The City of Gold and Lead (The Tripods) (17 page)

One afternoon while doing this I slipped and, his body turning round at the same time, the implement brushed lightly against the other side of him, between his nose and his mouth. The result was startling. He gave forth a wild howling noise, and a moment later I was flat on my back, smashed to the ground by a reflex action of two of his tentacles. I lay there half-stunned. The tentacles reached for me again, and I was sure that now, at any rate, I was in for another beating. But he lifted me to my feet instead.

His action, it appeared, had been instinctive, and defensive. That spot between the two openings was, he explained, a most sensitive one in the Masters. I must be careful not to touch it. A Master could be badly hurt by being struck in that place. He hesitated a moment, and then went on: a Master might even be killed by such a blow.

I looked as chastened and penitent as a devoted slave ought to do under such circumstances. I went on with the rubbing and scratching on the original site, and he was soon soothed. The leathery tentacles wound
themselves around me, like a loathsomely affectionate octopus. Half an hour later, I was excused to my refuge, and I hurried there and, tired as I was, before lying down made a note of this important new fact in the journal that I was keeping.

I had been doing this for some time. As I learned new things, however trivial, I jotted them down. It was better than relying on memory. I still had no idea how I was to get either the journal or myself out of the City, but it was important to go on collecting information. I was proud of my ingenuity over the journal. One of my Master’s favors had been to introduce me to the place where human books were kept, and to allow me to bring some of them back, to read during my rest periods. I had found that a blackish liquid which was used in preparing certain of the Master’s foods would serve as ink, and I had made myself a primitive pen to write with. Writing was not easy, but I was able to scrawl notes on the margins of the pages of a book; in perfect freedom from discovery since my Master could not come into the refuge, being unable to breathe human air.

• • •

Apart from the journal, I also, of course, continued to tell Fritz of these things when we met, and he passed any information he picked up on to me. The City was taking a heavy toll of him—the City, and his Master in particular. Once I did not see him for several days. I went twice to his Master’s pyramid, and questioned other slaves in the communal place. The first time, I drew a blank, but on the second I was told that he had been admitted to the slaves’ hospital. I asked where
that was, and they told me. It was a long way—too far for me to go just then. I had to wait until my Master’s next work time.

The hospital was in a section of a pyramid otherwise devoted to stores. It was larger than any of the communal places I had seen, and had beds in it, but there was little sign of luxury. It had been set up at some time in the past by a Master rather more benevolent than the rest, with the purpose of dealing with those slaves who, while they had collapsed from overwork or similar strains, were not yet so worn out that they needed to go to the Place of Happy Release. A slave had been put in charge of it, and had eventually been allowed to choose an assistant, who became his successor. It had carried on since then, unsupervised and for the most part disregarded by the Masters. When a slave collapsed, he was taken to the hospital if he did not quickly recover on his own account. He stayed there, resting, until either he was better or decided that his Happy Release was due.

There was no need for supervision, of course, since the thing the slaves most desired was to serve the Masters or, if they were no longer capable of serving, to end their lives. I found Fritz in a bed a little way off from the three others who were patients at the time, and asked him what had happened. He had been sent on an errand after a beating, with no chance to freshen up in his refuge, and he had collapsed on the way. I asked him how he was now, and he said better. In fact he looked terrible. He said, “I am going back to the Master tomorrow. If he has taken another slave, then I
go to the Choosing Place, to see if another Master wants me. But I do not think any will. There is a new batch due shortly, from Games they hold in the east. They will not want one as feeble as I am.”

I said, “Then you will go into the general pool of slaves? It may be better.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Only the new ones who are unclaimed do that.”

“Then . . .”

“The Place of Happy Release.”

I said, horrified, “They can’t make you do it!”

“It would seem strange if I did not want to, and we must do nothing that seems strange.” He managed a poor sort of smile. “I don’t think it will happen. The new ones have not yet arrived, so my Master will wait also. He will take me back for a while at least, I think. But I must not stay here longer than is necessary.”

I said, “We must do more about finding a way out of the City. Then, if something like that did happen to one of us, he could escape.”

Fritz nodded. “I have thought of that. But it is not easy.”

“If we could get into the Hall of the Tripods, and steal one . . . We might be able to find out how to work the mechanism that drives it.”

“I do not think there would be much chance. They are twice as tall as we, remember, and all the things they use in the City—except those like the carriages which are designed for us to work—are out of our reach. And I do not see how we could get into the Hall of the
Tripods. We would have to go through the Entering Place, and we would have no excuse for being there.”

“There must be
some
way of escaping.”

Fritz said, “Yes. We have learned many things that Julius would like to know. One of us must get back to the White Mountains.”

On my way back from the hospital, and later, I thought about Fritz. If his Master had taken another slave, after all, and refused to have him back . . . Even if not, he was so weak, and growing weaker. It was not just the beatings: his Master gave him tasks that were, deliberately, beyond his strength. I tried to remember the time, not so long before, when I had resented him for usurping Henry’s place on our expedition. Now, although we saw each other only at intervals and for brief periods, I felt closer to him than I had ever done to Henry or Beanpole—as though we were brothers.

One enjoys friendship most when times are good, when the sun shines and the world is kind. But it is the sharing of adversity that knits men together. We were both slaves of these monsters, and of all the slaves in the City, only we two understood what was being done to us: that they
were
monsters we were forced to serve, not gods whom it was a joy to wait on. The misery of this was a bond uniting us. I lay awake a long time that night, worrying about him and trying to plan some way of escape from the City. It was he, plainly, who would need this first. All sorts of crazy notions flitted through my head—such as scaling the inside of the golden wall and cutting a hole through the
glass-like stuff which formed the dome. I lay and sweated and despaired.

