‘That’s unjust,’ she protested, ‘since it was all your plan.’
He took her hand. ‘He was unjust in agreeing to it. It’s brought ashes and ruin on my head. He deserves to be punished. However, since it’s your wish, I won’t have him arrested, on condition that you come back here with me afterwards so that we can be together tonight.’
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘And while we stand talking we’re wasting time.’
They walked along the platform, the police chief swaggering as became his rank, and went out through the booking hall, to where his Zap sports car was waiting by the roadside.
Chapter 9
Benjamin sat in his silent car, wondering whether or not it had broken its back in tumbling down the bank. He was also curious as to why the powers of Nihilon were on to him so soon, for the driver in that red Zap was certainly no playboy out for a casual accident before breakfast. He’d tried to kill him, and that was a plain Nihilonian fact. Benjamin brooded that he’d probably betrayed himself by hitting the policeman at the frontier, an act he’d taken gluttonous pride in at the time, but which in the glare of midday he saw as his first and perhaps fatal mistake.
He’d always assumed that people over forty didn’t make such blunders, but in Nihilon he was learning certain things all over again. This fractured start threatened the fibres of his normally cool nerve, and as he turned the ignition key, he wondered whether his colleagues were faring any better in their allotted zones.
The ground was firmer under the trees, and he hoped to get back on the road, despite the many boulders scattered around. The engine sounded good, so he let off the brake, slipped into first gear, and went forward. Most of Benjamin’s life had been devoted to the study of history, and he had been chosen by the Editor of the proposed guidebook to concentrate, as far as possible, on recent events in Nihilon. This was easier said than done, for Benjamin knew that the history books of Nihilon’s more recent past were nothing more than gossip columns. In the country’s schools history was scandal. Nothing else was allowed. Dates and facts were hard to come by. Political reality was out. There were only false accounts of drunkenness, greed, bribe-taking, murder, orgy, perversion, incompetence, blackmail and corruption. The children and students loved it.
History, as it is ordinarily known, stopped at the beginning of the present regime which, during its twenty-five years of power, had closed the country off from the world, at least as regards any serious study of it. Tourists had been allowed to sample the nefarious delights of its nihilistic principles, but they had for the most part returned in a state of dumb shock.
Inwardly terrified of being disillusioned, they had praised the country out of all proportion to its negative achievements. In this way they kept faith in themselves, and by encouraging others to go in their tracks, enabled them to do the same. Some tourists had come back with no impressions at all, being none the wiser for their visits.
He cruised through the grove of trees, over ploughed earth and between stones, until an incline towards the road was gentle enough to ascend. Even so, it was steep, and called for the full power of the Thundercloud’s robust engine to get him to the top. Just in time, he noticed that a deep drainage ditch bordered the road, blocking him off from it. He cursed, stopped, pulled hard on the handbrake, and wondered how he could get over.
Some months ago a letter had reached him from an aged and venerable philosopher of Nihilon who had written a true and complete history of the last Nihilonian civil war, and of all that had happened since, which he was about to offer to a publisher in the capital. He said he would hide a carbon copy of the book in case the first one not only failed to be published, but was also not sent back to him. Another correspondent later informed Benjamin that the philosopher-historian had been arrested by his publisher and never seen again, adding that the spare copy of the manuscript was hidden somewhere in Nihilon. Benjamin, in his travels, hoped to find this document, but his return to Nihilon put him in great danger, because he had been there as a young man, and certain crimes were lyingly attributed to him. His life wouldn’t be worth a bent Nihilonian klipp if he were caught, which was why his encounter with the Zap was so worrying.
He got out of the car, hoping to stop a passing motorist and ask for help. But the road was empty, the sky was clear, the sun just past its zenith. At this rate it would take a week instead of a day to reach Nihilon City, so he decided to collect enough large stones to fill the ditch and then cross over it. Unfortunately, the most suitable stones lay at the bottom of the slope, which would mean great labour in bringing them up, but since it seemed the only solution he took off his shirt and walked down for the first consignment.
Twenty-five years ago there had been a civil war in Nihilon, between the ruling Rationalists, and the usurping Nihilists. Benjamin Smith, as an idealistic young man whose girlfriend had recently agreed to marry someone else, went off to fight, with other outsiders, for the cause of the Rationalists. His disappointment in love made him both cunning and reckless — cunning in military logic, and reckless for his personal safety — so that within a year he had reached the rank of company commander.
A drop of sweat from his forehead glistened momentarily on a large stone, that plunged to the bottom of the trench and gave back a sound of splintering fragments. During this lengthy transporting of boulders, perspiring freely, he recalled those days of battle for the Republic of Damascony — now Nihilon — when he had received the Damson Leaf Award for high and useful services from President Took, the last great Liberal president of the country, who was said to have died after the final collapse of the battlefronts. Benjamin wanted to find out what had really happened to him, and what had become of Took’s infant daughter, who would by now be a grown woman — if she had survived. It seemed to him, as he lugged a particularly heavy burden up the hill, that history was a dustbin to root around in occasionally for something spiritually satisfying to ponder on, especially when at the ripe age of fifty he was suffering the desolation of a broken marriage, and had accepted a job as historical adviser to an unnecessary guidebook merely to get away from it.
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.