"Looking good, chief," said his marketing head. "I'm doing breakfast with the buyers from all the leading supermarket chains tomorrow. No problem. We'll have MEALS in all the stores this time next month."
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"How's it going?" he asked.
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Raven Sable, slim and bearded and dressed all in black, sat in the back of his slimline black limousine, talking on his slimline black telephone to his West Coast base.
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"Good work, Nick."
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"Thank you," said Sable, and he broke the connection.
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He was particularly proud of MEALS®.
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Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW. CHOW® contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn't matter how much you ate, you lost weight. [And hair. And skin tone. And, if you ate enough of it long enough, vital signs.]
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"No problem. No problem. It's knowing you're behind us, Rave. You give great leadership, guy. Works for me every time."
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The Newtrition corporation had started small, eleven years ago. A small team of food scientists, a huge team of marketing and public relations personnel, and a neat logo.
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MEALS® was Sable's latest brainwave.
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Fat people had bought it. Thin people who didn't want to get fat had bought it. CHOW® was the ultimate diet food -- carefully spun, woven, textured, and pounded to imitate anything, from potatoes to venison, although the chicken sold best.
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MEALSD was CHOWN) with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS® you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.
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Sable sat back and watched the money roll in. He watched CHOW® gradually fill the ecological niche that used to be filled by the old, untrademarked food.
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He followed CHOWS with SNACKS® junk food made from real junk.
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MEALS® were currently being tested all over America. Pizza MEALS, Fish MEALS, Szechuan MEALS, macrobiotic rice MEALS. Even Hamburger MEALS.
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Sable's limousine was parked in the lot of a Des Moines, Iowa, Burger Lord -- a fast food franchise wholly owned by his organization. It was here they'd been piloting Hamburger MEALS for the last six months. He wanted to see what kind of results they'd been getting.
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The paradox delighted Sable.
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"Sir?"
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He leaned forward, tapped the chauffeur's glass partition. The chauffeur pressed a switch, and the glass slid open.
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"I'm going to take a look at our operation, Marlon. I'll be ten minutes. Then back to L. A."
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Sir.
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Sable sauntered in to the Burger Lord. It was exactly like every other Burger Lord in America. [But not like every other Burger Lord across the world. German Burger Lords, for example, sold lager instead of root beer, while English Burger Lords managed to take any American fast food virtues (the speed with which your food was delivered, for example) and carefully remove them; your food arrived after half an hour, at room temperature, and it was only because of the strip of warm lettuce between them that you could distinguish the burger from the bun. The Burger Lord pathfinder salesmen had been shot twenty-five minutes after setting foot in France.] McLordy the Clown danced in the Kiddie Korner. The serving staff had identical gleaming smiles that never reached their eyes. And behind the counter a chubby, middle-aged man in a Burger Lord uniform slapped burgers onto the griddle, whistling softly, happy in his work.
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"Anything-to-drink?"
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"Here y'are," he said.
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"Hello-my-name-is-Marie," said the girl behind the counter. "How-can-I-help-you?"
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Sable went up to the counter.
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Hello-my-name-is-Marie gave Sable his MEALS and told him to have a nice day.
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"A double blaster thunder biggun, extra fries, hold the mustard," he said.
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"A special thick whippy chocobanana shake."
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"Uhnnhuhn," crooned the cook. He sorted the food into little paper containers, pausing only to brush the graying cowlick from his eyes.
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She pressed the little pictogram squares on her till. (Literacy was no longer a requirement for employment in these restaurants. Smiling was.) Then she turned to the chubby man behind the counter. "DBTB, E F, hold mustard," she said. "Choc-shake."
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She took them without looking at him, and he returned cheerfully to his griddle, singing quietly, "Loooove me tender, looooove me long, neeever let me go…"
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The man's humming, Sable noted, clashed with the Burger Lord background music, a tinny tape loop of the Burger Lord commercial jingle, and he made a mental note to have him fired.
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Artificial bread roll. Artificial burger. Fries that had never even seen potatoes. Foodless sauces. Even (and Sable was especially pleased with this) an artificial slice of dill pickle. He didn't bother to examine his milkshake. It had no actual food content, but then again, neither did those sold by any of his rivals.
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He found a small plastic table, sat down in the plastic seat, and examined his food.
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There was a tug at his sleeve. "Party name of Sable?" asked a small, bespectacled man in an International Express cap, holding a brown paper parcel.
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Sable nodded.
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All around him people were eating their unfood with, if not actual evidence of enjoyment, then with no more actual disgust than was to be found in burger chains all over the planet.
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"Thought it was you. Looked around, thought, tall gent with a beard, nice suit, can't be that many of them here. Package for you, sir."
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He stood up, took his tray over to the PLEASE DISPOSE OF YOUR REFUSE WITH CARE receptacle, and dumped the whole thing. If you had told him that there were children starving in Africa he would have been flattered that you'd noticed.
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"Back to the office?" asked the chauffeur.
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And in the Burger Lord, behind the counter, the stout man with the cowlick slid another half-dozen burgers onto the grill. He was the happiest man in the whole world and he was singing, very softly.
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"The airport," said Sable. "And call ahead. I want a ticket to England."
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"About time," he said. He thrust the scales into his pocket, unheeding of the damage being done to the sleek line of his black suit, and went back to the limo.
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Sable smiled. It was a slim smile, and was gone almost instantly.
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"How long for, sir?"
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"Yessir. Return ticket to England."
