Travels in Nihilon (20 page)

‘Who?' Richard smiled, glad to make another contact with someone in Nihilon.

‘The pigeons,' said the man. ‘The black pigeons from the mountains and the white pigeons from the sea. They're all over the place. Will you join me in a Nihilitz?' He came over to Richard's table. ‘My name's Telmah, Orcam Telmah.'

‘Yes, I'll have another,' said Richard, shaking his hand.

‘A large Nihilitz,' said Orcam, in so soft a voice that Richard didn't see how he could be heard, but the waiter came along with two formidable tumblers and set them down. ‘They'll take our houses and jobs,' said Orcam, with a new eagerness in his eye, nodding across at the portrait of the boy and his mother – ‘and
they
won't stop them doing it. They won't even try. After suitable training and deployment the pigeons will sweep in on us and help themselves to all we've built up over thousands of years. So let's drink to our defeat, my friend.'

Richard lifted his glass. ‘I don't really think they'll do such a thing,' he said, sipping the fiery liquid.

Orcam drained his, and pulled his bow-tie undone. ‘They will. I know they will. We have to protect ourselves against the birds. They fly around all day and every day, observing our organization, or lack of it, and discovering the dispositions of our weaknesses. They watch us through windows, follow us in trains and motorcars, exchanging secret warbling signals between themselves. We can't understand a word of it, but nothing we do is not watched by those cool intelligent eyes. They're cruel, too. They'll blind us at first, before helping themselves to our accomplishments. It's all so easy and obvious, but nobody ever reads my letters. I spend hours every afternoon writing letters to President Nil and newspapers, but they're always ignored.' His hair was ruffled, and he became distraught, knocking over both glasses, and staring at the picture on the wall. ‘It's
their
fault. They connive with the birds. They use the birds to keep us subdued. And how can you be subdued if you're supposed to be a Nihilist? Ah! They never explain that. Crafty! Very crafty!'

Richard watched his hypnotizing balletic motions as he took a hammer and knife from his pocket and waved them at the portrait: ‘There's a man behind those eyes recording every word I say. But I don't care, I tell you. I'll be crafty too, by doing what I like!'

With vindictive strength and impetuosity, and before anyone could stop him, for all were equally entranced, he charged screaming across the room. Reaching the portrait, he ripped and hammered at it with the weapons in his hands.

There were howls of rage and pain from behind the panel, and tables were knocked over as people rushed forward at last to try and reason with him, though not before he had acted out their deepest wish and mutilated the picture.

When the door opened, three policemen came in and grabbed him firmly. He was wild-eyed, foam boiling from his mouth as they walked him to a car waiting by the kerb outside, in which they drove off slowly under a hail of machine-gun fire. Exploding grenades seemed to be smothering the whole square with the noise and smoke of serious combat.

Two waiters went to the assistance of the police agent behind the picture. When they brought him out of the movable, panel he was bleeding from one eye and had several bruises and cuts about the face. ‘I'm giving up my job,' he cried to everyone, as they led him into the manager's office for first-aid and Nihilitz.

Richard, though he had sat by and done nothing because he had considered it to be no concern of his, was so shaken by the incident that he called for more coffee, as well as another bottle. ‘That was very unfortunate,' said the waiter when he set it down, holding his hand out for the money. ‘We've had our eyes on that old man for some time. In fact he's been coming here for years. He used to work for the government radio, reading the Lies – before he went mad. He broadcast a speech about the birds wanting to take over everything. In our country lie-readers are very famous and popular, even more than filmstars. When one of them died a few years ago, many people committed suicide at his funeral. The whole nation was grief-stricken. You can't imagine how famous they are. The worse the lies are the more people adore them, because then the lie-announcers can really use their acting talent.'

Richard didn't feel like going beyond the bullet-proof glass while the gunfight was still on. In any case, he was gathering material faster than he could write it down, so there was a good excuse for staying where he was. A fieldpiece must have been wheeled from one of the side streets, because the head of Anarchy on the great statue was suddenly blown off, and the arm of the hunted and despised Progress was shattered from the elbow down.

