The Pool of Fire (The Tripods)

by John Christopher

  Henry’s meditations had been different. He had been much affected by his journey across the ocean. He and his companions had landed far to the north of the City on the isthmus, in a land where, as I have said, the people spoke English, though with an unfamiliar accent. He was struck by the fact that there, thousands of miles across trackless seas, he could talk and be understood, whereas when he and I crossed a mere twenty miles of water to France we had found ourselves unable to communicate with those who lived there.

  From this, he went on to think more deeply about those divisions of men which had existed before the Masters came, and which the Masters, themselves a single race of one language and nation, had never understood, even though they did not fail to take advantage of them. It seemed to him monstrous that such a state should exist, that men should go out to kill other men they did not know, simply because they lived in a foreign land. This, at any rate, was something that had ceased with the coming of the Masters.

  “They brought peace,” I agreed, “but what a peace! The peace of herded cattle.”

  “Yes,” Henry said. “That’s true. But does liberty have to mean slaughtering each other?”

  “Men do not fight against each other any more. We all fight the common enemy—Frenchmen like Beanpole, Germans like Fritz, Americans like your friend Walt . . .”

  “Now they fight together. But afterward, when we have destroyed the Masters—what will happen then?”

  “We shall remain united, of course. We have learned our lesson.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am certain! It would be unthinkable for men to go to war with each other again.”

  He was silent for a few moments. We were leaning against the starboard rail, and far off in the distance I thought I saw something flash, but realized it must be a trick of light. There could be nothing there.

  Henry said, “Not unthinkable, Will. I think about it. It must not happen, but we may have to work hard to make sure it does not.”

  I asked more questions, and he answered them. This, it seemed, was the aim he had set himself, of working for the maintenance of peace among the peoples of the free world. I was a little awed by it, but not entirely convinced. There had been war in the past, I knew, but that was because men had never had anything to unite them, as we now had in the struggle against the Masters. Having once gained this unity, it was impossible to imagine that we would ever give it up. Once this war was over . . .

  He was saying something, but I interrupted him, grabbing his arm.

  “There is something out there. I saw it before, but was not sure. A small flash. Could it be something to do with the Tripods? They can travel on the sea.”

  “I should be surprised to find them in mid-ocean,” Henry said.

  He was watching where I pointed. The wink of light came again. He said, “Low down, too, for a Tripod! Not far above the surface of the water. It will be a flying fish, I should think.”

  “A flying fish?”

  “It doesn’t really fly. It leaps out of the water, when the dolphins are pursuing it, and glides over the surface, using its fin as a sail. Sometimes they land on board. I believe they’re quite good to eat.”

  “You’ve seen them before?”

  Henry shook his head. “No, but the sailors have told me of them, and of other things. Whales, which are as big as a house, and blow spouts of water up through the tops of their heads, and giant squids, and, in warmer waters, creatures that look like women and suckle their young at the breast. The seas are full of wonders.”

  I could imagine him listening to their tales. He had become a good listener, attentive to what was being said, patient and thoughtful. That was another way in which he had changed from the brash boy I had known. I realized that if there were any need to keep men together after our victory, Henry was the sort of person who could help to do it. As things stood, Beanpole was becoming important among the scientists, Fritz was acknowledged as one of our best junior commanders, and even I (if only by luck) had had my moments of glory. Henry had been less successful, his one important enterprise a failure, though through no fault of his own. But it could be that in the world of the future, he would be more valuable than any of us. More even than Beanpole, because what good would it do to rebuild the great-cities of the ancients only to knock them down again?

  Though it was impossible that folly of that sort should happen again.

  And, in any case, the Masters were not beaten yet. Not by a long way.

  • • •

  The last stage of our voyage took us through warmer seas. We were heading farther south than on Henry’s first voyage, our landfall being close to the secondary base that had been set up in the mountains, some hundred miles east of the City. (It is an odd thing that, although the two continents of the Americas lie north and south of each other, the narrow isthmus that joins them runs east-west.) The primary base, from which the flying machines had been launched, had been abandoned after the failure of the attack. We had steady winds behind us from the northeast, and I was told that these blew, almost without changing, throughout the year. Once we had come under their influence, they propelled us powerfully.

  The sea was full of islands, of all shapes and sizes, some tiny and some so enormous that, if the sailors had not kept me better informed, I would have taken them for the continent itself. We sailed quite close to many, and there were tantalizing glimpses of lush green hills, golden sands, feathery fronds of trees waving in a breeze . . . Only the very big ones, it seemed, were inhabited. It would be wonderful to land and explore them. Perhaps, when this was all over . . . Henry could do his preaching for peace on his own, I decided. I would not have been much use to him, anyway.

  We landed at last, and went ashore to feel the unfamiliar solidity of firm ground under our feet. And to realize that we were back in the shadow of the enemy. This took place at dusk, and we unloaded and carted our gear that night, and the following day lay up in the cover of a forest. The work was difficult, and not helped by the fact that we had to endure several torrential downpours. It was rain unlike any I had encountered before, almost as though solid water were sheeting down out of the sky. It drenched to the skin within seconds.

