The Day After Judgement

by James Blish

  Overhead, the plane carrying the first contingent of paratroops was suddenly blurred by hundreds of tiny black dots Seconds later, the fuselage alone was plunging towards the desert; the legions of BEELZEBUB, the Lord of the Flies, had torn the wings off men. Lower, in the middle of the air, rocket-borne Assault Infantry soldiers were being plucked first of their harness, then of their clothing, and then of their hair, their fingernails and toenails by jeering creatures with beasts’ heads, most of whom were flying without even wings. The bodies when there was anything left of them at all, were being dropped unerringly into the heart of the Pit.

  In summary, the Siege of Dis could more reasonably be described as a rout, except for one curious discrepancy: When Phase Four began – without anyone’s ordering it, and otherwise not according to plan – the demons failed to follow up their advantage. None of them, in fact, had ever left the city; even when they had taken to the air, they had never crossed its perimeter, as though the moat represented some absolute boundary which ascended even into the sky.

  But the slaughter had been bad enough already. The chances that the Army of the United States could ever reform again looked very small indeed.

  And at the end, there formed upon the master screen in the Denver cavern, superimposed upon the image of the burning triumphant city, an immense Face. Baines knew it well; he had been expecting to see it again ever since the end of that Black Easter back in Positano.

  It was the crowned goat’s head of PUT SATANACHIA.

  McKnight gasped in horror for the very first time in Baines’s memory; and down on the floor of the control centre, several generals fainted outright at their consoles. Then McKnight was on his feet screaming.

  ‘A Chink! I knew it all along! Hay, clear the circuits! Clear the circuits! Get him off the screen!’ He rounded suddenly on Baines. ‘And you, you traitor! Your equipment failed us! You’ve sold us out! You were on their side all the time! Do you know into whose hands you have delivered your country? Do you? Do you?’

  His howling was only an irritant now, but Baines had the strength left to raise one mocking eyebrow questioning. McKnight levelled a trembling finger at the screen.

  ‘Hay, Hay, clear the circuits! I’ll have you court-martialled! Doesn’t anyone understand but me? That is the insidious Doctor Fu Manchu!’

  The Sabbath Goat paid him no heed. Instead, it looked directly and steadily across the cavern into Baines’s eyes. There was no mistaking the direction of that regard, and no question but that it saw him. It said:

  AH, THERE YOU ARE. MY DEARLY BELOVED SON. COME TO ME NOW. OUR FATHER BELOW HATH NEED OF THEE.

  Baines had no intention whatsoever of obeying that summons; but he found himself rising from his chair all the same.

  Foaming at the mouth, his hands clawing for the distant throat of the demon. McKnight plunged in a shower of splinters through the front of the booth and fell like a glass comet towards the floor.

  The Harrowing of Heaven

  As a picture, where in a black colouring occurs in its proper place, so is the universe beautiful, if any could survey it. notwithsunding the Presence of sinners, although, taken by themselves, their proper deformity makes them hideous.

  ST AUGUSTINE: De Civitate Dei, xi. 23

  Thus that Faustus, to so many a snare of death, had now, neither willing nor witting it, begun to loosen that wherein I was taken.

  Confessions, v.13

  11

  Baines did not have much time to experiment under the geas or compulsion which PUT SATANACHIA had laid upon him, but he nevertheless found that it was highly selective in character. For example, the great prince had said nothing about requiring the presence of Jack Ginsberg, but when Baines, in a mixture of vindictiveness and a simple desire for human companionship, decided to try to bring him along, he found that he was not prevented from doing so. Ginsberg himself showed no resentment at being routed out of the bed of the blonde runner; possibly the succubus in Positano had spoiled for him the pleasures of human women, an outcome Jack himself had suspected in advance; but then, even without that supernatural congress, jack’s sexual life had always been that of a rather standard Don Juan, for whom every success turned sour almost instantly.