A few minutes later the secret-police agent, his face lapped in bandages, stood by Richard's table, ruefully observing the scene in the square, as if wondering whether it would be worthwhile venturing into it at such a time. ‘I'm broken-hearted,' he said to Richard. ‘Absolutely dispirited. If you buy me a Nihilitz I'll sit down and tell you why.'

‘You're the first person I've met in such a frame of mind,' said Richard, calling the order.

‘I know, but I've given the best years of my life to that portrait, sitting behind it and looking at all sorts of people from every walk of life, and not harming anyone. I just recorded what they said so as to keep myself amused and happy, and then along comes this old lunatic who spoils my reason for being on earth. It's absolutely disgusting, such a mean trick. Can you imagine that anyone could be so thoughtless and spiteful as to throw me out of a job like that?'

‘I expect you'll have to get another,' said Richard, lifting his glass to drink, feeling slightly unreal from what he had so far poured into himself, though it seemed the only thing to do in such a country.

The secret agent cheered up under the impact of his glass. ‘I might register with the Outlaws,' he said. ‘It's the only thing to do.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, you see, when someone is at the end of his tether in Nihilon he can go to the office of the Ministry of the Interior and register himself as an Outlaw. He is given a gun, ammunition and supplies, and taken by lorry to a remote part of the country, where he is left to fend for himself.'

‘That doesn't seem too bad,' Richard commented.

‘Oh no, it isn't,' said the security agent, smiling between his bandages. ‘But on the other hand, I might be so depressed that I'll go and join the security forces. In which case I apply to the same building, but a different department. They give me a gun, uniform, ammunition and supplies, and take me to a remote part of the country where I am left on my own to hunt the Outlaws. The trouble is, I'm so downhearted at the moment that I don't know which to choose.'

‘I can't say I envy you,' said Richard.

Looking furtively around, the security agent took a heavy revolver from his pocket and made for the door. Pushing it open, he ran across the road towards the middle of the square, firing as he went, advancing in a quick zig-zag to avoid – or at least delay – getting picked off. So much fire was directed at him that certain people seemed bent on his extermination, and must have been waiting for him to emerge from the café.

Richard caught sight of a familiar figure coming down the steps of the Hotel Stigma, a tall bespectacled man wearing a long overcoat and carrying a briefcase. He walked quickly across to the ruins of the great statue, and when it seemed that the secret agent had reached the safety of its cover, the professor took a gun from his pocket, knelt on the ground between two cars, and shot him down, just as the secret agent had lifted his gun for retaliation against the upper windows of the Ministry of Social Security. A white and blue flag was unfurled from one of its windows, followed by a sound of cheering. Then a tank rumbled into the square bearing the emblem of Nihilon on its turret, and opened fire at the flag. The professor fled into the café where Richard was sitting.

‘Ah, my friend,' the professor said to him, drinking what remained of his Nihilitz. ‘I hereby appoint you Grand Insurrectionary General for the Southern Sector of the Athelstan Alps.'

Richard, taken from his placid enjoyment of the outside scene, which hadn't appeared in any way to concern him up to now, drew back in alarm. ‘What are you talking about?'

The professor put his briefcase on the table: ‘I leave you in charge, general. I have to go and organize the Northern Sector. I'm a very busy man in these great and stirring times.'

Richard objected to his appointment, but the professor, with a ludicrous and comic smile, rushed outside into the crossfire and smoke.

The waiter stood respectfully beside him. ‘Do you require anything else, general?'

‘No, no,' he said, waving him away.

The waiter, in spite of the fact that they were both in civilian clothes, gave a smart military salute, and walked off.

Chapter 22

There was a humming in the air. It was pitch dark, but by the light of his luminous watch, Adam saw that it was four o'clock. He had been asleep for only three hours, but was suddenly awake, and no longer tired, in spite of his exertions on the previous day. The warm body of the reception-girl lay beside him, her straight black hair spreading over the pillow like a fully opened fan.

