Sixty-two years after publication, the strangest thing about *The Day After Judgement* is not its premise — that God has died and Satan has won — but how thoroughly Blish refuses to let anyone enjoy the catastrophe. The demons, paroled from the Pit and loosed upon the Earth, build a city in Death Valley. The military throws nuclear weapons at it. The weapons do nothing. The city stands. And when the human pilgrims finally walk through its gates, they find "nothing worse than a summary and epitomization of what pre-Apocalyptic, post-industrial Man had been systematically creating for himself." Beautiful, identical clone-citizens in grey tabards with numbers woven across their chests, performing public sex acts out of boredom, tending no children, keeping no animals. A guided tour of a nineteenth-century world's-fair future, complete with the balloon works and the corrective discipline hospital. Baines, the munitions executive, shouts what Blish clearly considers the novel's punchline: "I always thought it'd be hell to actually have to live in a place like this. And now I know it." Nobody hears him.

This is a book about a vacancy. Not about evil triumphant but about the structural consequences of removing the organizing principle from a system that depended on it. The white monks at Monte Albano debate whether God might merely have "retir'd, withdrawn or otherwise / Contracted hath, as Zohar subtle saith, / His Essence Infinite" — a Lurianic *tzimtzum* smuggled into a paperback science-fiction novel in 1964, which is a quietly extraordinary thing. Satan's climactic speech, delivered in a labored pseudo-Miltonic verse that teeters between grandeur and bathos, announces that having won, the demons found "the world of men so much more foul / E'en than in the fabulous reign of witches / That all bewilder'd fell they and amazed." Evil, victorious, discovers it has inherited a job description. "That vacuous space where once Eternall Good / Had dwelt demanded to be filled." Satan is not celebrating. He is begging: "Man, O Man, I beg of you, / Take, O take from mee this Cup away!" The rebel has been promoted into management, and the promotion is indistinguishable from damnation. In my earlier review of the combined duology, I focused on the transactional architecture — Baines as client, Ware as contractor, Armageddon as deliverable. What I underestimated was how thoroughly this second half dismantles the satisfaction of that transaction. Nobody gets what they paid for. The contractor's spellbook is buried under tsunami mud. The client pivots to collaborationism. The deliverable turns out to be a universe that still requires administration, except now the administrator weeps from six eyes simultaneously.