The Pool of Fire (The Tripods) (8 page)

Julius arranged a general reshuffle
once we were back at the castle. Many of those who had taken part in the capture of the Master were detailed for duties elsewhere, and Julius himself left two or three days later. The immediate crisis was over, the examination and study of our captive would take long weeks or months, and there were a dozen other things which needed his attention. I had thought that Fritz and I might be sent away also, but this was not so. We were kept as guards. The prospect of relative inactivity was one I viewed with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I could see that it might well prove boring after a time; on the other, I was not sorry to be having a rest. A long and exhausting year lay behind us.

It was also pleasant to be in fairly continuous contact
with Beanpole, who was one of the examining group. Fritz and I knew each other very well by now, and were good friends, but I had missed Beanpole’s more inventive and curious mind. He did not say so himself, but I knew he was viewed with respect by the other scientists, all a great deal older than he was. He never showed the least sign of conceit over this, but he never did over anything. He was too interested in what was going to happen next to bother about people’s opinions of him.

In return for our various losses we had one gain, and a gain that for my part I could have well done without. This was Ulf, the erstwhile skipper of the
Erlkönig,
the barge that had been intended to take Fritz and Beanpole and me down the great-river to the Games. He had been forced to leave the barge because of sickness, and Julius had appointed him as guard commander at the castle. This meant, of course, that Fritz and I were directly under his authority.

He remembered us both very well, and acted on the memories. As far as Fritz was concerned, this was all very fine. On the
Erlkönig,
as in everything else, he had obeyed orders punctiliously and without question, and been content to leave anything outside the allotted task to his superiors. Beanpole and I had been the offenders, first in persuading his assistant to let us off the barge to look for him and then, in my case, in getting myself into a brawl with the townspeople which landed me in trouble, and in Beanpole’s case in disobeying him and coming to rescue me. The barge had sailed without us, and we had been forced to make our own way downriver to the Games.

Beanpole did not fall under Ulf’s jurisdiction, and I think Ulf was rather in awe of him, as belonging to the wise men, the scientists. My case was quite different. There was no glamour attaching to me, and he was my superior officer. The fact that, despite being left behind, we had got to the Games in time, that I had won there and, with Fritz, gone on into the City and in due course come back with information, did not mollify him. If anything, it made things worse. Luck (as he saw it) was no substitute for discipline; indeed, its enemy. My example might encourage others into similar follies. Insubordination was something which needed to be borne down on, and he was the man to do the bearing down.

I recognized the bitterness but did not, at first, take it seriously. He was just, I thought, working out his resentment over my (admittedly) thoughtless behavior during our previous encounter. I decided to stick it out as cheerfully as possible, and give no cause for complaint this time. Only gradually did it penetrate to me that his dislike was really deeply rooted, and that nothing I could do now was likely to change it. It was not until later that I realized how complex a man he was; nor that in attacking me he was fighting a weakness, an instability, which was part of his own nature. All I knew was that the more courteously and promptly and efficiently I obeyed instructions, the more tongue-lashings and extra duties I got. It is small wonder that within weeks I was loathing him almost as much as I had loathed my Master in the City.

His physical appearance and habits did nothing to
help. His barrel-chested squatness, his thick lips and squashed nose, the mat of black hair showing through the buttonholes of his shirt—all these repelled me. He was the noisiest consumer of soups and stews that I had ever encountered. And his trick of continually hawking and spitting was made worse, not better, by the fact that these days he did not spit on the floor but into a red-and-white spotted handkerchief which he carried around in his sleeve. I did not know then that much of the red was his own blood, that he was a dying man. I am not sure such knowing would have made all that much difference, either. He rode me continuously, and my control of my temper wore thinner day by day.

Fritz was a great help, both in calming me down and in taking things on himself where possible. So was Beanpole, with whom I talked a lot during off-duty times. And I had another source of interest, to take my mind off things to some extent. This was our prisoner, the Master: Ruki.

•  •  •

He came through what must have been a harrowing and painful experience very well. The room which had been made ready for him was one of the castle dungeons, and Fritz and I attended him there, entering through an airlock and wearing facemasks when we were inside. It was a big room, more than twenty feet square, much of it hewn out of solid rock. On the basis of our reports, the scientists had done everything to make him as comfortable as possible, even to sinking a circular hole in the floor which could be filled with warm water for him to soak in. I do not think it was, by
the time we got it there in buckets, as hot as he would have liked, and it was not renewed often enough to meet the longing all the Masters had for continually soaking their lizard-like skins; but it was better than nothing. Much the same applied to the food which had been worked out, like the air, on the basis of a few small samples Fritz had managed to bring out of the City.

He was in a mild state of shock for the first couple of days, and then went into what I recognized as the Sickness: the Curse of the Skloodzi my old Master had called it. Brown patches appeared on the green of his skin, his tentacles quivered all the time, and he himself was apathetic, not responding to stimuli. We had no way of treating him, not even the gas-bubbles which the Masters in the City used to alleviate pain or discomfort, and he just had to get over it as best he could. Fortunately, he did so. I went into his cell a week after he had been taken and found him back to a healthy shade of green and showing a distinct interest in food.

Earlier, he had made no response to questions in any of the human languages we tried. He still did not do so, and we began to wonder, despondently, whether we had picked on one of the few Masters without such knowledge. After a few days of this, though, and since he was plainly back to full health, one of the scientists suspected that the ignorance was feigned. We were told not to bring any hot water for his pool the next morning. He quickly showed evidence of discomfort and even indulged in sign language, going to the empty hole and waving his tentacles at it. We paid no attention to this. As we prepared to leave the room he finally spoke,
in the dull booming voice they used. In German, he said, “Bring me water. I need to bathe.”

