Good Omens
apparently successful it may seem upon the way, at the end it will wreck itself. It will founder upon the rocks of iniquity and sink headfirst to vanish without trace into the seas of oblivion.â
Crowley considered this. âNah,â he said, at last. âFor my money, it was just average incompetence. Heyââ
He whistled under his breath.
The graveled forecourt in front of the manor was crowded with cars, and they werenât nun cars. The Bentley was if anything outclassed. A lot of the cars had GT or Turbo in their names and phone aerials on their roofs. They were nearly all less than a year old.
Crowleyâs hands itched. Aziraphale healed bicycles and broken bones; he longed to steal a few radios, let down some tires, that sort of thing. He resisted it.
âWell, well,â he said. âIn my day nuns were packed four to a Morris Traveller.â
âThis canât be right,â said Aziraphale.
âPerhaps theyâve gone private?â said Crowley.
âOr youâve got the wrong place.â
âItâs the right place, I tell you. Come on.â
They got out of the car. Thirty seconds later someone shot both of them. With incredible accuracy.
IF THERE WAS ONE THING that Mary Hodges, formerly Loquacious, was good at, it was attempting to obey orders. She liked orders. They made the world a simpler place.
What she wasnât good at was change. Sheâd really liked the Chattering Order. Sheâd made friends for the first time. Sheâd had a room of her own for the first time. Of course, she knew that it was engaged in things which might, from certain viewpoints, be considered bad, but Mary Hodges had seen quite a lot of life in thirty years and had no illusions about what most of the human race had to do in order to make it from one week to the next. Besides, the food was good and you got to meet interesting people.
The Order, such as was left of it, had moved after the fire. After all, their sole purpose in existing had been fulfilled. They went their separate ways.
She hadnât gone. Sheâd rather liked the Manor and, she said, someone ought to stay and see it was properly repaired, because you couldnât trust workmen these days unless you were on top of them the whole time, in a manner of speaking. This meant breaking her vows, but Mother Superior said this was all right, nothing to worry about, breaking vows was perfectly okay in a black sisterhood, and it would all be the same in a hundred yearsâ time or, rather, eleven yearsâ time, so if it gave her any pleasure here were the deeds and an address to forward any mail unless it came in long brown envelopes with windows in the front.
Then something very strange had happened to her. Left alone in the rambling building, working from one of the few undamaged rooms, arguing with men with cigarette stubs behind their ears and plaster dust on their trousers and the kind of pocket calculator that comes up with a different answer if the sums involved are in used notes, she discovered something she never knew existed.
Sheâd discovered, under layers of silliness and eagerness to please, Mary Hodges.
She found it quite easy to interpret buildersâ estimates and do VAT calculations. Sheâd got some books from the library, and found finance to be both interesting and uncomplicated. Sheâd stopped reading the kind of womenâs magazine that talks about romance and knitting and started reading the kind of womenâs magazine that talks about orgasms, but apart from making a mental note to have one if ever the occasion presented itself she dismissed them as only romance and knitting in a new form. So sheâd started reading the kind of magazine that talked about mergers.
After much thought, sheâd bought a small home computer from an amused and condescending young dealer in Norton. After a crowded weekend, she took it back. Not, as he thought when she walked back into the shop, to have a plug put on it, but because it didnât have a 387 co-processor. That bit he understoodâhe was a dealer, after all, and could understand quite long wordsâbut after that the conversation rapidly went downhill from his point of view. Mary Hodges produced yet more magazines. Most of them had the term âPCâ somewhere in their title, and many of them had articles and reviews that she had circled carefully in red ink.
She read about New Women. She
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