Only Human (4 page)

‘Well, that's something.'

‘Oh thanks a
lot
.' Kevin rubs the tip of his nose with the heel of his hand, and tries to think. Not surprisingly, heavy-duty thinking isn't something his family go in for much; when you're omniscient, you don't need to think, you
know
. ‘Computer,' he says, inspired, ‘you've got to tell me what's going on because it's your
duty.
You're part of the Divine infrastructure,' he adds, remembering one of Jay's favourite phrases. ‘Which means you've got responsibilities. You can't just sit there while the world goes to rack and ruin.'

‘But's that's crazy,' Kevin objects, his knuckles white with fury. ‘Whose side are you on, anyway?'

Kevin frowns. ‘They have?'

Whimpering, Kevin curls up in a ball and swings slowly from side to side in the swivel chair. ‘This is awful,' he moans. ‘It's like Mickey Mouse all over again.'

‘Yes. You know, with the broom and the buckets of water? Just like that.'

Kevin looks up, glowering. ‘You should know,' he snaps. ‘You're the omniscient one around here. Look it up.'

‘That doesn't make me feel a whole lot better, actually.

Isn't there
anything
I can do?'

‘It'd be a start, I suppose.'

‘Wow!' murmurs Kevin, impressed. ‘For a moment there I was starting to worry.'

With a little shriek, Kevin jumps to his feet; as he does so, his knee jars the desk, toppling a small china paperweight in the shape of a pig from the top of the console. It falls on to the keyboard, depressing two keys . . .

 

Duke Artofel, peer of Hell and chamberlain pursuivant of the Satanic host, glanced up at the clock on his wall and muttered something under his breath.

For a moment, he wondered if one of the clerks in the Department was playing a trick on him. Recently, because of the increasing level of administration involved in the running of Flipside, they'd promoted a number of the least gormless shopfloor workers to the clerical grades, and although most of them were shaping up nicely, their ingrained habits of tormenting everybody around them did occasionally surface; hence a sporadic plague of whoopee-cushions, plastic spiders in the staff canteen and unauthorised adjustments to the central-heating controls. So, Artofel speculated, have they gone a stage further and swapped my office clock for something out of the lawyer pits?

(Where, since the first lawyer sent in the first lawyer's bill, countless millions of advocates, notaries and solicitors have sat giving legal advice to wealthy clients only too happy to pay by the hour, facing clocks whose hands never budge so much as a millionth of an inch. Not for nothing have the lawyer pits received the prestigious Dante Award for two thousand years in succession.)

He looked again; no, it's just the usual exquisitely slow passage of time in Hell between clocking on and morning coffee, during which a minute seems a year, an hour feels like a century; and that's only here in the admin block. Come to think of it, more so in the admin block than anywhere else. After all, Artofel mused bitterly,
we
haven't done anything wrong.

A valid point; and one to which his mind kept returning, like a duck in a public park. The admin staff hadn't been part of the Great Sideways Promotions, when Flipside was first established. As far as they were concerned, they were just celestial civil servants, doing their duty in that station of everlasting life to which it had pleased the Chief to call them. As between Artofel and Alizeth, his opposite number in the Wages Department of Topside, there was no moral differential. They both belonged to the same grade, contributed to the same pension scheme, had the same number of days' annual holiday a year. True, the view from Alizeth's office window was rather more cheerful; but he had further to walk to the lifts, and the coffee on this level was reckoned to be rather better. No; the main difference between Flipside and Topside was time. In Heaven there is no time, while in Hell there's all the time in the world.

In practice, this meant Alizeth put his nose round the door of his office on average about once a century, while Artofel was stuck behind his desk twelve hours a day, two hundred and fifty-eight days a year, Flipside Mean time (and no time anywhere is meaner). There was a policy explanation for that, of course. For the Elect in Topside, standing before the face of the living God is its own reward, so the need for wages clerks isn't all that great; whereas the wages of sin is death.

Come on, clock. Give it some welly. Put yer mainspring into it . . .

The bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling, for you but not for me. Artofel sighed, and picked up the receiver.

‘Wages,' he mumbled. ‘Artofel speaking.'

‘Central,' chirped a voice at the other end of the wire. ‘Going off line in three minutes.'

Artofel made a disapproving noise with his nose and the back of his throat. ‘Oh for crying out loud, that's the fourth time this week. How are we supposed to get any work done if you lot keep fiddling with the computers? All right then, tell me where I can back up to, and I'll get today's stuff patched through.'

‘Sorry,' replied the voice, ‘no can do.The entire system's got to come off.'

Artofel's eyebrows shot up like interest rates just after an election. ‘What, the whole thing?' he gasped. ‘You must be kidding, we'll lose the lot. Have you clowns up there got any idea how long it'll take us to . . .?'