  This, however, was one of those explanations which did not explain, and Baines had thought about it often before; for, as has already been observed, he liked to have his key men come equipped with handles he could grasp if the need arose. There were, the company psychologist had told him, at least three kinds of Don Juans: Freud’s, whose career is a lifelong battle to hide from himself an incipient homosexuality; Lenau’s, a Romantic in search of the Ideal Woman, for whom the Devil who comes for him is disgust with himself; and Da Ponte’s, a man born blind to the imminence of tomorrow, and hence incapable either of love or of repentance, even on the edge of the Pit. Well, but in the end, for Baines, it did not matter which one was jack; they all behaved alike.

  Jack did object powerfully when he was told that the journey to Dis would have to be made entirely on foot, but this was one of the areas in which Baines discovered that the geas left him no choice. Again, he wondered why it should be so. Did the Sabbath Goat mean to rub in the fact that the Siege of Dis had been the last gasp of secular technology? Or had it instead meant to impress upon Baines that, willy-nilly, he was about to embark upon a pilgrimage? But again, the outcome would have been the same, and that was all that mattered.

  As for jack, he still seemed to be afraid of his boss, or else still thought there was some main chance to be looked out for. Well, perhaps there was – but Baines would not have bet any shares of stock on it.

  Theron Ware saw the great compound mushroom cloud go up while he was still in Flagstaff, a point to which several lucky hitchhikes and one even luckier long freight train ride had brought him. The surging growth of the cloud, the immense flares of light beyond the mountains to the west, and the repeated earth shocks left him in little doubt about what was going on; and as the cloud drifted towards him, moving inexorably from west to east as the weather usually does, he knew that it meant death for him within a very few days – as for how many thousands of others? – unless by some miracle he could find an unoccupied fallout shelter, or one whose present occupants wouldn’t shoot him on sight.

  And why indeed go on? The bombing showed without question that Baines’s self-assumed mission to McKnight at Denver had failed, and that there was now open warfare between humanity and the demons. The notion that Theron Ware could do anything now to change that was so grandiose as to be outright pathetic More trivially, by the time that bombing was over, no matter how it affected the demons–if at all–the whole hundred-mile-plus stretch of Death Valley National Monument would have become instantly lethal for an unprotected man to enter.

  yet Theron ware could not yet quite believe that he was unprotected. He had come an immense distance by a traditional means which made it absolutely clear that black magic still worked; he had come almost an equal distance through a series of lucky breaks which he could not regard as the product of pure chance; and in his pocket the ruby talisman continued to emit a faint warmth which was that of no ordinary stone, natural or synthetic. Like all proverbs, Ware knew, the old saw that the Devil looks after his own was only half true; nevertheless the feeling that he had come all this way on some errand continued to persist, together with a growing conviction that he had never in fact known what it was. He would find out when he arrived; in the meantime, he was travelling on the Devil’s business, and would not die until it was concluded.

  He would have liked to have stopped over in Flagstaff to inspect the famous observatory where Percival Lowell had produced such complicated maps of the wholly illusory canals of Mars and where Tombaugh had discovered Pluto – and where in the sky did those planets stand, now that their gods had clashed frontally? – but under the circumstances he did not dare. He still had Grand Canyon and the Lake Mead area to cross; then, skirting northwards around the Spring Mountains to the winter
resort town of Death Valley, in which he hoped to be able to get some word about exactly where in the valley proper the perimeter of Nether Hell had surfaced. He had come far, but he still had far to go, and he was unlikely now to be able to hitch a ride in the direction of that roiling, flaming column of annihilation. Very well; now at last had come the time he had foreseen in the doomed farmhouse in Pennsylvania, when he would have to steal a car, He did not think that it would be difficult.

  Father Domenico too had come far, and had equally good reasons to be quite certain that he would still have been in Italy had it not been for some kind of supernatural intervention. He stood now at dusk in the shadow of the 11,000-foot Telescope Peak, looking eastwards and downwards to where the city of Dis flamed sullenly in the shadow of the valley of death itself against the stark backdrop of the Amargosa Range. That valley had been cut by the Amargosa River, but there had been no river there within the memory of civilized man; the annual rainfall now was well under two inches.

