‘Pay for coffee, then!’
Benjamin longed to shoot it out, knowing he would kill him. He was totally unconcerned for his own safety, but dared not do it with Jaquiline by his side.
The café-owner smiled. ‘If it’s true you’re leading the forces of law and honesty to final victory, you can’t refuse to pay for your coffee, though you may be greatly tempted. Nor can you order your soldiers to obliterate all sign of this shack and its too scrupulous occupant.’
‘How much?’ Benjamin asked.
‘A hundred klipps.’
He walked back and placed a bank note for that amount on the counter. ‘Where’s the tip?’ the man demanded, his revolver still pointing.
‘I’ve paid the price. No tip.’
‘A hundred and twenty,’ the man insisted.
‘I’ll have my soldiers burn you out, you robber.’
‘That would cost you twenty million klipps in compensation.’
‘For this shack?’ Benjamin shouted.
The man leered at him. ‘My soul is invested in it. A twenty-klipp tip on two cups of coffee is very reasonable.’
‘Tips and bribes are immediately abolished in territory I pass through.’
The man saw his dilemma, and lowered his revolver. ‘The price for the coffee was a hundred and twenty. I put the rates up this morning, but forgot to tell you. No tips from now on.’
Benjamin threw him a coin for the extra amount, and on his way to the car fought down a wild and reasonable urge to give the correct Nihilist order for the burning of the hut. But instead he decided to wait for the main body of his brigade, and give them a rousing speech about honesty and dignity, before leading the final advance towards that obscene rocket pointing into the sky above Tungsten.
Chapter 29
Adam became disgruntled, at the double load of another person placidly fixed on the seat behind, and decided to rest.
‘Why have you stopped?’ asked Firebrand.
‘My legs ache,’ Adam told him.
‘But mine don’t.’
‘That’s because you’re not doing the work.’
Firebrand got off the bike and sat down: ‘If you accuse me of not being an idealist, I’ll kill you. I’m on my way to take part in the Great Patriotic March of Honesty on Tungsten, and I invited you to join me out of the goodness of my heart, so that you can prove yourself as a bona fide traveller to Nihilon, a country which expects all good foreigners to come to the aid of the insurrection. Anyway, you don’t expect us to do it by ourselves, do you?’
‘I suppose not,’ said Adam, stunned by such international reasoning. ‘But I can’t pedal any more. My lungs are giving way.’
Firebrand was galvanized at the sound of a lorry coming up the hill, and stood in the road to wait for it. He held two hand-grenades, so that the driver was forced to stop and ask: ‘Where to?’
‘Orcam,’ said Firebrand, slipping the spare grenade into his pocket.
‘I’m going through Shelp to Nihilon,’ the driver told him, hopefully.
‘You were,’ said Firebrand, his free hand at the pin of a grenade. ‘Now you’re going to Orcam.’
The driver shrugged: ‘Get up then.’
‘And no tricks,’ said Firebrand. ‘One wrong turning, and this drops into your cab, while we jump off.’ Adam admired his talent for action, as he lifted his bicycle on to the lorry. ‘Nobody has to pedal any more,’ said Firebrand. ‘It struck me as a very primitive method of locomotion when you were gasping up that hill.’
The lorry was wrapped in its own breeze as it sped along, pleasurably cooling them, and Adam felt that he was really travelling, wondered in fact why he had used a bicycle in order to achieve something which could be done with much greater comfort over a good engine. A road branched to the left, and Firebrand told him it led to Troser, the chief coastal resort of Nihilon, famous as an intolerable place of residence due to dust, wind, heat, rain, snow, and high seas that forever batter the place. ‘But people love it precisely because of these unfortunate characteristics,’ he continued, ‘since it gives them a great deal to talk about when they get home, and you can’t ask for more than that.’
At the next road-fork, twenty kilometres further on, he banged on the door of the cab with his insurrectionary fist to indicate that the driver should take the right one, an extremely rocky switchback road which led between two high mountains. Firebrand then filched a blanket from Adam’s pannier, and spread it out so that he could lie on it. He also extracted his reserve rations of black bread and compact sausage, biscuit and a small flask of brandy, and shared it according to his egalitarian principles.
‘We’ll have to replenish our stocks soon,’ said Adam, alarmed at his friend’s improvidence, though enjoying the meal.
‘That will be easy,’ said Firebrand. ‘We’ll reach Orcam in the morning, by which time it will have been captured, so there’ll be plenty of food in the empty houses.’
‘That’s looting,’ said Adam, a piece of bread leaping down his gullet as the lorry hit a particularly forceful slab of rock.
‘The duty of a revolutionary,’ Firebrand answered, ‘is to keep alive, so that his ideals don’t perish with his body. He gets his food where he can, how he can, and when he can.’
‘Yes,’ Adam agreed.
‘Well, then,’ said Firebrand, ‘I’ll make a bargain by giving you my valuable ideals of honesty and cooperation, while you provide me with food till the revolution is over in two or three days.’
Adam saw that he had a lot to learn from his newfound friend. In any case, the food that they might consume couldn’t possibly be very much, so he agreed to his suggestion. At every village Firebrand assiduously searched out whatever shops there were, and returned laden with succulent provisions, but lacking most of the money that Adam had allotted him for foraging. After the first ample feed the driver no longer needed watching with a grenade at the ready, but was quite willing to cooperate with two such provident travellers.
The lorry bucked along at twenty kilometres an hour, and late that night they were within a few kilometres of Orcam. Firebrand decided to postpone their entry into the town because heavy firing could distinctly be heard coming from that direction. Signal-lights spat into the air, spelling danger, so he told them that they would park by the road and sleep on the lorry.
He sent the driver to look for wood, and soon a bright fire pulled them into its glare and smoke. They sat by it to eat, and the lorry-driver, a bull-headed man who seemed to have few cares simply because he was incapable of showing them, gave his views on the coming change of power.
‘I live in Nihilon City,’ he said, ‘and I hope to be back there tomorrow with my wife and children. I was delivering food to the soldiers at the frontier and just got through Fludd before the dam broke. I’ll be thirty-five next year, so I’ll register at the Halfway Department. Not that I mind getting a new job. I wouldn’t like to be an intellectual or a professional, because they are expected to stick at the same work all their lives, while people like me, well, we have to register with the Halfway Department!’
‘I suppose that’ll be altered by the new régime,’ said Adam, smiling mischievously.
‘Yes,’ Firebrand responded. ‘It will be a matter of “one life, one job”, meaning more efficiency in the industry of human relations.’
‘I like things to stay as they are,’ said the driver, ‘all mixed up and dangerous. That’s normal now, isn’t it? I’ll always vote for normal, no matter what it is. Otherwise I get upset.’
‘After the fighting,’ said Firebrand, ‘things will soon be normal again — only different.’
‘That’s all right then,’ said the driver. ‘But you haven’t won, yet, have you?’