Good Omens

it was going to happen everywhere .
Crowley was in Hell’s bad books. 47
Aziraphale was—as far as could be estimated—out of the equation.
All was black, gloomy and awful. There was no light at the end of the tunnel—or if there was, it was an oncoming train.
He might just as well find a nice little restaurant and get completely and utterly pissed out of his mind while he waited for the world to end.
And yet …
    And that was where it all fell apart.
    Because, underneath it all, Crowley was an optimist. If there was one rock-hard certainty that had sustained him through the bad times—he thought briefly of the fourteenth century—then it was utter surety that he would come out on top; that the universe would look after him.
    Okay, so Hell was down on him. So the world was ending. So the Cold War was over and the Great War was starting for real. So the odds against him were higher than a vanload of hippies on a blotterful of Owlsley’s Old Original. There was still a chance.
    It was all a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
    The right place was Tadfield. He was certain of that; partly from the book, partly from some other sense: in Crowley’s mental map of the world, Tadfield was throbbing like a migraine.
    The right time was getting there before the end of the world. He checked his watch. He had two hours to get to Tadfield, although probably even the normal passage of Time was pretty shaky by now.
    Crowley tossed the book into the passenger seat. Desperate times, desperate measures: he had maintained the Bentley without a scratch for sixty years.
    What the hell.
    He reversed suddenly, causing severe damage to the front of the red Renault 5 behind him, and drove up onto the pavement.
    He turned on his lights, and sounded his horn.
    That should give any pedestrians sufficient warning that he was coming. And if they couldn’t get out of the way … well, it’d all be the same in a couple of hours. Maybe. Probably.
    â€œHeigh ho,” said Anthony Crowley, and just drove anyway.
    THERE WERE SIX WOMEN and four men, and each of them had a telephone and a thick wodge of computer printout, covered with names and telephone numbers. By each of the numbers was a penned notation saying whether the person dialed was in or out, whether the number was currently connected, and, most importantly, whether or not anybody who answered the phone was avid for cavity-wall insulation to enter their lives.
    Most of them weren’t.
    The ten people sat there, hour after hour, cajoling, pleading, promising through plastic smiles. Between calls they made notations, sipped coffee, and marveled at the rain flooding down the windows. They were staying at their posts like the band on the Titanic . If you couldn’t sell double glazing in weather like this, you couldn’t sell it at all.
    Lisa Morrow was saying, “. . . Now, if you’ll only let me finish, sir, and yes, I understand that, sir, but if you’ll only … ,” and then, seeing that he’d just hung up on her, she said, “Well, up yours, snot-face.”
    She put down the phone.
    â€œI got another bath,” she announced to her fellow telephone salespersons. She was well in the lead in the office daily Getting People Out of the Bath stakes, and only needed two more points to win the weekly Coitus Interruptus award.
    She dialed the next number on the list.
    Lisa had never intended to be a telephone salesperson. What she really wanted to be was an internationally glamorous jet-setter, but she didn’t have the O-levels.
    Had she been studious enough to be accepted as an internationally glamorous jet-setter, or a dental assistant (her second choice of profession), or indeed, anything other than a telephone salesperson in that particular office, she would have had a longer, and probably more fulfilled, life.
    Perhaps not a very much longer life, all things considered, it being the Day of Armageddon, but several hours anyway.
    For that matter, all she really needed to do for a longer life was not ring the number she had just dialed, listed on her sheet as the Mayfair home of, in the best traditions of tenth-hand mail-order lists, Mr. A. J. Cowlley.
    But she had dialed. And she had waited while it rang four times. And she had said, “Oh, poot, another ansaphone,” and started to put down the handset.
    But then something climbed out of the earpiece. Something very big, and