فصل 9

Nine

I Strike a Desperate Blow

The days and the weeks went by. There was always the green dusk, but sometimes the twilight was less dim, and then one knew that outside it was a fine summer day, the sun scorching in a high blue heaven. What one saw inside the City was a pale disk, only visible when it was near the zenith, a small circle of lighter green. But the heat did not vary, nor the crushing weight of one’s body. And day by day the heaviness and the hotness drained strength away. Each night I lay down with greater thankfulness on my hard bed; each morning it was a greater effort to rise.

Matters were not helped by the fact that the Master became more and more obviously attached to me. His fondling of me, occasional at first, became a daily ritual, and I was pressed into doing something of the sort in return. There was a place on his back, above the rear tentacle, which he liked to have rubbed and scratched. He would urge me to do this more vigorously, and direct me to spots a little higher or lower. I wore my fingernails down against his tough abrasive hide, and he still called for more. Finally I found an implement—a thing vaguely like a brush but curiously shaped—which produced the same, or a similar effect. This saved my fingernails, but not the muscles of my right arm, as he continued to prod me to further exertion.

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.” I pricked my ears up. Was it possible that the Masters really were divided among themselves, for all that they professed not to understand man’s divisions? Was there a possibility of disunity, and could we exploit it? But he went on, “Those of us who feel like this believe that places should be made where some of the creatures could go on living. The Cities, for instance. Things could be arranged so that some men and animals and plants were able to shelter in them. And the Masters could visit them, masked or in sealed carriages, and see these creatures—not dead as they are in the Pyramid of Beauty, but alive. Would this not be a good thing, boy?” I thought how much I loathed him, loathed all of them, but smiled, and said, “Yes, Master.”

“There are some who say this is unnecessary, a waste of resources, but I think they are wrong. After all, we appreciate beauty, we Masters. We preserve the best of the worlds we colonize.” Places where a handful of men and animals could live, under glass, to satisfy the curiosity and vanity of the Masters . . . “We appreciate beauty . . .” There was a silence, in which we thought our different thoughts about what he had just told me. It continued, and the need to know the answer to the one vital question pressed in on me. I had to take the risk of asking him. I said, “When, Master?” A tentacle moved, in a gesture of interrogation.

“When . . . ?” he repeated.

“When will the Plan start, Master?”

He did not reply for a moment, and I thought he might be surprised by my query—suspicious, even. I could read some of his more obvious reactions by this time, but there was a great deal hidden. However, he said, “The great ship is well advanced on its journey back to us, with the things that are needed. In four years, it will be here.” Four short years before the engines began to belch out poison. Julius, I knew, had been assuming that we had time enough—that the next generation, or the one after that, might carry the campaign we had started to a final success. Suddenly time was an enemy, as implacable as the Masters themselves. If we failed and an attempt had to be made next year, we should have lost a quarter of the cruelly short interval in which it was possible to act.

The Master said, “It is a splendid sight when the great ship glides through the night like a shooting star. I hope you will see it, boy.” He meant that he hoped I would live that long: four years represented a very good span for the life of a slave in the City. I said fervently, “I hope so, Master. It will be a glorious and happy moment.” “Yes, boy.”

“Can I bring you another gas bubble, Master?”

“No, boy. I think I will eat. You may prepare my table.”

• • •

Fritz said, “Then one of us must get away.”

I nodded. We were in the communal place at Fritz’s pyramid. There were half a dozen other slaves present, two of them playing a game of cards, the remainder lying flat and not even talking. It would be the beginning of autumn in the world outside; the air this morning would have a nip in it, perhaps, after an early night frost. In the City the sweltering heat did not change. We sat apart, and talked in low voices.

I said, “You haven’t found anything, I suppose?”

“Only that the Hall of the Tripods is impossible. The slaves who work in the Entering Place have nothing to do with those inside the City. They are ones who were not chosen by Masters, and they envy those whom they pass through into the City. They would not let anyone through in the opposite direction.” “If we could trick our way in—attack them . . .”

“There are too many of them, I think. And there is another thing.”

“What?”

“Your Master told you about the Tripod being destroyed. They know there is some danger, but they think it is only from un-Capped boys. If they find out we have managed to get into the City, wearing false Caps . . . they ought not to have that warning.” “But if one of us escapes,” I argued, “—won’t that be enough to warn them, anyway? None of the truly Capped would want to leave the City.” “Except through the Place of Happy Release. There are no checks on who goes there. It must seem as though that is what has happened, and therefore the escape must be secret.” “Any kind of escape is better than none. We have to get this news to Julius and the rest.”

Fritz nodded, and I was conscious again of his thinness, his head, although gaunt, large against the frail stalk of his neck. It must be he who escaped, if only one could do so. With a Master kind by their standards, I could hold out for a year or more. He had said he hoped I would see the great ship returning in its glory. But Fritz would not live through this winter unless he got away: that was certain.

Fritz said, “I have thought of one thing.”

“What is it?”

He hesitated, and said, “Yes, it is better that you should know, even if it is only an idea. The river.”

“The river?”

“It comes into the City, and is purified and made right for the Masters. But it flows out, also. Do you remember that we saw, from the Tripods, the outflow beyond the walls? If we could find the place inside the City . . . there might be a possibility.” “Of course.” I thought about it. “It will probably be on the opposite side of the City from where the river flows in.”

