by Neil Gaiman
“No, he couldn’t of done that,” said Wensleydale sternly, “because I’ve read about the Mary Celeste, and there was no one on it. It’s famous for having no one on it. They found it floating around all by itself with no one on it.”
“I dint say he was on it when they found it, did I?” said Adam scathingly. “Course he wasn’t on it. ’Cos of the UFOs landin’ and takin’ him off. I thought everyone knew about that.”
The Them relaxed a bit. They were on firmer ground with UFOs. They weren’t entirely certain about New Age UFOs, though; they’d listened politely to Adam on the subject, but somehow modern UFOs lacked punch.
“If I was an alien,” said Pepper, voicing the opinion of them all, “I wouldn’t go round telling people all about mystic cosmic harmony. I’d say,” her voice became hoarse and nasal, like someone hampered by an evil black mask, “ ‘Thish ish a lasher blashter, sho you do what you’re told, rebel swine.”’
They all nodded. A favorite game in quarry had been based on a highly successful film series with lasers, robots, and a princess who wore her hair like a pair of stereo headphones™. (It had been agreed without a word being said that if anyone was going to play the part of any stupid princesses, it wasn’t going to be Pepper.) But the game normally ended in a fight to be the one who was allowed to wear the coal scuttle™ and blow up planets. Adam was best at it—when he was the villain, he really sounded as if he could blow up the world. The Them were, anyway, temperamentally on the side of planet destroyers, provided they could be allowed to rescue princesses at the same time.
“I s’pect that’s what they used to do,” said Adam. “But now it’s different. They all have this bright blue light around ’em and go around doing good. Sort of g’lactic policemen, going round tellin’ everyone to live in universal harmony and stuff.”
There was a moment’s silence while they pondered this waste of perfectly good UFOs.
“What I’ve always wondered,” said Brian, “is why they call ’em UFOs when they know they’re flying saucers. I mean, they’re Identified Flying Objects then.”
“It’s ’cos the goverment hushes it all up,” said Adam. “Millions of flying saucers landin’ all the time and the goverment keeps hushing it up.”
“Why?” said Wensleydale.
Adam hesitated. His reading hadn’t provided a quick explanation for this; New Aquarian just took it as the foundation of belief, both of itself and its readers, that the government hushed everything up.
“’Cos they’re the goverment,” said Adam simply. “That’s what goverments do. They’ve got this great big building in London full of books of all the things they’ve hushed up. When the Prime Minister gets in to work in the morning, the first thing he does is go through the big list of everything that’s happened in the night and put this big red stamp on them.”
“I bet he has a cup of tea first, and then reads the paper,” said Wensleydale, who had on one memorable occasion during the holidays gone unexpectedly into his father’s office, where he had formed certain impressions. “And talks about what was on TV last night.”
“Well, orlright, but after that he gets out the book and the big stamp.”
“Which says ‘Hush It Up,’” said Pepper.
“It says Top Secret,” said Adam, resenting this attempt at bipartisan creativity. “It’s like nucular power stations. They keep blowin’ up all the time but no one ever finds out ’cos the goverment hushes it up.”
“They don’t keep blowing all the time,” said Wensleydale severely. “My father says they’re dead safe and mean we don’t have to live in a greenhouse. Anyway, there’s a big picture of one in my comic26 and it doesn’t say anything about it blowing up.”
“Yes,” said Brian, “but you lent me that comic afterwards and I know what type of picture it was.”
Wensleydale hesitated, and then said in a voice heavy with badly tried patience, “Brian, just because it says Exploded Diagram—”
There was the usual brief scuffle.
“Look,” said Adam severely. “Do you want me to tell you about the Aquarium Age, or not?”
The fight, never very serious amongst the siblinghood of the Them, subsided.
“Right,” said Adam. He scratched his head. “Now you’ve made me forget where I’ve got to,” he complained.
“Flyin’ saucers,” said Brian.
“Right. Right. Well, if you do see a flying UFO, these goverment men come and tell you off,” said Adam, getting back into his stride. “In a big black car. It happens all the time in America.”
The Them nodded sagely. Of this at least they had no doubt. America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe that just about anything could happen in America.
“Prob’ly causes traffic jams,” said Adam, “all these men in black cars, going about telling people off for seeing UFOs. They tell you that if you go on seeing ’em, you’ll have a Nasty Accident.”
“Prob’ly get run over by a big black car,” said Brian, picking at a scab on a dirty knee. He brightened up. “Do you know,” he said, “my cousin said that in America there’s shops that sell thirty-nine different flavors of ice cream?”
This even silenced Adam, briefly.
“There aren’t thirty-nine flavors of ice cream,” said Pepper. “There aren’t thirty-nine flavors in the whole world.”
“There could be, if you mixed them up,” said Wensleydale, blinking owlishly. “You know. Strawberry and chocolate. Chocolate and vanilla.” He sought for more English flavors. “Strawberry and vanilla and chocolate,” he added, lamely.
“And then there’s Atlantis,” said Adam loudly.
