Travels in Nihilon (37 page)

The professor shouted for him to come back and, when he gave no sign of doing so, drew a revolver. Pehaps the old man expected this, for after the peremptory order, he zigzagged along the line of carriages to make the professor's aim more difficult, and to dodge the bullets now flying past him, in such a manner as to suggest that he was not altogether ignorant of the military art. Several rounds must have gone so high that they entered a nearby signal-box, and a man from that vantage point, enraged at the disturbance to his afternoon nap, began to sweep the whole platform with a light machine-gun, at which the professor and his band scattered to take up retaliatory positions.

Benjamin made his strength felt in the carriage, so that Jaquiline could sit down at least. In fact there had been enough seats for everyone, but the Nihilonians had spread luggage over them, which was now piled on the racks provided. In the struggle Adam had been pulled from the window, and didn't see whether or not the old man finally got on the train.

The railway ran a dozen kilometres to the east, straight through the suburbs, whence it turned in a southerly direction towards Shelp. When they began to talk, it was disclosed that the baby sitting on the knees of the peasant woman opposite had been born on the day of the Great Space-Launch, and since it was a boy its mother had called it Adam. She asked therefore for Adam's autograph, saying that she could frame it when her son grew up, for him to look upon with pride.

They tried to sleep during darkness, but it was barely possible. Benjamin woke from a brief nap, aware of a stranger lying full-length on the floor. When day came, Adam recognized him as the old man with the long white beard who had run for the train in peril of his life. ‘I'm glad you got on safely,' he said to him.

‘So am I,' responded the old man, who stood up and straightened himself. ‘I just had to get away from Mella,' Edgar said, taking off his beard. ‘In another month I
would
have been a very old man, wrinkled and finished, so I finally decided to leave on the same boat as you. And the only way I could get out of that palace was to disguise myself as a Geriatric. Unfortunately that sharp-eyed professor recognized me at the station.'

He put on his beard again, and took a bottle of Nihilitz from his pocket. ‘I stole it at the palace. There was plenty of it in Mella's sideboard.'

‘It makes me wonder why I helped the insurrection,' Benjamin reflected morosely, drinking more than his share.

When the peasants got out at a remote stop, they had the compartment to themselves. A fresh sea-wind blew up the wide expanse of the plain and into the carriage window. On either side, fading away into the distance, were the mountains which channelled this gratifying wind into the great plain of Nihilon. Jaquiline drew in a deep breath of it, saying how pleasant it was to leave this country, knowing that it was not only beautiful, but peaceful at last.

South of the railway, which ran across level and arable land, lay the main highway of the country, lorries and buses rolling along it in both directions, showing that the eternal business of life was moving once more. Beyond was the River Nihil, boats steaming up it to anchorages at Coba, thin streams of smoke bending in the air. The Bay of Shelp could be seen on the horizon, spreading in a straight line on either side of Shelp itself.

Chapter 40

It was several kilometres from the main station to the quay, and they decided to walk, both for a last look at the town, and to exercise their legs before getting on the ship.

There was a lively and light-hearted feeling about the clean wide streets of Shelp now that nihilism had been officially, finally, and in some places bloodily squashed. People were dressed in summer clothes, and it seemed as if hardly anyone were at work.

Edgar kept his disguise as a Geriatric, which was a gallant enough part to play in the New Nihilon because now, instead of being honoured as the bravest of the bravest and the saviours of the nation, they were treated in a hostile manner, and occasionally spat upon for not going fast enough into the grave and allowing the young of body to breathe their living-space and gobble the food they ate.

The signs of nervousness that Edgar naturally showed only increased the realism of his old-man act, which seemed to be expected from someone of his age now that the glorious era of Golden Honesty had begun. But he received commiserating glances from those passers-by who hankered after the old system, as he hung drooling on to Jaquiline's arm, whom they took to be his loving and noble daughter.

Adam led the way, as if unacquainted with his colleagues following behind. Last of all, maintaining a skilled and watchful eye, came Richard, and Benjamin who kept a hand on his loaded gun should any wayward soldier or policeman try to stop them getting on board at the last minute, and who now thought that they should have taken a taxi instead of walking so far in the scorching sun. He seemed to be striding along in a gallon of sweat, and turned to look back along the street in case a taxi should come, in spite of the fact that they had only half a kilometre to go.

