The Day After Judgement

by James Blish

  McKnight picked up his phone and spoke briefly. Since it was a Hush-a-Phone, what he said was inaudible, but Buelg’s guess about the call was promptly confirmed.

  ‘Chief Hay says the machine is in perfect order and has produced a third analysis just like this one,’ he reported. ‘The problem now clearly is one of reconnaissance. (He pronounced the word correctly, which, amidst his flat Californian American, sounded almost affected.) Is there such a thing in Death Valley, or isn’t there? For the satellite to be able to spot it at all, it must be gigantic. From twenty-three thousand miles up, even a city the size of San Antonio is invisible unless you know exactly what you’re looking for in advance.’

  Here, Buelg was aware McKnight was speaking as an expert. Until he had been put in charge of SAC in Denver, almost all his career had been spent in various aspects of Air Information; even as a teenager, he had been a Civil Air Patrol cadet involved in search-and-rescue operations, which, between the mud slides and the brush fires, had been particularly extensive in the Los Angeles area in those days.

  ‘I don’t doubt that the satellite has spotted something,’ Buelg said. ‘But what it probably “sees” is a hard-radiation locus – maybe thermally hot, too – rather than any optical object, let alone a construct. My guess is that it’s nothing more than the impact site of a multiple warhead component that lost guidance, or was misaimed to begin with.’

  ‘Highly likely.’ McKnight admitted. ‘But why guess? The obvious first step is to send a low-level attack bomber over the site and get close-in photographs and spectra. A primitive installation such as you suggested earlier would be typically Chinese, and if so they won’t have low-level radar. If on the other hand the plane gets shot down, that will tell us something about the enemy, too.’

  Buelg sighed inwardly. Trying to nudge McKnight out of his single channel was a frustrating operation. But maybe, in this instance, it wasn’t really necessary; after all, the suggestion itself was sensible.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘One plane seems like a small investment. We’ve got damn all else left to lose now, anyhow.

  3

  No attack was made on the plane, but there was nevertheless one casualty. Neither the photographer nor the flight engineer, both busy with their instruments, had actually seen much of the target, and the Captain, for the same reason, had seen little more.

  ‘Hell of a lot of turbulence,’ he said at the debriefing, which took place a thousand miles away, while the men under Denver watched intently. ‘And the target itself is one huge updraft, like New York used to be, only much worse.’

  But the navigator, once his job had been done, had had nothing to do but look out, and he was in a state of shock. He was a swarthy young enlisted man from Chicago who looked as though he might have been recruited straight from a Mafiosa family, but he could say nothing now but a sentence which refused to get beyond its first syllable: ‘Dis – Dis –’ Once he had recovered from his shock they would be able to question him. But for the time being he was of no help.

  The photographs, however, were very clear, except for the infra-red sensitive plates, which showed nothing intelligible to the eye at all. The installation was perfectly circular and surrounded by a moat which, impossibly for Death Valley, appeared to be filled with black but genuine water, from which a fog bank was constantly trying to rise, only to be dissipated in the bone-dry air. The construction itself was a broad wall, almost a circular city, a good fifteen miles in diameter. It was broken irregularly by towers and other structures, some of them looking remarkably like mosques. This shell glowed fiercely, like red-hot iron, and a spectrograph showed that this was exactly what it was.

  Inside, the ground was terraced, like a lunar crater. At ground level was a flat plain, dotted with tiny rectangular markings in no discernible pattern; these, too, the spectrograph said, were red-hot iron. What seemed to be another moat, blood-red and as broad as a river, encircled the next terrace at the foot of the cliff where it began, and this, even more impossibly, was bordered by a dense circular forest. The forest was as broad as the river, but thinned eventually to a ring of what appeared to be the original sand, equally broad.

  In a lunar crater, the foothills of the central peak would have begun about here, but in the pictures, instead, the terrain plunged into a colossal black pit. The river cut through the forest and the desert at one point and roared over the side in a vast waterwall, compounding the darkness with mist which the camera had been unable to penetrate.

  ‘What was that you were saying about building a fortress overnight, Buelg?’ the General said. ‘“No human agency could?”’

