The City of Gold and Lead (The Tripods) (10 page)

• • •

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.

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.