The Martian War (4 page)

* * *

He first met Dr. Moreau in an Algerian coffee shop, of all places.

The beefy man sat alone, drinking a glass of sweet mint
tea and taking apart an orange as if preparing to perform an autopsy on it. When he finished with the juicy sections, he turned to a plate of almonds and proceeded to crack the shells with his bare fingers, methodically eating one nut at a time.

Entering the cafe to escape the North African heat, Lowell waved his hat in front of his face to cool the sweat. He took another chair at the bar, cautiously nodding to the large Englishman. Outside, from the minarets of the mosques, mullahs let out warbling calls, like territorial songbirds competing with each other.

Lowell had just learned of delays at the Sahara construction site: Tuareg digger crews that had wandered off, French prison workers who had escaped, even supervisors who had taken money earmarked for wages and run off to Cairo. Here in Algiers, one Foreign Legion commander had accepted a retainer fee with the promise of finding Lowell other workers, but had never returned at the appointed meeting time.

Lowell was disgusted, impatient, and growing desperate. “If a work ethic exists on this continent, I’m damned if I can find it,” he said aloud so the other man could hear him. “No wonder they’re all so frightfully poor.”

The bearish man did not seem interested in conversation, but Lowell continued to vent his frustration. “When a man agrees to do a job, and accepts money for it, I should be able to count on him. Lazy bastards. They do bad work, they leave the site, they simply vanish—and there is not enough time to do it all over again!” He set his hat on the counter.

The other man’s eyes were a piercing blue, set in pale skin that had been subjected to the rigors of much sun but had never achieved more than the blotchy coloring of repeated burns. His
hair was reddish gold, as was his beard; the matted strands on his forearms were thick enough to be called a pelt. In a gruff voice he said, “They abandon you because they are not afraid of you.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Just a matter of incentive … and terror.” He paused, as if considering. “My name is Moreau. A medical doctor by trade, at least where I’m still allowed to practice.”

He cracked another almond and continued to stare across the tiled counter. The Algerian waiter asked in Arabic if he wanted another tea. Moreau motioned to Lowell as well, and the waiter stuffed two glasses with fresh green mint leaves then poured boiling sugar water over the top. The smell made Lowell dizzy.

“You’re Lowell, right? I heard about your massive project out in the desert.” Moreau did not even glance at him. “No one can understand why you are doing it.”

“No one attempts to understand. They prefer to scoff.”

“Then explain yourself. I am a man of some education.”

Lowell sipped his tea, made a face at the syrupy sweetness, then told the broad-shouldered doctor everything. He had nothing to gain by keeping a secret about something so vast and ambitious.

Moreau didn’t commiserate, but his broken-ice eyes showed true understanding. “I know how it feels to be ridiculed for one’s passion. I am a researcher into anatomy and physiology. I, too, have my ignorant detractors.”

Lowell had heard horrific tales of aspiring surgeons who paid grave robbers to provide fresh corpses for dissection. “I see. You are a … resurrectionist? Or a vivisectionist?”

“Neither, or both. In my time, I conducted … extreme investigations into the fundamental differences between humans and animals, and the mutability of the physical form. I was a colleague of the outspoken Darwinist T.H. Huxley in London, but my work was too extraordinary even for his comprehension. He called it ‘unethical,’ when it was really no more than unorthodox.” He cracked another almond. “Ethics! What do ethics have to do with pure discovery?”

Despite himself, Lowell was interested in this man. Moreau’s personality seemed as overpowering as his own. “And why are you here, in this godforsaken place?”

“Because Huxley discovered my work before I was ready to present it to the Imperial Institute. Damn him! I barely escaped England without being arrested. I am a wanted man there, probably reviled in all the newspapers, called a monster.”

“Oh. I think I read something about it. In the
Hong Kong Post?”

Moreau swept the crushed almond shells onto his plate with surprising delicacy. He turned to Lowell so abruptly that it startled the other man. “If I help you accomplish this strange task, will you promise me one thing?”

