Good Omens

"And off we go, then. "

In everybig‑budget science fiction movie there's the moment when a spaceship as large as New York suddenly goes to light speed. A twanging noise like a wooden ruler being plucked over the edge of a desk, a dazzling refraction of light, and suddenly the stars have all been stretched out thin and it's gone. This was exactly like that, except that instead of a gleaming twelve‑mile‑long spaceship, it was an off‑white twenty‑year‑old motor scooter. And you didn't have the special rainbow effects. And it probably wasn't going at more than two hundred miles an hour. And instead of a pulsing whine sliding up the octaves, it just went putputputputput . . .

VROOOOSH.

But it was exactly like that anyway.

– – -

Where the M25, now a screaming frozen circle, intersects with the M40 to Oxfordshire, police were clustered around in ever‑increasing quan­tities. Since Crowley crossed the divide, half an hour earlier, their number had doubled. On the M40 side, anyway. No one in London was getting out.

In addition to the police there were also approximately two hun­dred others standing around, and inspecting the M25 through binoculars. They included representatives from her Majesty's Army, the Bomb Dis­posal Squad, M 15, M 16, the Special Branch, and the CIA. There was also a man selling hot dogs.

Everybody was cold and wet, and puzzled, and irritable, with the exception of one police officer, who was cold, wet, puzzled, irritable, and exasperated.

"Look. I don't care if you believe me or not," he sighed, "all I'm telling you is what I saw. It was an old car, a Rolls, or a Bentley, one of those flash vintage jobs, and it made it over the bridge."

One of the senior army technicians interrupted. "It can't have done. According to our instruments the temperature above the M25 is somewhere in excess of seven hundred degrees centigrade."

"Or a hundred and forty degrees below," added his assistant.

". . . or a hundred and forty degrees below zero," agreed the se­nior technician. "There does appear to be some confusion on that score, although I think we can safely attribute it to mechanical error of some kind,[49] but the fact remains that we can't even get a helicopter directly over the M25 without winding up with Helicopter McNuggets. How on earth can you tell me that a vintage car drove over it unharmed?"

"I didn't say it drove over it unharmed," corrected the policeman, who was thinking seriously about leaving the Metropolitan Police and going into business with his brother, who was resigning his job with the Electricity Board, and was going to start breeding chickens. "It burst into flames. It just kept on going."

"Do you seriously expect any of us to believe . . ." began somebody.

A high‑pitched keening noise, haunting and strange. Like a thou­sand glass harmonicas being played in unison, all slightly off‑key; like the sound of the molecules of the air itself wailing in pain.

And Vrooosh.

Over their heads it sailed, forty feet in the air, engulfed in a deep blue nimbus which faded to red at the edges: a little white motor scooter, and riding it, a middle‑aged woman in a pink helmet, and holding tightly to her, a short man in a mackintosh and a day‑glo green crash helmet (the motor scooter was too far up for anyone to see that his eyes were tightly shut, but they were). The woman was screaming. What she was screaming was this: "Gerrrro

– – -

One of the advantages of the Wasabi, as Newt was always keen to point out, was that when it was badly damaged it was very hard to tell. Newt had to keep driving Dick Turpin onto the shoulder to avoid fallen branches.

"You've made me drop all the cards on the floor!"

The car thumped back onto the road; a small voice from some­where under the glove compartment said, "Oil plessure arert."

"I'll never be able to sort them out now," she moaned.

"You don't have to," said Newt manically, "Just pick one. Any one. It won't matter."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if Agnes is right, and we're doing all this because she's pre­dicted it, then any card picked right now has got to be relevant. That's logic."

"It's nonsense."

"Yeah? Look, you're even here because she predicted it. And have you thought what we're going to say to the colonel? If we get to see him, which of course we won't."

"If we're reasonable‑"

"Listen, I know these kinds of places. They have huge guards made out of teak guarding the gates, Anathema, and they have white helmets and real guns, you understand, which fire real bullets made of real lead which can go right into you and bounce around and come out of the same hole before you can even say 'Excuse me, we have reason to believe that World War Three is due any moment and they're going to do the show right here,' and then they have serious men in suits with bulging jackets who take you into a little room without windows and ask you questions like are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a pinko subversive organization such as any British political party? And='

"We're nearly there."

"Look, it's got gates and wire fences and everything! And probably the kind of dogs that eat people!"

"I think you're getting rather overexcited," said Anathema quietly, picking the last of the file cards up from the floor of the car.

"Overexcited? No! I'm getting very calmly worried that someone might shoot me!"

"I'm sure Agnes would have mentioned it if we were going to be shot. She's very good at that sort of thing." She began absentmindedly to shuffle the file cards.

"You know," she said, carefully cutting the cards and riffling the two piles together, "I read somewhere that there's a sect that believes that computers are the tools of the Devil. They say that Armageddon will come about because of the Antichrist being good with computers. Apparently it's mentioned somewhere in Revelations. I think I must have read about it in a newspaper recently . . ."

"Daily Mail. 'Letter From America.' Um, August the third," said Newt. "Just after the story about the woman in Worms, Nebraska, who taught her duck to play the accordion."

"Mm," said Anathema, spreading the cards face down on her lap.

So computers are tools of the Devil? thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of somebody, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn't him.

The car jerked to a halt.

The air base looked battered. Several large trees had fallen down near the entrance, and some men with a digger were trying to shift them. The guard on duty was watching them disinterestedly, but he half turned and looked coldly at the car.

"All right," said Newt. "Pick a card."

3001. Behinde the Eagle's

Neste a grate Ash hath fallen.

"Is that all?"

"Yes. We always thought it was something to do with the Russian Revolution. Keep going along this road and turn left."

49

This was true. There wasn't a thermometer on earth that could have been persuaded to register both 700° C and ‑140° C at the same time; which was the correct temperature.