He had their interest there. They enjoyed Atlantis. Cities that sank under the sea were right up the Them’s street. They listened intently to a jumbled account of pyramids, weird priesthoods, and ancient secrets.
“Did it just happen sudden, or slowly?” said Brian.
“Sort of sudden an’ slowly,” said Adam, “’cos a lot of ’em got away in boats to all the other countries and taught ’em how to do maths an’ English an’ History an’ stuff.”
“Don’t see what’s so great about that,” said Pepper.
“Could of been good fun, when it was sinking,” said Brian wistfully, recalling the one occasion when Lower Tadfield had been flooded. “People deliverin’ the milk and newspapers by boat, no one having to go to school.”
“If I was an Atlantisan, I’d of stayed,” said Wensleydale. This was greeted with disdainful laughter, but he pressed on. “You’d just have to wear a diver’s helmet, that’s all. And nail all the windows shut and fill the houses with air. It would be great.”
Adam greeted this with the chilly stare he reserved for any of Them who came up with an idea he really wished he’d thought of first.
“They could of done,” he conceded, somewhat weakly. “After they’d sent all the teachers off in the boats. Maybe everyone else stayed on when it went down.”
“You wouldn’t have to wash,” said Brian, whose parents forced him to wash a great deal more than he thought could possibly be healthy. Not that it did any good. There was something basically ground in about Brian. “Because everything would stay clean. An’, an’ you could grow seaweed and stuff in the garden and shoot sharks. And have pet octopuses and stuff. And there wouldn’t be any schools and stuff because they’d of got rid of all the teachers.”
“They could still be down there now,” said Pepper.
They thought about the Atlanteans, clad in flowing mystic robes and goldfish bowls, enjoying themselves deep under the choppy waters of the ocean.
“Huh,” said Pepper, summing up their feelings.
“What shall we do now?” said Brian. “It’s brightened up a bit.”
In the end they played Charles Fort Discovering Things. This consisted of one of the Them walking around with the ancient remains of an umbrella, while the others treated him to a rain of frogs or, rather, frog
. They could only find one in the pond. It was an elderly frog, who knew the Them of old, and tolerated their interest as the price it paid for a pond otherwise free of moorhens and pike. It put up with things good-naturedly for a while before hopping off to a secret and so-far-undiscovered hideout in an old drainpipe.
Then they went home for lunch.
Adam felt very pleased about the morning’s work. He’d always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he’d also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn’t properly exist any more.
Whereas this Aquarium Age stuff was really real. Grown-up people wrote lots of books about it (New Aquarian was full of adverts for them) and Bigfoots and Mothmen and Yetis and sea monsters and Surrey pumas really existed. If Cortez, on his peak in Darien, had had slightly damp feet from efforts at catching frogs, he’d have felt just like Adam at that moment.
The world was bright and strange and he was in the middle of it.
He bolted his lunch and retired to his room. There were still quite a few New Aquarians he hadn’t read yet.
THE COCOA WAS A CONGEALED brown sludge half filling the cup.
Certain people had spent hundreds of years trying to make sense of the prophecies of Agnes Nutter. They had been very intelligent, in the main. Anathema Device, who was about as close to being Agnes as genetic drift would allow, was the best of the bunch. But none of them had been angels.
Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these were wrong; Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort. But he was intelligent. And it was an angelic intelligence which, while not being particularly higher than human intelligence, is much broader and has the advantage of having thousands of years of practice.
Aziraphale was the first angel ever to own a computer. It was a cheap, slow, plasticky one, much touted as ideal for the small businessman. Aziraphale used it religiously for doing his accounts, which were so scrupulously accurate that the tax authorities had inspected him five times in the deep belief that he was getting away with murder somewhere.
But these other calculations were of a kind no computer could ever do. Sometimes he would scribble something on a sheet of paper by his side. It was covered in symbols which only eight other people in the world would have been able to comprehend; two of them had won Nobel prizes, and one of the other six dribbled a lot and wasn’t allowed anything sharp because of what he might do with it.
ANATHEMA LUNCHED on miso soup and pored over her maps. There was no doubt the area around Tadfield was rich in ley-lines; even the famous Rev. Watkins had identified some. But unless she was totally wrong, they were beginning to shift position.
She’d spent the week taking soundings with theodolite and pendulum, and the Ordnance Survey map of the Tadfield area was now covered with little dots and arrows.
She stared at them for some time. Then she picked up a felt-tip pen and, with occasional references to her notebook, began to join them up.
The radio was on. She wasn’t really listening. So quite a lot of the main news item passed right by her unheeding ears, and it wasn’t until a couple of key words filtered down into her consciousness that she began to take notice.
Someone called A Spokesman sounded close to hysteria.
“. . . danger to employees or the public,” he was saying.
“And precisely how much nuclear material has escaped?” said the interviewer.
There was a pause. “We wouldn’t say escaped,” said the spokesman. “Not escaped. Temporarily mislaid.”
“You mean it is still on the premises?”
