Armageddon In Retrospect (16 page)

In the United Nations, the small nations introduced a resolution to the effect that the big nations all join hands, like the affectionate children they really were at heart, and chase their only enemy, the Devil, away from earth forever.

For many months following Pine’s announcement, it was almost necessary to boil a grandmother or run berserk with a battle-axe in an orphanage to qualify for space on the front page of a newspaper. All the news was about Armageddon. Men who had entertained their readers with whimsical accounts of the Verdigris activities became, overnight, sober specialists in such matters as Bratpuhrian Devil-gongs, the efficacy of crosses on bootsoles, the Black Mass, and allied lore. The mails were jammed as badly as at Christmastime with letters to the U.N., Government officials, and the Pine Institute. Almost everybody, apparently, had known all along that the Devil was the trouble with everything. Many said they’d seen him, and almost all of them had pretty good ideas for getting rid of him.

Those who thought the whole thing was crazy found themselves in the position of a burial insurance salesman at a birthday party, and most of them shrugged and kept their mouths shut. Those who didn’t keep their mouths shut weren’t noticed anyway.

Among the doubters was Dr. Gorman Tarbell. “Good heavens,” he said ruefully, “we don’t know what we’ve proved in the experiments. They were just a beginning. It’s years too soon to say whether we were doing a job on the Devil or what. Now Pine’s got everybody all whooped up to thinking all we have to do is turn on a couple of gadgets or something, and earth’ll be Eden again.” Nobody listened.

Pine, who was bankrupt anyway, turned over the Institute to the U.N., and UNDICO, the United Nations Demonological Investigating Commitee, was formed. Dr. Tarbell and I were named as American delegates to the Committee, which held its first meeting in Verdigris. I was elected Chairman, and, as you might expect, I was subjected to a lot of poor jokes about my being the perfect man for the job because of my name.

It was very depressing for the Committee to have so much expected—demanded, even—of them, and to have so little knowledge with which to work. Our mandate from the people of the world wasn’t to prevent mental illness, but to eliminate the Devil. Bit by bit, however, and under terrific pressure, we mapped a plan, drawn up, for the most part, by Dr. Tarbell.

“We can’t promise anything,” he said. “All we can do is take this opportunity for world-wide experiments. The whole thing is assumptions, so it won’t hurt anything to assume a few things more. Let’s assume that the Devil is like an epidemic disease, and go to work on him accordingly. Maybe, if we make it impossible for him to find a comfortable place in anybody anywhere, he’ll disappear or die or go to some other planet, or whatever it is the Devil does, if there is a Devil.”

We estimated that to equip every man, woman, and child with one of the electric headsets would cost about $20,000,000,000, and about $70,000,000,000 more a year for batteries. As modern wars go, the price was about right. But we soon found that people weren’t inclined to go that high for anything less than killing each other.

The Tower of Babel technique, then, seemed the more practical. Talk is cheap. Hence, UNDICO’s first recommendation was that centers be set up all over the world, and that people everywhere be encouraged in one way or another, according to native methods of coercion—an easy buck, or a bayonet, or fear of damnation—to come regularly to these centers to unburden themselves about childhood and sex.

Response to this first recommendation, this first sign that UNDICO was really going to go after the Devil in a businesslike fashion, revealed a deep undercurrent of uneasiness in the flood of enthusiasm. There was hedging on the part of many leaders, and vague objections were raised in fuzzy terms like “running counter to our great national heritage for which our forefathers sacrificed unflinchingly at…” No one was imprudent enough to want to seem a protector of the Devil, but, all the same, the kind of caution recommended by many in high places bore a strong resemblance to complete inaction.

At first, Dr. Tarbell thought the reaction was due to fear—fear of the Devil’s retaliation for the war we wanted to make on him. Later, after he’d had time to study the opposition’s membership and statements, he said gleefully, “By golly, they think we’ve got a chance. And they’re all scared stiff they won’t have a chance of being so much as a dogcatcher if the Devil isn’t at large in the populace.”

