Good Omens

scientific equipment store.
    â€œBrilliant!” said Adam, prodding at it. “What’s the thing with the three legs?”
    â€œIt’s a theodolite,” said Anathema from the kitchen. “It’s for tracking ley-lines.”
    â€œWhat are they, then?” said Adam.
    She told him.
    â€œCor,” he said. “Are they?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAll over the place?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI’ve never seen ’em. Amazin’, there bein’ all these invisible lines of force around and me not seeing ’em.”
    Adam didn’t often listen, but he spent the most enthralling twenty minutes of his life, or at least of his life that day. No one in the Young household so much as touched wood or threw salt over their shoulder. The only nod in the direction of the supernatural was a half-hearted pretense, when Adam had been younger, that Father Christmas came down the chimney. 22
    He’d been starved of anything more occult than a Harvest Festival. Her words poured into his mind like water into a quire of blotting paper.
    Dog lay under the table and growled. He was beginning to have serious doubts about himself.
    Anathema didn’t only believe in ley-lines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rain forests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island. She didn’t compartmentalize her beliefs. They were welded into one enormous, seamless belief, compared with which that held by Joan of Arc seemed a mere idle notion. On any scale of mountain moving it shifted at least point five of an alp. 23
    No one had even used the word environment in Adam’s hearing before. The South American rain forests were a closed book to Adam, and it wasn’t even made of recycled paper.
    The only time he interrupted her was to agree with her views on nuclear power: “I’ve been to a nucular power station. It was boring . There was no green smoke and bubbling stuff in tubes. Shouldn’t be allowed, not having proper bubbling stuff when people have come all the way to see it, and having just a lot of men standin’ around not even wearin’ space suits.”
    â€œThey do all the bubbling after visitors have gone home,” said Anathema grimly.
    â€œHuh,” said Adam.
    â€œThey should be done away with this minute.”
    â€œServe them right for not bubblin’,” said Adam.
    Anathema nodded. She was still trying to put her finger on what was so odd about Adam, and then she realized what it was.
    He had no aura.
    She was quite an expert on auras. She could see them, if she stared hard enough. They were a little glow of light around people’s heads, and according to a book she’d read the color told you things about their health and general well-being. Everyone had one. In mean-minded, closed-in people they were a faint, trembling outline, whereas expansive and creative people might have one extending several inches from the body.
    She’d never heard of anyone without one, but she couldn’t see one around Adam at all. Yet he seemed cheerful, enthusiastic, and as well-balanced as a gyroscope.
    Maybe I’m just tired, she thought.
    Anyway, she was pleased and gratified to find such a rewarding student, and even loaned him some copies of New Aquarian Digest , a small magazine edited by a friend of hers.
    It changed his life. At least, it changed his life for that day.
    To his parents’ astonishment he went to bed early, and then lay under the blankets until after midnight with a torch, the magazines, and a bag of lemon drops. The occasional “Brilliant!” emerged from his ferocious-chewing mouth.
    When the batteries ran out he emerged into the darkened room and lay back with his head pillowed in his hands, apparently watching the squadron of X-wing™ fighters that hung from the ceiling. They moved gently in the night breeze.
    But Adam wasn’t really watching them. He was staring instead into the brightly lit panorama of his own imagination, which was whirling like a fairground.
    This wasn’t Wensleydale’s aunt and a wineglass. This sort of occulting was a lot more interesting.
    Besides, he liked Anathema. Of course, she was very old, but when Adam liked someone he wanted to make them happy.
    He wondered how he could make Anathema happy.
    It used to be thought that the events that changed