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.
TWO
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?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Well, you saw it, didn’t you? Consider the Tripods themselves, for a start. What sort of goons would dream up something so clumsy and inefficient as a means of getting around?”
Hilda Goossens, a tall, bony redhead who was the class genius and his favorite, said, “But they must have had very advanced technology. We know they couldn’t have come from within our solar system, so they must have traveled light-years to get here.”
Wild Bill nodded. “Agreed. But consider further. Although the Americans didn’t approach their Tripod, they did try the experiment of driving animals close in. Night had fallen by that time. And the Tripod switched on ordinary white light—searchlight beams, you could say—to find out what was happening beneath its feet. So it looks as though they don’t even have infrared!
“And having gone to the considerable trouble of dropping these three machines at various points of the planet, think of what they used them for. Two out of three just sat around; the third demolished a farmhouse and then sat around. And a single sortie from a single air force squadron was sufficient to reduce it to mechanical garbage. The other two put up no better defense; the one in America actually self-destructed without being attacked. In fact, altogether the dreaded invasion from outer space proved to be the comic show of the century.”
Some laughed. Although I’d done my bit of crawling to Wild Bill in the past, I didn’t join in. I could still see it too clearly—the insectlike shape towering above the ruins of the farmhouse, the snaky tentacles plucking up pathetic bits and pieces and tossing them away. . . . It hadn’t been funny then, and it wasn’t now.
• • •
Pa and I moved in with my grandmother after my mother left us. Grandpa had died not long before, and she was glad to have us take over part of the big house. It was a long, low granite building, and you reached her wing through a connecting door, which was mostly used from her side. She didn’t like us going through to her without prior warning. She was very positive altogether about what she liked and didn’t like. I had to call her Martha, for instance, not Granny. She was in her seventies, but very active; she took some keeping up with on walks.
After my father married Ilse, I think our being on tap suited her even better. Because Ilse was Swiss, she spoke several languages, which Martha found useful in her business. She had an antiques shop in Exeter and traveled around a lot, on the Continent sometimes, looking for things to buy. Ilse often went with her, and helped out generally.
Grandpa, who had been an army officer, was in poor health for several years before he died, and one of my earliest me
mories was of being shushed if I made any noise around him. Martha wasn’t one of those warm, cozy grannies you read about, and things didn’t change after we moved into the house. She wasn’t someone to chat with. When I asked her about my mother once, she headed the conversation off briskly, and went on about how lucky I was having Ilse. If she was fond of anyone it was my half sister, Angela, and, in a bossy way, of my father. There was also my Aunt Caroline, but we didn’t see much of her. On the whole, I always felt Martha was more at home with antiques than people.
She and Ilse were in the sitting room when Andy and I came in from a bike ride one Saturday afternoon—we’d cut it short when it started raining. They were pricing antiques, with Angela helping. Angela was seven, blonde and pretty and quite bright, I suppose. Pa was dotty about her. She was holding a china dog and saying how beautiful it was, and Martha was smiling at her. She loved people loving china and stuff. I could never work out how much of a creep my half sister was.
I asked, “OK if I turn on the TV?”
Ilse said, “Is it all right, Martha?”
“No,” Martha said crisply. “I cannot be distracted while I’m doing this. What did I give for the warming plate? My memory’s going totally.”
Ilse gave me one of her helpless placating looks that always maddened me. She wasn’t going to argue with Martha, but she wanted to put things right with me some other way.
“Lowree, in the kitchen are some chocolate chip cookies I make fresh this morning. If you wish, you find them in the little stone jar. . . .”
I cut across. “No, thanks.”
Actually they were one of the few things she cooked I really liked, but I wasn’t in the mood for accepting bribes. I thought how much I hated the way she called me Lowree, and that accent of hers altogether. It really made me cringe when I heard her talking to teachers at school on open days.
Besides, we’d bought Mars bars at the village shop on the way back from the ride. Andy looked as though he still wouldn’t mind taking chocolate chip cookies on board, so as a distraction I renewed a wrangle we’d been having earlier. He’d read something about the destruction of the Tripods being the greatest crime in history: first contact with another intelligent species, and we’d blown it. I didn’t care that much, but didn’t feel like agreeing, either.
I reminded him he hadn’t felt so friendly towards the Tripod when we were in the hut. He said that didn’t mean one couldn’t look at it in a balanced way afterwards.
I said, “And don’t forget the Tripod did the attacking in the first place. You saw what happened to the farmhouse.”
“Our people could still have taken time to find out more about it. It was obviously on a scouting expedition. Destroying the farmhouse could have been just a mistake.”
“The tank carried a white flag.”
“And played classical music,” Andy said, sneering. “That’s bound to be a big deal for creatures from another solar system.”
I was the one who’d thought it crazy at the time, but it wasn’t unusual in arguments with Andy for us to switch sides. I said, “They may have got it wrong, but at least they were trying to be civilized. And the Americans didn’t do anything to theirs, but it still blew itself up.”
“I should think two out of three destroyed would be enough to brand this a hostile planet. They called it off, and exploded the last one so as to leave as few clues as possible to their own technology. In case we came after them, I suppose. They knew we had rockets, so we were obviously on the verge of interplanetary flight.”
I was tired of the subject. Maybe we had passed up our one chance of establishing contact with aliens. I hadn’t been worrying about it at the time, and it didn’t bother me too much now.
