When the Tripods Came by John Christopher Read Free Book Online

overloaded. The police watched but didn’t try to do anything.
    I thought about it when I went to bed. I didn’t know whether or not to feel sorry for them. It had looked a miserable scene, but they hadn’t seemed miserable. I wondered what it was about. Could Dr. Monmouth be right about hypnosis through signals from space? But what for? Why a mass exodus like that? I remembered that lemmings went in for mass migrations. They wound up in the sea.
    Presumably Angela could have been among them if Dr. Monmouth hadn’t broken the spell. Some of the Trippies had looked no older than she was. The thought was chilling.
    In the morning I woke early. I switched on breakfast television and stared at the screen in disbelief. A Tripod stood center screen, with sodden, gray-green fields behind it. Small dots swarmed like bees about the gigantic feet.
    The newscaster was talking in a breathless, unsteady voice.
    “The second Tripod invasion is amazing enough in itself—and there are landings reported in Germany and the States—but this—how would you describe it?—parade of welcome? This really is incredible. . . .”
    The camera zoomed into close-up. The swarm of dots turned into people. Hundreds . . . thousands of them, waving and cheering and brandishing Trippy signs.



FOUR
    For a time there was a stalemate. The Tripods didn’t move and no one moved against them. There was no way of attacking them without killing the Trippies clustered round. The nearest Tripod to us was north of Exeter, and there were three others in England, one in Scotland between Edinburgh and Glasgow, and one in Ireland, south of Dublin. It was the same throughout the industrialized world. Someone worked out there was a Tripod for about every ten million people, mostly planted close to major centers of population.
    The Trippy Show was taken off the air, but came back, and the new broadcasts were traced to high-orbit satellites. The government tried jamming, but they switched frequency—and went on switching as fast as the jammer could chase them round.
    Martha said they should stop television.
    Pa said, “They can’t.”
    “Why not? They did during the war.”
    I wanted to ask which war—the Boer or the Crimean? It was amazing how old people could talk about The War, as though that meant something.
    Pa said, “It wasn’t the major channel of communication then; that was radio. You have to remember that even when I was little, less than one house in a hundred, probably, had a TV set. If they stopped it now, there’d be panic.”
    “They’ll have to do something. Mrs. Golightly says her maid’s Tripped. Yesterday she was rambling on about the Tripod, and this morning she didn’t turn up for work.”
    “If nothing worse happens to us than losing the daily help, we’ll not be doing badly.”
    I’d just come in from school. I said, “I meant to tell you—Andy’s mother’s gone.”
    Martha demanded, “Are you sure?”
    “The house was empty when he got home yesterday. He thought she might be visiting, but she didn’t come back. And didn’t leave a note as she usually does when she goes off.”
    Martha looked shocked. “Do you mean he’s in the house on his own?”
    “I suppose so. He can look after himself.”
    She turned to Pa. “Go and get him. He’d better stay with us while this is on.”
    “I was going to ring Ilse.”
    She looked at him in exasperation. “That can wait.”
    I knew Pa was comfortably off, though he spent a lot of time moaning about money and tax bills; and I supposed Martha was fairly rich. But my Uncle Ian was a real tycoon. He ran several companies in London—all sorts of things from coffee to property development—and they had a Rolls, and a Porsche, and one of those fantastic little MR-2 sports cars for the shopping. He and Aunt Caroline (Pa’s sister) spent a lot of time jetting around. He was tied in with a company in Tokyo and another in New York, and in between they lived in a real mansion in