"It really is vitally important that we are allowed to speak to whoever is in charge, " said Aziraphale. "I really must ask that he's right, you know, I'd be able to tell if he was lying yes, thank you, I think we'd really achieve something if you kindly allowed me to carry on all right thank you I was only trying to put in a good word Yes! Er. You were asking him to yes all right . . . now-"
"D'yer see my finger?" shouted Shadwell, whose sanity was still Attachéd to him but only on the end of along and rather frayed string. "D'yer see it? This finger, laddie, could send ye to meet yer Maker!"
Sgt. Deisenburger stared at the black and purple nail a few inches from his face. As an offensive weapon it rated quite highly, especially if it was ever used in the preparation of food.
The telephone gave him nothing but static. He'd been told not to leave his post. His wound from Nam was starting to play up.[53] He wondered how much trouble he could get into for shooting non‑American civilians.
– – -
The four bicycles pulled up a little way from the base. Tire marks in the dust, and a patch of oil, indicated that other travelers had briefly rested there.
"What're we stopping for?" said Pepper.
"I'm thinking," said Adam.
It was hard. The bit of his mind that he knew as himself was still there, but it was trying to stay afloat on a fountain of tumultuous darkness. What he was aware of, though, was that his three companions were one-hundred percent human. He'd got them into trouble before, in the way of torn clothes, docked pocket money, and so on, but this one was almost certainly going to involve a lot more than being confined to the house and made to tidy up your room.
On the other hand, there wasn't anyone else.
"All right," he said. "We need some stuff, I think. We need a sword, a crown, and some scales."
They stared at him.
"What, just here?" said Brian. "There's nothin' like that here."
"I dunno," said Adam. "When you think about the games and that, you know, we've played . . ."
– – -
Just to make Sgt. Deisenburger's day, a car pulled up and it was floating several inches off the ground because it had no tires. Or paintwork. What it did have was a trail of blue smoke, and when it stopped it made the pinging noises made by metal cooling down from a very high temperature.
It looked as if it had smoked glass windows, although this was just an effect caused by it having ordinary glass windows but a smoke‑filled interior.
The driver's door opened, and a cloud of choking fumes got out. Then Crowley followed it.
He waved the smoke away from his face, blinked, and then turned the gesture into a friendly wave.
"Hi," he said. "How's it going? Has the world ended yet?"
"He won't let us in, Crowley, " said Madame Tracy.
"Aziraphale? Is that you? Nice dress," said Crowley vaguely. He wasn't feeling very well. For the last thirty miles he had been imagining that a ton of burning metal, rubber, and leather was a fully‑functioning automobile, and the Bentley had been resisting him fiercely. The hard part had been to keep the whole thing rolling after the all‑weather radials had burned away. Beside him the remains of the Bentley dropped suddenly onto its distorted wheel rims as he stopped imagining that it had tires.
He patted a metal surface hot enough to fry eggs on.
"You wouldn't get that sort of performance out of one of these modern cars," he said lovingly.
They stared at him.
There was a little electronic click.
The gate was rising. The housing that contained the electric motor gave a mechanical groan, and then gave up in the face of the unstoppable force acting on the barrier.
"Hey!" said Sgt. Deisenburger, "Which one of you yo‑yos did that?"
Zip. Zip. Zip. Zip. And a small dog, its legs a blur.
They stared at the four ferociously pedaling figures that ducked under the barrier and disappeared into the camp.
The sergeant pulled himself together.
"Hey," he said, but much more weakly this time, "did any of them kids have some space alien with a face like a friendly turd in a bike basket?"
"Don't think so," said Crowley.
"Then," said Sgt. Deisenburger, "they're in real trouble." He raised his gun. Enough of this pussyfooting around; he kept thinking of soap. "And so," he said, "are you."
"I warns ye‑" Shadwell began.
"This has gone on too long " said Aziraphale. "Sort it out, Crowley, there's a dear chap."
"Hmm?" said Crowley.
"I'm the nice one, " said Aziraphale. "You can't expect me to‑oh, blast it. You try to do the decent thing, and where does it get you?" He snapped his fingers.
There was a pop like an old‑fashioned flashbulb, and Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger disappeared.
"Er, " said Aziraphale.
"See?" said Shadwell, who hadn't quite got the hang of Madame Tracy's split personality, "nothing to it. Ye stick by me, yell be all right."
"Well done," said Crowley. "Never thought you had it in you."
"No," said Aziraphale. "Nor did I, in fact. I do hope I haven't sent him somewhere dreadful."
"You'd better get used to it right now," said Crowley. "You just send 'em. Best not to worry about where they go." He looked fascinated. "Aren't you going to introduce me to your new body?"
"Oh? Yes. Yes, of course. Madame Tracy, this is Crowley. Crowley, Madame Tracy. Charmed, I'm sure."
"Let's get on in," said Crowley. He looked sadly at the wreckage of the Bentley, and then brightened. A jeep was heading purposefully towards the gate, and it looked as though it was crowded with people who were about to shout questions and fire guns and not worry about which order they did this in.
He brightened up. This was more what you might call his area of competence.