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"No," said Sable. He gave the man a tip -- five dollars -- and opened the package.
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"Thank you kindly, sir," said the delivery man. He paused. "Here," he said. "That bloke behind the counter. Does he remind you of anyone?"
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In it was a small pair of brass scales.
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Sable fingered the scales in his pocket. "Make that a single," he said. "I'll be making my own way back. Oh, and call the office for me, cancel all appointments."
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"The foreseeable future."
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Sable signed for it, his real name -- one word, six letters. Sounds like examine.
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"… y'ain't never caught a rabbit," he hummed to himself, "and y'ain't no friend of mine…"
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The Them listened with interest. There was a light drizzle which was barely kept at bay by the old iron sheets and frayed bits of lino that roofed their den in the quarry, and they always looked to Adam to think up things to do when it was raining. They weren't disappointed. Adam's eyes were agleam with the joy of knowledge.
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It had been 3:00 A. M. before he'd gone to sleep under a pile of New Aquarians.
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"Huh," said Pepper. "I bet. Alive frogs?"
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"Oh, yes," said Adam, warming to his subject. "Hopping around and croaking and everything. People paid him money to go away in the end an', an'…" He racked his brains for something that would satisfy his audience; he'd done, for Adam, a lot of reading in one go. "… And he sailed off in the Mary Celeste and founded the Bermuda Triangle. It's in Bermuda," he added helpfully.
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"An' then there was this man called Charles Fort," he said. "He could make it rain fish and frogs and stuff."
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"No, he couldn't of done that," said Wensleydale sternly, "because I've read about the Mary Celeste, and there was no one on it. It's famous for having no one on it. They found it floating around all by itself with no one on it."
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"I din't say he was on it when they found it, did I?" said Adam scathingly. "Course he wasn't on it. 'Cos of the UFOs landin' and takin' him off. I thought everyone knew about that."
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The Them relaxed a bit. They were on firmer ground with UFOs. They weren't entirely certain about New Age UFOs, though; they'd listened politely to Adam on the subject, but somehow modern UFOs lacked punch.
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"If I was an alien," said Pepper, voicing the opinion of them all, "I wouldn't go round telling people all about mystic cosmic harmony. I'd say," her voice became hoarse and nasal, like someone hampered by an evil black mask, "'Thish ish a lasher blashter, sho you do what you're told, rebel swine."'
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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.
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There was a moment's silence while they pondered this waste of perfectly good UFOs.
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"'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."
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"Why?" said Wensleydale.
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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.
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"Which says 'Hush It Up,"' said Pepper.
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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[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.]
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"Well, orlright, but after that he gets out the book and the big stamp."
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"Yes," said Brian, "But you lent me that comic afterwards and I know what type of picture it was."
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There was the usual brief scuffle.
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"Look," said Adam severely. "Do you want me to tell you about the Aquarium Age, or not?"
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Wensleydale hesitated, and then said in a voice heavy with badly tried patience, "Brian, just because it says Exploded Diagram --"
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"Right," said Adam. He scratched his head. "Now you've made me forget where I've got to," he complained.
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The fight, never very serious amongst the siblinghood of the Them, subsided.
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"Flyin' saucers," said Brian.
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"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."
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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.
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"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."
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"There could be, if you mixed them up," said Wensleydale, blinking owlishly. "You know. Strawberry and chocolate. Chocolate and vanilla." He sought for more English flavors. "Strawberry and vanilla and chocolate," he added, lamely.
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"And then there's Atlantis," said Adam loudly.
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"Sort of sudden an' slowly," said Adam, "'cos a lot of 'em got away in boats to all the other countries and taught 'em how to do maths an' English an' History an' stuff."
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"There aren't thirty-nine flavors of ice cream," said Pepper. "There aren't thirty-nine flavors in the whole world."
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This even silenced Adam, briefly.
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"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?"
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He had their interest there. They enjoyed Atlantis. Cities that sank under the sea were right up the Them's street. They listened intently to a jumbled account of pyramids, weird priesthoods, and ancient secrets.
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"Did it just happen sudden, or slowly?" said Brian.
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"They could of done," he conceded, somewhat weakly. "After they'd sent all the teachers off in the boats. Maybe everyone else stayed on when it went down."
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Adam greeted this with the chilly stare he reserved for any of Them who came up with an idea he really wished he'd thought of first.
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"Could of been good fun, when it was sinking," said Brian wistfully, recalled the one occasion when Lower Tadfield had been flooded. "People deliverin' the milk and newspapers by boat, no one having to go to school."
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"You wouldn't have to wash," said Brian, whose parents forced him to wash a great deal more than he thought could possibly be healthy. Not that it did any good. There was something basically ground in about Brian. "Because everything would stay clean. An', an' you could grow seaweed and stuff in the garden and shoot sharks. And have pet octopuses and stuff. And there wouldn't be any schools and stuff because they'd of got rid of all the teachers."
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"Don't see what's so great about that," said Pepper.
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"If I was an Atlantisan, I'd of stayed," said Wensleydale. This was greeted with disdainful laughter, but he pressed on. "You'd just have to wear a diver's helmet, that's all. And nail all the windows shut and fill the houses with air. It would be great."
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They thought about the Atlanteans, clad in flowing mystic robes and goldfish bowls, enjoying themselves deep under the choppy waters of the ocean.
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Adam felt very pleased about the morning's work. He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist any more.
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"What shall we do now?" said Brian. "It's brightened up a bit."
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"They could still be down there now," said Pepper.
