Good Omens

Newt.
    â€œHe might well point a gun at us in a menacing way,” Anathema conceded.
    â€œThat’s good enough for me. What do you suggest we do, then?”
    â€œWell, Agnes must have known something. So I suppose we just wait. It’s not too bad now the wind’s gone down.”
    â€œOh. “ Newt looked at the clouds piling up on the horizon. “Good old Agnes,” he said.
    ADAM PEDALED STEADILY along the road, Dog running along behind and occasionally trying to bite his back tire out of sheer excitement.
    There was a clacking noise and Pepper swung out of her drive. You could always tell Pepper’s bike. She thought it was improved by a piece of cardboard cunningly held against the wheel by a clothes peg. Cats had learned to take evasive action when she was two streets away.
    â€œI reckon we can cut along Drovers Lane and then up through Roundhead Woods,” said Pepper.
    â€œâ€™S all muddy,” said Adam.
    â€œThat’s right,” said Pepper nervously. “It gets all muddy up there. We ort to go along by the chalk pit. ’S always dry because of the chalk. An’ then up by the sewage farm.”
    Brian and Wensleydale pulled in behind them. Wensleydale’s bicycle was black, and shiny, and sensible. Brian’s might have been white, once, but its color was lost beneath a thick layer of mud.
    â€œIt’s stupid calling it a milit’ry base,” said Pepper. “I went up there when they had that open day and they had no guns or missiles or anythin’. Just knobs and dials and brass bands playin’.”
    â€œYes,” said Adam.
    â€œNot much milit’ry about knobs and dials,” said Pepper.
    â€œI dunno, reely,” said Adam. “It’s amazin’ what you can do with knobs and dials.”
    â€œI got a kit for Christmas,” Wensleydale volunteered. “All electric bits. There were a few knobs and dials in it. You could make a radio or a thing that goes beep.”
    â€œI dunno,” said Adam thoughtfully, “I’m thinkin’ more of certain people patching into the worldwide milit’ry communications network and telling all the computers and stuff to start fightin’.”
    â€œCor,” said Brian. “That’d be wicked .”
    â€œSort of,” said Adam.
    IT IS A HIGH AND LONELY destiny to be Chairman of the Lower Tadfield Residents’ Association.
    R. P. Tyler, short, well-fed, satisfied, stomped down a country lane, accompanied by his wife’s miniature poodle, Shutzi. R. P. Tyler knew the difference between right and wrong; there were no moral grays of any kind in his life. He was not, however, satisfied simply with being vouchsafed the difference between right and wrong. He felt it his bounden duty to tell the world.
    Not for R. P. Tyler the soapbox, the polemic verse, the broadsheet. R. P. Tyler’s chosen forum was the letter column of the Tadfield Advertiser . If a neighbor’s tree was inconsiderate enough to shed leaves into R. P. Tyler’s garden, R. P. Tyler would first carefully sweep them all up, place them in boxes, and leave the boxes outside his neighbor’s front door, with a stern note. Then he would write a letter to the Tadfield Advertiser . If he sighted teenagers sitting on the village green, their portable cassette players playing, and they were enjoying themselves, he would take it upon himself to point out to them the error of their ways. And after he had fled their jeering, he would write to the Tadfield Advertiser on the Decline of Morality and the Youth of Today.
    Since his retirement last year the letters had increased to the point where not even the Tadfield Advertiser was able to print all of them. Indeed, the letter R. P. Tyler had completed before setting out on his evening walk had begun:
    Sirs,
    I note with distress that the newspapers of today no longer feel obligated to their public, we, the people who pay your wages …
    He surveyed the fallen branches that littered the narrow country road. I don’t suppose, he pondered, they think of the cleaning up bill when they send us these storms. Parish Council has to foot the bill to clean it all up. And we, the taxpayers, pay their wages …
    The they in this thought were the weather forecasters on Radio Four, 51 whom R. P. Tyler blamed for the weather.
    Shutzi stopped by a roadside beech tree to cock its leg.
    R. P. Tyler looked away, embarrassed. It