When the Tripods Came (2 page)

“Someone’s making a film.” Andy’s voice was unsteady. I turned to him and he looked as scared as I felt. “That must be it. A science-fiction movie.”

“So where are the cameras?” I felt my voice was coming out wrong, too.

“They probably have to get it into position first.”

I didn’t know whether he believed it. I didn’t.

Something was moving beneath the capsule, curling and twisting and stretching out. It was like an elephant’s trunk, or a snake, except that it was silvery and metallic. It corkscrewed down towards the roof of the house and brushed lightly against it. Then it moved to the chimney stack and grasped it with a curling tip. Bricks sprayed like confetti, and we heard them crashing onto the slates.

I was shivering. Inside the house a woman screamed. A door at the back burst open, and a man
in shirt and trousers came out. He stared up at the machine looming above him and started running. Immediately a second tentacle uncurled, this time fast and purposeful. The tip caught him before he’d gone ten meters, fastened round his waist, and plucked him from the ground. He was screaming, too, now.

The tentacle lifted him up in front of the row of panels, and his screams turned to muffled groaning. After a few moments the tentacle twisted back on itself. A lenslike opening appeared at the base of the capsule; it carried him towards it and thrust him through. I thought of someone holding a morsel of food on a fork before popping it into his mouth, and felt sick.

His groans ended as the tentacle withdrew, and the opening closed. The woman in the house had also become quiet; but the silence was even more frightening. Resting on its spindly legs, the machine had the look of an insect digesting its prey. I remembered my glimpse of the derelict tractor in the night; this insect was as tall as King Kong.

For what seemed a long time, nothing happened. The thing didn’t stir, and there was no sound or movement from the house. All was still; not even a bird chirped. The tentacle hovered in midair, motionless and rigid.

When, after a minute or so, the tentacle did move, it raised itself higher, as though making a salute. For a second or two it hung in the air, before slamming down violently against the roof. Slates scattered, and
rafters showed through a gaping hole. The woman started to shriek again.

Methodically the tentacle smashed the house, and as methodically picked over the ruins, like a scavenger going through a garbage can. The shrieking stopped, leaving just the din of demolition. A second tentacle set to work alongside the first, and a third joined them.

They probed deep into the rubble, lifting things up to the level of the panels. Most of what was picked up was dropped or tossed aside—chairs, a sideboard, a double bed, a bathtub dangling the metal pipes from which it had been ripped. A few were taken inside: I noticed an electric kettle and a television set.

At last it was over, and dust settled as the tentacles retracted under the capsule.

“I think we ought to get away from here,” Andy said. His voice was so low I could hardly hear him.

“How far do you think it can see?”

“I don’t know. But if we dodge out quickly, and get round the back . . .”

I gripped his arm. Something was moving at the base of the rubble that had been the farmhouse: a black dog wriggled free and started running across the farmyard. It covered about ten meters before a tentacle arrowed towards it. The dog was lifted, howling, in front of the panels, and held there. I thought it was going to be taken inside, as the man
had been; instead the tentacle flicked it away. Briefly the dog was a black blur against the dawn light, then a crumpled silent heap.

The sick feeling was back, and one of my legs was trembling. I thought of my first sight of the Eiffel Tower, the summer my mother left and Ilse came to live with us—and my panicky feeling over the way it stretched so far up into the sky. This was as if the Eiffel Tower had moved—had smashed a house to bits and swallowed up a man . . . tossed a dog to its death the way you might throw away an apple core.

Time passed more draggingly than I ever remembered. I looked at my watch, and the display read 05:56. I looked again after what seemed like half an hour, and it said 05:58. The sky was getting lighter and there was first a point of gold, then a sliver, finally a disk of sun beyond the ruins of the house. I looked at my watch again. It was 06:07.

Andy said, “Look!”

The legs hadn’t moved but the capsule was tilting upwards and beginning a slow rotation. The row of panels was moving to the left. Soon we might be out of the field of vision and have a chance of sneaking away. But as the rotation continued, a second row of panels came into view. It could see all round.

When it had traversed a hundred and eighty degrees, the rotation stopped. After that, nothing happened. The monster just stayed there, fixed, as leaden minutes crawled by.

The first plane came over soon after eight. A fighter made two runs, east to west and then west to east at a lower level. The thing didn’t move. A quarter of an hour later a helicopter circled round, taking photographs, probably. It was nearly midday before the armored brigade arrived. Tanks and other tracked vehicles drew up on open farmland, and, in the bit of the farm lane in view, we could see an important-looking car and some trucks, including a TV van, all keeping a careful distance.

After that, nothing happened for another long time. We learned later this was the period in which our side was attempting to make radio contact, trying different frequencies without result. Andy got impatient, and again suggested making a run for it, towards the tanks.

I said, “The fact it hasn’t moved doesn’t mean it won’t. Remember the dog.”

“I do. It might also decide to smash this hut.”

“And if we run, and it starts something and the army starts something back . . . we’re likely to catch it from both sides.”

He reluctantly accepted that. “Why
hasn’t
the army done something?”

“What do you think they ought to do?”

“Well, not just sit there.”

“I suppose they don’t want to rush things. . . .”

I broke off as an engine started up, followed by a rumble of tracks. We ran to the window. A single tank was moving forward. It had a pole attached to its turret, and a white flag fluttering from the pole.

The tank lurched across the field and stopped almost directly beneath the capsule. The engine switched off, and I heard a sparrow chirruping outside the shed. Then, unexpectedly, there was a burst of classical music.

I asked, “Where’s that coming from?”

“From the tank, I think.”

