Armageddon In Retrospect (15 page)

“Judging from the major’s tone, it’s something very un-soldierly, naive, and soft-hearted. Shhhh! Here he comes.”

Captain Donnini was half solemn, half amused with his new importance.

He lit a cigarette thoughtfully, and looked as though he were trying to phrase something in his mind. “You asked when the end of hate would come,” he said at last. “It comes right now. No more labor battalions, no more stealing, no more smashing. I haven’t seen enough to hate.” He puffed on the cigarette and thought some more. “But I’m sure I can hate the people of Beda as bitterly as Major Evans did if they don’t start out tomorrow to rebuild this into a decent place for the children.”

He turned quickly, and recrossed the street.

“Captain,” I called, “I wrote a letter to Major Evans—”

“He turned it over to me. I haven’t read it yet.”

“Could I have it back?”

He looked at me questioningly. “Well, all right—it’s on my desk.”

“The letter is about the desk. There’s something I’ve got to fix.”

“The drawers work fine.”

“There’s a special drawer you don’t know about.”

He shrugged. “Come on.”

I threw some tools into a bag, and hurried to his office. The desk sat in magnificent isolation in the middle of the otherwise spartan room. My letter lay on its top.

“You can read it, if you like,” I said.

He opened the letter, and read aloud:

“Dear sir: There is one thing about the desk I neglected to tell you. If you will look just below the eagle, you will find that the oak leaf in the ornamentation can be pressed in and turned. Turn it so that the stem points up at the eagle’s left claw. Then, press down on the acorn just above the eagle, and…”

As he read, I followed my own directions. I pressed on the leaf and turned it, and there was a click. I pushed the acorn with my thumb, and the front of a small drawer popped out a fraction of an inch, just enough to let a person get a grip on it and pull it out the rest of the way.

“Seems to be stuck,” I said. I reached up under the desk, and snipped a strand of piano wire hooked to the back of the drawer. “There!” I pulled the drawer out the rest of the way. “You see?”

Captain Donnini laughed. “Major Evans would have loved it. Wonderful!” Appreciatively, he slid the drawer back and forth several times, wondering at how its front blended so perfectly with the ornamentation. “Makes me wish I had secrets.”

“There aren’t many people in Europe without them,” I said. He turned his back for a moment. I reached under the commandant’s desk again, slipped a pin into the detonator, and removed the bomb.

Dear Friend:

     May I have a minute of your time? We have never met, but I am taking the liberty of writing to you because a mutual friend has spoken of you highly as being far above average in intellect and concern for your fellow men.

     The impact of each day’s news being as great as it is, it is very easy for us to forget quickly major events of a few days before. Let me, then, refresh your memory on an event that shook the world five short years ago, and which is now all but forgotten, save by a few of us. I refer to what has come to be known, for good biblical reasons, as
Armageddon
.

     You will remember, perhaps, the hectic beginnings at the Pine Institute. I confess that I went to work as administrator of the Institute with a sense of shame and foolishness, and for no other reason than money. I had many other offers, but the recruiter from the Institute offered to pay me twice as much as the best of them. I was in debt after three years of poverty as a graduate student, so I took the job, telling myself that I would stay one year, pay off my debts and build my savings, get a respectable job, and deny ever after that I’d been within a hundred miles of Verdigris, Oklahoma.

     Thanks to this lapse in integrity, I was associated with one of the truly heroic figures of our time, Dr. Gorman Tarbell.

The assets I brought to the Pine Institute were general, chiefly the skills that go with a doctor’s degree in business administration. I might as easily have applied these assets to running a tricycle factory or an amusement park. I was not in any way the creator of the theories that brought us to and through Armageddon. I arrived on the scene quite late, when much of the important thinking had been done.

Spiritually, and in terms of sacrifice, the name of Dr. Tarbell should head the list of real contributors to the campaign and victory.

Chronologically, the list should probably begin with the late Dr. Selig Schildknecht, of Dresden, Germany, who spent, by and large fruitlessly, the last half of his life and inheritance in trying to get someone to pay attention to his theories on mental illness. What Schildknecht said, in effect, was that the only unified theory of mental illness that seemed to fit all the facts was the most ancient one, which had never been disproved. He believed that the mentally ill were possessed by the Devil.

He said so in book after book, all printed at his own expense, since no publisher would touch them, and he urged that research be undertaken to find out as much as possible about the Devil, his forms, his habits, his strong points, his weaknesses.

Next on the list is an American, my former employer, Jessie L. Pine of Verdigris. Many years ago, Pine, an oil millionaire, ordered 200 feet of books for his library. The book dealer saw an opportunity to get rid of, among other gems, the collected works of Dr. Selig Schildknecht. Pine assumed that the Schildknecht volumes, since they were in a foreign language, contained passages too hot to be printed in English. So he hired the head of the University of Oklahoma’s German Department to read them to him.

