Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [55]
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.
Armageddon in Retrospect
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,