by 4 Ye Gods!
'What's going to happen now?' Apollo asked. Mary looked at him and giggled.
'I don't know, do I?' she said. 'Who do you think I am, God almighty?'
Apollo frowned irritably. 'You seemed to have a pretty good idea just now,' he said, 'when you were telling me what to do. If this is some kind of practical joke...'
Mary assured him that it wasn't. 'If it was a joke,' she said, 'the last thing it would be would be practical. No, I know what should happen now, of course, but there are no guarantees.'
'What should happen, then?'
'Jupiter,' Mary said, 'should set out to destroy the Earth. Halfway down, he will be met with a surge of faith in an essentially non-violent, ecologically aware carbon copy of himself who wouldn't willingly uproot a dandelion if there was any way of avoiding it. All this faith will get right up his spine and he'll be forced to pigeonhole the entire project.'
'Fine.'
Well, up to a point fine,' said Mary, powdering her nose. 'The difficulty will be that he'll be very much aware that he wants to demolish the earth but can't, and this may make him resentful. And from what I can remember of the faith mechanics I learnt at college, there's nothing to stop him taking it out on someone in a big way, just so long as that person doesn't happen to be a planet. If I were you,' she concluded, closing her powder compact with a snap, 'I'd be distinctly edgy.'
'Me?'
'You,' said Mary. 'I don't want to worry you, but you are directly responsible for thwarting him. He should be arriving any time now.'
Apollo looked up at the sky; there was a thick bank of black cloud moving in from the east, and another from the west. Although he wasn't to know it, there was in fact another contingent trying to get in from the north, but it had got held up in a contraflow system over Finland.
'What can I do?' he said.
'Try and be dignified about it,' Mary replied. 'Well, it's been nice. Ciao.'
'Hold on,' Apollo said, grabbing her by the wrist.
'Oh, don't let's start all that again.'
Apollo blushed furiously. 'I didn't mean that,' he said. 'I mean, you've got me into this, now you'd better...'
'Nothing to do with me,' Mary said, 'Gods have free will, remember. And now I really do have to be going.'
'Where?'
'To meet the others. Prometheus and Gelos and the Derry kid. So if you'll just stop crushing my wrist for a moment, I'll be getting along.'
'Let me give you a lift,' Apollo said.
Actually, said a tiny voice at the back of Mary's mind, in a part of her brain that she had recently only used for operating some semi-redundant feathers on her left wing, he's quite good-looking, in a way. For a god. Nice smile.
'All right, she said. 'Head for the Caucasus.'
'Why?'
'That's where the others are. Come on, hurry up.'
'We'll be safe there?'
Mary considered this for a moment. 'I always think safe is such a terribly subjective word, don't you?'
'What word would you choose, then?'
'Conveniently-situated.'
'Oh.' Apollo hesitated, his hand on the ignition key. The starter motor system had been one of the trickiest parts of the whole conversion job, and Vulcan had finally managed it by wiring the starter motor up to an electrode fitted to the lead horse's rump. When you turned the key, it gave the horse a severe electric shock. Being a divine horse, it was supposed to understand by that that the driver wanted to be taken somewhere; but even divine horses can only stand so much of that sort of thing before they start lashing out with their hind legs. Fortunately for his peace of mind, Apollo wasn't mechanically minded and hadn't yet considered how the thing worked. 'Conveniently situated for what?'
'For a good view of the battle of course.'
Apollo was firmly of the opinion that the best view of a battle in which Jupiter was on the opposing or less friendly side was from the other side of space and, if possible, time, and said so. Mary replied by taking what later turned out to be a small sacrificial dagger from her handbag and pressing it, not unkindly, into the small of Apollo's back.
'I'm hijacking this chariot to the Caucasus,' she said. 'You know you're immortal but maybe I'm not convinced. Shall we go now?'
'I...' Apollo considered for a moment and then turned the ignition key. 'Are you sure you know what you're doing?' he asked.
'Yes,' Mary replied confidently. She was by inclination a truthful person, so it was for the best, she reckoned, that he hadn't asked her if what she was doing was sensible or not.
