III

The only real attempt to deal with the coming of the Martians upon a serious scale was made on the British side, and it was made by no less a person than Lord Thunderclap, that great synthetic press peer. It was made against the advice of his most trusted associates and it failed.

Lord Thunderclap was one of the supreme successes of the journalistic and business world; he had become enormously rich and influential in a gigantic inaccurate way all out of nasty little periodicals, and he was quite intelligent enough to understand there must be something wrong about his headlong, unchallenged prominence. Both he and his slightly derisive rival and associate, Lord Bendigo, deep down in their very bright minds, had that same sense of haphazard expansion and unjustifiable eminence; they could not believe, however much they tried, that in the long run the world would not call them to account; they had none of the innate assurance of royal personages and born aristocrats, and they were both haunted by the feeling that sooner or later, something hard, stern, and powerful, a Sphinx, a Nemesis, would come round a corner upon them and unfold an indictment for immediate attention, asking them what they thought they were and what in the last resort they thought they were up to.

The mercurial Bendigo regarded that possibility with unaffected facetiousness but Thunderclap was made of less mobile stuff. He liked being the large massive thing he was; the longer he lived the more he wanted to believe in his own importance and feel that he was really true. The longer he lived the more he liked himself and the less could he bear that sense of a delayed but pursuing judgment. He could ill endure the unprotesting acquiescence of this world in him; the accumulated menace of its uncritical disregard; but even less now could he endure the thought that this toleration might end.

The dark other–world of insomnia added itself to his daylight existence. That awful Court of Inquiry without any definite charges, just asking what he was and why, sat there in perpetual unprogressive session, waiting—waiting for something. There was no hurry. Most terrifyingly there was no hurry. But what could they be saving up for him? Day after day he went about his large abundant life, being the great Lord Thunderclap—because what else on earth could he be? What else on earth could he do? The day passed into evening, evening to night, and so at last to bed. And then that insatiable question…. What net were they weaving?

The faces about him were polite masks. You challenged them: 'You were saying about me—?'

'I said nothing, my lord.'

He told nobody of this increasing obsession, but the existence of his profound uneasiness was more or less manifest to most of his associates and subordinates. Was there something that had never been found out? They tried to guess at that. But nothing definite appeared, it was a dread at large. Evidently he feared men of science and knowledge, especially men who were reputed to be profoundly and exceptionally versed in political and social and economic affairs. What must they really think of his journalistic influence, his activities in party matters, his financial affairs? Were they just quietly letting him have rope, sewing him up unobtrusively? And he suspected the civil service profoundly. These civil servants, he thought, knew more than was good for them already and they were always trying to know more. The word 'inspector' moved him to a pallid rage. 'More Inspectors!' was one of the shrillest screams in his multifarious publications. Nasty mean men, he insisted, these inspectors were, with sharp noses like foxes', needy dependants, and a passion for petty bribes; always peeping through keyholes they were, looking into windows, creeping up pipes, getting through gratings, weaving a net about all wholesome business enterprise. They had to be fought off. They had to be frustrated, denounced, caricatured at every turn. And all these Trade Union and Labour people wanting to know, perpetually wanting to know, and then, I suppose, interfere. And this London School of Economics! What were they putting together and plotting and planning there? What did they want to have a school of economics for anyhow? It was like marking the cards.

In Lord Thunderclap's mind socialism was another name for malignant investigation. He had no idea what harmless, disconnected, doctrinaire little creatures socialists are, and how limited an area of the social problem they have ever explored. He really thought they had a strong, clear plan for a workable human society all ready for use, a hard competent society, ready to thrust him and his like out of existence. At any time now they might spring it upon him. He fought wildly in the darkness against that persuasion, but it held him. He was probably the only man alive in England who believed in socialism to that extent.

