The General Zapped an Angel

by Howard Fast

  “Why?”

  “Because we need your help.”

  “How can I help you when your own wisdom and power are apparently without measure?”

  The first spaceman explained. They were explorers, cartographers, surveyors—and behind them, light-years away, was their home planet, a gigantic ball the size of our planet Jupiter. Thus their small size, their incredible density. Weighing on earth only a fraction of what they weighed at home, they nevertheless weighed more than any earth creature their size—so much more that they walked on earth in dire peril of sinking out of sight. It was quite true that they could go anywhere in their spacecraft, but to get all the information they required, they would have to leave it—they would have to venture forth on foot. Thus the mouse would be their eyes and their feet.

  “And for this a mouse!” the mouse exclaimed. “Why? I am the smallest, the most defenseless of creatures.”

  “Not any longer,” they assured him. “We ourselves carry no weapons, because we have our minds, and in that way your mind is like ours. You can enter the mind of any creature, a cat, a dog—even a man—stop the neuron paths to his hate and aggression centers, and you can do it with the speed of thought. You have the strongest of all weapons—the ability to make any living thing love you, and having that, you need nothing else.”

  Thus the mouse became a part of the little group of space people who measured, charted, and examined the planet Earth. The mouse raced through the streets of a hundred cities, slipped in and out of hundreds of buildings, crouched in corners where he was privy to the discussions of people of power who ruled this part or that part of the planet Earth, and the space people listened with his ears, smelled with his sensitive nostrils, and saw with his soft brown eyes. The mouse journeyed thousands of miles, across the seas and continents whose existence he had never dreamed about. He listened to professors lecturing to auditoriums of college students, and he listened to the great symphony orchestras, the fine violinists and pianists. He watched mothers give birth to children and he listened to wars being planned and murders plotted. He saw weeping mourners watch the dead interred in the earth, and he trembled to the crashing sounds of huge assembly lines in monstrous factories. He hugged the earth as bullets whistled overhead, and he saw men slaughter each other for reasons so obscure that in their own minds there was only hate and fear.

  As much as the space people, he was a stranger to the curious ways of mankind, and he listened to them speculate on the mindless, haphazard mixture of joy and horror that was mankind’s civilization on the planet Earth.

  Then, when their mission was almost completed, the mouse chose to ask them about their own place. He was able to weigh facts now and to measure possibilities and to grapple with uncertainties and to create his own abstractions; and so he thought, on one of those evenings when the warmth of the five little creatures filled the spaceship, when they sat and mingled thoughts and reactions in an interlocking of body and mind of which the mouse was a part, about the place where they had been born.

  “Is it very beautiful?” the mouse asked.

  “It’s a good place. Beautiful—and filled with music.”

  “You have no wars?”

  “No.”

  “And no one kills for the pleasure of killing?”

  “No.”

  “And your animals—things like myself?”

  “They exist in their own ecology. We don’t disturb it, and we don’t kill them. We grow and we make the food we eat.”

  “And are there crimes like here—murder and assault and robbery?”

  “Almost never.”

  And so it went, question and answer, while the mouse lay there in front of them, his strangely shaped head between his paws, his eyes fixed on the two men and the two women with worship and love; and then it came as he asked them:

  “Will I be allowed to live with you—with the four of you? Perhaps to go on other missions with you? Your people are never cruel. You won’t place me with the animals. You’ll let me be with the people, won’t you?”

  They didn’t answer. The mouse tried to reach into their minds, but he was still like a little child when it came to the game of telepathy, and their minds were shielded.

  “Why?”

  Still no response.

  “Why?” he pleaded.

  Then, from one of the women. “We were going to tell you. Not tonight, but soon. Now we must tell you. You can’t come with us.”

  “Why?”

  “For the plainest of reasons, dear friend. We are going home.”

  “Then let me go home with you. It’s my home too—the beginning of all my thoughts and dreams and hope.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Why?” the mouse pleaded. “Why?”