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In the end they played Charles Fort Discovering Things. This consisted of one of the Them walking around with the ancient remains of an umbrella, while the others treated him to a rain of frogs or, rather, frog. They could only find one in the pond. It was an elderly frog, who knew the Them of old, and tolerated their interest as the price it paid for a pond otherwise free of moorhens and pike. It put up with things good-naturedly for a while before hopping off to a secret and so-far-undiscovered hideout in an old drainpipe.
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Then they went home for lunch.
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"Huh," said Pepper, summing up their feelings.
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He bolted his lunch and retired to his room. There were still quite a few New Aquarians he hadn't read yet.
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Whereas this Aquarium Age stuff was really real. Grown-up people wrote lots of books about it (New Aquarian was full of adverts for them) and Bigfoots and Mothmen and Yetis and sea monsters and Surrey pumas really existed. If Cortez, on his peak in Darien, had had slightly damp feet from efforts at catching frogs, he'd have felt just like Adam at that moment.
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The cocoa was a congealed brown sludge half filling the cup.
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The world was bright and strange and he was in the middle of it.
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Certain people had spent hundreds of years trying to make sense of the prophecies of Agnes Nutter. They had been very intelligent, in the main. Anathema Device, who was about as close to being Agnes as genetic drift would allow, was the best of the bunch. But none of them had been angels.
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Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these were wrong; Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort. But he was intelligent. And it was an angelic intelligence which, while not being particularly higher than human intelligence, is much broader and has the advantage of having thousands of years of practice.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Someone called A Spokesman sounded close to hysteria.
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"… danger to employees or the public," he was saying.
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"And precisely how much nuclear material has escaped?" said the interviewer.
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There was a pause. "We wouldn't say escaped," said the spokesman. "Not escaped. Temporarily mislaid."
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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.
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"You mean it is still on the premises?"
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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."
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"We certainly cannot see how it could have been removed from them," said the spokesman.
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"Surely you have considered terrorist activity?"
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"It is."
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What she had been drawing looked like a galaxy, or the type of carving seen on the better class of Celtic monolith.
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"How can it still be doing that if it hasn't got any reactors?"
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"But you said the power station is still producing electricity," gasped the interviewer.
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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."
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Anathema looked down at her map.
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The ley-lines were shifting. They were forming a spiral.
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It was centered -- loosely, with some margin for error, but nevertheless centered -- on Lower Tadfield.
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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.
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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.
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By inference, this also meant that he was more valuable dead than alive.
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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.
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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.
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Computers, that was the bloody trouble. The ship's papers were computerized and it could switch to the most currently advantageous flag 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.
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What he wanted to say was this: Was sailing SSW at position 33°N 47° 72'W. First Mate, who you may recall was appointed in New Guinea against my wishes and is probably a head-hunter, indicated by signs that something was amiss. It appears that quite a vast expanse of seabed has risen up in the night. It contains a large number of buildings, many of which appeared pyramid-like in structure. We are aground in the courtyard of one of these. There are some rather unpleasant statues. Amiable old men in long robes and diving helmets have come aboard the ship and are mingling happily with the passengers, who think we organized this. Please advise.
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He picked up his pen and wrote down: "XXXV QVVX."
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His questing finger moved slowly down the page, and stopped. Good old International Codes. They'd been devised eighty years before, but the men in those days had really thought hard about the kind of perils that might possibly be encountered on the deep.
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Translated, it meant: "Have found Lost Continent of Atlantis. High Priest has just won quoits contest."
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"It jolly well isn't!"
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"It jolly well is!"
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"It jolly well is!"
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"It isn't, you know!"
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"It isn't -- all right, then, what about volcanoes?" Wensleydale sat back, a look of triumph on his face.
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"What about 'em?" said Adam.
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"All that lather comes up from the center of the Earth, where it's all hot," said Wensleydale. "I saw a program. It had David Attenborough, so it's true."
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The Hollow Earth Theory was not going over well in the quarry. A beguiling idea that had stood up to the probings of such remarkable thinkers as Cyrus Read Teed, Bulwer-Lytton, and Adolf Hitler was bending dangerously in the wind of Wensleydale's searingly bespectacled logic.
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The other Them looked at Adam. It was like watching a tennis match.
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"I dint say it was hollow all the way through," said Adam. "No one said it was hollow all the way through. It prob'ly goes down miles and miles to make room for all the lather and oil and coal and Tibetan tunnels and suchlike. But then it's hollow after that. That's what people think. And there's a hole at the North Pole to let the air in."
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"Never seen it on an atlas," sniffed Wensleydale.
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"What do you mean, Tibetan tunnels?" said Pepper. "You said Tibetan tunnels."
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"Ah. Dint I tell you about them?"
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"The goverment won't let them put it on a map in case people go and have a look in," said Adam. "The reason being, the people livin' inside don't want people lookin' down on 'em all the time."
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"It's amazing. You know Tibet?"
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"Well, you know all those teachers that left Atlantis when it sunk?"
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Three heads shook.
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They nodded doubtfully. A series of images had risen in their minds: yaks, Mount Everest, people called Grasshopper, little old men sitting on mountains, other people learning kung fu in ancient temples, and snow.
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They nodded again.
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"Well, some of them went to Tibet and now they run the world. They're called the Secret Masters. On account of being teachers, I suppose. An' they've got this secret underground city called Shambala and tunnels that go all over the world so's they know everythin' that goes on and control everythin'. Some people reckon that they really live under the Gobby Desert," he added loftily, "but mos' competent authorities reckon it's Tibet all right. Better for the tunnelling, anyway."
