When the Tripods Came (15 page)

• • •

Autumn brought snow again, and an end to the days of lying out in the sunshine that burned so fiercely through the thin air. Once more we took to skis and darted across the white untrodden slopes. And one day, above Karaman, we watched a Tripod pass beneath us. This time it did not stop by the village but crawled on, disappearing round high ground to the east. Just over a week later we saw it again, and Pa looked at his watch.

“The same time, within minutes. I wonder if it’s a routine patrol?”

Over subsequent weeks, we studied the Tripod. It
was
a patrol, and one carried out with monotonous regularity. Every fourth day the Tripod passed below our aerie shortly before eleven in the morning,
treading a path that varied as little as the time.

On the fifth occasion we saw it, Pa said, “I wonder what the object is? I suppose, just keeping a general watch over things.”

He wiped away tears with the back of his glove; there was a biting northeast wind, and his eyes were inclined to water.

Andy said, “The way it thumps along, it could set off an avalanche.”

That was something Yone had recently warned us about. The mountain slopes were packed with snow, and an incautious movement could trigger off disaster. He had been a survivor of an avalanche as a young man—he was dug out of a cabin after days of being buried—and he’d described the horror of it: thousands of tons of snow and rock hurtling down with the speed of an express train and the noise of ten.

Pa said, “Pity it doesn’t.”

Something occurred to me. “I wonder . . .”

Pa wiped more tears away. “What?”

“We know it arrives here at the same time, every fourth day.” I looked down the slopes immediately beneath us, heavy with new snow. “What would happen if someone fired a shotgun into that, just as the Tripod was passing underneath?”

• • •

Yone, who suffered from rheumatism which sometimes crippled him for days, had not been with us that morning. He closed his eyes, listening to what Pa said.

“It is possible. But not easy to say when avalanche is—ripe, is it? And not easy to guess path it takes.”

“But worth trying?”

Yone paused before replying. “We take care no one finds us, make no tracks. But if we try, and it not work, perhaps they will come look for us.”

It was something to consider. The Tripods themselves, unwieldy as they were, could not invade our mountain fastness, but they had silver-headed slaves at their disposal in virtually endless numbers. If in failing we showed our hand, they could use them to track us down. And once they did, though we might defend the tunnel entrance for a time, our fate was certain.

For days we argued the question. Martha and Ilse were vehemently against the idea, Yone more calmly opposed. Most of the younger ones were for it, with varying enthusiasm. Angela demanded to be one of the party carrying out the attack. For my part, I thought what Yone had said made sense. I could imagine what it would be like being trapped and besieged in the tunnel. Our present life was not too bad, and you could say we were making progress. With the spring we could start recruiting again. The sensible thing was not to take a risk that might destroy us.

But being sensible wasn’t enough. The hatred I felt for the Tripods and what they had done to us was too great. Nor could I abide the thought of huddling here forever like moles, while our enemy
stomped arrogantly through the valley. I wanted to attack!

Next morning Pa called us together in that part of the cave which was our general meeting place. Oil lamps hung from hooks which Yone had screwed into the rocky ceiling, and an oil stove provided smelly warmth.

He had with him a battery-powered radio we’d found at the hotel, powerful and with six shortwave bands. At the beginning it had been possible to pick up occasional faint voices on it, sometimes too faint for the language to be distinguished. But the voices had died, one by one. It was months since anyone had bothered to listen.

He said, “I stayed up last night, searching the air waves. Nothing but Tripod buzz.”

He was referring to the radio sounds we assumed came from the Tripods, an oscillating noise that didn’t seem to have any coherent pattern.

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t free men out there. There may be groups without transmitters, or afraid to use them for fear of being traced. But we have to act as though we’re on our own, now and for the foreseeable future. We must act, that is, as though we’re the last hope of the human race.”

He stopped and wiped his brow; I saw he was sweating, though it was not all that warm. I looked from his face to Martha’s, Ilse’s, Yone’s. Yone was the only one who seemed unchanged, but he’d always looked ancient. All the rest showed new signs of strain and tiredness. It was easier, I realized, for
people of my age to adjust to confinement and hardships, and the lack of comforts, than for old people like them.

