Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [59]
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