The White Mountains (The Tripods) Read Online Free PDF

talking, but moving quietly, almost stealthily.
    A new fear struck me then. There were tales that a Vagrant once, years ago, had murdered children in a dozen villages, before he was caught and hanged. Could they be true, and could this be such another? I had invited him here, telling no one, and a cry for help would not be heard as far from the village as this. I froze against the wall of the den, tensing myself for a rush that might carry me past him to the comparative safety of the open.
    But a single glance at him as he looked in reassured me. Whether mad or not, I was sure this was a man to be trusted. The lines in his face were the lines of good humor. He said, “So I have found you, Will.” He glanced about him, in approval. “You have a snug place here.”
    “My cousin Jack did most of it. He is better with his hands than I am.”
    “The one that was Capped this summer?”
    “Yes.”
    “You watched the Capping?” I nodded. “How is he, since then?”
    “Well,” I said, “but different.”
    “Having become a man.”
    “Not only that.”
    “Tell me.”
    I hesitated a moment, but in voice and gesture as well as face he inspired confidence. He was also, I realized, talking naturally and sensibly, with none of the strange words and archaic phrases he had used previously. I began to talk, disjointedly at first and then with more ease, of what Jack had said, and of my own later perplexity. He listened, nodding at times but not interrupting. When I had finished, he said, “Tell me, Will—what do you think of the Tripods?”
    I said truthfully, “I don’t know. I used to take them for granted—and I was frightened of them, I suppose—but now … There are questions in my mind.”
    “Have you put them to your elders?”
    “What good would it do? No one talks about the Tripods. One learns that as a child.”
    “Shall I answer them for you?” he asked. “Such as I can answer.”
    There was one thing I was sure of, and I blurted it out: “You are not a Vagrant!”
    He smiled. “It depends what meaning you give that word. I go from place to place, as you see. And I behave strangely.”
    “But to deceive people, not because you cannot help it. Your mind has not been changed.”
    “No. Not as the minds of the Vagrants are. Nor as your cousin Jack’s was, either.”
    “But you have been Capped!”
    He touched the mesh of metal, under his thatch of red hair.
    “Agreed. But not by the Tripods. By men—free men.”
    Bewildered, I said, “I don’t understand.”
    “How could you? But listen, and I will tell you. The Tripods, first. Do you know what they are?” I shook my head, and he went on, “Nor do we, as a certainty. There are two stories about them. One is that they were machines, made by men, which revolted against men and enslaved them.”
    “In the old days? The days of the giant ship, of the great-cities?”
    “Yes. It is a story I find hard to believe, because I do not see how men could give intelligence to machines. The other story is that they do not come originally from this world, but another.”
    “Another world?”
    I was lost again. He said, “They teach you nothingabout the stars in school, do they? That is something that perhaps makes the second story more likely to be the true one. You are not told that the stars at night—all the hundreds of thousands of them—are suns like our own sun, and that some may have planets circling them, as our earth circles this sun.”
    I was confused, my head spinning with the idea. I said, “Is this true?”
    “Quite true. And it may be that the Tripods came, in the first place, from one of those worlds. It may be that the Tripods themselves are only vehicles, for creatures who travel inside them. We have never seen the inside of a Tripod, so we do not know.”
    “And the Caps?”
    “Are the means by which they keep men docile and obedient to them.”
    At first thought, it was incredible. Later, it seemed incredible that I had not seen this