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"My granny used to put a glass against the wall," said Brian. "She said it was disgustin', the way she could hear everything that went on next door."
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The Them instinctively looked down at the grubby, dirt-covered chalk beneath their feet.
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"They just have to listen, right?" hazarded Adam. "They just have to sit in their tunnels and listen. You know what hearin' teachers have. They can hear a whisper right across the room."
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"How come they know everything?" said Pepper.
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"All over the world," said Adam firmly.
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"Must of took a long time," said Pepper doubtfully. "You remember when we tried digging that tunnel out in the field, we were at it all afternoon, and you had to scrunch up to get all in."
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"I thought the Tibetans were conquered by the Chinese and the Daily Llama had to go to India," said Wensleydale, but without much conviction. Wensleydale read his father's newspaper every evening, but the prosaic everydayness of the world always seemed to melt under the powerhouse of Adam's explanations.
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"And these tunnels go everywhere, do they?" said Pepper, still staring at the ground.
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"Yes, but they've been doin' it for millions of years. You can do really good tunnels if you've got millions of years."
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They looked at one another.
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"What'd you have to go an' say that for?" said Adam. "Fat lot of good us trying to surprise them now, isn't it, with you shoutin' out something like that. I was just thinkin' we could dig down, an' you jus' have to go an' warn 'em!"
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"I bet they're down there now," said Adam, ignoring this. "They'd be all over the place by now. Sitting underground and listenin'."
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"If we dug down quickly --" said Brian. Pepper, who was a lot quicker on the uptake, groaned.
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"Oh, yes. Oh, yes. An' I s'pose you know more about it than Madame Blatvatatatsky?" sniffed Adam.
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They gave this due consideration.
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"I don't think they'd dig all those tunnels," said Wensleydale doggedly. "It doesn't make any sense. Tibet's hundreds of miles away."
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"Now, if I was a Tibetan," said Wensleydale, in a reasonable tone of voice, "I'd just dig straight down to the hollow bit in the middle and then run around the inside and dig straight up where I wanted to be."
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"You've got to admit that's more sensible than tunnels," said Pepper.
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Brian stared dreamily at the sky, while his finger probed the contents of one ear.
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"Yes, well, I expect that's what they do," said Adam. "They'd be bound to of thought of something as simple as that."
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"Funny, reely," he said. "You spend your whole life goin' to school and learnin' stuff, and they never tell you about stuff like the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs and all these Old Masters running around the inside of the Earth. Why do we have to learn boring stuff when there's all this brilliant stuff we could be learnin', that's what I want to know."
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There was a chorus of agreement.
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Then they went out and played Charles Fort and the Atlantisans versus the Ancient Masters of Tibet, but the Tibetters claimed that using mystic ancient lasers was cheating.
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There was a time when witchfinders were respected, although it didn't last very long.
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Matthew Hopkins, for example, the Witchfinder General, found witches all over the east of England in the middle of the seventeenth century, charging each town and village nine pence a witch for every one he discovered.
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So in order to turn a profit Hopkins had to find a remarkable number of witches. This made him more than a little unpopular with the village councils, and he was himself hanged as a witch by an East Anglian village who had sensibly realized that they could cut their overheads by eliminating the middleman.
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That was the trouble. Witchfinders didn't get paid by the hour. Any witchfinder who spent a week examining the local crones and then told the mayor, "Well done, not a pointy hat among the lot of them," would get fulsome thanks, a bowl of soup and a meaningful goodbye.
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It is thought by many that Hopkins was the last Witchfinder General.
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Nor is there a Witchfinder Colonel, a Witchfinder Major, a Witchfinder Captain, or even a Witchfinder Lieutenant (the last one was killed falling out of a very tall tree in Caterham, in 1933, while attempting to get a better view of something he believed was a satanic orgy of the most degenerate persuasion, but was, in fact, the Caterham and Whyteleafe Market Traders' Association annual dinner and dance).
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In this they would, strictly speaking, be correct. Possibly not in the way they imagine, however. The Witchfinder Army marched on, just slightly more quietly.
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There is no longer a real Witchfinder General.
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Later, when he was on nodding terms with Madame Tracy, Newt learned that if he had mentioned the other ad, the one in the magazine, Madame Tracy would have been available for strict discipline and intimate massage every evening except Thursdays. There was yet another ad in a phone box somewhere. When, much later, Newt asked her what this one involved, she said "Thursdays."
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It was the advertisement that got him, in the Gazette, between a fridge for sale and a litter of not-exactly dalmatians:
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"Hello," he began, tentatively. "I saw your advert."
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Newton hesitated. "The advert says 'Join the Professionals,'" he said. "It didn't mention Madame Tracy."
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"Which one, love?"
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In his lunch hour he phoned the number at the bottom of the ad. A woman answered.
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JOIN THE PROFESSIONALS. PART TIME ASSISTANT REQUIRED TO COMBAT THE FORCES OF DARKNESS. UNIFORM, BASIC TRAINING PROVIDED. FIELD PROMOTION CERTAIN. BE A MAN!
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"Er, the one in the paper."
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"Right, love. Well, Madame Tracy Draws Aside the Veil every afternoon except Thursdays. Parties welcome. When would you be wanting to Explore the Mysteries, love?"
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There is also, now, a Witchfinder Private. His name is Newton Pulsifer.
