CHAPTER TEN

THE MARTIAN SCEPTER

Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne,

In rayless majesty, now stretches forth

Her leaden scepter o’er a slumbering world.

—Edward Young

Alex Smith, 26 December, Mars Year i

Sonoma County, California, Planet Earth

Sonoma lies northeast of Novato. It’s ensconced within a beautiful green countryside sprinkled with patches of woods, fields, vineyards, houses, and farms, although the latter are rapidly being developed out of existence. The heavy firing from Novato ceased as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the evening peaceful and still and mercifully cool. We reached the town without incident just after dark. Anita had saved us a cold dinner, which we gulped down like the starving refugees we were.

“What have you heard?” she asked.

I told her about our journey.

“There’s absolutely nothing on the news,” Anita said.

Becky had been curiously silent throughout our drive. I pointed out to her again that the Martians were certainly tied to their pits by Earth’s gravity and by their sheer bulk, but I didn’t really believe what I was saying, not after seeing what we had seen in Novato.

She answered me in monotones.

After we’d filled our bellies, she turned to me and said, “You’re not going back, Alex.”

By then, though, my perversity of curiosity had once more supplanted my better sense.

“I’ve got to, Becky,” I said.

“Why, Alex? Why?”

“I just want to see this through. Nothing’s ever really happened to me, nothing like this anyway. I’ve had an easy, complacent life, pontificating to my students and planting my nose firmly in my books. I’m not complaining, mind, but I’ve never really done or experienced anything truly big. This is my great chance, Becky. It’s an opportunity for me to see history in the making, and then to report back to the world what’s actually occurring here.”

“What if they reach Sonoma? What then, Alex?”

“Even if they beat us, which I don’t believe, they’re going to be heading south towards the big city”—I was talking about San Francisco—“not this way. You’ll be perfectly safe here.”

“You don’t know anything about them. You really don’t. You think you do, but what you’re seeing is your own image reflected back at yourself. Don’t leave me alone, Alex. Please don’t abandon me.”

“You’ll be in good hands with Anita and Dave.”

Dave Bol Kwon was Anita’s current “live-in,” whom I’d just met for the first time an hour earlier. Old Dave was a nice enough guy, I suppose, but a bit stodgy for my tastes. I doubt if he’d cracked a book since high school. Still, salt of the earth and all that.

“Listen, I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m just going back for a day or two, and then I’ll return.”

“Please, Alex, listen to me.”

“I have to go,” I said.

Then I kissed her once, and once again. My heart was a lump of lead in my chest, but that wasn’t enough to deter me. Nothing was, not fear, not loss, nothing! There was a fire in my soul that drove me forward. God Himself couldn’t have stopped me. Becky’s face, I remember, was a pale white mask in the darkness. It watched me sadly as I drove away, and then turned and went back into Anita’s house.

But I was excited at the prospect of experiencing war up close again. I forgot my fear. I could see myself writing a book, being interviewed by Carson “Nuts” Davis or one of the other “regulars” on CNN. Oh yes!

By the time I returned to Novato late that evening—and it was a lot easier coming than going, let me tell you—I was even afraid that the silence that greeted me meant that I had missed the main event between Earth and Mars. I wanted to be in at the death! I wanted to see blood!

It was eleven o’clock when I reached town. The night was pockmarked with occasional streetlights, but many of them had been knocked out. I knew nothing of what’d happened in the ensuing hours. The radio was full of wild reports, as usual, but they didn’t convey all that much hard information. I suspected that the authorities were already censoring the news, trying to keep it both from us and from the enemy. What a dumb idea that seems in retrospect.

I didn’t even know what’d precipitated the initial conflict between our forces and theirs. It was just boom, boom, boom, rattle, rattle, rattle, zzzttt, zzzttt, zzzttt, and that was that. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. As I entered the outskirts of Novato, I could see along the western horizon a blood-red glow. As I drove ever nearer, it crept slowly upward in the sky. The clouds of the gathering storm mingled there with masses of black and red smoke.

