by James Blish
In addition, the Chinese had detonated another hydrogen device; there had been another raiding incident on the Israeli-Jordanian border; black tribesmen had staged a rape and massacre on a government hospital in Rhodesia; the poor were marching on Washington again; the Soviet Union had announced that it would not be able to recover three dogs and a monkey it had put in orbit a week ago; the U.S. gained another bloody inch in Vietnam, and Premier Ky put his foot in it; and …
All perfectly ordinary, all going to prove what everyone of good sense already knew, that there was no safe place on the Earth either inside this room or without it, and probably never had been. What, Baines began to wonder, was the profit in turning loose so many demons, at so enormous an expenditure of time, effort and money, if the only result was to be just like reading any morning’s newspaper? Of course, it might be that interesting private outrages were also being committed, but many newspaper and other publishers made fortunes on those in ordinary times, and in any event he could never hear of more than a fraction of them over this idiot machine.
Probably he would just have to wait until days or weeks later, when the full record and history of this night had been assembled and digested, when no doubt its full enormity might duly appear. He should have expected nothing else; after all, the full impact of a work of art is never visible in the sketches. All the same, he was obstinately disappointed to be deprived of the artist’s excitement of watching the work growing on the canvas.
Was there anything that Ware could do about that? Almost surely not, or he would have done it already; it was clear that he had understood the motive behind the commission as well as he had understood its nature. Besides, it would be dangerous to wake him – he would need all his strength for the latter half of the experiment, when the demons began to return.
Resentfully but with some resignation too, Baines realized that he himself had never been the artist here. He was only the patron, who could watch the colours being applied and the cartoon being filled, and could own the finished board or ceiling, but had never even in principle been capable of handling the brushes.
But there – what was that? The BBC was reporting:
‘A third contingent of apparatus has been dispatched along the Thames to combat the Tate Gallery fire. Expert observers believe there is no hope of saving the gallery’s great collection of Blake paintings, which include most of his illustrations for the Inferno and Purgatorio of Dante. Hope also appears to be lost for what amount to almost all the world’s paintings by Turner, including his watercolours of the burning of the Houses of Parliament. The intense and sudden nature of the initial outbreak has led to the suspicion that the fire is the work of an incendiary.’
Baines sat up alertly, feeling an even more acute stab of hope, though all his joints protested painfully. There was a crime with real style, a crime with symbolism, a crime with meaning. Excitedly he remembered HABORYM, the demon with the dripping fire brand. Now if there were to be more acts that imaginative …
The reception was getting steadily worse; it was extraordinarily tiring to be continuously straining to filter meaning out of it. Radio Luxembourg appeared to have gone off the air, or to have been shut out by some atmospheric disturbance. He tried Radio Milan, and got it just in time to hear it announce itself about to play all eleven of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, one right after the other, an insane project for any station and particularly for an Italian one. Was that some demon’s idea of a joke? Whatever the answer, it was going to take Radio Milan out of the newscasting business for well over twenty-four hours to come.
He cast further about the dial. There seemed to be an extraordinary number of broadcasts going out in languages he did not know or could even recognize, though he could get around passably in seventeen standard tongues and in any given year was fluent in a different set of three, depending on business requirements. It was almost as though someone had jammed an antenna on the crown of Babel.
Briefly, he caught a strong outburst of English; but it was only the Voice of America making piously pejorative sermonettes about the Chinese fusion explosion. Baines had known that that was coming for months now. Then the multilingual mumbling and chuntering resumed, interspersed occasionally with squeals of what might indifferently have been Pakistani jazz or Chinese opera.
Another segment of English shouted, ‘… with Cyanotabs! Yes, friends, one dose cures all ills! Guaranteed chockfull of crisp, crunchy atoms …’ and was replaced by a large boys’ choir singing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ the words for which, however, seemed to go, ‘Bison, bison! Rattus, rattus! Cardinalis Cardinalis!’ Then more gabble, marvellously static-free and sometimes hovering just on the edge of intelligibility.
The room stank abominably of an amazing mixture of reeks: brandy, camphor, charcoal, vervain, gunpowder, flesh, sweat, perfume, incense, candle wicks, musk, singed hair. Baines’s head ached dully; it was like trying to breathe inside the mouth of a vulture. He longed to take a pull at the brandy bottle under his rumpled alb, but he did not know how much of what was left would be needed when Ware resumed operations.
