The Pug flew low over the course, tipping its wings in a victory salute, before disappearing back towards Cronacia. The crowd descended with a great roar towards the course, intending to kill the Cronacian drivers who, however, thwarted this vengeful desire by piling into three salvageable cars and driving off towards the mountains. Those spectators who hadn’t joined in this move were cheering and clapping at the end of the festivities, and beginning to leave the grounds, highly satisfied at the day’s upheavals.
Edgar found Mella asleep on the boat-trolley, and woke her so that she could start towing him towards Nihilon City. The chill of evening was already biting through his thin suit, as the final yellow film of sunlight edged the rimline of the mountains. He called to Mella for his overcoat, and she fastened it around him with her own scarf. ‘Won’t you be chilly?’
‘I keep warm by pulling,’ she said. ‘We’ll go on for an hour, then stop by the roadside. I shall make a fire to cook your supper.’
‘You’re wonderful,’ he said, settling back comfortably, dozing to the regular rock of the cart, body warm and face healthily cold at the onset of Nihilon night.
One-door Zaps were eating through his dreams and bones. Then he was driving one towards the stars, till it hit the sun, and turned over when he pressed the doorknob with his foot. He dropped through the single door, into the free-fall of space. A planet grabbed his arm, and swung him against the studs of the Milky Way.
Mella was screaming, and a jolt that went with it finally woke him up. A thin man of medium height, wearing overalls and a rather expensive, finely-cut jacket, aimed a revolver as he lay on the ground: ‘You’re under arrest.’
A sickle moon curved above the man’s cap and the mountain crestline. Edgar felt as if his back had been broken in the fall, but he was able to stand up and comfort Mella, who was sobbing against the boat-trolley.
‘We insurrectionists are taking your property. You will be paid in full next week when we have formed a government. The name of the currency has yet to be decided, and so has the price of your property.’
They were opening his boxes in the lamplight, and laying his survey instruments gently on the ground. The man in charge examined them, after making sure that his prisoners were well guarded. Mella turned to Edgar and took him in her arms, her tears wetting his face. ‘I’m sorry, my love,’ she said. ‘It was an ambush, and I could do nothing. But don’t worry, we’ll get through.’
The ringleader was studying Edgar’s maps with interest, spreading each one out for discussion with his friends, as if to base future plans on them. During the prolonged talk, they were avidly eating the provisions that Mella had bought with such effort in Shelp. The chief of the group said to Edgar: ‘We are extremely grateful for your contribution of surveying and cartographic equipment. Now we can begin to form our general staff on a scientific basis. We have waited for you for many months, but you came exactly on time. Our overseas headquarters put the right material into your luggage, so when you return, please tell them how thankful we all are. The guidebook you want to write will be so complete that no description of our newly liberated country will ever be bettered. I hope that your four colleagues who also came to Nihilon are carrying out their missions with the same degree of success. Within a year, Nihilon will be a different country. We’ll even change its name. Order will be positive, law will be rigorous, chaos will be eliminated, nihilism will be banned. Nihilon City will be called Truth. The port of Shelp (our second largest conurbation) will be renamed Fact. We will be objective, just, able, honest. And you will always be an honoured guest because, with your four colleagues, you are contributing to the insurrection. In the main square of Truth we shall erect a group of statues to the Eternal Pentacle, those travellers who helped the nation to regain its dignity.’
‘If it means bringing order into this mad country, then I’m glad I’ve been able to help you,’ Edgar said, wondering how he could escape from such pompous bandits. To judge by their faces it seemed impossible that they would ever build good roads, or get trains to run on time. In any case, he saw now that he had been used as an unwitting dupe of the insurrection by the publishing company back home, and this put him into a self-deprecating frame of mind, and an ill-temper which came close to self-pity. But he was consoled by the fact that Mella’s tears had dried during the leader’s speech. She put her arms around Edgar, saying how proud she was that her sweetheart was also a hero who would help to save her country from ruin, and thereby restore the good name of her father, President Took, to the history books of Nihilon.
Chapter 24
The town of Amrel, perched on a steep hill beyond the river, slept in the midday sun. Brought closer by the lens of Benjamin’s binoculars, birds circled over red roofs and sandstoned walls, exactly as when he had abandoned it twenty-five years ago to the advancing forces of nihilism.
Members of his insurrectionary column were spread under cover in the barley-fields on either side of the road, while the headquarters caravan of his Thundercloud Estate car was hidden behind some trees. He sweated as he lay on the hot stony soil, trying to formulate some plan by which to recapture the unsuspecting town.
Only an immediate attack had any chance of succeeding. His column of six hundred men was well equipped with rifles and machine guns, but several thousand Nihilist fanatics were thought to be in Amrel. He decided therefore to drive his Thundercloud, with four other soldiers inside, over the bridge and up into the centre of the town. Posing as ordinary tourists, they would occupy the post-office, and turn it into a fortress. Five minutes later, with all attention focused there, a bridgehead would be secured from below, from which two companies would be launched into the town. A further force would by-pass Amrel to the north and establish blocking positions on the Nihilon City road so as to deal with any Nihilists attempting to retreat in that direction. This plan left him with no reserves should anything go wrong, but Benjamin thought this was a risk they had to take. In case of defeat, the survivors were to regroup in the eastern mountains.
He drove towards the bridge on a calm fine day that was full of the soft heat of spring, ripening barley on either side waving in the ever-provident earth. There was a new hotel by the river bank, and people dining on the terrace looked at Benjamin’s car with interest as it went by. Many were Nihilist officials wearing black bowler hats, with guns by their tables, and singing drunkenly.
Beyond the first half of the long bridge, standing on low land between two arms of the river, was a garage repair workshop, with lorries and tractors parked outside that, after the battle, Benjamin would use to inaugurate a motorized column for reconnaisance and vanguard operations. The narrow bridge had low walls on either side, and he drove across slowly, admiring the packed mass of the old town on the hillside above — one of the tourist gems of Nihilon, he would say in his guidebook.
It seemed as if his life were living itself all over again. Through the fully opened windows came the same smells of dust and food, river water and kerosene that had assailed him so long ago. In spite of the neat and bellicose plan about to be carried out, he felt as if he were in fact going into the town as a peaceful and enquiring tourist. Only the rifles and machine guns lying about the bottom of the car told him that this was not so. He felt calm enough, yet sweat was pouring from him, and his hands around the steering wheel slid a little too much for safety. Life is one mistake after another, and he wondered whether this would be his last, though he consoled himself with the fact all mistakes are different, which at least made them interesting.