Far from being infuriated by the book dealer’s selection, Pine was overjoyed. All his life he’d felt humiliated by his lack of education, and here he’d found a man with five university degrees whose fundamental philosophy agreed with his own, to wit: “Onliest thing in the world that’s wrong with folks is that the Devil’s got aholt of some of ’em.”

If Schildknecht had managed to hold on to life a little longer, he wouldn’t have died penniless. As it was, he missed the founding of the Jessie L. Pine Institute by only two years. From the moment of that founding on, every spurt from half the oil wells in Oklahoma was a nail in the Devil’s coffin. And it was a slow day, indeed, when an opportunist of one sort or another didn’t board a train for the marble halls rising in Verdigris.

The list, if I were to continue it, would get rather long, for thousands of men and women, a few of them intelligent and honest, began to explore the paths of research indicated by Schildknecht, while Pine followed doggedly with haversacks of fresh currency. But most of these men and women were jealous, incompetent passengers on one of the greatest gravy trains in history. Their experiments, usually awfully expensive, were principally satires on the ignorance and credulity of their benefactor, Jessie L. Pine.

Nothing would have come of all the millions spent, and I, for one, would have drawn my amazing paycheck without trying to deserve it, if it hadn’t been for the living martyr of Armageddon, Dr. Gorman Tarbell.

He was the oldest member of the Institute, and the most reputable—about sixty, heavy, short, passionate, with long white hair, with clothes that made him look as though he spent his nights under bridges. He’d retired near Verdigris after a successful career as a physicist in a large eastern industrial research laboratory. He stopped off at the Institute one afternoon, while on his way to get groceries, to find out what on earth was going on in the impressive buildings.

I was the one who saw him first, and, perceiving him to be a man of prodigious intelligence, I did a rather sheepish job of telling him what the Institute proposed to do. My attitude conveyed that “just between the well-educated pair of us, this is a lot of hooey.”

He didn’t join me in my condescending smile at the project, however, but asked, instead, to see something of Dr. Schildknecht’s writings. I got him the chief volume, that summarized what was said in all the others, and stood by and chuckled knowingly as he scanned it.

“Have you got any spare laboratories?” he said at last.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, we do,” I said.

“Where?”

“Well, the whole third floor’s still unoccupied. The painters are just finishing it off.”

“Which room can I have?”

“You mean you want a job?”

“I want peace and quiet and space to work.”

“You understand, sir, that the only kind of work that can be done here has to be related to demonology?”

“A perfectly delightful idea.”

I looked out into the hallway, to make sure Pine wasn’t around, and then whispered, “You really think there might be something to it?”

“What right have I got to think otherwise? Can you prove to me that the Devil doesn’t exist?”

“Well, I mean—for heaven’s sake, nobody with any education believes in—”

Crack!
Down came his cane on my kidney-shaped desk. “Until we prove that the Devil doesn’t exist, he’s as real as that desk.”

“Yessir.”

“Don’t be ashamed of your job, boy! There’s as much hope for the world in what’s going on here as there is in anything that’s going on in any atomic research laboratory. ‘Believe in the Devil,’ I say, and we’ll go on believing in him unless we get better reasons than we’ve got for not believing in him.
That’s
science!”

“Yessir.”

And off he went down the hall to arouse the others, and then up to the third floor to choose his laboratory, and to tell the painters to concentrate on it, that it had to be ready by the next morning.

I trailed him upstairs with a job application form. “Sir,” I said, “would you mind filling this out, please?”

He took it without looking at it, and wadded it into his coat pocket, which I saw was bulging like a saddlebag with crumpled documents of one sort and another. He never did fill out the application, but created an administrative nightmare by simply moving in.

“Now, sir, about salary,” I said, “how much would you want?”

He waved the question aside impatiently. “I’m here to do research, not keep the books.”

A year later,
The First Annual Report of the Pine Institute
was published. The chief accomplishment seemed to be that $6,000,000 of Pine’s money had been put back into circulation. The press of the Western World called it the funniest book of the year, and reprinted passages that proved it. The Communist press called it the gloomiest book of the year, and devoted columns to the tale of the American billionaire who was trying to make direct contact with the Devil in order to increase his profits.

Dr. Tarbell was untroubled. “We are now at the point at which the physical sciences once were with respect to the structure of the atom,” he said cheerfully. “We have some ideas that are little more than matters of faith. Perhaps they’re laughable, but it’s ignorant and unscientific to laugh until we’ve had some time to experiment.”

