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souls, and we ought to take them into
     consideration before we do anything rash.’
    Buelg saw the light, and with a great sense of relief; the Christian mythos had nothing to do with him, not personally that
     is. He had no objection to it as an exercise in theory, a form of non-zero-sum game.
    ‘If that’s the case, I don’t think there’s any question of our being caught in the middle,’ he said. ‘We’re required by the
     rules to come down on one side or the other.’
    ‘That’s true, by God,’ McKnight said. ‘And after all, we’re on the right side. We didn’t start this war – the Chinks did.’
    ‘Right, right,’ Buelg said. ‘We’re entitled to self-defence. And for my part, no matter what happens in the next world – about
     which we have no data – as long as I’m still in this one, I’m not prepared to regard
anything
as final. This may be a metaphysical war after all, but we still seem to live in some sort of secular universe. The universe
     of discourse has been enlarged, but it hasn’t been cancelled. I say, let’s find out more about it.’
    ‘Yes,’ McKnight said, ‘but how? That’s what I keep asking, and I don’t get anything back from either of you but philosophical
     discussion. What do you propose that we
do?
’
    ‘Have we got any missiles left?’
    ‘We’ve still got maybe a dozen five- to ten-megatonners left – and, of course Old Mombi.’
    ‘Buelg, you madman, are you proposing for one instant – ’
    ‘Shut up for a minute and let me think.’ Old Mombi was Denver’s doomsday machine, a complex carrier containing five one hundred-megaton
     warheads, one of which was aimed to make even the Moon uninhabitable; it was a postspasm weapon that the present situation
     certainly did not call for – best to hold it in reserve. ‘I think what we ought to do is to lob one of the small jobs on to
     the Death Valley encampment. I don’t really think it’ll do much harm, maybe not any, but it might produce some information.
     We can fly a drone plane through the cloud as it goes up, and take off radiological, chemical, any other kinds of readings
     that the computer can come up with. These demons have obtruded themselves into the real world, and the very fact that we can
     see them and photograph them shows that they share some of its characteristics now. Let’s see how they behave under something
     a good deal hotter than red-hot iron. Suppose they do nothing more than sweat a little? We can analyse even that!’
    ‘And suppose they trace the missile back to here?’ Šatvje said, but by his expression, Buelg knew that Šatvje knew that it
     was a last-ditch argument.
    ‘Then we’re sunk, I suppose. But look at the architecture of that encampment; does that suggest to you that they’ve been in
     contact with real warfare since back in the fourteenth century? No doubt they have all kinds of supernatural powers, but they’ve
     got a lot to learn about the natural ones! Maybe a decent adversary is what they’ve been lacking all along – and if Armageddon
     has ended in a standoff, a little action on the side of our Maker wouldn’t be amiss. If He’s still with us, and actively interested,
     any inaction on our parts would probably be viewed very gravely indeed if He wins after all. And if He’s not with us any longer,
     then we’ll have to help ourselves, as the proverb says.’
    ‘That’s the stuff to give the troops,’ McKnight said. ‘It is so ordered.’
    Buelg nodded and left the office to search out Chief Hay. On the whole, he felt he had made a nice recovery.
    4
    Positano had been washed away, but the remains of Ware’s palazzo still stood above the scoured cliffside, like some post-Roman
     ruin. The ceiling had fallen in, the fluted pink tiles smashing Ware’s glassware and burying the dim chalk diagrams of last
     night’s conjuration on the refectory floor in a litter of straw and potsherds, mounds of which collapsed now and then to send