When the Tripods Came

by Christopher, John

  Martha said, “I can’t think why they’ve let things get this far. It needs tackling with a firm hand.”

  “Easier said than done,” Pa said.

  “That’s the whole trouble. Too much saying, too little doing.”

  The news reader started talking about stocks and shares and a financial panic, and Angela, who had been sitting staring at the screen, got up and left the room. Martha and Pa went on talking about the rioting. She was getting angrier, and he was agreeing; he never liked being on the wrong side of her for long. He was saying yes, the Trippy Show should be banned, when I heard the front door open and close.

  I said, “That was Angela.”

  Pa turned to me. “What?”

  “Just then. Going out.”

  He asked Martha, “Did she say anything to you?”

  “No. I suppose she could have gone to Emma’s.”

  Emma was a friend of hers in the village.

  I said, “There was that bit on the news, about a Trippy commune in Exeter.”

  “She couldn’t—” Martha began. Pa went for the front door, and I followed him. Emma’s house was a couple of hundred yards to the left. Angela was heading right, in the direction of the bus station.

  • • •

  Pa needed my help in bringing her back; she fought for some time before suddenly going slack on us. He carried her to her room, and Martha and I watched her. She lay staring at the ceiling. When Pa came back she didn’t answer his questions, didn’t look at him or even move. Dr. Monmouth turned up a few minutes later. He lived close by.

  He was a small man, shorter than Pa, with a pink and white baby face and wispy hair. He spoke fast, stammering a bit. Pa explained what had happened.

  When he’d examined Angela and shone a light in her eyes, he said to Pa, “As you know, I use hypnosis sometimes. As we both know, it’s not a line you care for. If you like, I’ll sedate her and refer her to a p-pediatrician. But I would like to try hypnosis. It might just give us an idea what’s troubling her. M-may I?”

  Pa said reluctantly, “I don’t suppose it can do any harm.”

  “I’m sure it can’t.”

  Dr. Monmouth got her to sit up, handling her gently but firmly. From his bag he produced a steel ball on a chain and began to swing it in front of her. I’d seen something similar on a show, but it was interesting to watch, and listen to his voice, gentle and monotonous: “You are feeling sleepy . . . sleepy . . . sleepy. . . . Your eyelids are getting heavy. . . . Your eyes are closing . . . closing. . . . You are asleep. . . .”

  I was getting drowsy myself.

  Dr. Monmouth slipped the ball in his pocket. He said, “Angela. Can you hear me?”

  In a thick voice she said, “Yes.”

  “Is there anything you have to do—you m-must do?”

  No reply.

  He said, “Tell me. What is it you have to do?”

  She said slowly, “Obey the Tripod.”

  “What does that m-mean, Angela?”

  “The Tripod is good. The Tripod knows best.”

  “Best about what?”

  “About everything.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “I do what the Tripod tells me.”

  “And who told you this?”

  “The Tripod.”

  “Did the T-Tripod tell you to run away from home and join the Trippies?”

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Monmouth held her wrists in his hands. “Listen, Angela. Listen carefully. There is no Tripod. You have never watched the T-Trippy Show. There is no T-Trippy Show. You don’t like watching television. You are your own person, and no one, nothing, can rule your mind. Now, I am going to count to five, and on the count of five you will wake up, not r-remembering the words I’ve said, but r-remembering what I’ve told you. One, two, three . . .”

  Her eyes opened on five. She said, “What is it?” She looked at us standing round the bed. “I’ve not been ill or anything?”

  He smiled reassuringly. “Just a turn. You’re all right now. Fit for anything. Want to watch t-television?”

  “No.” She shook her head violently. “No, I don’t.”

  • • •

  Angela stayed in her room, rearranging her dolls. She had more than a dozen, and I realized it was weeks since she’d played with them. I went down with the others, and Pa poured them drinks.

  “I’m still not sure I know what that was about.” He handed a glass to Dr. Monmouth. “She’d been previously hypnotized by someone else? But who?”