I said, “Anyway, it’s finished. They won’t come again after a battering like that. Feel like a go on the computer? I’ve got a new Dragons game.”
Andy looked at his watch. “I’d better be getting back. It’s nearly five, and I told Miranda I’d be home early. She’s going out.”
Miranda was his mother; like Martha, she insisted on Christian names. She went out a lot, which was why Andy came to our place so much. I’d heard Pa and Ilse talking once about his not having a secure home. They were very keen on secure homes. If Andy’s was insecure, it didn’t seem to bother him.
Angela must have been listening. “That new show’s on at five,” she said, and switched on the television. I watched in silence, thinking what Martha would have said if I’d done it. Martha stretched and yawned.
“I think that finishes the pricing. Quite a good batch, really. Which show is that, Angel?”
“The Trippy Show.”
Behind the credits the screen was full of cartoon Tripods whirling round in a crazy dance. The program was supposed to have been inspired by the Tripod invasion. The music was wild, too—blasts of heavy metal and rock mixed up with traditional, including one quite catchy tune.
“I don’t think it’s going to be quite my kind of thing,” Martha said.
Angela, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, paid no attention. Martha didn’t say anything about switching off.
I said to Andy, “I’ll cycle over with you. Nothing better to do.”
• • •
My father was wiry, not very tall, and wore glasses. He looked like an athletic version of Woody Allen, but didn’t talk so fast. He was a real-estate agent and spent a lot of time out, weekends included.
I couldn’t recall much of the way things had been between him and my mother, except for the silences, which sometimes lasted days. And I could remember them talking separately to me, as though they were at the end of two different bowling alleys with a single set of pins, me being the pins. There was nothing like that with Ilse. He talked his head off both to her and to Angela. He never seemed to talk much to me, though. I reckoned I got about three percent of his conversation, and even that he had to work at.
One Sunday I found myself alone because he was showing a house to clients and Martha had taken the others to a mobile antiques market. She asked me if I wanted to come, and I said no, I had a load of homework. That was only partly true; I’d done most of it on Friday evening.
When I’d finished the rest, I was at a loose end. I made myself a bacon sandwich, played the Dragons game a bit, skimmed through the comic section of the Sunday paper. It was still only a quarter to eleven. I was wondering about telephoning Andy when I heard Pa’s car in the drive.
He said, “Where’s everybody? Oh yes, the antiques market. Feel like going along to surprise them, Laurie?”
“We wouldn’t find them.”
“It’s at Budlake, isn’t it? On the Green.”
“There are a couple of other places Martha said they might go on to.”
“We might still catch them there.”
I didn’t say anything. He looked at me with a slightly bothered expression.
“Something else you’d rather do?”
“We haven’t been on the boat lately.”
“It’s a bit late in the year. And not the best weather.”
There’d been a gale in the night. It was dying down, but the wind was gusting sharply and the sky full of gray clouds chasing each other’s tails.
I said, “We could check the mooring.”
He paused. “Sure, Laurie, we could do that.”
We’d had the boat for two years. It was a Moody 30, with seven berths in three cabins. It had bilge keels, a Bukh 20 h.p. diesel engine, Decca navigation and Vigal radar, with a big refrigerator in the galley, and a shower. Pa had bought it, secondhand, on the strength of his firm having a good year through the boom in house prices.
Pa talked a bit on the way to the river. I didn’t mind just listening. Then gradually he dried up, and we were back into the usual silence. I found myself resenting it as usual, too, then decided to do something about it.
I said, “Did you see the report about the body they found in the Tripod wreck having been dissected? Well, its head, at least
. I suppose they kept that part back at first so as not to scare people.”
“You could be right.”
“But there was no sign of anything that could have done the dissecting.”
“Remote-control robot, probably. Part of all that melted-down machinery they found in the capsule.”
I said, “He just happened to run out of the farmhouse. If it had been Andy or me, running out of the shed, it could have been one of us that got dissected.”
Pa was silent.
I said, “You’ve never said how you felt about it—when it was happening.”
“Didn’t I?”
I said sharply, “I’d have remembered if you had.”
“I remember that morning,” Pa said slowly. “I remember it very well. I woke early, and there was a bit on the six o’clock news about a strange object on Dartmoor. They gave more at six thirty, mentioning how big it was and the three legs, and that there was a report of something similar from America. Then at seven they dropped it completely, except to say there was a Ministry of Defense order banning traffic from certain roads. I worked out they were sealing off an area of Dartmoor. Remembering what you’d said on the telephone about orienteering, I also worked out you were probably inside it.”
I felt a bit uncomfortable. “It was a big area. There were half a dozen other teams who didn’t see anything.”
“The point was, I was pretty sure you were some-where around there, and it looked as though something nasty was happening. I started making calls—to the police first, then the BBC—in the end to the Ministry of Defense. They were so bland and cagey, I knew it must be serious. I lost my temper and shouted. It didn’t get me anywhere.”
Normally Pa was easy tempered and anxious to please with people he didn’t know. The thought of him losing his temper made me feel better.
He went on, “I was on the point of getting the car out and driving there—seeing if I could force a way in. Then there was the news of the air strike, and that whatever it was had been destroyed. I thought I’d better hang on by the telephone for news of you. It was a long wait.”