The Day After Judgement

by James Blish

  ‘The last form, maybe,’ Baines said. ‘But the spirit would remain. I don’t know why they’re clinging to physical forms so determinedly, but it probably has only a local and tactical reason” something to do with the prosecuting of the present war. But you can’t destroy a spirit by such means, any more than you can destroy a message by burning the piece of paper it’s written on.’

  As he said this, he became uncomfortably aware that he had gotten the argument out of some sermon against atheism that he had heard as a boy, and had thought simple-minded even then. But since then, he had seen demons – and a lot more closely than anybody else here had.

  ‘That is perhaps an open question, Šatvje said heavily. ‘I am not myself a sceptic, you should understand, Doctor Baines, but I have to remind myself that no spirit has ever been so intensively tested to destruction before. Inside a thermonuclear fireball, even the nuclei of hydrogen atoms find it difficult to retain their integrity.’

  ‘Atomic nuclei remain matter, and the conservation laws still apply. Demons are neither matter nor energy; they are something else.’

  ‘We do not know that they are not energy,’ Šatvje said. ‘They may well be fields, falling somewhere within the electro-magnetico-gravitic triad. Remember that we have never achieved a unified field theory; even Einstein repudiated his in the last years of his life, and quantum mechanics – with all respect to De Broglie – in only a clumsy avoidance of the problem. These … spirits … may be such unified fields. And one characteristic of such fields might be 100 per cent negative entropy.’

  There couldn’t be any such thing as completely negative entropy,’ Buelg put in ‘Such a system would constantly accumulate order, which means that it would run backwards in time and we would never be aware of it at all. You have to allow for Planck’s Constant. This would be the only stable case–’

  He wrote rapidly on a pad, stripped off the sheet and passed it across the table. The note read, in very neat lettering:

  The girl came in with another manifold of sheets from the computer, and this time Jack Ginsberg’s eye could be observed to be wandering haunchward a little. Baines had never objected to this – he preferred his most valuable employees to have a few visible and visable weaknesses – but for once he almost even sympathized; he was feeling a little out of his depth.

  ‘Meaning what?’ he said.

  ‘Why,’ Šatvje said, a little patronizingly, ‘eternal life, of course Life is negative entropy. Stable negative entropy is eternal life.’

  ‘Barring accidents,’ Buelg said, with a certain grim relish. ‘We have no access yet to the gravitic part of the spectrum, but the electromagnetic sides are totally vulnerable, and with the clues we’ve got now, we ought to be able to burst into such a closed system like a railroad spike going through an auto tyre.’

  ‘If you can kill a demon,’ Baines said slowly. ‘Then –’

  ‘That’s right,’ Buelg said affably. ‘Angel, devil, ordinary immortal soul – you name it, we can do for it. Not right away, maybe, but “before very long.’

  ‘Perhaps the ultimate human achievement,’ Šatvje said, with a dreaming, almost beatific expression. ‘The theologians call condemnation to Hell the Second Death. Soon, perhaps, we may be in a position to give the Third Death … the bliss of complete extinction … liberation from the Wheel!’

  McKnight’s eyes were now also wandering, though towards the ceiling. He wore the expression of a man who has heard all this before, and is not enjoying it any better the second time. Baines himself was very far from being bored – indeed, he was as close to horrified fascination as he had ever been in his life – but clearly it was time to bring everybody back to Earth. He said:

  ‘Talk’s cheap. Do you have any actual plans?’

  ‘You bet we do,’ McKnight said, suddenly galvanized. ‘I’ve had Chief Hay run me an inventory of the country’s remaining military power, and, believe me, there’s a lot of it. I was surprised myself. We are going to mount a major attack upon this city of Dis, and for it we’re going to bring some things up out of the ground that the American people have never seen before and neither has anybody else, including this pack of demons. I don’t know why they’re just sitting there, but maybe it’s because they think they’ve already got us licked. Well, they’re dead wrong. Nobody can lick the United States – not in the long run!’