  And he was equally certain of supernatural protection. The valley had held the world’s second-ranking heat record of 134°F., but although it was immensely hotter than that down here now, Father Domenico felt only a mild glow, as though he had just stepped out of a bath. When he had first come down from the mountain, he had been horrified to find the vitrified desert washing the foothills scattered with hundreds of strange, silent, misshapen grey forms, only vaguely human at first sight, which had proven to be stricken soldiers. He had tried to minister to them, but the attempt had proven hopeless: of the bodies in the few suits he was able to investigate most were shrunken mummies, and the rest had apparently died even more horribly. He wondered what on Earth could have happened here. His elevation from the waters to the mountain had taken place in a mystic rapture without which, indeed, it would have been impossible, but which had taken him rather out of touch with mundane events.

  But whatever the answer, he had no choice but to press on. As he descended the last of the foothills, he saw on the floor of the valley, approaching him along what had once been the old watercourse and more recently a modern road, three tiny figures. In so far as he could tell at this distance, they wore no more visible, Earthly protections against what the valley had become than he did himself. Yet they did not seem to be demons. Full of wonder, he scrambled down towards them; but when they met, and he recognized them, he wondered only that he should have been at all amazed. The meeting, he saw instantly now, had been foreordained.

  *

  ‘How did you get here?’ Baines demanded at once. It was not easy to determine of whom he was asking the question, but while Father Domenico wondered whether it was worthwhile trying to explain trance levitation, and if so how he would go about it, Theron Ware said:

  ‘I can’t think of a more trivial question under the circumstance, Doctor Baines. We’re here, that’s the important thing – and I perceive that we are all under some kind of magical aegis, or we would all be dead. This raises the question of what we hope to accomplish, that we should be so protected. Father, may I ask what your intentions are?’

  ‘Nothing prevenss you from asking.’ Father Domenico said, ‘but you Ire the last human being in the world to whom I would give the answer.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what my intentions are,’ said Baines. ‘My intentions are to stay in the bottommost levels of Denver and wait for this all to blow over, if it’s ever going to. One thing you learn fast in the munitions business is that it’s a very good idea to stay off battlefields. But my intentions have nothing to do with the matter. I was ordered to come here by the Sabbath Goat, and here I am.’

  ‘Oh?’ Ware said with interest. ‘He finally came for you?’

  ‘No, I have to come to him. He broke into a closed-circuit television transmission in Denver to tell me so. He didn’t even mention Jack; I only brought him along for the company, since it didn’t turn out to be forbidden.’

  ‘And small thanks for that,’ Ginsberg said, though apparently without rancour. ‘If there’s anything in the world that I hate, it’s exercise. Vertical exercise, anyhow.’

  ‘Have either of you two seen him at all?’ Baines added.

  Father Domenico remained stubbornly silent, but Ware said: ‘PUT SATANACHIA? NO, and somehow I doubt that I will, now. I seem to have put myself under the protection of another demon, although one subordinate to the Goat. Confusion of purpose is almost the natural state among demons, but in this instance I think it couldn’t have happened without direct Satanic intent.’

  ‘I was given my marching orders in the name of “Our Father Below”’ Baines said. ‘If he’s interested in me, the chances are that he’s even more interested in you, all right. But what did you think you were up to?’

  ‘Originally I thought I might try to intercede, or at least to plead for some sort of cease-fire – as you were trying to do from the opposite end in Denver. But that’s a dead letter now, and the result is that I have no more idea why I am here than you do. All I can say is that whatever the reason. I don’t think there can be much hope in it.’

  ‘While we live, there is always hope,’ Father Domenico said suddenly.

  The black magician pointed at the tremendous city towards which, volitionlessly, they had been continuing to walk all this time. ‘To be able to see that at all means that we have already passed far beyond mere futility. All the sins of the Leopard, the sins of incontinence, are behind us, which means that the gate is behind us too: the gate upon which it is carven in Dirghic, LAY DOWN ALL HOPE, YOU THAT GO IN BY ME.’