He took his hands out of his pockets and he raised them like Bruce Lee and then he smiled like Lee van Cleef. "Ah," he said, "here comes transport."
– – -
They parked their bikes outside one of the low buildings. Wensleydale carefully locked his. He was that kind of boy.
"So what will these people look like?" said Pepper.
"They could look like all sorts," said Adam doubtfully.
"They're grownups, are they?" said Pepper.
"Yes," said Adam. "More grown‑up than you've ever seen before, I reckon."
"Fightin' grownups is never any use," said Wensleydale gloomily. "You always get into trouble."
"You don't have to fight 'em," said Adam. "You just do what I told you.
The Them looked at the things they were carrying. As far as tools to mend the world were concerned, they did not look incredibly efficient.
"How'll we find 'em, then?" said Brian, doubtfully. "I remember when we came to the Open Day, it's all rooms and stuff. Lots of rooms and flashing lights."
Adam stared thoughtfully at the buildings. The alarms were still yodelling.
"Well," he said, "it seems to me‑"
"Hey, what are you kids doing here?"
It wasn't a one hundred percent threatening voice, but it was near the end of its tether and it belonged to an officer who'd spent ten minutes trying to make sense of a senseless world where alarms went off and doors didn't open. Two equally harassed soldiers stood behind him, slightly at a loss as to how to deal with four short and clearly Caucasian juveniles, one of them marginally female.
"Don't you worry about us," said Adam airily. "We're jus' lookin' around."
"Now you just‑" the lieutenant began.
"Go to sleep," said Adam. "You just go to sleep. All you soldiers here go to sleep. Then you won't get hurt. You all just go to sleep now. "
The lieutenant stared at him, his eyes trying to focus. Then he pitched forward.
"Coo," said Pepper, as the others collapsed, "how did you do that?"
"Well," said Adam cautiously, "you know that bit about hypnotism in the Boy's Own Book of 101 Things To Do that we could
never make work?"
"Yes?"
"Well, it's sort of like that, only now I've found how to do it." He turned back to the communications building.
He pulled himself together, his body unfolding from its habitual comfortable slouch into an upright bearing Mr. Tyler would have been proud of.
"Right," he said.
He thought for a while.
Then he said, "Come and see."
– – -
If you took the world away and just left the electricity, it would look like the most exquisite filigree ever made‑a ball of twinkling silver lines with the occasional coruscating spike of a satellite beam. Even the dark areas would glow with radar and commercial radio waves. It could be the nervous system of a great beast.
Here and there cities make knots in the web but most of the electricity is, as it were, mere musculature, concerned only with crude work. But for fifty years or so people had been giving electricity brains.
And now it was alive, in the same way that fire is alive. Switches were welding shut. Relays fused. In the heart of silicon chips whose microscopic architecture looked like a street plan of Los Angeles fresh pathways opened up, and hundreds of miles away bells rang in underground rooms and men stared in horror at what certain screens were telling them. Heavy steel doors shut firmly in secret hollow mountains, leaving people on the other side to pound on them and wrestle with fuse boxes which had melted. Bits of desert and tundra slid aside, letting fresh air into air‑conditioned tombs, and blunt shapes ground ponderously into position.
And while it flowed where it should not, it ebbed from its normal beds. In cities the traffic lights went, then the street lights, then all the lights. Cooling fans slowed, flickered, and stopped. Heaters faded into darkness. Lifts stuck. Radio stations choked off, their soothing music silenced.
It has been said that civilization is twenty‑four hours and two meals away from barbarism.
Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not.
There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic‑hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.
* * * * *
Death straightened up. He appeared to be listening intently. It was anyone's guess what he listened with.
HE IS HERE, he said.
The other three looked up. There was a barely perceptible change in the way they stood there. A moment before Death had spoken they, the part of them that did not walk and talk like human beings, had been wrapped around the world. Now they were back.
More or less.
There was a strangeness about them. It was as if, instead of ill-fitting suits, they now had ill‑fitting bodies. Famine looked as though he had been tuned slightly off‑station, so that the hitherto dominant signal of a pleasant, thrusting, successful businessman‑was beginning to be drowned out by the ancient, horrible static of his basic personality. War's skin glistened with sweat. Pollution's skin just glistened.
"It's all . . . taken care of," said War, speaking with some effort. "It'll . . , take its course."
"It's not just the nuclear," Pollution said. "It's the chemical. Thousands of gallons of stuff in . . , little tanks all over the world. Beautiful liquids . . . with eighteen syllables in their names. And the . . . old standbys. Say what you like. Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever."
"And then . . . winter," said Famine. "I like winter. There's something . . . clean about winter."
"Chickens coming . . . home to roost," said War.
"No more chickens," said Famine, flatly.
Only Death hadn't changed. Some things don't.
– – -
The Four left the building. It was noticeable that Pollution, while still walking, nevertheless gave the impression of oozing.
And this was noticed by Anathema and Newton Pulsifer.
