Good Omens

earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.
    It didn't.
    Which meant, as she had feared all along, that it was probably in the back of a car belonging to two consenting cycle repairmen.
    She could feel generations of Agnes Nutter's descendants laughing at her.
    Even if those two were honest enough to want to return it, they'd hardly go to all the trouble of finding a cottage they'd barely seen in the dark.
    The only hope was that they wouldn't know what it was they'd got.
    * * * * *

    ziraphale, like many Soho merchants who specialized in hard.. to.. find books for the discerning connoisseur, had a back room, but what was in there was far more esoteric than anything normally found inside a shrink.. wrapped bag for the Customer Who Knows What He Wants.
    He was particularly proud of his books of prophecy.
    First editions, usually.
    And every one was signed.
    He'd got Robert Nixon, [A sixteenth.. century half.. wit, not related to any U.S. president.] and Martha the Gypsy, and Ignatius Sybilla, and Old Ottwell Binns. Nostradamus had signed, "To myne olde friend Azerafel, with Beste wishes"; Mother Shipton had spilled drink on his copy; and in a climate.. controlled cabinet in one corner was the original scroll in the shaky handwriting of St. John the Divine of Patmos, whose "Revelation" had been the all.. time best seller. Aziraphale had found him a nice chap, if a bit too fond of odd mushrooms.
    What the collection did not have was a copy of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, and Aziraphale walked into the room holding it as a keen philatelist might hold a Mauritius Blue that had just turned up on a postcard from his aunt.
    He'd never even seen a copy before, but he'd heard about it. Everyone in the trade, which considering it was a highly specialized trade meant about a dozen people, had heard of it. Its existence was a sort of vacuum around which all sorts of strange stories had been orbiting for hundreds of years. Aziraphale realized he wasn't sure if you could orbit a vacuum, and didn't care; The Nice and Accurate Prophecies made the Hitler Diaries look like, well, a bunch of forgeries.
    His hands hardly shook at all as he laid it down on a bench, pulled on a pair of surgical rubber gloves, and opened it reverentially. Aziraphale was an angel, but he also worshiped books.
    The title page said:
The Nife and Accurate Prophefies of Agnes Nutter
In slightly smaller type:
Being a Certaine and Prefice Hiftory from
the Prefent Day Unto the Endinge of this World.
In slightly larger type:
Containing therein Many Diuerse Wonders and
precepts for the Wife
In a different type:
More complete than ever yet before publifhed

In smaller type but in capitals:
CONCERNING THE STRANGE TIMES AHEADE
In slightly desperate italics:
And events of a Wonderful Nature
In larger type once more:
'Reminifent of Noftradamus at hif beft'
.. Ursula Shipton

    The prophecies were numbered, and there were more than four thousand of them.
    "Steady, steady," Aziraphale muttered to himself. He went into the little kitchenette and made himself some cocoa and took some deep breaths.
    Then he came back and read a prophecy at random.
    Forty minutes later, the cocoa was still untouched.
    * * *

        The red.. haired woman in the corner of the hotel bar was the most successful war correspondent in the world. She now had a passport in the name of Carmine Zuigiber; and she went where the wars were.
    Well. More or less.
    Actually she went where the wars weren't. She'd already been where the wars were.
    She was not well known, except where it counted. Get half a dozen war correspondents together in an airport bar, and the conversation will, like a compass orienting to North, swing around to Murchison of The New York Times, to Van Home of Newsweek, to Anforth of I.T.N. News. The war correspondents' War Correspondents.
    But when Murchison, and Van Home, and Anforth ran into each other in a burnt.. out tin shack in Beirut, or Afghanistan, or the Sudan, after they'd admired each other's scars and had downed a few, they would exchange awed anecdotes of "Red" Zuigiber, from the National World Weekly.
    "That dumb rag," Murchison would say, "it doesn't goddamn know what it's goddamn got."
    Actually the National World Weekly did know just what it had got: it had a War Correspondent. It just didn't know