  It was an extraordinary sentiment from a man who had been maintaining for years that the United States had ‘lost’ China, ‘surrendered’ Korea, ‘abandoned’ Vietnam and was overrun by home-bred Communists; but Baines, who knew the breed, saw no purpose in calling attention to the fact. Their arguments, not being based in reason, cannot be swayed by reason. Instead he said:

  ‘General, believe me, I advise against it. I know some of the weapons you’re talking about, and they’re pretty powerful. I ought to know; my company designed and supplied some of them, so it would be against my own interests to run them down to you. But I very much doubt that any of them will do any good under the present circumstances.’

  ‘That, of course, remains to be seen,’ McKnight said.

  ‘I’d rather we didn’t. If they work, we may find ourselves worse off than before. That’s the point I came here to press. The demons are about 90 per cent in charge of the world now, but you’ll notice that they haven’t taken any further steps against us. There’s a reason for this. They are fighting against another Opponent entirely, and it’s quite possible that we ought to be on their side.’

  McKnight leaned back in his chair, with the expression of a president confronted at a press conference with a question on which he had not been briefed.

  ‘Let me be quite sure I understand you, Doctor Baines,’ he said. ‘Do you propose that the present invasion of the United States was a goodthing? And, further, that we ought not to be opposing the occupying forces with all our might? That indeed we ought instead to be aiding and abetting the powers responsible for it?’

  ‘I don’t propose any aiding and abetting whatsoever,’ Baines said, with an inward sigh. ‘I just think we ought to lay off for a while, that’s all, until we see how the situation works out.’

  ‘You are almost the last man in the world.’ McKnight said stiffly. ‘whom I would have suspected of being a ComSymp, let alone a pro-Chink. When I have your advice entered upon the record, I will also add an expression of my personal confidence. In the meantime, the attack goes forward as scheduled.’

  Baines said nothing more, advisedly. It had occurred to him, out of his experience with Theron Ware, that angels fallen and unfallen, and the immortal part of man, partook of and had sprung from the essentially indivisable nature of their Creator; that if these men could destroy that Part, they could equally well dissolve the Whole; that a successful storming of Dis would inevitably be followed by a successful war upon Heaven; and that if God were not dead yet, He soon might be.

  However it turned out, it looked like it was going to be the most interesting civil war he had ever run guns to.

  9

  UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES

  Strategic Air Command Office

  Denver, Colorado

  Date: May 1

  MEMORANDUM: Number I

  TO: All Combat Arms

  SUBJECT: General Combat Orders

  1. This Memorandum supersedes all previous directives on this subject.

  2. The United States has been invaded and all combat units will stand in readiness to expel the invading forces.

  3. The enemy has introduced a number of combat innovations of which all units must be made thoroughly aware. All officers will therefore read this Memorandum in full to their respective commands, and will thereafter post it in a conspicuous place. All commands should be sampled for familiarity with the contents of the Memorandum.

  4. Enemy troops are equipped with individual body armour. In accordance with ancient Oriental custom, this armour has been designed and decorated in various grotesque shapes, in the hope of frightening
the opposition. It is expected that the American soldier will simply laugh at this primitive device. All personnel are warned, however, that as armour these ‘demon suits’ are extremely effective. A very high standard of marksmanship will be required against them.

  5. An unknown number of the enemy body armour units, perhaps approaching 100 per cent, are capable of free flight, like the jump suits supplied to US. Mobile Infantry. Ground forces will therefore be alert to possible attack from the air by individual enemy troops as well as by conventional aircrat.

  6. It is anticipated that in combat the enemy will employ various explosive, chemical and toxic agents which may produce widespread novel effects. All personnel are hereby reminded that these effects will be either natural in origin, or illusion.

  7. Following the reading of this Memorandum, all officers will read to their commands those paragraphs of the Articles of War pertaining to the penalties for cowardice in battle.

