When the Tripods Came (14 page)

I remembered the other reason for wanting more time and asked, “What about the Swigramp?”

Pa took the pack from Ilse, and heaved on the strap. Over his shoulder he said, “He died, in the night.”

I looked down into the valley. People still died; the Tripods and Capping made no difference to that. And others had to go on. Far below I could see a section of the road that wound upwards from Interlaken. A yellow spot was crawling there: the mail van was on its way.

The first part of the route led higher up the mountain by way of a rough track, which deteriorated and eventually disappeared. It wasn’t easy going, in places very hard. Martha and Ilse tackled it well, but the Swigram was soon gasping and we were forced to slow down. We lost sight of the gasthaus, and for a time our only view was of the steeply climbing rocky slope and an ominous gray sky beyond. The wind was northeast, razor-edged. Yone thought there would be snow before nightfall.

A halt was called where there was a patch of level ground. The gasthaus was once more in view, and Yone pointed down. There were three cars outside the house, apart from the Suzuki. Pa scanned the scene with field glasses which had belonged to the Swigramp.

When I had a chance to look, I found they were so heavy it wasn’t easy to hold them steady, but the magnification was good. I recognized Graz. There were seven or eight men altogether.

Smoke rose from the gasthaus chimney, as it did all the year round—even in summer the big wood-burning range was in use, for cooking. But the smoke looked thicker than usual and was coming not only from the chimney but one of the bedroom windows as well.

Fire wastes no time in sweeping through a wooden building, and in seconds we could all see it. I heard the Swigram moan as the smoke’s blackness was shot with flame.

Holding her mother, Ilse said to Pa, “Why? To destruct a house like that . . . only because we refuse the Caps?”

“I don’t know,” Pa said. “To prevent us going back there, perhaps. To discourage anyone else from defying the Tripods. One thing we can be sure of: neither pity nor mercy are going to come into it. They believe what the Tripods tell them, and as far as the Tripods are concerned we are nothing but a nuisance. Like rats.”

Andy said, “I read somewhere that by trying to kill them, men have actually improved the intelligence of rats.”

“Yes,” Pa said, “I read that, too. Rats have lived close to man for thousands of years. Every one we managed to kill improved the breeding stock, because the brighter rats survived and reproduced. Maybe we’re going to have to take a leaf out of their book.”

Ilse said, “They must have found his body.” She was speaking of the Swigramp. “But they did not bring it out, for burial.”

“No.” She still had an arm round her mother, and he put his out to embrace them both. “But it doesn’t matter, does it? It was his home for nearly sixty years. No one could want a better funeral pyre.”

We resumed our trek. Having led exhaustingly upwards, the route changed to lead down even more steeply. It was wild, jagged country, with no sign of human beings or anything connected with them. We
saw a group of chamois, the local deer, leaping from crag to crag, and an eagle soared close to one of the crags above.

The Swigram needed to rest a lot. Pa and Yone, and then Andy and I, took turns helping to support her. She apologized for the trouble, and said we should leave her.

Pa said, “Just take it slowly,
Mutti.
We have plenty of time. And no one’s going to leave you. We can’t spare you. We can’t spare anyone. There are too few of us.”

At last we reached a more gentle slope and could see the little railway station of Kleine Scheidegg, the last stop for the cogwheel train before it entered the tunnel. As Yone had predicted, it was deserted. Tourism was a thing of the past, along with parliaments and television chat shows, universities and churches, human disorder and human freedom. The station shop, which had sold chocolate and maps and silly souvenirs, was boarded up, and the last train stood unmanned and covered with snow.

At this altitude there was deep-packed snow all round, and the tail of a glacier close to the tunnel mouth. It was late afternoon. The sky was a deepening melancholy gray, the whole landscape barren and wretched. As we toiled up the last few hundred meters it began to snow, in huge relentless flakes. I felt cold and miserable and hopeless.

I found the notebooks in which I’m writing this in the hotel; they were order books used by the restaurant manager, some partly filled with lists—
20 kg Blumenkohl, 1 Kiste Kaffee, 45 kg Kartoffeln
—“cauliflower, coffee and potatoes”—that sort of thing.

That was about a week after coming here. I’d thought the journey through the tunnel by train tedious, but it was much more so on foot. It was nearly five hours before Pa’s flashlight lit up the platform sign, J
UNGFRAUJOCH.
Minutes later we stepped out into a dazzling landscape of snow and ice, with the frozen river of a glacier stretched into hazy distance, surrounded by high white peaks. All was empty and lifeless: no animals, no birds, not even an insect. But no people, either, except for ourselves . . . and no Tripods. We stood on the cold roof of the world, rulers—for what it was worth—of all we surveyed.

The purpose of this journey through the tunnel
was to see if provisions had been left here, and we struck lucky. The hotel had kept good reserve stocks, apparently against the possibility of the rail line being blocked in winter. There were shelves loaded with cans, bags of flour and sugar, beans and dried fruits and rice. There were even deep-freeze cabinets whose contents, because of the below-zero temperature at this altitude, had stayed frozen after the electricity supply was cut off.

Flashlights and batteries were an important find. We only had two from the gasthaus, which we’d had to keep switching on and off to conserve power, and there were enough in the hotel, in vacuum-sealed packs, to last years. We found candles and oil lamps, too, and drums of fuel.

In a siding at the station there was a diesel coach with a charged battery, and after Pa had experimented with the controls we loaded it for the return journey. While he and Yone were making final checks, I showed Andy some of the things I’d seen when I was there before, including a room filled with ice statues. He was fascinated by a life-size ice motorcar, and pointed out it must have been carved more than seventy years ago because it was a model of an early Ford. I thought of how much things like motorcars and airplanes had changed in those seventy years. It was as though mankind had been a surfboarder, riding a high wave of invention. Who could tell what wonders might still have lain ahead? But now, thanks to the Tripods, it had all ended.

