‘Please stay as long as you like, sir,’ said the waiter. ‘I’m happy to be working. It keeps my mind off other things.’ He held a lighter to Adam’s cigar, who told himself that after his day’s tribulations (which had been rather minor ones, after all) he felt more content than he ever had in his life, which state was, now he thought of it, one of the real pleasures of travelling. ‘What things does it take your mind off?’ he asked languidly, blowing smoke across his empty dessert plate.
‘Just the town of Fludd.’
‘Seems a very nice place to me.’
The waiter poured himself a glass of Nihilitz. ‘It is, sir. It’s the best town in the country. None of us can deny that. We all love it. We’re deeply attached to it.’
Adam found him a fascinating old character.
‘What is it, then?’
‘It’s the dam, sir.’
‘Dam?’
The waiter drew up a chair and sat down, choosing a cigar and lighting it. ‘Don’t you know anything about Fludd?’
‘I just stumbled on it in the dark, as it were, though I knew of its existence by the map.’
The waiter leaned towards him, a thrill of fear in his eyes, the cigar trembling in his teeth: ‘Our town is built under the great walls of an unsafe dam.’
Adam almost choked on his own smoke: ‘Really?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s been completed for several months, but we’ve been expecting it to give way any moment ever since. Cracks were there while it was being opened by President Nil, and he and all his party couldn’t get away fast enough. They ran down the hill and back to their cars, top hats flying all over the place. If there was an election in Nihilon they wouldn’t be in power for long. It’s not that we are worried about the dam, but we can’t forgive them for running away.’
‘But why did they build a town under the dam?’
‘Most of it was here already, and they didn’t want to take it away. As soon as people realized what danger they were in, they decided to leave. But the government paid them treble wages, and made everything practically free. That’s why this hotel’s so cheap.’
‘How can you stay here, nevertheless?’ he asked, wanting to get on his bicycle and pedal out of the place at top speed.
‘Well, you see, sir, we’re all in a bit of a dilemma. We’re not only accustomed to the easier life, but we’ve got used to living in danger. If we were to leave — speaking for myself, and I know others feel the same — our lives would be empty. We wouldn’t know what to do. We’d be like dead people. Our lives wouldn’t be worth living. Yet at the same time we know that we’ll die if we stay here, because the dam is bound to give sooner or later, and sweep us all away. So we’re rather contemptuous of people who prefer to live in safety. At first, as you can imagine, it was difficult to sleep, not knowing when we’d drown. Men couldn’t even make love to their wives or girlfriends. But now, we live in the present, as it were, never thinking about tomorrow. It’s somehow made us all human again — you might say. I enjoy talking to you about it, sir. I feel noble at knowing that any moment the hotel walls could burst, and that would be the end of it all.’ He was sweating, and poured himself more Nihilitz. ‘Imagine living in safety!’ he said with great bravado and swagger, draining the liquor with trembling hands.
Adam, in despair, knocked his glass away: ‘Is it true? Or are you telling lies, you bloody old Nihilist?’
‘It’s true,’ the waiter said, standing up, in no way offended. ‘Come with me, and I’ll show you the cracks in the dam, with water beginning to trickle through. They’re lit up every night, and we Fluddites make it one of our favourite walks. We stroll there with our wives and loved ones, even children, to look at it and speculate on when it might break. There’s a café there, so we can split a bottle of Nihilitz together.’
Adam began to sweat: ‘You mean the inhabitants of this town don’t sleep?’
‘Not very much, sir. When they can, they do, but not often. There are thirty thousand inhabitants here, including cats and dogs.’
‘Cats and dogs?’
‘They were included in the last census, naturally.’
‘Why naturally?’
‘Because when the dam bursts the government can call it a really big disaster. We import cats and dogs, and breed them, so that the number of souls drowned will be high. They can claim a catastrophe, which will make sensational news, and say that Cronacian saboteurs blew the dam up, proclaim a national day of mourning; and declare war. We’d really like to get the hotel full of tourists, if we can, so that we can then claim an international incident and gain the sympathy of foreign governments against those Cronacian bastards.’
‘What you are saying,’ Adam cried, feeling the day’s exhaustion pouring back into him twentyfold, ‘is that your government deliberately built the dam with faults in it so that when it collapses they can say Cronacia did it?’
‘I suppose that’s about the measure of it, sir,’ said the waiter with sad resignation.
He stood up, pushing his chair back with a clatter: ‘I’m going.’
‘Wouldn’t be much good, sir. The roads are closed by the militia every night. If you get out tomorrow you’ll be lucky. Depends on whether any more foreigners are coming up from the frontier to take your place. You look worn out, sir. Don’t you think you’d better get some sleep? I think I’ll try and snatch an hour or two. It’s nearly midnight.’
Adam sat for twenty minutes on his own, head bowed, and unaware of lights being put out around him. When someone tapped his shoulder he looked up and saw the attractive young girl from the reception desk. ‘Is it true about the dam?’
She smiled, showing small white teeth. ‘Yes. Is it true that you’re a poet, as it says in your passport?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come up to bed, then, and we’ll try and get some sleep. They’ll be shutting the hotel doors now.’ He insisted on wheeling his bicycle along the hall and into the lift, so as not to lose sight of it, he explained, because it was his only form of transport. He leaned it against the lift-wall as they ascended, and put his arms around her.
In the opulently furnished room, his bicycle rested against the wardrobe at the bottom of the bed. The girl undressed him, and then herself, but only after much coaxing was he able to make love. The central heating kept up a comfortable temperature in the room, and they rolled around on the covers, playing and loving for an hour, until they crawled exhausted between the sheets, and he fell asleep to the sound of heavy rain. Adam thought of Jaquiline Sulfer, whom he had promised to meet in Nihilon City, and whom he was vaguely aware of having betrayed, but his last thoughts were about the dam. He hoped it wouldn’t burst during the night, or indeed split in any way at all till he had cycled far away from it. He did not know why he stayed where he was, but he felt such awful fatigue that it was utterly impossible for him to stir even one foot towards getting up.
Chapter 17
A circle of red fire-tenders poured fountains of pink foam over the airliner. Richard expected it to blow up any second, for after such a nightmare journey to this country of the damned there seemed no reason why he should be privileged to go on enjoying the good things of the earth when people had already been brutally snatched from it. Even the most balanced mind would have shunned optimism, and so did he, standing in a queue and waiting to be thrown by the air-crew and scorch-marked stewardesses out of an escape hatch.