Armageddon in Retrospect

by Kurt Vonnegut

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 t
he 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.

  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 pres
ence 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: