Ted Lane pulled a face . ‘Of course you did.’
Ben Gray was of that blessedly privileged class not even to know when he was being ragged.
‘To get back to the point,’ I said somewhat testily, ‘if this isn’t about communication – what, then?’ I tapped the leather satchel I had placed on the table, the packet of Walter’s sigils. ‘I’ve come a long way with this, Eric.’
He steepled his fingers. ‘Walter did believe everything he told you. And it really was his idea in the first place, the whole communications angle. We just – embellished it.’ Eden actually laughed.
I was growing angry. ‘What, then, is the truth?’
‘We haven’t been idle since 1907, you know. We being military intelligence, to which I have become at least partially attached, given the uniqueness of my experience. From the Martians’ point of view, it has always seemed to me a strategic error for them to have come, and failed. The first shot always had the best chance of success. Now we’ve had a chance to study them. Everybody knows how we’ve been able to make industrial use of some of their inventions – the aluminium smelter, for instance. But we’ve been looking into other aspects.’
My arms prickling from the injections, I was starting to intuit the truth – or rather, the Lie. ‘Other aspects like their biology?’ I prompted.
He eyed me. ‘Quite so. Everybody knows it was the germs that killed the Martians. I remember the lovely lines in Jenkins’ tome very welclass="underline" “The Martians – dead! – slain… by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” But precisely which of those humblest things? For Jenkins’s words about “putrefactive” and “disease” are the purest speculation, you know.’
‘Ah,’ Lane said with a soldier’s crafty smile. ‘And you clever beggars have been finding out which bacteria, have you? With all respect, sir.’
Eden nodded. ‘Not me in person, of course… Have you heard of a place called Porton Down, Miss Elphinstone? Hushhush Army laboratory, out in Wiltshire.’
‘I know it,’ said Ted Lane. ‘Or of it. Belonged to my lot, didn’t it? The Royal Engineers.’
‘That’s it. Set up during the Schlieffen War to look at the possibilities of chemical warfare – gassing, you know.’
Lane grunted. ‘Stinks shells. Worked in Russia.’
Gray eyed him curiously.
Eden went on, ‘When the Martians returned we set Porton on the germs, with a crash programme to determine which precisely was the pathogen that killed the Martians. The whole thing was another bright idea of Churchill’s, actually, if arrived at belatedly; the man does have a certain ruthless genius.’
Lane leaned forward. ‘How could you test it, though? All them Martians from ’07 were dead.’
‘Ah, but they left their corpses behind – plenty of tissue to experiment with. Did you know that one Martian was born during the ’07 invasion? Found partly budded off its parent – dead as the rest, of course. That provided particularly sweet materials for the sample labs, I’m told. And you needn’t look at me that way, Miss Elphinstone; I doubt that the Martians are showing much pity for human infants within the Cordon right now.’
As he spoke, I could feel my injection sites itch and crawl, and I realised what had been done to me. ‘They found it, didn’t they? The boffins at Porton Down – they found the pathogen that killed the Martians.’
‘Indeed they did – with a little help from equally advanced laboratories in Germany, which, if you want to know, was the true purpose of my own recent jaunt to the continent. Don’t ask me for the Latin names, that was never my bag. But it’s a very old bug, and it’s been with us a long time – you find it in every population – must have come with us out of Africa, you see, that’s if Darwin and the rest are right about our origin there, having no doubt scythed down our man-ape ancestors before they developed immunity. Well, we can be sure that by now the Martians have fixed themselves to resist that one. So we found another. An even nastier cousin, to which the Martians had no exposure last time, but distant enough related that any protection they cooked up after the last lot will do them no good. And it works; we have enough samples of fresh Martian tissue to have proved that.’
‘And those “tests” I went through last night—’
‘It happily reproduces in the human bloodstream, but does no harm to the carrier.’
‘It’s in me. This archaic killer. You put it in me. And you want me to carry it to the Martians, under this pretence of communication.’ There was the Lie, revealed and spoken aloud. I immediately felt foolish not to have suspected it before.
And I saw that my companions, Ted Lane, Lieutenant Gray, even the down-to-earth Marina Ogilvy, shrank away from me.
My mission, in the end, was simple. I was to enter the Cordon, and get as close to the Martians as I could – with or without Cook’s help, though the artilleryman seemed the best chance.
‘We’ll only get one shot,’ Eden said. ‘And so we’ve got to target it – to make it count. Bring them all down at once. Remember, another opposition is approaching. If more cylinders are meant to come our way, we believe our chances agin them will be that much greater if the Martians in England, spotters for the fleet, are knocked out before the reinforcements – or perhaps the main forces – even get here.
‘Now, one benefit we’ve extracted from Martian technology is a blood storage system – for much of the supply on which they subsisted in their interplanetary flights in the cylinders was externally stored, you know. We use the technology ourselves, on the battlefield. We’ve every reason to believe that they’re using a similar system in their big central pit at Amersham. And that’s what you’ve got to spoil, Julie. Should take most of them down in one fell swoop, and the open sores the infection creates ought to pass it on to the rest. So you see, you need the Martians to trust you, to get all the way in to the heart of the nest. Which is where Cook is going to provide vital cover.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me all this? I mean, before squirting your venom into my veins.’
‘Because, frankly, it was judged there’d have been a high chance of you turning down the job.’
‘Am I to commit mass murder, Major Eden?’
‘Are you to save the nation, Miss Elphinstone?’
And it was as if I saw my own epitaph.
10
A NIGHT IN HAMPSHIRE
As the next stage of my journey to the Cordon in Buckinghamshire, I learned, I was to be taken through London. Though millions remained trapped there, the capital was a great hive which the military infiltrated with relative ease, beneath the attention of the Martians – mostly. And I was to join a regular expedition.
That night I was escorted out of Portsmouth, by Ben Gray and Ted Lane, to stay in a rather fine house in the country – I never learned its name, and did not ask – out in the meadows beyond Eastleigh.
The owners had either abandoned the place when the Martians returned to England, or had had their property requisitioned, and now it was used to house officers, while the grounds had been given over to respite accommodation for active troops on leave. In the years since the owners had left the property had lost a lot of its glamour, as evidenced by the muddy boot prints in the hallways, the khaki greatcoats hanging in the cloakroom, and the lack of staff save for a few injured troops, evidently given light behind-the-line duties. One poor chap who served us dinner had half his face a mask of scars.