Good Omens (4 page)

Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended, because he was immortal and wouldn't have any alternative. But he'd hoped it would be a long way off.

Because he rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon.

Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he'd felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there's nothing we can do to them that they don't do themselves and they do things we've never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They've got what we lack. They've got
imagination
. And electricity, of course.

One of them
had
written it, hadn't he … “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

Crowley had got a commendation for the Spanish Inquisition. He had been in Spain then, mainly hanging around cantinas in the nicer parts, and hadn't even
known
about it until the commendation arrived. He'd gone to have a look, and had come back and got drunk for a week.

That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.

And just when you'd think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger.

Aziraphale had tried to explain it to him once. The whole point, he'd said—this was somewhere around 1020, when they'd first reached their little Arrangement—the whole point was that when a human was good or bad it was because they wanted to be. Whereas people like Crowley and, of course, himself, were set in their ways right from the start. People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.

Crowley had thought about this for some time and, around about 1023, had said, Hang on, that only works, right, if you start everyone off equal, okay? You can't start someone off in a muddy shack in the middle of a war zone and expect them to do as well as someone born in a castle.

Ah, Aziraphale had said, that's the good bit. The lower you start, the more opportunities you have.

Crowley had said, That's lunatic.

No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

Aziraphale. The Enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.

Crowley reached down and picked up the car phone.

Being a demon, of course, was supposed to mean you had no free will. But you couldn't hang around humans for very long without learning a thing or two.

MR. YOUNG HAD NOT BEEN
too
keen on Damien, or Wormwood. Or any of Sister Mary Loquacious' other suggestions, which had covered half of Hell, and most of the Golden Years of Hollywood.

“Well,” she said finally, a little hurt, “I don't think there's anything wrong with Errol. Or Cary. Very nice American names, both of them.”

“I had fancied something more, well, traditional,” explained Mr. Young. “We've always gone in for good simple names in our family.”

Sister Mary beamed. “That's right. The old names are always the best, if you ask me.”

“A decent English name, like people had in the Bible,” said Mr. Young. “Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John,” he said, speculatively. Sister Mary winced. “Only they've never struck me as very good Bible names, really,” Mr. Young added. “They sound more like cowboys and footballers.”

“Saul's nice,” said Sister Mary, making the best of it.

“I don't want something too old-fashioned,” said Mr. Young.

“Or Cain. Very modern sound, Cain, really,” Sister Mary tried.

“Hmm.” Mr. Young looked doubtful.

“Or there's always … well, there's always Adam,” said Sister Mary. That should be safe enough, she thought.

“Adam?” said Mr. Young.

IT WOULD BE NICE to think that the Satanist Nuns had the surplus baby—Baby B—discreetly adopted. That he grew to be a normal, happy, laughing child, active and exuberant; and after that, grew further to become a normal, fairly contented adult.

And perhaps that's what happened.

Let your mind dwell on his junior school prize for spelling; his unremarkable although quite pleasant time at university; his job in the payroll department of the Tadfield and Norton Building Society; his lovely wife. Possibly you would like to imagine some children, and a hobby—restoring vintage motorcycles, perhaps, or breeding tropical fish.

You don't want to know what
could
have happened to Baby B.

We like your version better, anyway.

He probably wins prizes for his tropical fish.

IN A SMALL HOUSE in Dorking, Surrey, a light was on in a bedroom window.

Newton Pulsifer was twelve, and thin, and bespectacled, and he should have been in bed hours ago.

His mother, though, was convinced of her child's genius, and let him stay up past his bedtime to do his “experiments.”

His current experiment was changing a plug on an ancient Bakelite radio his mother had given him to play with. He sat at what he proudly called his “work-top,” a battered old table covered in curls of wire, batteries, little light bulbs, and a homemade crystal set that had never worked. He hadn't managed to get the Bakelite radio working yet either, but then again, he never seemed able to get that far.

Three slightly crooked model airplanes hung on cotton cords from his bedroom ceiling. Even a casual observer could have seen that they were made by someone who was both painstaking and very careful, and also no good at making model airplanes. He was hopelessly proud of all of them, even the Spitfire, where he'd made rather a mess of the wings.

He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, squinted down at the plug, and put down the screwdriver.

He had high hopes for it this time; he had followed all the instructions on plug-changing on page five of the
Boy's Own Book Of Practical Electronics, Including A Hundred and One Safe and Educational Things to Do With Electricity
. He had attached the correct color-coded wires to the correct pins; he'd checked that it was the right amperage fuse; he'd screwed it all back together. So far, no problems.

He plugged it in to the socket. Then he switched the socket on.

Every light in the house went out.

Newton beamed with pride. He was getting better. Last time he'd done it he'd blacked out the whole of Dorking, and a man from the Electric had come over and had a word with his mum.

He had a burning and totally unrequited passion for things electrical. They had a computer at school, and half a dozen studious children stayed on after school doing things with punched cards. When the teacher in charge of the computer had finally acceded to Newton's pleas to be allowed to join them, Newton had only ever got to feed one little card into the machine. It had chewed it up and choked fatally on it.

Newton was certain that the future was in computers, and when the future arrived he'd be ready, in the forefront of the new technology.

The future had its own ideas on this. It was all in The Book.