Across from him, something moved: Father Domenico had unlocked his hands and turned away from the small window. He was now taking a few prim steps towards Baines. The slight stir of human life seemed to disturb Jack Ginsberg, who thrashed himself into an even more uncomfortable-looking position, shouted hoarsely, and then began to snore. Father Domenico shot a glance at him, and, stopping just short of his side of the Grand Circle, beckoned.
‘Me?’ Baines said.
Father Domenico nodded patiently. Putting aside the overheated little radio with less reluctance than he would have imagined possible only an hour ago, Baines heaved himself arthritically to his knees, and then to his feet.
As he started to stumble towards the monk, something furry hurtled in front of him and nearly made him fall: Ware’s cat. It was darting towards the altar; and in a soaring arc incredible in an animal of its shameless obesity, leapt up there and settled down on the rump of its sleeping master. It looked greenly at Baines and went itself to sleep, or appeared to.
Father Domenico beckoned again, and went back to the window. Baines limped after him, wishing that he had taken off his shoes; his feet felt as though they had turned into solid blocks of horn.
‘What’s the matter?’ he whispered.
‘Look out there, Mr Baines.’
Confused and aching, Baines peered past his uninvited and unimpressive Virgil. At first he could see nothing but the streaked steam on the inside of the glass, with a spume of fat snowflakes slurrying beyond it. Then he saw that the night was in fact not wholly dark. Somehow he could sense the undersides of turbulent clouds. Below, the window, like the one in Ware’s office, looked down the side of the cliff and out over the sea, which was largely invisible in the snow whorls; so should the town have been, but it was in fact faintly luminous. Overhead, from frame to frame of the window, the clouds were overstitched with continuous streaks of dim fire, like phosphorescent contrails, long-lasting and taking no part in the weather.
‘Well?’ Baines said.
‘You don’t see anything?’
‘I see the meteor tracks or whatever they are. And the light is odd – sheet lightning, I suppose, and maybe a fire somewhere in town.’
That’s all?’
That’s all,’ Baines said, irritated. ‘What are you trying to do, panic me into waking Dr Ware and calling it all quits? Nothing doing. We’ll wait it out.’
‘All right,’ Father Domenico said, resuming his vigil. Baines stumped back to his corner and picked up the radio. It said:
‘… now established that the supposed Chinese fusion test was actually a missile warhead explosion of at least thirty megatons, centred on Taiwan. Western capitals, already in an uproar because of the napalm murder of the U.S. President’s widow in a jammed New York discotheque, are moving quickly to a full war footing and we expect a series of security blackouts on the news at any moment. Until th
at happens we will keep you informed of whatever important events come through. We pause for station identification. Owoo. Eeg. Oh, piggly baby, I caught you – cheatin’ on me – owoo
Baines twisted the dial savagely, but the howling only became more bestial. Down the wall to his right, Hess twisted his long body on the table and suddenly sat upright, swinging his stockinged feet to the floor.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said huskily. ‘Did I hear what I thought I heard?’
‘Dead right you did,’ Baines said quietly, and not without joy; but he, too, was worried. ‘Slide over here and sit down. Something’s coming to a head, and it’s nothing like we’d expected – or Ware either.’
‘Hadn’t we better call a halt, then?’
‘No. Sit down, goddamn it. I don’t think we can call a halt – and even if we could, I don’t want to give our clerical friend over there the satisfaction.’
‘You’d rather have World War Three?’ Hess said, sitting down obediently.
‘I don’t know that that’s what’s going to happen. We contracted for this. Let’s give it the benefit of the doubt. Either Ware’s in control, or he should be. Let’s wait and see.’
‘All right,’ Hess said. He began to knead his fingers together. Baines tried the radio once more, but nothing was coming through except a mixture of The Messiah, Mahler and The Supremes.
Jack Ginsberg whined in his pseudo-sleep. After a while, Hess said neutrally:
‘Baines?’
‘What is it?’
‘What kind of a thing do you think this is?’
‘Well, it’s either World War Three or it isn’t. How can I know yet?’
