He recalled how he and his company of Rational Guards, reduced to twenty-five men out of two hundred, had been ordered to defend the town of Amrel, which was of great importance for the safety of Nihilon City a hundred and sixty kilometres to the southwest. But there was little chance of holding back the ever-pressing forces of nihilism, for with terror on their side, the sinuous and pot-holed roads opened before them, and led inexorably towards the centre of government.
Amrel was one of the last remaining blocks to their progress. It stood on a sheer hill, a packed little town of tall and ancient buildings from whose ramparts one could see the long bridge over the River Aznal – an impregnable position, and tactically the right place for a last stand since it overlooked the eastern plateau for a great distance, and would have commanded it in every way if the Rationalists had possessed a dozen heavy machine guns, a battery of artillery, and several hundred fresh, well-trained men, instead of twenty-five worn-out idealistic fugitives who had little food and ammunition left.
Even so, the forward patrols of the Nihilists had suffered at the bridge, as the score of bodies rotting in the sun has proved. Benjamin had gone down the hill himself and laid explosive charges under its supports, wired them skilfully, and trailed the lead up the cliff face to his headquarters in the old palace. He would wait for days if necessary for that armoured group he’d dreamed of all his life, a trio of prime and perfect tanks on a long bridge suddenly convulsed in an earthquake of explosions that dropped them into icy water below.
Such a picture was with him still as he heaved another stone up to the culvert, part of the same hot territory he’d tried to defend so long ago. That classically perfect bridge had never been blown, for a man of the town had approached him one evening, and beckoned him on to the arcaded walk with a wide view over the empty and lustreless plain. He talked for a long time of how the bridge was of great commercial and cultural value to the town, part of its actual life-spirit, a bridge which not only connected it to the rich wheatlands and the pastures of the Alpine regions, but also to the Chimney Zone north of Nihilon City from which came all manufactured goods. The bridge was a vital lifeline of the country that, once destroyed, would take years to rebuild, and in any case it was no longer a question, the man went on, of holding up the Nihilist army. All the Nihilists had to do was cross the river by boat to the north and south, out of range of Rationalist patrols, and the town would fall within a matter of hours.
Benjamin knew he ought to have shot the man dead, and had his body thrown towards the river, as the townspeople slung their dogs when they wanted to kill them, but he hesitated, and went on listening in the dusk. The man offered him a bus, with enough petrol to get his company to Nihilon City, in exchange for leaving the bridge alone. Amrel would fall anyway, even if they died defending it. Benjamin knew that the Rationalist armies were being defeated on all fronts because they lacked supplies and popular support. Walking up and down in the cool moonlight, smoking a cigar and listening to the smooth persuasions of this man, offering him safety in the form of a bus and petrol, he felt for the first time since leaving his own country that he wanted to live. Perhaps if he survived he would even fall in love again, and his nod of acceptance was barely visible in the half darkness.
The following morning he and his soldiers had got into the bus. The man who had provided it, and who had shaken his hand warmly, who had embraced him and called him his own brother as they said goodbye, was an agent of the Nihilists. Halfway to the capital, it was by the merest chance that a bomb was found under one of the bus seats, which was to have destroyed them all. Also, five of the petrol cans were full of water, though this was remedied by taking more fuel from filling-stations at gunpoint.
His company deserted him to a man on the outskirts of Nihilon City, where he was arrested, charged with treason for deserting the bridge, and sentenced to be shot. He had no defence, though he said he was innocent, and that his retreat from Amrel was a tactical move to draw the Nihilists into an ambush, but that his own men had abandoned him before he could carry it out.
A Nihilist column had marched over the bridge into Amrel on the following day, and so all the surrounding region was lost by the Rationalists. Other areas were thus outflanked, and the defenders of each front began to fall back in panic. It was the end of the end. In the general collapse, he escaped from his gaolers, and it was only by raw cunning and infinite privation that he was able to get out of the country some months later. As for President Took, no news of his fate had ever been published by the Nihilists.
