‘Oh no, you won’t,’ cried the waiter, turning red with rage. ‘You’ll pay now, in cash, you foreign scum, or I’ll telephone the Shooting Squads.’
Richard stood up. ‘I’m a general in your army, and you’ll be tried for this, when I get back from Tungsten.’
‘You’re not a general,’ the waiter scoffed, ‘you’re a tourist and a spy, that’s what you are, so pay up peacefully. Even our great and noble President Took wouldn’t refuse to settle his bill like an honest man. I suppose you are one of those diabolical Nihilists whose yoke we’ve had to suffer under these last twenty-five years. Well, we know what to do with people like you!’
He was shouting, and Richard saw that he must pay the seven hundred klipps demanded, which nevertheless seemed outrageously expensive, though he supposed it would go towards repairing the great crack down the bullet-proof glass terrace caused by the premature destruction of the People’s Academy of Erotic Arts and Crafts. ‘Your bill is two thousand klipps,’ said the waiter, coolly writing this new amount in pencil.
‘The government has banned bribery,’ Richard cried out, undoing his tie.
‘But I still expect a tip, dear friend. How else do you think I’m going to live? The price of bread has already doubled.’
‘Doubled?’
‘In the last hour. Now that honesty is in, the traders say they must charge honest prices. Everyone has to live. You can’t deny that.’
Richard put down two thousand-klipp notes, being anxious to look for his briefcase. ‘There’ll be an enquiry about this.’
The waiter pocketed the money with a good-natured laugh, and made as if to pat him on the back, but thought better of it: ‘Don’t be grumpy, dear friend. The only thing to do is enjoy life, like a good Nihilonian. I can see you’re new to the country. And it is a great country, you know.’ Richard left while the waiter was still talking to himself about the eternal virtues of Nihilon in particular, and human life in general.
Chapter 31
Ex-President Took rose from his narrow bed and began to dress. He was seventy-five years old, tall and lean, with a nest of wild white hair which was always difficult to comb, especially first thing in the morning. As the day wore on it became more tractable and, while sweeping between the giant computers, wearing his white overall and holding a long-handled brush, he would stop and take a comb from his pocket. After attempting to run it through his hair he would sigh and go on with his work. The clever young men at the computers had long since given up teasing him about it. In any case, most of them were no longer young, in many ways sympathizing with his plight, for they were just as much prisoners as he.
From a fiery, progressive, hard-dealing president of a wayward republic who had spent much of his life trying to set his country on the path of rectitude, Took had perforce turned into a mild, studious, hard-working old man whose only loyalty was to the cleanliness of the Tungsten Space-Research Station.
For the administrative staff of Tungsten, day and night had been reduced to eternity, being divided into A, B, and C shifts of eight hours each that went in rotation forever and ever. Professor Took (as an inmate had inevitably dubbed him at the beginning) was on B shift, and left his bed at seven in order to start work at eight. The canteen never closed, but the menu imperceptibly changed throughout the twenty-four hours, from supper to breakfast, to lunch, to dinner and back to supper. Working on the cafeteria system, it was one of many canteens in the vast space-project compound; Professor Took picked up a tray, pausing to read the menu:
Starcrush, with Milk-all-the-way
Moonsteak and Marseggs,
Galaxy Bran, with Astrobreads.
His sharp appetite made him suspect that the countdown was close. The two people chosen for the honour of occupying the first Nihilon space-rocket were said by the serving-woman in her stained overall to have had a good night’s rest.
‘Away from each other, of course,’ added Professor Took, but such humour was lost on that dour face, which did not allow itself to smile because of too much work, for she merely pushed over his dish of Starcrush, with Milk-all-the-way, and passed him along to the next counter.
He sat by himself. In any case, no one would eat with him, since they found him so garrulous. But Took considered it both polite and desirable to converse with others, especially during a meal. When not working, people either ate or slept. When they slept, they dreamed, which meant talking to oneself. And when they ate, they thought, which meant talking to others.
A man was not an automaton with no inner life. Only the Nihilists thought that — which was why they took such trouble to give him one. At the same time Took was wise enough to realize that the technical workers of Tungsten were too preoccupied to take an old fool like him into their confidence. Their inner lives were sufficiently enriched by a desire to enslave the cosmos, while for Took this space research station was one place in the country where nihilism could not strictly prevail, and he considered himself lucky to have been captured in the neighbourhood, and incarcerated with other inmates and workers in the sort of social and professional discipline he had always thought to inculcate into the feckless masses of Nihilon. It was at the same time unfortunate that he could never go back into his country with the experience he had gained in this rare enclave of it. For though people did not talk much in Tungsten, they worked together, and depended totally upon each other, and Took saw that you could not get much closer than that to a well-ordered earth.
He had been sadly aware during the last few weeks that this striving together as one family would soon be at an end, for he saw that when the first rocket went up, their brotherly unity would be broken by its very success. He would like this preparatory stage to go on forever, for the finale never to come, and so he had conceived a plan to do something about it, proving that the indefatigable brain of President Took, which he had once used well to guide his country, had by no means atrophied at Tungsten.
Picking up his sweeping-brush, he walked along the corridor, towards an outdoor lift. A familiar and friendly figure to everyone, he was left more or less to wander where he wished. At the beginning he had been strictly enrolled in a cleaning brigade, but of late years he had deliberately developed an absent-mindedness that created havoc in any well-run group. So he was ordered, as a punishment whose purpose was to reduce him to a form of nihilism which everyone assumed he would hate bitterly because of his past, to be a member of no particular group, but to drift on his own and where he liked, as long as he kept out of the way and appeared to make himself useful. It was thus expected that his insanity would increase, and that he would soon lapse into a final state of foolishness that could justify turning him loose, or sending him to the Groves of Aspron.
But Took’s brain was as clear as ever, under his cloud of amiability. When he stepped from the elevator and pushed through the guarded swing-doors, it seemed as if the magic eye winked at him. He walked towards the immense rocket set on its launching pad. From a distance it loomed so huge and solid that he thought it would pull much of the earth with it when it lifted off. A chain of work-trailers drawn by a tractor separated him from his objective, and while waiting for it to pass, he swept the concrete floor at his feet, creating a circle of cleanliness, within which he stood for some minutes and marvelled at the purity of the earth on which he felt himself privileged to be.
His private countdown had started on leaving the breakfast table. Illuminated numbers ran through his brain as if on the flash-level of the Master Com forever in front of his and everyone else’s eyes. The elevator took him, brush on shoulder, up the immense side of the rocket, and before entering he glanced at the super carnival-ground of the space-age spread below, with its monitoring centres, work-sheds, radial living-quarters, community lake, and a network of ways and roads lacing over the plateau of the Athelstan Alps.