Quartermass Street was deserted, and except for a lighted window or two, showed no signs of life whatever. I narrowly escaped hitting a multi-car pileup at the corner of Glass Road and Niswander Lane, where a small group had collected on one of the corners. They eyed me suspiciously as I edged past the tangled wreckage. From Niswander I partially followed Novato Creek into the small downtown area. As I ascended the little hill beyond St. Katherine’s Church, I could see signs of fire again. The nearby trees shivered in the fresh breeze. The rooftops were silhouetted black and sharp against the red-tinged clouds.

Suddenly a bright green flash illuminated the road around me, and I heard a very loud roaring noise pass over my head. It was a falling star—and a close one too. Another Martian ship was landing. I almost laughed out loud. When would it end? How many more were coming?

As I drove up Novato Boulevard, I could see the wreck of an Army transport hanging over a ditch off one side of the road, somewhere near Schweitzer Street. I passed Sargent’s Pepper Pot and Zee’s Zippy Zone, both closed and locked up tight. Even the KFC outlet had been abandoned, and the twenty-four-hour sign at McDonald’s, with its echo of Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions,” was turned off for the very first time that I could recall. I guess they didn’t serve Martians.

Because of the abandoned vehicles littering the street and the garbage strewn everywhere, I had to keep my eyes on the road. Then my attention suddenly wavered. Something was moving rapidly down one of the side streets. I couldn’t make it out at first. The light reflected off its dome in a flickering fashion unlike anything I’d ever seen. For a moment, I thought it was one of ours, some bizarre Army vehicle sent by the National Guard to defend the town. And then the thing shot forth its searchlight of destruction, illuminating the surrounding territory and its own immense body in pale emerald light.

How can I describe something so bizarre, so inhuman? It took the shape of a great tripod, twice as high as the houses around it, towering over most of the trees; and it strode down the street swaggering from side to side with imperial potency, smashing anything that got in its way, a walking, wobbling, withering engine of glossy, glittering metal, with long, articulate, almost animate ropes of some whitish alloy writhing beneath it. The clattering tumult of its passage intermingled with the riot of the flames and the revving of its weapon of mass destruction. Another immense flash, and then it abruptly heeled over on one foot, two of its supports waving in the air, and changed direction in mid-stride, moving down towards me on Kurtzoff Avenue, vanishing and reappearing almost instantaneously with each flash of its lightning-like weapon.

I’ve heard young people use the word “awesome” to describe just about everything that amazes them (which is just about everything in the world!); but I’d never been so surprised by anything in all my life. “Awesome” indeed!

The trees lining the street a block ahead of me parted like the Red Sea. The brittle reeds that were trunks snapped before Moses’s imperious command. A second tripod appeared, rushing headlong towards me. It must have been a hundred feet high, even larger than the first death-machine. And I was driving right at it down the middle of the main street in town! I slammed on my brakes, swung the car around, the tires protesting this unwanted exertion, and floored the gas pedal. The sting-ray touched the trunk of my vehicle, and I slewed sideways into a ditch filled with shallow water.

I unbuckled my belt and crawled out, almost immediately falling into the muck, just a second before another blast seared the top of the car, scorching me with its heat. Only the cool water saved me from being fried along with my vehicle. I scurried away as fast as I could, keeping my head down. The gas tank exploded behind me, showering me with metal debris. I looked back: one of the car’s burning wheels was still spinning slowly in the wind. Then I heard a clanking sound, and I pressed myself deep into the mud. The colossal mechanism went striding right by me, evidently satisfied that it had crushed the vermin menace. It ran up the avenue towards its brother.

Seen from behind, the thing was unbelievably large and strange. I had the distinct impression that it was somehow more than a gadget, more than just an odd collection of nuts and bolts, more than the classic robot warrior depicted in the old “B” films of the 1950s. There were plenty of mechanical parts, to be sure, and some kind of greenish alloy had been layered over the carapace and legs; but the long, flexible, glittering tentacles that dangled beneath the thing one of them gripping a tree trunk, swung and rattled against its shiny body. I spied an occasional glistening of gleaming flesh amidst the metal sheen.

