He goes to his terminal and calls up two final angels before bedtime: Leviathan and Behemoth. Behemoth is the great hippopotamus-angel, the vast beast of darkness, the angel of chaos. Leviathan is his mate, the mighty she-whale, the splendid sea serpent. They dance for him on the screen. Behemoth’s huge mouth yawns wide. Leviathan gapes even more awesomely. “We are getting hungry,” they tell him. “When is feeding time?” In rabbinical lore, these two will swallow all the damned souls at the end of days. Cunningham tosses them some electronic sardines and sends them away. As he closes his eyes he invokes Poteh, the angel of oblivion, and falls into a black dreamless sleep.
At his desk the next morning, he is at work on a standard item, a glitch-clearing program for the third-quadrant surveillance satellites, when he finds himself unaccountably trembling. That has never happened to him before. His fingernails look almost white, his wrists are rigid, his hands are quivering. He feels chilled. It is as though he has not slept for days. In the washroom he clings to the sink and stares at his pallid, sweaty face. Someone comes up behind him and says, “You all right, Dan?”
“Yeah. Just a little attack of the damn queasies.”
“All that wild living in the middle of the week wears a man down,” the other says, and moves along. The social necessities have been observed: a question, a noncommittal answer, a quip, good-bye. He could have been having a stroke here and they would have played it the same way. Cunningham has no close friends at the office. He knows that they regard him as eccentric—eccentric in the wrong way, not lively and quirky but just a peculiar kind of hermit—and getting worse all the time. I could destroy the world, he thinks. I could go into the Big Room and type for fifteen seconds, and we’d be on all-out alert a minute later and the bombs would be coming down from orbit six minutes later. I could give that signal. I could really do it. I could do it right now.
Waves of nausea sweep him and he grips the edge of the sink until the last racking spasm is over. Then he cleans his face, and calmer now, returns to his desk to stare at the little green symbols on the screen.
That evening, still trying to find a function for Basileus, Cunningham discovers himself thinking of demons, and of one demon not in the classical demonology—Maxwell’s Demon, the one that the physicist James Clerk Maxwell postulated to send fast-moving molecules in one direction and slow ones in another, thereby providing an ultra-efficient method for heating and refrigeration. Perhaps some sort of filtering role could be devised for Basileus. Last week a few of the loftier angels had been complaining about the proximity to them of certain fallen angels within the computer. “There’s a smell of brimstone on this disk that I don’t like,” Gabriel had said. Cunningham wonders if he could make Basileus a kind of traffic manager within the program: let him sit in there and ship the celestial angels into one sector of a disk, the fallen ones to another.
The idea appeals to him for about thirty seconds. Then he sees how fundamentally trivial it is. He doesn’t need an angel for a job like that; a little simple software could do it. Cunningham’s corollary to Kant’s categorical imperative: Never use an angel as mere software. He smiles, possibly for the first time all week. Why, he doesn’t even need software. He can handle it himself, simply by assigning princes of Heaven to one file and demons to a different one. It hadn’t seemed necessary to segregate his angels that way, or he would have done it from the start. But since now they were complaining—
He begins to flange up a sorting program to separate the files. It should have taken him a few minutes, but he finds himself working in a rambling, muddled way, doing an untypically sloppy job. With a quick swipe, he erases what he has done. Gabriel would have to put up with the reek of brimstone a little longer, he thinks.
There is a dull throbbing pain just behind his eyes. His throat is dry, his lips feel parched. Basileus would have to wait a little longer, too. Cunningham keys up another angel, allowing his fingers to choose for him, and finds himself looking at a blank faced angel with a gleaming metal skin. One of the early ones, Cunningham realizes. “I don’t remember your name,” he says. “Who are you?”
“I am Anaphaxeton.”
“And your function?”
“When my name is pronounced aloud, I will cause the angels to summon the entire universe before the bar of justice on Judgment Day.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Cunningham says. “I don’t want you tonight.”
He sends Anaphaxeton away and finds himself with the dark angel Apollyon, fish scales, dragon wings, bear feet, breathing fire and smoke, holding the key to the Abyss. “No,” Cunningham says, and brings up Michael, standing with drawn sword over Jerusalem, and sends him away only to find on the screen an angel with 70,000 feet and 4,000 wings, who is Azrael, the angel of death. “No,” says Cunningham again. “Not you. Oh, Christ!” A vengeful army crowds his computer. On his screen there passes a flurrying regiment of wings and eyes and beaks. He shivers and shuts the system down for the night. Jesus, he thinks. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. All night long, suns explode in his brain.
On Friday his supervisor, Ned Harris, saunters to his desk in an unusually folksy way and asks if he’s going to be doing anything interesting this weekend. Cunningham shrugs. “A party Saturday night, that’s about all. Why?”
“Thought you might be going off on a fishing trip, or something. Looks like the last nice weekend before the rainy season sets in, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’m not a fisherman, Ned.”
“Take some kind of trip. Drive down to Monterey, maybe. Or up into the wine country.”
“What are you getting at?”
“You look like you could use a little change of pace,” Harris says amiably. “A couple of days off. You’ve been crunching numbers so hard, they’re starting to crunch you, is my guess.”
“It’s that obvious?”
Harris nods. “You’re tired, Dan. It shows. We’re a little like air traffic controllers around here, you know, working so hard we start to dream about blips on the screen. That’s no good. Get the hell out of town, fellow. The Defense Department can operate without you for a while. Okay? Take Monday off. Tuesday, even. I can’t afford to have a fine mind like yours going goofy from fatigue, Dan.”
“All right, Ned. Sure. Thanks.”
His hands are shaking again. His fingernails are colorless.
“And get a good early start on the weekend, too. No need for you to hang around here today until four.”
“If that’s okay—”
“Go on. Shoo!”
Cunningham closes down his desk and makes his way uncertainly out of the building. The security guards wave at him. Everyone seems to know he’s being sent home early. Is this what it’s like to crack up on the job? He wanders about the parking lot for a little while, not sure where he has left his car. At last he finds it, and drives home at thirty miles an hour, with horns honking at him all the way as he wanders up the freeway.
He settles wearily in front of his computer and brings the system on line, calling for Harahel. Surely the angel of computers will not plague him with such apocalyptic matters.
Harahel says, “Well, we’ve worked out your Basileus problem for you.”
“You have?”
“Uriel had the basic idea, building on your Maxwell’s Demon notion. Israfel and Azrael developed it some. What’s needed is an angel embodying God’s justice and God’s mercy. A kind of evaluator, a filtering angel. He weighs deeds in the balance, and arrives at a verdict.”