But, as I said, we felt that we had less than a chance in a trillion of changing the world much more than one whit. Thanks to an accident and the undercurrent of opposition, the odds soon jumped to an octillion to one.

Shortly after the Committee’s first recommendation, the accident happened. “Any fool knows the quick and easy way to get rid of the Devil,” whispered one American delegate to another one in the U.N. General Assembly. “Nothing to it. Just blow him to hell in his headquarters in the Kremlin.” He couldn’t have been more mistaken in thinking the microphone before him was dead.

His comment was carried over the public address system, and was dutifully translated into fourteen languages. The Russian delegation walked out, and telegraphed home for a suitable reaction. Two hours later, they were back with a statement:

“The people of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics hereby withdraw all support of the United Nations Demonological Investigating Committee as being an internal affair of the United States of America. Russian scientists are in full agreement with the findings of the Pine Institute as to the presence of the Devil throughout the United States. Using the same experimental techniques, these scientists have found no signs whatsoever of the Devil’s activities within the boundaries of the U.S.S.R., and, hence, consider the problem as being uniquely American. The people of the U.S.S.R. wish the people of the United States of America success in their difficult enterprise, that they may all the sooner be ready for full membership in the family of friendly nations.”

In America, the instant reaction was to declare that any effort on UNDICO’s part in this country would mean a further propaganda victory for Russia. Other nations followed suit, declaring themselves to be already Devil-free. And that was that for UNDICO. Frankly, I was relieved and delighted. UNDICO was beginning to look like a real headache.

That was that for the Pine Institute, too, for Pine was dead broke, and had no choice but to close the doors at Verdigris. When the closing was announced, the hundreds of phonies who’d found wealth and relaxation in Verdigris stormed my office, and I fled to Dr. Tarbell’s laboratory.

He was lighting his cigar with a hot soldering iron when I entered. He nodded, and squinted through the cigar smoke at the dispossessed demonologists milling around in the courtyard below. “About time we got rid of the staff so we could get some work done.”

“We’re canned, too, you know.”

“Right now I don’t need money,” said Tarbell. “Need electricity.”

“Hurry up, then—the last check I sent the Power and Light Company was as rubber as your overshoes. What is that thing you’re working on, anyway?”

He soldered a connection to the copper drum, which was about four feet high and six feet in diameter, and had a lid on the top. “Going to be the first M.I.T. alumnus to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Think there’s a living in it?”

“Seriously.”

“Such a sober boy. First read me something aloud. That book there—see the bookmark?”

The book was a classic in the field of magic, Sir James George Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
. I opened it to the bookmark, and found a passage underlined, the passage describing the Mass of Saint Sécaire, or the Black Mass. I read it aloud:

“‘The Mass of Saint Sécaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night…and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the midnight hour…. The host he blesses is black and has three points; he consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptized infant has been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the ground and with his left foot. And many other things he does which no good Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and dumb for the rest of his life.’ Phew!” I said.

“Supposed to bring the Devil like a fire alarm box brings the hook-and-ladder,” said Dr. Tarbell.

“Surely you don’t think it’d really work?”

He shrugged. “I haven’t tried.” The lights suddenly went out. “That’s that,” he sighed, and laid down the soldering iron. “Well, there’s nothing more we can do here. Let’s go out and find an unbaptized infant.”

“Won’t you tell me what the drum is for?”

“Perfectly self-evident. It’s a Devil-trap, of course.”

“Naturally.” I smiled uncertainly, and backed away from it. “And you’re going to bait it with Devil’s-food cake.”

“One of the major theories to come out of the Pine Institute, my boy, is that the Devil is completely indifferent to Devil’s-food cake. However, we’re sure he’s anything but indifferent to electricity, and, if we could pay the light bill, we could make electricity flow through the walls and lid of this drum. So, all we have to do, once the Devil is inside, is to throw the switch and we’ve got him. Maybe. Who knows? Who was ever crazy enough to try it? But first, as the recipe for rabbit stew goes, catch your rabbit.”

