"Hoy!" shouted R. P. Tyler. "Young!"
Mr. Young was in his front garden, sitting on his deck chair, smoking his pipe.
This had more to do with Deirdre's recent discovery of the menace of passive smoking and banning of smoking in the house than he would care to admit to his neighbors. It did not improve his temper. Neither did being addressed as Young by Mr. Tyler.
"Yes?"
"Your son, Adam."
Mr. Young sighed. "What's he done now?"
"Do you know where he is?"
Mr. Young checked his watch. "Getting ready for bed, I would assume."
Tyler grinned, tightly, triumphantly. "I doubt it. I saw him and his little fiends, and that appalling mongrel, not half an hour ago, cycling towards the air base."
Mr. Young puffed on his pipe.
"You know how strict they are up there," said Mr. Tyler, in case Mr. Young hadn't got the message.
"You know what a one your son is for pressing buttons and things," he added.
Mr. Young took his pipe out of his mouth and examined the stem thoughtfully.
"Hmp," he said. "I see," he said.
"Right," he said.
And he went inside.
At exactly that same moment, four motorbikes swished to a halt a few hundred yards from the main gate. The riders switched off their engines and raised their helmet visors. Well, three of them did.
"I was rather hoping we could crash through the barriers," said War wistfully.
"That'd only cause trouble," said Famine.
"Good."
"Trouble for us, I mean. The power and phone lines must be down, but they're bound to have generators and they'll certainly have radio. If someone starts reporting that terrorists have invaded the base then people'll start acting logically and the whole Plan collapses."
"Huh."
WE GO IN, WE DO THE JOB, WE GO OUT, WE LET HUMAN NATURE TAKE ITS COURSE, said Death.
"This isn't how I imagined it, chaps," said War. "I haven't been waiting for thousands of years just to fiddle around with bits of wire. It's not what you'd call dramatic. Albrecht Dürer didn't waste his time doing woodcuts of the Four Button-Pressers of the Apocalypse, I do know that."
"I thought there'd be trumpets," said Pollution.
"Look at it like this," said Famine. "It's just groundwork. We get to do the riding forth afterwards. The proper riding forth. Wings of the storm and so on. You've got to be flexible."
"Weren't we supposed to meet… someone?" said War.
There was no sound but the metallic noises of cooling motorbike engines.
Then Pollution said, slowly, "You know, I can't say I imagined it'd be somewhere like this, either. I thought it'd be, well, a big city. Or a big country. New York, perhaps. Or Moscow. Or Armageddon itself."
There was another pause.
Then War said, "Where is Armageddon, anyway?"
"Funny you should ask," said Famine. "I've always meant to look it up."
"There's an Armageddon, Pennsylvania," said Pollution. "Or maybe it's Massachusetts, or one of them places. Lots of guys in heavy beards and seriously black hats."
"Nah," said Famine. "It's somewhere in Israel, I think."
MOUNT CARMEL.
"I thought that was where they grow avocados."
AND THE END OF THE WORLD.
"Is that right? That's one big avocado."
"I think I went there once," said Pollution. "The old city of Megiddo. Just before it fell down. Nice place. Interesting royal gateway."
War looked at the greenness around them.
"Boy," she said, "did we take a wrong turning."
THE GEOGRAPHY IS IMMATERIAL.
"Sorry, lord?"
IF ARMAGEDDON IS ANYWHERE, IT IS EVERYWHERE.
"That's right," said Famine, "we're not talking about a few square miles of scrub and goats anymore."
There was another pause.
LET US GO.
War coughed. "It's just that I thought that… he'd be coming with us…?"
Death adjusted his gauntlets.
THIS, he said firmly, IS A JOB FOR THE PROFESSIONALS.
Afterwards, Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger recalled events at the gate as having happened like this:
A large staff car drew up by the gate. It was sleek and officiallooking although, afterwards, he wasn't entirely sure why he had thought this, or why it sounded momentarily as though it were powered by motorbike engines.
Four generals got out. Again, the sergeant was a little uncertain of why he had thought this. They had proper identification. What kind of identification, admittedly, he couldn't quite recall, but it was proper. He saluted.
And one of them said, "Surprise inspection, soldier."
To which Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger replied, "Sir, I have not been informated as to the incidence of a surprise inspection at this time, sir."
"Of course not," said one of the generals. "That's because it's a surprise."
The sergeant saluted again.
"Sir, permission to confirmate this intelligence with base command, sir," he said, uneasily.
The tallest and thinnest of the generals strolled a little way from the group, turned his back, and folded his arms.
One of the others put a friendly arm around the sergeant's shoulders and leaned forward in a conspiratorial way.
"Now see here—" he squinted at the sergeant's name tag "— Deisenburger, maybe I'll give you a break. It's a surprise inspection, got that? Surprise. That means no getting on the horn the moment we've gone through, understand? And no leaving your post. Career soldier like you'll understand, am I right?" he added. He winked. "Otherwise you'll find yourself busted so low you'll have to say 'sir' to an imp."
Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger stared at him.
"Private," hissed one of the other generals. According to her tag, her name was Waugh. Sgt. Deisenburger had never seen a female general like her before, but she was certainly an improvement.
"What?"
"Private. Not imp."
"Yeah. That's what I meant. Yeah. Private. Okay, soldier?"
The sergeant considered the very limited number of options at his disposal.
"Sir, surprise inspection, sir?" he said.
"Provisionatedly classificisioned at this time," said Famine, who had spent years learning how to sell to the federal government and could feel the language coming back to him.
"Sir, affirmative, sir," said the sergeant.
"Good man," said Famine, as the barrier was raised. "You'll go a long way." He glanced at his watch. "Very shortly."
Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you're in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.
No one stopped the four as they purposefully made their way into one of the long, low buildings under the forest of radio masts. No one paid any attention to them. Perhaps they saw nothing at all. Perhaps they saw what their minds were instructed to see, because the human brain is not equipped to see War, Famine, Pollution, and Death when they don't want to be seen, and has got so good at not seeing that it often manages not to see them even when they abound on every side.