Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [57]
“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