Travels in Nihilon

Chapter 9

Benjamin sat in his silent car, wondering whether or not it had broken its back in tumbling down the bank. He was also curious as to why the powers of Nihilon were on to him so soon, for the driver in that red Zap was certainly no playboy out for a casual accident before breakfast. He’d tried to kill him, and that was a plain Nihilonian fact. Benjamin brooded that he’d probably betrayed himself by hitting the policeman at the frontier, an act he’d taken gluttonous pride in at the time, but which in the glare of midday he saw as his first and perhaps fatal mistake.

He’d always assumed that people over forty didn’t make such blunders, but in Nihilon he was learning certain things all over again. This fractured start threatened the fibres of his normally cool nerve, and as he turned the ignition key, he wondered whether his colleagues were faring any better in their allotted zones.

The ground was firmer under the trees, and he hoped to get back on the road, despite the many boulders scattered around. The engine sounded good, so he let off the brake, slipped into first gear, and went forward. Most of Benjamin’s life had been devoted to the study of history, and he had been chosen by the Editor of the proposed guidebook to concentrate, as far as possible, on recent events in Nihilon. This was easier said than done, for Benjamin knew that the history books of Nihilon’s more recent past were nothing more than gossip columns. In the country’s schools history was scandal. Nothing else was allowed. Dates and facts were hard to come by. Political reality was out. There were only false accounts of drunkenness, greed, bribe-taking, murder, orgy, perversion, incompetence, blackmail and corruption. The children and students loved it.

History, as it is ordinarily known, stopped at the beginning of the present regime which, during its twenty-five years of power, had closed the country off from the world, at least as regards any serious study of it. Tourists had been allowed to sample the nefarious delights of its nihilistic principles, but they had for the most part returned in a state of dumb shock.

Inwardly terrified of being disillusioned, they had praised the country out of all proportion to its negative achievements. In this way they kept faith in themselves, and by encouraging others to go in their tracks, enabled them to do the same. Some tourists had come back with no impressions at all, being none the wiser for their visits.

He cruised through the grove of trees, over ploughed earth and between stones, until an incline towards the road was gentle enough to ascend. Even so, it was steep, and called for the full power of the Thundercloud’s robust engine to get him to the top. Just in time, he noticed that a deep drainage ditch bordered the road, blocking him off from it. He cursed, stopped, pulled hard on the handbrake, and wondered how he could get over.

Some months ago a letter had reached him from an aged and venerable philosopher of Nihilon who had written a true and complete history of the last Nihilonian civil war, and of all that had happened since, which he was about to offer to a publisher in the capital. He said he would hide a carbon copy of the book in case the first one not only failed to be published, but was also not sent back to him. Another correspondent later informed Benjamin that the philosopher-historian had been arrested by his publisher and never seen again, adding that the spare copy of the manuscript was hidden somewhere in Nihilon. Benjamin, in his travels, hoped to find this document, but his return to Nihilon put him in great danger, because he had been there as a young man, and certain crimes were lyingly attributed to him. His life wouldn’t be worth a bent Nihilonian klipp if he were caught, which was why his encounter with the Zap was so worrying.

He got out of the car, hoping to stop a passing motorist and ask for help. But the road was empty, the sky was clear, the sun just past its zenith. At this rate it would take a week instead of a day to reach Nihilon City, so he decided to collect enough large stones to fill the ditch and then cross over it. Unfortunately, the most suitable stones lay at the bottom of the slope, which would mean great labour in bringing them up, but since it seemed the only solution he took off his shirt and walked down for the first consignment.

Twenty-five years ago there had been a civil war in Nihilon, between the ruling Rationalists, and the usurping Nihilists. Benjamin Smith, as an idealistic young man whose girlfriend had recently agreed to marry someone else, went off to fight, with other outsiders, for the cause of the Rationalists. His disappointment in love made him both cunning and reckless — cunning in military logic, and reckless for his personal safety — so that within a year he had reached the rank of company commander.

A drop of sweat from his forehead glistened momentarily on a large stone, that plunged to the bottom of the trench and gave back a sound of splintering fragments. During this lengthy transporting of boulders, perspiring freely, he recalled those days of battle for the Republic of Damascony — now Nihilon — when he had received the Damson Leaf Award for high and useful services from President Took, the last great Liberal president of the country, who was said to have died after the final collapse of the battlefronts. Benjamin wanted to find out what had really happened to him, and what had become of Took’s infant daughter, who would by now be a grown woman — if she had survived. It seemed to him, as he lugged a particularly heavy burden up the hill, that history was a dustbin to root around in occasionally for something spiritually satisfying to ponder on, especially when at the ripe age of fifty he was suffering the desolation of a broken marriage, and had accepted a job as historical adviser to an unnecessary guidebook merely to get away from it.