  “Don’t you understand? Our planet is the size of your planet Jupiter here in the solar system. That is why we were so small in earth terms—because our very atomic structure is different from yours. By the measure of weight they use here on earth, I weigh almost a hundred kilograms, and you weigh less than an eighth of a kilogram, and yet we are almost the same size. If we were to bring you to our planet, you would die the moment we reached its gravitational pull. You would be crushed so completely that all semblance of form in you would disappear. You can’t ask us to destroy you.”

  “But you’re so wise,” the mouse protested. “You can do almost anything. Change me. Make me like yourselves.”

  “By your standards we’re wise—” The space people were full of sadness. It permeated the room, and the mouse felt its desolation. “By our own standards we have precious little wisdom. We can’t make you like us. That is beyond any power we might dream of. We can’t even undo what we have done, and now we realize what we have done.”

  “And what will you do with me?”

  “The only thing we can do. Leave you here.”

  “Oh, no.” The thought was a cry of agony.

  “What else can we do?”

  “Don’t leave me here,” the mouse begged them. “Anything—but don’t leave me here. Let me make the journey with you, and then if I have to die I will die.”

  “There is no journey as you see it,” they explained. “Space is not an area for us. We can’t make it comprehensible to you, only to tell you that it is an illusion. When we rise out of the earth’s atmosphere, we slip into a fold of space and emerge in our own planetary system. So it would not be a journey that you would make with us—only a step to your death.”

  “Then let me die with you,” the mouse pleaded.

  “No—you ask us to kill you. We can’t.”

  “Yet you made me.”

  “We changed you. We made you grow in a certain way.”

  “Did I ask you to? Did you ask me whether I wanted to be like this?”

  “God help us, we didn’t.”

  “Then what am I to do?”

  “Live. That’s all we can say. You must live.”

  “How? How can I live? A mouse hides in the grass and knows only two things—fear and hunger. It doesn’t even know that it is, and of the vast lunatic world that surrounds it, it knows nothing. But you gave me the knowledge—”

  “And we also gave you the means to defend yourself, so that you can live without fear.”

  “Why? Why should I live? Don’t you understand that?”

  “Because life is good and beautiful—and in itself the answer to all things.”

  “For me?” The mouse looked at them and begged them to look at him. “What do you see? I am a mouse. In all this world there is no other creature like myself. Shall I go back to the mice?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And discuss philosophy with them? And open my mind to them? Or should I have intercourse with those poor, damned mindless creatures? What am I to do? You are wise. Tell me. Shall I be the stallion of the mouse world? Shall I store up riches in roots and bulbs? Tell me, tell me,” he pleaded.

  “We will talk about it again,” the space people said. “Be with yo
urself for a while, and don’t be afraid.”

  Then the mouse lay with his head between his paws and he thought about the way things were. And when the space people asked him where he wanted to be, he told them:

  “Where you found me.”

  So once again the saucer settled by night into the back yard of the surburban split-level house. Once again the air lock opened, and this time a mouse emerged. The mouse stood there, and the saucer rose out of the swirling dead leaves and spun away, a fleck of gold losing itself in the night. And the mouse stood there, facing its own eternity.

  A cat, awakened by the movement among the leaves, came toward the mouse and then halted a few inches away when the tiny animal did not flee. The cat reached out a paw, and then the paw stopped. The cat struggled for control of its own body and then it fled, and still the mouse stood motionless. Then the mouse smelled the air, oriented himself, and moved to the mouth of an old mole tunnel. From down below, from deep in the tunnel, came the warm, musky odor of mice. The mouse went down through the tunnel to the nest, where a male and a female mouse crouched, and the mouse probed into their minds and found fear and hunger.

  The mouse ran from the tunnel up to the open air and stood there, sobbing and panting. He turned his head up to the sky and reached out with his mind—but what he tried to reach was already a hundred light-years away.

  “Why? Why?” the mouse sobbed to himself. “They are so good, so wise—why did they do it to me?”

