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Be that as it may, it seemed as if a giant, invisible, vicious hand tugged the bicycle from him, threw it on the ground in front, then finished its work by dropping him on top of it. The roar of an explosion shed a sudden orange light, and tried to pull the roof from his mouth. In spite of his previous constant preoccupation with the dam, it was some minutes, while he lay there half-stunned, before he realized that it must have been destroyed. He expected masses of water to churn through the groaning sky and fall directly upon him, and his one impulse was to crawl the remaining few hundred metres to the skyline and get over the crest of the hill, as if he would find safety there. The lights of Fludd in the valley behind were going out one by one. He knew at last that there was no safety in Nihilon, but wondered why he alone out of thirty thousand had survived the disaster? The noise of breaking walls reached him, as more apartment blocks gave way.

He had pains in his stomach, but was relieved to find that his bicycle had suffered no real damage. There were tears on his face, forced out by shock, and perhaps sorrow at the fate of the inhabitants of Fludd. At the summit of the hill he turned to look back in the first light of dawn, at a sluggishly turning sheet of water where the flourishing town had been. He sat on a rock and wrote a hymn to Fludd, and to his sleeping loved one lost to him forever, thinking that should he come back this way to the frontier, she would not be there to greet him.

But he recalled once more his far-off promise to meet Jaquiline Sulfer in Nihilon City, and their intention of going home together in a first-class express sleeper. Such a bright lascivious picture calmed him down, and with one last look at the grey lake of Fludd, he turned and pedalled along the road towards the capital, reflecting that travels in a foreign country put you into the way of knowing more about yourself, or clarifying what was already in your heart. Out of your own country, he had discovered, a veritable explosion of the personality takes place, even over the most minor incidents. All you had to do was stay calm in the face of the final threatened disintegration, he decided, stopping to take a bar of chocolate from one of his panniers, and noting how fresh and cool the air smelled as he stood by the roadside to eat it.

The road gradually descended through open moorland, scenery broken by small fenced-off fields of black earth in which people were already working.

At the next village was a restaurant, and he went in to get some breakfast. The dining room was full of well-dressed men and their stout wives eating heavy nihilistic meals. There were no seats left, so he sat on a high stool at the bar.

A dark-haired half-starved young man standing on a nearby chair appeared to be shouting at everyone: ‘You eat too much, I say! But the revolution will cure all that! Honesty and order and progress will make you lean, and you’ll be afraid to eat for fear of choking on your own guilt.’

This sort of talk in Nihilon sounded exciting to Adam, and he looked up at the young man so as to hear his words more clearly. Several eaters took a moment from masticating to laugh at what he said.

‘You are disgusting,’ he went on. ‘You are all fat maggots living off the backs of the people. You gobble such enormous meals while they are sweating in the fields on nothing to eat. You are a herd of rich pigs gluttonizing all day, while they starve even at night.’

A few of them clapped, but he was obviously not yet in the full stream of his wrath. ‘When the revolution comes, and make no mistake, it will come sooner than you think, you’ll all be set to work, building roads, draining marshes, moving mountains, excavating canals, digging with spades.’

Several of the eaters groaned. He was getting better. ‘But if I have my way, my own particular way, my own private personal spiteful heartfelt way, I’ll have all of you stood up against a sunlit wall and shot.’ To their cheers and applause he came down, and walked across to the bar. On his way there, some of the more appreciative and enthusiastic diners thrust money into his hands.

Adam was served with meat, bread, coffee, and Nihilitz. ‘I loathe them so much,’ the firebrand said to him, ‘that I can’t even eat.’

The barman put a pot of coffee before him: ‘What was that explosion at Fludd?’

‘Explosion?’ said Adam.

‘We heard a bit of a bang from that direction not long ago,’ said the barman.

‘The dam went,’ Adam told him, his mouth full.

‘I’d better get on to the local newspaper then,’ said the barman. ‘Anybody survive?’

‘Only me, as far as I know.’

The barman whistled through his teeth and went to the telephone.

‘The government’s been waiting to make an example of Fludd for a long time,’ said the firebrand. ‘Those who can live like the people of Fludd are dangerous, unpredictable, proud, sleepy, independent — in a word, revolutionary. But that barman’s wasting his time phoning the local paper. The news is known already. The dam was blown up deliberately.’

‘It must have been,’ said Adam. ‘I saw it. There was a great explosion.’

‘You saw it, did you?’ said Firebrand, ‘and you’re the only survivor?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, your life isn’t worth that empty plate you haven’t eaten. They’ll kill you. They must have banked on having no witnesses so that they could blame it on Cronacia. You’re a hunted man from now on. You’d better throw in your lot with me.’

This was bad news, but Adam ordered another breakfast. ‘You see,’ Firebrand explained, ‘I’m the resident agitator at this popular and expensive restaurant. The manager hired me six months ago to make speeches so that the customers, thinking the revolution was coming, would eat more to make up for the hard times that the revolution would bring, if it did actually come. So because people are superstitious his business increased twenty times. Restaurants for fifty kilometres around had to close down. He pays me almost nothing, as you can imagine, but that’s all right, because while I’m shouting about a mock revolution, I’m meanwhile planning and working for the real revolution. No one suspects this — how could they? — but my first blow is due to be struck today, and since you are on the government’s death-list you’d better join me. We aren’t the only two, because there’s street fighting already in Shelp and Nihilon City. The whole country is rising.’

‘What did you do before you took this job?’ Adam asked out of genuine curiosity.

‘I was a writer working for the National Magazine, and I did very well at that sort of work. The best thing I wrote was a series of articles in praise of nihilistic capitalism. I was made a Hero of the Evolution by President Nil, being the youngest man ever to get that award, so you can imagine how I felt. The only trouble about doing something like that, though, is that you get disillusioned straight away with what you’ve just written. So of course I lost my job because I began to see that nihilism was not the right thing for Nihilon. I became a revolutionary, met other people who had actually formed dissident groups, and for a time I travelled around getting familiar with the country and its terrain. The only maps we had were those in school atlases on a small scale, a rudimentary motoring-map, and a few wild productions from those cartographic maniacs patronized by President Nil.’