In his perpetual attempt to materialize his terror he mixed up all these professors, civil servants, inspectors, socialists, sociologists (whom he regarded as a nastier variety of socialist), liberals—every sort of interrogator and critic—in a great jumble of hateful menace, the 'Intelligentsia,' the 'Lefts,' the 'Reds.' He imagined a worldwide hostile, incredibly subtle, incredibly far–sighted net closing about him. And he never really got them plain for a straight fight to a finish and have done with it. Never could he drag them into the light of open day. He knew that they were at it, at it all the time, conspiring, scheming, taking their orders, passing their messages, nodding, winking, giving their signals, working their mischiefs. They ramified everywhere. You never knew who was with them. They were Jesuits today and Freemasons tomorrow. Even judges and lawyers might be scheming. Hard to do a deal with them. You were safe with no one.

All his partners and secretaries and editors knew those odd moments of his, when he would affect to look out of the window idly, and then spin round upon you with incredible nimbleness to scrutinize your face.

Or when he would lead you through a long rambling talk about Russia, about Germany, about China, to jump upon you suddenly with a handful of carefully premeditated posers, designed to wring the very plotting soul out of you.

Such was the large fear–obsessed mentality to which the disclosures of Harold Rigamey came like a torch to a hayrick.

Never for a moment when he heard it did Lord Thunderclap doubt the story. Not until he read about it in his own papers had he a twinge of doubt. It came as the embodiment and confirmation of his worst fears. He felt he had really known all about it from the very beginning. He carried Harold Rigamey off for dinner and the night to his suburban headquarters at Castle Windrow, Bunting Hayland, and thither he assembled by wire and telephone all his most trusted henchmen, tools, stooges, subordinates, intimates, Watsons, yes–girls, medical advisers, soothsayers, astrologists, stenographers, masseurs, soothers, and family connexions.

'The thing's out at last,' he said. 'Listen to him! Listen to what Rigamey has to tell us. We've been barking up the wrong tree. These Reds—Moscow—Bernard Shaw—New Dealers—Atheists—Protocols of Zion, all of that—mere agents. It's Mars that is after us. Listen to him. Mars! What are we to do about it? What are we to do?

'Everything we value in life. Cross and crown. Nation and loyalty. Morals, Christmas. Family lift. The Reds are just their front line. While we stand about here and stare at each other and do nothing, there they are working away, getting born, growing up, plotting, planning—one after another—these monsters. I ask you: Is nothing to be done?'

'Well, Chief,' said Cotton–Jones, the archsoother. 'Everything has to be done. But it's got to be done in the right way. No need to tell you that.'

'The whole world is in danger. Hideous danger.'

'That's too big for stop–press news. Chief, we've got to go into conference right away. Here and now. We've got to just hold the whole thing in silence, until we've organized a plan of campaign and a general staff. You said it, Chief, yourself, years ago. "The more urgent the crisis," you said, "the more danger there is in hurry."'

'I said that?' said Lord Thunderclap.

'Yes, Sir. You said that….'

It was daylight before that assembly at Castle Windrow dispersed and Lord Thunderclap was safely put to bed. His sedatives were furtively doubled. And throughout all the offices and organizations which owed him allegiance, grave and weary men plotted guardedly with each other—no double–crossing mind!—against the call for action that would come to them when he awoke.

Cotton–Jones, toiling wearily up to his suite under the roof at headquarters, realized suddenly the mysterious sensitiveness of the Thunderclap system. Two small lift attendants stopped upon the second landing to exchange news, unaware of his presence in the middle elevator. The youngest and shrillest spoke without emotion.

'Jimmy, you heard? The Chief’s nuts at last.'

'Clean off it?'

'Clean.'

'Bound to happen sooner or later. What dislodged him?'

'Them Martians….'

Now how had the little devils got hold of that?…

Throughout the most difficult ten days in their lives the entourage of Lord Thunderclap struggled to mitigate the impact of his full excitement upon the public. What he had in mind seemed to be some sort of world–wide witch–smelling for Martians everywhere. He swept aside every difficulty there might be in distinguishing them. You could tell them by the things they said and the way they behaved. You could tell them because instinctively you disliked them…. Not a massacre. Massacres were out of date. What was needed was a vast sanitary concentration of all these people to save our race (Lord Thunderclap) alive.