“What this means,” Pa went on, “is that everything we do is critical. Our first aim has to be self-preservation, but self-preservation isn’t enough. Aiming just at that, we could slip into a routine of caution and playing safe which would progressively weaken us, and eventually destroy us as totally as the Tripods have destroyed our cities. So our second aim must be to fight the Tripods—without much hope for the immediate future, but as a means of keeping hope alive.

“That’s why we go out to recruit the young—why we’ve brought in Hanna and Hans and, God willing, will find more.” He wiped his face again. “And that’s why I think we must attack this Tripod, even if it means risking our own destruction. My personal instinct is to leave well alone, play safe. Martha and Ilse and Yone feel the same way. But we’re old and overcautious. The young are for attack, and the young are right.”

Ilse said, “No! Martin, you must listen. . . .”

Pa looked at her with a grim face. “I lead this group. I never saw myself as a leader, but there it is; in a situation like this, someone has to. And a leader has to command confidence, and consent. I hope I will always get your consent to things I propose, but if ever I don’t you will need to choose someone else.”

A silence followed. Everyone knew there was no
one who could take his place. Eventually, when he was too old, someone would, but that was a long time in the future. Maybe Andy, I thought, looking at him across the cave. I looked at Hanna, with the lamplight shining on her hair. Or maybe me. A lot of things had changed, not just in the world outside but in me, to make that believable.

“The day after tomorrow,” Pa said. “That’s when the Tripod’s due again.”

• • •

The party consisted of Pa, Andy, and myself. Yone had given us a further warning. Our aim was to start an avalanche below us, but there were slopes above which were also overcharged with snow. The shock might start another, higher up, that could overwhelm us. Setting out, Pa said if we didn’t come back the others were to take orders from Martha. He kissed Use, holding her a long time.

She came to me then, and said, “Take care, Lowree.”

She was looking at me, and there was a tear on her cheek. She made no move towards me, but I went forward, and kissed her, too. “I will.”

We moved into position on a clear morning, with sunlight sparkling from the peaks and the surface of the lake below. Then came the waiting—only for an hour, but seeming much longer. At one point, on a slope to the west of us, a minor shift of snow looked as though it might be the start of a natural avalanche, but as we held our breaths the slide checked, and all was still again.

Pa looked at his watch for the hundredth time. At that moment, following the same path round a spur of rock as it had on previous occasions, the Tripod came in view, three or four hundred meters below us and more than twice that to the west. Now Pa faced the crucial problem of judging the moment to fire Yone’s shotgun.

Rising to his feet, he pointed it at the snow slope. The Tripod was coming on in its awkward skittering motion, a metal spider that had lost all but three of its legs. From up here it looked small, unthreatening.

How deceptive that was! Across the valley to the north we looked at a wasteland of white peaks, but beyond them lay what had been great cities. And the simple reality of this metal beast, stalking unchallenged through a remote alpine valley, was the measure of our humiliation. I thought back to the early days, and Wild Bill talking about Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind. Whatever bizarre creatures had launched the Tripods, no one had taken them seriously until it was too late.

No, not too late. I wouldn’t accept that. As long as even a handful of men and women survived free, hope lived. And Pa was right: we must risk everything to fight them, for without fighting, everything was lost.

I saw his finger crook in the trigger guard. It was too early! The Tripod was a hundred meters short of the point the avalanche would hit. I wanted to cry out, tell him to hold fire. . . . Then the shotgun went off, its thunder shattering the still cold air.

. . . And nothing happened. The snow remained even, undisturbed. Below, the Tripod continued on its twisting way. Pa fired the second barrel, and thunder reverberated again. I heard Andy whisper, “Move! For God’s sake, move!” Then slowly, very slowly, the surface rippled, and the snow started to slide.