During the winter we gradually adjusted to our new life. Although the nearest house was more than ten miles away down the mountain, and the tunnel entrance commanded a good view of the approaches, we took care to leave no traces and to avoid creating recognizable paths in going out and returning. Yone instructed us in this, and kept a close watch to make sure no one slipped up.

He also instructed us in the use of the skis we took from the hotel ski school. Despite having looked forward to it, I found skiing very difficult to begin with—the sense of losing contact with the earth bothered me—and had plenty of falls. I spent ten days immobilized with a strained thigh muscle. Andy took to it much more quickly, and Rudi, of course, was an experienced skier: I watched him skim down the slopes below the tunnel mouth with admiring frustration. But I slowly got the hang of things, and then found it more exhilarating than anything I’d known.

At the outset we ventured out primarily for recreation—confinement in the tunnel was oppressive—but with the coming of spring we launched more purposeful expeditions. With snow and ice surrounding us all year long, water was never going to be a problem, but Pa decided we should aim at conserving food supplies.

I said, “But there’s enough in the hotel to last years!”

Martha asked, “How many years?”

I saw her drawn face in the lamplight and realized fully for the first time that this was no temporary
resting place—that she at least expected to end her days here. The Swigram did die, before spring came, not from any particular sickness, perhaps just from missing the Swigramp. We wrapped her body in a blanket and lowered it into a crevasse in the glacier, covering it with snow. We could not mark the grave, but her body would lie there forever unchanged in the perpetual frost. A different end from the Swigramp, whose body had burned to ash in the flames that destroyed the home they’d shared, but bodies didn’t matter, really. They had both died free.

So we started expeditions to get food. We aimed at isolated houses, traveling long distances to find suitable targets. In some cases we were able to raid larders or take hens or eggs while the owners slept. But there were times when people wakened and had to be intimidated by the sight of Yone’s shotgun. Fortunately so far we’ve not had to use it.

It’s theft, of course—we have no money to leave if we wanted to—but the people we steal from are Capped, and we are as much at war with them as their Tripod masters. On the third expedition we found an un-Capped girl in the house, and stole her, too. She was dubious at first, but eventually agreed to come with us. Her name is Hanna. She’s a few months younger than I am, and has yellow hair that’s beginning to darken. Her eyebrows are dark already, her eyes deep brown. She speaks English in a husky voice and with a German accent, but it doesn’t irritate me the way Ilse’s once did.

I find myself getting on with Ilse better all the
time. It’s difficult to remember how much she used to madden me in England. (I was going to write
at home,
but remembered that this is the only home we now have, or are likely to have.) She took over the cooking from the Swigram and although not as good yet, is improving. And of course, the Swigram didn’t have to cook with limited supplies on a primitive oil stove stuck in a tunnel.

On one expedition we found a man living alone, and Pa tried the experiment of removing his Cap. We had to overpower him, and he cried pitifully afterwards. But when we left he followed, and Pa let him join us. His name is Karl, and he’s in his middle twenties. Although physically strong, he can only do simple things, under instruction. At times you find him crying, for no apparent reason. We don’t know whether his mind has always been slow, or if it happened because we removed the Cap. But it’s something we agreed we would not do again.

And in fact we couldn’t if we wanted to. In late summer a Tripod came to the valley, and stationed itself close by a village called Karaman. From a vantage point we watched what followed. All day long a procession of Capped came to stand by the Tripod’s foot. A tentacle lifted them one by one into the belly of the machine, and after some minutes deposited them back on the ground. Through field glasses we could see that in place of the black of the helmets, their heads gleamed silver when they were put down.

It was Andy’s guess that this could signify the replacement
of the original Caps with something more permanent, and he was proved right when, on our next trip, we found a man and woman, both silver-headed. The horrifying thing was that the silver part was a metal mesh, which seemed welded into the living flesh. From now on, the Cap, once imposed, was there for life, and eventually would crown a skeleton.

That was when Pa decided to adopt a deliberate policy of recruiting young people who were likely to be Capped within the year. We take none by force, though that would be justifiable with such an alternative. For our own security we can’t afford to harbor doubters. And so far, of five given the chance, only one, a boy called Hans, has chosen to accept. It is obviously not easy to leave parents, and the comforts of home, to join an unknown band of marauders, but it’s depressing that so few are willing.

It seems to me that boys are more ready to take the risk than girls. Two of the four who refused were boys, and both seemed to hesitate, whereas the girls were quite definite about it.

I said something of the sort to Angela, and had my head snapped off.
She
was as willing to take a risk as any boy, she said, and it was unfair Pa still refused to let her go on the scouting trips. For that matter, what about Hanna, who’d been the first to join us? In fact, she pointed out, the score was equal between boys and girls as far as recruits went.

“Hanna’s different,” I said.

“Oh yes, isn’t she?” she said scornfully. “Because
you fancy her. Well, you’re not likely to impress her talking that way.”

I ended the conversation by walking off to my private patch of tunnel, thinking there were times when Angela really was insufferable. She was growing up, of course—she’d had her eighth birthday just before we left England, and her ninth was not far off. I had to admit she was bright, though—a bit brighter, if I were honest, than I’d been at her age. And though her pertness sometimes drove me mad, I reflected, as I cooled down, that in general I found her, too, easier to get on with these days. I made up my mind to organize a trip to the hotel to find a birthday present. I remembered seeing a mirror in one of the rooms which she might like.