The City of Gold and Lead (The Tripods)

by John Christopher

  In the end, I grew desperate. I abandoned my own defense, deliberately this time, and went on hitting as fast and as often as I could. Most of my blows failed to land, whereas he got in a couple to the body which rocked me. But I kept on, fighting not boxing, forcing in the hope that somehow something would give. And it did. He measured me for a punch that would have finished the job the uppercut had started, and missed. And I did not miss with my own hook to the jaw. His knees buckled and he went down, and I was sure he was not going to get up by a count of ten or, for that matter, fifty. The only doubt I had was whether the bell would go before the count was completed—I had an idea we were in the final seconds. But my mind had been playing me tricks. I learned, to my astonishment, that less than a minute had elapsed of this last round.

  • • •

  Beanpole and I watched the final of the Hundred Meters in silence, concealing our different feelings. But our silence was shattered when it became apparent that Fritz was keeping up with the runner who had outclassed him in the previous heat. We were both shouting as the two of them crossed the tape. Beanpole thought Fritz had won, I that he had just lost. It was some time before the announcement came, and it proved us both wrong. There had been no clear winner. The race would be rerun, with these two competitors only.

  And this time Fritz made no mistake. He went into the lead right away and held it to win comfortably. I cheered with the others, and fervently. I would far rather it had been Beanpole, but I was glad that, at any rate, I would have one ally when I went into the City.

  • • •

  That evening, during the Feast, the heavens opened, thunder rolled almost continuously, and through the high windows I saw lightning playing across the roofs of the town. We ate rich food in enormous quantities, and drank a wine that bubbled in the glass and tingled in one’s throat. And I sat at the High Table, wearing my scarlet belt with the rest.

  In the morning, as we paraded, a light drizzle was still falling. The Field itself was waterlogged, and our shoes were clogged with mud. I had said good-bye to Beanpole and told him that I hoped I would meet him again, and soon, in the White Mountains.

  But the hope was a faint and feeble one. The six Tripods stood, fixed as they had been throughout the Games, while the ceremony of farewell was gone through. I looked at the faces of my companions, all happy and exalted at the thought of serving the Tripods, and did my best to put the same expression on my own. My legs trembled. I made an effort and controlled them, but moments later they were trembling again.

  There were more than thirty of us, in six groups. I saw the group with Fritz in it go first, marching toward the Tripod immediately ahead. The tentacle snaked down as they came close to the great metal foot and lifted them, in turn, to the hole that opened in the hemisphere, the hole into which, nearly a year before, I had thrown the exploding metal egg of the ancients. I had no defense now, and could have none. I watched the next group go, and the third and fourth. Then it was our turn and, splashing through puddles, I walked woodenly forward with the rest.

  Six

  The City of Gold and Lead

  What chiefly worried me was that my true feelings would show when the tentacle gripped me—that I would not be able to avoid straining against it and marking myself as different from the others. I even wondered if the tentacle could somehow read my thoughts: I remembered the feel of it—hard metal but weirdly resilient, pulsing with what seemed like life. When it was my turn to be lifted, I did my best to blank out what was happening. I thought instead of my home, of lazy afternoons wandering through the fields, of swimming in the river with my cousin Jack. Then the breath gasped from my body, as I was plucked up and lifted through the rain-drizzling air. Above me the door in the hemisphere was open—a mouth growing larger as I was brought toward it.

  I was expecting the lapse into unconsciousness which had occurred in my first encounter with a Tripod, outside the Chateau de la Tour Rouge, but it did not happen. Later I understood why. The Tripods had a means of doing this, but they used it only on the un-Capped, who might panic and struggle. There was no need for such restraint with those who had learned to worship them. The tentacle put me inside and released me, and I could take in my surroundings.

  The hemispheres were some fifty feet across the base, but the part we were in was much smaller, an irregularly shaped cell about seven feet high. The outer wall with the door was curved, and had portholes on either side, covered with what seemed to be very thick glass. The remaining walls were straight, but the side ones sloped inward, so that the interior wall was shorter than the external. There was another door there, I saw, but it was closed.

