The Day After Judgement (9 page)

‘That bomb did you no good at all, I take it,’ he said.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,’ McKnight said. ‘True, it didn’t destroy the city, or even hurt it visibly, but
it certainly seemed to take them by surprise. For about an hour after the fireball went up, the sky above the target was full
of them. It was like firing a flashbulb in a cave full of sleeping bats – and we got pictures too.’

‘Any evidence that you, uh, destroyed any of them?’

‘Well, we saw a lot of them going back to the city under their own power – despite very bad design, they seem to fly pretty
well – but we don’t have any count of how many went up. We didn’t see any falling, but that might have been because some of
them had been vaporized.’

‘Not bloody likely. Their bodies may have been vaporized,
but the bodies were borrowed in the first place. Like knocking down a radio-controlled aircraft: the craft may be a total
loss, but the controlling Intelligence is unharmed, somewhere else, and can send another one against you whenever it likes.’

‘Excuse me,. Doctor Baines, but the analogy is inexact,’ Buelg said. ‘We know that because we did get a lot out of the bomb
besides simply stirring up a flurry. High-speed movies of the column of the mushroom as it went up show a lot of the creatures
trying to reform. One individual we were able to follow went through thirty-two changes in the first minute. The changes are
all incredible and beyond any physical theory or model we can erect to account for them, but they do show, first, that the
creature was seriously inconvenienced, and second, that it wanted and perhaps needed to hold on to
some
kind of physical form. That’s a start. It suggests to me that had we been able to confine them all in the firebal, where
the temperatures are way higher still, no gamut of change they could have run through would have done them any good. Eventually
they would have been stripped of the last form and utterly destroyed.’

‘The last form, maybe,’ Baines said. ‘But the spirit would remain. I don’t know why they’re clinging to physical forms so
determinedly, but it probably has only a local and tactical reason” something to do with the prosecuting of the present war.
But you can’t destroy a spirit by such means, any more than you can destroy a message by burning the piece of paper it’s written
on.’

As he said this, he became uncomfortably aware that he had gotten the argument out of some sermon against atheism that he
had heard as a boy, and had thought simple-minded even then. But since then, he had
seen
demons – and a lot more closely than anybody else here had.

‘That is perhaps an open question, Šatvje said heavily. ‘I am not myself a sceptic, you should understand, Doctor Baines, but
I have to remind myself that no spirit has ever been so intensively tested to destruction before. Inside a thermonuclear fireball,
even the nuclei of hydrogen atoms find it difficult to retain their integrity.’

‘Atomic nuclei remain matter, and the conservation laws
still apply. Demons are neither matter nor energy; they are something else.’

‘We do not know that they are not energy,’ Šatvje said. ‘They may well be fields, falling somewhere within the electro-magnetico-gravitic
triad. Remember that we have never achieved a unified field theory; even Einstein repudiated his in the last years of his
life, and quantum mechanics – with all respect to De Broglie – in only a clumsy avoidance of the problem. These … spirits
… may be such unified fields. And one characteristic of such fields might be 100 per cent negative entropy.’

There couldn’t be any such thing as completely negative entropy,’ Buelg put in ‘Such a system would constantly
accumulate
order, which means that it would run backwards in time and we would never be aware of it at all. You have to allow for Planck’s
Constant. This would be the only stable case–’

He wrote rapidly on a pad, stripped off the sheet and passed it across the table. The note read, in very neat lettering:

The girl came in with another manifold of sheets from the computer, and this time Jack Ginsberg’s eye could be observed to
be wandering haunchward a little. Baines had never objected to this – he preferred his most valuable employees to have a few
visible and visable weaknesses – but for once he almost even sympathized; he was feeling a little out of his depth.

‘Meaning what?’ he said.

‘Why,’ Šatvje said, a little patronizingly, ‘eternal life, of course Life is negative entropy. Stable negative entropy is
eternal life.’

‘Barring accidents,’ Buelg said, with a certain grim relish. ‘We have no access yet to the gravitic part of the spectrum,
but the electromagnetic sides are totally vulnerable, and with the clues we’ve got now, we ought to be able to burst into
such a closed system like a railroad spike going through an auto tyre.’

‘If you can kill a demon,’ Baines said slowly. ‘Then –’

‘That’s right,’ Buelg said affably. ‘Angel, devil, ordinary immortal soul – you name it, we can do for it. Not right away,
maybe, but “before very long.’

‘Perhaps the ultimate human achievement,’ Šatvje said, with a dreaming, almost beatific expression. ‘The theologians call
condemnation to Hell the Second Death. Soon, perhaps, we may be in a position to give the Third Death … the bliss of complete
extinction … liberation from the Wheel!’

McKnight’s eyes were now also wandering, though towards the ceiling. He wore the expression of a man who has heard all this
before, and is not enjoying it any better the second time. Baines himself was very far from being bored – indeed, he was as
close to horrified fascination as he had ever been in his life – but clearly it was time to bring everybody back to Earth.
He said:

‘Talk’s cheap. Do you have any actual plans?’

