go to sleep. Then you won’t get hurt. You all just go to sleep now.”
The lieutenant stared at him, his eyes trying to focus. Then he pitched forward.
“Coo,” said Pepper, as the others collapsed, “how did you do that?”
“Well,” said Adam cautiously, “you know that bit about hypnotism in the Boy’s Own Book of 101 Things To Do that we could never make work?”
“Yes?”
“Well, it’s sort of like that, only now I’ve found how to do it.” He turned back to the communications building.
He pulled himself together, his body unfolding from its habitual comfortable slouch into an upright bearing Mr. Tyler would have been proud of.
“Right,” he said.
He thought for a while.
Then he said, “Come and see.”
IF YOU TOOK THE WORLD away and just left the electricity, it would look like the most exquisite filigree ever made—a ball of twinkling silver lines with the occasional coruscating spike of a satellite beam. Even the dark areas would glow with radar and commercial radio waves. It could be the nervous system of a great beast.
Here and there cities make knots in the web but most of the electricity is, as it were, mere musculature, concerned only with crude work. But for fifty years or so people had been giving electricity brains.
And now it was alive, in the same way that fire is alive. Switches were welding shut. Relays fused. In the heart of silicon chips whose microscopic architecture looked like a street plan of Los Angeles fresh pathways opened up, and hundreds of miles away bells rang in underground rooms and men stared in horror at what certain screens were telling them. Heavy steel doors shut firmly in secret hollow mountains, leaving people on the other side to pound on them and wrestle with fuse boxes which had melted. Bits of desert and tundra slid aside, letting fresh air into air-conditioned tombs, and blunt shapes ground ponderously into position.
And while it flowed where it should not, it ebbed from its normal beds. In cities the traffic lights went, then the street lights, then all the lights. Cooling fans slowed, flickered, and stopped. Heaters faded into darkness. Lifts stuck. Radio stations choked off, their soothing music silenced.
It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.
Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not.
There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic—hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.
DEATH STRAIGHTENED UP. He appeared to be listening intently. It was anyone’s guess what he listened with.
HE IS HERE, he said.
The other three looked up. There was a barely perceptible change in the way they stood there. A moment before Death had spoken they, the part of them that did not walk and talk like human beings, had been wrapped around the world. Now they were back.
More or less.
There was a strangeness about them. It was as if, instead of ill-fitting suits, they now had ill-fitting bodies. Famine looked as though he had been tuned slightly off-station, so that the hitherto dominant signal—of a pleasant, thrusting, successful businessman—was beginning to be drowned out by the ancient, horrible static of his basic personality. War’s skin glistened with sweat. Pollution’s skin just glistened.
“It’s all … taken care of,” said War, speaking with some effort. “It’ll … take its course.”
“It’s not just the nuclear,” Pollution said. “It’s the chemical. Thousands of gallons of stuff in … little tanks all over the world. Beautiful liquids … with eighteen syllables in their names. And the … old standbys. Say what you like. Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.”
“And then … winter,” said Famine. “I like winter. There’s something … clean about winter.”
“Chickens coming … home to roost,” said War.
“No more chickens,” said Famine, flatly.
Only Death hadn’t changed. Some things don’t.
The Four left the building. It was noticeable that Pollution, while still walking, nevertheless gave the impression of oozing.
And this was noticed by Anathema and Newton Pulsifer.
It had been the first building they’d come to. It had seemed much safer inside than out, where there seemed to be a lot of excitement. Anathema had pushed open a door covered in signs that suggested that this would be a terminally dangerous thing to do. It had swung open at her touch. When they’d gone inside, it had shut and locked itself.