The ditch was at last filled, and he drove his car on to the road, reflecting that his day back in Nihilon had so far been as arduous as when he was fighting to save it from the black threat which had now overtaken it.
After a few kilometres along the empty highway in his fast, comfortable car he came to a barrier with the words: CUSTOMS POST. WE IMPLORE YOU TO HALT in painted white letters across the top. There was a maroon Bivouac saloon car in front, and when the gate opened, they advanced between two concrete buildings with armed guards standing outside.
An arrogant young customs officer came out of the first door holding a large steel hammer with which he smashed the windscreen of the Bivouac to pieces. ‘You are forbidden to import windscreens into Nihilon,’ he sneered.
The blond, fair-haired, tall, blue-eyed man at the wheel jumped out and protested: ‘This is ridiculous.’
‘And that’s treasonable talk,’ shouted the customs officer. ‘Nothing is ridiculous in Nihilon. Drive on, or I’ll pulverize your headlamps. It’s also forbidden to import headlamps. It’s forbidden to bring anything in at all. I’ll tax your toenails if you insult me personally like that.’
The man quickly handed over a bundle of money, and after a big red paint mark had been splashed down the side of his car by a second customs officer, he was allowed to enter the country.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said the customs officer obsequiously when Benjamin drove forward, putting his hammer away into a briefcase. Benjamin was resigned to losing his windscreen, because he had a spare plastic one in his repair kit, but the customs officer asked: ‘How much blood do you have in your body, sir?’
Puzzled, he made a wild guess: ‘Sixteen litres.’
The customs officer opened the door: ‘You’re only allowed fifteen. Will you step this way, sir?’
He swore, but inaudibly, deciding to be more patient than he’d been at the first obstacle, and followed the customs man inside.
‘May I see your passport?’
Benjamin gave it to him: ‘Certainly.’
‘It’s forged,’ the man said with a smile, and Benjamin marvelled at how uncannily quick they were in detecting this fact, which was indeed true, though the falsification was so perfect that he didn’t see how they could tell. ‘However,’ the passport general said from behind the desk, ‘we don’t worry about such details in Nihilon. Kindly sit in that chair so that we can confiscate your litre of surplus blood, then we’ll let you go.’
Benjamin put his passport away, and began to roll up his shirt sleeve. ‘What would happen if I had a litre of blood less than the normal amount?’
‘You’d have a transfusion of the difference. That would be inconvenient, because you’d have to wait a few days until they could do it at the local clinic. And you’d have a big medical bill to pay. But there’d be no trouble. No trouble at all. As a Nihilist I have an answer to every question. There are advantages to this system, as you’ll no doubt find before you leave.’
Benjamin flinched and grunted as the needle went in, and turned pale when he saw such a huge flow of his life’s blood going out. However, the nurse who extracted it was pretty, so he didn’t object, but stood up as soon as it was finished and walked unsteadily back to his car.
‘The fact is,’ said the young customs official with the hammer in his briefcase, ‘no matter how much blood a person says he has we always take a litre out, on this route. We sell it to the Nihilon Blood Bank for use
in our war against Cronacia. It not only makes us money, but it’s patriotic as well.’
‘A charming idea,’ said Benjamin, glad to be back in his car, though feeling that he’d need a week to recover from this day’s blows.
‘Another thing,’ said the customs officer, ‘do you have a repair kit in your car?’
‘Of course.’
‘Kindly get it out for me.’
Like a man under interrogation, he had admitted something he thought to be totally innocent, if not irrelevant, only to find it of vital consequence to his exhausted body and irascible mind. ‘What the hell for?’
‘All repair kits have to be inspected.’
‘Is there duty to pay on them?’
The customs man shook his head. With a sigh, Benjamin went to the back of the car, lifted the tailgate, and pulled boxes about till he came to the repair kit.
‘Open it,’ said the customs officer.
He regarded it as the pride of his travelling equipment, a collection of spare parts and tools which he had chosen with care so as to make sure he could deal with any minor breakdown, having heard of Nihilon’s bad and brutal service stations. The customs officer picked over the tools disdainfully: ‘Do you think our garages are badly equipped? Or do you suspect that our mechanics are incompetent?’
