Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [58]
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 the 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