Mercury Rests (35 page)

1
Like all almond farmers in the California Central Valley, Travis pronounced
almond
to rhyme with
salmon
. When asked why, Travis would smile (Number Six) and say, “Because when they shake the nuts out of the tree, they knock the
l
out of them.”

2
Almonds on his father’s side, walnuts on his mother’s. There were also some pistachios a few generations back, but the Babcocks didn’t like to talk about that.

3
It was customary at the time to denote wealth in terms of the quantities of animals owned, which is a rather unhelpful measuring system if you think about it. Massive herds of animals are all well and good, but they don’t necessarily translate to luxurious living. After all, who wouldn’t trade a couple hundred yoke of oxen for indoor plumbing or, say, a house that doesn’t smell like several hundred oxen? Still, I think we can assume that Job was living pretty well, despite being surrounded by thousands of filthy farm animals.

4
Those who have read my previous report will recall Mercury’s decapitation at the hands of Lucifer’s planeport spies.

5
Plane 4721c, known for its delicious cheeses.

6
Job had a hard time believing this one, but it actually happened as reported. Heaven was testing an upgrade to their Pillar of Fire project (Class 3), and Lucifer had one of his spies switch out the test coordinates (the middle of the Gobi desert) with the coordinates of Job’s sheep herd.

7
On more than one occasion while president he had resorted to humming the “I’m Just a Bill” song to remember the sequence of the legislative process.

8
It may strike the reader as odd that an angel would use such a primitive method of attack. In fact, angels often resort to using crude projectile weapons (such as handguns or rocks) because it tends to be quicker and easier than harnessing interplanar energy.
Mano a mano
fights between two angels armed with only their own miraculous angelic powers tend to go on for days, ending only when one of them becomes too bored to continue. An angel armed with a steady supply of rocks can keep the defender too off balance to get a handle on the energy streams, eventually pelting him into submission.

9
Generally believed to be a listless cherubic paper-pusher named Ederatz.

10
A representation of the Eye of Providence can be found on the US dollar bill, supposedly put there by wily Freemasons. Freemasonry has been the subject of much conspiracy theorizing, but in fact it is a completely benign and prosaic organization that was founded specifically to divert attention from the activities of the far more secretive and insidious Order of the Pillars of Babylon.

11
There is probably no single process in Heaven requiring more paperwork than a Class 5 Pillar of Fire. After several POF-related debacles early on (the worst being the incineration of Job’s sheep by a misdirected Class 3), a considerable number of fail-safes were put in place to prevent future abuses and/or mistakes. Regulations became progressively more onerous over the course of the next few thousand years, culminating with the POFPAP (Pillar of Fire Paperwork Alleviation Protocol), which doubled the number of forms required.

12
In one of his first assignments, Perp was tasked with having the prophet Jonah killed by a whale for refusing to go to Nineveh. Perp felt sorry for Jonah and arranged for him to be swallowed alive by the whale and regurgitated three days later. Heaven found out that Jonah was still alive and was about to throw the book at Jonah when Mercury stepped forward, claiming that he had given the whale indigestion by feeding it tainted eels.

Robert Kroese’s sense of irony was honed growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan—home of the Amway Corporation and the Gerald R. Ford Museum, and the first city in the United States to fluoridate its water supply. In the second grade he wrote his first novel—the saga of Captain Bill and his spaceship, Thee Eagle. This turned out to be the high point of his academic career. After barely graduating from Calvin College in 1992 with a philosophy degree, he was fired from a variety of jobs before moving to California, where he stumbled into software development. As this job required neither punctuality nor a sense of direction, he excelled at it. In 2009 he called upon his extensive knowledge of useless information and love of explosions to write his first novel,
Mercury Falls. Mercury Rests
, his third book, concludes the trilogy.