ADAM, THOUGHT MR. YOUNG. He tried saying it, to see how it sounded. “Adam.” Hmm …

He stared down at the golden curls of the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness.

“You know,” he concluded, after a while, “I think he actually looks like an Adam.”

IT HAD NOT BEEN A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT.

The dark and stormy night occurred two days later, about four hours after both Mrs. Dowling and Mrs. Young and their respective babies had left the building. It was a particularly dark and stormy night, and just after midnight, as the storm reached its height, a bolt of lightning struck the Convent of the Chattering Order, setting fire to the roof of the vestry.

No one was badly hurt by the fire, but it went on for some hours, doing a fair amount of damage in the process.

The instigator of the fire lurked on a nearby hilltop and watched the blaze. He was tall, thin, and a Duke of Hell. It was the last thing that needed to be done before his return to the nether regions, and he had done it.

He could safely leave the rest to Crowley.

Hastur went home.

TECHNICALLY AZIRAPHALE was a Principality, but people made jokes about that these days.

On the whole, neither he nor Crowley would have chosen each other's company, but they were both men, or at least men-shaped creatures, of the world, and the Arrangement had worked to their advantage all this time. Besides, you grew accustomed to the only other face that had been around more or less consistently for six millennia.

The Arrangement was very simple, so simple in fact that it didn't really deserve the capital letter, which it had got for simply being in existence for so long. It was the sort of sensible arrangement that many isolated agents, working in awkward conditions a long way from their superiors, reach with their opposite number when they realize that they have more in common with their immediate opponents than their remote allies. It meant a tacit non-interference in certain of each other's activities. It made certain that while neither really won, also neither really lost, and both were able to demonstrate to their masters the great strides they were making against a cunning and well-informed adversary.

It meant that Crowley had been allowed to develop Manchester, while Aziraphale had a free hand in the whole of Shropshire. Crowley took Glasgow, Aziraphale had Edinburgh (neither claimed any responsibility for Milton Keynes,
⁷
but both reported it as a success).

And then, of course, it had seemed even natural that they should, as it were, hold the fort for one another whenever common sense dictated. Both were of angel stock, after all. If one was going to Hull for a quick temptation, it made sense to nip across the city and carry out a standard brief moment of divine ecstasy. It'd get done
anyway
, and being sensible about it gave everyone more free time and cut down on expenses.

Aziraphale felt the occasional pang of guilt about this, but centuries of association with humanity was having the same effect on him as it was on Crowley, except in the other direction.

Besides, the Authorities didn't seem to care much who did anything, so long as it got done.

Currently, what Aziraphale was doing was standing with Crowley by the duck pond in St. James' Park. They were feeding the ducks.

The ducks in St. James' Park are so used to being fed bread by secret agents meeting clandestinely that they have developed their own Pavlovian reaction. Put a St. James' Park duck in a laboratory cage and show it a picture of two men—one usually wearing a coat with a fur collar, the other something somber with a scarf—and it'll look up expectantly. The Russian cultural attaché's black bread is particularly sought after by the more discerning duck, while the head of MI9's soggy Hovis with Marmite is relished by the connoisseurs.

Aziraphale tossed a crust to a scruffy-looking drake, which caught it and sank immediately.

The angel turned to Crowley.

“Really, my dear,” he murmured.

“Sorry,” said Crowley. “I was forgetting myself.” The duck bobbed angrily to the surface.

“Of course, we knew something was going on,” Aziraphale said. “But one somehow imagines this sort of thing happening in America. They go in for that sort of thing over there.”

“It might yet do, at that,” said Crowley gloomily. He gazed thoughtfully across the park to the Bentley, the back wheel of which was being industriously clamped.

“Oh, yes. The American diplomat,” said the angel. “Rather
showy
, one feels. As if Armageddon was some sort of cinematographic show that you wish to sell in as many countries as possible.”

“Every
country,” said Crowley. “The Earth and all the kingdoms thereof.”

Aziraphale tossed the last scrap of bread at the ducks, who went off to pester the Bulgarian naval attaché and a furtive-looking man in a Cambridge tie, and carefully disposed of the paper bag in a wastepaper bin.

He turned and faced Crowley.

“We'll win, of course,” he said.

“You
don't want that,” said the demon.

“Why not, pray?”

“Listen
,” said Crowley desperately, “how many musicians do you think your side have got, eh? First grade, I mean.”

Aziraphale looked taken aback.

“Well, I should think—” he began.

“Two,” said Crowley. “Elgar and Liszt. That's
all
. We've got the rest. Beethoven, Brahms, all the Bachs, Mozart, the lot. Can you imagine eternity with Elgar?”

Aziraphale shut his eyes. “All too easily,” he groaned.

“That's it, then,” said Crowley, with a gleam of triumph. He knew Aziraphale's weak spot all right. “No more compact discs. No more Albert Hall. No more Proms. No more Glyndbourne. Just celestial harmonies all day long.”

“Ineffable,” Aziraphale murmured.

“Like eggs without salt, you said. Which reminds me. No salt, no eggs. No gravlax with dill sauce. No fascinating little restaurants where they know you. No
Daily Telegraph
crossword. No small antique shops. No bookshops, either. No interesting old editions. No”—Crowley scraped the bottom of Aziraphale's barrel of interests—“Regency silver snuffboxes … ”