  In the morning, though, the sun beat hotly through the leaves of unfamiliar trees. I ventured out to bask and to dry my clothes in a clearing nearby. We had already climbed some way, and this shelf of land looked a long way east. I could see the coastline, with minute offshore islands. Something else, also. It was miles away but clear, pinpointed in the bright tropic light.

  A Tripod.

  • • •

  It took us several days to get to our base, and another week to complete our preparations. After that, all we had to do was wait.

  I had had to wait before, and thought I had learned patience. There had been the long months of training for the Games, the seemingly endless weeks of enforced idleness in the caves, the days by the river preparing for our invasion of the City. All these, I thought, had schooled me; but they had not. For this was waiting of an entirely different kind—waiting with no fixed term and on a permanent alert. We were dependent not on any decisions of men, or even of the Masters, but on the vagaries of a greater force than either—Nature.

  Our planning staff had consulted with those, recruited in our earlier expeditions, who had lived here all their lives, and knew the country and its weather. We had to have a wind which would carry our balloons over the City, a wind, that is, from the northeast. This was, in fact, the prevailing wind, which had brought us on the last leg of our voyage, and at this time of year constant. Unfortunately, it normally died out, over this very strip of land, into the equatorial calm which prevailed to the south and west. We must wait for a moment of greater wind strength if we were not to find ourselves becalmed, and even drifting away from our target.

  So we had advance positions set up, as near as possible to the City, whose duty was to report back, by pigeon, when the wind was holding strongly enough in that
direction. Until they did, we could do nothing but chafe at the delay.

  And chafe we did. Ours had been the second to last party to arrive, but although many had waited longer, I found myself one of the least able to accept the situation. I flared up at the smallest provocation. When one of the others made a joking remark—that I was so full of hot air he doubted if I needed a balloon—I sailed into him, and we fought furiously until we were dragged apart. That evening, Fritz spoke to me.

  We were in a tent which was leaking in several places. The rain of this land was not easily stopped by canvas. It swished down relentlessly, as he remonstrated with me. I said I was sorry, but he was not impressed.

  “You have been sorry before,” he told me, “but you keep on doing things without thinking—flying off the handle. We cannot afford dissension here. We must live together and work together.”

  “I know,” I said. “I will do better.”

  He stared at me. He was fond of me, I knew, as I of him. We had been together a long time, and shared hardships and dangers. Nevertheless, his expression was grim. He said, “As you know, I am in charge of the attack. Julius and I discussed many things before we left. He told me that if I was not sure of any man I must leave him out of the assault. He spoke of you, Will, in particular.”

  He liked me, but duty came first, as it always would with Fritz. I pleaded with him for a last chance. In the end, shaking his head, he said he would—but it really was a last chance. If any trouble occurred in which I was concerned, he would not bother to find out who was responsible. Out I would go.

  The following morning, in the course of our usual drill on the balloons, the one I had fought with tripped me—perhaps accidentally, perhaps not—and I went sprawling. Not only did my elbow hit a chunk of rock, but I landed in a patch of sticky mud. I closed my eyes, and lay there for at least five seconds before getting up again. With a smile on my face, and my teeth tightly gritted.

  Two mornings later, through yet another downpour, a bedraggled pigeon alighted on the perch in front of its box. A little scroll of paper was fastened to its leg.

  • • •

  We had twelve balloons altogether in our force, with one man to each so as to be able to carry the greatest possible weight of explosive. This was sealed inside metal containers, something like the grooved metal eggs we had found in the ruins of the great-city, but very much larger. It was not too easy a task to lift them over the edge of the basket. They were fitted with fuses, which would cause them to explode four seconds after the release was pulled.

  This meant, Beanpole had explained to us, that we needed to make our drop from a height of just under a hundred and fifty feet. The calculation depended on something which had been discovered by a famous scientist of the ancients called Newton. He tried to explain it but it was beyond our comprehension—beyond mine, anyway. What it meant was that an object falling through the air traveled a distance in feet of sixteen, multiplied twice over by the number of seconds it had been falling. Thus in the first second it would fall sixteen feet (sixteen multiplied by one multiplied by one), in two seconds sixty-four feet, and in three a hundred and forty-four. The fourth second was the time allowed for getting the bomb, as he called it, into position and ready for the drop.

  We had practiced with dummy bombs over and over again, learning to calculate distances from the ground, to estimate time, and so on. There was also the question of the forward motion of the balloon, which naturally affected the place at which the bomb dropped. We had become reasonably skilled in the art. Now we had to apply it.

  The balloons went up at two-second intervals into a sodden gray sky and a wind dragging in from the ocean behind us. Our order had been allocated by Fritz, who went first. I was sixth, and Henry tenth. As I cast off and found myself shooting skyward, I looked down at the faces so quickly dwindling below. I saw Beanpole looking up, his spectacles almost certainly obscured by rain. It was hard luck on Beanpole, I thought, but the thought was fleeting. I was more concerned with having made it myself, with being freed of the delays and irritations. The lashing rain had already soaked me, but that was unimportant.