One of the leading drawbacks to travelling to battle in the heart of an inky black thundercloud is that you get very wet indeed. If you are carrying an ample supply of lightning bolts, there is also the risk of a serious short-circuit. Jupiter was therefore not at his most affable during the journey from the sun to Earth. The Captain of Spectral Warriors who had interrupted his light lunch with an enquiry about the possibility of overtime payments for the Forces of Darkness (it being daytime) and who was now buzzing sadly along behind the Host in the shape of a small bee, was generally considered to have got away with it lightly.
Minerva, as Officer i/c Destruction, North-western Sector, was sitting in her winged-dragon-propelled mobile command centre studying a confused bundle of maps and a dog-eared copy of Baedeker when Mars knocked tentatively at the door and stepped in.
'Well, Ma, what is it now?' Minerva took off her glasses and looked at him sourly. She tended to be impatient with failures, and the fact that after the previous debacle Mars had been temporarily suspended from his duties at War and put in charge of Troop Welfare and Entertainment made her less ready to waste valuable time on him than she would otherwise have been, which was not very. 'If you want me to sing in the Camp Concert, I'm afraid I'm far too busy.'
Mars, who had heard Minerva sing, assured her that he quite understood. 'No,' he said, 'what I really wanted was a quiet word about what's going to happen when we destroy the world.'
'We've been into that already,' Minerva said. 'And I do take your point, but there it is. You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs.'
'I don't want a bloody omelette, Mm.' Mars gave her a despairing look. 'For crying out loud, we're all going to die in about twenty minutes and nobody seems to care a damn. What's got into you all?'
'We're trying not to think about it,' Minerva replied, putting her spectacles back on and returning to her paperwork. 'I can only recommend that you try to do the same. Close the door after you, please.'
On his way back to the Welfare Office, Mars met Diana. She had been given the post of Annihilation Liaison Officer, and she had been going round the army trying to find Out what it meant.
'I don't know,' Mars replied when she asked him. 'I don't particularly want to find out, either. The whole point about knowledge, I always thought, was that you find something out and then you remember it for the rest of your life. In the circumstances it all seems rather pointless, don't you think?'
Diana ignored him. 'I'm a bit worried about Pol,' she said.
'Pol?' Mars stared. 'You're worried about Apollo?'
'Well, he is my brother,' Diana replied defensively. 'I'm just hoping he's going to be all right.'
'How can he be all right?' Mars shouted. 'He's going to die in just under fifteen minutes, according to the schedule. So are the rest of us.'
'All right, yes, you needn't go on about it,' Diana replied. 'What I mean is, is he going to be all right till then?'
Mars left her and wandered off in search of the Officers' Mess. In his opinion, the description fitted the entire enterprise, but the part of it he was interested in was the small, tastefully furnished area selling intoxicants.
He finally tracked it down at the south-eastern corner of the cloud and went in. The only other customer was Neptune, who was sitting at the bar trying to drown his sorrows -- a difficult undertaking for a sea-god.
'Siddown, Ma,' he said: 'Have a li'l drink. Think we just got time for a quick one.'
>
'What are you having?'
'Think I'll have a Gorgon's Revenge.'
Mars looked at him. 'Are you sure?'
Neptune hiccupped and grinned. 'Course I'm sure,' he replied. 'It's the only time in the history of the world a man can have five Gorgon's Revenges on an empty stomach and not have to worry about the morning after. Gesundheit.'
'You have a point there, Uncle Nep,' said Mars. 'Make mine the same.'
Soon afterwards the barman brought the drinks, and Neptune, by way of experiment, picked out a diamond from his dress crown and dropped it into the glass. It dissolved.
'I've always wondered what they put in these things,' he remarked, staring into the glass. The fumes blinded him for a moment.
'Best not to ask, so they say,' replied Mars. 'Well, here's health.'
Neptune looked round. 'Where?'
'No,' Mars said, 'it's a toast. Cheers.'
'Mud in your eye,' Neptune answered. They drank deeply and for a long time were silent.
'I think I'll have another one of those,' said Neptune.
'Why not?' Mars replied. 'That way, things can only get better.'
