commendation arrived. He’d gone to have a look, and had come back and got drunk for a week.
That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.
And just when you’d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger.
Aziraphale had tried to explain it to him once. The whole point, he’d said—this was somewhere around 1020, when they’d first reached their little Arrangement—the whole point was that when a human was good or bad it was because they wanted to be. Whereas people like Crowley and, of course, himself, were set in their ways right from the start. People couldn’t become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.
Crowley had thought about this for some time and, around about 1023, had said, Hang on, that only works, right, if you start everyone off equal, okay? You can’t start someone off in a muddy shack in the middle of a war zone and expect them to do as well as someone born in a castle.
Ah, Aziraphale had said, that’s the good bit. The lower you start, the more opportunities you have.
Crowley had said, That’s lunatic.
No, said Aziraphale, it’s ineffable.
Aziraphale. The Enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.
Crowley reached down and picked up the car phone.
Being a demon, of course, was supposed to mean you had no free will. But you couldn’t hang around humans for very long without learning a thing or two.
MR. YOUNG HAD NOT BEEN too keen on Damien, or Wormwood. Or any of Sister Mary Loquacious’ other suggestions, which had covered half of Hell, and most of the Golden Years of Hollywood.
“Well,” she said finally, a little hurt, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Errol. Or Cary. Very nice American names, both of them.”
“I had fancied something more, well, traditional,” explained Mr. Young. “We’ve always gone in for good simple names in our family.”
Sister Mary beamed. “That’s right. The old names are always the best, if you ask me.”
“A decent English name, like people had in the Bible,” said Mr. Young. “Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John,” he said, speculatively. Sister Mary winced. “Only they’ve never struck me as very good Bible names, really,” Mr. Young added. “They sound more like cowboys and footballers.”
“Saul’s nice,” said Sister Mary, making the best of it.
“I don’t want something too old-fashioned,” said Mr. Young.
“Or Cain. Very modern sound, Cain, really,” Sister Mary tried.
“Hmm.” Mr. Young looked doubtful.
“Or there’s always … well, there’s always Adam,” said Sister Mary. That should be safe enough, she thought.
“Adam?” said Mr. Young.
IT WOULD BE NICE to think that the Satanist Nuns had the surplus baby—Baby B—discreetly adopted. That he grew to be a normal, happy, laughing child, active and exuberant; and after that, grew further to become a normal, fairly contented adult.
And perhaps that’s what happened.
Let your mind dwell on his junior school prize for spelling; his unremarkable although quite pleasant time at university; his job in the payroll department of the Tadfield and Norton Building Society; his lovely wife. Possibly you would like to imagine some children, and a hobby—restoring vintage motorcycles, perhaps, or breeding tropical fish.
You don’t want to know what could have happened to Baby B.
We like your version better, anyway.
He probably wins prizes for his tropical fish.
IN A SMALL HOUSE in Dorking, Surrey, a light was on in a bedroom window.
Newton Pulsifer was twelve, and thin, and bespectacled, and he should have been in bed hours ago.
His mother, though, was convinced of her child’s genius, and let him stay up past his bedtime to do his “experiments.”
His current experiment was changing a plug on an ancient Bakelite radio his mother had given him to play with. He sat at what he proudly called his “work-top,” a battered old table covered in curls of wire, batteries, little light bulbs, and a homemade crystal set that had never worked. He hadn’t managed to get the Bakelite radio working yet either, but then again, he never seemed able to get that far.
Three slightly crooked model airplanes hung on cotton cords from his bedroom ceiling. Even a casual observer could have seen that they were made by someone who was both painstaking and very careful, and also no good at making model airplanes. He was hopelessly proud of all of them, even the Spitfire,