Good Omens

“Goats haven’t got a bottom half,” said Wensleydale. “They’ve got a front half and a back half. Just like cows.”

They watched Dog some more, drumming their heels on the gate. It was too hot to think.

Then Pepper said, “If he’s got goat legs, he shouldn’t have horns. They belong to the front half.”

“I didn’t make him up, did I?” said Adam, aggrieved. “I was just telling you. It’s news to me I made him up. No need to go on at me.”

“Anyway,” said Pepper. “This stupid Pot can’t go around complaining if people think he’s the Devil. Not with having horns on. People are bound to say, oh, here comes the Devil.”

Dog started to dig up a rabbit hole.

Adam, who seemed to have a weight on his mind, took a deep breath.

“You don’t have to be so lit’ral about everything,” he said. “That’s the trouble these days. Grass materialism. ’S people like you who go round choppin’ down rain forests and makin’ holes in the ozone layer. There’s a great big hole in the ozone layer ’cos of grass materialism people like you.”

“I can’t do anythin’ about it,” said Brian automatically. “I’m still paying off on a stupid cucumber frame.”

“It’s in the magazine,” said Adam. “It takes millions of acres of rain forest to make one beefburger. And all this ozone is leakin’ away because of … ” he hesitated, “people sprayin’ the enviroment.”

“And there’s whales,” said Wensleydale. “We’ve got to save ’em.”

Adam looked blank. His plunder of New Aquarian’s back issues hadn’t included anything about whales. Its editors had assumed that the readers were all for saving whales in the same way they assumed that those readers breathed and walked upright.

“There was this program about them,” explained Wensleydale.

“What’ve we got to save ’em for?” said Adam. He had confused visions of saving up whales until you had enough for a badge.

Wensleydale paused and racked his memory. “Because they can sing. And they’ve got big brains. There’s hardly any of them left. And we don’t need to kill them anyway ’cos they only make pet food and stuff.”

“If they’re so clever,” said Brian, slowly, “what are they doin’ in the sea?”

“Oh, I dunno,” said Adam, looking thoughtful. “Swimmin’ around all day, just openin’ their mouths and eating stuff … sounds pretty clever to me—”

A squeal of brakes and a long drawn-out crunch interrupted him. They scrambled off the gate and ran up the lane to the crossroads, where a small car lay on its roof at the end of a long skidmark.

A little further down the road was a hole. It looked as though the car had tried to avoid it. As they looked at it, a small Oriental-looking head darted out of sight.

The Them dragged the door open and pulled out the unconscious Newt. Visions of medals for heroic rescue thronged Adam’s head. Practical considerations of first aid thronged around that of Wensleydale.

“We shouldn’t move him,” he said. “Because of broken bones. We ought to get someone.”

Adam cast around. There was a rooftop just visible in the trees down the road. It was Jasmine Cottage.

And in Jasmine Cottage Anathema Device was sitting in front of a table on which some bandages, aspirins, and assorted first-aid items had been laid out for the past hour.

ANATHEMA HAD BEEN looking at the clock. He’ll be coming around any moment now, she’d thought.

And then, when he got there, he wasn’t what she’d been expecting. More precisely, he wasn’t what she’d been hoping for.

She had been hoping, rather self-consciously, for someone tall, dark, and handsome.

Newt was tall, but with a rolled-out, thin look. And while his hair was undoubtedly dark, it wasn’t any sort of fashion accessory; it was just a lot of thin, black strands all growing together out of the top of his head. This was not Newt’s fault; in his younger days he would go every couple of months to the barber’s shop on the corner, clutching a photograph he’d carefully torn from a magazine which showed someone with an impressively cool haircut grinning at the camera, and he would show the picture to the barber, and ask to be made to look like that, please. And the barber, who knew his job, would take one look and then give Newt the basic, all-purpose, short-back-and-sides. After a year of this, Newt realized that he obviously didn’t have the face that went with haircuts. The best Newton Pulsifer could hope for after a haircut was shorter hair.

It was the same with suits. The clothing hadn’t been invented that would make him look suave and sophisticated and comfortable. These days he had learned to be satisfied with anything that would keep the rain off and give him somewhere to keep his change.

And he wasn’t handsome. Not even when he took off his glasses.31 And, she discovered when she took off his shoes to lay him on her bed, he wore odd socks: one blue one, with a hole in the heel, and one gray one, with holes around the toes.

I suppose I’m meant to feel a wave of warm, tender female something-or-other about this, she