‘I carry such tools in my own country,’ Benjamin lied.
‘Do they do things better there?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ he said, staggering from weakness.
‘Confiscated,’ said the customs officer, pulling them to the ground with a clatter. A humble little man in a white overall came with a barrow and carried them away. Benjamin, in no position to fight, walked to the front of his car, intending to drive on. ‘One moment,’ called the customs officer, drawing the hammer from his briefcase and making purposefully for the windscreen.
Benjamin ran with his remaining strength and, gasping for breath as he opened the door, took the heavy revolver from the glove-box. He pointed it at the customs officer, who also turned pale, and let his hammer drop. ‘Put that paint mark on the side of my car and let me go,’ Benjamin rasped, ‘or I’ll blow you to pieces.’
‘Yes sir,’ said the customs officer. Another man splashed a blue streak down the Thundercloud’s door, so that, highly satisfied at his forcefulness, Benjamin drove towards the gate.
A squat-faced soldier with rifle and bayonet turned a mangle-handle to open it. As Benjamin was driving through, obeying the road sign speed of five kilometres per hour, the soldier took a hammer from his pocket and ran in front of the car, smashing its windscreen to pieces. Benjamin, with wild rage, pressed on the accelerator in the hope of crushing him to death, but the adept soldier dodged clear and waved him on with a smile.
Chapter 10
Nihilon Airways ran three distinct services into Nihilon from the outside world: first-class, second-class, and a flight that could not be described as of any class at all. The fifth member of the guidebook research team, Richard Lope – a tall, dark, slim and handsome young man who, up to now, had been of a highly nervous disposition, had chosen second-class, or middle-class, and was finding it quite comfortable, though there were still three hours to go before landing. Lope had recently graduated with honours from the university, after three years studying the language of his own country which he had learned to speak at two and read at five. He was destined to become a diplomat, but looked upon the Nihilon trip as a pre-paid adventure before getting down to it.
What fascinated him at the moment was the naked air-hostess walking up and down with a tray of drinks and food. All she wore was a thin belt at the waist from which swung a notepad to take down the passengers’ orders. Naked air-hostesses were a speciality of Nihilon Airways, though few people were said to take advantage of the service for that fact alone. Nevertheless, Richard considered it a very pleasant aspect of Nihilonian travel, an encouraging introduction to the country as he gazed at the breasts of a beautiful young woman walking along the gangway with his lunch. Her red made-up lips smiled as she bent down to set the tray before him, one of her nipples only a few inches from his left eye.
What puzzled him, on the other hand, were the several protuberances along both sides of the plane which came awkwardly out towards the seats, and which the passengers unfortunate enough to have such a place – of which he was one – found difficult to sit by. They were a sort of oblong box, from which a long pipe or barrel went through the perspex windows. He imagined them to be the multiple aerials of some new and complicated beam-approach landing system, though he wasn’t entirely satisfied by this explanation.
During the meal, which included half a bottle of pink, fizzy and potent wine, he read the instruction booklet attached to the seat in front: ‘In case of emergency, passengers are kindly requested to carry on talking, reading, eating or sleeping, because though your lives are in our hands, and we will do our best to preserve them, there will be nothing anybody can do about it. Like all other airlines of the world we carry highly inflammable petrol, fly at a great height, and do not provide parachutes, so in the event of an emergency it is highly unlikely that either passengers or crew would survive. When the aircraft is about to land you may notice, if you are fortunate enough to be near an appropriate window, that the inner-port engine will burst into flames. This is part of our special Thrill Service, so you need not be alarmed. Your Captain is quite experienced at this form of landing, because he has already done it many times with this particular type of aircraft. All that remains is for Nihilon Airways to wish you a pleasant trip. You are flying at ten thousand metres. Speed unknown because the pitot tube has snapped off the main chimney, ha-ha! Your aircraft is a Cyclon B Private Enterprise 4-Jet Special, a miracle of modern technology built in the factories of Nihilon.’