“But why?”

“Maybe they want to demonstrate that we’re civilized, not barbarians. It’s that bit from a Beethoven symphony, isn’t it—the one that’s sung as a European anthem?”

“That’s crazy,” I said.

“I don’t know.” Andy pointed. “Look.”

The machine was showing signs of movement. Beneath the capsule a tentacle uncurled. It extended down towards the tank and began waving gently.

“What’s it
doing?”
I asked.

“Maybe it’s keeping time.”

The weird thing was, he was right; it was moving in rhythm with the music. A second tentacle emerged, dipped, and brushed against the turret. As though it were getting the hang of things, the first tentacle started moving faster, in a more positive beat. The second felt its way round the tank from front to rear, then made a second approach from the side, moving over it and probing underneath. The tip dug down, rocking the tank slightly, and reemerged to complete an embrace. The tank rocked more violently as it was lifted, at first just clear of the ground, then sharply upward.

Abruptly the music gave way to the stridence of machine-gun fire. Tracer bullets flamed against the sky. The tank rose in the tentacle’s grip until it was level with the panels. It hung there, spitting out sparks.

But pointlessly; at that angle the tracers were scouring empty sky. And they stopped abruptly, as the tentacle tightened its grip; armorplate crumpled like tinfoil. For two or three seconds it squeezed the tank, before uncurling and letting it drop. The tank fell like a stone, landing on its nose and balancing for an instant before toppling over. There was a furrow along the side where it had been compressed to less than half its original width.

Andy said, “That was a Challenger.” He sounded shaken, but not as shaken as I felt. I could still see that terrible careless squeeze, the tank dropped like a toffee paper.

When I looked out again, one of the tentacles had retracted, but the other was waving still, and still in the rhythm it had picked up from the music. I wanted to run—somewhere, anywhere, not caring what came next—but I couldn’t move a muscle. I wondered if anyone in the tank had survived. I didn’t see how they could have.

Then, unexpectedly and shatteringly, there was a roar of aircraft as the fighter-bombers, which had been on standby, whooshed in from the south, launching rockets as they came. Of the six they fired, two scored hits. I saw the long spindly legs shatter,
the capsule tilt and sway and crash. It landed between the ruins of the farmhouse and the wrecked tank, with an impact that shook the shed.

I could hardly believe how quickly it was over—and how completely. But there was the capsule lying on its side, with broken bits of leg sticking out. As we stared, a second wave of fighter-bombers swooped in, pulverizing the remains.

The school term started three weeks later. By then the big excitement—with Andy and me being interviewed on television and local radio and all that—was over, but people at school were still interested. They fired questions at us—mostly me, because Andy was less willing to talk. I talked too much and then regretted it. When Wild Bill brought the subject up in physics class, I no longer wanted to discuss it, least of all with him.

He didn’t look wild and his name wasn’t Bill; he was a small, neat gray-haired man with a clipped voice and a sarcastic manner. His name was Hockey, and he had a habit of swinging round from the board and throwing whatever was in his hand—a piece of chalk usually—at someone he thought might be misbehaving behind his back. On one occasion it was the board eraser, which was wooden and quite
heavy, and he hit a boy in the back row on the forehead. We called him Wild Bill Hockey after Wild Bill Hickock.

“Come on, Cordray,” he said, “don’t be shy. Now that you’re famous you owe something to those of us who aren’t.” Some of the girls tittered. “The first person to see a Tripod, as I gather the media has decided we shall call them. . . . You’ll be in the history books for that, even if not for the Nobel Prize in Physics.”

There was more tittering. I’d been second from bottom the previous term.

“It throws an interesting light on national psychology,” Wild Bill went on, “to consider the various reactions to man’s first encounter with creatures from another part of the universe.”

He had a tendency, which most of us encouraged, to launch into discourses on things that interested him, some of them quite remote from physics. I was happier still if it got him off my back.

He said, “As you know, there were three landings; one in the United States, in Montana, one in Kazakhstan in the Soviet Union, and Cordray’s little show on the edge of Dartmoor. The landings were roughly simultaneous, ours in the middle of the night, the American late the previous evening and the Russian in time for breakfast.

“The Americans spotted theirs first, after tracking it in on radar, and just surrounded it and waited. The Russians located the one in their territory fairly
quickly too, and promptly liquidated it with a rocket strike. We played Beethoven to ours, sent in a single tank, and then smashed it after it had destroyed the tank. Is that a testimony to British moderation? Cordray?”

I said unwillingly, “I don’t know, sir. After it wrecked the farmhouse, I didn’t care how soon they finished it off.”

“No, I don’t suppose you did. But presumably you had no more notion than the military of what a pushover it was going to be. And that, of course, is the fascinating part.” He ran his fingers through his thinning hair.

“When I was your age there was a war on. We had a physics class similar to this interrupted one afternoon by a V-2 rocket that landed a quarter of a mile away and killed fifteen people. It was alarming, but I didn’t really find it
interesting.
What interested me more than the war was what I read in the science-fiction magazines of those days. Rockets being hurled from Germany to England to kill people struck me as dull, compared with the possibilities of their being used to take us across interplanetary space to discover exotic life forms—or maybe bring them here to us.

“Science-fiction writers have portrayed that second possibility in a variety of ways. We have read of, or more recently watched on screen, alien invaders of every shape and size, color and texture, from over-grown bloodsucking spiders to cuddly little creatures
with long snouts. Their arrival has been shown as bringing both disaster and revelation. What no one anticipated was a Close Encounter of the Absurd Kind, a cosmic farce. Why do I say farce, Cordray?”