They spoke little. Verity seemed too nervous to say much of herself. He did gather she was single, and had only just moved out of her parents’ home into an apartment near Woolwich with some of the other workers when the call-up came. He tried to distract her with talk of himself – or rather of his brother, whose book, he glumly suspected, had enjoyed a spike in sales that day.
Of course she had heard of Walter. ‘I was only twelve,’ she said. ‘We had been visiting family in the Midlands when the news started coming out of London. My father got us on a boat to Ireland, out of Liverpool. I missed the whole show.’
‘You were lucky. And now here you are in the opening overs of the rematch.’
‘But your brother’s book – it made it so real. I met him once. There was an illustrated edition. He came to Foyles on the Charing Cross Road to give a talk. I remember he complained about the drawings, though. I got him to sign a copy for me.’
‘Of course you did,’ Frank said, gritting his teeth.
‘Captain, you saw one fall, didn’t you? A cylinder. Last time.’
‘Yes. The sixth, that came down at Wimbledon. That was at midnight too. We were sleeping out in the open, myself and my future wife and her sister-in-law. Long story.’ He glanced at his watch; it wanted five minutes of midnight.
‘What did it look like?’
‘The cylinder? Like a falling star, sliding across the sky. Green flashes.’
‘Green? Then that’s what we must look out for, I suppose.’ She raised small binoculars and scanned the sky.
For a time neither of them spoke. Frank imagined a great circle drawn around Uxbridge, the quiet, deserted town at the centre, with its electric street lights pointlessly glowing, and a ring of troops like themselves with their guns and field hospitals and binoculars, all waiting, waiting.
‘Captain, it’s gone midnight. My watch has a luminous dial… Midnight plus ten seconds. Fifteen now.’
From somewhere a Cockney voice floated, singing to a carol tune: ‘Why are we waiting? Why-y are we waiting?’ Chuckles of laughter, a soft command to be still.
‘I don’t see any green flashes—’
There was a crack, a detonation high in the air above them. Then a searing light that smashed down from the sky, coming from directly above them. White light – not green at all.
Plunging at the dark earth.
‘Down!’ Frank lay flat,and pressed the back of Verity’s neck to force down her head.
Then the shock hit them.
14
THE LANDING OF THE FIRST WAVE
I learned later that the astronomical spotters had got some of it right – at least the number of projectiles, and the rough location of their fall. None had anticipated the manner of that fall.
A total of fifty-two cylinders landed on central England that night. Tsiolkovsky and co-workers later calculated, given comparisons with the 1907 assault, that they must have come in five flotillas, each of ten or so shots: launched on the 18th February, and then on the 20th, 22nd, 24th and 26th.
(The cylinders to fall the next night, at that moment still en route to the earth, had been fired off on the interleaving nights, from the 19th through to the 27th February…)
As Tsiolkovsky had suggested, the Martians used engines during their interplanetary flight to tweak their trajectories, the lead volleys slowing to allow latecomers to catch up, so that in the end all the cylinders of the first wave fell simultaneously – at least within the limits of accuracy of the timepieces of the military observers who saw them fall – at midnight of Monday, March 29. And the last cylinder to be fired, accompanied by its tardier brothers, landed on the earth four weeks and four days after its launch – the precise same timing as the cylinders launched in ’07.
(And meanwhile the second wave cylinders were still coordinating their own fall, out in space…)
That first fifty-two fell together in a great ring of sixteen miles diameter, roughly centred on the town of Amersham in Buckinghamshire. The circle of impacts reached out as far as High Wycombe to the south-west, Uxbridge to the south-east where Frank was stationed, and Berkhamstead to the northeast. The cylinders came down in a chain, each roughly a mile from its neighbours on either side. There were no green flashes this time, no attempts to slow the craft – if true craft they were, rather than inert missiles fitted with steering engines. Their purpose with that first wave was evidently not to deliver Martians and their equipment intact to the earth, as had been the case with the Horsell cylinder and its siblings of the First War.
The sole objective was destruction.
In their analysis of the 1907 event, Denning and others with expertise in the kinematics of meteorites had pointed out that by landing their cylinders relatively softly, the Martians had actually thrown away a kind of advantage of position – the advantage of the sky over the earth. Barringer, meanwhile, has studied the Canyon Diablo crater in Arizona, and has suggested that it may have been formed, not by volcanic action or by such events as a steam explosion, but by the uncontrolled fall from space of an iron-rich meteorite a few tens of yards across – that is, of a similar size to a Martian cylinder. A hole in the earth some half-mile across and two hundred yards deep: there you have a measure of the harm such a fall can inflict. Indeed, Walter’s account of his experience of close proximity to a cylinder-fall on the houses in Sheen gives a vivid impression of the damage done even by these relatively gentle landings.
(Incidentally one speculative writer – the man-of-the-year-million essayist whom Walter met in Berlin – has irresponsibly suggested that the Barringer crater was created by such a cylinder, an early Martian visitor of the remote past.)
This was the simple but cruder tactic adopted by the Martians to begin their second assault on the earth: to use the brute kinetic energy of these dummy projectiles to smash any resistance before it had a chance to escape, let alone respond.
Thus the event that befell England that March night. Consider the impact of a single cylinder. In its last seconds of its existence the Uxbridge cylinder angled in from the west, across the Atlantic Ocean. It punched its way through the earth’s atmosphere in fractions of a second, blasting away the air around it, blowing it into space, leaving a tunnel of vacuum where it had passed. And when it hit the ground, it delivered all its energy of motion as heat in a fraction of a second. The cylinder itself must have been utterly destroyed, says Denning, and a great wave pulsed outward through the bedrock. A narrow cone of incandescent rock mist fired back along the cylinder’s incoming trajectory, back through the tunnel in the air dug out in those last moments – some more distant observers thought they had seen a vast searchlight beam. Around this central glowing shaft, a much broader spray of pulverised and shattered rock, amounting to hundreds of times the cylinder’s own mass, was blown out of the widening crater. Then the shock waves came, a battering wind, a searing heat. Even the ground flexed and groaned, as a crater a mile wide was dug into the flesh of the earth.
And in that same moment the event was repeated in that grand ring, all around the target circle: seen from the air (as photographs taken the next day proved) it was a circle of glowing pits, every one still more impressive than the Arizona crater, neatly punched into the English ground. And any military units which had been within a mile of the infall were lost.