Good Omens(52)

There was a pause. “We wouldn't say escaped,” said the spokesman. “Not escaped. Temporarily mislaid.”

“You mean it is still on the premises?”

“We certainly cannot see how it could have been removed from them,” said the spokesman.

“Surely you have considered terrorist activity?”

There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, “Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours.”

“But you said the power station is still producing electricity,” gasped the interviewer.

“It is.”

“How can it still be doing that if it hasn't got any reactors?”

You could see the spokesman's mad grin, even on the radio. You could see his pen, poised over the “Farms for Sale” column in Poultry World. “We don't know,” he said. “We were hoping you clever buggers at the BBC would have an idea.”

Anathema looked down at her map.

What she had been drawing looked like a galaxy, or the type of carving seen on the better class of Celtic monolith.

The ley.. lines were shifting. They were forming a spiral.

It was centered.. loosely, with some margin for error, but nevertheless centered.. on Lower Tadfield.

* * *

Several thousand miles away, at almost the same moment as Anathema was staring at her spirals, the pleasure cruiser Morbilli was aground in three hundred fathoms of water.

For Captain Vincent, this was just another problem. For example, he knew he should contact the owners, but he never knew from day to day .. or from hour to hour, in this computerized world.. actually who the current owners were.

Computers, that was the bloody trouble. The ship's papers were computerized and it could switch to the most currently advantageous flag

GOOD OMENS

of convenience in microseconds. Its navigation had been computerized as well, constantly updating its position by satellites. Captain Vincent had explained patiently to the owners, whoever they were, that several hundred square meters of steel plating and a barrel of rivets would be a better investment, and had been informed that his recommendation did not accord with current cost/benefit flow predictions.

Captain Vincent strongly suspected that despite all its electronics the ship was worth more sunk than afloat, and would probably go down as the most perfectly pinpointed wreck in nautical history.

By inference, this also meant that he was more valuable dead than alive.

He sat at his desk quietly leafing through International Maritime Codes, whose six hundred pages contained brief yet pregnant messages designed to transmit the news of every conceivable nautical eventuality across the world with the minimum of confusion and, above all, cost.

What he wanted to say was this: Was sailing SSW at position 33°N 47° 72'W. First Mate, who you may recall was appointed in New Guinea against my wishes and is probably a head.. hunter, indicated by signs that something was amiss. It appears that quite a vast expanse of seabed has risen up in the night. It contains a large number of buildings, many of which appeared pyramid.. like in structure. We are aground in the courtyard of one of these. There are some rather unpleasant statues. Amiable old men in long robes and diving helmets have come aboard the ship and are mingling happily with the passengers, who think we organized this. Please advise.

His questing finger moved slowly down the page, and stopped. Good old International Codes. They'd been devised eighty years before, but the men in those days had really thought hard about the kind of perils that might possibly be encountered on the deep.

He picked up his pen and wrote down: “XXXV QVVX.”

Translated, it meant: “Have found Lost Continent of Atlantis. High Priest has just won quoits contest.”

* * *

“It jolly well isn't!”

“It jolly well is!”

“It isn't, you know!”

“It jolly well is!”

“It isn't.. all right, then, what about volcanoes?” Wensleydale sat back, a look of triumph on his face.

“What about 'em?” said Adam.

“All that lather comes up from the center of the Earth, where it's all hot,” said Wensleydale. “I saw a program. It had David Attenborough, so it's true.”

The other Them looked at Adam. It was like watching a tennis match.

The Hollow Earth Theory was not going over well in the quarry. A beguiling idea that had stood up to the probings of such remarkable thinkers as Cyrus Read Teed, Bulwer.. Lytton, and Adolf Hitler was bending dangerously in the wind of Wensleydale's searingly bespectacled logic.