“We certainly cannot see how it could have been removed from them,” said the spokesman.
“Surely you have considered terrorist activity?”
There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, “Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it’s running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they’ll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you’d like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours.”
“But you said the power station is still producing electricity,” gasped the interviewer.
“It is.”
“How can it still be doing that if it hasn’t got any reactors?”
You could see the spokesman’s mad grin, even on the radio. You could see his pen, poised over the “Farms for Sale” column in Poultry World. “We don’t know,” he said. “We were hoping you clever buggers at the BBC would have an idea.”
Anathema looked down at her map.
What she had been drawing looked like a galaxy, or the type of carving seen on the better class of Celtic monolith.
The ley-lines were shifting. They were forming a spiral.
It was centered—loosely, with some margin for error, but nevertheless centered—on Lower Tadfield.
SEVERAL THOUSAND miles away, at almost the same moment as Anathema was staring at her spirals, the pleasure cruiser Morbilli was aground in three hundred fathoms of water.
For Captain Vincent, this was just another problem. For example, he knew he should contact the owners, but he never knew from day to day—or from hour to hour, in this computerized world—actually who the current owners were.
Computers, that was the bloody trouble. The ship’s papers were computerized and it could switch to the most currently advantageous flag of convenience in microseconds. Its navigation had been computerized as well, constantly updating its position by satellites. Captain Vincent had explained patiently to the owners, whoever they were, that several hundred square meters of steel plating and a barrel of rivets would be a better investment, and had been informed that his recommendation did not accord with current cost / benefit flow predictions.
Captain Vincent strongly suspected that despite all its electronics the ship was worth more sunk than afloat, and would probably go down as the most perfectly pinpointed wreck in nautical history.
By inference, this also meant that he was more valuable dead than alive.
He sat at his desk quietly leafing through International Maritime Codes, whose six hundred pages contained brief yet pregnant messages designed to transmit the news of every conceivable nautical eventuality across the world with the minimum of confusion and, above all, cost.
What he wanted to say was this: Was sailing SSW at position 33° N 47° 72’W. First Mate, who you may recall was appointed in New Guinea against my wishes and is probably a headhunter, indicated by signs that something was amiss. It appears that quite a vast expanse of seabed has risen up in the night. It contains a large number of buildings, many of which appeared pyramid-like in structure. We are aground in the courtyard of one of these. There are some rather unpleasant statues. Amiable old men in long robes and diving helmets have come aboard the ship and are mingling happily with the passengers, who think we organized this. Please advise.
His questing finger moved slowly down the page, and stopped. Good old International Codes. They’d been devised eighty years before, but the men in those days had really thought hard about the kind of perils that might possibly be encountered on the deep.
He picked up his pen and wrote down: “XXXV QVVX.”
Translated, it meant: “Have found Lost Continent of Atlantis. High Priest has just won quoits contest.”
“IT JOLLY WELL ISN’T!”
“It jolly well is!”
“It isn’t, you know!”
“It jolly well is!”
“It isn’t—all right, then, what about volcanoes?” Wensleydale sat back, a look of triumph on his face.
“What about ’em?” said Adam.
“All that lather comes up from the center of the Earth, where it’s all hot,” said Wensleydale. “I saw a program. It had David Attenborough, so it’s true.”
The other Them looked at Adam. It was like watching a tennis match.
The Hollow Earth Theory was not going over well in the quarry. A beguiling idea that had stood up to the probings of such remarkable thinkers as Cyrus Read Teed, Bulwer-Lytton, and Adolf Hitler was bending dangerously in the wind of Wensleydale’s searingly bespectacled logic.
“I dint say it was hollow all the way through,” said Adam. “No one said it was hollow all the way through. It prob’ly goes down miles and miles to make room for all the lather and oil and coal and Tibetan tunnels and suchlike. But then it’s hollow after that. That’s what people think. And there’s a hole at the North Pole to let the air in.”
“Never seen it on an atlas,” sniffed Wensleydale.
“The Goverment won’t let them put it on a map in case people go and have a look in,” said Adam. “The reason being, the people livin’ inside don’t want people lookin’ down on ’em all the time.”
“What do you mean, Tibetan tunnels?” said Pepper. “You said Tibetan tunnels.”
“Ah. Dint I tell you about them?”
Three heads shook.
“It’s amazing. You know Tibet?”
They nodded doubtfully. A series of images had risen in their minds: yaks, Mount Everest, people called Grasshopper, little old men sitting on mountains, other people learning kung fu in ancient temples, and snow.
“Well, you know all those teachers that left Atlantis when it sunk?”
They nodded again.
“Well, some of them went to Tibet and now they run the world. They’re called the Secret Masters. On account of being teachers, I suppose. An’ they’ve got this secret underground city called Shambala and tunnels that go all over the world so’s they know everythin’ that goes on and control everythin’. Some people reckon that they really live under the Gobby Desert,” he added loftily, “but mos’ competent authorities reckon it’s Tibet all right. Better for the tunneling, anyway.”