The huge machine picked up its pace as it strode along, proud and arrogant and utterly without fear. The brazen hood that surmounted the thing moved to and fro, back and forth, like a giant mantis head looking for some new prey. Slung behind the main body was a basket of white metal that looked similar to a fisherman’s creel. Puffs of green smoke squirted randomly from the monster’s body as it swept by.

And then, in an instant, it was gone.

As it passed it began warbling a defiant, deafening howl that drowned out everything else:

“Ah-loo!” It screamed to the æther. “Ah-loo!”

In another minute it had joined its companion half a mile away, and then both of them moved on, stooping over something cached in the open field. I have no doubt that this was another of the alien ships dispatched from Mars.

“Ah-loo!” came the call once again. I thought of a pack of wolves baying to the stars.

I didn’t—and don’t—know what any of it meant, or if, indeed, the ululation meant anything at all. Maybe it was just the Martians’ cry of exultation.

I lay there in the mud for some time, wet and weary, watching the flashes of intermittent light and the monstrous metal gods bobbing in the distance under the skeletons of the few remaining trees. Their figures sometimes grew misty within the clouds of smoke, and then would suddenly flash again into sharp clarity. Occasionally the night swallowed them up altogether.

I was soaked through, but it was some time before my senses allowed me to struggle back up the bank to a dry spot on the asphalt. I’d been a fool, once again! I never seemed to learn.

I could see Min’s old observatory-cum-garage a few hundred yards distant. I made a run for it and hammered at the door, but no one answered (Mindon himself, of course, was long gone). I thought about breaking the glass, but decided that I really needed to get away from here altogether before the striders returned.

After awhile I succeeded in crawling home unobserved by the monstrous machines, heading back towards the residential area of Novato.

I pushed on, wet and shivering, towards my own house. It was very dark indeed on the back roads. The streetlights were now out completely.

If I’d had any sense at all, I would have tried to rejoin my wife in Sonoma. But the shock of that night, and my physical weakness, prevented me from thinking clearly. I was bruised, I was weary, I was wet to the skin, and I was really, really dumb.

I blundered into a man in the darkness. He cried out in sheer terror, as did I, and then sprang sideways, rushing pell-mell down the street before I could gather my wits sufficiently to speak to him. I stayed close to the fence line, where I could keep my bearings, and worked my way down the street, yard by yard.

Near the intersection with Brea, I stumbled onto something soft and large, and was able to feel around enough with my feet to realize that I was touching the broken, bloody body of a man. A flash of light in the distance gave me just enough illumination to see that it was Brice Boston, his head bent down at an awkward angle, the rest of his body crumpled up on the sidewalk, as if he’d been flung there from on high. There was no sign of his weapon.

I felt for a pulse, but he was quite, quite dead. He’d owned a bar in town, the Shawnee Shack on Joseph McCarthy Boulevard; its walls had been littered with short snippets of really weird verse and prose poems, so his death was a kind of poetic justice, in a way. I had to stop myself from breaking out in hysterical laughter at the thought.

I stepped around the body and pushed on. The police station was abandoned and burned out. My own home, though, was still intact, save for the cracked chimney, and most of my neighbors’ dwellings seemed to have come through the conflagration relatively undamaged.

Down the road towards the bridge I could hear distant voices and the occasional sound of rushing feet, but I didn’t have the courage or energy to investigate. I just wanted to be left alone.

I let myself in, closed and locked and bolted the door, staggered to the foot of the staircase, and sat down, appalled by what had happened to me. All I could think of was the striding metal monsters, like something out of A. Merritt, and the dead body of my neighbor smashed against the walkway, unloved and unmourned and unparsed.

I crouched there on the stairs with my back pressed against the railing, shivering violently, sick and empty and filled with dread. I had no idea what to do or where to go. I knew nothing. That terrible night seemed to last forever, and I knew what my fellow citizens were feeling, each and every one—in Novato, in California, in the grand old U.S. of A., even in the world.

The age of man had ended.