Travels in Nihilon

Chapter 5

Benjamin Smith laughed at having knocked the policeman down at the frontier, reflecting that it served the bastard right for tearing up his visa certificate — which he’d worked on for three days, a pure sweat of the forger’s art. The car droned softly and efficiently on, and at a level stretch across a mountain plateau a red Zap sports car came towards him on the same side, a crimson swift oval flattened on the blue-grey tarmac road. The Zap was far off at first, so that Benjamin thought it was going away from him, that it had appeared from some slip-road while his eyes had wandered, but the car grew and came close, the dare-devil inside dead-set on some vicious suicide game. Benjamin’s calculations speeded up rapidly, weighing his own heavy car as three times that of the Zap, but even so, the thought of entering a brick-wall competition didn’t appeal to him, since the smoke would be mutual if it came to a smash.

He turned to the other side of the road, choosing safety, but the Zap thought otherwise, and Benjamin sweated at the sight of death coming up so quick. He almost stood on the brakes, and angled the car to the edge of the road he had originally been on, but it seemed as if the Zap was latched at him by some demonically tuned radio beam.

At the last point of evasion he felt that something subtle yet deadly had been done to the camber of the road. It was as if the man in the Zap, having set on him from far away, had planned his tactics knowing that Benjamin would turn off for final safety at this section of the innocent-looking highway, because the heavy Thundercloud Estate car rumbled off it, descended a slope, turned completely over, then righted itself, shaking from side to side, and bouncing on its indestructible springs before settling down to silence.

Benjamin opened his eyes, and reached into the glove-box for his revolver. He didn’t know whether he was hurt or not. For all he knew, and he felt it might be so, he could have broken a few limbs and been bleeding at a couple of internal places. But he sprang out of the car as if to murder the first animal or human being he came across, and crawled up the sandy embankment to the road. A smell of heat and pinecones came from sparse forest on the opposite side. He lay in the ditch and listened. The road was empty. A gentle wind turned the sweat cold on his face. He screamed out at the road, and fired a shot in the direction the Zap had taken, then smiled like a baby that was conscious of hearing for the first time, as he listened to the explosion, and its echoes breaking through each barrier of silence.