“I haven’t asked for your help, sir.”

“Nevertheless, you need it. If your scheme turns out to be true, if creatures from the planet Mars do arrive here, then I must be the one to study them, physiologically.” For a moment, Moreau looked vulnerable. “It will restore my reputation in the scientific community.”

Lowell finished his tea, then rubbed his teeth with his monogrammed handkerchief, removing bits of bright green leaf. “Just like that? You don’t think I’m mad?”

“I have been called that myself.” Moreau extended his hand. “Remember,
I
will be the one to study the Martian. Agreed?”

Lowell reached out to grasp the hand of the criminal vivisectionist.

* * *

Tuareg work crews and criminal laborers toiled day and night to move the sand. Some complained; some were happy for the meager pay or a reduction in their penal sentences; some shook their sweat-dripping heads at the insanity of this wealthy American’s incomprehensible obsession, and the bearded doctor who drove them as fiercely as if they were animals.

The florid-faced surgeon allowed no slacking in the construction, and he was not above whipping the men if necessary. “Savages!” He often left Lowell behind in the camp, riding a horse up and down the miles of diggings.

Shovels tossed sand up over the ditches; half-naked boys ran back and forth with ladles and buckets from camels that strained to drag barrels of water along the dry canal that went from nowhere, to nowhere. Every third day, Lowell himself went to inspect the other two straight-line trenches that were moving with excruciating slowness to intersect with this one.

For the past month, when the teams grew too tired to continue, he had sent word to any oasis, tribal camp, or village, as far as Timbuctoo and Tripoli to hire more workers. Lowell had spread his inexhaustible funds as far as Alexandria, Tangier, and Cairo. He had bribed port officials and paid for the construction of a new railroad spur from Algiers
out into the stark heart of the dunes, so that a private train could deliver supplies and workers directly to the diggings.

Blown sand hissed in the breeze. A drummer pounded a cadence to give the workers a steady rhythm, like galley slaves. Moreau had suggested the technique, and it seemed to be working. “They’re being paid for this labor, Lowell, and they volunteered. Don’t feel sympathy for them.”

Smoke curled into the air, carrying an acrid, sulfurous stench as French convicts dumped wagonloads of hot bitumen into the trench. The sticky black flow would seal the sands with a thick, flammable mass that would also hold fuel. Even so, the walls still shifted, and the tarry bitumen ran soft and smelly in the heat of the day.

If one of the great dust storms of the Sahara swept across the dunes, God could erase all of Lowell’s handiwork with one mighty breath. But he needed his luck to hold until he sent his signal. By now, the Martian vessel had to be close.

Moreau strutted up and down, a dusty bandanna wrapped across his face. The immense line in the sand stretched into a shimmer of mirage. Just a ditch, many miles long, extending to meet two others in what his surveyors guaranteed would be a perfect equilateral triangle … .

Looking at the plans in the tent with Moreau on their first night, he thought their symbol looked laughably small when viewed in perspective against the backdrop of the whole African continent. Lowell despised the thought that his work might prove to be
insignificant.
“Even if we achieve our goals, Moreau, we have accomplished little more than a gnat, compared to what the Martians have done.”

“Nonsense!” Moreau always talked too loudly, as if he had
never learned a normal conversational tone. “Their task would have been much simpler, given that Martian gravity is only a third of Earth’s.” He thumped his fingers on the top of the small worktable. Moreau’s numerous notebooks lay around the tent. “Based on current theories of evolution, such Martians could be twenty-one times as efficient and have eighty-one times the effective strength of an Earthman.” He held the kerosene lamp closer to the map. “For such a species, the project of planetary canals seems neither difficult nor unlikely.”

Lowell had done the excavation mathematics himself, letting the engineers double-check his work. Three trenches, each ten miles long, five yards wide, filled with liquid to a depth of an inch or so, equaled thousands and thousands of gallons of petroleum distillate, naphtha, kerosene. Convoys traveled endlessly across the Sahara.