‘I didn’t ask you that … not what you think it is. I asked you, what kind of a thing do you think it is? You ought to have some sort of notion. After all, you contracted for it.’
‘Oh. Hmm. Father Domenico said it might turn out to be Armageddon. Ware didn’t think so, but he hasn’t turned out to be very right up to now. I can’t guess, myself. I haven’t been thinking in these terms very long.’
‘Nor have I,’ Hess said, watching his fingers weave themselves in and out. ‘I’m still trying to make sense of it in the old terms, the ones that used to make sense of the universe to me. It isn’t easy. But you’ll remember I told you I was interested in the history of science. That involves trying to understand why there wasn’t any science for so long, and why it went into eclipse almost every time it was rediscovered. I think I know why now. I think the human mind goes through a sort of cycle of fear. It can only take so much accumulated knowledge, and then it panics, and starts inventing reasons to throw everything over and go back to a Dark Age … every time with a new, invented mystical reason.’
‘You’re not making very much sense,’ Baines said. He was still also trying to listen to the radio.
‘I didn’t expect you to think so. but it happens. It happens about every thousand years. People start out happy with their gods, even though they’re frightened of them. Then, increasingly, the world becomes secularized, and the gods seem less and less relevant. The temples are deserted. People feel guilty about that, but not much. Then, suddenly, they’ve had all the secularization they can take, they throw their wooden shoes into the machines, they take to worshipping Satan or the Great Mother, they go into a Hellenistic period or take up Christianity, in hoc signo winces – I’ve got those all out of order but it happens, Baines, it happens like clockwork, every thousand years, The last time was the chiliastic panics just before the year A.D. 1000, when everyone expected the Second Coming of Christ and realized that they didn’t dare face up to Him. That was the heart, the centre, the whole reason of the Dark Ages. Well, we’ve got another millennium coming to a close now, and people are terrified of our secularization, our nuclear and biological weapons, our computers, our overprotective medicine, everything, and they’re turning back to the worship of unreason. Just as you’ve done – and I’ve helped you. Some people these days worship flying saucers because they don’t dare face up to Christ. You’ve turned to black magic. Where’s the difference?’
‘I’ll tell you where,’ Baines said. ‘Nobody in the whole of time has ever seen a saucer, and the reasons for believing that anybody has are utterly pitiable. Probably they can be explained just as you’ve explained them, and never mind about Jung and his thump-headed crowd. But, Adolph, you and I have seen a demon.’
‘Do you think so? I don’t deny it. I think it very possible. But Baines, are you sure? How do you know what you think you know? We’re on the eve of World War Three, which we engineered. Couldn’t all this be a hallucination we conjured up to remove some of our guilt? Or is it possible that it isn’t happening at all, and that we’re as much victims of a chiliastic panic as more formally religious people are? That makes more sense to me than all this medieval mumbo-jumbo about demons. I don’t mean to deny the evidence of my senses, Baines. I only mean to ask you, what is it worth?’
‘I’ll tell you what I know,’ Baines said equably, ‘though I can’t tell you how I know it and I won’t bother to try. First, something is happening, and that something is real. Second, you and I and Ware and everyone else who wanted, to make it happen, therefore did make it happen. Third, we’re turning out to be wrong about the outcome – but no matter what it is, it’s our outcome. We contracted for it. Demons, saucers, fallout – what’s the difference? Those are just signs in the equation, parameters we can fill any way that makes the most intermediate sense to us. Are you happier with electrons than with demons? Okay, good for you. But what I like, Adolph, what I like is the result. I don’t give a damn about the means. I invented it, I called it into being, I’m paying for it – and no matter how else you describe it, I made it, and it’s mine. Is that clear? It’s mine. Every other possible fact about it, no matter what that fact might turn out to be, is a stupid footling technicality that I hire people like you and Ware not to bother me with.’
‘It seems to me,’ Hess said in a leaden monotone, ‘that we are all insane.’
At that same moment, the small window burst into an intense white glare, turning Father Domenico into the most intense of inky silhouettes.
‘You may be right,’ Baines said. There goes Rome.’
Father Domenico, his eyes streaming, turned away from the dimming frame and picked his way slowly to the altar. After a long moment of distaste, he took Theron Ware by the shoulder and shook him. The cat hissed and jumped sidewise.