He recalled how he and his company of Rational Guards, reduced to twenty-five men out of two hundred, had been ordered to defend the town of Amrel, which was of great importance for the safety of Nihilon City a hundred and sixty kilometres to the southwest. But there was little chance of holding back the ever-pressing forces of nihilism, for with terror on their side, the sinuous and pot-holed roads opened before them, and led inexorably towards the centre of government.

Amrel was one of the last remaining blocks to their progress. It stood on a sheer hill, a packed little town of tall and ancient buildings from whose ramparts one could see the long bridge over the River Aznal — an impregnable position, and tactically the right place for a last stand since it overlooked the eastern plateau for a great distance, and would have commanded it in every way if the Rationalists had possessed a dozen heavy machine guns, a battery of artillery, and several hundred fresh, well-trained men, instead of twenty-five worn-out idealistic fugitives who had little food and ammunition left.

Even so, the forward patrols of the Nihilists had suffered at the bridge, as the score of bodies rotting in the sun has proved. Benjamin had gone down the hill himself and laid explosive charges under its supports, wired them skilfully, and trailed the lead up the cliff face to his headquarters in the old palace. He would wait for days if necessary for that armoured group he’d dreamed of all his life, a trio of prime and perfect tanks on a long bridge suddenly convulsed in an earthquake of explosions that dropped them into icy water below.

Such a picture was with him still as he heaved another stone up to the culvert, part of the same hot territory he’d tried to defend so long ago. That classically perfect bridge had never been blown, for a man of the town had approached him one evening, and beckoned him on to the arcaded walk with a wide view over the empty and lustreless plain. He talked for a long time of how the bridge was of great commercial and cultural value to the town, part of its actual life-spirit, a bridge which not only connected it to the rich wheatlands and the pastures of the Alpine regions, but also to the Chimney Zone north of Nihilon City from which came all manufactured goods. The bridge was a vital lifeline of the country that, once destroyed, would take years to rebuild, and in any case it was no longer a question, the man went on, of holding up the Nihilist army. All the Nihilists had to do was cross the river by boat to the north and south, out of range of Rationalist patrols, and the town would fall within a matter of hours.

Benjamin knew he ought to have shot the man dead, and had his body thrown towards the river, as the townspeople slung their dogs when they wanted to kill them, but he hesitated, and went on listening in the dusk. The man offered him a bus, with enough petrol to get his company to Nihilon City, in exchange for leaving the bridge alone. Amrel would fall anyway, even if they died defending it. Benjamin knew that the Rationalist armies were being defeated on all fronts because they lacked supplies and popular support. Walking up and down in the cool moonlight, smoking a cigar and listening to the smooth persuasions of this man, offering him safety in the form of a bus and petrol, he felt for the first time since leaving his own country that he wanted to live. Perhaps if he survived he would even fall in love again, and his nod of acceptance was barely visible in the half darkness.

The following morning he and his soldiers had got into the bus. The man who had provided it, and who had shaken his hand warmly, who had embraced him and called him his own brother as they said goodbye, was an agent of the Nihilists. Halfway to the capital, it was by the merest chance that a bomb was found under one of the bus seats, which was to have destroyed them all. Also, five of the petrol cans were full of water, though this was remedied by taking more fuel from filling-stations at gunpoint.

His company deserted him to a man on the outskirts of Nihilon City, where he was arrested, charged with treason for deserting the bridge, and sentenced to be shot. He had no defence, though he said he was innocent, and that his retreat from Amrel was a tactical move to draw the Nihilists into an ambush, but that his own men had abandoned him before he could carry it out.

A Nihilist column had marched over the bridge into Amrel on the following day, and so all the surrounding region was lost by the Rationalists. Other areas were thus outflanked, and the defenders of each front began to fall back in panic. It was the end of the end. In the general collapse, he escaped from his gaolers, and it was only by raw cunning and infinite privation that he was able to get out of the country some months later. As for President Took, no news of his fate had ever been published by the Nihilists.

The ditch was at last filled, and he drove his car on to the road, reflecting that his day back in Nihilon had so far been as arduous as when he was fighting to save it from the black threat which had now overtaken it.

After a few kilometres along the empty highway in his fast, comfortable car he came to a barrier with the words: CUSTOMS POST. WE IMPLORE YOU TO HALT in painted white letters across the top. There was a maroon Bivouac saloon car in front, and when the gate opened, they advanced between two concrete buildings with armed guards standing outside.

An arrogant young customs officer came out of the first door holding a large steel hammer with which he smashed the windscreen of the Bivouac to pieces. ‘You are forbidden to import windscreens into Nihilon,’ he sneered.

The blond, fair-haired, tall, blue-eyed man at the wheel jumped out and protested: ‘This is ridiculous.’

