She had never been so fervent or afraid in her busy and fashionable life beyond Nihilon, he remembered. This country seemed to have changed her utterly, which made him so happy that he blessed the guidebook they had been sent to write. ‘I won’t,’ he promised, pressing her close, and wanting to make love.
‘Not yet,’ she said, buttoning her shirt. ‘I love you so much.’ But the exquisite sensations of unfulfilled desire gave them an even more intense feeling of safety. ‘Where shall we go?’ she asked.
He was hungry, but thought it indelicate to say so: ‘Nihilon City would be the best place, but it’s some way off. And we’ll have to hide in the woods till Mella’s column has gone through.’
‘I want to get out of this country,’ she said, her self-assurance suddenly diminishing in spite of him. ‘I’m frightened.’
Adam saw nothing ahead but hunger, if they didn’t reach a town or village before the new day was out. Getting finally home was too far away to contemplate, a distant mixed-up vision of heaven and hell that he couldn’t shake into focus, though he did not confide this to Jaquiline who, in the first light of dawn, looked at him lovingly from her blue eyes.
For some time they had been observed by an invisible circle of orderlies from the space-station. The tender behaviour of our lovers was noted with satisfaction, and the ringleader of these marauders at last gave his signal. There was a crack of twigs and a scuffle of stones, and on turning sharply to see who was there, Adam heard a scream from Jaquiline before he himself was brought down. A thin rope was tied around his wrists.
Jaquiline sobbed as she was carried away. Her bitterness at this latest molestation, from the very arms of Adam, was such that no words from him could comfort her. Adam was also pulled along, though he was aware of his captors doing it with as little roughness as possible.
‘Where are we going?’ he demanded.
‘A long way,’ laughed one of the men.
‘Up!’ said another.
Chapter 34
Two-faced flags were out in Nihilon City, one side marked for the Festival of Liberation by the Army of Honesty and Order, the other marked to celebrate the Festival of Salvation by the Forces of Nihilism. Despite a generally expectant air of enjoyment, no one could yet say with certainty which side of the flag would be finally displayed, though the fact that it would obviously be one side or the other made the people happy enough.
The city was in the hands of order and honesty however, and reinforcements of Cronacian troops shuttling up from Shelp were said to have been marching through the suburbs all day, dressed in the blue overalls of the insurrection, on their way to attack the last bastion of nihilism at Tungsten. But the people, with their two-faced flags, convertible bunting, and age-old instincts, were by no means convinced of their victory.
Richard passed the early part of the night looking for the man who had stolen his briefcase. He telephoned the professor to report its loss, and was told that such carelessness was an act of treason, and that he would be shot out of hand for it when the forces of law and order brought him to justice, as they undoubtedly would. Determined that this should not happen, Richard returned to his room at the Hotel Stigma, to gather up his few possessions and leave the city before daybreak, then make his way to the escape port of Shelp.
But his briefcase was on the bed, and nothing had been taken from it. With mixed feelings at finding it again, he was faced with the moral problem as to whether or not he should go on with his work as an insurrectionary general, or follow through his plan of slipping away to Shelp and safety. The art of living under nihilism consisted in being able to make moral decisions of a fundamental nature every few hours instead of every ten years. Most Nihilists solved it, he had found, by discounting the ethics of each problem, and merely making a choice in the form of a gamble. Thus they saved themselves from moral inanition, but only at the expense of the soul itself, a payment which nevertheless enabled them to go on living with a certain amount of spirit, until such time as the damaged soul could, if they desired it, reconstitute its moral qualities once more, possibly under a new régime of honesty and law. This would no doubt impose its own peculiar form of ethics, with just as much bother to conscientious citizens.
A note attached to the handle of the briefcase said that in a country noted for its nihilism he should trust no one, and that in a régime soon to be distinguished ‘for its honesty he should trust them even less. ‘However,’ a postcript from the young man added, ‘I hope that if honesty triumphs, and I am brought to trial, you will have the goodness to remember that I protected your invaluable briefcase during the hours when it was undoubtedly in great peril from real thieves and other such nihilistic scum.’
Richard, deciding to set out for the rendezvous with his loyally waiting troops, put on his general’s cap, fastened the revolver-belt, and went downstairs carrying the briefcase. The clerk at the desk sat to attention and saluted smartly, a mark of respect that Richard hadn’t received on going into the hotel.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ the clerk said, passing him a straw shopping-basket, ‘perhaps you’ll need this. It contains bread and cheese, sausage, Nihilitz, and packets of chocolate. And good luck, sir,’ he added, as Richard went outside to the waiting car, feeling like a real general at last.
There was little hard marching to be done, for a railway went into the mountains, so that an immensely long train took Richard and his brigade as far as the copper-mining township of Tolemac. A seat was found for him in the engine-cab, and he sat there from the passing of night through dawn and daylight, studying his map by the glow of a torch. Beside him was a wireless-operator whose apparatus was fixed to the back of the plate. Cursing and sweating, the stokers were feeding coal into the huge white-mouthed boiler, their spades swinging dangerously close to Richard as he puzzled over possible systems of deployment on arrival at Tungsten.
They travelled the final forty kilometres by road, most of his brigade finding enough lorries at Tolemac for a shuttle service, so that by nine o’clock he was observing Tungsten through field-glasses from the cover of a grove of trees. The white, glistening, low walls of the compound were five kilometres square, and seemed by no means impregnable in the blue and brilliant light of this vital day.
No preparations appeared to have been made for its defence, which he found strange, not to say disappointing. Several thousand metres of open ground lay between his soldiers and the walls. In the middle of the extensive compound of buildings and hangars he now saw the rocket, surrounded by a gridwork of superstructure, rearing up slim and grey from this distance, and smokily shining in the new morning light, the last score or so metres of its pinnacle coloured a glittering crimson. He clandestinely thought it a pity to stop such a marvellous engine going its natural way into the heavens, regretting that it wouldn’t begin to rise up now, for him alone, in front of his very eyes.
But the air shimmered around it, and the compound seemed uninhabited. It had been given out on Radio Tungsten the previous evening, in a Lies bulletin of nihilistic candour, that the two candidates destined for the sexual hook-up had become ill, and that no replacements were available, though the staff were leaving no stone unturned to find some. Richard, gazing across at the magnificent rocket, felt his groin aching at such frustrations of the Nihilon Space Plan, and the preposterous but delightful thought came to him that he wouldn’t mind offering himself as the male specimen for this experiment, no matter what the dangers might be. He tried to bring the rocket-head closer and closer, till his binoculars were overfocused and it shimmered into a haze.