  There were no furnishings of any kind. I ran my fingernails over the metal and found it hard but satiny in texture. There were six in my group, and I had been the fifth to be taken. The last one was brought in, and the door closed, a raised round flap coming down to make a tight seal. I looked at the faces of my companions. They showed some confusion, but excitement and exaltation as well, which I did my best to copy. No one spoke, which was a help. I would not have known what to say, or how to say it.

  Silence for endless minutes; then, abruptly, the floor tilted. The embarkation must have been completed. Our journey to the City had begun.

  • • •

  The motion was extremely odd. The three legs of the Tripods were attached to a circumferential ring beneath the hemispheres. At their points of attachment and where the legs jointed, there were segments which could lengthen and shorten as the legs shifted relative to each other. There was also an arrangement of springs between the ring and the hemisphere which compensated for much of the remaining jolting. What was left, after the tilt when the Tripod started to march, was a mild rocking movement. It was a little nauseating at first, but one rapidly grew accustomed to it.

  The Tripods could travel as easily in one direction as another by reason of their three-legged symmetry, but at present the section we were in was at the front. We crowded to the portholes, and looked out.

  Ahead, a little to our right, was the hill with the ancient semicircle of stone steps; behind it, the town where, the night before, we had feasted. Beyond that again was the dark ribbon of the great river. We were going slightly north of east, heading toward it. The countryside beneath us was blurred and wet, but the actual rain had stopped and there was a patch of brightness in the cloud where the sun might be. Everything was small and far away. The fields and houses and cattle seen in the valley below from the Tunnel had been tinier, but that panorama had been fixed, unchanging. Here, change was continual. It was like being in the belly of a huge low-flying bird, flapping its way across the landscape.

  Remembering the Tripods whose feet had served as boats, I wondered if these might do so, too, on reaching the river, but they did not. The forward leg sent up a fount of spray as it broke the surface, and the others followed. The Tripod crossed the riverbed as a horseman would have forded the stream below my father’s mill at Wherton. On the other side, it changed direction, turning south. There was open country, and then desolation.

  Beanpole and I had seen something of this brooding ruin of one of the great-cities on our way north—the river had flowed for miles between its black, unpromising shores. But from this high vantage point, one saw so much more. It stretched eastward from the river, a dark and ugly mass of destroyed buildings and broken roads. Trees had grown among them, but to a lesser extent than in the great-city we had crossed on our journey south to the White Mountains. This place seemed to be vaster, and uglier. I saw no remains of broad avenues and concourses, no sense, here, that our ancestors, before the Tripods came, had lived lives of order and beauty. But there was an awareness of might and power, and I wondered again how they could have been defeated—how we, a handful of shattered remnants, could hope to succeed where they had failed.

  One of the others saw the City first, cried out, and we jostled each other to look. It rose beyond the edge of the ruins, a ring of dull gold standing against the
gray of the horizon, surmounted and roofed in by an enormous bubble of green-tinged crystal. The Wall was more than three times as high as the Tripods, smooth and unbroken. The whole place, although resting solidly on the earth, seemed strangely unconnected with it. Some distance from the point for which we were making, a river bubbled up from under the shield of gold, and flowed away toward the mother river behind us. The eye, following its course, could almost imagine that the City was not there at all—that if one looked hard enough the illusion would vanish, and there would be just the river running through ordinary fields. But it did not vanish. The Wall rose higher as we approached, becoming more awful and forbidding.

  The sky grew lighter. From one instant to the next, the sun broke through the mask of cloud. Sunlight glistened on the ramparts—was reflected from the crystal roof. It was a great band of gleaming gold, on which flashed a titanic emerald. And I saw a narrow slit of darkness, that widened. A door opened in the seamless wall. The first of the Tripods marched through.

