Good Omens

Greasy’s listless finger was a spread on American football, and how it was really catching on in Europe. Which was odd—because when the magazine had been printed, those pages had been about photography in desert conditions.
    It was about to change his life.
    And Warlock flew on to America. He deserved something (after all, you never forget the first friends you ever had, even if you were all a few hours old at the time) and the power that was controlling the fate of all mankind at that precise time was thinking: Well, he’s going to America , isn’t he? Don’t see how you could have anythin’ better than going to America .
    They’ve got thirty-nine flavors of ice cream there. Maybe even more.
    THERE WERE A MILLION exciting things a boy and his dog could be doing on a Sunday afternoon. Adam could think of four or five hundred of them without even trying. Thrilling things, stirring things, planets to be conquered, lions to be tamed, lost South American worlds teeming with dinosaurs to be discovered and befriended.
    He sat in the garden, and scratched in the dirt with a pebble, looking despondent.
    His father had found Adam asleep on his return from the air base—sleeping, to all intents and purposes, as if he had been in bed all evening. Even snoring once in a while, for verisimilitude.
    At breakfast the next morning, however, it was made clear that this had not been enough. Mr. Young disliked gallivanting about of a Saturday evening on a wild-goose chase. And if, by some unimaginable fluke, Adam was not responsible for the night’s disturbances—whatever they had been, since nobody had seemed very clear on the details, only that there had been disturbances of some sort—then he was undoubtedly guilty of something . This was Mr. Young’s attitude, and it had served him well for the last eleven years.
    Adam sat dispiritedly in the garden. The August sun hung high in an August blue and cloudless sky, and behind the hedge a thrush sang, but it seemed to Adam that this was simply making it all much worse.
    Dog sat at Adam’s feet. He had tried to help, chiefly by exhuming a bone he had buried four days earlier and dragging it to Adam’s feet, but all Adam had done was stare at it gloomily, and eventually Dog had taken it away and inhumed it once more. He had done all he could.
    â€œAdam?”
    Adam turned. Three faces stared over the garden fence.
    â€œHi,” said Adam, disconsolately.
    â€œThere’s a circus come to Norton,” said Pepper. “Wensley was down there, and he saw them. They’re just setting up.”
    â€œThey’ve got tents, and elephants and jugglers and pratic’ly wild animals and stuff and—and everything!” said Wensleydale.
    â€œWe thought maybe we’d all go down there an’ watch them setting up,” said Brian.
    For an instant Adam’s mind swam with visions of circuses. Circuses were boring, once they were set up. You could see better stuff on television any day. But the setting up  … Of course they’d all go down there, and they’d help them put up the tents, and wash the elephants, and the circus people would be so impressed with Adam’s natural rappore with animals such that, that night, Adam (and Dog, the World’s Most Famous Performing Mongrel) would lead the elephants into the circus ring and …
    It was no good.
    He shook his head sadly. “Can’t go anywhere,” he said. “They said so.”
    There was a pause.
    â€œAdam,” said Pepper, a trifle uneasily, “what did happen last night?”
    Adam shrugged. “Just stuff. Doesn’t matter,” he said. “’Salways the same. All you do is try to help, and people would think you’d murdered someone or something.”
    There was another pause, while the Them stared at their fallen leader.
    â€œWhen d’you think they’ll let you out, then?” asked Pepper.
    â€œNot for years an’ years. Years an’ years an’ years . I’ll be an old man by the time they let me out,” said Adam.
    â€œHow about tomorrow?” asked Wensleydale.
    Adam brightened. “Oh, tomorrow’ll be all right,” he pronounced. “They’ll have forgotten about it by then. You’ll see. They always do.” He looked up at them, a scruffy Napoleon with his laces trailing, exiled to a rose-trellissed Elba. “You all go,” he told