Warming himself amid the blazing fires of Hades, Beelzebub was disconcerted.   He had become of a social outcast in Hell in recent times.   It had been so long since Old Beelzy had conjured up a truly great catastrophe to inflict upon the Earth.

Admittedly the world was still mourning the recent Earthquakes in Italy, which Beelzy had caused.   But the few thousand deaths in Italy could not sate Beelzebub.   Why, the disaster was simply not in his usual league.   Not for the fiend who had brought about the two world wars, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and countless other abominations.

Yet he had not created any truly great havoc for decades, and as a result he had become the laughing stock of the netherworld.   In particular, his archrivals, Lucifer and Diabolus, derived great pleasure from deriding him as a fool, and making him feel that he was a failure.   It was so unfair really; it was not Beelzebub’s fault.   Those bloody fools, Carter and Brezhnev, had not worked out at all.   Despite a number of minor confrontations between the Soviet Union and America, the two world leaders had refused to be goaded into war.

Old Beelzy had been sure that he was on to a good thing when the United States and the Soviet Union had split up the world between them after the Second World War.   And from the days of the McCarthy era he had succeeded at playing Russia and America against each other very well.   Then just when things had been going nicely under the Nixon administration, that damn fool Richard Nixon had had to go and get caught overstepping the mark and had been forced to resign from the presidency.   That had paved the way for that bloody peace-monger Jimmy Carter.

How Beelzebub hated Carter!   Why, the bastard had not only refused to go to war with the Soviet “Union, but had actually patched up things between the Arabs and the Jews.

Reagan would do better though, Reagan would put things right.   Old Beelzy could feel it in his bones.   Ronald Reagan was his kind of person, his kind of a President, a real blood and guts, down to Earth, no nonsense warmonger.   How it warmed his soul — or rather souls, he had collected countless trillions of them down the aeons — to think of Reagan’s evil possibilities.