The Pool of Fire (The Tripods) Read Online Free PDF Page A

found the Capping ceremony looming up in their lives. There was an intoxicating sense of release for them in being in the presence of two who whileseeming to be Capped, did not, like their parents, treat the subject as a mystery that must never be spoken of, but instead encouraged them to talk and listened to what they said.
    Of course, we had to be careful. It was a matter, at the outset, of veiled hints, inquiries—seemingly innocent—whose effect depended on the look that went with them. Our procedure was to discover the one or two who, in each village, best combined independence of mind and reliability. Then, shortly before we moved on, these were taken to one side, and briefed and counseled.
    We told them the truth, about the Tripods and the world, and of the part they must play in organizing resistance. It was not a matter now of sending them back to one of our headquarters. Instead, they were to form a resistance group among the other boys in the village or town, and plan an escape before the next Cappings. (This would be long enough after our visit for there to be no suspicion that we were concerned in it.) They must find places to live, well apart from the Capped but from where they could raid their lands for food and their youth for new recruits. And where they could wait for new instructions.
    There could be little definitely laid down: success must depend on individual skill in improvisation and action. Some small help we could offer, by way of communications. We carried pigeons with us, caged in pairs, and at intervals we left a pair with one of our recruits. These were birds that could return, over vast distances, to the nest from which they had come, andcarry messages, written very small on thin paper, tied to their legs. They were to be bred, and their descendants used to keep the various centers in touch with each other and eventually with the headquarters group responsible for them.
    We gave them signs of identification, too: a ribbon tied in a horse’s mane, hats of a certain kind worn at a certain angle, a way of waving, the simulated cries of certain birds. And places, nearby, where messages could be left, to guide us again, or our successors, to whatever hiding place they had found. Beyond that, we could do no more than leave it in the hands of providence; and go our way, further and further, on the path Julius had prescribed for us.
    At the beginning, we had seen Tripods fairly frequently. As we went on, though, this happened less and less. It was not a matter of the winter making them inactive, we found, but a real effect of distance from the City. In the land called Hellas, we were told that they appeared only a few times in the year, and in the eastern parts of that country the villagers told us that the Tripods came only for the Capping ceremonies, and then not to every small place, as they did in England: children were brought great distances by their parents to be Capped.
    This was reasonable, of course. The Tripods could travel fast—many times the speed of a galloping horse—and without stopping, but distance must take a toll even on them. It was inevitable that they should police those regions close to the City more thoroughly than far-off places: each mile represented a widening ofthe circle of which it was the center. For our part, it was a relief to find ourselves in territories where we could be well nigh certain—at this time of year—that no metal hemisphere on its three jointed legs would break the skyline. And it raised a thought. There were two Cities of the Masters, at either edge, more or less, of this vast continent. If control grew more tenuous the farther one traveled from a City, might there not be a part, midway between them, where control did not exist at all—where men were un-Capped and free?
    (In fact, as we learned later, the arcs of control overlapped each other, and the area falling outside them was mostly ocean in the south and wastes of frozen land in the north.