‘You bet we do,’ McKnight said, suddenly galvanized. ‘I’ve had Chief Hay run me an inventory of the country’s remaining military
power, and, believe me, there’s a lot of it. I was surprised myself. We are going to mount a major attack upon this city of
Dis, and for it we’re going to bring some things up out of the ground that the American people have never seen before and
neither has anybody else, including this pack of demons. I don’t know why they’re just sitting there, but maybe it’s because
they think they’ve already got us licked. Well, they’re dead wrong. Nobody can lick the United States – not in the long run!’

It was an extraordinary sentiment from a man who had been maintaining for years that the United States had ‘lost’ China, ‘surrendered’
Korea, ‘abandoned’ Vietnam and was overrun by home-bred Communists; but Baines, who knew the breed, saw no purpose in calling
attention to the fact.
Their arguments, not being based in reason, cannot be swayed by reason. Instead
he said:

‘General, believe me, I advise against it. I know some of the weapons you’re talking about, and they’re pretty powerful. I
ought to know; my company designed and supplied some of them, so it would be against my own interests to run them down to you.
But I very much doubt that any of them will do
any good under the present circumstances.’

‘That, of course, remains to be seen,’ McKnight said.

‘I’d rather we didn’t. If they work, we may find ourselves worse off than before. That’s the point I came here to press. The
demons are about 90 per cent in charge of the world now, but you’ll notice that they haven’t taken any further steps against
us. There’s a reason for this. They are fighting against another Opponent entirely, and it’s quite possible that we ought
to be on their side.’

McKnight leaned back in his chair, with the expression of a president confronted at a press conference with a question on
which he had not been briefed.

‘Let me be quite sure I understand you, Doctor Baines,’ he said. ‘Do you propose that the present invasion of the United States
was a goodthing? And, further, that we ought not to be opposing the occupying forces with all our might? That indeed we ought
instead to be aiding and abetting the powers responsible for it?’

‘I don’t propose any aiding and abetting whatsoever,’ Baines said, with an inward sigh. ‘I just think we ought to lay off
for a while, that’s all, until we see how the situation works out.’

‘You are almost the last man in the world.’ McKnight said stiffly. ‘whom I would have suspected of being a ComSymp, let alone
a pro-Chink. When I have your advice entered upon the record, I will also add an expression of my personal confidence. In
the meantime, the attack goes forward as scheduled.’

Baines said nothing more, advisedly. It had occurred to him, out of his experience with Theron Ware, that angels fallen and
unfallen, and the immortal part of man, partook of and had sprung from the essentially indivisable nature of their Creator;
that if these men could destroy that Part, they could equally well dissolve the Whole; that a successful storming of Dis would
inevitably be followed by a successful war upon Heaven; and that if God were not dead yet, He soon might be.

However it turned out, it looked like it was going to be the most interesting civil war he had ever run guns to.

9

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES

Strategic Air Command Office

Denver, Colorado

Date: May 1

MEMORANDUM:
Number I

TO
: All Combat Arms

SUBJECT
: General Combat Orders

1. This Memorandum supersedes all previous directives on this subject.

2. The United States has been invaded and all combat units will stand in readiness to expel the invading forces.

3. The enemy has introduced a number of combat innovations of which all units must be made thoroughly aware. All officers
will therefore read this Memorandum in full to their respective commands, and will thereafter post it in a conspicuous place.
All commands should be sampled for familiarity with the contents of the Memorandum.

4. Enemy troops are equipped with individual body armour. In accordance with ancient Oriental custom, this armour has been
designed and decorated in various grotesque shapes, in the hope of frightening the opposition. It is expected that the American
soldier will simply laugh at this primitive device. All personnel are warned, however, that as armour these ‘demon suits’
are extremely effective. A very high standard of marksmanship will be required against them.

5. An unknown number of the enemy body armour units, perhaps approaching 100 per cent, are capable of free flight, like the
jump suits supplied to US. Mobile Infantry. Ground forces will therefore be alert to possible attack from the air by individual
enemy troops as well as by conventional aircrat.

6. It is anticipated that in combat the enemy will employ various explosive, chemical and toxic agents which may
produce widespread novel effects. All personnel are hereby reminded that these effects will be either natural in origin, or
illusion.

7. Following the reading of this Memorandum, all officers will read to their commands those paragraphs of the Articles of
War pertaining to the penalties for cowardice in battle.

By order of the Commander in Chief:

D. WILLIS MCKNIGHT

General of the Armies, USAF

Because of the destruction of Rome and of the Vatican with it – alas for that great library and treasure house of all Christendom!
– the Holy See had been moved to Venice, which had been spared thus far, and was now housed in almost equal magnificence in
the Sala del Collegio of the Palazzo Ducale, the only room to escape intact from the great fire of 1577, where, under a ceiling
by Veronese, the doges had been accustomed to receive their ambassadors to other city-states. It was the first time the palace
had been used by anybody but tourists since Napoleon had forced the abdication of Lodovico Manin exaclly eleven hundred years
after the election of the first doge.

There were no tourists here now, of course: the city, broiling hot and stinking of the garbage in its canals, brooded lifelessly
under the Adritic sun, a forgotten museum. Nobody was about in the crazy narrow streets, and the cramped
ristorant,
but the native Venetian, their livelihood gone, sullenly starving together in small groups and occasionally snarling at each
other in their peculiar dialect. Many already showed signs of radiation sickness: their hair was shedding in patches and pools
of vomit caught the sunlight, ignored by everyone but the flies.