The City of Gold and Lead (The Tripods) (15 page)

But instead he put me down. Belatedly I made the bow of reverence and, because of my soreness and stiffness, nearly overbalanced while doing it. The Master steadied me, and said, “What is friendship, boy?”

“Friendship, Master?”

“There is an archive in the City where those things your people call books are kept. I have studied some of them, being interested in your race. Some of the books are lies, but lies which seem like truth. Friendship is one of the things of which they tell. A closeness between two entities . . . that is a strange business to us Masters. Tell me, boy—in your life before you were chosen to serve, did you have such a thing? A friend?”

I hesitated, and said, “Yes, Master.”

“Speak of him.”

I talked of my cousin Jack, who had been my closest friend until he was taken to be Capped. I changed the details to the life I was supposed to have led, in the mountainous Tirol, but I described the way we had done things together, and the den which we had made outside the village. The Master listened attentively. He said finally:

“There was a link between you and this other human—a link that was voluntary, not forced by circumstances . . . so that you desired to be together, to talk with each other. Is this right?”

“Yes, Master.”

“And it happens much with your people?”

“Yes, Master. It is a common thing.”

He fell into a silence. It lasted a long time, and in the end I wondered whether he had forgotten about me, as sometimes happened, and whether I should take my leave, being careful to remember to bow. But as I was contemplating this, the Master spoke again.

“A dog. That is a small animal that lives with men?”

“Some do, Master. Some are wild.”

“It has been stated, in one of the books that I saw, ‘His only friend was his dog.’ Can this be true, or is it one of the lies?”

“It can be true, Master.”

“Yes,” he said, “that is what I have thought.” His tentacles described a small movement in the air which I had come to recognize as expressing satisfaction. Then one of them wrapped itself, but not roughly, around my waist.

“Boy,” said the Master, “you will be my friend.”

I was almost too astonished to think. I had got it wrong, I saw. I was not a kitten, after all, in the Master’s eyes. I was his puppy!

• • •

When I saw Fritz, and was able to tell him of what had happened, I expected him to find it funny, but he did not. He said seriously, “This is a wonderful thing, Will.”

“What’s wonderful about it?”

“The Masters seemed all alike at first, but I suppose men would to them. In fact, they differ a great deal. Mine is strange in one way, yours in another. But the strangeness of yours may help us to learn things about them, while with mine”—he forced a grin—“it is merely painful.”

“I still dare not ask him things that the Capped would not ask.”

“I am not so sure. You should have howled when he thrashed you, but it was because you didn’t that he became interested in you. He said you were strange before he told you that you were to be his friend. They are not used to seeing free men, remember, and it would never occur to them that a human could be dangerous. I think you can ask him things, as long as the questions are general, and you keep making the bow of reverence at the right time.”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“It would be useful to find the archive where the books are. They had the Capped destroy all the books that held the knowledge of the ancients, but I suppose they would not have destroyed them here.”

“I will try to find out.”

“But go carefully,” he warned. He looked at me. “Your task is not an easy one.”

He was thinking, I felt, that he could have carried it out a good deal better than I; and I was inclined to agree with him. Where I had stubbornness and pride, he had a watchful endurance. He was looking ill, and
had been badly beaten again that morning. The whip his Master used left marks which faded in about forty-eight hours, and these welts were fresh. He had once or twice been beaten with a tentacle, as I had been, and said that, although one ached for longer afterward, the beating itself was not so bad as with the whisk thing. I hated to think of what that must be like.

Fritz went on to tell me of his own latest discoveries. The most useful of these was that he had found a place where there were walls with pictures of stars at night, and the Masters could make these pictures move. In the same pyramid, there was a globe, almost as high as he was, turning on a spindle, and the globe’s entire surface was a map. He had not wanted to seem too curious, but there was a part he had recognized as depicting the places which we knew: it showed the narrow sea across which Henry and I had come, the White Mountains far to the south, and the great river down which the
Erlkönig
had sailed. And on the map, at a point which he calculated as being roughly our present location, there was a golden button, which could only be the City.

As far as he could see, there were two other golden buttons on the globe, both well to the south of this one and situated far apart, one on the edge of a great continent to the east, the other on an isthmus between two continents to the west. They must also represent Cities of the Masters, which meant there were three in all, from which the world was ruled. A Master had come into the room at that stage, and Fritz had been forced to move on. But he planned to go back, and get the positions fixed more firmly in his head.

I still had nothing that seemed worthwhile to report. Except that I was to be my Master’s puppy. He had said my task was not easy. In one sense, I saw, he was right. But in every other respect his was incomparably the harder. And he was the only one who seemed to be getting anywhere.

• • •

My Master’s Sickness lasted for several days. He did not go to his place of work, and spent a lot of time squatting in the pool in the window-room. He breathed the gas bubbles a good deal, but did not beat me again. Occasionally he came out of the pool and picked me up and fondled me, and he also talked to me. Some of it was as incomprehensible as when he had talked about his work, but not all. I found one day, when the green dusk outside was fading as the sun, beyond the dome, slanted out of sight in the west, that he was talking about the Masters’ conquest of the earth.

They had come in a vast ship that could move through the emptiness between the worlds, and the greater emptiness between the stars that warmed the worlds circling around them. This ship had been propelled at an unimaginable speed, almost as fast, he told me, as a sunbeam travels, but even so the journey had lasted many long years of time. (The Masters, I now realized, lived immensely longer than we did, for this one—and, I think, all the Masters in the City—had made that journey, and lived here ever since.) Theirs had been an expedition sent out with the purpose of finding worlds that their people could conquer and colonize, and an expedition that had many setbacks and
disappointments. Not all stars had planets near them, and where they did these planets were usually unsuitable, for various reasons.

