone, trying to provoke him, ‘Then Churchill’s strategy might work. The precedent shows it.’
‘But even so, would it be right? Julie, Martian civilisation is immeasurably old, by our standards – counted perhaps in the millions of years. Who are we to smash such an edifice? We would be like the Huns at the gates of Rome. And old the Martian culture might be but perhaps it is fragile too. You know that I believe the Martians communicate with a form of telepathy. Whatever the mechanism, what are the greater implications? One oddity that few have remarked upon regarding the Martians is this – that they have no books. Or at least, none they brought to the earth. In their cylinders, no scrap of writing or anything like it: indeed, they show no sign of symbolism at all save for their great planetary sigils which, as I correctly surmised—’
‘I know you did, Walter,’ I said with a sigh.
‘My own conclusion is this. There are no books – or rather, the Martians are their own books. If you could talk direct, mind to mind – memory to memory – what need have you of a book? One could pool thoughts, pool memories, into a communal whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Nothing need ever be lost, in the vaults of those great capacious memories – as long as they survive. But you see the consequences. Murder the Martians, and you burn their libraries too – gone for all time!’
I coughed, rudely. ‘But these big-brained librarians of yours came to the earth – our earth – and slaughtered us, and drank the blood of our children.’
‘Perhaps we need men like Churchill when we must make war, and we must think the unthinkable. But it was you who found a way to make the peace, Julie – not Churchill…’
You must imagine the two of us, arguing in that odd little room with its rather dim lights and rather ill-judged furniture, and its window looking out over the ruins to Horsell Common, where history had been made – and here was the man who first wrote that history, with some degree of eloquence. I scarce believed a word he said, but they were such beautiful words. ‘They will not come,’ declared the Unreliable Narrator now. ‘The Jovians have ensured that. But – and I’m with Haldane on this – I’m not one to argue for an over-reliance on the Jovians to look after us forever. The Jovians intervened once in our affairs, and the Martians’, like a deus ex machina – like the Old Testament God with His floods and plagues. We cannot rely on such help in the future; we should not. We cannot bow down before these temporal deities. We ought to stand on our own two feet – perhaps Mikaelian’s marvellous Federation is a first hopeful step—’
‘How long, then, Walter? Always assuming the Martians give us the time… How long before we reach some level of perfection?’