  ‘No human agency was involved,’ Šatvje said in a hoarse whisper. He turned to the aide who had brought the pictures, an absurdly young lieutenant colonel with a blond crew cut, white face and shaking hands. ‘Are there any close-ups?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor. There was an automatic camera under the plane that took a film of the approach run. Here is one of the best shots.’

  The picture showed what appeared to be a towering gate in the best medieval style. Hundreds of shadowy figures crowded the barbican, of which three, just above the gateway itself, had been looking up at the plane and were shockingly clear. They looked like gigantic naked women, with ropy hair all awry, and the wide-staring eyes of insane rage.

  ‘I thought so.’ Šatvje said.

  ‘You recognize them?’ Buelg asked incredulously.

  ‘No, but I know their names: Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone,’ Šatvje said. ‘And it’s a good thing that there’s at least one person among us with a European education. I presume that our distrait friend the navigator is a Catholic, which does just as well in this context. In any event, he was quite right: this is Dis, the fortress surrounding Nether Hell. I think we must now assume that all the rest of the Earth is contiguous with Upper Hell, not only in metaphor but in fact.’

  ‘It’s a good thing,’ Buelg said acidly, ‘that there’s at least one person among us with a good grip on his sanity. The last thing we need now is a relapse into superstition.’

  ‘If you blow up that photograph, I think you’ll find that the hair on those women actually consists of live snakes. Isn’t that so, Colonel?’

  ‘Well… Doctor, it… it certainly looks like it.’

  ‘Of course. Those are the Furies who guard the gates of Dis. They are the keepers of the Gorgon Medusa, which, thank God, isn’t in the picture. The moat is the River Styx; the first terrace inside contains the burning tombs of the Heresiarchs, and on the next you have the River Phlegethon, the Wood of the Suicides, and the Abominable Sand. A rain of fire is supposed to fall continually on the sand, but I suppose that’s invisible in Death Valley sunlight or maybe even superfluous. We can’t see what’s down below, but presumably that too will be exactly as Dante described it. The crowd along the barbican is made up of demons – not so, Colonel?’

  ‘Sir… we can’t tell what they are. We were wondering if they were, well, Martians or something. Every one is a different shape.’

  Buelg felt his back hairs stirring. ‘I refuse to believe this nonsense,’ he said. ‘Šatvje is interpreting it from his damned obsolete “education”. Even Martians would make more sense.’

  ‘What are the facts about this Dante?’ McKnight said.

  ‘An Italian poet, of about the thirteenth century – ’

  ‘Early fourteenth,’ Šatvje said. ‘And not just a poet. He had a vision of Hell and Heaven which became the greatest poem ever written – the Divine Comedy. What we see in those pictures exactly corresponds to the description in Cantos Eight through Eleven of it.’

  ‘Buelg, see if you can locate a copy of the book and have it read to the computer. First we need to know if the correspondence is all that exact. If it is, we’ll need an analysis of what it means.’

  ‘The computer probably already has the book,’ Buelg said. ‘The whole Library of Congress, plus all our recreational library, is on microfilm inside it, we didn’t have roo
m for books per se down here. All we need to do is tell Chief Hay to make it part of the problem. But I still think it’s damn nonsense.’

  ‘What we want,’ McKnight said, ‘is the computer’s opinion. Yours has already been shown to be somewhat less reliable.’

  ‘And while you’re at it,’ Šatvje said, perhaps a shade less smugly than Buelg might have expected, ‘have Chief Hay make a part of the problem everything in the library on demonology. We’re going to need it.’

  Throwing up his hands, Buelg left the office. In the country of the mad…

  Nobody retains his sanity.

