The General Zapped an Angel: New Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction

by Howard Fast

  “His Eminence, the Cardinal, is provoked at me,” he said finally. “He wants me to persuade you to leave.”

  “So you’re bringing back the fuzz.”

  “No, peacefully.”

  “Before you were with me on this being God’s pad. Has His Eminence talked you out of that?”

  “He pointed out that the Almighty has equal claim to the Soviet Union. I suppose wherever it is, the tenants make the rules.”

  “All right. Spell it out.”

  “I hate to be a top sergeant about it,” Father O’Conner said. “How long were you planning to stay?”

  “Until God answers me.”

  “That can be a long time,” Father O’Conner said unhappily.

  “Or an instant. I am meditating on time.”

  “Time?”

  “I always think of time when I think of God,” the Indian said. “He has His time. We have ours. I want Him to open His time to me. What in hell am I doing here on Fifth Avenue? I’m a Mohawk Indian. Right?”

  Father O’Conner nodded.

  “I don’t know,” the Indian said. “We’ll give it the old school try, and then you can call the fuzz. How about it? Until morning?”

  “Until morning,” Father O’Conner said.

  “I’ll do as much for you sometime,” the Indian said, and those were the last words he was heard to say. The newspaper reporters came down and the television crowd made a second visit, but the Indian was through talking.

  The Indian was meditating. He allowed thought to leave his mind and he watched his breath go in and out and he became a sort of a universe unto himself. He considered God’s time and he considered man’s time—but without thought. There are no thoughts known to man that are capable of dealing even with man’s time, much less God’s time; but the Indian was not so far from his ancestors as to be trapped in thought. His ancestors had known the secret of the great time, which all white men have forgotten.

  The Indian was photographed and televised until even the networks had enough of him, and Father O’Conner remained there to see that the Indian’s meditation was not interrupted. The priest felt a great kinship with the Indian, but being a priest, he also knew how many had asked and how few had been answered.

  By midnight the press had gone and even the few passers-by ignored the Indian. Father O’Conner was amazed at how long he had remained there, motionless, in what is called the lotus position, but he had always heard that Indians were stoical and enduring of pain and desire and he supposed that this Indian was no different. The priest was gratified that the June night was so warm and pleasant; at least the Indian would not suffer from cold.

  Before the priest fell asleep that night, he prayed that some sort of grace might be bestowed upon the Indian. What kind of grace he wasn’t at all sure, nor was he ready to plead that the Indian should have a taste of God’s time. The notion of God’s time was just a bit terrifying to Father O’Conner.

  He slept well but not for long, and he was up and dressed with the first gray presence of dawn. The priest walked to the porch of the cathedral, and there was the Indian exactly as the priest had left him. So erect, so unmoving was his body that, were it not for the slight motion of his bare stomach, the priest might have thought him dead.

  As for the Indian, Clyde Lightfeather, he was alert and within himself, and his mind was clear and open. Eyes closed, he felt the breezes of dawn on his cheek, the scent of morning in his nostril. He had no need for prayer; his whole being was a gentle reminder; and that way he heard a bird singing.

  He allowed the sound to pass through him; he experienced it but did not detain it. And then he heard the leaping, gurgling passage of a brook. That too he heard without detention. And then he smelled the smell of the earth in June, the wonderful wet, sweet, thick smell of life coming and life going, and this smell he clung to, for he knew that his meditation was finished and that he had been granted a moment of God’s time.

  He opened his eyes, and instead of the great masses of Rockefeller Center, he saw an ancient stand of tulip trees, each of them fifteen feet across the base and reaching so high up that only the birds knew where they topped out. Thin fingers of the dawn laced through the tulips, and out of the great knowledge that comes with the great time, the Indian knew that there would be birch-bark canoes on the shore of the Hudson, carefully sheltered for the day they would be needed, and that the Hudson was the road to the Mohawk Valley where the longhouses stood. He waited no longer but leaped to his feet and raced through the tulip trees.

