Gobble-Up Stories. Oscar Mandel

no wonder, either, that, one morning, as the meeting of the Board of Directors was getting under way, the Chairman confronted the President with rage rampaging in his face, gestures, and words. “The news has come to me,” he thundered, “that our President has fired Hank. Why, Mr. Weamish, did you fire Hank?”

      The Board was dumbfounded. The President said nothing.

      “Why, why, why?” the Chairman shouted. “What made you do it?”

      And still the President was silent. But now the Board was finding its voice. “Confess,” said a cunning Director. “Wasn’t it envy? Was Hank too successful? Did he steal the sunlight from you?”

      “Oh no!” cried the President. “I? I envy Hank, I who admired him so, I who gave him raise after raise?”

      “What then?” asked another Director. “Did he debauch the typists?”

      “He did,” replied the President, “but that was stipulated in his contract.” Several tears were beginning to sprout from his eyes.

      “Did he peculate and malversate?” suggested another Director.

      “Hank malversate or peculate? Hank? Oh Hank,” blubbered the President, “you who lunched on yogurt when you traveled in order to save the company’s pennies! I never knew a boy as honest as you, except my grandmother in Heaven.”

      “Enough!” bawled the Chairman. “Mr. Weamish, you fired our most brilliant salesman, though you were aware that the competition was luring him with bonuses, stock options, and limousines. One last time, tell us the cause, or else you in turn—the rest is blank, but as you all know, my silences are even more terrible than my words.”

      And indeed the President was trembling. “Mr. Oglethorpe,” he whispered, “forgive me, but you named the cause yourself.”

      “Fiddlesticks! Where? When?”

      “The offers from our competitors…every day a new one… oh, I was so afraid that he was going to leave us…so nervous, so terrified…”

      “That you fired him?”

      “That I fired him.”

      And there my story ends. Hank, as you might guess, went on to sell innumerable units of the next product, while the President was condemned to wrap parcels with twine and tape in the stockroom. There, for years to come, he would impart to newcomers and old-timers alike his settled conviction that doing mischief in order to prevent it is a very sad mistake.

HOW GOD BESTED THE DEVIL

      Some people believe that the devil is busy day and night tormenting mankind. But that’s a pretty medieval way of thinking. Actually, the devil turned the whole machinery on, so to speak, right from the start; I mean, he made people as ornery as he could and then he left them to their own devices. Now and then he lands here to make sure that everything is going wrong, but then he goes about his interests elsewhere, or else between trips, he relaxes on the homestead in Gehenna.

      On one of his tours on Earth, the devil happened into the troposphere just when a few physicists and generals were trying out a hydrogen bomb. The devil’s a tough piece of steak, as you can imagine, but he got burned and jolted all the same, like that time long ago when AX-469 exploded in Galaxy Azazel and the universal pottlewibblets were exterminated. Anyway, after he recovered from the shock, the devil went to talk to the generals and physicists. “Something new is cooking, I see,” he said.

      “Yes,” replied the chief physicist, “and we’re pretty proud of it; believe me, it took brains.”

      “Tell me more,” said Lucifer. So the physicist gave him the lecture—hydrogen isotopes, tritium, and deuterium, critical mass, self-sustaining reactions, annihilation of matter…. “Excellent, excellent,” said the devil, rubbing his hands together, “but what do you propose to do with it? It seems a pity just to let it drift.”

      “Who said anything about drifting?” retorted one of the generals. “This gizmo of ours ain’t no drifter; it’s a proliferator!”

      The chief physicist explained: “My colleague is suggesting that scientific discoveries can’t be kept secret forever, as indeed they shouldn’t be when they’re as luminous and far-reaching as this one.”

      “I couldn’t agree more,” said Lucifer, “congratulations to one and all. I look forward to a heartwarming bash. But after the concussion I had today, I think I’ll go watch it from neutral ground.”

      “I’m afraid, sir—” the physicist began, but the general got ahead of him with a big laugh. “Neutral ground? Never heard of it! Tell me what it is and where I can find it, haw, haw, haw!” Now, everybody knows the devil has a sense of humor, but he didn’t laugh this time; in fact, he began to feel a little worried.

      “Neutral ground—you know what I mean, the kind of place where people just sit around; you know, just sit around and live. With geranium pots.” At this, the general turned serious. “You read too many Happy Birthday cards, Mr. Fangs. After the last of these gewgaws has blown its lid, there won’t be no geraniums left to tell the tale, the watering cans’ll be scrap and so will the people that were gonna use them on the geraniums that ain’t there anymore.”

      “Technically, sir, we call it the nuclear winter,” said the physicist. “Allow me to explain: as the radioactive cloud—” but Lucifer was gone, gone like a shot, gone in a panic that was a pity to see. The truth is, the devil needs people for his mischief, because there’s no such thing as disembodied mischief. Mischief is absolutely void until it gets into living creatures. So the devil flew like a bullet to the mansion of the lord, where he didn’t even announce himself; he merely plunged in and demanded an immediate audience.

      When God took him into his private cabinet, he couldn’t hold himself back. “Murder,” he bawled, “it’s murder, it’s massacre, it’s a plot against me, don’t tell me it isn’t, I ought to know a plot when I see one, and what in hell am I going to do without people?”

      The lord chuckled. He’d never seen Lucifer in such a broil. “At last,” he said, and then he repeated, “at last and at long last I have found the way of besting you. The forces of evil are smashed. Hang up your pitchfork, Satanas, I’ve outsmarted you. I’m almighty after all.”

      “You mean—” said the devil, gasping. “I do. From now on, it’s cosmic dust for you; enjoy it if you can.”

      And that is the story of how evil had to quit the Earth forever.

HOW GOD LEARNED WHAT MEASURE IS