Muddle and Win by John Dickinson Page B

by-y the Foe
.
    Your mi-ission, if to accept it you cho-ose:
    Apply to the butt of the fiend some well-planted sho-oes
.
    Oh spe-ed you no-ow for glo-ory beckons
,
    This choir will self destru-uct in fi-i-ive seconds
.
    A-a-a-men.’
    They accompanied him to the very top of a high watchtower. And there, true to their word, they vanished into little puffs of purple smoke.
    Agent Windleberry paused on the brink. All along the battlements, the eyes of the Host were on him. Below his feet was the great gulf: the darkness, the nebulae, the stars, the Earth. He looked down upon it, at the tiny, tiny gem of the world.
    No angel could be unmoved by that sight. So forlorn. So deadly, like a beautiful, poisoned flower.
    Because it
was
deadly. The only way an angel could get there was to fall. Falling is easy. An angel that falls can fall a very long way. It’s the Not Falling Any Further that’s hard. It was said that Pandemonium itself was founded by a group of angels that, so to speak, had simply got off at the wrong floor.
    But that was a long time ago.
    Windleberry saw the sunlight playing across half the Earth. He saw the border of night and day, a ring of twilight forever moving, forever in the same place. He saw the galaxy of human souls shining in the darkness of their lives.
    He put one foot out over the void.
    And he fell.

CERTAIN VERY-WELL-TRAINED SOLDIERS on Earth, when they have to land secretly in enemy territory, do what they call a ‘HALO’ jump. That’s ‘HALO’ as in High Altitude Low Opening. You jump out of a plane that’s flying very high up, where it can’t be shot down. You then fall and fall and fall and fall, and at the very last moment, when you are least likely to be spotted or picked up on someone’s radar, you open your parachute. And you land safely.
    That’s the idea.
    Angels, when they are landing in dangerous territory, do what they call the ‘NO HALO’ jump. That is, before you jump you switch your halo off.
    It also helps if you are not accompanied by bright lights , the appearance of new stars, tongues of fire or claps of thunder. All these things tend to give your position away.
    Windleberry, of course, executed his jump perfectly. He always did. And he made his landing not on the top of Sally’s head but somewhere else. He had some reconnaissance to do.
    The mind he came to was not like Sally’s mind. The corridors were narrow. They were also ill-lit, because the person they belonged to was on the edge of sleep. In this mind, if you didn’t have a very clear idea of where you were going, you ended up in the same place three times out of five. There was one huge room near the bottom where most of the ideas were kept. They wandered about in the half-darkness, getting in each other’s way and occasionally eating one another. Around it, other rooms were arranged in no kind of order, stacking up on top of each other like badly built apartment blocks.
    Windleberry trudged up endless flights of stairs. The stairs looked as if they saw more use from a skateboard than a pair of shoes. In the gloom, little things scuttled and squeaked around his feet. Somewhere a voice shrieked ‘
Sally
!’ in rage tinged with tears.
    In a dark passage high up in the mind, he found the door he was looking for. It had a sign on it. The sign read:

    He knocked. There was a sudden movement inside.
    ‘Who’s there?’ called a voice.
    ‘Agent Windleberry,’ he said. And then – since he realized, with some broad-mindedness, that Ismael had been out here for some years and might not even know the name ‘Windleberry’ or associate it with the long string of glories and achievements that were sung in the corridors above the clouds – he added, ‘I’m assigned to Sally.’
    More sounds followed, as if things were quickly being swept off a desk or table.
    ‘Come in,’ said the voice.
    Windleberry entered. It was a small, gloomy office, lit by a single anglepoise lamp that was perched on one of a number