Good Omens

He patted a metal surface hot enough to fry eggson.

"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 spi

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.