Travels in Nihilon (31 page)

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.

The control panel was no mystery to a brain which had not ceased to take in information during the twenty-five years of imprisonment. He had obtained the special tools, without which certain key plates leading to the rear cables could not have been dehinged. It was thought that Professor Took had given up his youthful and middle-aged ideals, but they had hidden and rested in the deepest recesses of his heart, and no influence had been able to reach them. He smiled, and wiped his nose, and considered that his long imprisonment had been worth it, since he was the only man in Tungsten able to save the country, and therefore the world, from the spectacle of this obscene aurora blazing its vile rites in the sky for all to see, in order that nihilism might be perpetuated to the end of time.

And yet, even though the project might actually be called obscene, these space nuptials were to be far from illicit. It was no dirty weekend that Nihilon had planned. The two candidates were to be joined in official matrimony before being packed into the rocket and launched towards their honeymoon. Though this seemed to go against nihilism, the authorities had decided on it as a mark of politeness to the other more moral nations of the world who could not then refuse to show this immortal film to their abundant and eager viewers.

Thus, as well as applauding the technological expertise of nihilism, Nihilon would also be the beneficiary of an untold amount of money in copyright fees. But Professor Took had decided that he could not permit his once proud and honourable country to solve its balance-of-payments problem in this way.

He cut two of the power lines, then joined them together, each to the wrong one. Piece by piece, he methodically worked the countdown with the other side of his brain while he coolly probed and severed. Even the last-minute tests would be read as normal, because of his simple idea of sliding a length of pencil into each vital pipe.

When the rocket went into orbit, a rejection by the computer of its allotted plan would not give it the expected performance. After one circuit of the earth the capsule would detach itself for re-entry, and come back by parachute to the Athelstan plateau. Thus, though the Nihilionian space-programme would not succeed, neither would it be a total failure in the eyes of the world. This was an important consideration for President Took because, as an ex-president of the country, he was still loyal to it, despite the régime. Neither did he have any wish to kill the passengers.

The air was fresh on his way down, a cool breeze licking through the warmth, for he went not by lift, but by the steps, sweeping each one until he came to the bottom. The rest of the day he spent going with his sweeping-brush from one hall to another, sometimes behind the regular cleaners, who had already scoured them well by super-thorough vacuum machines, and occasionally in advance, when his feeble attempts at sweeping were not noticed.

At the evening meal there was much more talk than usual, and he gathered from the confused chatter that a crisis had struck the space-programme, something so serious that there were even bottles of Nihilitz on the tables. For a few minutes of devastating uncertainty his veins seemed blocked and ready to snap at the thought that his sabotage had been discovered, and he waited for louder and more insistent voices to let him know whether or not this was the case. He put on his characteristic shamble and walked from the counter with a bowl of Betelgeuse soup and a round of zodiac bread, and found an empty table between two full and overcrowded ones.

Their talk poured into him, with such force that it was almost more than his mind could bear. Soup trickled on to his wrist when he tried to drink it, and he gripped the edge of the table, thinking he was going to faint. He caught the phrase ‘intestinal fever', and it gradually penetrated his state of trance that the two subjects set to take part in the space copulation had become so ill that they could not be expected to perform when the rocket went up tomorrow.

Twenty-five years' work would come to nothing if they couldn't shove another loving couple into that rocket in the morning. Professor Took, in his tearful bewilderment at this unexpected turn, heard some of the technicians actually laughing loudly, as if it were funny. Meanwhile, the armies of insurrection were closing in, and almost no troops were deploying to stop them, apart from the garrison of Tungsten itself. President Nil's guards were nowhere to be seen or heard. The frontier divisions were at the frontier, making sure that the Geriatrics did their bit. And the ordinary Nilitia Regiments had either gone to ground or joined the insurrectionaries.

But the lack of an army seemed the least worry to those whose job it was to see that the heavenly nuptials took place as planned. And such had been the insidious influence of nihilism that, in spite of the strictest precautions, no one had suggested training reserve passengers for the historic flight that was to put Nihilon in the forefront of nations. Unless a young man and woman of sufficient physical stamina and mutual attraction were found quickly, a great calamity was upon them.

Chapter 32

Surveying the distant establishment from the roof of Benjamin's car, it appeared as no accident to Jaquiline that the Groves of Aspron protected the approaches to the rocket-launching base of Tungsten. The first three hundred insurrectionaries had gone into the attack, dodging skilfully between oak and olive trees, and getting as close as possible to the compound wire.

Lifting themselves up from the psychiatrists' couches, the inmates of Aspron were given rifles by orderlies who only days ago had fought to fasten them down during one of their typical anti-Nihilist frenzies. The patients formed up and marched smartly through the central square of the buildings, and then past their director, who took the salute with tears in his eyes from a rostrum of packing-cases now emptied of the latest drugs. From there they went straight to the front, lining the barbed wire behind a rough embankment of stones and soil.

When three hundred of his best troops withered and wavered under the shattering hail of bullets, Benjamin sat by his car to think. A siege would take too long: he hadn't sufficient men to bottle up Aspron with part of his column while the rest went to Tungsten. Neither did he care to lose half his force in dead or wounded to capture it, for then he wouldn't have enough to use in the great battle yet to come. He decided to send six hundred of his hardiest guerrillas through the Groves of Aspron to attack from the south. Since the lunatic defenders did not realize his strength, they must be shown it, for while they were busy holding that assault, he would launch a shock offensive along both sides of the Aspron–Agbat road.

The southerly arm would be led by two lorries laden with petrol drums – which would run into the wall and catch fire. Jaquiline wanted to drive one of these vehicles, and Benjamin, knowing her hatred of nihilism, and the blows she had suffered from it, gave permission for her to do so. A soldier on the seat beside her clutched a string of hand-grenades for use when they stopped at the compound fence.

The sun was low, but the heat of day still hung over them. A petrol stench floated thickly in the lorry and made her feel faint, but she held the wheel on course for the wall, still two hundred metres away. White-coated figures carrying rifles scurried behind the wire. But they seemed to be few, as if no more than pickets had been left at this point, the others having gone to repel the diversionary attack. Nevertheless, their fire at both lorries now coming up the slope was consistent and accurate.

Jaquiline suddenly thought of flames, and of being burned in them. The air was buzzing around her, ending in sharp clicks as bullets struck tyres or metal rims. The windscreen changed into a jigsaw puzzle, then fell to pieces, and the soldier was whining on the floor. She took her foot from the clutch to kick him, and he got up again, bleeding at the face.

Fifty metres from the wall, the men in white coats were shouting. She couldn't imagine what they had to discuss with her, and when the lorry stalled she turned the ignition key, feeling the vibrating accelerator underfoot, and rammed the lorry into the wall, pushing the soldier as a sign that he should get out and do his work. A bird fell against the bonnet when she tried to open the door. The second lorry was already burning to her right. A bullet had smashed one door and jammed it. The other was too hot to open, so the only way free was through the shattered windscreen.

She screamed at the sight of a bird beating its wings on broken glass. Another bullet swept it away. Her eyes were fixed by leaves falling, black dust and smoke. A white-coated figure climbed the low wall and leapt on to the bonnet, pulling hard to free her. They rolled to the ground.