His one thought while dressing was to write more notes concerning his travels in Nihilon. There was much to record for the intended guidebook, and he considered his present inexplicable wakefulness a good opportunity to get some of it done. But the humming, which he assumed to come from the giant generators at the dam, disturbed him. Opening the window he stepped on to the terrace. The sky was raddled with stars. He looked up the valley hoping to see the actual wall of the dam, but though the whole sky in that direction was lit up, a block of flats hid it from him.

The generator noise frightened him, especially when he suddenly remembered the story of the dam being unsafe, which he had heard from both the waiter and the pretty girl still sleeping in his bed. The thought of it releasing a ferocious amount of water on to him and thirty thousand others filled his soul with such anxiety that he was ready to vomit. But he fought it back. He didn't want to believe it. Yet why should they lie to him? Was it merely a complex trick of the town council to make life more exciting for thrill-seeking visitors to Fludd? Nothing seemed strange any more. The previous day's travel had shattered his standards and expectations, and made him feel both cowardly and ready to do something about his possible doom in the town of Fludd. The fact that thirty thousand valiant people were sleeping around him, and disregarding such danger to their lives, only made him want to get out of the place as soon as possible, for they seemed because of this to be absolutely insane in their passivity, and a positive menace to those, such as himself, who still felt a human twinge of self-preservation. He packed his few belongings into the panniers and, without further looking at his companion of the night, opened the door and pushed his bicycle outside.

In the corridor he could not find a light-switch, and was unable to remember the way to the lift. When he struck a match and found a switch, no bulb lit up. The match burned his finger, and he was in darkness again. Perhaps there was a power failure, he thought, yet how could this be, with the hotel so close to the largest electrical generating plant in Nihilon?

He sat on his cicyle, and pedalled along the corridor, his dynamo lighting all in front. Reaching a cul-de-sac, he turned and rode the other way, close to panic, wanting only to get out of the hotel, the town and valley before the dam burst. He told himself that, in spite of all his fears, it might not collapse tonight, but this was only to calm himself so that he would be able to think more clearly if it did.

Reaching the lift he found that it did not work, which seemed one more reason to hurry out of the place. He steadied his bicycle down four flights of stairs, then along by the silent reception desk to the main front exit, where an old, white-haired, pale-faced doorman slept peacefully on a chair. His face was so gentle and good-natured that Adam suspected he might not really be asleep. A street light came on outside and shone through the glass. ‘Where are you going?'

‘I can't rest,' said Adam. ‘I'm going for a ride around the town.'

‘I don't trust sleep, either,' said the old man. ‘That's why I woke up. If I trusted sleep and thought it would do me some good, I wouldn't wake up from it, and that might be better for me, because then I'd live longer – but who cares about that sort of thing in the town of Fludd? Your light hit the corner of my eye, tangled with a vein in the dark, you might say. I don't trust sleep because then I can wake up for a bit of human talk. Give me a cigarette.'

‘I'm going out to buy some,' said Adam.

The old man opened the door for him. ‘Don't be long, then.'

The streets were deserted, but increasingly well-lit as he came to the edge of the town. Slogans in red paint had been scrawled on the walls saying
DOWN WITH THE DAM
and
FLUDD WILL RISE AGAIN.
The main road ascended in hairpin curves up the side of the valley, and he rode the bicycle as far as he could, but had to push when the gradient became too steep. He disconnected the dynamo and walked slowly by the light of the risen moon, as silently as possible in case he should be stopped by pickets and sent back to the hotel. He thought with regret of the warm bed, and the girl he had left lying in it, now feeling foolish at his decision to get out of the valley when in all probability there was no need to. He'd only heard about the dam, and hadn't actually seen it, yet he felt sure that it existed, but who the hell, he wondered, working himself into a fury as he approached the skyline after an hour's hard push up a few hundred toilsome metres, had started the irresponsible nihilistic rumour that it was unsafe?