Frederic Brown, who dabbled in both mystery and science fiction and is better known for his short, short stories that carry a big knockout punch line, has been one of my favorite authors from childhood...his Armageddon appeared in the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 3 (1941). Only five pages long, it was a fast read, and had a superficially religious angle to it. Herbie, a little boy who is a budding amateur magician in his own right, is attending a magic show in Cincinnati with his parents. The magician onstage keeps performing tricks that the boy understands from his own experience, but there is one he doesn't that requires the presence of a volunteer from the audience...so he has planned to rush up to the stage at the expected moment of the call...this proves successful. So there they are, the magician, the boy...and a box. And then a prayer wheel in Tibet gets loose from its owner in a flood and stops spinning...causing an unlikely transformation across the world: the magician turns into the devil, complete with his fiery powers of destruction. How the boy unwittingly saves the world from Armageddon...well, I'll leave that part for you to read...
We've not literally had the devil to directly deal with to avoid worldwide catastrophe, but like in Armageddon, there have been moments when disaster almost came about in happenstance fashion...and was squelched by a combination of what would appear to be heroism and pure luck. One example: in September 1983 the Soviets received an erroneous early warning of nuclear missiles being launched against them from Europe. Only one single Soviet officer was there to make the crucial decision to override the otherwise automatic chain of events that would have left the world in a nuclear holocaust. For this he received no award or recognition...he had turned into an embarrassment to his superiors. Likewise, in Armageddon, little Herbie gets no respect for his act of heroism...in fact, both he and the Soviet officer end up being punished...
How many times have we dodged the bullet on this planet and avoided the worst kinds of disasters imaginable, with the truth hidden either to cover up for those who may have been negligent or to keep the public from panicking? The 1983 Soviet incident was only uncovered after that country's dissolution in 1991 and secret files on the subject were revealed...that's not likely to happen very often. Although Frederic Brown's premise in Armageddon was unrealistic...even silly...there are many real, seriously dangerous scenarios around us today that could bring it all down were events to combine in the "perfect storm" of calamity: will we have a Herbie to step up onstage and save us from it all?
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