Good Omens

him.
    The questing root must have found the buried soil. It changed color and thickened, like a fire hose when the water is turned on. The artificial waterfall stopped running; Jaime visualized fractured pipes blocked with sucking fibers.
    Now he could see what was happening outside. The street surface was heaving like a sea. Saplings were pushing up between the cracks.
    Of course, he reasoned; they had sunlight. His tree didn’t. All it had was the muted gray light that came through the dome four stories up. Dead light.
    But what could you do?
    You could do this:
    The elevators had stopped running because the power was off, but it was only four flights of stairs. Jaime carefully shut his lunchbox and padded back to his cart, where he selected his longest broom.
    People were pouring out of the building, yelling. Jaime moved amiably against the flow like a salmon going upstream.
    A white framework of girders, which the architect had presumably thought made a dynamic statement about something or other, held up the smoked glass dome. In fact it was some sort of plastic, and it took Jaime, perched on a convenient strip of girder, all his strength and the full leverage of the broom’s length to crack it. A couple more swings brought it down in lethal shards.
    The light poured in, lighting up the dust in the plaza so that the air looked as though it was full of fireflies.
    Far below, the tree burst the walls of its brushed concrete prison and rose like an express train. Jaime had never realized that trees made a sound when they grew, and no one else had realized it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves twenty-four hours from peak to peak.
    Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is vroooom .
    Jaime watched it come toward him like a green mushroom cloud. Steam was billowing out from around its roots.
    The girders never stood a chance. The remnant of the dome went up like a ping-pong ball on a water spray.
    It was the same over all the city, except that you couldn’t see the city any more. All you could see was the canopy of green. It stretched from horizon to horizon.
    Jaime sat on his branch, clung to a liana, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
    Presently, it began to rain.
    THE KAPPAMAKI , a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?
    Except that, today, there weren’t any whales. The crew stared at the screens, which by the application of ingenious technology could spot anything larger than a sardine and calculate its net value on the international oil market, and found them blank. The occasional fish that did show up was barreling through the water as if in a great hurry to get elsewhere.
    The captain drummed his fingers on the console. He was afraid that he might soon be conducting his own research project to find out what happened to a statistically small sample of whaler captains who came back without a factory ship full of research material. He wondered what they did to you. Maybe they locked you in a room with a harpoon gun and expected you to do the honorable thing.
    This was unreal. There ought to be something .
    The navigator punched up a chart and stared at it.
    â€œHonorable sir?” he said.
    â€œWhat is it?” said the captain testily.
    â€œWe seem to have a miserable instrument failure. Seabed in this area should be two hundred meters.”
    â€œWhat of it?”
    â€œI’m reading 15,000 meters, honorable sir. And still falling.”
    â€œThat is foolish. There is no such depth.”
    The captain glared at several million yen worth of cutting-edge technology, and thumped it.
    The navigator gave a nervous smile.
    â€œAh, sir,” he said, “it is shallower already.”
    Beneath the thunders of the upper deep , as Aziraphale and Tennyson both knew, Far, far beneath in the abyssal sea / The kraken sleepeth .
    And now it was waking up.
    Millions of tons of deep ocean ooze cascade off its flanks as it rises.
    â€œSee,” said the navigator. “Three thousand meters already.”
    The kraken doesn’t have eyes. There has never been anything for it to look at. But as it billows up through the icy waters it picks up the microwave noise of the sea, the sorrowing beeps and whistles of the whalesong.
    â€œEr,” said the navigator, “one thousand meters?”
    The kraken is not amused.
    â€œFive hundred meters?”
    The factory ship rocks on the