The cloud, meanwhile, had smashed its way through a very confused stratosphere and was rushing down towards the surface of the planet. It was just gathering momentum nicely when the prayers hit it.
Being hit by a prayer is no joke. The first thing that happened was that all the lights went out. When the backup power supply came on, Neptune and Mars found themselves looking at something quite unexpected.
'Here,' Neptune demanded querulously, 'what do they put in these things?'
A shaft of golden light had impaled the cloud like a skewer through a veal souvlaki. There were a lot of -- well, it went against the grain to say this, but there was no avoiding the fact that they were angels. They were also holding flaming swords.
'How do they do that?' asked Mars.
'I dunno,' Neptune replied. 'Oven-gloves, maybe.'
As if the sunbeam and the angels weren't bad enough, there were other indications that something quite out of the ordinary was happening. There were a lot of quite unsolicited flowers, for example, and the air was heavy with strong, sweet, cheap perfume. Both Mars and Neptune suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to grant requests.
'I don't know about you,' Neptune said, 'but right now I'm feeling a bit funny. I think I'll just go and lie down for a minute.'
Mars nodded carefully.. 'Good idea,' he said. "Which way is the door?'
Outside they stopped again and stared. Peculiar though the other manifestations had been, this was something else.
It was Jupiter. Jupiter standing in the middle of the cloud's parade ground. Jupiter smiling.
You could see at once that he was fighting it, with every fibre of his supreme being. And the harder he tried, it seemed, the harder it was to resist. The golden sunbeam had got him right in the navel.
'Do you think we ought to ...' Mars's voice drained away.
'Help, you mean?'
'Well, yes.'
Neptune shook his head. 'Wouldn't do that,' he said.
'You wouldn't?'
'Certainly not,' he said. Twenty thousand years of sibling rivalry blossomed on his face into a grin the size of California. 'That'd be blasphemy.'
'Blasphemy?'
'Absolutely,' Neptune replied. 'To attempt to assist Jupiter would be implicitly to deny his omnipotence. No, let the old bastard sort it out for himself. I'm going back to the bar.'
'But...'
'My shout.'
Mars shot another glance at the Father of Gods and Men and headed back to the Mess tent.
'What's going on, Nep?' he asked.
'It's a prayer,' Neptune replied, hopping up onto a bar stool and eating olives. 'A biggy, too. In fact, that's the biggest prayer I've ever seen in the whole of my life. And Jupe's got it right through his guts. Champagne!' he called to the barman.
Apollo and Mary arrived in the Caucasus just in time to see the cloud grind to a halt, waver and slowly start to retreat back into the sun. The golden shaft gradually faded, until there was nothing left but a little sprinkling of silver filings, the residue of a few inappropriate prayers contributed by members of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
'Thanks for the lift,' Mary said. 'Now, are you going to hang around and catch the fun?'
'Do I have a choice?'
'Of course you have a choice,' Mary replied, pressing very gently with the small knife. 'Weren't you listening to what I was saying about gods having free will?'
'I don't mean a choice between staying and getting knifed,' Apollo said. 'I don't really call that a choice, do you?'
'It's what you expect the mortals to put up with most of the time,' Mary started to say; but then she remembered what her mother had told her about not talking politics on a first date. Her mother hadn't mentioned the social effects of digging a small knife in the guy's back, so presumably that was OK.
'All right then,' Apollo was saying, 'so what's happening?'
'So far as I can see,' Mary replied, 'the gods have just tried to land and blow the Earth away, but all the prayers and faith you managed to whip up have forced them back again. That's it so far as destroying the Earth goes, at least for now. In about five minutes, I expect Jupiter will be back to kill somebody.'
'Fine.'
'Oh look,' Mary interrupted, 'there's Pro and Gel and the Derry kid. I think we should go over and have a word with them, don't you? They might be able to think of something to stop Jupiter killing us all. That'd be nice, wouldn't it?'
'Absolutely.'
Mary bit her lip indecisively. On the one hand, she knew it was totally counterproductive to go around throwing yourself at people; on the other hand, she had the feeling that unless she gave some sort of hint or indication at this stage, a promising relationship might simply fade away and die.
