The Red Weed Dies

The weed went first, and it went in a single week, and if there is a mercy in this account, it is that the week was not filmed.

I had walked with the weed for a month. It had been the true face of the occupation for me, more than the walkers: the crimson scum from bank to bank of the Mica, the curtains of it over the porches of Delmar Street, the breathing sound it made at night, and somewhere east of Calder, on a morning of high wind, I came over a rise and the whole valley below me had turned from red to brown. The weed was dying. It hung in the fences in great rust-colored rags, and it stank, a smell like a cannery in August, and where the mats lay on the water they had gone gray and were sinking in rags, and the river ran black underneath, thick with the shed decay of the thing, and the wind off the water was so foul that I tied my shirt over my face, and then, two hundred yards on, stopped dead in the road, because I understood what the dying of the weed meant, and it meant the walkers would be next.

It took me a day and a half to work up the courage of that arithmetic, and when I did, I turned west, back into the occupied country, against every instinct that four weeks of terror had installed in my legs, because there are maybe three moments in a life when a man gets to see the curtain of the world drawn back, and I was not going to watch this one from the wrong side of a hill.

I want to write down the sound first, because the sound has been written about so badly.

The walkers stood where they had stopped. West of Calder, on the flats above the river, three of them stood in a loose triangle, hoods down, motionless, and they were not wrecked, that was the first thing, there was not a mark on them, no shell hole, no melted seam, and they had not fallen, and that was the detail we had no rehearsal for. They had not fallen. They stood. And out of the louvers of their hoods came the sound, the one the whole world now knows from the survivors of the city, a keening that was not mechanical, that could not be mechanical, because no machine that ever ran on this earth made a sound like an animal that has been left. It went on all that day. It went on at a different pitch the next day, thinner, and on the third day the nearest hood was silent, and on the fourth day there was one keening left, and then there were none, and the silence that came down over the flats of the Mica was the silence of a cancelled quarantine, and I sat on the levee and listened to it arrive, and I am not equal to describing what a man does with his face when a sound like that stops.

I went into the pit at the fairground two days later, with a stick and a shirt over my face, and I saw the Martians.

They were beyond my science and they are beyond my prose, and what I set down is only what a writer with a stick saw from the rim. There were four of them in the pit, near the cylinder, and they were dead, and they had not been destroyed. They had run down. The gray-brown bulk of them, that glistening bear-sized body I had seen work itself out of the first cylinder on the flats, lay collapsed, deflated, the tentacles slack in the mud like shoelaces, and the flesh of them had gone a dry oyster-white at the edges, and over the whole pit hung the flies of the earth, our flies, in clouds, doing what the flies of the earth do, which is the whole of this chapter, which is the whole of the war, which I did not understand until I saw the birds.

The gulls had come up the river valley behind the dying weed, thirty miles at least from the coast, and they were on the hoods of the dead walkers, and I stood on the rim of the pit with the shirt over my face and watched our small gray citizens pick apart the mastery of twenty million years, and I laughed, I could not help it, the laugh came up out of me like water out of a cracked pipe, because I knew then, before any laboratory told the world, what the laboratories confirmed eleven days later. It was in every report since, and the reports are right, and I am glad the reports are right: The general with his drums had been right, and the drums had been ours. It was the bacteria. The humblest things of the earth, the things in the water and the soil and the breath of every one of us since the first warm pond, the things we spend our whole lives washing off our hands. The Martians had swept the planet of everything that resisted them, and they had done it on a world where death by infection is the price of a ticket, and the ticket had been punched the first hour they unscrewed their lid and breathed.

The physicians had their theories ready, of course. Quarantine had been whispered about in the east from the second week. And there is a bitter anthem in all of it that I want to sing once and then be quiet. We had spent six days in the fixed belief that we were being beaten by the best of them, and the truth was that we had been inoculated, all of us, all along. In the end they were unvaccinated travelers in the oldest country of death there is.

I want to add one more thing about the cylinders, because everyone asks and the films never answer. The cylinder on the flats, the first one, stood all winter where it had landed, and the government built a road to it and a fence and a viewing stand, as we build viewing stands, and in the spring the physicists went into it through the heat-warped hatch with instruments, Halloran's people from the capital among them, and came out silent for a week, and then the physicists gave the only press conference of my lifetime at which the professionals looked like the rest of us. The cylinder was a lifeboat, they said. Bare machinery, a hull, a descent engine, tanks, couches, the geometry of a thing built to be survived in. The things inside it had crossed forty million miles as emigrants cross an ocean, packed, and the caskets of the crossing were still bolted to the bulkhead. There were none of us in the speeches that day. Nobody mentioned the war. A nation stood at a fence and looked at an emigrant ship and understood, all of it at once, exactly what had come off the boat, and why, and what the crossing had cost, and the fence, which had been built to keep us out, felt for the first time like it was there to keep us from doing something foolish to the only proof that we were not alone.

I took nothing from the pit. The histories say the scientists took a great deal, and I have read their reports and their reports are not the half of it, but that was their work and this was mine, which was to stand at the rim and see it, and to come down off the rim alive, and to write it while the flies were still on the hoods. I spent one more night on the levee at the fairground, in sight of the cylinder, and I slept, the first whole night of the war, under no light but the stars, with the keening gone and the flies at work, and whatever the earth had been before that August, it was ours again, ours and the gulls' and the flies', and I rose before dawn and washed in the Mica, foul as it was, deliberately, up to the elbows, like a man taking a sacrament. The sergeant's whistle never blew in my hearing. There was no day and no hour to print; the war ended as an epidemic ends, quietly, without surrender, and the nation under the mud stayed there, unneeded and unspent, the cheapest army the earth ever fielded, and I turned my face east.