  • • •

  What happened as our Tripod entered the City was something for which I was completely unprepared. I felt as though I had been struck a savage blow, but a blow which contrived to hit me in every part of my body at the same time, a blow from the front, from behind, most of all from above, smashing me down. I staggered and fell, and saw my companions do the same. The floor of the compartment pulled us, as though it were a magnet and we were flakes of iron. I struggled to rise, and I realized it was not a blow, but something different. All my limbs had turned to lead. It was an effort to raise my arm, even to twitch a finger: I strained, and stood up. I was carrying a tremendous burden on my back. Not on my back alone—on every square inch of bone and muscle in my body.

  The others followed suit. They looked puzzled and frightened, but they still did not look unhappy. After all, whatever the Tripods wished on them was good: it must be. There was dim green light. It was as though one were very far down in a thick forest, or in a cave under the sea. I tried to make sense of it all, but could not. The weight on my body bowed my shoulders. I straightened myself up, but felt them sag again.

  Time passed, and we waited. There was silence and heaviness and greenness. I tried to concentrate on what must be the most important thing—that we had achieved our first objective and were inside the Tripods’ City. One must have patience. It was not, as Julius had pointed out, my most outstanding quality, but I had to command it now. Waiting would have been easier without the dimness and the crushing weight. It would have been a relief to say something, anything, but I dared not. I shifted my feet, seeking an easier stance, but not finding one.

  I had been looking at the door on the inner wall, but it was the other which opened, swinging back and up with a faint whirring noise. There was still nothing to be seen outside—just a high dim green. A tentacle came in, and lifted one of my companions out. I realized that it must be able to see, independently of the hemisphere. Might it not still be that the Tripods themselves were sentient—that we were the captives of living and intelligent machines? The tentacle returned. This time it took me.

  It was like a hall—long and narrow but of enormous size, probably eighty feet high and two or three times that in length. I saw that it was a kind of stable for Tripods—against one wall a long row of them stretched away into the green dusk, faintly illumined by hanging globes that gave a dim lemon-green light. Their hemispheres rested close against the wall, far above us. Those in which we had traveled were unloading their human cargo. I saw Fritz, but did not speak to him. We had agreed that no contact should be attempted until the first stage, whatever it proved to be, was safely over. One by one, the others joined us. At last the tentacles hung limp and inactive. A voice spoke.

  This, too, sounded as though it might have been the voice of a machine. It was deep and toneless, echoing and booming in the vast space. The words were in the German language that we knew.

  “Humans, you have the privilege, the high honor, to have been chosen as servants of the Masters. Go where the blue light shines. In the place to which it leads you, you will find fellow-slaves who will instruct you in what you are to do. Follow the blue light.”

  It had come on while the voice was speaking, a light that glowed deep blue in the base of the wall by which the Tripods were standing. We walked toward it, or staggered, rather, against the drag of this leaden weight which pulled us down. And the air was hotter, I thought, than it had been inside the Tripod, and clammy with it, like the moments before summer thunder. The light was above an open door, admitting us to a small room, much the same size as that in the Tripod, but of more regular shape. The door closed when we were all in. There was a click and another whirr, and suddenly the weight was even greater, seeming to drag my stomach down with it in a swoop of nausea. This lasted several seconds, and was followed by a brief sensation of lightness. The whirring stopped, the door opened, and we walked out into another room.

  This also was large, although modest-seeming after the Hall of the Tripods, but of more conventional proportions. There was the same lemon-green glow from lamps which studded the walls. (Their light, I saw, did not flicker in the way our lamps did.) I had a confused impression of rows of tables, benches rather. And of half-naked old men.

  They were the ones who, the voice said, were to instruct us. They wore only shorts, reminding me of men who worked in the harvest fields, but there was no other resemblance. The greenish light tricked the eyes, but even so I could see that their skins were an unhealthy pallid color. They came, one to each of us, and I followed my particular guide to the benches. A little pile of articles was laid out there.