I’d hoped I’d seen the end of demonology for a while, and was looking forward to moving on to other things. But Dr. Tarbell’s tenacity inspired me to stay with him, to see where his “intelligent playfulness” would lead next.

And, six weeks later, Dr. Tarbell and I, pulling the copper drum along on a cart, and laying wire from a spool on my back, were picking our way down a hillside at night, down to the floor of the Mohawk Valley, in sight of the lights of Schenectady.

Between us and the river, catching the full moon’s image and casting it into our eyes, was an abandoned segment of the old Erie Ship Canal, now useless, replaced by channels dredged in the river, filled with still, brackish water. Beside it lay the foundations of an old hotel, that had once served the bargemen and travelers on the now forgotten ditch.

And beside the foundations was a roofless frame church.

The old steeple was silhouetted against the night sky, resolute, indomitable, in a parish of rot and ghosts. As we entered the church, a tugboat pulling barges somewhere up the river sounded its horn, and the voice came to us, echoing through the architecture of the valley, funereal, grave.

An owl hooted, and a bat whirred over our heads. Dr. Tarbell rolled the drum to a spot before the altar. I connected the wires I’d been stringing to a switch, and connected the switch, through twenty feet more of wire, to the drum. The other end of the line was hooked into the circuits of a farmhouse on the hillside.

“What time is it?” whispered Dr. Tarbell.

“Five of eleven.”

“Good,” he said weakly. We were both scared stiff. “Now listen, I don’t think anything at all’s going to happen, but, if it does—I mean to us—I’ve left a letter at the farmhouse.”

“That makes two of us,” I said. I seized his arm. “Look—what say we call it off,” I pleaded. “If there really is a Devil, and we keep trying to corner him, he’s sure to turn on us—and there’s no telling what he’d do!”

“You don’t have to stay,” said Tarbell. “I could work the switch, I guess.”

“You’re determined to go through with it?”

“Terrified as I am,” he said.

I sighed heavily. “All right. God help you. I’ll man the switch.”

“O.K.,” he said, smiling wanly, “put on your protective headset, and let’s go.”

The bells in a steeple clock in Schenectady started striking eleven.

Dr. Tarbell swallowed, stepped to the altar, brushed aside a squatting toad, and began the grisly ceremony.

He had spent weeks reading up on his role and practicing it, while I had gone in search of a proper site and the grim props. I hadn’t found a well in which an unbaptized infant had been flung, but I’d found other items in the same category that seemed gruesome enough to be satisfactory substitutes in the eyes of the most depraved demon.

Now, in the name of science and humanity, Dr. Tarbell put his whole heart into the performance of the Mass of Saint Sécaire, doing, with a look of horror on his face, what no good Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and dumb.

I somehow survived with my senses, and sighed with relief as the clock in Schenectady knelled twelve.

“Appear, Satan!” shouted Dr. Tarbell as the clock struck. “Hear your servants, Lord of Night, and appear!”

The clock struck for the last time, and Dr. Tarbell slumped against the altar, exhausted. He straightened up after a moment, shrugged, and smiled. “What the hell,” he said, “you never know until you try.” He took off his headset.

I picked up a screwdriver, preparing to disconnect the wires. “And that, I hope, really winds up UNDICO and the Pine Institute,” I said.

“Well, still got a few more ideas,” said Dr. Tarbell. And then he howled.

I looked up to see him wide-eyed, leering, trembling all over. He was trying to say something, but all that came out was a strangled gurgle.

Then began the most fantastic struggle any man will ever see. Dozens of artists have tried to paint the picture, but, bulging as they paint Tarbell’s eyes, red as they paint his face, knotted as they paint his muscles, they can’t recapture a splinter of the heroism of Armageddon.

Tarbell dropped to his knees, and, as though straining against chains held by a giant, he began to inch toward the copper drum. Sweat soaked his clothes, and he could only pant and grunt. Time and again, as he would pause to catch his breath, he was pulled back by invisible forces. And again he would rise to his knees, and toil forward over the lost ground and inches beyond.