"Christopher, John - Tripods 03 - The Pool of Fire 2.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Christopher Barbara)
Beanpole did his best to explain to us. It was something to do with the air, which I had always thought of as a sort of invisible nothing, being made up of two different nothings, two gases, and the part that was smaller being the part we needed to keep alive. The scientists had learned how to separate the two, and keep the useful part in those containers on the swimmers' backs. Things called valves regulated a supply of it to the masks the men wore. One could stay submerged for a long time. Flippers attached to the feet would enable one to swim strongly against a tide. We had found our means of entering the Cities.
The next morning, Henry left. He took the lean taciturn stranger with him. He also took a supply of the masks, and the tubes and boxes that went with them.
From a dugout by the river bank, I looked at the City of Gold and Lead again, and could not entirely repress the tremor that ran through my body. The ramparts of gold, topped with the emerald bubble of its protective dome, stretched across the river and the land on either side, immense and massive and seemingly impregnable. It was ludicrous to imagine that it could be overthrown by the half dozen of us who had collected here.
None of the Capped would venture so close to the City, having such an awe of it, so we were safe from any interference by them. We saw Tripods in plenty, of course, giant-striding across the sky on journeys to or from the City, but we were not near any of the routes they used. We had been here three days, and this was the last. As daylight faded from a blustery gray sky, it took with it the last few hours before the moment of decision.
It had not been easy to synchronize the attacks on the three Cities. The actual entries had to be made at different times, because the cover of darkness varied throughout the world. The one in which Henry was concerned would follow six hours after ours. That in the east was taking place just about now, in the middle of the night. That City, we all knew, represented the riskiest part of the enterprise. Our base out there was the smallest and weakest of the three, existing in a land where the Capped were entirely alien and spoke an incomprehensible language. Our recruits had been few. Those who were to make the attack had come to the castle the previous autumn; they were slim, yellow-skinned boys who spoke little and smiled less. They had learned a little German, and Fritz and I had briefed them on what they would find inside the City ( we presumed that all three Cities would be much the same), and they had listened and nodded, but we had not been sure how much they understood.
At any rate, there was nothing we could do about that now. We had to concentrate on our job here. Darkness gathered, over the City, the river, the surrounding plain, and the distant hump that was the ruin of a great-city of old. We had our last meal of ordinary human food in the open air. After this, it would be a matter of relying on what we could find in the City eating the slaves' tasteless food in the protection of one of the refuge rooms.
I looked at my companions in the last light. They were dressed as the slaves were, and had the masks ready to put on, and their skins, like my own, had been rendered pale by a winter spent completely under cover from the sun. We wore the false-Caps closely fitted to our skulls, our hair growing through them. But they did not look like slaves, and I wondered how the deception could succeed. Surely the first Master who saw one of us would realize the truth, and raise the alarm?
But the time had passed for doubts and brooding. A star gleamed in the sky, not far above the western horizon. Fritz, the leader of our troop, looked at the watch which he alone carried and which he must keep hidden in the belt of his shorts. It kept perfect time and would work even underwater, and had been made not by our own scientists but by the great craftsmen who lived before the time of the Masters. It reminded me of the one I had found in the ruins of the first great-city, and lost when boating on the river with Eloise, at the Chateau de la Tour Rouge-how far away all that seemed now!
"It is time," Fritz said. "In we go."
Spies before us had traced the underwater configuration of the vents through which we had to swim. They were large, fortunately, and there were four of them, each presumably leading back to a pool like the one into which we had plunged. They came out twenty feet below the surface of the water. One by one, we dived and forced our way against the current, guided by small lights fixed on bands about our foreheads: another wonder of the ancients, but this time re-created by Beanpole and his colleagues. Beanpole had had to stay back at headquarters, despite his pleas to come with us. It was not just that he was too valuable to be spared. There was also the weakness of his eyes. Spectacles would not work underwater, and would also set him unmistakably apart from the other slaves in the City.
The lights moved in front of me, and I saw one wink out. That must be the vent. I swam farther down and saw a curved edge of metal, and the shadowy outline of a tunnel wall. I kicked my flippered legs and went forward.
The tunnel seemed interminable. There was the flicker of the light ahead of me, the dim swath of my own lamp, and always the pressure of water against which I must force my body. There was a time when I wondered if we were getting anywhere at all-was it possible that the current was so strong that our seeming to move against it was an illusion? That we were doing no more than hold our own, and would stay suspended here in this featureless tube of a world until tiredness overcame us and we were pushed back to the outlet in the river? The water seemed to have gotten a little warmer, but that could be another illusion. At that moment, though, the light in front disappeared, and I forced my weary limbs to a greater effort. From time to time, I had touched the roof of the tunnel with my outstretched hand. I tried again, and found nothing solid. And above, far above, there was a glimmer of green.
The last time, the pool had been deserted by night, but we could take no chances. Fritz cautiously heaved himself up the side, and peered over. He waved to the rest of us, and we climbed out, onto solid ground. And into the crushing leaden weight of the City's gravity. I saw my companions, prewarned but shaken for all that, stagger under the sudden strain. Their shoulders sagged. The spring had gone out of their limbs, as I knew it had gone out of my own. I realized that we might not look so very different from the slaves, after all.