  By order of the Commander in Chief:

  D. WILLIS MCKNIGHT

  General of the Armies, USAF

  Because of the destruction of Rome and of the Vatican with it – alas for that great library and treasure house of all Christendom! – the Holy See had been moved to Venice, which had been spared thus far, and was now housed in almost equal magnificence in the Sala del Collegio of the Palazzo Ducale, the only room to escape intact from the great fire of 1577, where, under a ceiling by Veronese, the doges had been accustomed to receive their ambassadors to other city-states. It was the first time the palace had been used by anybody but tourists since Napoleon had forced the abdication of Lodovico Manin exaclly eleven hundred years after the election of the first doge.

  There were no tourists here now, of course: the city, broiling hot and stinking of the garbage in its canals, brooded lifelessly under the Adritic sun, a forgotten museum. Nobody was about in the crazy narrow streets, and the cramped ristorant, but the native Venetian, their livelihood gone, sullenly starving together in small groups and occasionally snarling at each other in their peculiar dialect. Many already showed signs of radiation sickness: their hair was shedding in patches and pools of vomit caught the sunlight, ignored by everyone but the flies.

  The near desertion of the city, at least by comparison with the jam which would have been its natural state by this time of year, gave Father Domenico a small advantage. Instead of having to take refuge in a third-class hotel, clamorous twenty-four hours a day with groups of Germans and Americans being processed by the coachload like raw potatoes being convented into neatly packaged crisps, he was able without opposition to find himself apartments in the Patriarch’s Palace itself. Such dusty sumptuousness did not at all suit him, but he had come to see the Pope, as the deputy of an ancient, still honoured monastic order; and the Patriarch, after confessing him and hearing the nature of his errand, had deemed it fitting that he be appropriately housed while he waited.

  There was no way of telling how long the wait might be. The Pope had died with Rome; what remained of the College of Cardinals – those of them that had been able to reach Venke at all – was shut in the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci, attempting to elect a new one. It was said that the office of the Grand Inqisitor, directly next door, held a special guest, but of this rumour the Patriarch seemed to know no more than the next man. In the meantime, he issued to Father Domenico a special dispensation to conduct Masses and hear confessions in small churches off the Grand Canal, and to preach there and even in the streets if he wished. Technically, Father Domenico had no patent to do any of these things, since he was a monk rather than a priest, but the Patriarch, like everyone else now, was short on manpower.

  On the trip northward from Monte Albano, Father Domenico had seen many more signs of suffering, and of out-right demoniac malignancy, than were visible on the surface of this uglily beautiful city; but it was nevertheless a difficult, almost sinister place m which to attempt to minister to the people, let alone to preach a theology of hope. The Venetians had never been more than formally and outwardly allegiant to the Church from at least their second treaty with Islam in the mid-fifteenth century. The highest pinnacle of their ethics was that of dealing fairly with each other, and since there was at the same time no sweeter music to Venetian ears than the scream of outrage from the outsider who had discovered too late that he had been cheated, this left them little that they felt they ought to say in the confessional. Most of them seemed to regard the now obvious downfall of almost all of human civilization as a plot to divent the tourist trade to some other town – probably Istanbul, which they still referred to as Constantinople.

  As for hope, they had none. In this they were not alone. Throughout his journey, Father Domenico had found nothing but terror and misery, and a haunted populace which could not but conclude that everything the Church had taught them for nearly two thousand years had been lies. How could he tell them that, considering the real situation as he knew it to be, the suffering and the evil with which they were afflicted were rather less than he had expected to find? How then could he tell them further that he saw small but mysteriously increasing signs of mitigation of the demons’ rule? In these, fighting all the way against confounding hope with wishful thinking, he believed only reluctantly himself.

