Free The Day After Judgement by James Blish Page A

do so, whatever delusions about
     the point might be harboured by Father Domenico and his fellows.
    Ware identified the farmhouse proper without any trouble. It looked every bit as clean, fat and prosperous as the rest, but
     it was suspiciously quiet; by this hour, everyone should be up and beginning the day’s chores. He approached with caution,
     alert for guns or dogs, but the silence continued.
    The caution had been needless. Inside, the place was an outright slaughterhouse, resembling nothing so much as the last act
     of Webster’s
The White Devil.
Ware inspected it with clinical fascination. The family had been a large one – the parents, one grandparent, four daughters,
     three sons and the inevitable dog – and at some time during the preceding night they had suddenly fallen upon each other with
     teeth nails, pokers, a buggy whip, a bicycle chain, a cleaver, a pig knife and the butt end of a smoothbore musket, old enough
     to have been a relic of the Boer War. It was an obvious case of simultaneous mass possession, probably worked through the
     women, as these things almost always were. Doubtless they would infinitely have preferred a simple localized earthquake, but
     from an attack like this no conceivable peasant hex sign could have protected them.
    Probably nothing could have, for as it had turned out, in their simple traditional religiosity they had chosen the wrong side.
     Like most of humankind, they had been bom victims; even a beginning study of the Problem of Evil would have suggested to them
     that their God had never played fair with them, as indeed He had caused to be written out in Job for all to read; and their
     primitive backwoods demonology had never honestly admitted that there really were two sides to the Great Game, let alone allowing
     them any inkling of who the players were.
    While he considered what to do next he prowled around the kitchen and the woodshed, where the larder was, trying not to Slip
     or step on anybody. There were only two eggs – today’s had obviously not been harvested – but he found smoked, streaky rashers
     of bacon, a day-old loaf of bread just ripe for cutting, nearly a pound of country butter and a stone jug of cold milk. All
     in all it was a good deal more than he could eat, but he built a fire in the old wood-burning stove, cooked the eggs and the
     bacon, and did his best to put it all down. After all he had noidea when he would meet his next meal. He had already decided that he was not yet desperate enough to risk calling for an
     apport, but instead would keep walking generally westward until he met an opportunity to steal a car. (He would find none
     on the farm; the Amish still restricted themselves to horses.)
    As he came out of the farmhouse into the bright morning, a sandwich in both hip pockets, he heard from the undestroyed barn
     a demanding lowing of cattle. Sorry, friends, he though; nobody’s going to milk you this morning.
    8
    Baines knew the structure and approaches of Strategic Air Command headquarters rather better than the Department of Defense
     would have thought right and proper even for a civilian with Q clearance, although there had been several people in DoD who
     would not have been at all surprised at it. The otherwise passengerless jet carrying him and Jack Ginsberg made no attempt
     to approach either Denver Airport or the US Air Force Academy field at Colorado Springs, both of which, he correctly assumed,
     would no longer be in existence anyhow. Instead, he directed the pilot to land at Limon, a small town which was the eastern-most
     vertex of a nearly equilateral triangle formed by these three points. Hidden there was one terminus of an underground rapid
     transit line which led directly into the heart of SAC’s fortress – and was now its only surviving means of physical access
     to the outside world.
    Baines and his secretary had been there only once before, and the guards at the station now were not only new but