An oblong piece of wood had been stuck on top of an oncoming car, presumably as a makeshift sign, which said that it was a taxi on service. Perhaps it was, and had already been called to some distant address, for when Benjamin stepped into the road to stop it in true nihilistic fashion, it drove slowly by and almost ran over his foot. This did not anger him at all, but what did was when he realized that the so-called taxi was none other than his Thundercloud Estate car which he had soberly given up to the Museum of the Insurrection. There was no mistaking it, for every scratch and dent along the side was known to him, and no panel-beater had been put to work on it since he had presented it. The windscreen had been replaced, as well as the tyres and windows, and he was so stunned he did not even reach for his gun to fire at it. In any case, a policeman stood by a traffic-light a hundred metres away, watching him carefully.

When their phalanx quickened pace towards the control-post and customs-sheds, they all turned silent, as if expecting some final trouble to come from this grim concrete building. But a policeman at the door waved them on to the open quay and went back to a card-game with his friends. Benjamin walked across to a tourist kiosk where a uniformed and good-looking woman distributed travel literature to holidaymakers who had come to see the great and renovated nation of New Nihilon. With a rather wan smile she gave him a bundle of pamphlets, which he thought might contain information useful to the guidebook.

No one looked at their ticket as they moved up the gangway. After securing their cabins they came on deck and stood by the rail to enjoy a last glimpse of Shelp, having gathered that the ship was to sail in half an hour. Further across the bay Edgar saw boatwomen rowing sturdily from other ships back to the shore, transferring passengers' luggage to the customs-shed. He looked through his binoculars in case any of them resembled Mella, and the memory of her great love for him brought an ache to his heart.

Such sadness however was offset by the fact that this great white ship of the Nihilon Line had a full array of lifeboats along either flank. It was something he had hoped for but not expected, and it was good because it promised him a relaxing journey, which he felt he had earned after his tribulations with Mella, whom he dreaded to see at any moment come in all her fury to get him back, perched high on her mighty throne that would be hauled by a thousand followers between the customs-sheds. So he was not really sad, except for the sake of being sad, and because the rowing boatwomen in the distance did make a rather gentle picture.

Another person stood close to their group, so that to anyone not of it he seemed to belong to it, an unobtrusive preoccupied gentleman of medium height who wore dark glasses of such size that they might almost have been a mask to hide his face. Richard took him for a common tourist, with a camera hanging on his chest, and what appeared to be a transistor-radio in his hand, with the silver rod of the aerial extended. He fiddled with prominent metal knobs under the dial, his anxious mouth working as he looked across at the shore, as if to receive speech or music from that direction.

The town was gleaming and prosperous in the sun. Fortune seemed to have smiled on it, with so many blocks of flats, factories, buses, cars, and well-dressed people. Along the quay were oil-tanks, gasometers, warehouses, ships, and cranes, a sight that filled their heads with memories. Adam remembered the girl at the hotel in Fludd, and was saddened at the thought that she had been swept away in the great disaster. Further back in time was his entrance into Nihilon when he had innocently held the soldier's rifle and fired it towards Cronacia, thus bringing the retaliation that appeared to have set the whole insurrection in motion.

Who had fired that fatal shot? He had never felt guilty of it, and could only ascribe it to an accident, or an impulse travelling through heart to finger, just strong enough to move it on the trigger. But none of them was innocent, being heaven-bent for the end of the world, and never set for a beginning. It was too late to wonder where it all began, yet that seemed the only hope, if hope were wanted, and to a poet it was. A beginning might be mysterious, but it was always feasible.

Benjamin, as he smoked his cigar, dwelt on the magnificent charge of the two hundred Zaps which he had let loose at the soulless space-base of Tungsten. But his perilous journeyings in nether Nihilon were over, and he prided himself on having left the country a better place than he had found it, all in all. He wondered what he would do with the rest of his life, whether in the large world there wasn't another Nihilon waiting to be surreptitously exploded and brought back to sanity, or whether he wouldn't have to come back to this one and start all over again on familiar ground.

