Good Omens

The turning led to a narrow lane,with thebase's perimeter fence on the left‑hand side.

"And now pull in here. There's often cars here, and no one takes any notice," said Anathema.

"What is this place?"

"It's the local Lovers' Lane."

"Is that why it appears to be paved with rubber?"

They walked along the hedge‑shaded lane for a hundred yards until they reached the ash tree. Agnes had been right. It was quite grate. It had fallen right across the fence.

A guard was sitting on it, smoking a cigarette. He was black. Newt always felt guilty in the presence of black Americans, in case they blamed him for two hundred years of slave trading.

The man stood up when they approached, and then sagged into an easier stance.

"Oh, hi, Anathema," he said.

"Hi, George. Terrible storm, wasn't it."

"Sure was."

They walked on. He watched them out of sight.

"You know him?" said Newt, with forced nonchalance.

"Oh, sure. Sometimes a few of them come down to the pub. Pleas­ant enough in a well‑scrubbed way."

"Would he shoot us if we just walked in?" said Newt.

"He might well point a gun at us in a menacing way," Anathema

"That's good enough for me. What do you suggest we do, then?"

"Well, Agnes must have known something. So I suppose we just wait. It's not too bad now the wind's gone down."

"Oh." Newt looked at the clouds piling up on the horizon. "Good old Agnes," he said.

– – -

Adam pedalled steadily along the road, Dog ru

There was a clacking noise and Pepper swung out of her drive. You could always tell Pepper's bike. She thought it was improved by a piece of cardboard cu

"I reckon we can cut along Drovers Lane and then up through Roundhead Woods," said Pepper.

"'S all muddy," said Adam.

"That's right," said Pepper nervously. "It gets all muddy up there. We ort to go along by the chalk pit. 'S always dry because of the chalk. An' then up by the sewage farm."

Brian and Wensleydale pulled in behind them. Wensleydale's bicy­cle was black, and shiny, and sensible. Brian's might have been white, once, but its color was lost beneath a thick layer of mud.

"It's stupid calling it a milit'ry base," said Pepper. "I went up there when they had that open day and they had no guns or missiles or anythin'. Just knobs and dials and brass bands playin'."

"Yes," said Adam.

"Not much milit'ry about knobs and dials," said Pepper.

"I du

"I got a kit for Christmas," Wensleydale volunteered. "All electric bits. There were a few knobs and dials in it. You could make a radio or a thing that goes beep."

"I du

"Cor," said Brian. "That's be wicked"

"Sort of," said Adam.

– – -

It is a high and lonely destiny to be Chairman of the Lower Tadfield Residents' Association.

R. P. Tyler, short, well‑fed, satisfied, stomped down a country lane, accompanied by his wife's miniature poodle, Shutzi. R. P. Tyler knew the difference between right and wrong; there were no moral grays of any kind in his life. He was not, however, satisfied simply with being vouchsafed the difference between right and wrong. He felt it his bounden duty to tell the world.

Not for R. P. Tyler the soapbox, the polemic.verse, the broadsheet. R. P. Tyler's chosen forum was the letter column of the Tadfield Adver­tiser. If a neighbor's tree was inconsiderate enough to shed leaves into R. P. Tyler's garden, R. P. Tyler would first carefully sweep them all up, place them in boxes, and leave the boxes outside his neighbor's front door, with a stern note. Then he would write a letter to the Tadfield Advertiser. If he sighted teenagers sitting on the village green, their portable cassette players playing, and they were enjoying themselves, he would take it upon himself to point out to them the error of their ways. And after he had fled their jeering, he would write to the Tadfield Advertiser on the Decline of Morality and the Youth of Today.

Since his retirement last year the letters had increased to the point where not even the Tadfield Advertiser was able to print all of them. In­deed, the letter R. P. Tyler had completed before setting out on his evening walk had begun:

Sirs,

I note with distress that the newspapers of today no longer feel obligated to their public, we, the people who pay your wages . . .

He surveyed the fallen branches that littered the narrow country road. I don't suppose, he pondered, they think of the cleaning up bill when they send us these storms. Parish Council has to foot the bill to clean it all up. And we, the taxpayers, pay their wages . . .

The they in this thought were the weather forecasters on Radio Four, whom R. P. Tyler blamed for the weather.[50]

Shutzi stopped by a roadside beech tree to cock its leg.

R. P. Tyler looked away, embarrassed. It might be that the sole purpose of his evening constitutional was to allow the dog to relieve itself, but he was dashed if he'd admit that to himself. He stared up at the storm clouds. They were banked up high, in towering piles of smudged gray and black. It wasn't just the flickering tongues of lightning that forked through them like the opening sequence of a Frankenstein movie; it was the way they stopped when they reached the borders of Lower Tadfield. And in their center was a circular patch of daylight; but the light had a stretched, yellow quality to it, like a forced smile.

It was so quiet.

There was a low roaring.

Down the narrow lane came four motorbikes. They shot past him, and turned the corner, disturbing a cock pheasant who whirred across the lane in a nervous arc of russet and green.

"Vandals!" called R. P. Tyler after them.

The countryside wasn't made for people like them. It was made for people like him.

He jerked Shutzi's lead, and they marched along the road.

Five minutes later he turned the corner, to find three of the motor­cyclists standing around a fallen signpost, a victim of the storm. The fourth, a tall man with a mirrored visor, remained on his bike.

R. P. Tyler observed the situation, and leaped effortlessly to a con­clusion. These vandals‑he had, of course been right‑had come to the countryside in order to desecrate the War Memorial and to overturn sign­posts.

He was about to advance on them sternly, when it came to him that he was outnumbered, four to one, and that they were taller than he was, and that they were undoubtedly violent psychopaths. No one but a violent psychopath rode motorbikes in R. P. Tyler's world.

50

He did not have a television. Or as his wife put it, "Ronald wouldn't have one of those things in the house, would you Ronald?" and he always agreed, although secretly he would have liked to have seen some of the smut and filth and violence that the National Viewers and Listeners Association complained of. Not because he wanted to see it, of course. Just because he wanted to know what other people should be protected from