  Most of them were self-explanatory. There were two pairs of shorts, like the ones our instructors were wearing, two pairs of socks, two pairs of shoes. No, one pair of shoes and one of sandals, the latter, I was told, for indoor wear. But there was also a device which baffled me. My guide explained it in a tired voice, with a South German accent.

  “You must put this on before you go through the airlock, and wear it always while you breathe the Masters’ air. In the house of your own Master you will have a room, in which to eat and sleep, where you will not need it, but otherwise it must never be removed. The air of the Masters is too powerful for such as we. If you go into it without protection, you will die.”

  It was like glass in that one could see through it, but different to the touch. Even the thicker part, which fitted over the head and rested on the shoulders, would yield a little when one pressed it, and it tapered to a thin stuff that molded itself to the body. There was a belt which went around the chest, high under the arms, and could be tightened to hold the helmet on firmly. On either side of the neck were pouches holding a dark green sponge-like material. These had a network of fine holes, on both outside and inside, admitting air. The sponges, it seemed, could filter out the part of the Masters’ air which was too strong for their slaves to breathe. My instructor pointed to it.

  “This must be changed every day. Your Master will supply you with new ones.”

  “Who is my Master?” I asked.

  It was a foolish question. He stared at me blankly.

  “Your Master will choose you.”

  I reminded myself that my policy was to lie low and say nothing, observing not questioning. But there was one thing I could not avoid asking.

  “How long have you been in the City?”

  “Two years.”

  “But you’re not . . .”

  The remnants of pride broke through the heavy dullness of his voice. He said, “I won the Thousand Meters at the Games, less than a month after I was Capped. No one from my province had ever done that before.”

  I stared at him, at the slumped tired body, the worn, sick-looking flesh, with horror. He was no more than two years older than I was, perhaps less.

  “Change into these clothes.” His voice was once more blank and expressionless. “Throw your old ones on that pile.”

  I took off my scarlet champion’
s belt. “What about this?”

  “Put it with the rest,” he said. “You do not need it in the City.”

  • • •

  We dressed in our new clothes, putting the articles we did not require immediately into a small bag which we were given, and fastened on our masks. Then we were marshaled along the room and through a door into another smaller one. The door closed behind us, and I saw there was an identical one on the opposite side. There was a hissing sound and I could feel a breeze over my feet and realized that air was being drawn into a grille that ran along the base of the wall. But air was also coming in, from another grille just above head level. I could feel it, and after a time I thought I could see it—thicker, greener in the green light. In some strange way the air was being changed in this room, the ordinary kind being replaced by that which the Masters breathed. It continued for several minutes. Then the hissing stopped, the door in front opened, and we were told to walk out.

  It was the heat that struck me first. I had thought it was hot enough inside the Tripod and in the outer rooms of the City, but that was mild in comparison with the furnace-blast that I now encountered. And yet not a furnace-blast, because the air was damp as well as hot. Sweat started out all over my body but particularly on my head, encased in its hard transparent cover. It trickled down my face and neck to the place, high on my chest, where the belt trapped it against my skin. I drew in gulping breaths of hot, stifling air. I felt weak, and the weight dragged me down. My knees started to buckle. One of my companions fell, and then a second and a third. Two of them struggled back to their feet in a moment or two, the third lay still. I thought of helping him, but remembered my resolution not to take a lead in anything. I was glad of the excuse to do nothing. Keeping myself from falling or fainting was difficult enough.

  Gradually I became a little more accustomed to things, and could look at what lay in front of us. We had come out on a kind of ledge, and the main thoroughfares of the City lay below us. It was an eye-wrenching confusion. None of the roads were straight, and few of them were level; they dipped and rose and curved between the buildings, and were lost in the dim green distance. The City seemed even vaster inside than it had from the porthole of the Tripod, but I had an idea that was because of the thicker, greener air. One could not see very far with any clarity. The crystal dome that covered everything was invisible from here: the green dusk seemed to stretch endlessly.