I looked up at him, a wrinkled misshapen monster twice my own height.

“Say please,” I told him.

But that was a word they had never learned in any of our languages. He merely repeated: “Bring me water.”

“You wait,” I said. “I’ll see what the scientists say.”

Once the barrier was down, he did not attempt to go mute again. Nor, on the other hand, was he particularly forthcoming. He answered some questions that were put to him, and treated others with an obdurate silence. It was not always easy to work out the basis on which he chose to respond or stay silent. There were obvious blanks where questions were pertinent to a possible defense of the City, but it was difficult to see why, for instance, after talking freely on the role of human slaves and the opposition to this by some of the Masters, he should have refused to say anything about the Sphere Chase. This was the sport of which all the Masters seemed to be passionately fond, played on a triangular arena in the center of the City. I suppose in a remote way it resembled basketball, except that there were seven “baskets,” the players were miniature Tripods, and the ball was a flashing golden sphere which seemed to appear out of thin air. Ruki would not answer a single question on that subject.

During my long months of slavery, I had never known the name of my Master, nor if he had a name: he was always “Master,” and I was “boy.” One could
scarcely call our prisoner by such a title. We asked him his name and he told us it was Ruki. In a very short time I found I was thinking of him as that—as an individual, that is, as well as a representative of the enemy who held our world in subjection and whom we must destroy. I had known already, of course, that the Masters had differing characteristics. My own had been relatively easygoing, Fritz’s brutal by comparison. They had different interests, too. But any distinctions I had made between them in the City had been severely practical; one looked for them in order to exploit them. In this altered situation one saw things from a more detached point of view.

One day, for instance, I had been delayed in bringing him his evening meal by something which Ulf had given me to do. I came in through the airlock to find him squatting in the center of the room, and said something about being sorry I was late. He made a slight twirling gesture with one tentacle, and boomed at me, “It is not important, when there are so many interesting things to do and to see.”

The blank featureless walls of his prison were all around him, lit by the two small lamps, colored green for his convenience, which provided illumination. The only breaks in the monotony were provided by the door and the hole in the floor. (It served as a bed for him, as well as a bath, with seaweed in place of the mossy stuff that was used in the City.) One could not read expression into these completely alien features—the neckless head with its three eyes and orifices for breathing and
eating, connected by a weird pattern of wrinkles—but at this moment he looked, in a peculiar fashion, lugubrious and rueful. I realized something, at any rate: that he was making a joke! Feeble, admittedly, but a joke. It was the first indication I had had that they might have even a rudimentary sense of humor.

I had instructions to enter into conversation with him as much as possible, as Fritz did. The scientists examined him in more formal sessions, but it was thought that we might also pick something up. We reported to one of the examiners every time we left the cell, repeating what had been said, word for word as far as we could. I began to find this interesting in itself, and easier. He would not always say much in reply to my promptings, but at times he did.

On the question of the slaves in the City, for instance, he was quite voluble. It emerged that he was one of those who had opposed this. The usual basis of such opposition, as I had discovered, was not through any consideration for the poor wretches whose lives were so brutally shortened by the heat and the leaden weight, and the ill treatment they were given, but because it was felt that dependence on slaves might weaken the strength of the Masters and eventually, perhaps, their will to survive and go on spreading their conquests through the universe. In Ruki’s case, though, there seemed to be some small but genuine feeling of sympathy toward men. He did not accept that the Masters had been wrong in taking over the earth, and using the Caps to keep human beings subservient to them. He believed that men were happier in that state
than they had been before the coming of the Masters. There was less disease and starvation now, and men were free of the curse of war. It was true they still resorted occasionally to violence against each other in the course of disputes, and this was horrifying enough from the Masters’ point of view, but at least it was kept on that level. An end had been made to that hideous state of affairs in which men could be taken from their homes and sent to far lands, there to kill or be killed by strangers with whom they had no direct or personal quarrel. It seemed a hideous state of affairs to me, too, but I realized that Ruki’s disapproval was much stronger—more passionate I would almost say—than my own.

This in itself, in his eyes, justified the conquest and the Capping. The men and women who were Capped enjoyed their lives. Even the Vagrants did not appear to be particularly unhappy, and the overwhelming majority led peaceful and fruitful lives, with much ceremony and celebration.

I was reminded of a man who had been in charge of a traveling circus when I was a boy. He had talked of his animals in much the way Ruki did of men. Wild animals, he said, were subject to disease, and spent their days and nights either hunting or hunted, but in either case struggling to get enough food to avoid starvation. The ones in his circus, on the other hand, were sleek and fat. What he had said had seemed sensible then, but was not compelling now.

Ruki, at any rate, while approving the Masters’ control of the planet, and of the undisciplined warlike
creatures who had previously ruled it, thought it was wrong to bring them into the City. He was confirmed in his view, of course, by finding that somehow, despite their Caps, one or more of the slaves had given information to those of us who remained rebellious. (We had not told him that, nor anything else that could possibly be useful to the Masters, but it was not difficult for him to work out that some leakage must have occurred for us to be able to reproduce their air and food.) You could see that, despite his own captivity, he obtained a kind of satisfaction from having been proved right in his stand.

This was not to say that he had any fear that our attempt to rebel against the Masters might be successful. He seemed to be impressed by our ingenuity in having carried out the attack against the Tripod in which he had been traveling; but it was much as a man would be impressed by a hound following a scent or a sheepdog bringing its charges back to the pen through many hazards. All this was interesting, and clever, although a nuisance to him personally. It could make no difference to the real state of things. The Masters were not to be overthrown by a handful of impudent pygmies.