The Pool of Fire (The Tripods)

by John Christopher

  “A message, Master. It is . . .”

  Three of us, simultaneously, grabbed for tentacles. Fritz leapt and the other two heaved his legs higher still. It was over almost at once. Fritz struck hard at the weak spot and with a single ear-splitting howl, the Master collapsed, sending us sprawling with a last convulsive action.

  We had thought the second one might be more of a problem, but in fact he proved easier. He came around from behind the machine, saw us standing by his fallen colleague, and asked, “What happened here?”

  We made the ritual bow of reverence. Fritz said, “The Master is hurt, Master. We do not know how.”

  Once more their absolute confidence in the devotion of their slaves gave us the chance we needed. Without hesitation or suspicion, he came forward and bent down slightly, probing at the other with his tentacles. That brought the openings which were his nose and mouth within reach of Fritz’s fist without him having to jump. This one dropped without even crying out.

  “Drag them out of sight behind the machine,” Fritz ordered. “Then get on with the work.”

  No urging was necessary. We had about half an hour before the third Master came back. Two worked in the tunnel, bringing the containers out along the narrow ledge; the rest of us carried them, two at a time, from there to the drinking water conduit, and tipped them in. There were about a hundred containers altogether. A dozen trips should do it. The colorless liquid splashed into the water, mixing in without a trace. I ticked off my staggering runs. Nine . . . ten . . . eleven . . .

  The tentacle caught me without my even seeing it. The Master must have come to the top of the ramp and for some reason paused to look down, instead of proceeding with the usual slap of feet, which we would have heard. It was the supervisor, making one of his periodic visits. He obviously saw the procession of slaves with containers, saw the contents being tipped into the conduit, and was curious. He came down, spinning—which was their equivalent of running and was almost silent because only the point of one foot made intermittent contact with the ground. His tentacle tightened around my waist.

  “Boy,” he demanded, “what is this? Where are the Masters?”

  Mario, who had been directly behind me, dropped his container and jumped at him. He was gripped by the second tentacle in midair. The one that held me bit in, squeezing breath from my body. I saw the other two coming up, but could do nothing. I heard myself scream as the squeezing became unbearable. With his third tentacle, the Master flailed at the Dutch boy, Jan, tossing him, as though he were a doll, against the nearest machine. He then picked up Carlos with it. The three of us were as helpless as trussed chickens.

  He did not know of the two in the tunnel, but that was small consolation. They would be bound to check the water. We had come so close to success, and now . . .

  Jan was struggling to his feet. I was upside down, my masked head brushing against the lower part of the Master’s body. I saw Jan get a hand on something, a bolt of metal, about six inches long and a couple of inches thick, which was used for adjusting one of the machines. And I remembered—before he was switched to this expedition he had been preparing for a possible entry in the Games . . . as a discus-thrower. But if the Master saw him . . . I reached down and wrenched at the nearest stubby leg, trying to dig my nails in.

  It had as little effect as a gnat biting a cart-horse. He must have been aware of it, though, because the tentacle tightened again. I yelled in pain. The agony increased. I was on the point of blacking out. I saw Jan twist his body, tense it for the throw. Then came oblivion.

  • • •

  I recovered, to find myself propped against one of the machines. Rather than waste time trying to revive me, they had, very properly, got on with the job. I was bruised and when I drew breath it was like inhaling fire. The Master lay not far from me on the floor, oozing a greenish ichor from a gash just below the mouth. I watched, dazed, as the last of the containers was tipped in. Fritz came up, and said, “Get all the empty containers back to the tunnel, in case another of them comes.” He saw that I was conscious. “How are you feeling, Will?”

  “Not so bad. Have we really done it?”

  He looked at me, and a rare grin spread over his long face.

  “I think we have. I really think we have.”

  • • •

  We crept quietly up the ramp, and away. Out in the open, a Master saw us but paid no attention. Both Jan and I were walking with difficulty, he with a badly bruised leg and I with a stabbing burning pain that came with every breath and every movement. This was not remarkable, though; many slaves were crippled in various ways. The third Master had been dragged behind the machine to lie with the other two. It was almost time for the fourth one to return from the garden-pool. He would find them, and perhaps raise an alarm, but the machines would be running as usual, and producing pure water. The contaminated water was already on its way through the pipes to taps all over the City.

  • • •

  We put a good distance between ourselves and the purification plant. We went to a communal place, to freshen up. I drank water, but it tasted no different. From tests on Ruki, the scientists had worked it out that quite a minute proportion of alcohol had a paralyzing effect on them, but I wondered now if what we had managed to put in was enough. With our masks off, Fritz ran his hands over the upper part of my body. I winced, and almost cried out.

  “A fractured rib,” he said. “I thought so. We will try to make it more comfortable.”

  There were spare masks in the communal place. He ripped one up, and used the material to make two bandages which he fixed above and below the place where it hurt most. He told me to breathe out as far as possible. Then he tightened and knotted the bandages. It hurt more while he was doing it, but I felt better after that.

  We waited half an hour before going out. The Masters were tremendous consumers of water, never going longer than an hour without drinking. We walked about, and watched, but nothing seemed to have changed. They passed us with their usual arrogance, their contemptuous disregard. I began to feel despondent again.

  Then, passing a pyramid, we saw one of them come out. Mario gripped my arm, unthinkingly, and I winced. But the pain did not matter. He teetered on his three stubby legs, and his tentacles moved uncertainly. A moment later, he crashed and lay still.

  Six

  The Pool of Fire

  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 with
drawal 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.