  ‘We are alive.’ Father Domenico said stolidly, ‘and I utterly deny and repudiate those sins.’

  ‘You may not do so,’ Ware said, his voice gradually rising in intensity. ‘Look here, Father, this is all so mysterious, and the future looks so black, that it’s ridiculous for us not to make available and to make use of any little scraps of information that we may have to share. The very symbolism of our presence here is simple, patent and ineluctable, and you as a Karest in white magic should be the first to see it. To take the circles of Upper Hell in order, Ginsberg here is almost a type creation of the lust-dominated man; I have sold my soul for unlimitted knowledge, which in the last analysis is surely nothing more than an instance of gluttony; and you have only to look around this battlefield to see that Doctor Baines is an instrument of wrath par excellence.’

  ‘You have skipped the Fourth Circle,’ Father Domenico said, ‘with obvious didactic intent, but your arrogance is wasted upon me. I draw no moral from it whatsoever.’

  ‘Oh, indeed? Wasn’t treasure finding once the chiefest use of white magic? And isn’t the monkish life-withdrawal from the snares, affairs and duties of the world for the sake of one’s own soul – as plain a case of hoarding as one could ask for? It is in fact so egregious an example of that very sin that not even canonization remits it; I can tell you of my own certain knowledge that every single pillar saint went instantly to Hell, and of even the simple monks, none escaped except those few like Matthew Paris and Roger of Wendover who also lead useful worldly lives.’

  ‘And regardless of what your fatuous friends on Monte Albano believed, there is no efficacious dispensation for the practice of white magic, because there is no such thing as white magic. It is all black, black, black as the ace of spades, and you have imperilled your immortal soul by practising it not even for your own benefit, but on commission for others; if that does not make you a spendthrift as well as a hoarder, what would you call it?

  ‘Think at last, Father: Why did your crucifix burst in your hands at the last minute on Black Easter? Wasn’t it because you tried to use it for personal gain? What does it symbolize, if not total submission to whatever may be Willed? Yet you tried to use it – the ultimate symbol of resignation in the face of death – to save your own paltry life. Really, Father Domenico. I think the time has come for us to be frank with each other – for you as surely as for the rest of us!’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ Baines said with r
ather a sick grin.

  After six or seven paces of silence, Father Domenico said:

  ‘I am terribly afraid you are right. I came here in the hope of forcing the demons to admit that God still lives, and I saw what I thought were indisputable signs of Divine sponsorship. Unless you are simply more subtle a casuist than any I have ever encountered before, even in print, it now appears that I had no right to think any such thing… which means that the real reason for my presence here is no less mysterious than that for yours. I cannot say that this increases my understanding any.’

  ‘It establishes a common ignorance,’ said Ware. ‘And as far as your original assumption is concerned. Father, it suggests some basic uniformity of purpose which I must admit is certainly not characteristic of demons, whatever that may mean. But I think we shall not have long to wait for the answer, gentlemen. It appears that we have arrived.’

  They all looked up. The colossal barbican of Dis loomed over them.

  ‘One thing is surely clear’ Father Domenico whispered. ‘We have been making this journey all our lives.’

  12

  No Beatrice sponsored them, and no Vergil led them; but as they approached the great ward, the undamaged portcullis rose, and the gates swung inward in massive silence. No demons mocked them, no Furies challenged them, no angel had to cross the Styx to bring them passage! they were admitted, simply and non-committally.

  Beyond the barbican, they found the citadel transformed. The Nether Hell of diuturnal torture, which had withstood the bombardment of Man without damage to so much as a twig in the Wood of the Suicides, was gone entirely. Perhaps in some sense it had never been there at all, but was still located where it had always been, in Eternity, not on Earth; a place still reserved for the dead. For these four still-living men, it had vanished.

  In its place there stood a clean, well-lighted city like an illustration from some Utopian romance; it looked, in fact, like a cross between the city of the future in the old film Things to Come and a fully automated machine shop. It screamed, hammered and roared like a machine shop as well.