‘Wake up, Theron Ware,’ Father Domenico said formally. ‘I charge you, awake. Your experiment may now wholly and contractually be said to have gone astray, and the Covenant therefore satisfied. Ware! Ware! Wake up, damn you.’
Baines looked at his watch. It was 3:00 a.m.
Ware awoke instantly, swung to his feet with a spring and without a word started for the window. At the same instant, the agony that had been Rome swept over the building. The shock wave had been attenuated by distance and the jolt was not heavy, but the window Father Domenico had uncurtained sprang inward in a spray of flying glass needles. More glass fell out from behind the drapes which hung below the ceiling, like an orchestra of celestas.
As far as Baines could see, nobody was more than slightly cut. Not that a serious wound could have made any difference now, with the Last Death already riding on the winds.
Ware was not visibly shaken. He simply nodded once and wheeled towards the Grand Circle, stooping to pick up his dented paper hat. No, he was moved – his lips were pinched white. He beckoned to them all.
Baines took a step towards Jack Ginsberg, to kick him awake if necessary. But the special executive assistant was already on his feet, trembling and wild-eyed. He seemed, however, totally unaware of where he was: Baines had to push him bodily into his minor circle.
‘And stay there,’ Baines added, in a voice that should have been able to scar diamonds. But Jack gave no sign of having heard it.
Baines went hastily to his Tanist’s place, checking for the bottle of brandy. Eve
ryone else was already in position, even the cat, which in fact had vaulted to its post promptly upon having been dumped off Ware’s rear.
The sorcerer lit the brazier, and began to address the dead air. He was hardly more than a sentence into this invocation before Baines realized for the first time, in his freezing heart, that this was indeed the last effort – and that indeed they might all still be saved.
Ware was making his renunciation, in his own black and twisted way – the only way his fatally proud soul could ever be brought to make it. He said:
‘I invoke and conjure thee, LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, and fortified with the Power and the Supreme Majesty, I strongly command thee by BARALEMENSIS, BALDACHIENSIS, PAUMACHIE, APOLORESEDES and the most potent princes GENIO, LIACHIDE, ministers of the Tartarean seat, chief princes of the seat of APOLOGIA in the ninth region, I exorcise and command thee, LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, by him Who spake and it was done, by the Most Holy and glorious Names ADONAI, EL, ELOHIM, ELOHE, ZEBAOTH, ELION, ESCHERCE, JAH, TETRAGRAMMATON, SADIE do thou and thine forthwith appear and show thyself unto me, regardless of how thou art previously charged, from whatever part of the world, without tarrying!
‘I conjure thee by Him to Whom all creatures are obedient, by this ineffable Name, TETRAGRAMMATON JEHOVAH, by which the elements are overthrown, the air is shaken, the sea turns back, the fire is generated, the earth moves and all the hosts of things celestial, of things terrestrial, of things infernal, do tremble and are confounded together, come. ADONAI, King of kings, commands thee!’
There was no answer, except an interior grumble of thunder.
‘Now I invoke, conjure and command thee, LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE. to appear and show thyself before this circle, by the Name of ON … by the Name Y and V, which Adam heard and spake … by the name of JOTH, which Jacob learned from the angel on the night of his wrestling and was delivered from the hands of his brother… by the Name of AGLA, which Lot heard and was saved with his family … by the Name ANEHEXETON, which Aaron spake and was made wise … by the name SCHEMES AMATHIA, which Joshua invoked and the Sun stayed upon his course … by the Name EMMANUEL, by which the three children were delivered from the fiery furnace … by the Name ALPHA-OMEGA, which Daniel uttered, and destroyed Bel and the dragon … by the Name ZEBAOTH, which Moses named, and all the rivers and the waters in the land of Egypt were turned into blood … by the Name HAGIOS, by the Seal of ADONAI, by those others, which are JETROS, ATHENOROS, PARACLETUS … by the dreadful Day of Judgement … by the changing sea of glass which is before the face of the Divine Majesty … by the four beasts before the Throne … by all these Holy and most potent words, come thou, and come thou quickly. Come, come! ADONAI, King of kings, commands thee!’