The Pool of Fire (The Tripods) (19 page)

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 explosions, 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.

Crouching, and cradling something in his arms. I turned away. Not until some seconds after the explosion did I have the heart to look back. The Masters’ air billowed up like green smoke from a ragged hole which, as I looked, crumbled still further at the edges.

Almost blindly I pulled the cord and let my balloon drop toward the waiting earth.

Once before three of us
had gone up through the tunnel that wound inside the mountain to the fields of eternal snow and ice at the top. We had walked then, resting when we were tired, lighting our way with the big slow-burning tallow candles which were used to illuminate the lower caves in which we lived. Not the same three. Fritz now took the place that had been Henry’s.

And not in the same way, either. Instead of walking we sat at ease in one of four carriages pulled by the small but powerful diesel-electric train up the cogged track. Instead of the dim flicker of candlelight, we were in a bright and even radiance, in which one could read a book if one had a mind. We did not carry rations—tough stringy dried meat and hard tasteless biscuits—because food was to be provided at our journey’s end,
where a skilled staff of fifty waited, more than eleven thousand feet above sea level, to look after the delegates and those fortunate others who had been invited to attend the Conference of Man.

It was Julius’s wish that it should be held here, high up among the peaks of the White Mountains that had sheltered the early seeds of man’s resistance to his conquerors. It was by Julius’s order that we, along with other survivors of the days of battle, had come. We were not delegates, though probably we could have been had we so desired. I am not boasting in saying that. It was just that those of us who had fought against the Masters and defeated them could claim privileges everywhere . . . and had so wearied of adulation that we preferred to look for quietness and privacy.

The three of us had looked in different directions. Beanpole was immersed in research in the vast laboratories that had been built in France, not far from the castle by the sea. Fritz had turned farmer in his own native land, and spent his days with his crops and beasts. While I, more restless and perhaps less purposeful than they, had sought contentment in exploring those parts of the world which the Masters had stripped of their previous human inhabitants. In a ship, with half a dozen others, I crossed the seas, and put in to strange forgotten harbors on unknown coasts. Under sail because, although there were ships with engines now, we preferred it that way.

This had been our first meeting in two years. We had laughed and talked a lot when we met, in the town that lay between two lakes down in the valley, but the
talk had dried up during the long journey inside the mountain. We were engaged with our own thoughts. Mine were somewhat melancholy. I was remembering the things we had done together, the times we had had. It would have been pleasant to preserve that comradeship in the days that came after. Pleasant, but alas, impossible. That which had brought us together had gone, and now our paths diverged, according to our natures and our needs. We would meet again, from time to time, but always a little more as strangers; until perhaps at last, as old men with only memories left, we could sit together and try to share them.

Because with victory everything had changed. There had been the months of anxious waiting for the arrival of the great ship of the Masters, but even during that time the world had been picking itself up, relearning forgotten skills, compressing into months what it had taken our forefathers decades, centuries even, to accomplish. Only when, one autumn night, a new star winked in the sky did people pause to draw breath, and stare anxiously into the heavens.

It was a star that moved, a point of light traveling past the fixed familiar ones. In powerful telescopes it resolved into a shape, a metal cocoon. Scientists made calculation of its size, and the result was breathtaking. More than a mile long, they said, and a quarter of a mile wide at its thickest part. It swung in an orbit around the earth and we waited tense, to see what it would do.

They had won before by guile, and the trick would not work twice. The air of our planet was poison to them, and they had no base in which to shelter. Men still wore Caps,
but the Caps would give no orders. They could try to set up fresh bases, and might succeed, but we would harry them continually with weapons that were more and more sophisticated every year. Having beaten them when they were all powerful and we pitifully weak, we knew we could better any effort they made in the future.