Good Omens

He stopped, suddenly.

"Well, nice try," he said, in a completely different voice, "only it won't be like that at all. Not really.

"I mean, you're right about the fire and war, all that. But that Rapture stuff well, if you could see them all in Heaven-serried ranks of them as far as the mind can follow and beyond, league after league of us, flaming swords, all that, well, what I'm trying to say is who has time to go round picking people out and popping them up in the air to sneer at the people dying of radiation sickness on the parched and burning earth below them? If that's your idea of a morally acceptable time, I might add.

"And as for that stuff about Heaven inevitably winning… Well, to be honest, if it were that cut and dried, there wouldn't be a Celestial War in the first place, would there? It's propaganda. Pure and simple. We've got no more than a fifty percent chance of coming out on top. You might just as well send money to a Satanist hotline to cover your bets, although to be frank when the fire falls and the seas of blood rise you lot are all going to be civilian casualties either way. Between our war and your war, they're going to kill everyone and let God sort it out—right?

"Anyway, sorry to stand here wittering, I've just a quick questionwhere am I?"

Marvin O. Bagman was gradually going purple.

"It's the devil! Lord protect me! The devil is speakin' through me!" he erupted, and interrupted himself, "Oh no, quite the opposite in fact. I'm an angel. Ah. This has to be America, doesn't it? So sorry, can't stay…"

There was a pause. Marvin tried to open his mouth, but nothing happened. Whatever was in his head looked around. He looked at the studio crew, those who weren't phoning the police, or sobbing in corners. He looked at the gray-faced cameramen.

"Gosh," he said, "am I on television?"

* * *

Crowley was doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour down Oxford Street.

He reached into the glove compartment for his spare pair of sunglasses, and found only cassettes. Irritably he grabbed one at random and pushed it into the slot.

He wanted Bach, but he would settle for The Travelling Wilburys.

All we need is, Radio Gaga, sang Freddie Mercury.

All I need is out, thought Crowley.

He swung around the Marble Arch Roundabout the wrong way, doing ninety. Lightning made the London skies flicker like a malfunctioning fluorescent tube.

A livid sky on London, Crowley thought, And I knew the end was near. Who had written that? Chesterton, wasn't it? The only poet in the twentieth century to even come close to the Truth.

The Bentley headed out of London while Crowley sat back in the driver's seat and thumbed through the singed copy of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter.

Near the end of the book he found a folded sheet of paper covered in Aziraphale's neat copperplate handwriting. He unfolded it (while the Bentley's gearstick shifted itself down to third and the car accelerated around a fruit lorry, which had unexpectedly backed out of aside street), and then he read it again.

Then he read it one more time, with a slow sinking feeling at the base of his stomach.

The car changed direction suddenly. It was now heading for the village of Tadfield, in Oxfordshire. He could be there in an hour if he hurried.

Anyway, there wasn't really anywhere else to go.

The cassette finished, activating the car radio.

"…Gardeners' Question Time coming to you from Tadfield Gardening Club. We were last here in 1953, a very nice summer, and as the team will remember it's a rich Oxfordshire loam in the East of the parish, rising to chalk in the West; the kind of place of say, don't matter what you plant here, it'll come up beautiful Isn't that right, Fred?"