Gunshots suddenly sounded from near the front of the plane, many fast gunshots, and more screaming. And then silence.
The turbanned man squeezed his shoulders higher around his ears, pressed his beads harder between the balls of his fingertips, and his lips moved faster and faster above his quaking round chin. Everyone in this cabin waited, hardly daring to breathe, and the silence went on and on.
Then all at once the blond man shifted, seemed to relax, and nodded. He looked at Pami, who hadn’t noticed before how powerful his eyes were. “So that’s that,” he said.
X
Calm. We will be calm. We shall not indulge our wrath until it is of some use. But then. Then!
It won the first round, yes it did, that pallid serf, that spiritless spirit, god’s golem. Yes. They do win sometimes, but that’s only to be expected; after all, we’re very evenly matched. We were like them, Satan protect us, before we won our freedom.
As for the widespread belief that they inevitably win, well, that’s just crap, isn’t it? Of course, it is. If they inevitably won, we’d no longer be here, would we? But here we are.
And here you are, you scrofulous fleas. And now he’s after you as well, isn’t he? Now you’ll know what it’s like to suffer his snotty displeasure. But be encouraged. He can be resisted, as we are here to prove. He was just an early master of propaganda, that’s all.
But how shall we save you bilious earth-lice from your creator’s boredom? First we have to know what he’s up to. He’s always, of course, up to something: testing Job and Isaac, tempting Thomas and Judas, on and on. Idle hands are whose workshop?
He Who We Serve was going to and fro in the Earth, and walking up and down in it, as was his wont, when he came upon one of the bloodiest slaughters of a Dane since the good old days of Elsinore. But the Dane didn’t exist. He reacted with the Njoroge woman, she sliced him into stew meat, he died, and yet he was without existence. Once the woman had fled with the sack of loot, the body vanished. The blood unsprayed itself. The mattress became unslashed. The towels returned, laundered, to their folded positions in the bathroom. The deed became, in short, undone.
God’s baroque hand was clear in this playlet, because we hadn’t done it. Pami Njoroge is not a creature we need to subvert. He Who We Serve maintains contacts in the adversary’s camp, and even on occasion visits there himself, so it didn’t take him long to find out what had really happened in that Nairobi hotel room. Significantly, god isn’t using a slavey who’s already had extensive contact with humans, one of his ordinary lickspittles like Michael or Gabriel or Raphael. As spineless as the rest, they still might have developed some sympathy for the wretched human race during previous contacts. So no, he chose Ananayel, a timeserver, a mediocrity, as nondescript as an umbrella in the lost-and-found.
But what is Ananayel doing? What is that flunkey up to? Torturing a Bantu whore, yes, using elaborate stratagems to move her from her normal mud wallow to the similar but far-off dung heap called New York, and at the same time encouraging in her emotions of guilt and despair. But what is she to do, this blowfly, once she gets to New York? How can a miserable midge like Pami Njoroge bear any direct responsibility for the end of the human race? She has even less knowledge and power than normal among her kind.
So there are others in the scheme. That bleached sycophant, Ananayel, is assembling them, isn’t he, from somewhere? Moving them to New York, putting them together, letting them do the job themselves. That’s god’s way, isn’t it? Deniability. “They brought it on themselves,” he’ll say, with that airy smugness of his.
Well, we’re alert now. We’re on the job. My companions have spread across the world, searching for the spoor of Ananayel’s passage. Whatever humans he has touched, chosen, altered, moved, we will crush like a louse between a chimpanzee’s fingertips.
So that you will live. You, my darlings.
The greatest good for the greatest number. Hah!
Antithesis
14
To be public information director (PID) for a nuclear power plant less than a hundred miles from a major population center like New York City is not, at the best of times, an easy job, but Joshua Hardwick cheerfully soldiered on, almost never losing heart. Thirty-three years old, pudgy and open-faced, a relentless optimist and a refugee from the advertising business in the city, Hardwick could sing the pro-nuclear song with the best of them, downplaying the downside and painting a picture of an energy-rich and peaceful and happy and secure future dominated by the image of a little girl in a pink crinoline dress playing ball on an expanse of lush green lawn. Like Hans Brinker himself, he could skate with aplomb over the occasional patch of thin ice, such as plant safety or disposal of contaminated wastes, awing and distracting the populace with the grace and assurance of his arabesques.
But this was too much. Arriving at Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant this morning, after his usual pleasant bucolic twenty-minute drive from his home in Connecticut, Joshua was startled to see demonstrators marching around on the asphalt of the country road out front.
Oh, God. Not since the operating license struggle when the plant first opened had there been demonstrators here. The emptiness of this rural area, its calm and quiet, seemed to deter most dissenters, as though they needed crowds and hard pavements to fully believe their own rhetoric.
This was a very small demonstration: fewer than a dozen protestors, plus, parked a little distance away, one state police car containing a couple of bored troopers. But was it an augury of worse to come? Squinting, leaning forward over his Honda steering wheel to look out the windshield, Joshua tried to read the signs the demonstrators carried:
“No Nukes Is Good Nukes.” Well, yes, we know that one.
“No Experiments With Our Lives!” Hmm; that one’s new, but what does it mean exactly? That’s the trouble with slogans, they can get a little too cryptic for their own good.
“Keep Maniac Philpott Away From Reactors!” Well, that was straightforward enough, if not quite as clear as chicken broth. Maniac Philpott. A person? Who?
Did one of the demonstrators have a halo? Joshua blinked, and peered again, and of course not. Just a trick of the light.
As usual, Joshua showed his face and his clearance badge to the guard at the gate, who looked more grim than customary this morning but who did wave him through in the ordinary way. Joshua waved back, and drove up and over the gentle rise concealing the main structures from the idle gaze — or concentrated gaze, for that matter — of the populace on the public roadway, and as he drove he mulled that last sign.
“Keep Maniac Philpott Away From Reactors!” Wasn’t there a Philpott, a scientist, some kind of big-dome thinking machine, over at Grayling, not far from here? Philpott, Philpott; Joshua couldn’t remember the first name. There was new construction starting, off to the right of the main buildings, but Joshua, deep in thought, barely registered it. Philpott; Philpott. A scientist, an experimenter.
“No Experiments With Our Lives!”
“Oh, no. Here? Here?” Inside his Honda, as he steered toward his reserved parking space, Joshua looked stricken. They wouldn’t.