  The priest had turned for a moment to regard the soaring majesty of St. Patrick’s; when he looked again, the Indian was gone. Instead of being pleased that he had accomplished what the Cardinal desired, the priest felt a sense of loss.

  A few hours later the Cardinal sent for Father O’Conner, and the priest told him that the Indian had left very early in the morning.

  “There was no unpleasantness, I trust?”

  “No, Your Eminence.”

  “No police?”

  “No, sir—only myself.” Father O’Conner hesitated, swallowed, and instead of departing, coughed.

  “Yes?” the Cardinal asked.

  “If I may ask you a question, Your Eminence?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What is God’s time, Your Eminence?”

  The Cardinal smiled, but not with amusement. The smile was a turning inward, as if he were remembering things that had happened long, long ago.

  “Was that the Indian’s notion?”

  Father O’Conner nodded with embarrassment.

  “Did you ask him?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Then when he returns,” the Cardinal said, “I suggest that you do.”

  THE WOUND

  MAX GAFFEY always insisted that the essence of the oil industry could be summed up in a simple statement: the right thing in the wrong place. My wife, Martha, always disliked him and said that he was a spoiler. I suppose he was, but how was he different from any of us in that sense? We were all spoilers, and if we were not the actual thing, we invested in it and thereby became rich. I myself had invested the small nest egg that a college professor puts away in a stock Max Gaffey gave me. It was called Thunder Inc., and the company’s function was to use atomic bombs to release natural gas and oil locked up in the vast untouched shale deposits that we have here in the United States.

  Oil shale is not a very economical source of oil. The oil is locked up in the shale, and about 60 percent of the total cost of shale oil consists of the laborious methods of mining the shale, crushing it to release the oil, and then disposing of the spent shale.

  Gaffey sold to Thunder Inc. an entirely new method, which involved the use of surplus atomic bombs for the release of shale oil. In very simplistic terms, a deep hole is bored in shale-oil deposits. Then an atomic bomb is lowered to the bottom of this hole, after which the hole is plugged and the bomb is detonated. Theoretically, the heat and force of the atomic explosion crushes the shale and releases the oil to fill the underground cavern formed by the gigantic force of the bomb. The oil does not burn because the hole is sealed, and thereby, for a comparatively small cost, untold amounts of oil can be tapped and released—enough perhaps to last until that time when we experience a complete conversion to atomic energy—so vast are the shale deposits.

  Such at least was the way Max Gaffey put the proposition to me, in a sort of mutual brain-picking operation. He had the utmost admiration for my knowledge of the earth’s crust, and I had an equally profound admiration for his ability to make two or five or ten dollars appear where only one had been before.

  My wife disliked him and his notions, and most of all the proposal to feed atomic bombs into the earth’s crust.

  “It’s wrong,” she said flatly. “I don’t know why or how, but this I do know, that everything connected with that wretched bomb is wrong.”

  “Yet couldn’t you look at this as a sort of salvation?” I argued. “Here we are in t
hese United States with enough atom bombs to destroy life on ten earths the size of ours—and every one of those bombs represents an investment of millions of dollars. I could not agree more when you hold that those bombs are the most hideous and frightful things the mind of man ever conceived.”

  “Then how on earth can you speak of salvation?”

  “Because so long as those bombs sit here, they represent a constant threat—day and night the threat that some feather-brained general or brainless politician will begin the process of throwing them at our neighbors. But here Gaffey has come up with a peaceful use for the bomb. Don’t you see what that means?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” Martha said.

  “It means that we can use the damn bombs for something other than suicide—because if this starts, it’s the end of mankind. But there are oil-shale and gas-shale deposits all over the earth, and if we can use the bomb to supply about five million dollars to man with a century of fuel, not to mention the chemical by-products, we may just find a way to dispose of those filthy bombs.”

  “Oh, you don’t believe that for a moment,” Martha snorted.

