The Pool of Fire (The Tripods) (13 page)

I do not know what
they thought was happening to them, but they plainly failed to work it out. Perhaps they thought it was the Sickness, the Curse of the Skloodzi, operating in a new and more virulent fashion. I suppose the notion of poisoning was something they were incapable of grasping. They had, as we had found with Ruki, an apparently infallible means of sensing anything in their food or drink which could be injurious. Apparently infallible, but not quite. It is hard to be defensive toward a danger which you have never imagined existed.

So they drank, and staggered, and fell; a few at first and then more and more until the streets were littered with their grotesque and monstrous bodies. The slaves moved among them, pitifully at a loss, occasionally trying to rouse them, timid and imploring at the same
time. In a plaza where more than a score of Masters were lying, a slave rose from beside one of the fallen, his face streaming tears. He called out, “The Masters are no more. Therefore our lives no longer have a purpose. Brothers, let us go to the Place of Happy Release together.”

Others moved toward him gladly. Fritz said, “I think they would do it, too. We must stop them.”

Mario said, “How? Does it matter, anyway?”

Not answering, Fritz jumped onto a small platform of stone, which was sometimes used by one of the Masters for a kind of meditation they did. He cried, “No, brothers! They are not dead. They sleep. Soon they will wake, and need our care.”

They were irresolute. The one who had urged them before said, “How do you know this?”

“Because my Master told me, before it happened.”

It was a clincher. Slaves might lie to each other, but never about anything relating to the Masters. The idea was unthinkable. Bewildered, but a little less sorrowful, they dispersed.

As soon as it was apparent that the scheme had succeeded, we turned to the second and equally important part of our task. The paralysis, as we knew, was temporary. It might have been possible, I suppose, to kill each Master individually as he lay helpless, but we probably would not find them all in the time . . . quite apart from the fact that it was most unlikely that the slaves would stand idly by while we did it. As long as the Masters were not dead, but only unconscious, the power of the Caps remained.

The answer was to strike at the heart of the City, and wreck it. We knew—it was one of the first things Fritz had discovered—where the machines were that controlled the City’s power: its heat and light and the force that produced this dragging leaden weight under which we labored. We headed in that direction. It was some way off, and Carlos suggested we should use the horseless carriages which carried the Masters about. Fritz vetoed that. Slaves drove the carriages for their Masters, but did not use them otherwise. The Masters were in no position to notice the infringement, but the slaves would, and we did not know how they would react.

So we toiled along to Street II, and to Ramp 914. The approach was through one of the biggest plazas in the City, lined with many ornate garden-pools. The ramp itself was very broad and dipped under a pyramid that towered above its neighbors. From below came a hum of machinery that made the ground under our feet vibrate slightly. I had a sense of awe, going down into the depths. It was a place that slaves never went near, and so we had not been able to earlier. This was the City’s beating heart: how dared we think of penetrating it?

The ramp led into a cavern twice or three times as big as any I had seen, made up of three half circles about a central circle. In each of the hemispheres were vast banks of machinery, having hundreds of incomprehensible dials along their fronts. Scattered about the floor were the bodies of the Masters who had tended them. Some, clearly, had dropped at their posts. I saw one whose tentacle was still curled about a lever.

The number of the machines, and their complexity, confused us. I looked for switches by which they might be turned off, but found none. The metal, gleaming a faint bronze, was unyielding and seamless, the dials covered by toughened glass. We went from one to another, looking for a weak spot but finding nothing. Was it possible that, even with the Masters made impotent, their machines would continue to defy us?

Fritz said, “Perhaps that pyramid in the middle . . .”

It occupied the dead center of the inner circle. The sides were about thirty-five feet at the base and formed equilateral triangles, so that the apex was more than thirty feet high. We had not paid attention to it before because it did not look like a machine, being featureless apart from a single triangular doorway, high enough to admit a Master. But there were no fallen bodies anywhere near it.

It was of the same bronze metal as the machines, but we did not hear a hum as we approached. Instead there was a faint hissing noise, rising and falling in volume and also in tone. The doorway showed only more blank metal inside. There was a pyramid within the pyramid, with an empty space between them. We walked along the passage this formed and found the inner pyramid also had a doorway, but in a different face. We went through, and faced a third pyramid inside the second.

This, too, had a doorway, in the side which was blank in the external pyramids. A glow came from within. We entered, and I stared in wonder.

A circular pit took up most of the floor, and the glow
was coming from there. It was golden, something like the golden balls produced in the Sphere Chase, but deeper and brighter. It was fire, but a liquid fire, pulsing in a slow rhythm which matched the rise and fall of the hissing sound. One had an impression of power—effortless, limitless, unceasing.

Fritz said, “This is it, I think. But how does one stop it?”

Mario said, “On the far side . . . do you see?”

It lay beyond the glow, a single slim bronze column, about the height of a man. Something protruded from the top. A lever? Mario, not waiting for an answer, was going around the glowing pit toward it. I saw him reach up, touch the lever—and die.