Although it was a huge investment, what better way could Lowell spend his money, than to make a mark upon the Earth itself—and upon history?

But they had to hurry. Hurry.

* * *

Finally.

Finally. Lowell had never been a man of extraordinary patience, but the last week of waiting for the trenches to join at precise corners had seemed the most interminable time of his life.

Now, under the starlight and residual heat that wafted off the sands, Lowell stood with torch in hand like a tribal shaman, ready to send a symbol of welcome to aliens from
another world. Moreau would be standing at a second distant corner of the triangle, along with his work crew supervisor.

The stench of petroleum distillates stung his eyes and nostrils. The convict workers had all been shipped back to Algiers or distant Saharan outposts. The chemical smell had driven off the camels and most of the workers. A few European foremen had stayed to watch the spectacle, and curious Tuaregs gathered by their tents to observe. This would be an event their tribal storytellers would repeat for generations.

Lowell turned to the telegraph operator beside him. Miles of overland cable had been run to the vertices of the great triangle. “Signal Dr. Moreau and Mr. Lewisham at the intersections. Tell them to light their channels.”

The telegraph operator pecked away at his key, sending a brief message. When the clicks fell into silence, Lowell stepped to the brink of his canal in the sand. He stared into the bitumen-lined trench at the foul-smelling black mass that was now pooled with kerosene and gasoline.

Lowell tossed his torch into the fuel, then watched the fire rush down the channel like a hungry demon. The inferno devoured the petroleum, its flames hot enough to ignite the sticky bitumen liner so that the triangular symbol would burn for a long time.

Across the desert night, rifle shots rang out, signaling to torch-bearers stationed along the miles of each canal, who also tossed their burning brands into the ditch.

Lowell’s family had amassed its fortune in textiles, in landholdings, in finance. His maternal grandfather was Abbott Lawrence, minister to Britain. His father, Augustus, was descended from early Massachusetts colonists. But Percival Lowell himself would make the greatest mark—on
two
worlds instead of one.

An unbroken wall of flame roared into the night. He prayed the Martians were watching. He had so much to say to them.

* * *

Even long after the inferno had died down, Lowell found it difficult to sleep. He lay on his cot, smelling the dying smoke and harsh fumes, listening to the whisper of sand sloughing into the trench from the burned walls. Far off in the Tuareg camp a pair of camels belched at each other.

Lying awake on his cot, he spoke aloud to the apex of his tent. “I am an experienced ambassador to foreign cultures. I have diplomatic credentials. How could Martians be stranger than what I have already seen?”

If only they would arrive … .

* * *

Days later, the cylinder screamed through the air with the wailing of a thousand lost souls, trailing a flaming banner from atmospheric friction and a bright green mist from outgassing extraterrestrial substances.

Lowell scrambled out of his shaded tent to see the commotion. A burnt smudge smoldered like a scar across the ceramic-blue sky. Booms of sound came in waves as the gigantic projectile crossed overhead.

Moreau was already outside. “It’s the emissaries from Mars, Lowell!” He raised his hands in the air. “The Martians!”

The cylinder crashed into the desert, spewing a plume of sand and dust. Lowell felt the tremor of impact in his knees. He and Moreau both laughed aloud and pounded each other on the back.

After the burning of the enormous triangle, the place had rapidly turned into a ghost town, but Lowell and Moreau had remained here to wait. Now, as the dust settled in the distance, Lowell cried, “We are vindicated!”

Moreau clapped him on the shoulder. “It is a very good feeling, Lowell.”

The last Tuareg helpers retreated in panic, thrashing their camels to an awkward gallop across the dunes to a safe distance.
Fools
. They did not realize the magnitude of what was happening here.

“The world as we know it is about to change, Moreau. Come, we must welcome our visitors from space.”

Together, they set off toward the pit.