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"That'll be Mister Shadwell you'll be wanting, then. Just a sec, I'll see if he's in."
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There is, however, a Witchfinder Sergeant.
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"Newton. Newton Pulsifer."
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"Aye?"
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"I read your advert. 'Join the professionals.' I wanted to know a bit more about it."
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"Oh. Aye. Well, then. Pulsifer. Pulsifer. I've seen that name afore, maybe?"
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"I don't know," said Newton. "My uncle runs a toy shop in Hounslow," he added, in case this way any help.
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"That's Pulsifer," explained Newton. "With a P. I don't know about the other stuff, but we come from Surrey."
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"What's your name, lad?"
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"Oh," squeaked Newton.
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"LUCIFER? What's that you say? Are ye of the Spawn of Darkness, a tempting beguiling creature from the pit, wanton limbs steaming from the fleshpots of Hades, in tortured and lubricious thrall to your stygian and hellish masters?"
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The voice on the phone sounded vaguely disappointed.
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"Aye. There's many as would like to know more about it, an' there's many…" the voice trailed off impressively, then crashed back to full volume, "… there's many as WOULDN'T."
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Eventually there was the sound of feet in uncarpeted hallways, a deep coughing, and a voice the color of an old raincoat rumbled:
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"Oh yes. Except for fillings."
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"Have ye all your own teeth?"
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There was a thin layer of dust on Aziraphale, too.
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"Er. Two?"
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"What?"
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"No. Yes. I mean, I've got some scissors. I'm not deaf."
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"Is that sooo?" said Shadwell.
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"Pardon?"
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"How many nipples?"
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"Scissors! Scissors! Are ye deaf?"
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Mr. Shadwell's accent was unplaceable. It careered around Britain like a milk race. Here a mad Welsh drill sergeant, there a High Kirk elder who'd just seen someone doing something on a Sunday, somewhere between them a dour Daleland shepherd, or bitter Somerset miser. It didn't matter where the accent went; it didn't get any nicer.
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"I suppose so," Newt stuttered. "I mean, that was why I wanted to join the territorials. Brian Potter in Accounting can bench-press almost a hundred since he joined. And he paraded in front of the Queen Mother."
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The cocoa had nearly all solidified. Green fur was growing on the inside of the mug.
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"Good. Have ye got your ane scissors?"
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"Nipples, laddie, nipples," said the voice testily. "How many nipples hae ye got?"
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"Are ye fit?"
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He'd never met Agnes. She was too bright, obviously. Normally Heaven or Hell spotted the prophetic types and broadcast enough noises on the same mental channel to prevent any undue accuracy. Actually that was rarely necessary; they normally found ways of generating their own static in self-defense against the images that echoed around their heads.
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The stack of notes was building up beside him. The Nice and Accurate Prophecies was a mass of improvised bookmarks made of torn strips of Daily Telegraph.
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Aziraphale stirred, and pinched his nose.
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He was nearly there.
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Poor old St. John had his mushrooms, for example. Mother Shipton had her ale. Nostradamus had his collection of interesting oriental preparations. St. Malachi had his still.
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Good old Malachi. He'd been a nice old boy, sitting there, dreaming about future popes. Complete piss artist, of course. Could have been a real thinker, if it hadn't been for the poteen.
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A sad end. Sometimes you really had to hope that the ineffable plan had been properly thought out.
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He'd got the shape of it.
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Thought. There was something he had to do. Oh, yes. Phone his contact, get things sorted out.
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Then he thought: why not? Worth a try.
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He stood up, stretched his limbs, and made a phone call.
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"Hallo? Good afternoon. So kind. Yes. This will be a Tadfield number, I think. Or Lower Tadfield… ah. Or possibly Norton, I'm not sure of the precise code. Yes. Young. Name of Young. Sorry, no initial. Oh. Well, can you give me all of them? Thank you."
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He went back and shuffled through his sheaf of notes. Apes really had been good. And clever. No one was interested in accurate prophecies.
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Paper in hand, he phoned Directory Enquiries.
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Back on the table, a pencil picked itself up and scribbled furiously.
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At the third name it broke its point.
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He hung up almost reverentially, took a few deep breaths, and dialed again. The last three digits gave him some trouble, because his hand was shaking.
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"Ah," said Aziraphale, his mouth suddenly running on automatic while his mind exploded. "I think that's the one. Thank you. So kind. Good day to you."
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"Hallo?" said the receiver. "Hallo."
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If he had known that army life consisted chiefly of applying the one to the other, he used to muse, he would never have joined.
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He listened to the ringing tone. Then a voice answered. It was a middle-aged voice, not unfriendly, but probably it had been having a nap and was not feeling at its best.
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Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell had made him a list, which was taped to the wall in Shadwell's tiny crowded flat situated over Rajit's Newsagents and Video Rental. The list read:
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He also had a huge pile of newspapers.
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It said "Tadfield Six double-six."
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He replaced the receiver.
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Newt was looking for either. He signed and picked up another newspaper, scanned the front page, opened it, ignored page two (never anything on there) then blushed crimson as he performed the obligatory nipple count on page three. Shadwell had been insistent about this. "Ye can't trust them, the cunning buggers," he said. "It'd be just like them to come right out in the open, like, defyin' us."
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Unexplainable Phenomenons. Phenomenatrices. Phenomenice. Things, ye ken well what I mean.
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"Sorry," he said, "Right number."
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Aziraphale's hand started to shake.
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Aziraphale got a grip on himself.
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Witches.