“Probably, though it need not be. But that is the part where the Masters who do not have slaves live. One cannot search there as easily, for fear of drawing attention to oneself.” “It is worth trying.” A number flashed on the wall, and a slave roused himself wearily. “Anything is worth trying.”

Fritz said, “As soon as we find a way out, one of us must go.”

I nodded. There was no doubt of that, nor of whom the one should be. I thought of the loneliness of staying behind, with no friend in this hideous place, no one to talk to. Except, of course, my Master. That only added a further horror to the prospect. I thought of the autumn world outside, the early snows already falling and lying on the White Mountains, covering the entrance to the Tunnel for another half year. I looked at the clock on the wall, marked in periods and ninths—Masters’ time. In a few minutes I would have to put on my mask, and return to take my Master home from his work.

• • •

It happened four days later.

I had been sent on an errand by the Master. One of their habits was to rub various oils and ointments into their bodies, and he told me to go to a certain place and get a particular oil. It was something like a shop, with a narrowing spiral ramp in the center and items laid out at different heights. I say a shop, though no one was in charge, as far as I could see, and it seemed that no money was paid. This pyramid to which I was sent was much farther away than the ones I customarily went to. I presumed the oil he wanted—he gave me an empty container to identify it—was not available nearer at hand. I slogged my way across the City, taking well over an hour to get there and back, and returned exhausted and soaked with sweat. I wanted desperately to go to my refuge—to take off the mask and wash and rub myself—but it was unthinkable that a slave should do that without first reporting to his Master. So I went the other way, to the window-room, expecting to find him in the pool. He was not, but in a far corner of the room. I went to him. and made the bow of reverence.

I said, “Do you wish the oil now, Master, or shall I put it with the others?”

He did not answer. I waited a moment or two, and prepared to go away. It might be one of his times of being withdrawn and uncommunicative. Having done my duty, I could put the oil in the cupboard, and go to my refuge until he called me. But as I turned, one of his tentacles snaked out, caught and lifted me. More fondling, I thought, but it was not that. The tentacle held me up, the unwinking eyes surveyed me.

“I knew you were a strange one,” said the Master. “But I did not know how strange.”

I made no reply. I was uncomfortable but, having grown used to the license he granted me and, to some extent, to the strangeness of his moods, not apprehensive.

He went on, “I wished to help you, boy, because you are my friend. I thought it might be possible to make more comfort for you in your refuge. In one of the storybooks of your people, it tells of a man making for a friend what is called a surprise. This I wished to do. So I sent you away, and put on a mask and went into the refuge. I discovered a curious thing.” It had been held behind him by another tentacle and he produced it and showed it to me: the book in which I had written the notes of what I had learned. I was anxious now, all right. Desperately I racked my mind to think of something to say, some explanation, but nothing came.

“A strange one,” he repeated. “One who listens, and writes down in a book. For what purpose? The human who wears a Cap knows that the things concerning the Masters are wonders and mysteries, which it is not good for men to learn. I have talked of them, and you have listened. You were my friend, were you not? Though even so it was odd that you showed little fear of being told that which was forbidden. A strange one, as I said. But to record afterward, in secret, in your refuge . . . The Cap should forbid that absolutely. Let us examine your Cap, boy.” Now he did what I had feared might happen on the day he beat me, when later he called me back and told me I was to be his friend. While a tentacle held me in mid-air, a second one moved to the lower part of the mask, where the material was soft, and its hard tip probed upwards. I wondered if it would break through the material, so that I choked in the poisonous air, but it did not. I felt the tip, narrowing to needle point but hard and precise, run over the edge of the false Cap I was wearing, probe and pluck.

“Strange, indeed,” said the Master. “The Cap is not married to the flesh. Something is wrong here, very wrong. It will be necessary to investigate. You must be examined, boy, by the . . .” The word he said meant nothing: I suppose he was talking about a special group of Masters who had to do with the Cappings. What was clear was that my situation was desperate. I did not know whether they could read my mind under examination or not, but at least they would know of the existence of the false Caps, and be alerted against our enterprise. They would obviously check all other slaves in the City. In which case, Fritz, too, was lost.

It would be useless to fight against him. Even fully fit, at normal weight, a man was no match for the strength of the Masters. The tentacle had me round the waist, so that my arms were free. But what was the good of that? Unless . . . The central eye, above the creature’s nose and mouth, stared at me. He knew something was wrong, but he still did not think of me as a danger. He did not remember what he had told me once, when I was rubbing him and my arm slipped.

I said, “Master, I can show you. Bring me closer.”

The tentacle moved me in toward him. I was no more than two feet away. I canted my head to the right, as though to show something concerned with the Cap. The movement hid the start of my next one, until it was too late for him to parry or push me away. Bunching my muscles, I put every ounce of strength I possessed into an upward swinging right hook. It caught him where the implement had brushed him, between nose and mouth, but this time with the full force of my body behind it.

He gave a single howl, which broke off in mid-cry, and at the same time the tentacle holding me hurled me away from him. I hit the floor hard, some yards away, and slid to the very edge of the garden pool. I was barely conscious as I staggered to my feet, and almost fell into the steaming waters.

But the Master had keeled over as he threw me. He lay there, prone and silent.