  “You heard her: the Tripod.”

  Martha said, “That’s ridiculous. The Tripods were destroyed. By the television show, do you mean? Is that possible?”

  Dr. Monmouth took his drink. “Hypnosis is a state of artificially induced sleep or trance, in which the subject is susceptible to suggestion. There are various m-methods of inducing it. I’ve never known of it being done through television, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility.”

  “But the actual suggestion,” Pa said, “how would that work?”

  “It could be subliminal: a message flashed onscreen for a microsecond. Reinforced by the spoken message, ‘Hail the T-Tripod.’ It’s interesting that it affects some people and not others. But so do other things, of course. Strobe lighting doesn’t bother m-most people, but induces epilepsy in a m-minority. It could be the result of a minor cortical irregularity. A difference in alpha rhythm, perhaps, which makes them susceptible.”

  “But done by whom,” Martha demanded, “the Russians?”

  “I suppose that’s possible. But the show originated in the United States.”

  “Why would the Americans want to do such a thing? It makes no sense.”

  “There have been experiments in the past with subliminal suggestion in advertising. M-maybe somebody’s preparing the launch of a T-Tripod toy, and the p-project got out of hand. Or maybe it’s like the mass hysteria you get with pop stars—hysteria and hypnosis both involve surrender of the will—and by some freak it’s got tied in with this particular show.”

  Pa asked, “Which do you think?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a third possibility.”

  “What?”

  “Television signals aren’t stopped by the ionosphere. The show originates in America, but the suggestions could be superimposed from somewhere else.” He paused. “F-from space.”

  Martha shook her head. “Now that really is ridiculous.”

  Pa said, “From whatever was behind the Tripods, you mean? It’s a bit unlikely, isn’t it? The Tripods were a joke.”

  “Scientific knowledge doesn’t have to follow the pattern we’re familiar with. The Incas had a superb road system, but didn’t m-manage to invent the wheel. The fact of using something as clumsy as a T-Tripod doesn’t mean they might not be a long way ahead of us in studies of the m-mind, and mental processes.”

  Pa shook his head. “An advertising gimmick getting out of hand sounds more likely.”

  • • •

  The television news was full of Trippies, demonstrating and chanting about the Tripod and clashing with the police. And not just in England; there were similar scenes from America and Canada, Australia and Europe. There were rumors it was happening behind the Iron Curtain, too, but we weren’t shown any of that.

  The media had invented the name Trippy, and they called the demonstrations Tripping. The Trippies took it up themselves, and started singing a new song to one of the minor tunes on the Trippy Show.

  “Trip, trip, trip with the Tripod . . .”

  Then suddenly the Trippies were on the move. It began in London. We watched the report on early evening television, and it was like a mass migration. They had managed to pick up cars and vans from all over the city and were moving out into the country. Others waited by the roadside. The weather was terrible, with rain slashing out of a black sky and a near-gale blowing. They stood patiently in the rain, wet, bedraggled, uncomplaining. Many of them carried hand-lettered signs and ban
ners: HAIL THE TRIPOD! THE TRIPOD LIVES! or just a drawing of a Tripod. Cars and vans driven by other Trippies stopped to pick them up, and crawled on, overloaded. The police watched but didn’t try to do anything.

  I thought about it when I went to bed. I didn’t know whether or not to feel sorry for them. It had looked a miserable scene, but they hadn’t seemed miserable. I wondered what it was about. Could Dr. Monmouth be right about hypnosis through signals from space? But what for? Why a mass exodus like that? I remembered that lemmings went in for mass migrations. They wound up in the sea.

  Presumably Angela could have been among them if Dr. Monmouth hadn’t broken the spell. Some of the Trippies had looked no older than she was. The thought was chilling.

  In the morning I woke early. I switched on breakfast television and stared at the screen in disbelief. A Tripod stood center screen, with sodden, gray-green fields behind it. Small dots swarmed like bees about the gigantic feet.