The world from which the Masters came was much larger than the earth, and hotter. Being larger, things on its surface weighed more. The Masters had found some worlds too small and others too big for their purpose, some too cold—being far removed from the central sun—and others too hot. Of the ten worlds circling our sun, ours was the only one that would do, and it had an atmosphere poisonous to them and a gravity too light. All the same, it was thought to be worth conquering.

So the great ship was made to go in a circle around the earth, as the moon does, and the Masters studied the world which they were to seize. It seems that the ancients had marvelous machines by which they could speak and show pictures at a distance, and the Masters were able to listen and watch without needing to come close enough for their ship to be seen. They stayed like this for many years, occasionally sending smaller ships nearer to examine things which were not shown on the distance-pictures, or not in sufficient detail. (Some of the ancients, my Master said, reported seeing these ships, but others did not believe them. This could not have happened with the Masters, but men had this strange thing called lying, in which they told of things that had not occurred, and therefore they did not trust each other.)

They recognized that in man they had an enemy who might be formidable. There were all these marvels, like the distance-pictures, there were the great-cities at the height of their glory and power, and there
were other things, too. Men had already begun to build ships that would take them across the emptiness. They had nothing like the ships of the Masters, but they had started, and they were learning fast. And they had weapons. One of these, from what he said, was of the nature of the iron eggs Beanpole had found in the Tunnel below the great-city; but as much more powerful as a bull compared to an ant. With one of these giant eggs, the Master told me, an area of land many miles in circumference could be scorched and blasted—one of the great-cities itself completely obliterated.

If they had brought their ship down to the earth, and made a bridgehead, that bridgehead would have been destroyed. They had to find a different method. The one they chose lay in a field of knowledge where they were even more advanced than star traveling—the understanding and control of the mind.

When, on the journey to the White Mountains, they had put the button under my arm by which the Tripods afterward tracked us, and Henry had said that I must have known it was there, Beanpole had spoken of the man in the circus who could make people go to sleep and then obey his commands. I had once seen such a man with a traveling fair that came to Wherton. This sort of thing, and much, much more, was known to the Masters. They could, quite easily, put men to sleep and make them, even without the Caps, obey commands—for a time at least. But the problem still remained of getting men into a position where their power could be used. It is no good being able to make a rabbit pie, unless you can first catch your rabbit.

And they caught their rabbits with the ancients’ own marvel: the distance-pictures. These pictures were sent out on invisible rays through the air, and turned back into pictures in millions on millions of homes all over the world. The Masters found a means of suppressing those rays at their source, and sending out in their place rays which made the pictures they wanted. There went with them other rays that made men’s minds receptive. So they watched the pictures, and the pictures told them to go to sleep, and when they had gone to sleep, the pictures gave them their orders.

This control, as I have said, would wear off eventually, but it lasted for days, and the Masters made good use of the time. A hundred small ships landed, and men flocked to them as they had been told, and the Caps were put on their heads—by Masters at first, but later by men who had already been Capped. It was a process which grew as it went on. All that was needed was that there should be enough Caps, and there were. The plans had been well laid.

By the time those who had not watched the pictures realized something of what was happening, it was almost too late to do anything about it. They were separate, isolated, while the others were working under the orders of the Masters, united in one purpose. And by the time the effect of the commands given by the distance-pictures wore off, enough men had been Capped to ensure that the Masters would not have any but scattered and ineffective opposition to face: one of the first things the Capped had done was to take control of the mighty weapons of the ancients. So it was
possible for the parent-ship to come down to earth, and the first occupation base to be set up.

That was not quite the end, my Master told me. Some resistance continued. There were great ships on the sea, and ships that traveled under the sea; and some of these remained free for a time, and had weapons with which they could strike from half a world away. The Masters had to track them down, to destroy them, and one of the undersea ships survived for more than a year, and at the end of that time somehow located the main base, and sent one of the giant eggs through the air, to miss its target only by a narrow margin. In the attack though, it revealed its own position, so that the Masters could use a similar weapon of their own, and sink it.

On land, there was sporadic fighting for years, though steadily diminishing because all the time the number of the Capped grew while the number of the free diminished. The Tripods stalked the earth, guiding and helping their followers against bands of men whose weapons were puny, or nonexistent. In the end, there was peace.

I said, “So now all men are happy, having the Masters to rule and help them, and no more wars and wickedness.”

It was an expected comment, and I tried to put as much enthusiasm as possible into it. The Master said, “Not quite all. Last year, a Tripod was attacked and the Masters in it killed when the poisonous air broke in on them.”

I said, shocked, “Who could do that?”

One of his tentacles splashed water over him from
the pool. He said, “Before you were Capped, boy, did you love the Masters as you do now?”

“Of course, Master.” I hesitated. “Perhaps not quite as much. The Cap helps.”

He moved a tentacle in a gesture which I knew to be a sign of agreement. He said, “The Caps are put on when the skull is near the end of its growing. There are some Masters who think now that it should be done earlier, because some humans, in the year or two before they are Capped, become rebellious and act against the Masters. This was known, but not thought important, because the Cap makes them good again. But it was boys like these who found old weapons that still had power, and used them in such a way that four of the Masters were killed.”

Making a note of the fact that four was presumably a standard crew for a Tripod, I feigned a great shudder of horror, and said passionately, “Then of course boys must be Capped earlier!”

“Yes,” the Master said. “I think that will happen. It means that the Capped will die sooner, and have pains in their heads because the Caps grip their skulls more tightly, but it is unwise to take risks, even small risks.”