Lazy and content at having accomplished her mission, Jaquiline waited for the gangway to be hoisted to the side of the white ship. She thought of her strange encounter with the bookseller chief-of-police friend at the frontier, whom she almost expected to see on the ship but didn't, and of the exquisite experience of swirling through orgiastic space with her husband Adam. There were things about Nihilon that she would never be able to forget, and that alone had made her sojourn worthwhile.

Everyone who was to travel seemed now to be on board. Refugees from the honesty of New Nihilon were soberly dressed and quietly happy to be leaving, while those travellers who had spent time in the country since its change of system were glazed at the eyes, and belligerent after their continual battering of straightforward nihilistic honesty.

Though Richard anticipated a smooth trip from the Bay of Shelp and across the sea to Cronacia, he was inwardly uneasy, but without knowing why – a not uncommon state in recent times. The days of peril seemed truly over, yet he felt unprotected and exposed standing by the rail of the ship, and wanted to go down and sleep in his cabin, from which no black force in any form would be able to pull him back to nightmare Nihilon. But he didn't want to appear unsociable by leaving the others.

Sailors were fixing block and tackle to hoist the gangway, a few minutes before departure time, when a curious thing happened. The woman in the tourist-office hurriedly picked up a large handbag, ran across the quay, walked up the gangplank, and came aboard just as preparations were made to get the ship away. She stood a few yards from Jaquiline, gazing at the shoreline in a mood of bitter regret.

‘I think I know you,' Jaquiline said, with an unpleasant pang of recognition.

‘Please, let's not talk,' said Cola quickly. ‘When I left you I was sent to Mount Bathos for a month, to be rehabilitated. It was really very successful.'

‘Then why are you leaving New Nihilon in such a hurry?'

‘You'll see,' Cola said, a tone of sad hysteria that prompted Jaquiline to hold her hands in a generous effort to calm her.

As the ship steamed between the arms of the inner breakwater, dragons of fire and smoke suddenly ate up part of the waterfront. The explosion was so mighty that a low wave came eddying towards the ship, at which they ran into the main saloon and closed the door. Débris rained down over the harbour, and a few scattered pieces fell on to the ship like dead and dying birds.

But, while still outside before the explosion took place, Benjamin had seen the unobtrusive tourist press one of the buttons on what they had thought to be a transistor-radio, and as the first flash broke on the skyline he had noticed how ex-President Nil's mouth lost its twisted anxiety, and smiled.

Bells were ringing, and sirens moaning along the shore. Cola stood with her head resting on the edge of a window, in tears at another wrecking of beautiful Nihilon, the new model she had been taught to love in the brain-laboratories of Mount Bathos, and which she had spent a week describing to people who would never understand it. It was like a volcano erupting, a spectacle which showed Benjamin – though only for a moment – that Nihilon was a country for which nothing could be done, a part of the world that could no more be adequately covered by a guidebook than a jungle could. But he saw plainly that such a wayward reflection was only the false fire of nihilism continuing to blaze in his heart – when he knew all the time that men in general, and he in particular, had the power to extinguish it forever.

Before the tourist with the radio device could press the second of his series of buttons Benjamin furtively drew the revolver from inside his jacket and, taking careful aim, fired one shot and killed him. The machine fell from his hands and splashed into the sea. He ran up to the body, and heaved it on to the rail. With a further effort he sent it spinning after the radio-detonator.

He then returned the gun to its holster, and went into the saloon to comfort his friends, as the ship steamed out of the Bay of Shelp, and away from Nihilon.

A Biography of Alan Sillitoe by Ruth Fainlight

Not many of the “Angry Young Men” (a label Alan Sillitoe vigorously rejected but which nonetheless clung to him until the end of his life), could boast of having failed the eleven plus exam not only once, but twice. From early childhood Alan yearned for every sort of knowledge about the world: history, geography, cosmology, biology, topography, and mathematics; to read the best novels and poetry; and learn all the languages, from Classical Greek and Latin to every tongue of modern Europe. But his violent father was illiterate, his mother barely able to read the popular press and when necessary write a simple letter, and he was so cut off from any sort of cultivated environment that, at about the age of ten, trying to teach himself French (unaware books existed that might have helped him), the only method he could devise was to look up each word of a French sentence in a small pocket dictionary. It did not take long for him to realize that something was wrong with his system, but there was no one to ask what he should do instead.