"Well, orlright, but after that he gets out the book and the big stamp."

"Which says 'Hush It Up,"' said Pepper.

"It says Top Secret," said Adam, resenting this attempt at biparti­san creativity. "It's like nucular power stations. They keep blowin' up all the time but no one ever finds out 'cos the goverment hushes it up."

"They don't keep blowing all the time," said Wensleydale severely. "My father says they're dead safe and mean we don't have to live in a greenhouse. Anyway, there's a big picture of one in my comic* and it doesn't say anything about it blowing up."

[26]

"Yes," said Brian, "But you lent me that comic afterwards and I know what type of picture it was."

Wensleydale hesitated, and then said in a voice heavy with badly tried patience, "Brian, just because it says Exploded Diagram‑"

There was the usual brief scuffle.

"Look," said Adam severely. "Do you want me to tell you about the Aquarium Age, or not?"

The fight, never very serious amongst the siblinghood of the Them, subsided.

"Right," said Adam. He scratched his head. "Now you've made me forget where I've got to," he complained.

"Flyin' saucers," said Brian.

"Right. Right. Well, if you do see a flying UFO, these government men come and tell you off," said Adam, getting back into his stride. "In a big black car. It happens all the time in America."

The Them nodded sagely. Of this at least they had no doubt. Amer­ica was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe that just about anything could happen in Amer­ica.

"Prob'ly causes traffic jams," said Adam, "all these men in black cars, going about telling people off for seeing UFOs. They tell you that if you go on seeing 'em, you'll have a Nasty Accident."

"Prob'ly get run over by a big black car," said Brian, picking at a scab on a dirty knee. He brightened up. "Do you know," he said, "my cousin said that in America there's shops that sell thirty‑nine different flavors of ice cream?"

This even silenced Adam, briefly.

"There aren't thirty‑nine flavors of ice cream," said Pepper. "There aren't thirty‑nine flavors in the whole world."

"There could be, if you mixed them up," said Wensleydale, blinking owlishly. "You know. Strawberry and chocolate. Chocolate and vanilla." He sought for more English flavors. "Strawberry and vanilla and choco­late," he added, lamely.

"And then there's Atlantis," said Adam loudly.

He had their interest there. They enjoyed Atlantis. Cities that sank under the sea were right up the Them's street. They listened intently to a jumbled account of pyramids, weird priesthoods, and ancient secrets.

"Did it just happen sudden, or slowly?" said Brian.

"Sort of sudden an' slowly,"said Adam, "'cos a lot of 'em got away in boats to all the other countries and taught 'em how to do maths an' English an' History an' stuff."

"Don't see what's so great about that," said Pepper.

"Could of been good fun, when it was sinking," said Brian wist­fully, recalled the one occasion when Lower Tadfield had been flooded. "People deliverin' the milk and newspapers by boat, no one having to go to school."

"If I was an Atlantisan, I'd of stayed," said Wensleydale. This was greeted with disdainful laughter, but he pressed on. "You'd just have to wear a diver's helmet, that's all. And nail all the windows shut and fill the houses with air. It would be great."

Adam greeted this with the chilly stare he reserved for any of Them who came up with an idea he really wished he'd thought of first.

"They could of done," he conceded, somewhat weakly. "After they'd sent all the teachers off in the boats. Maybe everyone else stayed on when it went down."

"You wouldn't have to wash," said Brian, whose parents forced him to wash a great deal more than he thought could possibly be healthy. Not that it did any good. There was something basically ground in about Brian. "Because everything would stay clean. An', an' you could grow seaweed and stuff in the garden and shoot sharks. And have pet octopuses and stuff. And there wouldn't be any schools and stuff because they'd of got rid of all the teachers."

"They could still be down there now," said Pepper.

They thought about the Atlanteans, clad in flowing mystic robes and goldfish bowls, enjoying themselves deep under the choppy waters of the ocean.

"Huh," said Pepper, summing up their feelings.

"What shall we do now?" said Brian. "It's brightened up a bit."

In the end they played Charles Fort Discovering Things. This con­sisted of one of the Them walking around with the ancient remains of an umbrella, while the others treated him to a rain of frogs or, rather, frog. They could only find one in the pond. It was an elderly frog, who knew the Them of old, and tolerated their interest as the price it paid for a pond otherwise free of moorhens and pike. It put up with things good‑naturedly for a while before hopping off to a secret and so‑far‑undiscovered hideout in an old drainpipe.

Then they went home for lunch.

Adam felt very pleased about the morning's work. He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist any more.

Whereas this Aquarium Age stuff was really real. Grown‑up people wrote lots of books about it (New Aquarian was full of adverts for them) and Bigfoots and Mothmen and Yetis and sea monsters and Surrey pumas really existed. If Cortez, on his peak in Darien, had had slightly damp feet from efforts at catching frogs, he'd have felt just like Adam at that mo­ment.

The world was bright and strange and he was in the middle of it.

He bolted his lunch and retired to his room. There were still quite a few New Aquarians he hadn't read yet.

– – -

The cocoa was a congealed brown sludge half filling the cup.

Certain people had spent hundreds of years trying to make sense of the prophecies of Agnes Nutter. They had been very intelligent, in the main. Anathema Device, who was about as close to being Agnes as genetic drift would allow, was the best of the bunch. But none of them had been angels.

Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these were wrong; Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort. But he was intelligent. And it was an angelic intelligence which, while not being particularly higher than human intelligence, is much broader and has the advantage of having thousands of years of practice.