He made no sound, and perhaps did not know what was happening to him. Pale fire ran down the arm grasping the lever, divided and multiplied to leap in a dozen different streams along his body. He stayed like that for a brief instant. Then he slumped, and the lever came down with his dead weight, before his fingers unclasped and he slipped to the ground.

There was a shocked murmur from the others. Carlos moved, as though to go to him. Fritz said, “No. It would do no good, and might kill you, too. But, look! Look at the pit.”

The glow was dying. It went slowly, as though reluctantly, the depths remaining lambent while the surface first silvered and then darkened over. The hissing faded, slowly, slowly, and this time into a whisper that trailed into silence. Deep down the glow reddened to a dull crimson. Spots of blackness appeared, increased in
size, and ran together. Until at last we stood there, in silence and in the pitch dark.

In a low voice, Fritz said, “We must get out. Hold on to each other.”

At that moment, the ground shuddered under us, as though we were in a small earthquake; and suddenly we were liberated from the leaden weight which had dragged at us throughout our time here. My body was light again. It felt as though thousands of little balloons, attached to nerves and muscles, were lifting me up. It is an odd thing. For all the sensation of lightness, I found myself desperately weary.

We shuffled and groped our way through the maze of pyramids, blind leading the blind. In the great cavern it was just as black, the lights having gone out. Black and silent, for there was no hum of machines any longer. Fritz guided us to what he thought would be the entrance, but instead we came up against one of the banks of machines. We went along, feeling the metal with our hands. Twice he checked, encountering the body of a Master, and once I myself, at the end of the line, unwittingly put my foot on the end of a tentacle. It rolled under my foot, and I wanted to be sick.

At last we found the entrance and, making our way along the curving ramp, saw the glimmer of green daylight ahead. We went more quickly, and soon could let go of each other. We came out, into the great plaza with the garden-pools. I saw a couple of Masters floating in one of them, and wondered if they had drowned. It really did not matter any longer.

Three figures confronted us at the next intersection. Slaves. Fritz said, “I wonder . . .”

They looked dazed, as though knowing themselves to be in a dream—on a point of waking but not capable of bringing themselves into full consciousness. Fritz said, “Greetings, friends.”

One of them answered, “How do we get out of this . . . place? Do you know a way?”

It was an ordinary, simple remark, but it told us everything. No slave would possibly seek a way out of the hellish paradise in which they could serve the Masters. It meant that the control was broken, the Caps they wore as powerless as the ones we had put on for a disguise. These were free men. And if this were the case inside the City, it must be equally true in the world beyond. We were a fugitive minority no longer.

“We will find one,” Fritz said. “You can help us.”

We talked with them as we made our way toward the Hall of the Tripods, the gateway to the City. They were desperately confused. They remembered what had happened since they were Capped, but could make no sense of it. Their earlier selves, who had worshipfully tended the Masters, were strangers to them. The horror of what they had experienced was slow in dawning, but searing when it came. Once they all three, stopped, where two Masters had fallen side by side, and I thought they might be going to savage them. But, after a long moment’s looking, they turned their heads away, shuddering, and walked on.

We met many of the Capped. Some joined our party; others wandered aimlessly about, or sat staring into vacancy. Two were shouting nonsense, perhaps turned Vagrant by the withdrawal of the Masters’ influence as others had been by its imposition. A third, who possibly had gone the same way, was lying at the edge of one of the ramps. He had taken his mask off, and his face wore a hideous grimace of death: he had choked in the poisonous green air.

Our band was some thirty strong when we came to the spiral ramp, at the edge of the City, which rose to the platform that fronted the Entering Place. I remembered coming down, on my first day here, striving to keep upright on knees that buckled under me. We reached the platform, and were on a height above the smaller pyramids. There was the door, through which we had come from the changing room; on the other side of it air that we could breathe. I was ahead of the others, and pressed the small button which had worked the entrance to the airlock. Nothing happened. I pressed again, and again. Fritz had come up. He said, “We should have realized. All the power for the City came from the pool of fire. Including the power for opening the carriages, and also for opening and closing doors. It will not work now.”

We took turns hammering and banging against the barrier, but without success. Someone found a piece of metal, and tried that; it dented the surface, but the door would not yield. One of the newcomers said, fear plain in his voice, “Then we are trapped in here!”

Could it be so? The sky was less bright, as the afternoon
faded. In a few hours it would be night, and the City dark and lightless. The heat was no longer as powerful, without the machines to maintain it. I wondered if cold would kill the Masters, or if they might recover before the temperature dropped too low. And, having recovered, relight the pool of fire . . . Surely, we could not be defeated now.

I thought of something else, too. If this door would not open, neither would those in the communal places. We had no means of getting food or water; more important, no means of renewing the filters in our masks. We would choke to death, as that one lying on the ramp had done. I had an idea, from the look on Fritz’s face, that the same thought had come to him.

The one who was hammering with the metal said, “I think it will give if we persist long enough. If you others found things to hammer with, as well.”

Fritz said, “It would not help. There is the other door beyond that. Then the Entering Place. The room that goes up and down will not be working, either. We could never get past that. And there will be no light in there . . .”