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Newt wasn't deaf. And he did have his own scissors.
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"You want to watch him. He's one o' them," he said.
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"He does give us the newspapers free, though, Sergeant," said Newt. "And they're not too old."
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There was a muffled thumping on the door.
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A couple in black turtleneck sweaters glowered at the camera on page nine. They claimed to lead the largest coven in Saffron Walden, and to restore sexual potency by the use of small and very phallic dolls. The newspaper was offering ten of the dolls to readers who were prepared to write "My Most Embarrassing Moment of Impotency" stories. Newt cut the story out and stuck it into a scrapbook.
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"Who, sir?"
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Newt opened it; a pile of newspapers stood there. "Shift yerself, Private Pulsifer," it barked, and it shufed into the room. The newspapers fell to the floor, revealing Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell, who coughed, painfully, and relit his cigarette, which had gone out.
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"Tak yer ease, Private. Him. That little brown feller. Mister socalled Rajit. It's them terrible forn arts. The ruby squinty eye of the little yellow god. Women wi' too many arms. Witches, the lot o' them."
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"Ah," said Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell, and took another drag on his cigarette. Or appeared to. Newt had never actually quite seen one of his superior's cigarettes -- it was something to do with the way he cupped his hands. He even made the ends disappear when he'd finished with them. "Ah."
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"But Mister Rajit's from Bangladesh, or India, or somewhere," he said. "I thought voodoo came from the West Indies."
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Newt tried to picture Shadwell's landlord as an exponent of voodoo. Certainly Mr. Rajit worked on the Sabbath. In fact, with his plump quiet wife and plump cheerful children he worked around the clock, never mind the calendar, diligently filling the area's needs in the matter of soft drinks, white bread, tobacco, sweets, newspapers, magazines, and the type of top-shelf pornography that made Newt's eyes water just to think about. The worst you could imagine Mr. Rajit doing with a chicken was selling it after the "Sell-By" date.
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"And voodoo. I bet he does voodoo. Sacrificing chickens to that Baron Saturday. Ye know, tall darkie bugger in the top hat. Brings people back from the dead, aye, and makes them work on the Sabbath day. Voodoo." Shadwell sniffed speculatively.
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"Errrukh! Yes lad, that's it. Words right out of me mouth. Bangladesh. Exactly."
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"Hidden wisdom, lad. Inner mili'try secrets of the Witchfinder army. When you're all initiated proper ye'll know the secret truth. Some voodoo may come from the West Indies. I'll grant ye that. Oh yes, I'll grant ye that. But the worst kind. The darkest kind, that comes from, um…"
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"Well, doesn't it?"
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"So. Ye got anything, Witchfinder Private?"
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Shadwell made the end of his cigarette vanish, and managed furtively to roll another, never letting papers or tobacco be seen.
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"Well, there's this." Newton held out the clipping.
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"Bangladesh?"
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Shadwell squinted at it. "Oh them," he said. "Load o' rubbish. Call themselves bloody witches? I checked them out last year. Went down with me armory of righteousness and a packet of firelighters, jemmied the place open, they were clean as a whistle. Mail order bee jelly business they're trying to pep up. Load o' rubbish. Wouldn't know a familiar spirit if it chewed out the bottoms o' their trousers. Rubbish. It's not like it used to be, laddie."
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Newt took this as his cue to sit down. He shook his head. Shadwell lit his roll-up with a battered Ronson lighter, and coughed appreciatively.
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"My cellmate, he was. Witchfinder Captain Ffolkes. Ten years for arson. Burning a coven in Wimbledon. Would have got them all too, if it wasn't the wrong day. Good fellow. Told me about the battle -- the great war between Heaven and Hell… It was him that told me the Inner Secrets of the Witchfinder Army. Familiar spirits. Nipples. All that…"
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"Did I ever tell you how I was recruited to the army?" he asked.
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He sat down and poured himself a cup of sweet tea from a filthy thermos.
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"That's what we'm reduced to, lad," he said. "A few hundred years ago, see, we was powerful. We stood between the world and the darkness. We was the thin red line. Thin red line o' fire, ye see."
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"Pah!" said Shadwell. Newt had seen the word in print, but this was the first time he'd ever heard anyone say it. "Churches? What good did they ever do? They'm just as bad. Same line o' business, nearly. You can't trust them to stamp out the Evil One, 'cos if they did, they'd be out o' that line o' business. If yer goin' up against a tiger, ye don't want fellow travellers whose idea of huntin' is tae throw meat at it. Nay, lad. It's up to us. Against the darkness."
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"I thought the churches…" Newt began.
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"Knew he was dying, you see. Got to have someone to carry on the tradition. Like you is, now…" He shook his head.
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Everything went quiet for a moment.
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Newt always tried to see the best in everyone, but it had occurred to him shortly after joining the WA that his superior and only fellow soldier was as well balanced as an upturned pyramid. "Shortly," in this case, meant under five seconds. The WA's headquarters was a fetid room with walls the color of nicotine, which was almost certainly what they were coated with, and a floor the color of cigarette ash, which was almost certainly what it was. There was a small square of carpet. Newt avoided walking on it if possible, because it sucked at his shoes.
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One of the walls had a yellowing map of the British Isles tacked to it, with homemade flags sticking in it here and there; most of them were within a Cheap Day Return fare of London.
