The Pool of Fire (The Tripods) by John Christopher Read Free Book Online Page B

thrown back.) On aparticular morning, we kept well out of sight while two of our number went farther up, to hide behind rocks and watch the Tripod pass. Those of us who stayed in the cave heard it, anyway: it was making one of the calls whose meaning we did not know, an eerie warbling sound. As it faded in the distance, Julius said, “On time, to the minute. Now we go to work.”
    We labored hard at preparing the trap. Nine days was not so long a time, when it involved digging away enough earth to serve as a pitfall for a thing with fifty-foot legs, leaving a pattern of supports on which the camouflage must rest. Beanpole, pausing in his digging, spoke wistfully of something which had been called a bulldozer, and which could move earth and stones by the ton. But that was another thing there had not been time enough to re-create.
    At any rate, we got through the task, with a day to spare. The day seemed longer than the previous eight together had. We sat in the mouth of the cave, looking out to a gray calm sea, patched with mist. At least, the sea journey should not offer much difficulty. Once we had trapped our Tripod, and caught our Master, that was.
    The weather stayed cold and dry next morning. We took up our places—all of us—over an hour before the Tripod was due to pass. Fritz and I were together, Beanpole with the man working the jammer. This was a machine that could send out invisible rays of its own, to break up the rays coming to and going from the Tripods and isolate it, for the time being, from contact with others. I was full of doubts about this, but Beanpole was confident. He said the rays could be interrupted bynatural things like thunderstorms, or by a fault in the machine transmitting them: the Masters would think something like that had happened, until it was too late to do anything about it.
    The minutes crawled by. Gradually my concentration turned into a sort of daze. I was jolted back to reality by Fritz touching my shoulder. I looked and saw the Tripod swing around the side of a hill to the south, heading directly for us. Immediately I tensed for the part I was to play. It was traveling at an average speed. In less than five minutes . . . Then, without warning, the Tripod stopped. It halted with one of its three feet raised, looking absurdly like a dog begging for a bone. For three or four seconds it stayed there. The foot came down. The Tripod continued its progress; but it was no longer heading our way. It had changed course, and would miss us by something like a mile.
    In stunned amazement, I watched it travel on and disappear. From behind a clump of trees on the other side of the pitfall, André, our leader, came out and waved. We went to join him, with the others.
    It was soon established what had gone wrong. The Tripod’s hesitation had coincided with the ray jammer being turned on. It had stopped, and then shied away. The man who had worked the machine said, “I should have waited till it was on top of the trap. I didn’t expect it to react like that.”
    Someone asked, “What do we do now?”
    The letdown feeling was evident in all of us. All that work and waiting for nothing. It made our entire project seem hopeless, childlike almost.
    Julius had come hobbling up. He said, “We wait, of course.” His calmness was steadying. “We wait till next time, and then we won’t use the jammer until the absolutely last moment. Meanwhile, we can extend the trap farther still.”
    So the working and waiting went on, for nine more days, and zero-hour came around again. The Tripod appeared, as it had done previously, marched around the side of the hill, reached the point where it had stopped the time before. This time it did not stop. But it did not come on toward us, either. Without hesitation, it took the identical course it had taken after its earlier check. Seeing it depart, well out of our reach, was more than a double bitterness.
    •  •  •
    At a council of war we were in low