‘Don't blame me,' said the voice indifferently. ‘Apparently it's all to do with gremlins up in Mainframe. Got to go. Bye.'

The line died on him, and he dropped the receiver back on to its cradle. Something wrong with Mainframe? Impossible. Mainframe was . . . Well, it was, and ever had been. Only a very brave or a very foolish gremlin would venture in there; certainly not any of the ones he occasionally shared a table with in the canteen. Mostly, in fact, the gremlins he knew were quiet, staid little chaps, more-than-my-job's-worth types, forever quoting the rule book and worrying about what they could justifiably put down on their expense sheets. Unless—

Maybe it's not one of ours.

Artofel sat back in his chair, his mouth open.
Other
gremlins, from somewhere else. Somewhere outside. Although he wasn't superstitious, he shuddered and made the sign of the pitchfork. The very thought of it gave him the shivers.

Oh Christmas, the working files . . . If he was quick, there might just be time to make a hard copy, that was assuming the printers were free and he could access the backup utilities. He swung his chair round, barking his knee on the edge of the desk, and stabbed at a few keys like a hung-over woodpecker. The screen cleared -

- and went green on him. Spiffing, he muttered under his breath, now I've gone and killed the wretched thing. Could've saved them upstairs the bother.

No, he hadn't; because the screen cleared and a personnel file scrolled up. Artofel's brow furrowed like an old-fashioned roll-top desk; not a file he was familiar with. Not, in fact, a Flipside file at all. More like a Topsider, as far as he could tell from the brief CV.

Jeepers, a mortal! What's more, a One of Them; a sky-pilot, a God-botherer, a back-to-front-collar merchant. The V word. What the Flip was his file doing down here?

Mistake, obviously; gremlins in Mainframe. Whatever the reason, it could only mean trouble, so the obvious thing to do was get rid of it and pretend it'd never happened. Press CLEAR/ENTER and hope nobody'd noticed.

Claws trembling slightly, he tapped the keys—

Flashing green lights. Lots of bleeping.

Dukes of Hell aren't supposed to panic; after all, what could possibly happen to them to justify it? Accordingly, it took Artofel some time to recognise the unfamiliar and thoroughly disconcerting sensation he was experiencing. When his mind cleared, he found he was no longer sitting at his desk; more than that, he wasn't in his office. He wasn't even Flipside any more. Not Topside either. Which only left one place he could be.

It was then that he became aware of all the people looking at him.

Rows and rows of them, with eyes fixed on him like so many cats watching a mouse; mortals, at a guess, although since he'd never met a mortal in the flesh he had no way of knowing. They were sitting in a sort of auditorium, and he was standing in a wooden box at the top of a short flight of stairs. And he was wearing a sort of dressing-gown thing with wide sleeves, and a shirt without a collar—

Correction. There was a collar, but it was the wrong way round—

 

‘Mainframe?'

Kevin closes his eyes. ‘That does it,' he groans. ‘Where's that number? I'm going to phone Dad.'

‘That's what I thought. Will you give me the number, or have I got to go back to my room and get it?'

‘
What?'

‘Attempting? Don't talk soft, Mainframe, when did you ever
attempt
anything? You're Mainframe, for pity's sake.'

‘But . . .' Mickey Mouse, he reflects, be blowed; all he'd had to deal with was a certain amount of surplus water. A few ruined carpets, tidemarks on the wallpaper, nothing the insurance wouldn't cover. He hadn't started something that was capable of crippling the Mind of Heaven. And he at least had some vague idea of what it was he'd actually done.

‘Mainframe, there
is
no time in Heaven, you know that . . . Mainframe? Oh no, what's happening to you? Mainframe?'

Frantically he taps - tapped - at the keys; but nothing happened. The screen was frozen, with that last awful message stuck on it like the silly face your mother warned you about. It's time, Kevin realised; somehow or other, there's time in Heaven, and it's jamming everything up. Now what'll I do?

Dad!

Dad?

Time in Heaven, where there isn't any. Imagine you'd grown up on the Moon and you'd just come to Earth for the first time and had your first brush with gravity. Time, though, is worse; because gravity just tries to grind you into the dirt. Time gets you all ways at once, crushing you down and inflating you like a balloon, compressing you like a Cortina in a scrapyard and dragging at you like a rupture in the cabin wall at forty thousand feet. Worse; think what it'd be like if both sides of the cabin ruptured at once, and you were standing in the middle of the gangway.

Who?

Dad, is that you? Look, you've got to come home, everything's going wrong and it's all my fault. Please, Dad, listen to me. It's all going wrong and I don't know what to do.

Who is that, please? Is there anybody there? Hello?

And then silence. As far as Kevin was concerned, that was it. Snap, went the camel's back. He balled his fists, squealed like clapped-out brake drums and bashed the keyboard as hard as he could -

- and in doing so, depressed two keys.