Tripods 02 - The City of Gold and Lead

by John Christopher

  The shallow breaths were no longer enough: I had to breathe more deeply. And this did not help, either. I was breathing in my own exhaled breath. I felt a hammering inside my head. A blackness was growing there, to match the blackness of the water. It was all hopeless, a trap with no way out. I was finished, and so was Fritz, and those we had left behind in the White Mountains -- all mankind. I might as well give up, stop struggling. And yet...

  It was the faintest of glimmers at first, something that only inextinguishable optimism could read as light. But I flailed on with my weary arms, and it grew. Brightness filtering through -- white light, not green. It must be the end of the tunnel. The pain in my chest was savage, but I found I could almost ignore it. Nearer, brighter, but still out of reach. Another stroke, I told myself, and another, and another. The brightness was right over me, and I kicked and fought my way up to it. Brighter and brighter, and a bursting through to the eye-piercing brilliance of the earthly sky.

  The sky, but not the air for which my tortured lungs were crying out. The sealed mask held me. I tried to release the buckle of the belt, but my fingers were too feeble. I was being carried downriver, the mask buoying me up. Buoying, and also suffocating. I tried again, and failed again. What a terrible irony, I thought, that I should have come so far, only to choke to death in freedom. I clawed at the mask, ineffectually. I was filled with a sense of failure and shame, and then the blackness, for so long barely held at bay, swooped down and swallowed me.

  My name was being spoken, but from a long way off.

  "Will..."

  There was something wrong about that, I thought drowsily. It was my name, but...pronounced in the English fashion, not with the initial "V" to which I had grown accustomed since we had been speaking German. Was I dead, I wondered? In Heaven, perhaps?

  "Are you all right, Will?"

  Did they speak English in Heaven? But it was English with an accent -- a voice I remembered. Beanpole! Was Beanpole in Heaven, too?

  I opened my eyes, and saw him kneeling above me, on the river's muddy bank. He said, with relief, "You are all right."

  "Yes." I gathered my scattered senses. A bright autumn morning -- the river flowing beside us -- the sun, from which my eyes still automatically turned away -- and, farther off...the great rampart of gold, topped by the vast green crystal bubble. I really was outside the City. I stared at him.

  "But how did you get here?"

  The explanation was simple. When Fritz and I had gone, taken by the Tripods, he had intended to go back to the White Mountains and tell Julius what had happened. But he had not been eager for it, and had stayed in the town a few days, listening for anything that was said that might be useful. One thing he learned was the approximate site of the City, and he thought he might as well go and take a look at it. It lay, he was told, across a tributary of the great river down which we had come together. He took the hermit's boat and paddled south and east.

  Having found it, he decided to survey it. He dared not risk approaching the Wall by day, but on nights when there was moonlight -- some, but not too much -- he made his investigations. The result was not encouraging. There was no break in the Wall, and no hope of scaling it. One night he dug down several feet, but the Wall continued still farther, and he had to fill in the hole and leave as dawn broke. None of the Capped approached the City, so he was safe from their attentions. There were farms within reach, and he lived on what food he could pick up or steal.

  Once he had been right round the City, there seemed little point in staying on. But it was then that the thought occurred to him, too, that if anyone were going to escape, the river provided what was probably the only feasible route. Its waters, plainly, were waste from the City: nothing grew on the banks for a mile downstream; there were no fish, though there were plenty in the part of the river above the City; and he found strange items of debris from time to time. He showed me some -- various empty containers, including a couple of empty gas bubbles, which ought to have gone into one of the waste cupboards but had found their way into the river instead. One afternoon he saw something quite large floating in midstream. It was too far for him to see clearly, particularly since his eyes, without his lenses, were weak, but he took the boat out and salvaged it. It was of metal, hollow so that it floated, measuring some six feet by two, and a foot thick. If that could come out of the City, he argued, a man could. In fact it was hard to see any other way in which an escape was possible. Because of that, he resolved to take up a position where he could watch the outflow -- watch, and wait.

  And so he had stayed here, while the days and the weeks went by. As time passed, his hopes that one of us might get away dwindled. He had no notion of what things were like inside the City: we might have been discovered on the first day as falsely Capped, and killed. He stayed on, more, he said, because leaving would mean abandoning the last shred of hope than because hope had anything to feed on. Now, with the autumn, he realized that he could not delay much longer if he were to get back to the White Mountains before the heavy snows. He had decided to give it another week, and on the morning of the fifth day had seen something else floating downriver. He had taken the boat out again, found me, and with a knife had ripped open the soft part of the mask, to let me breathe.

  He said, "And Fritz?"

  I told him, briefly. He was silent, and then said, "What do you think the chances are?"

  I said, "Not good, I'm afraid. Even if he finds his way back to the river, he's much weaker than I am."

  "He said he would try in three days?"

  "Yes, three days."

  "We'll keep a close watch. And your eyes are better than mine."

  We gave him three days, and three times three days, and three days beyond that, each time finding a less convincing argument for our vigil. Nothing came out of the City, that we could see, but ordinary debris. On the twelfth day there was a snowstorm, and we huddled, shivering, cold, and hungry, under the upturned boat. The next morning, without discussion, we set out under a watery sun peering through gray clouds, toward the great river and the south.

  Once I looked back. The snow was melting, but the land still stretched bare and white on either side of the river. The river was a gray arrow in the alabaster desert, pointing to the circle of gold and the dome of green crystal. I lifted my arm. It was still a positive joy to be free of the leaden weight that had crushed me for so long. Then I thought of Fritz, and the joy turned to sadness, and a deep and bitter hatred against the Masters.

  We were going home, but only to arm ourselves and others. We would come back.