The Complete Stories_ Volume 1 - Isaac Asimov [61]
Vincenzo looked tormented. "It will work. We've run pilot tests. But the important thing—"
"Which is?"
"That these bombs are man's death sentence. We don't seem to be able to learn that." Vincenzo nodded. "Look at them here. They're excited and thrilled, but not afraid."
The newsman said, "They know the danger. They're afraid, too."
"Not enough," said the scientist. "I've seen men watch an H-bomb blow an island into a hole and then go home and sleep. That's the way men are.
For thousands of years, hell-fire has been preached to them, and it's made no real impression."
"Hell-fire: Are you religious, sir?"
"What you saw yesterday was hell-fire. An exploding atom bomb is hell-fire. Literally." That was enough for Homer. He got up and changed his seat, but watched the audience uneasily. Were any afraid? Did any worry about hell-fire? It didn't seem so to him.
The lights went out, the projector started. On the screen, the firing tower stood gaunt. The audience grew tensely quiet.
Then a dot of light appeared at the apex of the tower, a brilliant, burning point, slowly budding in a lazy, outward elbowing, this way and that, taking on uneven shapes of light and shadow, growing oval. A man cried out chokingly, then others. A hoarse babble of noise, followed by thick silence. Horner could smell fear, taste terror in his own mouth, feel his blood freeze.
The oval fireball had sprouted projections, then paused a moment in stasis, before expanding rapidly into a bright and featureless sphere.
That moment of stasis—the fireball had shown dark spots for eyes, with dark lines for thin, flaring eyebrows, a hairline coming down V-shaped, a mouth twisted upward, laughing wildly in the hell-fire — and horns.
The Last Trump
The Archangel Gabriel was quite casual about the whole thing. Idly, he let the tip of one wing graze the planet Mars, which, being of mere matter, was unaffected by the contact.
He said, "It's a settled matter, Etheriel. There's nothing to be done about it now. The Day of Resurrection is due." Etheriel, a very junior seraph who had been created not quite a thousand years earlier as men counted time, quivered so that distinct vortices appeared in the continuum. Ever since his creation, he had been in immediate charge of Earth and environs. As a job, it was a sinecure, a cubbyhole, a dead end, but through the centuries he had come to take a perverse pride in the world.
"But you'll be disrupting my world without notice."
"Not at all. Not at all. Certain passages occur in the Book of Daniel and in the Apocalypse of St. John which are clear enough."
"They are? Having been copied from scribe to scribe? I wonder if two words in a row are left unchanged."
"There are hints in the Rig-Veda, in the Confucian Analects—"
"Which are the property of isolated cultural groups which exist as a thin aristocracy—"
"The Gilgamesh Chronicle speaks out plainly."
"Much of the Gilgamesh Chronicle was destroyed with the library of Ashurbanipal sixteen hundred years, Earth-style, before my creation.
"There are certain features of the Great Pyramid and a pattern in the inlaid jewels of the Taj Mahal—"
"Which are so subtle that no man has ever rightly interpreted them." Gabriel said wearily, "If you're going to object to everything, there's no use discussing the matter. In any case, you ought to know about it. In matters concerning Earth, you're omniscient."
"Yes, if I choose to be. I've had much to concern me here and investigating the possibilities of Resurrection did not, I confess, occur to me."
"Well, it should have. All the papers involved are in the files of the Council of Ascendants. You could have availed yourself of them at any time."
"I tell you all my time was needed here. You have no idea of the deadly efficiency of the Adversary on this planet. It took all my efforts to curb him, and even so—"
"Why, yes"—Gabriel stroked