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This time the explosion was a red flame inside a billow of black smoke, and it smelled of oil.
With a rolling, ti
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 gri
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 gri
"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. "
* * * * *
N
ewt 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," said 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 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.
There was the noise of something he hadn't realized he'd been hearing suddenly stopping, and the descending whine of a distant generator. The lights on the panels flickered, and most of them went out.
All over the world, people who had been wrestling with switches found that they switched. Circuit breakers opened. Computers stopped pla
The lights came on. Civilization stopped its slide into chaos, and started writing letters to the newspapers about how people got overexcited about the least little thing these days.
In Tadfield, the machines ceased radiating menace. Something that had been in them was gone, quite apart from the electricity.
"Gosh," said Newt.
"There you are," said Anathema. "You fixed it good. You can trust old Agnes, take it from me. Now let's get out of here."
– – -
"He didn't want to do it!"
said Aziraphale. "Haven't I always told you, Crowley? If you take the trouble to look, deep down inside anyone, you'll find that at bottom they're really quite‑"
"It's not over," said Crowley flatly.
Adam turned and appeared to notice them for the first time. Crowley was not used to people identifying him so readily, but Adam stared at him as though Crowley's entire life history was pasted inside the back of his skull and he, Adam, was reading it. For an instant he knew real terror. He'd always thought the sort he'd felt before was the genuine article, but that was mere abject fear beside this new sensation. Those Below could make you cease to exist by, well, hurting you in unbearable amounts, but this boy could not only make you cease to exist merely by thinking about it, but probably could arrange matters so that you never had existed at all.
Adam's gaze swept to Aziraphale.
"'Scuse me, why're you two people?" said Adam.
"Well," said Aziraphale, "it's a long‑"
"It's not right, being two people," said Adam. "I reckon you'd better go back to being two sep'rate people."
There were no showy special effects. There was just Aziraphale, sitting next to Madame Tracy.
"Ooh, that felt tingly," she said. She looked Aziraphale up and down. "Oh," she said, in a slightly disappointed voice. "Somehow, I thought you'd be younger."
Shadwell glowered jealously at the angel and thumbed the Thundergun's hammer in a pointed sort of way.