  Only a few moments were needed for the computer to produce its report:

  THE ANCIENT TEXTS AND FICTIONS NOW ADMITTED TO THE PROBLEM DISAGREE WITH EACH OTHER. HOWEVER, NEW FACTUAL DATA MAKE EXACT MATCHES WITH A NUMBER OF THEM, AND APPROXIMATE MATCHES WITH THE MAJORITY OF THEM. THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE CONSTRUCT IN DEATH VALLEY IS RUSSIAN, CHINESE OR OTHERWISE OF HUMAN ORIGIN IS OF THE LOWEST ORDER OF PROBABILITY AND MAY BE DISCOUNTED. THE INTERPLANETARY HYPOTHESIS IS OF SLIGHTLY HIGHER PROBABILITY, AN INVASION FROM VENUS BEING COMPATIBLE WITH A FEW OF THE FACTUAL DATA, SUCH AS THE IMMENSE HEAT AND ABERRANT LIFE FORMS OF THE DEATH VALLEY INSTALLATION, BUT IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH MOST ARCHITECTURAL AND OTHER HISTORICAL DETAILS IN THE DATA, AS WELL AS WITH THE LEVEL OF TECHNOLOGY INDICATED. THE PROBABILITY THAT THE DEATH VALLEY INSTALLATION IS THE CITY OF DIS AND THAT ITS INTERNAL AREA IS NETHER HELL IS 0.1 WITHIN A S PER CENT LEVEL OF CONFIDENCE, AND THEREFORE MUST BE ADMITTED. AS A FIRST DERIVATIVE, THE PROBABILITY THAT THE WAR JUST CONCLUDED WAS ARMAGEDDON IS 0.01 WITHIN THE SAME CONFIDENCE LEVEL. AS A SECOND DERIVATIVE, THE PROBABILITY THAT THE FORCES OF GOD HAVE LOST THE WAR AND THAT THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH IS NOW CONFLUENT WITH UPPER HELL IS 0.001 WITHIN THE SAME CONFIDENCE LEVEL.

  ‘Well, that clarifies the situation considerably,’ McKnight said. ‘It’s just as well we asked.’

  ‘But – my God! – it simply can’t be true,’ Buelg said desperately. ‘All right, maybe the computer is functioning properly, but it has no intelligence, and above all, no judgement. What it’s putting out now is just a natural consequence of letting all that medieval superstition into the problem.’

  McKnight turned his shrimp’s eyes towards Buelg. ‘You’ve seen the pictures,’ he said. ‘They didn’t come out of the computer, did they? Nor out of the old books, either. I think we’d better stop kicking against the pricks and start figuring out what we’re going to do. We’ve still got the United States to think of. Doctor Šatvje, have you any suggestions?’

  That was a bad sign. McKnight never used honorifics except to indicate, by inversion, which of the two of them had incurred his displeasure – not that Buelg had been in any doubt about that, already.

  ‘I’m still in a good deal of doubt,’ Šatvje said modestly. ‘To begin with, if this has been Armageddon, we all ought to have been called to judgement by now; and there was certainly nothing in the prophecies that allowed for an encampment of victorious demons on the surface of the Earth. If the computer is completely right, then either God is dead as Nietzsche said, or, as the jokes go, He is alive but doesn’t want to get involved. In either case, I think we would be well advised not to draw attention to ourselves. We can do nothing against supernatural powers: and if He is still alive; the battle may not be over. We are, I hope, safely hidden here, and we would be ill advised to be caught in the middle.’

  ‘Now there you’re dead wrong,’ Buelg said with energy. ‘Let’s suppose for a minute that this fantasy represents the true state of affairs – in other words, that demons have turned out to be real, and are out there in Death Valley – ’

  ‘I’m none too sure what would be meant by “real” in this context,’ Šatvje said. ‘They are apparent, true enough; but they certainly don’t belong to the same order of reality as – ’

  That’s a question we can’t afford to debate,’ Buelg said. He knew very well that the issue Šatvje was raising was a valid one – he was himself a fairly thoroughgoing Logical Positivist. But it would only confuse McKnight and there were brownie points to be made in keeping things clear-cut, whether they were clear-cut or not. ‘Look. If demons are real, then they occupy space/time in the real universe. That means that they exist inside some energy system in that universe and are maintained by it. All right, they can walk on red-hot iron and live comfortably in Death Valley; that’s not inherently more supernatural than the existence of bacteria in the boiling waters of volcanic springs. It’s an adaptation. Very well, then we can find out what that energy system is. We can analyse how it works. And once we know that, we can attack it.’

  ‘Now that’s more like it,’ McKnight said.

  ‘Pardon me, but I think we should proceed with the most extreme caution,’ Šatvje said. ‘Unless one has been raised in this tradition, one is not likely to think of all the implications. I myself am quite out of practice at it.’

