Good Omens

Aziraphale was the first angel ever to own a computer. It was a cheap, slow, plasticky one, much touted as ideal for the small businessman. Aziraphale used it religiously for doing his accounts, which were so scrupulously accurate that the tax authorities had inspected him five times in the deep belief that he was getting away with murder somewhere.

But these other calculations were of a kind no computer could ever do. Sometimes he would scribble something on a sheet of paper by his side. It was covered in symbols which only eight other people in the world would have been able to comprehend; two of them had won Nobel prizes, and one of the other six dribbled a lot and wasn't allowed anything sharp because of what he might do with it.

* * *

Anathema lunched on miso soup and pored over her maps. There was no doubt the area around Tadfield was rich in ley lines; even the famous Rev. Watkins had identified some. But unless she was totally wrong, they were beginning to shift position.

She'd spent the week taking soundings with theodolite and pendulum, and the Ordinance Survey map of the Tadfield area was now covered with little dots and arrows.

She stared at them for some time. Then she picked up a felt-tip pen and, with occasional references to her notebook, began to join them up.

The radio was on. She wasn't really listening. So quite a lot of the main news item passed right by her unheeding ears, and it wasn't until a couple of key words filtered down into her consciousness that she began to take notice.

Someone called A Spokesman sounded close to hysteria.

"…danger to employees or the public," he was saying.

"And precisely how much nuclear material has escaped?" said the interviewer.

There was a pause. "We wouldn't say escaped," said the spokesman. "Not escaped. Temporarily mislaid."

"You mean it is still on the premises?"

"We certainly cannot see how it could have been removed from them," said the spokesman.

"Surely you have considered terrorist activity?"

There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours."

"But you said the power station is still producing electricity," gasped the interviewer.

"It is."

"How can it still be doing that if it hasn't got any reactors?"

You could see the spokesman's mad grin, even on the radio. You could see his pen, poised over the "Farms for Sale" column in Poultry World. "We don't know," he said. "We were hoping you clever buggers at the BBC would have an idea."

Anathema looked down at her map.

What she had been drawing looked like a galaxy, or the type of carving seen on the better class of Celtic monolith.

The ley-lines were shifting. They were forming a spiral.

It was centered—loosely, with some margin for error, but nevertheless centered—on Lower Tadfield.

* * *

Several thousand miles away, at almost the same moment as Anathema was staring at her spirals, the pleasure cruiser Morbilli was aground in three hundred fathoms of water.

For Captain Vincent, this was just another problem. For example, he knew he should contact the owners, but he never knew from day to day—or from hour to hour, in this computerized world—actually who the current owners were.

Computers, that was the bloody trouble. The ship's papers were computerized and it could switch to the most currently advantageous flag

GOOD OMENS

of convenience in microseconds. Its navigation had been computerized as well, constantly updating its position by satellites. Captain Vincent had explained patiently to the owners, whoever they were, that several hundred square meters of steel plating and a barrel of rivets would be a better investment, and had been informed that his recommendation did not accord with current cost/benefit flow predictions.

Captain Vincent strongly suspected that despite all its electronics the ship was worth more sunk than afloat, and would probably go down as the most perfectly pinpointed wreck in nautical history.

By inference, this also meant that he was more valuable dead than alive.

He sat at his desk quietly leafing through International Maritime Codes, whose six hundred pages contained brief yet pregnant messages designed to transmit the news of every conceivable nautical eventuality across the world with the minimum of confusion and, above all, cost.