Yet he couldn’t bring himself to hurry, lingered a few minutes over the subtlety and success of his scheme to have five foreigners come to Nihilon and write a guidebook about the country. They had been the final poisonous agents who would, under the umbrella of idealism, wreck his nihilist paradise, and help to change his onerous existence. It gave him great satisfaction to play with people who thought they were making history.
One of the many proverbs of Nihilon said: The end is always quicker than the beginning. And so it was, seen now to be the truest of truths as the preparations across no-man’s-land went on with tigerish speed, the insurrectionist forces mercilessly goaded in their psyches by his great rocket which they wouldn’t be able to stop no matter how quickly they ran, or how desperately they fought.
The tunnel under Tungsten was wide enough to take his Mangler de luxe motorcar, and it led for ten kilometres to an opening in the forest. Nil had prepared a secret chalet where he could rest for a fortnight, before getting out of the country through the seaport of Shelp. During the last twenty-five years no one had been allowed to know what he looked like. In all the newspapers, day after day for the whole reign, a speech or announcement by President Nil, or a news item concerning him, would be accompanied by a photograph of some unsuspecting citizen of Nihilon. Over the nine thousand days, every one of many newspapers and magazines of the country had used at least one photograph every day, which means that while nearly a million photographs of Nihilon citizens had been used, not one of them had been of the real President Nil.
In this one way his reign had been democratic, because a million people from all walks of life, and on his hilarious days even from the zoo, had, by their likeness at least, ruled the country.
No actual photographs of President Nil had ever been taken. He had never shown himself to the people, and only to his more immediate advisers while wearing a mask. His wife and mistress had already been sent out of the country, so not even they could be set to identify him. He had so successfully remained a cypher that many people doubted his existence, which was why he hoped to be unrecognizable when he walked to the ship in Shelp harbour dressed like any tourist, complete with camera around his neck, and a special transmitter in his pocket by which he would be able to spark off the bombs he would have placed along the quayside.
President Nil was born of a father from Damascony (of the tribe of Gelt) and a mother from Cronacia, fifty-five years ago. His upbringing was strict and traditional, and his training as a lawyer was one of the best. Each of the thousand books described a thousand laws, and the silence of each one was deafening to his heart, and these millions laws turned into maggots eating up his soul. But he held the rotting dust at bay, in order to satisfy his parents who had struggled for his education. He became adept at hair-splitting, a monster of rationality with a memory that was profound, and his judgments were famous — if too complicated to carry out. By the age of twenty-eight he was a rich and respected judge, but in order to stop himself from going mad he took to the mountains on the frontier of Damascony where, in a few months of intellectual explosion, he reversed and then shattered all his previous precepts and wrote a short but stunning manual of nihilism. How he made contact with the maniac-dissidents of the country which was to become Nihilon, and came to power after two years of political acitivity and civil war, is too long and complex to relate here, but his meticulous training in law, coupled to the fires of his own hitherto half buried temperament, ideally suited him for the task he knew he had to carry out.
He put on his mask, went down by the ladder and back into the building. Walking along to his private suite he considered it inopportune to dwell too long on his past. In any case he always thought it extremely tedious to delve into his humble origins and early struggles, and his quick rise to power in Nihilon. It didn’t make him feel proud, or inspire him to nobler and higher things. When he wasn’t engrossed in the present he was thinking about the future, and so the past had no flavour for him. The past was of no value to a Nihilist. The past was out of date, an anachronism, an anchor on the true heart’s blood of pure chaos.
He changed his clothes, picked up a camera, revolver, and briefcase full of money, and left his Tungsten rooms forever, hoping, as he stepped into the elevator that would take him to the tunnel, that the technical staff would keep its promise and get the rocket up into the sky before the attack started.
As the dull sound of gunfire rumbled above he got into his Mangler and turned the headlights on, then set off slowly along the tunnel. He took off his mask, and mulled nostalgically on his past as he lightly gripped the wheel. These recollections were the only real sign that his days of power were over.
Chapter 36
The first regiment of a hundred sports cars moved slowly forward in a perfect line so as to present a terrifying spectacle to those Nihilists who would no doubt rush to defend the walls when they came close enough. Each Zap was separated from the next by ten metres, so that the advance was on a front of nearly a kilometre. At the same time a more conventional attack by three thousand men was launched against the northern wall, a mere diversion, however, to the great set-piece. He was annoyed by Mella anxiously gripping his hand as the cars departed, and by her continual sniffing and dabbing at her eyes with a small flowered handkerchief.
When Benjamin judged that the first line was at the five-hundred-metre picket-mark out from the trees, he fired a shot for the second regiment to advance. Three further shots in sharp order set three thousand-strong battalions flowing from the trees on either side, following behind the Zaps. These were supported by two hundred dynamiters who drew their equipment along on rudimentary trolleys. They were to destroy the rocket before it could be launched, though they had the firmest orders not to damage any of the control or computer machinery, so that it would be available for the new government should it decide to begin its own space-programme.
With nearly seven thousand men and two hundred sports cars launched at Tungsten, a force was in motion that no power on earth could stop. And yet, those mysterious walls worried him because they still gave no sign of life. The cars, travelling fast, needed only a few minutes to cross the three-kilometre no-man’s-land, so if there was to be opposition it must come soon.
The big advantage of staking everything on a Zap attack was that it would be over quickly. Benjamin had no taste for long-drawn-out battles. Yet he felt confident, and enjoyed the meaty exhalations from his cigar. In a few mere weeks he had ceased to be a dullish compiler of travel and history books, and a pilgrim in half-known lands. He now commanded an insurrectionary army the like of which Nihilon had never seen, nor was going to see again, and for a moment he dwelt on this promotion, until stopped by a look of alarm on what was visible of Richard’s face under the heavy binoculars.
The leading regiment was halfway across. As much as the nature of the ground allowed, it still kept its precise alignment, though at the expense of speed. Benjamin would have liked a bit of lost formation at this moment, if it meant them getting quickly to the enemy, for through his binoculars he saw white panels sliding out of the white wall, and gleaming barrels of artillery threatening his Zap Brigade with calamity.
When Mella began sobbing uncontrollably he wanted to throw her off the platform. Richard was swearing, unable to say anything intelligible, or take his eyes from the small gobs of white smoke rising to the noise of great earth-cracking explosions from a whole kilometre of that enigmatic wall in the distance. Fortress Tungsten had spoken at last.