'I don't know if you were wondering,' she said, 'but there isn't anything between me and the Derry kid.'
'No?'
'No.'
'Well, there we go,' Apollo said. 'Do you think you might take that knife out of my back now?'
'There should be,' Mary went on. 'I mean, it was fated and so forth. But what the hell, just because a thing's fated doesn't mean to say you're stuck with it, does it?'
'Doesn't it?'
'And as for Pro and me,' Mary went on, finding it all rather harder work than she had originally anticipated but staying with it nevertheless, 'we really are just good friends. I mean, what there is between me and Pro is very special, don't get me wrong, but really, there's the age difference, the size difference, the species difference. You've got to be realistic about things like that, haven't you?'
'Ouch,' Apollo replied.
'Oh hell, sorry,' Mary replied. 'I'm just so clumsy sometimes you wouldn't believe it. My mother used to say to me...'
Prometheus had seen them and was hurrying over. He looked the same, but there was somehow something different about him; if he had been a tune he'd be in stereo instead of mono.
'Pol, my boy,' he shouted, 'good of you to come. Just in time, too.'
'Hello, Uncle Pro,' replied Apollo resignedly. 'Look, if I'd known it was all going to get as messy as this...'
'Don't be silly,' Prometheus said. 'And anyway, everything is going to be fine. We've got the eagle, the dog and the Derry boy...'
'Hello, said Jason, sheepishly. Meeting new gods for the first time always made him a little bit bashful.
Apollo nodded briefly and smiled a tight-lipped smile and then resumed his search for knowledge. 'Look, Uncle Pro,' he started to say, but Prometheus silenced him with a gesture of his hand.
'I know,' he said. 'But there's nothing to worry about. If Jupiter starts getting violent, Jason here will threaten to tell him the Joke.'
'What joke?'
'The Joke, idiot.'
Apollo's eyes widened like balloons in the course of being inflated. 'You mean to say he knows the Joke?'
'Most o
f it,' Prometheus replied. 'All of it except the punch line.'
'Ah. But even so...'
'It's all right, don't worry,' Prometheus replied. 'I made sure that neither part of the Joke would be volatile without the other.'
Apollo thought of something. 'How come you know the Joke, Uncle Pro?'
'Uncle Pro doesn't know the Joke,' said Prometheus, 'but I do.'
Apollo didn't understand at first; then the truth dawned on him. He backed away. 'You mean you're...'
'Thing.'
'Yes.' Apollo said, 'Begins with a G... On the tip of my tongue...'
'No, you fool, that's my name,' Prometheus snapped. 'It has pleased me to call myself Gelos and play at being a. mere Form for a number of years, but in fact I'm your great-uncle, brother of Cronus and Rhea. Do you believe me?'
'Yes.'
'Well,' said Prometheus, 'just in case you don't...'
He narrowed his eyes and gave Apollo a good long stare. Suddenly Apollo started to laugh, until he could feel his lungs straining to bursting point. In fact he was just about to black out when the laughter stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
'Again for the sake of convenience,' Prometheus continued, 'I'm sharing bodies with my old friend Prometheus at the moment. Minds, too. We've always had similar tastes m minds, Pro and I, haven't we, Pro? Yes, ever since I can remember, except I like mine a bit less cluttered. Well, we won't go into that now; it takes all sorts. I was only going to say. Later, Pro, all right? Please yourself, then. Sorry, Pol, as I was saying...'
But before he could continue, his head snapped upwards. Apollo followed his gaze and saw something high up by the sun. He recognised it.
'What is it?' Mary said.
'Jupiter's coming back,' Prometheus replied. 'Right, everyone -- action stations.'
'What might those be, exactly?'
'Er, you know, get ready and everything.'
'I take it,' Apollo said, 'that you do have a plan.'
'A plan, yes.'
'A plan of battle,' Apollo said. 'Stratagems and so forth.'
'Sort of.'
'And are you going to let us into the secret, or are we --ouch! For pity's sake, woman, mind what you're doing with that knife. You could do someone an injury.'