Nineteen hours!
Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield was a little further back, on a slight rise, observing. He could not see the heat beam itself, or indeed the projector being wielded from the suddenly open cylinder, but he saw men, machines, vehicles and horses incinerated in a glare of light, all around the pit. Then he saw more beams, coming presumably from projectors within the cylinders themselves, reaching up into the sky, pale, barely visible in air that was already filling with smoke. He looked up, wondering – and saw detonations, high in the air, almost like fireworks, he would say later. These were the artillery shells, incoming from the remote big guns, on their way to smash the Martian cylinder before it ever opened – that had been the theory. None of them reached the ground, never mind its target. A few spotter planes too were caught like moths in an invisible flame, brief flares against the midnight sky.
And then, rising out of the pit, above the smoke, he saw a great cowl, like a bronze helmet, lifting smoothly three unfolding legs. It was a fighting-machine – a great tripedal engine of war, returned to the earth after thirteen years, rising out of the smoke, above the disintegrated corpses of hundreds of men. All this and not yet a minute since the cylinder had landed.
Fairfield saw it in an instant. If we had deduced that the Martians were at their most vulnerable on first landing, so had they themselves, and they had done something about it.
Verity Bliss, in the medics’ ditch with my brother, was too far back to see any of the first moments of the conflict in detail, but she quickly got the general picture – so she would tell me later. The Martians, who were supposed to be dormant in their pit, were fighting back; the soldiers were dying. And that great cowl of the first fighting-machine was already advancing, looming out of the pit. Verity grabbed my brother’s collar, and hauled him by main force out of the trench. ‘We must run! It is the only chance!’
Frank had heard the cries of freshly wounded; in his head he had been frantically preparing to go over the top, to help who he could, he and his staff. Back into the horror. But he could see he had no choice but to agree; the whole position would soon be overwhelmed. Out of the trench he came, and he and Verity rounded up the rest of their staff, yelling and pushing: ‘A doctor’s no use to anyone fried! Run, scatter!’
But even as Frank ran away from the pit – heading deeper into the Martian Cordon – Frank saw that others were running forward: gunners scrambling to man their weapons, even individual troopers hurling themselves into trenches and taking pot-shots at the Martian with their rifles. And Frank saw, looking back over his shoulder, that the Martian was advancing remorselessly into the fire. He saw again that peculiar threelegged motion of the thing, this mobile war-machine without wheels. It was a tripod, like a milking stool tipped over and bowling along at a tremendous speed – a traumatic memory of thirteen years before, he told me. But even as it advanced the fighting-machine kept its upper body steady, that great cowled ‘head’ a superb platform for targeted fire. And it was already picking its targets precisely, Frank saw: weapon emplacements, ammunition dumps, vehicles. A stray pass caused Frank’s field hospitals, a row of muddy tents, to flash into flame. A bit of him mourned, but at least they had been empty. Individual soldiers fled in terror, but they were generally spared – though any who shot back got a dose of that ghostly, lethal beam as it raked the trenches and dugouts.
Then Verity gasped, pointing back to the pit. ‘Here comes another fighting-machine. And another. How can they come so fast?’
‘Down, you fools!’
A firm hand in the back forced Frank to the ground, with Verity sprawled alongside him. Frank twisted to see the sootsmeared face of Bert Cook, grinning, his teeth white in the light of Frank’s torch. ‘Sorry about the rough handlin’, Miss.’ Frank protested, ‘Bert –’
‘Lie still, I say!’
And Cook kept them pressed down even as a fighting-machine swept over them.
Frank, twisting, saw one immense leg, the best part of a hundred feet tall, swing through the air over him, as the cowl far above twisted this way and that. And Frank saw the metallic net on the thing’s ‘back’, a detail with grisly associations. Though the Heat-Ray stabbed this way and that, it never came close to the three of them. He survived – they survived – and the Martian passed.
‘Can you see the pattern?’ Cook yelled in Frank’s ear. ‘They’re going for equipment, guns and ammo – and men who fight back, they’ll get a lick of the Ray too. But if you submit – well, you might get stomped on accidental—’
‘They’re leaving us alive,’ Verity said.
‘’Course they are. That’s why they’re not using the Black Smoke, I imagine. And we all know for why, don’t we?’ He smacked his lips, as if hungry. ‘They’re harvesting. And you know why? Because we’re defeated already. Already. Oops – here comes the second machine – down!’
Again he pressed their heads into the dirt, as hundreds of tons of articulated metal waved in the air above them.
And then came a third fighting-machine, and a fourth.
‘This is the life!’ yelled Bert Cook, through the din. ‘This is the life!’
18
THE FLYING-MACHINE OVER LONDON
On the Monday night I had slept badly.
Before midnight, when the next batch of Martians were due – so the rumours had it, and by now they were well informed – I had returned to the West End. I had been out on the Strand, in fact, in the night air. With the restrictions on traffic the city was free of engine noise, and I could clearly hear the voices of people out and about as I was, and somewhere the clank of a train leaving Charing Cross, perhaps a troop-carrier. And to the north, I thought by Covent Garden, I heard voices raised in revelry, even the shrill sounds of a ragtime band, and then a thin police whistle. Marvin’s regime had not quite sucked all the gaiety out of the city, then; not even the Martians had managed that.
It is an odd thing, looking back, how bright London had been made in the night, in those years between the Martian Wars. It was not quite Times Square, but the West End would ever be ablaze with electric lighting, and even the meaner districts to the east and south of the river would shine with electric, and with old-fashioned gas where the supply was kept up. All of it bright enough that the sky above was masked from sight – as if the British who had been threatened from the sky now wanted to shut out the night altogether, to pretend it did not exist.
But in spite of the customary glare that night, at midnight, as Tuesday began, I saw green flashes, off to the north-west: the Martians coming down for the second night in a row, really not so far away from London, and right on top of my ex-husband. I heard a brief barrage, like a flash storm, far beyond the horizon, and thought I saw a few flickers of white light, like immense explosions. But it was over quickly – within a minute or so. Could the battle be concluded so soon? I refused to be drawn into the speculation of the anxious strangers around me, as ignorant as I was myself. But I stood, and waited, and listened.
After perhaps half an hour of silence from the front, it might have been more, I went back indoors. Again the hotel had kept the bars open, though there were markedly fewer guests there than the previous night – and fewer staff too, and many of those still working wore armbands proclaiming their volunteer dedication to one service or another, and might not be around much longer. I took more sandwiches for my pockets, and a glass of hot toddy, and retired to my room. Of course there was no news to be had on the Marvin’s Megaphone, nothing but patriotic music, sad or uplifting. I turned it off and tried to nap.