  “I do. I certainly do.”

  And I think I did. I went over the plans that Gaffey and his associates had worked out, and I could not find any flaw. If the hole were plugged properly, there would be no fallout. We knew that and we had the know-how to plug the hole, and we had proven it in at least twenty underground explosions. The earth tremor would be inconsequential; in spite of the heat, the oil would not ignite, and in spite of the cost of the atom bombs, the savings would be monumental. In fact, Gaffey hinted that some accommodation between the government and Thunder Inc. was in the process of being worked out, and if it went through as planned, the atom bombs might just cost Thunder Inc. nothing at all, the whole thing being in the way of an experiment for the social good.

  After all, Thunder Inc. did not own any oil-shale deposits, nor was it in the oil business. It was simply a service organization with the proper know-how, and for a fee—if the process worked—it would release the oil for others. What that fee would be was left unsaid, but Max Gaffey, in return for my consultation, suggested that I might buy a few shares, not only of Thunder Inc., but of General Shale Holdings.

  I had altogether about ten thousand dollars in savings available and another ten thousand in American Telephone and government bonds. Martha had a bit of money of her own, but I left that alone, and without telling her, I sold my Telephone stock and my bonds. Thunder Inc. was selling at five dollars a share, and I bought two thousand shares. General Shale was selling for two dollars, and I bought four thousand shares. I saw nothing immoral—as business morality was calculated—in the procedures adopted by Thunder Inc. Its relationship to the government was no different than the relationships of various other companies, and my own process of investment was perfectly straightforward and honorable. I was not even the recipient of secret information, for the atom-bomb—shale-oil proposal had been widely publicized if little believed.

  Even before the first test explosion was undertaken, the stock of Thunder Inc. went from five to sixty-five dollars a share. My ten thousand dollars became one hundred and thirty thousand, and that doubled again a year later. The four thousand shares of General Shale went up to eighteen dollars a share; and from a moderately poor professor I became a moderately rich professor. When finally, almost two years after Max Gaffey first approached me, they exploded the first atom bomb in a shaft reamed in the oil-shale deposits, I had abandoned the simple anxieties of the poor and had developed an entirely new set tailored for the upper middle class. We became a two-car family, and a reluctant Martha joined me in shopping for a larger house. In the new house, Gaffey and his wife came to dinner, and Martha armed herself with two stiff martinis. Then she was quietly polite until Gaffey began to talk about the social good. He painted a bright picture of what shale oil could do and how rich we might well become.

  “Oh, yes—yes,” Martha agreed. “Pollute the atmosphere, kill more people with more cars, increase the speed with which we can buzz around in circles and get precisely nowhere.”

  “Oh, you’re a pessimist,” said Gaffey’s wife, who was young and pretty but no mental giant.

  “Of course there are two sides to it,” Gaffey admitted. “It’s a question of controls. You can’t stop progress, but it seems to me that you can direct it.”

  “The way we’ve been directing it—so that our rivers stink and our lakes are sewers of dead fish and our atmosphere is polluted and our birds are poisoned by DDT and our natural resources are spoiled. We are all spoilers, aren’t we?”

  “Come now,” I protested, “this is the way it is, and all of us are indignant about it, Martha.”

  “Are you, really?”

  “I think so.”

  “Men have always dug in the earth,” Gaffey said. “Otherwise we’d still be in the Stone Age.”

  “And perhaps a good bit happier.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “The Stone Age was a very unpleasant time, Martha. You don’t wish us back there.”

  “Do you remember,” Martha said slowly, “how there was a time when men used to speak about the earth our mother? It was Mother Earth, and they believed it. She was the source of life and being.”

  “She still is.”

  “You’ve sucked her dry,” Martha said curiously. “When a woman is sucked dry, her children perish.”

