The Pool of Fire (The Tripods)

Preface to the Anniversary Edition

One
A Plan of Action

Two
The Hunt

Three
The Green Man on the Green Horse

Four
A Little Drink for Ruki

Five
Six Against the City

Six
The Pool of Fire

Seven
A Summer on the Wind

Eight
The Freedom Bubbles

Nine
The Conference of Man

To Sheila and Margret

with love

What is the greatest gift any human being can possess?

It is not intelligence, strength, health, courage, good looks. These are all good to have, but without something else, something much deeper and more important, they are worthless.

Think of Helen Keller. Blind and deaf from infancy, she was trapped in a terrifying and hopeless isolation until someone found her, cared for her, and taught her how to communicate. She learned to speak, to read and write, and did all three things with great skill. She was eighty-eight when she died, after a life largely spent working to help others who were blind and deaf. Indeed we are all born into isolation and need others—usually our parents, fundamentally our mothers—to teach us that skill without which every other human gift is pointless: the skill of communication.

Now think about Will, and his Master in the City of Gold and Lead. The Masters, Will learns, lead much more separate lives than humans. In their world, for instance, there is no such thing as marriage, or children. They perpetuate their species through parthenogenesis, a kind of budding. To Will’s Master the notion of such a thing as friendship is bizarre, and consequently, fascinating. In fact, he’s so intrigued by it that he makes an attempt to establish such a relationship with Will. But friendship requires equality between the friends, and that’s beyond him. Instead, he treats Will as a kind of pet.

But this defect (as we would see it) in the Masters has a positive side. Human beings communicate, but when their communication fails or is inadequate, they get angry
with one another. The world which the Masters found and conquered was one that was perpetually at war. This was something else they found baffling. They could never destroy themselves through warfare, as we have sometimes seemed to threaten to do.

Will thinks about this:

“I had wondered at one time why the Masters had taken the trouble to learn our languages rather than make the slaves learn theirs. . . . My Master spoke German to me, but to other slaves from other lands he could speak in their language. It was a thing which amused him: the division of men into different races who could not understand each other. The Masters had always been part of one race, it seemed, solitary in themselves but yet part of a unity which men, even before they came, had shown small signs of achieving.”

The world into which Will is born, and in which he grows up, is not at first sight an unhappy one. Life goes on in tune with the changing seasons, peacefully and harmoniously. The Capped adults who surround him—his parents, their friends, even his cousin and best friend Jack—live lives which seem good to them. They are content with their loss of liberty because they do not understand what they have lost. Even the occasional sight of a Tripod stalking the horizon does not trouble them, because their minds have been conditioned to see the Tripods not as enslaving monsters, but as kind and protective gods.

Will himself is swayed by this vision during his stay at the Château de la Tour Rouge. Even after he discovers that the beautiful Eloise has been Capped—is fundamentally
committed to the Tripods—he is tempted by the prospects that Eloise’s mother, the Comtesse, sets before him. She tells him: “You are not noble, but nobility can be granted. It lies in the gift of the King, and the King is my cousin.” Will’s head spins with thoughts of what seems to lie ahead. “I could have servants of my own, and horses, and armor made for me so that I could ride in the tournaments, and a place in the family of the Comte de la Tour Rouge. . . .”

So when Henry and Beanpole are ready to move on, to continue their journey to the White Mountains where people are still free, Will holds back. Would it be so terrible to be Capped, if it meant enjoying such a good life, with the promise of marriage to Eloise to make it perfect? He tells his friends he will follow them later, but they do not believe him, and in his heart he doesn’t believe it himself. Only after Eloise is crowned Queen of the Games and tells him—gladly—that, as a result, she is to go to the City of the Tripods to serve them, is he shocked into realizing what he was on the point of doing, and into renewing his determination to fight for freedom.

But if humanity does succeed, against overwhelming odds, in winning the struggle—in defeating the Tripods and regaining freedom—what follows?

The wonderful capacity we have of relating to one another, however doubtfully and uncertainly, is also the root of our enmities. Love and hate are opposite sides of a coin, which has been endlessly tossed throughout human history without producing any final result. So there are two challenges which Will and his friends have to face. The most urgent one is to throw off the tyranny of the Masters—to regain freedom for mankind. But even if they achieve that, they are left with the problems that
were there before the Tripods came: the problems of disunity and the horrors of war.

The second challenge is even bigger than the first, and more daunting. Can we be free, and still live together in peace? At the end of their adventures, it is understandable that Will and his companions should take an optimistic view.

We must all wish them well.

Everywhere there was the sound
of water. In places it was no more than a faint whisper, heard only because of the great stillness all around; in others, an eerie distant rumbling, like the voice of a giant talking to himself in the bowels of the earth. But there were places also where its rushing was clear and loud, and the actual torrent was visible by the light of oil lamps, flinging itself down dark rocky water-courses or spilling in a fall over a sheer edge of stone. And places where the water lay calm in long black reaches, its sound muted to a monotonous drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . which had continued for centuries and would continue for as many more.

I was relieved from guard to go to the conference, and so went through the dimly lit tunnels late and alone. The work of nature here mingled with the work
of man. The earth’s convulsions, and the action of long-dead rivers, had hollowed out these caverns and channels in the limestone hills, but there were marks of the ancients, too. Men had been here in the past, smoothing uneven floors, widening narrow gaps, sinking handrails into an artificial stone to aid and guide the traveler. There were also long ropelike cables, which had once carried the power called electricity to light bulbs of glass along the way. Our wise men, Beanpole had told me, had learned the means of doing this again, but needed resources that were not available to them here—nor would be, perhaps, while men were forced to skulk like rats in the dark corners of a world governed by the Tripods, those huge metal monsters who strode on three giant legs across the face of the earth.