Lost among the pages and pages of nonsense in the
Report
were three hypotheses suggested by Dr. Tarbell:

That, since many cases of mental illness were cured by electric shock treatment, the Devil might find electricity unpleasant; that, since many mild cases of mental illness were cured by lengthy discussions of personal pasts, the Devil might be repelled by endless talk of sex and childhood; that the Devil, if he existed, seemingly took possession of people with varying degrees of tenacity—that he could be talked out of some patients, could be shocked out of others, and that he couldn’t be driven out of some without the patients’ being killed in the process.

I was present when a newspaper reporter quizzed Tarbell about these hypotheses. “Are you kidding?” said the reporter.

“If you mean that I offer these ideas in a playful spirit, yes.”

“Then you think they’re hokum?”

“Stick to the word ‘playful,’” said Dr. Tarbell. “And, if you’ll investigate the history of science, my dear boy, I think you’ll find that most of the really big ideas have come from intelligent playfulness. All the sober, thin-lipped concentration is really just a matter of tidying up around the fringes of the big ideas.”

But the world preferred the word “hokum.” And, in time, there were laughable pictures to go with the laughable stories from Verdigris. One was of a man wearing a headset that kept a small electric current going through his head, that was supposed to make him an uncomfortable resting place for the Devil. The current was said to be imperceptible, but I tried on one of the headsets, and found the sensation extremely unpleasant. Another photogenic experiment, I recall, was of a mildly deranged person talking about her past while under a huge glass bell-jar, which, it was hoped, might catch some detectable substance of the Devil, who was theoretically being evicted bit by bit. And on and on the picture possibilities went, each seemingly more absurd and expensive than the last.

And then came what I called
Operation Rat-hole
. Because of it, Pine was obliged to look at his bank balance for the first time in years. And what he saw sent him prospecting for new oilfields. Because of the frightful expense involved, I opposed the undertaking. But, over my objections, Dr. Tarbell convinced Pine that the only way to test Devil theories was to experiment with a large group of people. Operation Rat-hole, then, was an attempt to make Nowata, Craig, Ottawa, Delaware, Adair, Cherokee, Wagoner, and Rogers counties Devil-free. As a check, Mayes County, in the midst of the others, was to be left unprotected.

In the first four counties, 97,000 of the headsets were passed out, to be worn, for a consideration, night and day. In the last four, centers were set up where persons were to come in, for a consideration, at least twice a week to talk their hearts out about their pasts. I turned over management of these centers to an assistant. I couldn’t bear the places, where the air was forever filled with self-pity and the dullest laments imaginable.

Three years leter, Dr. Tarbell handed Jessie L. Pine a confidential progress report on the experiments, and then went to the hospital with a case of exhaustion. He had made the report tentative, had warned Pine not to show it to anyone until more work—much more—had been done.

It came as a terrible shock to Tarbell when, on the radio in his hospital room, he heard an announcer introduce Pine on a coast-to-coast network, and he heard Pine say, after an incoherent preamble:

“Ain’t been a person possessed by the Devil in these here eight counties we been protecting. Plenty of old cases, but ain’t no new ones, ’cept five that was tongue-tied and seventeen that let their batteries go dead. Meanwhile, smack spang in the middle, we let the Mayes County folks take care of theirselves the best they could, and they been goin’ to hell regular as ever….

“Trouble with the world is and always has been the Devil,” concluded Pine. “Well, we done run him out of northeastern Oklahoma, ’cept for Mayes County, and I figure we can run him out of there, too, and clean off the face of the earth. Bible says there’s gonna be a great battle ’tween good and evil by and by. Near’s I can figure, this here’s it.”

“The old fool!” cried Tarbell. “My Lord,
now
what’s going to happen?”

Pine couldn’t have chosen another instant in history when his announcement would have set off a more explosive response. Consider the times: the world, as though by some malevolent magic, had been divided into hostile halves, and had begun a series of moves and countermoves that could only, it seemed, end in disaster. Nobody knew what to do. The fate of humanity seemed out of the control of human beings. Every day was filled with desperate helplessness, and with worse news than that of the day before.

Then, from Verdigris, Oklahoma, came the announcement that the trouble with the world was that the Devil was at large. And with the announcement came an offer of proof and a suggested solution!

The sigh of relief that went up from the earth must have been heard in other galaxies. The trouble with the world wasn’t the Russians or the Americans or the Chinese or the British or the scientists or the generals or the financiers or the politicians, or, praise be to God, human beings anywhere, poor things. People were all right, and decent and innocent and smart, and it was the Devil who was making their good-hearted enterprises go sour. Every human being’s self-respect increased a thousand-fold, and no one, save the Devil, lost face.

Politicians of all lands rushed to the microphones to declare themselves as being against the Devil. Editorial pages everywhere took the same fearless stand—against the Devil. Nobody was for him.