The Martian in the Wood by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

IV

It was early March of 1908 by the time Walter freed himself sufficiently of other commitments to be able to visit Holmburgh, and Zena Gardner.

He had been staying with his brother Frank, then my fiancé, in London. And, with the rail links in the south of England still under repair, to get to Sussex he decided to take one of the German airships that at that time ran regular if expensive passenger services from London to Brighton and other destinations. Back in ’08 such journeys were still a novelty for the British, and he recorded his impressions with boyish eagerness in his daily journal.

The highlight of the trip was an entirely trivial expedition, led by one of the Hermann’s senior officers, into the interior of the great craft. Walter’s party were led first to the upper deck of the gondola, and then to a series of metal staircases that led to hatches in the ceiling. Up the party climbed. Though they had been warned to wrap up, still the cold of the upper air hit Walter immediately as they exited the heated interior of the gondola, and a couple of people turned back at that point.

Those who persisted ascended into wonderland. The craft was built around a stout metal spine that ran the length of the main envelope, and from it radial ribs supported the essentially cylindrical frame of the craft. But one only got the vaguest of impressions of this architecture, for the space was crowded with lift balloons. It was like exploring St. Paul’s, Walter thought, on a day when the dome happened to have been crammed full of hot-air balloons. The sacs were lit from inside by electric lamps, the purpose being for the crews to detect any leaks or other problems by easy visual inspection. The effect was magical, as if one were in a cloud, glowing from within.

I like to think of dear Walter, his mind as well as his body still badly scarred from his experiences of the First Martian War – he was then forty-two years old – and yet here he was clambering around the insides of an airship like a wide-eyed schoolboy.

And I like to imagine the reaction of poor Zena Gardner when his hired car brought him to Holmburgh at last: on her doorstep, the man who would narrate the most famous account of our first War of the Worlds.

* * *

It was early spring when Walter arrived at Holmburgh. Yet, he says, he immediately had a sense of something not right. It seemed too cold. The pretty flowers of late winter and early spring were nowhere in evidence. The fields were bare; the farm animals, the cattle and sheep and horses, seemed sullen, oddly perturbed. And the birds were silent too, he remembers.

Walter was made welcome at the Lodge. He says the servant, Pierce, was grave, rough-spoken but kindly, and Walter was immediately struck by his fatherly devotion to the troubled young woman who paid his wages.

When he was

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