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.’
Notices along the plane said that in the interests of safety and hygiene, smoking was forbidden. Richard had been tempted to take out his pipe and slyly puff at it, but he was put off because there were no ashtrays. Now that the meal was over, however, he saw his neighbour, and other people, buying huge cut-glass souvenir ashtrays of Nihilon Airways at ten klipps each from the stewardesses, then taking out pipes and cigars, and lighting up. Richard also bought one, though not without five minutes of bargaining which finally brought the price down to seventeen klipps from the naked, though mercenary stewardess.
‘We have strange customs,’ said the professor, blowing thick smoke across the gangway. ‘In Nihilon’s internal politics the domestic theme is always and continually freedom — the uttermost freedom of the people to do what they like. We sing songs of freedom, ballads of liberty, lullabies of free-for-all. I supppose you’re even going to stay at Freedom Hotel in Nihilon?’
‘Hotel Stigma, Ekeret Place,’ said Richard. ‘May I borrow a match?’
‘Set the plane on fire if you want to,’ laughed the professor, passing him one. ‘See if I care! But you see, when a few dissident intellectuals formed a political party called Real Freedom, they were derided not only by the people, but by the government as well (what’s left of it) since everyone believed that they had freedom already. Freedom to start a political group based on freedom was only a way of destroying freedom. So President Nil ordered the offenders to be sent to a school for writers and journalists. However, a group of workers and intellectuals started a political party with the idea that people in our country had too much freedom, and that they should lose some of it in the name of National Unity and Recovery. The government saw a real threat in this. Scores of these dissidents were rounded up and shot without trial, but quite a few got away to the mountains, where they may still be, for all any of us know. Such political ideas were getting dangerously close to those of the Rationalists during our civil war twenty-five years ago, and none of us are nihilistic enough to want that back.’
A voice from a small air-vent, built into the back of the seat in front, called out: ‘Well said, professor. You speak like a true and grateful citizen of Nihilon.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said the professor. He grimaced at Richard, then pressed a handkerchief over the mouthpiece. ‘I was only praising the awful place,’ he whispered to Richard, ‘to see whether they were tuned in or not. The fact is I’m high on the executive staff of a revolutionary party myself, but don’t betray me, will you?’
Richard suspected a trap. ‘I really don’t want to know about it.’
‘It’s all right, my friend, they can’t hear us now. I’ve got to tell you certain things because, as a foreigner, you might be useful to us.’
‘My sole purpose in going to Nihilon is to write a guidebook,’ Richard protested, ‘not to help in revolution.’ An air-hostess whose breasts were slightly too low asked with a smile if they needed anything to drink. ‘A glass of water,’ said Richard, taking no chances on anything stronger. The lunch wine had given him a headache, indigestion, eye-strain, hot flushes, heartburn, handshake and a sudden flood of inexplicable melancholia, and he hoped these discomforts would diminish if not wear off by the time they landed. In order to change the subject, he mentioned these ailments to the professor while he sipped the water brought to him by the girl whose breasts he wanted to touch and who, he seemed sure, had winked at him suggestively while placing the glass into his hand.
The professor removed the handkerchief from the speaker-microphone in front, saying in a pompous voice: ‘There are many different vines in this country. Nihilon is famous for its superlative vintages, all of which are extremely delectable.’ He stuffed the handkerchief back again so that he could not be overheard: ‘But some of them have unenviable reputations, dear foreign friend. That particularly sweet and faintly fizzy wine you so unwisely imbibed during lunch sends one into the blackest of black sadnesses. At one time our political prisoners were induced to get drunk on it, so that they invariably confessed, except the schizophrenics, who were always as hard as nails, full of contradictions, and confessions you could never rely on. Anyway, Richard, I remember an incident a few months ago, when I was staying at a remote village in the mountains for some peace and quiet to get on with my work. There was an impressionable tourist who, after drinking one glass of the wine you had at lunch, fancied he’d changed into a vampire bat so that, unknown to any of us, who thought he’d merely gone outside to sample the pure night air, he launched himself in one glorious leap from a hundred-metre cliff at the end of the village. The night had been dark to all but him as he climbed that fatal parapet, but the police found him mangled on the rocks next morning. Unfortunately, in his back pocket were the details of our proposed coup d’état, but as our relations with Cronacia were rather tender at that time, as they are today, so I heard on the radio, the police assumed he was one of their agents, and didn’t connect us with it.’
‘You certainly seem to have exciting lives,’ said Richard.
‘That’s nihilism,’ the professor beamed, taking a large envelope from his briefcase: ‘Will you deliver this to a certain address when you get to Nihilon City? Our operations orders are inside. I can’t do it myself because I’m followed everywhere. Otherwise I would.’
Richard held it: ‘Who follows you?’
‘Everyone,’ said the professor. ‘In Nihilon everyone follows everyone else. I follow the person I’m ordered to, just as another person is ordered to follow me. I’m never sure who it is, because he’s changed from day to day, just as my own instructions are. It’s all worked out by computer and communicated to us by telephone before breakfast each morning.’
Richard didn’t believe a word of it. ‘Sounds like a lot of wasted energy.’