‘And that must be Eden because—’
‘He’s the only one looking at the artwork.’
Indeed, hands in pockets, oblivious to the crowds, the man was staring up at the ceiling, which (had I ever noticed this before?) was coated with mosaics that looked Roman, perhaps Byzantine. That was the Americans for you; in this new monument to a triumphant Mammon, they felt the need to reach back to their detached European past.
Harry strode across the floor, muttering, ‘Could he look more the Englishman abroad? If this is the best he can do to blend into the background, no wonder the Martians caught him.’
That made me snort with laughter as I followed. ‘Hush. You’re terrible. The man’s a hero.’
Hero or not, Eden looked rather nervous as we bore down on him, and he couldn’t help glancing down at the practical trouser suit I was wearing, as was my custom. ‘Mrs Jenkins, I take it—’
‘I prefer Miss Elphinstone, actually, since my divorce.’
‘My apologies. I imagine you recognised me from the posters in the bookshop windows.’
Harry grinned. ‘Something like that.’
‘It has been a well-announced tour. Just Bert Cook and myself for now, but we should be joining up with old Schiaparelli in Boston – discoverer of the canals, you know – in his eighties but going strong…’
I introduced Harry quickly. ‘We both work for the Post.’
‘I’ve not read your book, sir,’ Harry admitted. ‘It’s kind of out of my sphere. I spend my time fighting Tammany Hall as opposed to men from Mars.’
Eden looked baffled, and I felt moved to interpret. ‘Tammany Hall’s the big Democrat political machine in the city. Americans do everything on a heroic scale, including corruption. And they were not men in that cylinder, Harry.’
‘However,’ Harry went on, unabashed, ‘I’ve been known to dabble in the book trade myself. Sensational potboilers, that’s my line, not having a heroic past to peddle.’
‘Be glad of that,’ Eden said, softly enough.
A line which seemed to me the embodiment of British understatement! Eric Eden was, after all, the only living human being who had actually been inside a functioning Martian cylinder – he was captured in the first couple of days in ‘07, as the military, in their ignorance, probed at the first landing pit at Horsell. Having been kept alive, perhaps as a specimen for later examination by the Martians, Eden had fought his way out of a space cylinder with nothing much more than his bare hands, and had ultimately made it back to his unit with invaluable information on Martian technology.
He said now, ‘Miss Elphinstone, Walter Jenkins did warn me of your likely – ah, reluctance to get involved. Nevertheless Mr Jenkins did press on me the importance of the contact, for you, the rest of his family. He seems to have fallen out of touch with you all. Indeed that’s why he had to make such a circuitous attempt to contact you, through myself and Bert.’
‘Really?’ Harry grinned. ‘Isn’t this all kind of flaky?’ He twirled a finger beside his temple. ‘So the man wants to contact his ex-wife, and the only way he can do it is by contacting somebody he barely knows, with respect, sir, on the other side of the world, in the hope that he can talk to his brother’s ex-wife-’
‘That’s Walter for you,’ I said, feeling oddly motivated to defend the man. ‘He never was very good at coping.’
Eden said grimly, ‘And that was presumably even before he spent weeks being chased by Martians across the countryside.’
Harry, young, confident, was not unsympathetic, but I could see he did not understand. ‘I don’t see what favours Jenkins has done you either, Major Eden. I saw the interview you gave to the Post, where you attacked him for claiming to have seen more of the Martians than any other eyewitness, when they were at loose in England. As you said, you certainly saw stuff he never did—’
Eden held up his hand politely. ‘Actually I didn’t say that, not quite. Your reporter rather gingered it in the telling – well, you have to sell newspapers, I suppose. But I rather feel that we veterans should, ah, stick together. And besides, if you take a longer view, Jenkins did me a favour. One cannot deny that his memoir is the one that has most shaped public perception of the War ever since its publication. And he does mention me, you know.’
‘He does?’
‘Oh, yes. Book I, Chapter 8. Although he does describe me mistakenly as “reported to be missing”. Only briefly!’
I snorted. ‘The man’s in the dictionary under “unreliable narrator”.’
Eden laughed, not very sincerely. ‘But he never related my own adventures, as he did Bert Cook’s, say, and so I got the chance to tell it myself – and my publishers to label it as an “untold story”.’
Harry laughed. ‘It’s all business in the end? Now that I sympathise with. So what’s the plan, Major Eden? We gonna stand around gawping at frescoes all day?’
‘Mosaics, actually. Sorry. Miss Elphinstone, Mr Jenkins wishes to make a telephone call. To you, I mean.’
Harry whistled. ‘From Vienna? Transatlantic? That will cost a pretty penny. I know we’re all excited by the new submarine cable, and all, but still…’ The cable had been planned as part of a global alert system in the aftermath of the Martian War – although in the event the cable was not laid in place before the Schlieffen War had broken out, that entirely human affair.
Eden smiled. ‘As I understand it Mr Jenkins is not short of pennies, thanks to the success of his book. Not to mention the rights he has sold for the movie versions.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Anyhow, Jenkins will make the call to our hotel suite – I mean, mine and Bert’s. If you wouldn’t mind accompanying me there—’
‘Which hotel?’
Eden looked faintly embarrassed. ‘The Plaza.’
Harry laughed out loud.
‘I myself would have been content with more modest accommodation, but Bert—’
I said, ‘No need to apologise. But—’ I looked Eden in the eyes, and I recognised something of myself in there – something I could never share with Harry, good-hearted though he was. The look of the war veteran. ‘Why would he call? Could it be they are coming back? And why now? The timing’s all wrong, isn’t it?’
Eden only shrugged, but he knew what I meant.
I was never an astronomer, but since the Martian War we had all picked up a little about the dance of the planets. Mars and the earth chase each other around the sun like racing cars at Brooklands. The earth, on the inside track, moves faster, and periodically overtakes Mars – the Red Planet is lapped once every couple of years or so, in fact. And it is at these moments of overtaking, called oppositions (because at such instances sun and Mars are at opposite poles as seen in the earth’s sky), that Mars and the earth come closest to each other. But Mars’s orbit is elliptical, and so is the earth’s to a lesser degree – that is, they are not perfect circles. And so this closest approach varies in distance from encounter to encounter, from some sixty million miles or more to less than forty million – the closest is called a perihelic opposition. Again there is a cycle, with the minimal perihelic approaches coming by once every fifteen years or so: in 1894, and then in 1909, and again in 1924…
I recited from memory, ‘The next perihelic opposition is still four years away. The 1907 assault came two years before the last perihelic. Surely they won’t come, if they come at all, for another couple of years, then. But if they were to break the pattern and come this year, they may be already on their way. This year the opposition date is April 21—’