Muddle and Win by John Dickinson

and would carry on saying he would get it fixed until Mum either bullied him into it or lost patience and called the electrician herself. And then she would have to miss a morning’s work waiting in for the electrician, who would promise to come some time between eight and twelve and would, in fact, arrive at about a quarter to one.)
    Mum put her head on the table. ‘I want a new job.’
    ‘Mine’s taken,’ said Greg.
    *
    There was dismay, too, in the palaces above the clouds. Voices were raised. Discussions were heated. Fingers jabbed at charts on which lines dipped alarmingly. Angels hurried down corridors clutching sheaves of papers. Juniors followed seniors into meetings, wriggling their brows at bystanders in that way that says, ‘Don’t ask. It’s terribly important, but just don’t ask!’ And of course that meant the bystanders did ask. And the answer would be an urgent shake of the head and the words, mouthed through the crack of a closing door, ‘Sally Jones’.
    ‘It’s a disaster!’ exclaimed a Seraph, sitting halfway down a table of polished rainwater.
    ‘We’ve been caught with our cassocks down,’ said another. ‘We must rectify the situation immediately!’
    ‘I have an attack choir standing by, Archagent.’
    On his throne of rose petals the Archagent brooded. His wings were a hundred fathoms in length and rippled with the light of rainbows. They wavered gently, reaching to the distant walls and up into the great dome above him. His eyebrows were small thunderclouds. He had ten thousand of them. When he frowned it was really quite impressive.
    He was frowning now.
    ‘The LDC still registers zero, Archagent,’ said the last speaker. ‘There’s time. If we move quickly—’
    ‘Infiltration has occurred,’ said the Archagent.
    All down the long table, rows of faces watched him. He could look each one of them in the eye. Many times over. And he had also been around for a few thousand years more than any of them. He understood some things they didn’t. ‘It is a situation of Potential.’
    Of course the golden trumpets could blow. The Divine Wind could breathe upon the invader. The ranks of angels could descend with fire upon the mind of Sally Jones, and very quickly there would not be much of this particular infiltrator left.
    But once the mind had opened to the ideas of the Enemy, the Enemy could keep coming back. There would be another infiltration, and another, and another. And sometimes it happened that the Enemy chose to meet force with force. Legions of demons and cacodemons might come surging up to meet the powers of Heaven head-on. With consequences that could be
very
undesirable for the subject.
    ‘Ground once lost to the Enemy can never be wholly regained,’ he said.
    There was a dispirited rustle of feathers down the long table.
    ‘We should cut our losses,’ said a young angel. ‘Go to Early Martyrdom.’
    Another rustle greeted his words. They were thinking about it. If there was a knife fight at school (unheard of at Darlington High, but not impossible). If Sally tried to intervene. If it happened tomorrow, while the LDC still read zero  . . .
    ‘Drastic, Simael,’ said the Archagent, mentally recording the young angel as someone who, given a red button, would find a reason to press it no matter what. ‘Drastic – if direct.’
    ‘Shall I arrange it, sire?’
    ‘No.’ He rose from the throne of petals. He was taller than a cathedral spire and as gentle as a cloud in the soft south wind. He looked out of the window of opal down at the little world below. ‘This is the Long War,’ he said. ‘There is disappointment, but no defeat. There is valour, but no victory.’
    His thousands of years of struggle had taught him many things. One of them was that however high you got, no one ever told you what was
really
going on.
    Another was that, no matter what the LDCs said at any particular moment, the worst heart on Earth was never very far from Glory, and the