It gathered speed only gradually, moving at a child’s walking pace to begin with. That was when I felt sure that, instead of firing too soon, Pa had left it too late. The Tripod came steadily on, varying neither pace nor path. It would be past by the time the wave of snow arrived. I felt like weeping with anger and despair.

“Go on! Go on!”

That was Pa. I heard myself echoing him—“Go, go!”—as though urging the mountain, the planet which had borne us, to come to our aid. We were all three crying out, shouting for help to the empty sky.

And the avalanche was gathering force, spreading, foaming up out of itself, tossing huge boulders into the air as though they were specks of gravel. It looked as though the whole face of the mountain was on the move. The sound, as Yone had said, was titanic, a thousand giants bellowing wrath. Faster and faster it drove, then suddenly seemed to leap and charge forward like a living thing . . . and sweep over the Tripod, burying it. When the avalanche finally came to a halt, an unbroken expanse of snow lay beneath us.

At the beginning of summer I sat outside the cave with Andy and Rudi. We are a united company—we have to be, the way we live—but I get on better with them than with Hans, or Dieter, the boy we recruited just before Christmas. I like Hanna better still, but that’s a different story; not really to do with sitting and idly talking.

We were talking about the Tripods and the avalanche. For weeks after, we waited in apprehension, expecting reprisal or at least response. There was none. We kept constant patrols, but nothing happened, and no new Tripod came.

Then, with the melting of the snow, a patrol—unfortunately I was not on it—witnessed a strange sight. Two Tripods crawled along the valley and approached the spot where the hemisphere of the wrecked one was just beginning to be visible. They probed around it with their tentacles for several minutes, then went back the way they had come. As they disappeared, the wreck erupted in a fount of flame.

I had been arguing that the two must have come in response to some kind of radio beacon. Andy shook his head and said, “Doesn’t make sense. Why wait all that time? They must have known something was wrong when it didn’t return to base.”

“Knowing something’s gone wrong isn’t the same as knowing
where
it’s gone wrong. Their transmitter was probably blocked through being under snow. Then, when the snow melted—”

“All they had to do was send another Tripod
along the same route to look for it. They didn’t.”

“How do we know that? We weren’t able to keep watch all the time.”

He paused, but when I thought he’d yielded the point, said, “Because the second Tripod would have left thumping great tracks in the snow, wouldn’t it? I should have thought that was obvious.”

Rudi said, while I was trying to think of an answer, “I think they are knowing from the beginning.”

I asked shortly, “Why?”

“Because they do not take time looking at the wreck. All they do is explode it.”

“So why wait all those months?” Andy came in. “Why not do whatever they were going to do right away?”

Rudi shrugged. “I do not know. All we truly know is how little we know of them. What matters is that now they send no Tripods through the valley. It is not much, but it is better.”

His calmness calmed me. What he said was right. We had managed to destroy one Tripod, and in this small corner of the world, none had replaced it. I remembered the speculation about their coming from a swamp world. Perhaps mountains were unfamiliar to them, and perhaps they would decide they were dangerous and keep away from them in future. It was a small victory, but something to build on.

No one spoke for several moments. The sun
scorched overhead. Around us the green grass was studded with a dozen different colors of summer flowers, and above, against a strong blue sky, a pair of yellow butterflies slowly waltzed. A lazy day—the sort of day for a game of tennis, a bike ride, fishing maybe . . . then back home to a shower, tea, television. . . .

Andy said, “I like the idea of this extended patrol Martin was talking about.”

They all called Pa Martin these days, though certainly not from lack of respect. Everyone listened carefully when he spoke. But he talked to me more than the others, and I called him Pa.

Rudi said, “Yes. We will make more recruits if we go further.”

And yet what a lot there was to build! I could see no end in our lifetimes, perhaps not in centuries. At least, though, we’d made a start. I wondered about those who would come after—if maybe one day three like us would lie on this hillside in the sun, watching butterflies as we were doing, but able also to look towards a day which would see humanity free again.

Our job—my job—was to lay the foundations which could make it happen.

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.