Good Omens

They all nodded. A favorite game in quarry had been based on a highly successful film series with lasers, robots, and a princess who wore her hair like a pair of stereo headphones. (It had been agreed without a word being said that if anyone was going to play the part of any stupid princesses, it wasn't going to be Pepper.) But the game normally ended in a fight to be the one who was allowed to wear the coal scuttle® and blow up planets. Adam was best at it—when he was the villain, he really sounded as if he could blow up the world. The Them were, anyway, temperamentally on the side of planet destroyers, provided they could be allowed to rescue princesses at the same time.

"I s'pect that's what they used to do," said Adam. "But now it's different. They all have this bright blue light around 'em and go around doing good. Sort of g'lactic policemen, going round tellin' everyone to live in universal harmony and stuff."

There was a moment's silence while they pondered this waste of perfectly good UFOs.

"What I've always wondered," said Brian, "is why they call 'em UFOs when they know they're flying saucers. I mean, they're Identified Flying Objects then."

"It's 'cos the goverment hushes it all up," said Adam. "Millions of flying saucers landin' all the time and the goverment keeps hushing it up."

"Why?" said Wensleydale.

Adam hesitated. His reading hadn't provided a quick explanation for this; New Aquarian just took it as the foundation of belief, both of itself and its readers, that the government hushed everything up.

"'Cos they're the goverment," said Adam simply. "That's what goverments do. They've got this great big building in London full of books of all the things they've hushed up. When the Prime Minister gets in to work in the morning, the first thing he does is go through the big list of everything that's happened in the night and put this big red stamp on them."

"I bet he has a cup of tea first, and then reads the paper," said Wensleydale, who had on one memorable occasion during the holidays gone unexpectedly into his father's office, where he had formed certain impressions. "And talks about what was on TV last night."

"Well, orlright, but after that he gets out the book and the big stamp."

"Which says 'Hush It Up,"' said Pepper.

"It says Top Secret," said Adam, resenting this attempt at bipartisan creativity. "It's like nucular power stations. They keep blowin' up all the time but no one ever finds out 'cos the goverment hushes it up."

"They don't keep blowing all the time," said Wensleydale severely. "My father says they're dead safe and mean we don't have to live in a greenhouse. Anyway, there's a big picture of one in my comic* and it doesn't say anything about it blowing up."

[Wensleydale's alleged comic was a 94-week part-work called Wonders of Nature and Science. He had every single one so far, and had asked for a set of binders for his birthday. Brian's weekly reading was anything with a lot of exclamation marks in the title, like "WhiZZ!!" or "Clang!!" So was Pepper's, although even under the most refined of tortures she still wouldn't admit to the fact that she also bought Just Seventeen under plain covers. Adam didn't read any comics at all. They never lived up to the kind of things he could do in his head.]

"Yes," said Brian, "But you lent me that comic afterwards and I know what type of picture it was."

Wensleydale hesitated, and then said in a voice heavy with badly tried patience, "Brian, just because it says Exploded Diagram—"

There was the usual brief scuffle.

"Look," said Adam severely. "Do you want me to tell you about the Aquarium Age, or not?"

The fight, never very serious amongst the siblinghood of the Them, subsided.

"Right," said Adam. He scratched his head. "Now you've made me forget where I've got to," he complained.

"Flyin' saucers," said Brian.

"Right. Right. Well, if you do see a flying UFO, these government men come and tell you off," said Adam, getting back into his stride. "In a big black car. It happens all the time in America."

The Them nodded sagely. Of this at least they had no doubt. America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe that just about anything could happen in America.

"Prob'ly causes traffic jams," said Adam, "all these men in black cars, going about telling people off for seeing UFOs. They tell you that if you go on seeing 'em, you'll have a Nasty Accident."

"Prob'ly get run over by a big black car," said Brian, picking at a scab on a dirty knee. He brightened up. "Do you know," he said, "my cousin said that in America there's shops that sell thirty-nine different flavors of ice cream?"

This even silenced Adam, briefly.

"There aren't thirty-nine flavors of ice cream," said Pepper. "There aren't thirty-nine flavors in the whole world."