Quickly, we did what was necessary, unclipping the tubes from our masks and unstrapping the oxygen tanks from our backs. This left us with ordinary masks, with sponge filters in the neck pouches which we would renew later in one of the communal places that the slaves used. We punctured the tanks and lashed them and the tubes together. Then one of us climbed back into the pool for a moment, and held them under till they filled. They sank down. The current would take them out into the river. Even if one of the Capped fished them out, tomorrow or the day after, he would make nothing of them. He would take them for another of the mysteries of the Tripods; as we knew, solid debris did emerge from the City from time to time.
We could talk to each other, but were anxious to make no unnecessary noise. Fritz nodded again, and we set off. Past the nets which took heat out of the water, so that beyond the last one the surface steamed and even bubbled in places, past the great cascade that formed the pool, along by stacks of crates reaching up to the pointed roof of the hall, and so to the steep curving ramp which marked the way out. The light around us was a dim green, from the globes which hung from the ceiling. Fritz led the way, advancing warily from cover to cover, and we followed at his signal. Few of the Masters were active at night, but it would not do to be surprised by one; because no slave would be abroad. Moreover, we were carrying certain things we had brought with us, parts of the distillation apparatus which we might not be able to find here.
Slowly and carefully we made our way across the sleeping City. We passed places where there was the hum of busy machinery, and we passed the deserted garden pools in which ugly, somber-colored plants looked like menacing sentient beings themselves. We made our cautious way along one side of the great arena on which the Sphere Chase was played. Looking at these, and other familiar places, the days, years of the free life I had known seemed to disappear. I could almost think that I was on my way back to that apartment in 19 Pyramid where my Master would be waiting for me. Waiting for me to make his bed, rub his back, prepare his meal-or even just to talk to him, to give him the companionship which, in some strange nonMasterlike way, he wanted.
It was a long journey, made more protracted by our determination to run no risk. By the time we reached the area we sought, the area, on the opposite side of the City, where the river came in, to be purified and treated for the Masters, the darkness overhead was beginning to turn green. In the world outside, a clean dawn would be breaking over the distant hills. We were tired and hot, clammy with our own sweat, thirsty and aching under the never-ending strain of the weight that dragged us down. Many hours must elapse still before we would be able to slip into one of the refuges, remove our masks, and eat and drink. I wondered how the four who were new to all this were taking it. At least Fritz and I had been through it before.
We were crossing an open triangular space, keeping under the cover of gnarled treelike plants that leaned out of the inevitable pool. Fritz went on a stage, stopped, and waved for others to follow. I, as rearguard, would be the last to go. As I prepared, I saw, instead of a beckoning wave, his hand held up in warning. I froze to my spot, and waited. There was a sound in the distance: a series of rhythmic slapping noises. I knew what that was. Three feet coming down in succession on the smooth stone.
A Master. My skin prickled as I saw him, in the dim green twilight, passing along the far side of the plaza. I thought that, having seen so much of Ruki over so long a time, I had grown used to them, but Ruki had been our prisoner, confined to that small featureless room. Looking at this one, at large in the City which was the symbol of their power and dominance, all the old fear returned, and the old hatred.
Fritz and I had found, during our sojourn here, that there were many places in the City which were rarely if ever used. A lot of these were storehouses of some kind, stacked with crates, like the cavern through which we had entered, or empty in preparation for some future use. I imagine that in building the City, they had allowed space for expansion, and that a lot of it had not yet been taken up.
At any rate, this was something of which we could take advantage. The Masters, as exemplified in the unvarying routes so often followed by the Tripods, were creatures of repetitious habit in many ways; and the human slaves would never venture anywhere except on a direct errand. It would have been unthinkable for them to pry into what they regarded as the holy mysteries of the gods.
We headed for a pyramid which Fritz had previously explored, and which was less than a hundred yards from the ramp leading down to the water purification plant. It was obvious that the ground floor was not in use; a brownish fuzz, slowly growing and easily brushed off by contact, covered the exposed surfaces of the crates. (There were a number of such funguslike growths in the City, which the Masters did not seem to bother about.) To make ourselves doubly safe, though, we went down the spiral ramp to the basement, where the crates were stacked even higher. We cleared a space at the far corner, and began at once to set up our apparatus.
We were depending on the resources of the City itself for a good part of our equipment. Glass tubes, for instance, and jars, we knew to be available. What we had brought with us were chiefly small tools, and rubber tubes and sealers. Another item for which we were going to poach on our enemy was the form of heating. There were no open fires here, but there were devices which no longer seemed as magical as they once had. These were pads, of various sizes, which, when a button was pressed, gave off a concentrated radiant heat: the smaller ones were used by the slaves to heat liquids to boiling point for their Masters. The pads had attachments which fitted into sockets in the walls of the buildings, and when heat stopped being produced they were fitted in and left for an hour or so, after which they were as good as new. Beanpole had explained that it must be a form of the same electricity which our scientists had rediscovered.
Day broke, the light paled through different shades of green, and there was even a pale, barely visible disk which was the sun. In two shifts, Fritz guiding one and I the other, we went to one of the communal places, to freshen ourselves, to eat and drink and replace the filters which we used in our masks. This, too, had been carefully chosen. It was the communal place attached to one of the major pyramids, where a large number of Masters, from different parts of the City, met daily to conduct some sort of business. ( Like so many other things, the business itself was quite baffling.) This meant that there was a large and constant turnover of slaves who had accompanied their Masters and whose services had been dispensed with for the time being. Some, Fritz had noted, were there for hours, sleeping on the couches, and the majority of them did not know each other except as vague characterless figures, with whom they jostled for places at the dispensing machines or for vacant couches. All the slaves, of course, were always so exhausted that they had little energy for observation, anyway.
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