The rail stop had no name.
‘What is this place?’
Gray was half-dozing. ‘Umm? What time is it?’ He glanced at a pocket timetable. ‘Camp A-One-43, I should think, if we’re on schedule.’
‘Camp? I see children playing.’
Lane said, ‘You have been away a while, haven’t you, Miss? This is a Winstonville – that’s what the Cockneys call ’em.’
‘Oh. A refugee camp.’
‘Rather more than that,’ Gray said. ‘It’s a functioning township, with shops and doctors’ surgeries and schools and chapels, all thrown up in the blink of an eye. One of dozens, if not more – they label them by the road-numbering system, you see…’
I was familiar with the general idea. All of this was a consequence of the unending Martian threat to London. There were still millions trapped in the capital, and a significant percentage of our national resource was spent on provisioning the Londoners, trying to enable their escape, and catering for refugees.
London had always been more than a sink of people, however. It had been at the centre of Britain’s economic activity, as a financial centre, a port, even as a manufacturing centre – the Woolwich Arsenal alone, now smashed and burned out, had been our most significant munitions factory. After the Martians struck we needed a national reorganisation, and for better or worse that was what we got. So the other ports of Britain, from Hull to Harwich, Southampton to Liverpool, were now taking cargo that had once unloaded in London, and vast new transport networks, camouflaged against Martian attack, were being thrown down. And new manufactories of all kinds were being set up across the country, with the aid of loans from the Germans and Americans and others. Huge areas of the north of England had been torn up and transformed into giant open-cast mines for the ores, readily available, that now yielded aluminium with the Martian process. But there were the usual mutterings of profiteering; even with the Martians for company, the rich got richer and the poor poorer.
The government system had been shaken up too. Much power had been devolved to regional governors under Lloyd George, now the Prime Minister. (Marvin was long gone, dead at the hands of the Martians, after a foolish advance that he, shamed by Churchill’s example, had insisted on leading in person against a Martian foray in 1921.) The royal family was still ensconced in Delhi, and from the beginning I had heard nothing but pleasure from the people that the King, at least, was safe.
‘Winstonvilles, though?’
Gray eyed me. ‘I take it you know that Churchill is Governor of London – of that region of the country, as it’s been carved up by the government in exile in Bamburgh. Not that those field guns would be much protection if a Martian were to take a dislike to one of them. He thinks in big, bold strokes, and these refugee communities are one of his ideas.’
‘A bit of a lad,’ Lane said, grinning. ‘Good old Winston.’
At Oxford we changed trains at a brand new station, in an industrial belt that now appeared to encircle the historic core of that university city. It was early afternoon, but I thought the air was odd, with a kind of electrical tang to it – like sniffing ozone at the sea side – and a peculiarly greenish tint to the air brought back unwelcome memories. I wondered what was being manufactured in these great new factories, with their Marstainted technologies.
I was relieved to board the connecting train, which would take us directly south through Southampton to Portsmouth. When we passed through Abingdon, Gray said we were about as close to the Chilterns, and the Martian Cordon, as we would get. All along the train, I saw as it followed a wide bend in the track, faces were pressed to the glass, staring out to the east in awe and trepidation. But of the Martians I saw nothing – not that day.
8
IN PORTSMOUTH
In Portsmouth at last, we were met off the train by a despatch rider with revised orders. I was to first report, not to HMNB Portsmouth, the Navy base, as I had expected, but to a military hospital outside the city. Gray accepted this change of circumstance with a kind of cheerful resignation; indeed he seemed pleased to have a grain of fresh evidence of the caprice of command.
As a car was found for me, I made my clumsy goodbyes to Sergeant Lane – his given name was Ted, he vouchsafed to me now.
‘It’s been a pleasure, Miss. But I’ll have to call my unit and find out if I’m still to make my way to Harwich. Probably another train ride, and paid for out of my own pocket. And me a veteran of the eastern front.’
‘Criminal,’ I said.
‘Ain’t it, though?’
Gray was eyeing him speculatively. ‘Well now, look, Sergeant. You know that my mission is to escort Miss Elphinstone here across London and all the way into the Martian Cordon. And you know about as much about that as I do. Why don’t you hang around for the evening? I could make a couple of phone calls, get you transferred pro tem. Unless there are duties for which you are absolutely essential elsewhere.’
Lane rubbed his chin and glanced north, the direction the Martians lay. ‘Hmm. A veteran of the eastern front, and now into the Martian pit. Not many men can say that, can they, sir?’
‘I wouldn’t imagine so.’
‘And it is your round.’
‘Let’s get Miss Elphinstone settled first…’
The Queen Alexandra hospital, a sprawl of red-brick buildings that dated to before the First Martian War, was outside the city, a short tram-ride if you hadn’t got a military chauffeur as I had. They were expecting me at reception – and I was surprised to be met there by Marina Ogilvy, wife of the astronomer at Ottershaw. It was an awkward encounter; in my surprise I struggled for a moment to recognise her.
A brisk matron took charge, and led me to a private room. Marina came with me. En route I got a glance into a ward; I saw men evidently badly burned, cocooned in bandages, or with obvious respiratory problems. This was the kind of injury you came to expect from contact with the Martians, if you survived at all. We were a long way from the front line of the Second Martian War here; this was the first set of casualties I had seen since leaving England two years before, but it would not be the last.
At my room the matron told me I faced a series of injections – ‘Your friend can stay with you.’ The area within the Martian Cordon was quarantined, I was told. Though attempts were made to maintain supplies and otherwise support those trapped, there had been reports of such war-zone horrors as cholera and the typhoid, and I was to be inoculated as best as possible. ‘And you will be given other vaccines of a more experimental nature,’ the nurse told me vaguely. ‘It’s all quite routine.’
That last was, as it turned out, my first encounter with the Lie. But I felt no alarm at the time. One trusts nurses!
After the injections were done I lay on a bed, sleeves rolled up, and while we were alone briefly, I spoke with Marina. ‘I do apologise for not recognising you back there.’
She smiled tiredly; she was a woman who had always seemed tired, in my recollection of her. ‘Oh, don’t be. It was my husband who had the famous face after all.’
‘I suppose I understand why they called on you. In the First War your husband was among the first to try to communicate peacefully with the Martians—’
‘The first in the war to lose his life, along with Professor Stent and the rest, silly fools all.’
‘Perhaps. But their motive was a good one, wasn’t it? And now here we are attempting contact again.’