Chapter 6:The Golden City

The thing that struck Tommy first of all was the scarcity of men in the city, compared to its size. The next thing was the entire absence of women. The roar of machines smote upon his consciousness as a bad third, though they made din enough. Perhaps he ignored the machine noises because the ornithopter on which they had arrived made such a racket itself.

They landed on a paved space perhaps a hundred yards by two hundred, three sides of which were walled off by soaring towers. The fourth gave off on empty space, and he realized that he was still at least a hundred feet above the ground. The ornithopter landed with a certain skilful precision and its wings ceased to beat. Behind it, the two fixed-wing machines soared down, leveled, hovered, and settled upon amazingly inadequate wheels. Their pilots got out and began to push them toward one side of the landing area. Tommy noticed it, of course.

He was noticing everything, just now. He said amazedly:

“Evelyn! They launch these planes with catapults like those our battleships use! They don’t take off under their own power!”

The six men on the ornithopter put their shoulders to their machine and trundled it out of the way. Tommy blinked at the sight.

“No field attendants!” He gazed out across the open portion of the land area and saw an elevated thoroughfare below. Some sort of vehicle, gleaming like gold, moved swiftly on two wheels. There was a walkway in the center of the street with room for a multitude. But only two men were in sight upon it. “Lord!” said Tommy. “Where are the people?”

There was brief talk among the crew of the ornithopter. Two of them picked up Tommy’s weapons, and the pilot he had wounded made a gesture indicating that he should follow. He led the way to an arched door in the nearest tower. A little two-wheeled car was waiting. They got into it and the pilot fumbled with the controls. As he worked at it--rather clumsily on account of his arm--the rest of the ornithopter’s crew came in. They wheeled out another vehicle, climbed into it, and shot away down a sloping passage.

Their own vehicle followed and emerged upon the paved and nearly empty thoroughfare. Tall buildings rose all about them, with curved walls soaring dizzily skyward. There was every sign of a populous city, including the dull drumming roar of many machines, but the streets were empty. The little machine moved swiftly for minutes. Twice it swung aside and entered a sloping incline. Once it went up. The other time it dived down seventy feet on a four-hundred-foot ramp. Then it swung sharply to the right, meandered into a street-level way leading into the heart of a monster building, and stopped. And in all its travel it had not passed fifty people.

The pilot-turned-chauffeur turned and grinned amiably, and led the way again. Steps--twenty or thirty of them. Then they emerged suddenly into a vast room. It must have been a hundred and fifty feet long, fifty wide, and nearly as high. It was floored with alternate blocks of what seemed to be an iron-hard black wood and the omnipresent golden metal. Columns and pilasters about the place gave forth the same subdued deep golden glow. Light streamed from panels inset in the wall and ceiling--a curious saffron-red light. There was a massive table of the hard black wood. Chairs with curiously designed backs were ranged about it. They were benches, really, but they served the purpose of chairs. Each was too narrow to hold more than one person.

The room was empty.

They waited. After a long time a man in a blue tunic came into the room and sat down on one of the benches. A long time later, another man came in, in red; and another and another, until there were a dozen in all. They regarded Tommy and Evelyn with a weary suspicion. One of them--an old man with a white beard--asked questions. The pilot answered them. At a word, the two men with Tommy’s weapons placed them on the table. They were inspected casually, as familiar things. They probably were, since some of Jacaro’s gunmen had been killed in a fight in this city. Another question.

The pilot explained briefly and offered Tommy the black-metal pad again. It still contained the incomplete map of a hemisphere, and was obviously a repetition of the question of where he came from.

Tommy took it, frowning thoughtfully. Then an idea struck him. He found the little stud which, pressed by the pad’s owner, had erased the previous drawings. He pressed it and the lines disappeared. And Tommy drew, crudely enough, that complicated diagram which is supposed to represent a cube which is a cube in four dimensions: a tesseract.

Upon one surface of the cube he indicated the curving towers of the Golden City. Upon a surface representing a plane beyond the three dimensions of normal experience, he repeated the angular tower structures of New York. He shrugged rather hopelessly as he passed it over, but to his amazement it was understood at once.

The little black pad passed from hand to hand and an animated discussion took place. One rather hard-faced man was the most animated of all. The bearded old man demurred. The hard-faced man insisted.

Tommy could see that his pilot’s expression was becoming uneasy. But then a compromise seemed to be arrived at. The bearded man spoke a single, ceremonial phrase and the twelve men rose. They moved toward various doors and one by one left, until the room was empty.

But the pilot looked relieved. He grinned cheerfully at Tommy and led the way back to the two-wheeled vehicle. The two men with Tommy’s weapons vanished. And again there was a swift, cyclonelike passage along empty ways with the throbbing of machinery audible everywhere.

Into the base of a second building, up endless stairs, past innumerable doors. It seemed to Tommy that he heard voices behind some of them, and they were women’s voices.

At a private, triple knock a door opened wide, and the pilot led the way into a room, closed and locked the door behind him, and called. A woman’s voice cried out in astonishment. Through an inner arch a woman came running eagerly. Her face went blank at sight of Tommy and Evelyn, and her hand flew to a tiny golden object at her waist. Then, at the pilot’s chuckle, she flushed vividly.

Hours later, Tommy and Evelyn were able to talk it over. They were alone then, and could look out an oval window upon the Golden City all about them. It was dark, but saffron-red panels glowed in building walls all along the thoroughfares, and tiny glowing dots in the soaring spires of gold told of people within other dwellings like this.

“As I see it,” said Tommy restlessly, “the Council--and it must have been that in the big room to-day--put us in our friend’s hands to learn the language. He’s been working with me four hours, drawing pictures, and I’ve been writing down words I’ve learned. I must have several hundred of them. But we do our best talking with pictures. And Evelyn, this city’s in a bad fix.”

Evelyn said irrelevantly: “Her name is Ahnya, Tommy, and she’s a dear.

We got along beautifully. I’ll bet I found out things you don’t even guess at.”

“You probably have,” admitted Tommy, frowning. “Check up on this: our friend’s name is Aten, and he’s an air-pilot and also has something to do with growing foodstuffs in some special towers where they grow crops by artificial light only. Some of the plants he sketched look amazingly like wheat, by the way. The name of the town is”--he looked at his notes--”Yugna. There are some other towns, ten or twelve of them. Rahn is the nearest, and it’s worse off than this one.”

“Of course,” said Evelyn, smiling. “They use cuyal openly, there!”

“How’d you learn all that?” demanded Tommy.

“Ahnya told me. We made gestures and smiled at each other. We understood perfectly. She’s crazy about her husband, and I--well she knows I’m going to marry you, so...”

Tommy grunted.

“I suppose she explained with a smile and gestures just how much of a strain it is, simply keeping the city going?”

“Of course,” said Evelyn calmly. “The city’s fighting against the jungle, which grows worse all the time. They used to grow their foodstuffs in the open fields. Then within the city. Now they use empty towers and artificial light. I don’t know why.”

Tommy grunted again.

“This planet’s just had, or is having, a change of geologic period,” he explained, frowning. “The plants people need to live on aren’t adapted to the new climate and new plants fit for food are scarce.

They have to grow food under shelter, now, and their machines take an abnormal amount of supervision--I don’t know why. The air-conditions for the food plants; the machines that fight back the jungle creepers which thrive in the new climate and try to crawl into the city to smother it; the power machines; the clothing machines--a million machines have to be kept going to keep back the jungle and fight off starvation and just hold on doggedly to the bare fact of civilization.