Having parted with another five hundred klipps, whereupon everything was put back into her cases, she followed the broad back of the stationmaster to the waiting train. There was a booth open on the platform at which one could buy tickets to Nihilon City, but she got into a long and acrimonious argument with the woman behind the glass, who tried to insist that she pay for a return instead of a single journey. Jaquiline refused to give in on this point, and after snatching the correct ticket, and throwing down the money, she watched her cases taken towards a suitable compartment. The hooter of the train blew a prolonged and urgent note, unpleasant, she thought, if heard in the distance from some comfortable bed at night, but now giving a feeling of actual relief, because in a short time she would be taken out of these bleak and extortionate frontier sheds.
The stationmaster climbed over her cases to reach the door of the high carriage, before pulling each one in after him. He told her to wait on the platform while he took them to her compartment. Through the window, a few yards along the train, she saw his rather long limbs placing her cases respectfully on the racks. It would be difficult to climb those steel steps unaided, so she waited for him to come back and assist her. He had shown such magnificent kindness in this barbaric country that she wondered how to reward him. It would be embarrassing and wrong to tip such an impressive stationmaster, who looked so sincere and dignified in his immaculate uniform, almost like some elderly general about to review his equally smart and elderly soldiers. If she were a man she could offer him a cigar, but then, he wouldn’t help a man in this way, so the situation would not arise. It was a quandary that stayed with her till the train began to move during the blast of the final whistle blown by the stationmaster as he leaned far out of the window.
She ran along the platform, unable to mount the steps and get on the train. Drawing level with her compartment, she saw the stationmaster smile ecstatically as he threw his gold-braided cap over her head and as far as he could across the platform. He then unbuttoned his tunic, all set to relax on the long and easy ride to Nihilon City.
Chapter 5
Benjamin Smith laughed at having knocked the policeman down at the frontier, reflecting that it served the bastard right for tearing up his visa certificate — which he’d worked on for three days, a pure sweat of the forger’s art. The car droned softly and efficiently on, and at a level stretch across a mountain plateau a red Zap sports car came towards him on the same side, a crimson swift oval flattened on the blue-grey tarmac road. The Zap was far off at first, so that Benjamin thought it was going away from him, that it had appeared from some slip-road while his eyes had wandered, but the car grew and came close, the dare-devil inside dead-set on some vicious suicide game. Benjamin’s calculations speeded up rapidly, weighing his own heavy car as three times that of the Zap, but even so, the thought of entering a brick-wall competition didn’t appeal to him, since the smoke would be mutual if it came to a smash.
He turned to the other side of the road, choosing safety, but the Zap thought otherwise, and Benjamin sweated at the sight of death coming up so quick. He almost stood on the brakes, and angled the car to the edge of the road he had originally been on, but it seemed as if the Zap was latched at him by some demonically tuned radio beam.
At the last point of evasion he felt that something subtle yet deadly had been done to the camber of the road. It was as if the man in the Zap, having set on him from far away, had planned his tactics knowing that Benjamin would turn off for final safety at this section of the innocent-looking highway, because the heavy Thundercloud Estate car rumbled off it, descended a slope, turned completely over, then righted itself, shaking from side to side, and bouncing on its indestructible springs before settling down to silence.
Benjamin opened his eyes, and reached into the glove-box for his revolver. He didn’t know whether he was hurt or not. For all he knew, and he felt it might be so, he could have broken a few limbs and been bleeding at a couple of internal places. But he sprang out of the car as if to murder the first animal or human being he came across, and crawled up the sandy embankment to the road. A smell of heat and pinecones came from sparse forest on the opposite side. He lay in the ditch and listened. The road was empty. A gentle wind turned the sweat cold on his face. He screamed out at the road, and fired a shot in the direction the Zap had taken, then smiled like a baby that was conscious of hearing for the first time, as he listened to the explosion, and its echoes breaking through each barrier of silence.
Chapter 6
A fortnight on the steamship Nihilon brought many mundane reflections to Edgar Salt’s mind as he paced the decks, or walked between rows of cabin doors listening to the victims of sea-sickness. A disturbing fact about this ship was that there were no lifeboats. At first he had been afraid, because the sea was rough, and the clean uncluttered flanks of the ship often brought to mind the possibility of being drowned. He asked a seaman about this deficiency, and the seaman exclaimed scornfully: ‘What do we want with lifeboats? Don’t you have any faith in the strength and seaworthiness of Nihilon’s ships? Our aim is to defeat the nature of the sea, and how can we be seen to do that if we cravenly steam across it festooned with old-fashioned lifeboats? None of our fine vessels have sunk yet, and don’t you dare insinuate that this is going to be the first, because it’s not.’
As a geographer Edgar took sightings with his sextant and, aided by a chronometer and tables, plotted the ship’s position every few hours of the day. He pencilled its track on a chart in his cabin, and noted that the same line, drawn in broad red pencil on the wallchart of the main saloon by the chief navigating officer for the benefit of the passengers, did not coincide with his own. He supposed they must have their reasons for this, though he thought that those passengers who believed the red pencil to be accurate were unfortunate, and even in many ways inferior to himself and those officers who knew that it was not so.
He stopped an officer, to ask why the saloon chart was so much out of true. They talked urbanely, to the noise of people playing ball games in a nearby space, while sturdy green waves created a swell on which the new white ship laboured heavily. ‘It’s dishonest to deceive the passengers like this,’ Edgar said, his precise geographer’s mind hurt by such blatant deviation from the truth.
The officer’s uniform was clean, his buttons polished, his shirt white and ironed. But he needed a shave: ‘You’re only honest when you can’t be anything else,’ he said, with a mechanical smile. ‘Honesty is the lowest form of self-expression. Since you’re going to Nihilon I’m telling you this for your own good, because you’ll need to keep it in mind, believe me. Honesty is a weapon. If you want to kill someone, never be anything but honest to them.’
A huge wave beat up as far as where the lifeboats should have been. ‘We’re very philosophical on this ship,’ the officer went on, ‘and I hope we never meet a real storm, or go too close to a rocky coast! Honesty is an international conspiracy. It’s everywhere. It’s a haven for dogs who think only of their own safety. We in Nihilon have to stay united and fight it. We must never cease to be vigilant. Cronacia, our vile and diabolical neighbour, is forever preaching law, order, honesty, progress, but above all honesty, which shows how dead set she is to wipe us off the face of the earth. You see, if I want to insult you, I need only be honest. But to be honest in that way is a terrible and inhuman form of cowardice. Apart from that, it would be insulting to your intelligence, and to my self-esteem.’