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But Newt had stuck with it the past few weeks because, well, horrified fascination had turned into horrified pity and then a sort of horrified affection. Shadwell had turned out to be about five feet high and wore clothes which, no matter what they actually were, always turned up even in your short-term memory as an old mackintosh. The old man may have had all his own teeth, but only because no one else could possibly have wanted them; just one of them, placed under the pillow, would have made the Tooth Fairy hand in its wand.
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He appeared to live entirely on sweet tea, condensed milk, handrolled cigarettes, and a sort of sullen internal energy. Shadwell had a Cause, which he followed with the full resources of his soul and his Pensioner's Concessionary Travel Pass. He believed in it. It powered him like a turbine.
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Newton Pulsifer had never had a cause in his life. Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half-hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He'd sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn't come. And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strength of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. And he'd given up on ecology when the ecology magazine he'd been subscribing to had shown its readers a plan of a self-sufficient garden, and had drawn the ecological goat tethered within three feet of the ecological beehive. Newt had spent a lot of time at his grandmother's house in the country and thought he knew something about the habits of both goats and bees, and concluded therefore that the magazine was run by a bunch of bib-overalled maniacs. Besides, it used the word "community" too often; Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word "community" were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.
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But he found he rather liked Shadwell. People often did, much to Shadwell's annoyance. The Rajits liked him because he always eventually paid his rent and didn't cause any trouble, and was racist in such a glowering, undirected way that it was quite inoffensive; it was simply that Shadwell hated everyone in the world, regardless of caste, color, or creed, and wasn't going to make any exceptions for anyone.
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Newt had not believed in the Cub Scouts and then, when he was old enough, not in the Scouts either.
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He was prepared to believe, though, that the job of wages clerk at United Holdings [Holdings] PLC, was possibly the most boring in the world.
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To Newt's straightforward mind this was intolerable.
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Then he'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist.
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This is how Newton Pulsifer looked as a man: if he went into a phone booth and changed, he might manage to come out looking like Clark Kent.
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Madame Tracy liked him. Newt had been amazed to find that the tenant of the other flat was a middle-aged, motherly soul, whose gentlemen callers called as much for a cup of tea and a nice chat as for what little discipline she was still able to exact. Sometimes, when he'd nursed a half pint of Guinness on a Saturday night, Shadwell would stand in the corridor between their rooms and shout things like "hoor of Babylon!" but she told Newt privately that she'd always felt rather gratified about this even though the closest she'd been to Babylon was Torremolinos. It was like free advertising, she said.
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She said she didn't mind him banging on the wall and swearing during her seance afternoons, either. Her knees had been giving her gyp and she wasn't always up to operating the table rapper, she said, so a bit of muffled thumping came in useful.
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You couldn't help liking Shadwell, she said. For all the good it did, though, she might as well be flicking bread pellets into a black hole.
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On Sundays she'd leave him a bit of dinner on his doorstep, with another plate over the top of it to keep it warm.
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"Any cows droppin' dead after some woman has looked at 'em?"
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He'd spent weeks on this. Shadwell had really let the papers pile up. Some of them went back for years. Newt had quite a good memory, perhaps because in his twenty-six years very little had happened to fill it up, and he had become quite expert on some very esoteric subjects.
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"I'm afraid not."
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Newt remembered the other cuttings. He pushed them across the stained desk.
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"What are these?" said Shadwell, suspiciously.
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"Anyone bin shootin' hares wi' a silver bullet and next day an old crone in the village is walkin' wi' a limp?" Shadwell said hopefully.
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"What is it, then?" said Shadwell. He shuffled across to the sticky brown cupboard and pulled out a tin of condensed milk.
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"No."
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"Phenomena," said Newt. "You said to look for phenomena. There's more phenomena than witches these days, I'm afraid."
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"Odd things happening," said Newt.
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"Seems to be something new every day," said Newt, flicking through the rectangles of newsprint. "Something weird has been happening to nuclear power stations, and no one seems to know what it is. And some people are claiming that the Lost Continent of Atlantis has risen." He looked proud of his efforts.
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Shadwell's penknife punctured the condensed milk tin. There was the distant sound of a telephone ringing. Both men instinctively ignored it. All the calls were for Madame Tracy anyway and some of them were not intended for the ear of man; Newt had conscientiously answered the phone on his first day, listened carefully to the question, said "Marks and Spencer's 100% Cotton Y-fronts, actually," and had been left with a dead receiver.
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Shadwell sucked deeply. "Ach, that's no' proper phenomena," he said. "Can't see any witches doing that. They're more for the sinking o' things, ye ken."
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Newt's mouth opened and shut a few times.
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"Any witches on it?" said Shadwell, showing a spark of interest for the first time.
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"But American troops have landed on it to protect it from things," moaned Newt. "A non-existent continent…"
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"If we're strong in the fight against witchery we can't afford to be sidetracked by this style o' thing," Shadwell went on. "Haven't ye got anything more witchcrafty?"
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"It doesn't say," said Newt.
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Newt looked despondently at his cuttings as Shadwell went out, grumbling, to the phone. There was one about the stones of Stonehenge moving out of position, as though they were iron filings in a magnetic field.
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"Awa' wi' ye, harlot," said Shadwell, automatically.
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"So if you'd let me have the plates back from last week it'd be a help, there's a love," said Madame Tracy, and tottered unsteadily back on three-inch heels to her flat and whatever it was that had been interrupted.
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"Ach, then it's just politics and geography," said Shadwell dismissively.
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"He sounds ever so refined," said Madame Tracy, taking no notice. "And I'll be getting us a nice bit of liver for Sunday."
