Good Omens

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 grinned at Adam.

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 grinned back.

“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.”

NEWT 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,” s

aid 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 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.”