  It was an odd and poetical thing to say, and, as I thought, in bad taste. I punished Martha by leaving Mrs. Gaffey with her, with the excuse that Max and I had some business matters to discuss, which indeed we did. We went into the new study in the new house and we lit fifty-cent cigars, and Max told me about the thing they had aptly named “Project Hades.”

  “The point is,” Max said, “that I can get you into this at the very beginning. At the bottom. There are eleven companies involved—very solid and reputable companies”—he named them, and I was duly impressed—“who are putting up the capital for what will be a subsidiary of Thunder Inc. For their money they get a twenty-five-percent interest. There is also ten percent, in the form of stock warrants, put aside for consultation and advice, and you will understand why. I can fit you in for one and a half percent—roughly three quarters of a million—simply for a few weeks of your time, and we will pay all expenses, plus an opinion.”

  “It sounds interesting.”

  “It should sound more than that. If Project Hades works, your interest will increase tenfold within a matter of five years. It’s the shortest cut to being a millionaire that I know.”

  “All right—I’m more than interested. Go on.”

  Gaffey took a map of Arizona out of his pocket, unfolded it, and pointed to a marked-off area. “Here,” he said, “is what should—according to all our geological knowledge—be one of the richest oil-bearing areas in the country. Do you agree?”

  “Yes, I know the area,” I replied. “I’ve been over it. Its oil potential is purely theoretical. No one has ever brought in anything there—not even salt water. It’s dry and dead.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “That’s the way it is. If we could locate oil through geological premise and theory, you and I would both be richer than Getty. The fact of the matter is, as you well know, that sometimes it’s there and sometimes it isn’t. More often it isn’t.”

  “Why? We know our job. We drill in the right places.”

  “What are you getting at, Max?”

  “A speculation—particularly for this area. We have discussed this speculation for months. We have tested it as best we can. We have examined it from every possible angle. And now we are ready to blow about five million dollars to test our hypothesis—providing—”

  “Providing what?”

  “That your expert opinion agrees with ours. In other words, we’ve cast the die with you. You look at the situation and tell us to go ahead—we go ahead. You look at it and tell us it’s a crock of beans—well, we fold our t
ents like the Arabs and silently steal away.”

  “Just on my say-so?”

  “Just on your brains and know-how.”

  “Max, aren’t you barking up the wrong tree? I’m a simple professor of geology at an unimportant western state university, and there are at least twenty men in the field who can teach me the right time—”

  “Not in our opinion. Not on where the stuff is. We know who’s in the field and we know their track records. You keep your light under a bushel, but we know what we want. So don’t argue. It’s either a deal or it isn’t. Well?”.

  “How the devil can I answer you when I don’t even know what you’re talking about?”

  “All right—I’ll spell it out, quick and simple. The oil was there once, right where it should be. Then a natural convulsion—a very deep fault. The earth cracked and the oil flowed down, deep down, and now giant pockets of it are buried there where no drill can reach them.”

  “How deep?”

  “Who knows? Fifteen, twenty miles.”

  “That’s deep.”

  “Maybe deeper. When you think of that kind of distance under the surface, you’re in a darker mystery than Mars or Venus—all of which you know.”

  “All of which I know.” I had a bad, uneasy feeling, and some of it must have shown in my face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you leave it alone, Max?”

  “Why?”

  “Come on, Max—we’re not talking about drilling for oil. Fifteen, twenty miles. There’s a rig down near the Pecos in Texas and they’ve just passed the twenty-five-thousand-foot level, and that’s about it. Oh, maybe another thousand, but you’re talking about oil that’s buried in one hundred thousand feet of crust. You can’t drill for it; you can only go in and—”

  “And what?”

  “Blast it out.”

  “Of course—and how do you fault us for that? What’s wrong with it? We know—or least we have good reason to believe—that there’s a fissure that opened and closed. The oil should be under tremendous pressure. We put in an atom bomb—a bigger bomb than we ever used before—and we blast that fissure open again. Great God almighty, that should be the biggest gusher in all the history of gushers.”