  We soared higher, in a long line that still preserved some irregularity. The country on which I looked down was a strange one, made up of low-pointed hills, rounded but in all sorts of different shapes, and covered by the dense forest that stretched away almost to reach the gray line that marked the ocean. The rain drove steadily on the driving wind. Valleys unfolded again behind me. Gradually the hills flattened, and the forests gave way to fields of crops. There were occasional small villages of whitewashed houses. A river appeared, and for a time our course followed it.

  The line was breaking up, spreading out, affected by small inconstancies in the wind. Some balloons were making better progress than others. I was chagrined to find that my own was falling behind. We were in two main groups, nine in advance and three of us forming a rearguard. Henry was one of the three. I waved to him, and he waved back.

  We lost the river but found this or another not long after. If it was the same one, it had widened. Later it flowed into a lake, a long neck of water stretching for at least ten miles on our right. The land beneath us was barren and lifeless, with a scorched blackened look. This would be part of the zone around the City which the Masters had laid waste as a defensive measure. I looked ahead more keenly but saw nothing but water on one side and burnt empty land rising on the other. The advance balloons were increasing their lead over the rest. It was infuriating, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  In fact, we were all traveling more slowly, because the rain had died out and the wind had dropped. Our course had been carefully calculated, but I wondered if the calculation might not be off, or the wind had changed direction, so that we would drift aimlessly out to sea. Ahead, the lake dog-legged to the right. But at that point . . .

  It ran south of west, almost straight, absolutely regular, a ditch that the ancients had made to take their ships across the isthmus from one ocean to the other. There were no ships in it but there was something else straddling it, a gigantic green-shelled golden beetle. The calculation had not been wrong. Right ahead of us lay the third City of the Masters.

  I did not have much time for contemplation. My attention was taken up by something else which appeared from behind high ground to the left of the City. Presumably the Tripod was returning, in the ordinary way, to its base. But, catching sight of the cluster of bubbles bobbing through the air, it checked and changed course. It got to them when the first balloon was within a hundred yards of the Wall. A flailing tentacle came close, but missed, as the balloonist, jettisoning ballast, sent his craft soaring. The others were approaching the Tripod, too. The tentacle flailed again, and this time struck home. The balloon crumpled, and dropped to the dark wet ground below.

  The Tripod was like a man swatting insects. Two more balloons in the advance group went down. The others got past. The first was over the City. Something fell from it. I counted: one, two, three . . . Nothing happened. The bomb had failed to explode.

  Two other balloons were off target, to the left. But the remaining three would cross over the expanse of green crystal. Another bomb dropped. Once more I counted. There was a great thump of sound as it went off. But the dome, as far as I could see, was still inviolate. I could not watch what was happening ahead after that. The Tripod stood directly in my path.

  Everyone so far had dropped ballast to rise and dodge the enemy’s blows. I guessed he would be getting used to the maneuver. Waiting until the tentacle was moving to its strike, I pulled the release cord and, with a sickening lurch, felt the balloon drop. The tentacle passed overhead. I had no idea by how much for my attention was on the ground toward which I was falling. Hastily I threw out sandbags, and the balloon shot up. The Tripod was behind me, the City ahead. Glancing back, I saw one of the two last balloons struck down, the other coming on. I hoped it was Henry, but could not look to find out.

  I had heard two more explosio
ns, but the City’s dome still stood intact. My balloon was over it and looking down I could dimly see, through its translucent green, the clustered peaks of the pyramids inside. My height was about right, though more by luck than anything else after the evading action I had been forced to take. Reaching down, I pulled out the fuse pin, and heaved the bomb up over the basket’s edge, poised it for an instant, and let go.

  The balloon lifted with the release of weight. I counted the seconds. Just before three, the bomb hit, skidded, bounced from the curve of the dome. It went off, and the blast of air rocked me violently. With dismay, I saw that there was no sign of a break in the crystal. That left just one balloon, one single hope.

  It was Henry: I knew by the color of the shirt he was wearing. He was going in dead center over the City. But not keeping the height that Beanpole and the scientists had prescribed. I watched him dropping, dropping . . . The basket scraped the surface of the dome.

  Then I understood what he was about. He had seen the failure of those of us in front and understood the reason for it. The scientists had told us that the bombs were powerful enough to shatter the crystal, having experimented on the broken dome of the City we had taken, but of course the bomb had to be touching or very close to the crystal when the explosion took place. Our bombs had ricocheted sufficiently to be outside those limits. The odds were against his being any more successful, at least as far as dropping a bomb was concerned.

  But planting was another matter. My own transit had been toward the edge, with the roof a falling curve beneath me. Henry’s course had taken him across the center: the dome flattened there, and a man could walk on it.

  My mind was a confusion of hope and horror. The basket scraped again, bounced up, dropped. I saw the distant figure struggle to lift something. As I watched, he scrambled over the edge of the basket. The balloon, released, rose sharply into the sullen gray sky. Henry stayed there, crouching, antlike against the gleaming surface that stretched all around.