Travels in Nihilon

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.

‘Lay flat,’ he said, for they were still on the exposed side of the wall. But Jaquiline staggered to safety behind a tree, while a stray bullet caught her rescuer, keeping him in the fire-zone. Sheets of hot metal and petrol went far and wide. Some insurrectionist soldiers were caught as they rushed forward, but the conflagration cleared the wall, which in any case was not intensively manned.

Though such pyrotechnics hadn’t been strictly necessary, they had put heart into the attackers, and discouraged the defenders from reinforcing the wall should they have thought to do so. Several hundred of Benjamin’s men entered the compound, though it turned out that the other attacks had also been successful. As messages came to his Thundercloud, he felt justified in using such weight in view of the urgent need to push on that night towards Tungsten, which was still thirty kilometres away.

An immense bonfire was made of many psychiatrist’s couches, together with tons of records and notes that had been scrupulously kept on every patient of past and present. To atone for their sins against humanity, the doctors were ordered to care for the wounded, and to bury the dead, and those members of the staff who refused were threatened with a course of their own electric-shock therapy, at which they turned amiable and accepted all Benjamin’s conditions.

Indeed, it was easier to win over the doctors and medical staff to the insurrectionist cause than the patients, who saw the capture of Aspron as just another trap, a noisy and realistic show staged by the staff so as to make the final test on their loyalty to nihilism. They were like hunted people, physically well-fed and cared for, but only so that they would be able to run when the great chase was on. Even the presence of dead and wounded after the battle didn’t convince them, for those who had been there longest whispered that such attention to detail was not unknown.

Observing Benjamin’s perplexity and disappointment, the Big Doctor offered to set up a quick course of persuasion, promising that at the end of a week every patient would be eager to join the new cause. Benjamin turned down his proposal (while seeing the sense of it), though he decided to retain him as his medical officer for the attack on the rocket base.

Immense food stores were found, and long tables were set out in the main square so that soldiers and ex-patients could dine together. Other captured booty included a score of forty-seater Maloram Mountain Buses, as well as two hundred Zap sports cars. Benjamin had already sent an advance-guard of eight hundred soldiers towards Tungsten, and now, at midnight, every light turned on, the patients’ band of the Aspron Psychic Redemption Institution (Lunatics) performed a fairly musical interpretation of ‘Honesty Forever’.

With the Malorams lined up and the Zaps in four files behind, he looked back on his army from the battered and windowless command car. Full of life’s joy and fervour, he gave a salute, then got in and turned the ignition key.

Jaquiline was not in her accustomed place. There had been so much work after his victory that he had not missed her until now, when the enormous blunder of her absence shot him out of the car. He sent runners to every vehicle saying that the advance would be delayed until she was found. Search parties went into the surrounding groves, while the ex-patients scoured the compound and buildings.

He brooded in Big Doctor’s office, because there was nothing else to be done. Several crates of Nihilitz and Anihilitz were found in a store-cellar by patients who had not tasted such fiery ambrosia for years, and they were soon wandering around in a state of agreeable drunkenness. The staff did nothing to stop them breaking into rooms and offices, out of fear because they had now lost all authority, but mostly, it must be said, to increase the very atmosphere of nihilism that this army of barbaric insurrectionists had hoped to subdue.

Because of this confusion, and darkness beyond the walls, it was by no means easy to search for Jaquiline.

Benjamin walked up and down the small room, sweating with worry and impatience, sipping now and again at a glass of water mixed with Nihilitz. Big Doctor offered pills to calm his nerves, but Benjamin refused, though he didn’t know why. The Nihilitz was making him drowsy, in spite of his ravening anxiety, which was a bad thing because he still had to drive all night through unknown country on a rotten road, in the darkness, as well as fight a decisive battle in the morning. If he didn’t start soon he wouldn’t get there on time, and the whole combined operation might fail, in which case that nihilistic cargo of space-pornography would be triumphantly launched.

It was no use waiting, he decided. They would continue the search after he left, and if Jaquiline were found she could be driven to Tungsten in Big Doctor’s car, a swift and comfortable Mangler which was to be left behind for her.

With two soldiers at the radio set, and Big Doctor on the other seat, Benjamin drove through the shattered gate, at the head of his column, almost an hour off schedule. Outside, where darkness began, a piece of sharp flint punctured his left front wheel. It was a rancid omen, and he matched it with ripe curses. Big Doctor, he saw, was smiling. The soldiers didn’t know how to work the jack and change the wheel, so he did it himself, a task which calmed him down, and was perfomed so quickly and well that Big Doctor’s smile went back into his long face.

The black trees looming around were fixed in their own deep dreams, stalwart trunks brought forward in every case by the Thundercloud’s headlights. The advance-guard had left luminosity-stones to mark the route, which made it easy to follow. He felt carefree, back at his favourite work, for in spite of his sedentary life so far, Benjamin was convinced that he was at last doing what he had been born for — to be a soldier, no matter in what cause he was fighting.