Rigamey had brought some entirely irrelevant facts about what are called Mongoloid children into the discussion, and Thunderclap seized upon them as data for the first selection of victims in the world drive against the Martians. Individuals of this type should be at once arrested and secluded in protective isolation. There ought to be a human race–purity conference set up in permanent session. All the leading obstetricians in the world ought to be in it, with stimulating fees and unlimited powers.

Like to like. It was natural for the turbid stream of Anti–Semitism to contribute some richly helpful ideas to this fresh flow of anti–Martian animosity….

Cotton–Jones took his courage in both hands and withstood his master. ‘We can't do this,' he said, with the Chief's programme in his hand.

'We can't do this? Then what on earth are we to do?'

'The public mind is not prepared for anything of the sort.'

His lordship raged up and down the room but Cotton–Jones felled him with the deadliest, most arresting assertion than an editorial assistant can use.

'It will fall flat,' said Cotton–Jones.

'This!?'

'It will fall flat.'

'We can't go on with this on our own responsibility,' he insisted, and Thunderclap knew that he was right. 'We must have authority. We must quote. We ourselves cannot seem to be bringing this out from the office. Merely from the office. Journalistic stunt, they will say. Yes, Sir. They will say that. Newspapers may lead but they should not appear to lead. We must seem to be responding to "publicly responsible, unquestionable appeals." Your words, Chief. Someone not ourselves, someone else, must make for righteousness.'

He shook the programme in his hand. He added a still more difficult assertion.

'And really—for a thing of this size—we must bring in other groups of papers.'

'I have had something of that sort in mind throughout,' said Thunderclap, after a stupendous pause.

He walked across the room. 'Perhaps I have been precipitate. I see things too quickly.'

He sat down to his desk and began to write down, strike out, and tick off names. There were one or two great physicians on the verge of advertisement; they ought to give him something. After all he had done for them. No. Damn them, they wouldn't. One or two of the more pushful young bishops were still in the toady stage, still rather anxious to prove how serviceable and friendly they could be to any lord of publicity. They surely might be called upon to denounce this diabolical threat to mankind. He sent them urgent and embarrassing communications, held them up himself on the telephone, and found them as blandly evasive as they knew how. They knew very well how. He cast about for this great public figure and then that to shoulder the new burden. Gradually, as he sought, with diminishing success, among these great instruments of public stimulation, the pressure of his own initiative dispersed itself. Fatigue supervened. Violence deferred maketh the heart grow sick. Four, five, six days passed and nothing stupendous was done. In the life of Lord Thunderclap two days are as a thousand years. The bright surface of his great disclosure was dulled by familiarity. The preparatory Articles, announcements, and so forth became less and less a preparation and more and more like the wailing and booming of a receding school of ichthyosauri heard through the twilight of the past.

It came to him abruptly one night that he didn't care a damn now if nothing was done. The affair had evaporated. If nobody cared to stir a finger, the whole silly business might slide. The Martians might eat the world now so far as he was concerned. It would last his time—anyhow. What was the sense of being the one earnest energetic man in a world of unresponsive fools?

He called Cotton–Jones into his presence. 'You've been going too strong on this Martian stuff,' he said, and Cotton–Jones knew at once that the brainstorm was over. 'You've made it a bit too loud and brassy. The public doesn't want to hear about them in this serious way you've been putting it. They want it guyed. What the public won't hear about can't exist really. Circulation dies down and then where are you? Ease off on it. Guy it.'

'After all we have said!' reflected Cotton–Jones.

'Ease off on it. Make it kind of semi–symbolical—humorous and all that.'

'I get you,' said Cotton–Jones, trying not to look too glad. 'I think I can manage to ease it off. Yes, it's a damned good political nickname, Chief, whatever you like to say. You've never thought of anything better. Give "Highbrow" and "Brain Trust" a holiday for the next ten years. Let the Reds fade out. Martians! People will hate them from the word Go!'