  Yet hope somehow found its way forward. On an oppressive afternoon while he was trying to preach to a group of young thugs, most of them too surly and indifferent even to jeer, before the little Church of Sta. Maria dei Miracoli, his audience was suddenly galvanized by a series of distant whistles. The whistles, as Father Domenico knew well enough, had been until only recently the signals of the young wolves of Venice, to report the spotting of some escortless English schoolmarm, pony-tailed Bennington art student or gaggle of Swedish girls. There were no such prey about now, but nevertheless, the piazzetta emptied within a minute.

  Bewildered and of course apprehensive, Father Domenico followed, and soon found the streets almost as crowded as of old with people making for St Mark’s. A rumour had gone around that a puff of white smoke had been seen over the Palazzo Ducale. This was highly unlikely, since – what with the fear of another fire which constantly haunted the palace – there was no stove in it anywhere in which to burn ballots; nevertheless, the expectation of a new Pope had run through the city like fire itself. By the time Father Domenico reached the vast square opposite the basilica (for after all, he too had come in search of a Pope) it was so crowded as to scarcely leave standing room for the pigeons.

  If there was indeed to be any announcement, it would have to come Venetian style from the top of the Giant’s Staircase of Antonio Rizzo; the repetitive arches of the first-floor loggia offered no single balcony on which a Pope might appear. Father Domenico pressed forward into the great internal courtyard towards the staircase, at first saying, ‘Prego, prego,’ and then ‘Scusate, scusate mi’, to no effect whatsoever and finally with considerable judicious but hard monkish use of elbows and knees.

  Over the tense rumbling of the crowd there sounded suddenly an antiphonal braying of many trumpets – something of Gabrielli’s, no doubt – and at the same Father Domenico found himself jammed immovably against the coping of the cannon-founder’s well, which had long since been scavenged clean of the tourists’ coins. By luck it was not a bad position; from here he had quite a clear view up the staircase and between the towering statues of Mars and Neptune. The great doors had already been opened, and the cardinals in their scarlet finery were ranked on either side of the portico. Between them and a little forward stood two pages, one of them holding a red cushion upon which stood something tall and glittering.

  Amidst the fanfare, an immensely heavy tolling began to boom: La Trottiera, the bell which had once summoned the members of the Grand Council to mount their horses and ride over the wooden bridges to a meeting. The combination of bell and trumpets was sokmnly beautiful, and under it the crowd fell quickly silent. Yet the difference from the Roman ritual was disturbing, and there was something else wrong about it, too. W
hat was that thing on the cushion? It certainly could not be the tiara; was it the golden horn of the doges?

  The music and the tolling stopped. Into the pigeon-cooing silence, a cardinal cried in Latin:

  ‘We have a Pope, Sumraus Antistitum Antistes! And it is his will that he be called Juvenember LXIX!’

  The unencumbered page now stepped forward. He called in the vernacular:

  ‘Here is your Pope, and we know it will please you.’

  From the shadow of the great doors there stepped forth into the sunlight between the statues, bowing his head to accept the golden horn, his face white and mild as milk, the special guest of the office of the Grand Inquisitor: a comely old man with a goshawk on his wrist, whom Father Domenico had first and last seen on Black Easter, released from the Pit by Theron Ware – the demon AGARESS

  There was an enormous shout from the crowd, and then the trumpets and the bell resumed, now joined by all the rest of the bells in the city,, and by many drums, and the firing of cannon. Choking with horror, Father Domenico fled as best he could.

  The festival went on all week, climaxed by bull dancing in the Cretan style in the courtyard of the Palazzo, and by fireworks at night while Father Domenico prayed. This event was definitive. The Antichrist had arrived, however belatedly, and therefore God still lived. Father Domenico could do no more good in Italy; he must now go to Dis, into Hell-Mouth itself, and challenge Satan to grant His continuing existence. Nor would it be enough for Father Domenico to aspire to be the Antisatan. If necessary – most terrifying of all thoughts – he must now expose himself to the temptation and the election, by no Earthly college, of becoming the vicar of Christ whose duty it would be to harrow this Earthly Hell.