Good Omens

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:

“Gerrrronnnimooooo!”

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 facedown 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 fellen.

“Is that all?”