  ‘Damn your education,’ Buelg said. But it was all coming back to him: The boundaryless ghetto along Nostrand Avenue; the fur-hatted, fur-faced, maxi-skirted Hassidim walking in pairs under the scaling elm saplings of Grand Central Parkway; the terror of riding the subway among the juvenile gangs under the eternal skullcap; the endless hairsplitting over the Talmudic and Midrashic creation myths for hour upon stuffy hour in Schule; the women slaving over their duplicate sets of dishes, in the peculiar smell of a kosher household, so close to being a stench compared to all other American smells, supporting their drone scholars; his mother’s pride that Hansli too was plainly destined by God’s will to become a holy man; and when he had discovered instead the glories and rigours of the physical universe, that light and airy escape from fur hats and the smell of gefuelte fish and the loving worn women, the terror of the wrath of the jealous God. But all that was many years ago; it could not come back. He would not have it back.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ McKnight said. ‘Are we going to do something, and if so, what? Get to the point.’

  ‘My point,’ Šatvje said, ‘is that if all this – demonology – is well, valid, or I suppose one should say true, then the whole Christian mythos is true, though it is not coming out in precisely the way it was prophesied. That being the case then there are such things as immortal souls, or perhaps I should say, we may well have immortal souls, and we ought to take them into consideration before we do anything rash.’

  Buelg saw the light, and with a great sense of relief; the Christian mythos had nothing to do with him, not personally that is. He had no objection to it as an exercise in theory, a form of non-zero-sum game.

  ‘If that’s the case, I don’t think there’s any question of our being caught in the middle,’ he said. ‘We’re required by the rules to come down on one side or the other.’

  ‘That’s true, by God,’ McKnight said. ‘And after all, we’re on the right side. We didn’t start this war – the Chinks did.’

  ‘Right, right,’ Buelg said. ‘We’re entitled to self-defence. And for my part, no matter what happens in the next world – about which we have no data – as long as I’m still in this one, I’m not prepared to regard anything as final. This may be a metaphysical war after all, but we still seem to live in some sort of secular universe. The universe of discourse has been enlarged, but it hasn’t been cancelled. I say, let’s find out more about it.’

  ‘Yes,’ McKnight said, ‘but how? That’s what I keep asking, and I don’t get anything back from either of you but philosophical discussion. What do you propose that we do?’

  ‘Have we got any missiles left?’

  ‘We’ve still got maybe a dozen five- to ten-megatonners left – and, of course Old Mombi.’

  ‘Buelg, you madman, are you proposing for one instant – ’

  ‘Shut up for a minute and let me think.’ Old Mombi was Denver’s doomsday machine, a complex carrier containing five one hundred-megaton warheads, one of which was aimed to make even the Moon uninhabitable; it was a postspasm weapon that the present situation certain
ly did not call for – best to hold it in reserve. ‘I think what we ought to do is to lob one of the small jobs on to the Death Valley encampment. I don’t really think it’ll do much harm, maybe not any, but it might produce some information. We can fly a drone plane through the cloud as it goes up, and take off radiological, chemical, any other kinds of readings that the computer can come up with. These demons have obtruded themselves into the real world, and the very fact that we can see them and photograph them shows that they share some of its characteristics now. Let’s see how they behave under something a good deal hotter than red-hot iron. Suppose they do nothing more than sweat a little? We can analyse even that!’

  ‘And suppose they trace the missile back to here?’ Šatvje said, but by his expression, Buelg knew that Šatvje knew that it was a last-ditch argument.

  ‘Then we’re sunk, I suppose. But look at the architecture of that encampment; does that suggest to you that they’ve been in contact with real warfare since back in the fourteenth century? No doubt they have all kinds of supernatural powers, but they’ve got a lot to learn about the natural ones! Maybe a decent adversary is what they’ve been lacking all along – and if Armageddon has ended in a standoff, a little action on the side of our Maker wouldn’t be amiss. If He’s still with us, and actively interested, any inaction on our parts would probably be viewed very gravely indeed if He wins after all. And if He’s not with us any longer, then we’ll have to help ourselves, as the proverb says.’