The next day, I saw Fritz again. He had left the hospital, and his Master had taken him back. He had beaten him again already. The urgency of discovering a way out had retreated, but not far.

• • •

I had wondered at one time why the Masters had taken the trouble to learn our languages rather than make the slaves learn theirs, but it was obvious really. The Masters lived far, far longer than normal men, and the slaves in the City were mayflies by comparison. A slave would be worn out by the time he could understand enough to be useful. There were other factors, too, I imagine. By this means, the Masters retained a privacy of expression among themselves. It was also true that they had a way of learning which men did not: they did not need books but somehow passed knowledge from mind to mind, and so it was easier for them to acquire skills of this kind. My Master spoke German to me, but to other slaves from other lands he could speak in their language. It was a thing which amused him: the division of men into different races who could not understand each other. The Masters had always been of one race, it seemed, solitary in themselves but yet part of a unity which men, even before they came, had shown small signs of achieving.

Like other human things, apart from amusing him it also in a way attracted him. He had studied mankind more closely than most of the other Masters—he read the old books, and he still plied me with questions—and
his attitude toward us was a strange one. It combined contempt and disgust, fascination and regret. This last came to the fore when he was in one of his moods of melancholy—minor phases of the Sickness—and stayed for long periods in the garden pool, inhaling gas bubbles. It was during one of these that he told me something more about the Plan.

I had taken him a third gas bubble, and been forced to submit to the usual caressing from tentacles slimy from the pool, and he started bemoaning the fact that this wonderful friendship we had could only last so short a time—since I, his dog, destined anyway for a brief human life, must have it curtailed still further by the conditions under which I lived in the City. (It did not occur to him that the curtailing might be prevented by having me released to a normal life outside, and I could not, of course, suggest it without letting it appear that I preferred such a thing to a year or two of glorious misery as his slave.) This was not a new topic. He had dwelt on it before, and I had done my best to look puzzled and adoring and ineffably contented with my lot.

On this occasion, though, the professed unhappiness about my approaching death turned into a form of speculation, and even doubt. It began on a personal level. He had asked me again about my life before I came to the City, and I painted for him the picture, a combination of truth and falsehood, which I had outlined before. (I am sure that sometimes there were inconsistencies, but he did not appear to notice them.) I talked of children’s games we had played, and then of the Christmas Feast, which I knew was roughly the
same in the south as it had been at Wherton except that, in the mountains, there was more likelihood of snow. I told him of the exchanging of gifts, the service in the church, and the feast after—the roast turkey stuffed with chestnuts and surrounded by glistening brown sausages and golden potatoes, the flaming plum pudding. I described it with some poignancy, because my mouth, despite the heat and my growing weakness, watered at the thought, contrasted with the dreadful food which kept us alive here.

The Master said, “One cannot share another creature’s pleasure, especially a lower creature’s, but I can tell that this was a joy to you. And if you had not won at the Games, you would have gone on having such joys through many years. Do you ever think of this, boy?”

I said, “But by winning at the Games, I was permitted to come to the City, where I can be with you, Master, and serve you.”

He was silent. The brownish mist had finished rising from the gas bubble and, without being bidden, I rose and brought him another. He accepted it, still silent, put it in place, and pressed it. As the mist rose, he said, “So many of you, year after year—it is a sad thing, boy. But nothing compared with the night-feeling that comes when I think of the Plan. And yet it has to be. This is the purpose of things, after all.”

He paused, and I stayed quiet, and eventually he began to talk again. He talked about the Plan.

There were, as I have said, several differences between the world from which the Masters came, and the earth. Their world was bigger, so that things on it
weighed much more, and also hotter and wetter. These were things which did not greatly matter. In the City, there were machines which made the heaviness that I knew only too well, but the Masters could have lived without them. The present heaviness was less than had existed on the home planet, and they or their successors could learn to live naturally on a world like this. As for the heat, there were parts of the earth, it seemed, which were hot enough—in the south where the other two Cities were.

But there was, of course, another difference to which they could not adapt themselves: the fact that our atmosphere was as poisonous to them as theirs to us. This meant that outside the enclaves of the Cities they could only be masked; and not just head-masked as we slaves were here, but with their whole bodies covered by a clinging greenish envelope, because the brightness of the sun’s light hurt their skins also. In fact, except on extremely rare occasions, outside their Cities they never left the Tripods—in this cold part of the earth, never at all.

All this, though, could be changed, and would be. The success of the expedition, the conquest of this world, had been reported back to the home planet. Samples had been taken—of air, water, other natural constituents. Their wise men had studied them, and in due course the message had been sent: the earth’s atmosphere could be altered to enable the Masters to live naturally in it. This colonization would in due course be a complete one.

It would take time. Mighty engines had to be created, and while some parts of them could be made here, others
had to be shipped across the gulfs of space. Once they were set up, at a thousand different places on the earth, they would take in our air and breathe out an air suited to the Masters. It would be thick and green, like the air inside the City’s dome, and as it spread the sun’s light would dim and the living things that now flourished—flowers and trees, animals and birds and men—would choke and die. Within ten years of the setting up of the engines, it was calculated, the planet would be fit for the Masters’ habitation. Long before that, the human race would have perished.

I was appalled by what I was told, by the revelation that man’s subjugation was not, as we had thought, a final evil, but the precursor of annihilation. I managed to make some inane remark, to the usual effect that whatever the Masters desired was good. My Master said, “You do not understand, boy. But there are some of us who are saddened by the thought that the things and creatures now living on this world must be blotted out. It is a heavy burden to the mind.”