  The newscaster was talking in a breathless, unsteady voice.

  “The second Tripod invasion is amazing enough in itself—and there are landings reported in Germany and the States—but this—how would you describe it?—parade of welcome? This really is incredible. . . .”

  The camera zoomed into close-up. The swarm of dots turned into people. Hundreds . . . thousands of them, waving and cheering and brandishing Trippy signs.

  FOUR

  For a time there was a stalemate. The Tripods didn’t move and no one moved against them. There was no way of attacking them without killing the Trippies clustered round. The nearest Tripod to us was north of Exeter, and there were three others in England, one in Scotland between Edinburgh and Glasgow, and one in Ireland, south of Dublin. It was the same throughout the industrialized world. Someone worked out there was a Tripod for about every ten million people, mostly planted close to major centers of population.

  The Trippy Show was taken off the air, but came back, and the new broadcasts were traced to high-orbit satellites. The government tried jamming, but they switched frequency—and went on switching as fast as the jammer could chase them round.

  Martha said they should stop television.

  Pa said, “They can’t.”

  “Why not? They did during the war.”

  I wanted to ask which war—the Boer or the Crimean? It was amazing how old people could talk about The War, as though that meant something.

  Pa said, “It wasn’t the major channel of communication then; that was radio. You have to remember that even when I was little, less than one house in a hundred, probably, had a TV set. If they stopped it now, there’d be panic.”

  “They’ll have to do something. Mrs. Golightly says her maid’s Tripped. Yesterday she was rambling on about the Tripod, and this morning she didn’t turn up for work.”

  “If nothing worse happens to us than losing the daily help, we’ll not be doing badly.”

  I’d just come in from school. I said, “I meant to tell you—Andy’s mother’s gone.”

  Martha demanded, “Are you sure?”

  “The house was empty when he got home yesterday. He thought she might be visiting, but she didn’t come back. And didn’t leave a note as she usually does when she goes off.”

  Martha looked shocked. “Do you mean he’s in the house on his own?”

  “I suppose so. He can look after himself.”

  She turned to Pa. “Go and get him. He’d better stay with us while this is on.”

  “I was going to ring Ilse.”

  She looked at him in exasperation. “That can wait.”

  I knew Pa was comfortably off, though he spent a lot of time moaning about money and tax bills; and I supposed Martha was fairly rich. But my Uncle Ian was a real tycoon. He ran several companies in London—all sorts of things from coffee to property development—and they had a Rolls, and a Porsche, and one of those fantastic little MR-2 sports cars for the shopping. He and Aunt Caroline (Pa’s sister) spent a lot of time jetting around. He was tied in with a company in Tokyo and another in New York, and in between they lived in a real mansion in the Cotswolds, with indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts, half a dozen stables, and grounds that stretched for miles.

  They had two children: Verity, who was seventeen, and Nathanael, a year older than me. (They really did call him Nathanael, even sitting round the swimming pool.) He looked like his father, with a thin, pale face and gingery hair and a weedy, slouching body, though without the potbelly Uncle Ian had got from living rich around the world. Verity was redheaded, too, but pretty.

  We didn’t see much of them, for a number of reasons. One was they made Ilse feel uncomfortable; another was that Martha disapproved of the way they lived. A third was because of the way they lived. You had to feel like a poor relation because you were. This didn’t worry me too much. I envied Nathanael some of the things he took for granted (like the swimming pools), but I wouldn’t have wanted them if it meant being like Nathanael, and I managed to convince myself the two went together. I might have liked Verity if she’d ever paid me any attention, but she didn’t.

  Pa had telephoned Aunt Caroline after what happened with Angela, partly as a warning. From what he said to Martha, I gathered she’d not been very interested; Nathanael and Verity were safe at their expensive boarding schools (Eton in Nathanael’s case), and she and Ian didn’t watch television. She said the Tripod business was a nuisance, all the same. They’d been planning a trip to Los Angeles—Ian was setting up a company there—but he’d decided it was best to wait till things sorted themselves out.