‘And that’s treasonable talk,’ shouted the customs officer. ‘Nothing is ridiculous in Nihilon. Drive on, or I’ll pulverize your headlamps. It’s also forbidden to import headlamps. It’s forbidden to bring anything in at all. I’ll tax your toenails if you insult me personally like that.’

The man quickly handed over a bundle of money, and after a big red paint mark had been splashed down the side of his car by a second customs officer, he was allowed to enter the country.

‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said the customs officer obsequiously when Benjamin drove forward, putting his hammer away into a briefcase. Benjamin was resigned to losing his windscreen, because he had a spare plastic one in his repair kit, but the customs officer asked: ‘How much blood do you have in your body, sir?’

Puzzled, he made a wild guess: ‘Sixteen litres.’

The customs officer opened the door: ‘You’re only allowed fifteen. Will you step this way, sir?’

He swore, but inaudibly, deciding to be more patient than he’d been at the first obstacle, and followed the customs man inside.

‘May I see your passport?’

Benjamin gave it to him: ‘Certainly.’

‘It’s forged,’ the man said with a smile, and Benjamin marvelled at how uncannily quick they were in detecting this fact, which was indeed true, though the falsification was so perfect that he didn’t see how they could tell. ‘However,’ the passport general said from behind the desk, ‘we don’t worry about such details in Nihilon. Kindly sit in that chair so that we can confiscate your litre of surplus blood, then we’ll let you go.’

Benjamin put his passport away, and began to roll up his shirt sleeve. ‘What would happen if I had a litre of blood less than the normal amount?’

‘You’d have a transfusion of the difference. That would be inconvenient, because you’d have to wait a few days until they could do it at the local clinic. And you’d have a big medical bill to pay. But there’d be no trouble. No trouble at all. As a Nihilist I have an answer to every question. There are advantages to this system, as you’ll no doubt find before you leave.’

Benjamin flinched and grunted as the needle went in, and turned pale when he saw such a huge flow of his life’s blood going out. However, the nurse who extracted it was pretty, so he didn’t object, but stood up as soon as it was finished and walked unsteadily back to his car.

‘The fact is,’ said the young customs official with the hammer in his briefcase, ‘no matter how much blood a person says he has we always take a litre out, on this route. We sell it to the Nihilon Blood Bank for use in our war against Cronacia. It not only makes us money, but it’s patriotic as well.’

‘A charming idea,’ said Benjamin, glad to be back in his car, though feeling that he’d need a week to recover from this day’s blows.

‘Another thing,’ said the customs officer, ‘do you have a repair kit in your car?’

‘Of course.’

‘Kindly get it out for me.’

Like a man under interrogation, he had admitted something he thought to be totally innocent, if not irrelevant, only to find it of vital consequence to his exhausted body and irascible mind. ‘What the hell for?’

‘All repair kits have to be inspected.’

‘Is there duty to pay on them?’

The customs man shook his head. With a sigh, Benjamin went to the back of the car, lifted the tailgate, and pulled boxes about till he came to the repair kit.

‘Open it,’ said the customs officer.

He regarded it as the pride of his travelling equipment, a collection of spare parts and tools which he had chosen with care so as to make sure he could deal with any minor breakdown, having heard of Nihilon’s bad and brutal service stations. The customs officer picked over the tools disdainfully: ‘Do you think our garages are badly equipped? Or do you suspect that our mechanics are incompetent?’

‘I carry such tools in my own country,’ Benjamin lied.

‘Do they do things better there?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ he said, staggering from weakness.

‘Confiscated,’ said the customs officer, pulling them to the ground with a clatter. A humble little man in a white overall came with a barrow and carried them away. Benjamin, in no position to fight, walked to the front of his car, intending to drive on. ‘One moment,’ called the customs officer, drawing the hammer from his briefcase and making purposefully for the windscreen.

Benjamin ran with his remaining strength and, gasping for breath as he opened the door, took the heavy revolver from the glove-box. He pointed it at the customs officer, who also turned pale, and let his hammer drop. ‘Put that paint mark on the side of my car and let me go,’ Benjamin rasped, ‘or I’ll blow you to pieces.’

‘Yes sir,’ said the customs officer. Another man splashed a blue streak down the Thundercloud’s door, so that, highly satisfied at his forcefulness, Benjamin drove towards the gate.

A squat-faced soldier with rifle and bayonet turned a mangle-handle to open it. As Benjamin was driving through, obeying the road sign speed of five kilometres per hour, the soldier took a hammer from his pocket and ran in front of the car, smashing its windscreen to pieces. Benjamin, with wild rage, pressed on the accelerator in the hope of crushing him to death, but the adept soldier dodged clear and waved him on with a smile.