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Madame Tracy poked her head around the door. "Coo-ee, Mr. Shadwell," she said, giving Newt a friendly little wave. "A gentleman on the telephone for you. Hallo, Mr. Newton."
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"I'd sooner sup wi' the De'el, wumman."
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"Who? Ah. Aye. Aye. Ye say? Wha' class o' thing wud that be? Aye. Just as you say, sor. And where is this place, then --?"
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He was vaguely aware of one side of a telephone conversation.
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But mysteriously moving stones wasn't Shadwell's cup of tea or, rather, tin of milk.
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"All these things that are happening --" Newt began.
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He shuffled back into the room, and then stared at Newt as if he had forgotten why he was there.
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"Well, there's this little town which has been having some amazing weather for the last few years," Newt went on helplessly.
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"Aye." Shadwell continued to look through him while thoughtfully tapping the empty tin against his teeth.
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"What was it ye was goin' on about?" he said.
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"Fine, fine," Shadwell reassured the caller. "We'll get onto it right awa'. I'll put my best squad on it and report success to ye any minute, I ha' no doubt. Goodbye to you, sor. And bless you too, sor." There was the ting of a receiver going back on the hook, and then Shadwell's voice, no longer metaphorically crouched in deference, said, "'Dear boy'! Ye great southern pansy." [Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole.]
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"What? Rainin' frogs and similar?" said Shadwell, brightening up a bit.
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"Call that a phenomena?" said Shadwell. "I've seen phenomenas that'd make your hair curl, laddie." He started tapping again.
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"No. It just has normal weather for the time of year."
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"I never used to dream when I was a kid," he said quietly.
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Newt was aware of skidding around the lip of some deep, unpleasant pit. He mentally backed away.
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"It's just very odd," he said. "There's a weatherman here talking about averages and norms and microclimates and things like that."
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Shadwell's eyes looked unfocussed. He paused with the condensed milk tin halfway to his lips.
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"When do you remember normal weather for the time of year?" said Newt, slightly annoyed. "Normal weather for the time of year isn't normal, Sergeant. It has snow at Christmas. When did you last see snow at Christmas? And long hot Augusts? Every year? And crisp autumns? The kind of weather you used to dream of as a kid? It never rained on November the Fifth and always snowed on Christmas Eve?"
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"What's that mean?" said Shadwell.
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"Means he doesn't know why," said Newt, who hadn't spent years on the littoral of business without picking up a thing or two. He looked sidelong at the Witchfinder Sergeant.
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Shadwell wiped his upper lip thoughtfully.
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Shadwell ignored him. "Aye. I suppose it can't do any harm. Yell pay yer ane petrol, ye say?"
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"Wonder what the Southerners is playing at noo?" said Shadwell under his breath.
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"That's right, Mr. Shadwell," said Newt. "How did you know that?"
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"Who'll be playing, Sergeant?" said Newt.
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Oh God, he thought, or other suitable entity, don't let me spend another evening cutting newspapers to bits in this ashtray of a room. Let me get out in the fresh air. Let me do whatever is the WA's equivalent of going waterskiing in Germany.
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"Witches are well known for affecting the weather," he prompted. "I looked it up in the Discouverie."
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"Weeell," he said, out loud. "And why not?"
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"This place," he said, "it wouldna be called Tadfield, would it?"
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"It's only forty miles away," he said tentatively. "I thought I could just sort of nip over there tomorrow. And have a look around, you know. I'll pay my own petrol," he added.
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Newt nodded.
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"Then yell come here at nine o' the clock in the morning," he said, "afore ye go."
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"Two calls in one day, Mr. Shadwell," she said, "Your little army must be marching away like anything!"
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"Ach, awa' wi' ye, ye murrain plashed berrizene," muttered Shadwell, and slammed the door. Tadfield, he thought. Och, weel. So long as they paid up on time…
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"Yer armor o' righteousness."
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"What for?" said Newt.
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Neither Aziraphale nor Crowley ran the Witchfinder Army, but they both approved of it, or at least knew that it would be approved of by their superiors. So it appeared on the list of Aziraphale's agencies because it was, well, a Witchfinder Army, and you had to support anyone calling themselves witchfinders in the same way that the U. S. A. had to support anyone calling themselves anti-communist. And it appeared on Crowley's list for the slightly more sophisticated reason that people like Shadwell did the cause of Hell no harm at all. Quite the reverse, it was felt.
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Just after Newt had left the phone rang again. This time it was Crowley, who gave approximately the same instructions as Aziraphale. Shadwell took them down again for form's sake, while Madame Tracy hovered delightedly behind him.
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Strictly speaking, Shadwell didn't run the WA either. According to Shadwell's pay ledgers it was run by Witchfinder General Smith. Under him were Witchfinder Colonels Green and Jones, and Witchfinder Majors Jackson, Robinson, and Smith (no relation). Then there were Witchfinder Majors Saucepan, Tin, Milk, and Cupboard, because Shadwell's limited imagination had been beginning to struggle at this point. And Witchfinder Captains Smith, Smith, Smith, and Smythe and Ditto. And five hundred Witchfinder Privates and Corporals and Sergeants. Many of them were called Smith, but this didn't matter because neither Crowley nor Aziraphale had ever bothered to read that far. They simply handed over the pay.
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Shadwell didn't consider this in any way criminal. The army was a sacred trust, and a man had to do something. The old ninepences weren't coming in like they used to.
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After all, both lots put together only came to around £60 a year.
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