  It was a very different Aunt Caroline who telephoned while Pa was fetching Andy. At first I couldn’t make out what she was saying, her voice was so choked. It gradually emerged that though television had been banned at Eton since the second Tripod invasion, someone had been operating a set illicitly. A master had found it tuned to the Trippy Show and confiscated it, but a dozen boys had run away during the night. Nathanael was one of them.

  Ian had set off at once to look for him. The nearest Tripod was on Farnham Common, not far from Eton, and they thought that was where they’d be heading. She was worried about Ian, too, now.

  She was still on the telephone when Pa came back with Andy. He listened to her and made big brother noises. I heard him say, “Ian will be all right, Caro. I’m sure of it. And Nathanael. It’s not as if they’re in physical danger. It’s been a week now, and nothing terrible’s happened. It’s just a silly business which will blow itself out. Have a drink, and try to relax. All right, have another drink. There are times when getting drunk’s not a bad idea.”

  He didn’t look so cheerful when he came away from the telephone. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “They called the police as soon as they heard from school, and the police didn’t even pretend to help—told Ian they’d given up handling missing persons calls. There were too many of them.”

  Andy nodded. “That’s what they told me. And some police are Tripping. The policeman at Little Ittery’s gone.”

  That was a village five miles away. Pa said, “Try not to worry about your mother. As I told my sister, it’s not as though anything terrible’s happening. Nobody’s been hurt. And hypnotic effects don’t last. They had a doctor on the radio this morning saying he expected people to start trickling back home any time now.”

  I asked, “What about Angela?”

  “What about her?”

  “Dr. Monmouth hypnotized her. Might that not last?”

  “That’s different. He hypnotized her to dehypnotize her. If we find her glued to the tube again there might be reason to worry, but I’ve seen no sign of that.”

  Nor had I. I’d noticed that if anyone left the TV switched on—as Martha sometimes did when she was going out, to deter burglars—Angela switched it off.

  • • •

  I wasn’t all that delighted about Andy staying with us. I liked him well enough, but the thought of having him twenty-four hours a day, sharing a room, didn’t make
me jump for joy.

  That evening he got to bed first and was reading a book. That suited me, but when I got back from the bathroom, he put the book down.

  “It’s raining,” he said. “And blowing up a storm. I wonder where Miranda is.”

  Even though I called Ilse by her name, it seemed wrong, his saying Miranda. After all, she was his real mother, not his stepmother. I’d never been able to work out how he really felt about her. He could talk about her weird ideas—like painting all the ceilings black—in a faintly amused way, as though she were a character in a play. At the same time, when she wasn’t storming at him, he was affectionate in a way I couldn’t be to anyone, let alone Use. He was always hugging her.

  I said lamely, “She’ll be all right.”

  “It’s funny.” He lay looking at the ceiling. “When she’s gone off somewhere before, there’ve been times I hoped she wouldn’t come back.”

  He spoke in his usual calm way. This time I didn’t know what to say, and didn’t try.

  After a while he went on, “Of course, she’d gone those times because she wanted to. I didn’t have to worry, because she was doing her own thing. I don’t feel she is now.” He paused. “I’ve been wondering if I ought to go and look for her, like your uncle with Nathanael.”

  I said, “You’d never find her, and if you did, what good would it do? Angela was little enough to be dragged back, and we had Dr. Monmouth round the corner. What could you do against a mob of Trippies?”

  He nodded. “Not much, I suppose. But she’s part of it at this moment. It’s happening to her. All the mad things she did . . . And now . . . can she do anything except wave a banner and hail the Tripod?”

  “It doesn’t mean she’s unhappy. Angela wasn’t.” I wouldn’t have called it happy, either, but I didn’t say that.