It had been the first building they'd come to. It had seemed much safer inside than out, where there seemed to be a lot of excitement. Anathema had pushed open a door covered in signs that suggested that this would be a terminally dangerous thing to do. It had swung open at her touch. When they'd gone inside, it had shut and locked itself.
There hadn't been a lot of time to discuss this after the Four had walked in.
"What were they?" said Newt. "Some kind of terrorists?"
"In a very nice and accurate sense," said Anathema, "I think you're right."
"What was all that weird talk about?"
"I think possibly the end of the world," said Anathema. "Did you see their auras?"
"I don't think so," said Newt.
"Not nice at all."
"Oh."
"Negative auras, in fact."
"Oh?"
"Like black holes."
"That's bad, is it?"
"Yes."
Anathema glared at the rows of metal cabinets. For once, just now, because it wasn't just for play but was for real, the machinery that was going to bring about the end of the world, or at least that part of it that occupied the layers between about two meters down and all the way to the ozone layer, wasn't operating according to the usual script. There were no big red canisters with flashing lights. There were no coiled wires with a "cut me" look about them. No suspiciously large numeric displays were counting down toward a zero that could be averted with seconds to spare. Instead, the metal cabinets looked solid and heavy and very resistant to last‑minute heroism.
"What takes its course?" said Anathema. "They've done something, haven't they?"
"Perhaps there's an off switch?" said Newt helplessly. "I'm sure if we looked around‑"
"These sort of things are wired in. Don't be silly. I thought you knew about this sort of thing."
Newt nodded desperately. This was a long way from the pages of Easy Electronics. For the look of the thing, he peered into the back of one of the cabinets.
"Worldwide communications," he said indistinctly. "You could do practically anything. Modulate the mains power, tap into satellites. Absolutely anything. You could"-zhip‑"argh, you could" zhap‑"ouch, make things do" zipt‑"uh, just about"‑zzap‑"ooh."
"How are you getting on in there?"
Newt sucked his fingers. So far he hadn't found anything that resembled a transistor. He wrapped his hand in his handkerchief and pulled a couple of boards out of their sockets.
Once, one of the electronics magazines to which he subscribed had published a joke circuit which was guaranteed not to work. At last, they'd said in an amusing way, here's something all you ham‑fisted hams out there can build in the certain knowledge that if it does nothing, it's working. It had diodes the wrong way round, transistors upside down, and a flat battery. Newt had built it, and it picked up Radio Moscow. He'd written them a letter of complaint, but they never replied.
"I really don't know if I'm doing any good," he said.
"James Bond just unscrews things," said Anathema.
"Not just unscrews," said Newt, his temper fraying. "And I'm not" zhip‑"James Bond. If I was"‑whizzle‑"the bad guys would have shown me all the megadeath levers and told me how they bloody well worked, wouldn't they?"‑Fwizzpt‑"Only it doesn't happen like that in real life? I don't know what's happening and I can't stop it."
- – -
Clouds churned around the horizon. Overhead the sky was still clear, the air torn by nothing more than a light breeze. But it wasn't normal air. It had a crystallized look to it, so that you might feel that if you turned your head you might see new facets. It sparkled. If you had to find a word to describe it, the word thronged might slip insidiously into your mind. Thronged with insubstantial beings awaiting only the right moment to become very substantial.
Adam glanced up. In one sense there was just clear air overhead. In another, stretching off to infinity, were the hosts of Heaven and Hell, wingtip to wingtip. If you looked really closely, and
had been specially trained, you could tell the difference.
Silence held the bubble of the world in its grip.
The door of the building swung open and the Four stepped out. There was no more than a hint of human about three of them now‑they seemed to be humanoid shapes made up of all the things they were or represented. They made Death seem positively homely. His leather greatcoat and dark‑visored helmet had become a cowled robe, but these were mere details. A skeleton, even a walking one, is at least human; Death of a sort lurks inside every living creature.
"The thing is," said Adam urgently, "they're not really real. They're just like nightmares, really."
"B‑but we're not asleep," said Pepper.
Dog whined and tried to hide behind Adam.
"That one looks as if he's meltin'," said Brian, pointing at the advancing figure, if such it could still be called, of Pollution.
"There you are, then," said Adam, encouragingly. "It can't be real, can it? It's common sense. Something like that can't be reelly real."
The Four halted a few meters away.
IT HAS BEEN DONE, said Death. He leaned forward a little and stared eyelessly at Adam. It was hard to tell if he was surprised.
"Yes, well," said Adam. "The thing is, I don't want it done. I never asked for it to be done."
Death looked at the other three, and then back to Adam.
Behind them a jeep skewed to a halt. They ignored it.
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND, he said. SURELY YOUR VERY EXISTENCE REQUIRES THE ENDING OF THE WORLD. IT IS WRITTEN.
"I dunt see why anyone has to go an' write things like that," said Adam calmly. "The world is full of all sorts of brilliant stuff and I haven't found out all about it yet, so I don't want anyone messing it about or endin' it before I've had a chance to find out about it. So you can all just go away."
("That's the one, Mr. Shadwell," said Aziraphale, his words trailing into uncertainty even as he uttered them, "the one with T‑shirt . . . ")
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