by Neil Gaiman
“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 … the … T-shirt … ”)
Death stared at Adam.
“You … are part … of us,” said War, between teeth like beautiful bullets.
“It is done. We make … the … world … anew,” said Pollution, his voice as insidious as something leaking out of a corroded drum into a water table.
“You … lead … us,” said Famine.
And Adam hesitated. Voices inside him still cried out that this was true, and that the world was his as well, and all he had to do was turn and lead them out across a bewildered planet. They were his kind of people.
In tiers above, the hosts of the sky waited for the Word.
(“Ye canna want me to shoot him! He’s but a bairn!”
“Er,” said Aziraphale. “Er. Yes. Perhaps we’d just better wait a bit, what do you think?”
“Until he grows up, do you mean?” said Crowley.)
Dog began to growl.
Adam looked at the Them. They were his kind of people, too.
You just had to decide who your friends really were.
He turned back to the Four.
“Get them,” said Adam, quietly.
The slouch and slur was gone from his voice. It had strange harmonics. No one human could disobey a voice like that.
War laughed, and looked expectantly at the Them.
“Little boys,” she said, “playing with your toys. Think of all the toys I can offer you … think of all the games. I can make you fall in love with me, little boys. Little boys with your little guns.”
She laughed again, but the machine-gun stutter died away as Pepper stepped forward and raised a trembling arm.
It wasn’t much of a sword, but it was about the best you could do with two bits of wood and a piece of string. War stared at it.
“I see,” she said. “Mano a mano, eh?” She drew her own blade and brought it up so that it made a noise like a finger being dragged around a wineglass.
There was a flash as they connected.
Death stared into Adam’s eyes.
There was a pathetic jingling noise.
“Don’t touch it!” snapped Adam, without moving his head.
The Them stared at the sword rocking to a standstill on the concrete path.
“‘Little boys,”’ muttered Pepper, disgustedly. Sooner or later everyone has to decide which gang they belong to.
“But, but,” said Brian, “she sort of got sucked up the sword—”
The air between Adam and Death began to vibrate, as in a heatwave.
Wensleydale raised his head and looked Famine in the sunken eye. He held up something that, with a bit of imagination, could be considered to be a pair of scales made of more string and twigs. Then he whirled it around his head.
Famine stuck out a protective arm.
There was another flash, and then the jingle of a pair of silver scales bouncing on the ground.
“Don’t … touch … them,” said Adam.
Pollution had already started to run, or at least to flow quickly, but Brian snatched the circle of grass stalks from his own head and flung it. It shouldn’t have handled like one, but a force took it out of his hands and it whirred like a discus.
This time the explosion was a red flame inside a billow of black smoke, and it smelled of oil.
With a rolling, tinny little sound a blackened silver crown bowled out of the smoke and then spun round with a noise like a settling penny.
At least they needed no warning about touching it. It glistened in a way that metal should not.
“Where’d they go?” said Wensley.
WHERE THEY BELONG, said Death, still holding Adam’s gaze. WHERE THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN. BACK IN THE MINDS OF MAN.
He grinned at Adam.
There was a tearing sound. Death’s robe split and his wings unfolded. Angel’s wings. But not of feathers. They were wings of night, wings that were shapes cut through the matter of creation into the darkness underneath, in which a few distant lights glimmered, lights that may have been stars or may have been something entirely else.
BUT I, he said, AM NOT LIKE THEM. I AM AZRAEL, CREATED TO BE CREATION’S SHADOW. YOU CANNOT DESTROY ME. THAT WOULD DESTROY THE WORLD.
The heat of their stare faded. Adam scratched his nose.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “There might be a way.” He grinned back.
“Anyway, it’s going to stop now,” he said. “All this stuff with the machines. You’ve got to do what I say just for now, and I say it’s got to stop.”
Death shrugged. IT IS STOPPING ALREADY, he said. WITHOUT THEM, he indicated the pathetic remnants of the other three Horsepersons, IT CANNOT PROCEED. NORMAL ENTROPY TRIUMPHS. Death raised a bony hand in what might have been a salute.
THEY’LL BE BACK, he said. THEY’RE NEVER FAR AWAY.
The wings flapped, just once, like a thunderclap, and the angel of Death vanished.
“Right, then,” said Adam, to the empty air. “All right. It’s not going to happen. All the stuff they started—it must stop now.”
NEWT STARED desperately at the equipment racks.
“You’d think there’d be a manual or something,” he said.
“We could see if Agnes has anything to say,” volunteered Anathema.
“Oh, yes,” s
aid Newt bitterly. “That makes sense, does it? Sabotaging twentieth-century electronics with the aid of a seventeenth-century workshop manual? What did Agnes Nutter know of the transistor?”
“Well, my grandfather interpreted prediction 3328 rather neatly in 1948 and made some very shrewd investments,” said Anathema. “She didn’t know what it was going to be called, of course, and she wasn’t very sound about electricity in general, but—”
“I was speaking rhetorically.”
“You don’t have to make it work, anyway. You have to stop it working. You don’t need knowledge for that, you need ignorance.”
Newt groaned.
“All right,” he said wearily. “Let’s try it. Give me a prediction.”
Anathema pulled out a card at random.
“‘He is Not that Which He Says he Is,’” she read. “It’s number 1002. Very simple. Any ideas?”
“Well, look,” said Newt, wretchedly, “this isn’t really the time to say it but,”—he swallowed—“actually I’m not very good with electronics. Not very good at all.”
“You said you were a computer engineer, I seem to remember.”
“That was an exaggeration. I mean, just about as much of an exaggeration as you can possibly get, in fact, really, I suppose it was more what you might call an overstatement. I might go so far as to say that what it really was,” Newt closed his eyes, “was a prevarication.”
“A lie, you mean?” said Anathema sweetly.
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” said Newt. “Although,” he added, “I’m not actually a computer engineer. At all. Quite the opposite.”
“What’s the opposite?”
“If you must know, every time I try and make anything electronic work, it stops.”
Anathema gave him a bright little smile, and posed theatrically, like that moment in every conjurer’s stage act when the lady in the sequins steps back to reveal the trick.
“Tra-la,” she said.
“Repair it,” she said.
“What?”
“Make it work better,” she said.
“I don’t know,” said Newt. “I’m not sure I can.” He laid a hand on top of the nearest cabinet.