Richard Lope copied this into his notebook, then went on to inform future would-be air travellers of the attractive stewardesses circulating on this class of plane. An elderly man sitting next to him said: ‘She is good-looking, isn’t she?’
‘Very,’ Richard agreed, as she poured his coffee.
‘If you stare too much it embarrasses them,’ the man whispered. ‘They’re liable to slap your face, or spill a lunch tray over you.’
‘It’s hardly possible not to stare.’
‘You are young,’ the man laughed, ‘I suppose that’s why. I’m fifty-five, and I’ve done this trip many times. I’m a professor of economics at Nihilon University, and I frequently visit other countries to attend seminars and conferences. I’m going back to form a committee for investigating ways of reorganizing Nihilon’s economy. All is not well in our country, Mr …?’
‘My name is Richard.’
‘Richard. There is a great deal of wastage.’
‘Too much nihilism?’ he laughed.
The professor nodded. ‘We may have to alter all that. There is talk that nihilism is not a viable economic proposition, though only a little talk, as yet. Nihilism is so highly regarded by the common people that we intellectuals are afraid to criticize it. Some won’t even talk about it. I don’t want to bore you with such vital topics, but I am beginning to realize that as a nihilist I have only one life, which fact will worry me in my old age, if ever it comes. That is why I travel second-class to Nihilon. I could go first-class, but that’s only for young people.’
‘What’s it like, then?’ Richard asked.
‘The best that Nihilon can offer. It is often referred to by us as the Ballroom Special, the biggest airliner we have, with eight engines, and no seats, but bars all round the plane and a dance band on a platform at the tail end. It is a heady wine-and-dance at twenty thousand metres, lasting five hours, followed by a forced landing at Nihilon airport with two engines on fire. There are charming dance hostesses fully dressed. Sometimes the captain comes down from his cockpit to join the passengers, and take a snack at one of the bars. Chandeliers glitter from the ceiling as the plane flies above all cloud at magnificent speed. Of course, there are incidents.
People fight or get drunk, or they become ill, or hysterical, or morbid, or so happy they want to wreck the plane and make it crash. Or they try to organize a hijack mutiny against the captain and crew, in which case they are brought down by concealed water-guns set at various parts of the fuselage. Those who don’t indulge in these scrapes may just sit back and observe the antics of those who do, so that a good time is usually had by everyone. But as I get older I like danger less, and prefer the company of these nubile young hostesses. You may also have heard about the Party Specials. No? Well, when members of our government want to gather in a light-hearted way, they have a meeting in one of these great planes. It circles for hours high over the country, a magnificent going-on, which often lasts till fuel runs out and the pilot is forced to land. No one can gatecrash at that height, and so, with all credentials thoroughly checked before take-off, the guests can relax and have the time of their lives, with no fear of assassination, and very little from a coup d’état, since everyone is drunk. Naturally, loyal citizens of Nihilon fervently hope that no such plane will ever crash. We put great faith in our technological achievements.’
Richard, who had been writing in his notebook, at last looked up. ‘What about third-class, or whatever it’s called?’
The professor seemed uninterested. ‘Third-class tourist-economy night-flight in ten miserable hours? Yes, people are towed in huge gliders by obsolescent bombers, or so I hear. They sit on the floor with luggage at their feet and packets of sandwiches in their hands. A continuous tape of crying babies is played from stereo-speakers to make them feel more uncomfortable, and smells of fatty stew emerge from the end of a pipe near the tail of the plane as it goes through air pockets above the mountain tops. Not very nice, I must say. During the flight passports are collected, and hardly distinguishable false ones are handed back before landing on an improvised field in some remote area fifty kilometres from the main airport, so that people have to make their way to Nihilon City by a very irregular bus service on bumpy tracks, or walk through unmapped forest, if and when they get by the police and customs tent at the side of the field. Even disorganization is well organized in Nihilon. I’m very proud of my country, in some ways. The aim of our government is absolute chaos meticulously regulated. There can’t be a more noble aim in the world than that. I defy you or anybody else to tell me that there can.’