Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [56]
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?