  He then moved toward the house. He had become an adept at entering houses, and only a steel vault would have defied him. He found his point of entry and slipped into the cellar of the house. His night vision was good, and this combined with his keen sense of smell enabled him to move swiftly and at will.

  Moving through the shifting web of strong odors that marked any habitation of people, he isolated the sharp smell of old cheese, and he moved across the floor and under a staircase to where a mousetrap had been set. It was a primitive thing, a stirrup of hard wire bent back against the tension of a coil spring and held with a tiny latch. The bit of cheese was on the latch, and the lightest touch on the cheese would spring the trap.

  Filled with pity for his own kind, their gentleness, their helplessness, their mindless hunger that led them into a trap so simple and unconcealed, the mouse felt a sudden sense of triumph, of ultimate knowledge. He knew now what the space people had known from the very beginning, that they had given him the ultimate gift of the universe—consciousness of his own being—and in the flash of that knowledge the mouse knew all things and knew that all things were encompassed in consciousness. He saw the wholeness of the world and of all the worlds that ever were or would be, and he was without fear or loneliness.

  IN THE MORNING, the man of the split-level suburban house went down into his cellar and let out a whoop of delight.

  “Got it,” he yelled up to his family. “I got the little bastard now.”

  But the man never really looked at anything, not at his wife, not at his kids, not at the world; and while he knew that the trap contained a dead mouse, he never even noticed that this mouse was somewhat different from the other mice. Instead, he went out to the back yard, swung the dead mouse by his tail, and sent it flying into his neighbor’s back yard.

  “That’ll give him something to think about,” the man said, grinning.

  The Vision of Milty Boil

  Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini all had one thing in common with Milton Boil: they were short men. But the most explosive moments in human history have often been the result of an absent six or seven inches in height, and while it is hardly profitable it is certainly interesting to speculate upon what might have been man’s destiny had Milton Boil been six feet and one inch instead of five feet and one inch—with a name like Smith or Jones or Goldberg instead of Boil.

  But at his maturity he was five feet and one inch, and his name had already caused him so much small suffering that no force on earth would have persuaded him to change it. All his life he had been stuck with pins, pinched and punned upon because of his name and his height; no wonder he was a millionaire before he reached thirty.

  He was born in 1940 and he grew up in the time of affluence. His father was a builder of small apartment houses. Milton (or Milty, as he came to be known the world over) came out of college, spent a year learning more about his father’s business than the old man ever knew, and then parted company with his father and built his first big apartment house. Milty was a genius. By 1970 he had become the largest builder of apartment houses in New York City. He married Joan Pebbleman, whose father was one of the country’s largest builders of office buildings, and they had three lovely children. Joan worked in charitable efforts. Her name was in The New York Times at least once a week. She was only four feet and ten inches tall, so from a reasonable distance they were a very handsome couple indeed.

  Milty respected money, rich people, brains, organizational drive, very rich people, the government, the church, and millionaires. In an interview, he was asked what he considered the first necessary attribute of a young man who desired to become a millionaire.

  “Ambition,” he replied promptly. He respected ambition.

  “And after that?”

  “Influence,” he replied. “Proper friends.”

  And Milty made friends and built influence. By 1975, at the age of thirty-five, he was considered the most influential man in New York City. His influence was such that he was able to have a number of significant changes made in the building code—among them the lowering of the minimum height of the ceilings to seven feet. With this achieved, he built the first one-hundred-story apartment house in New York. In 1980, riding the crest of the wave created by the population explosion, Milty Boil managed to have the city council pass an ordinance permitting ceilings of six feet in all apartment buildings over fifty stories high.

  Rival builders sneered at Milty’s new house, claiming that no one would be so damn foolish as to rent an apartment with six-foot ceilings, but such was the housing shortage by then that the entire building, with its seven hundred apartments, was fully rented in sixty days.

  The cash flow that passed through Milty’s deserving hands had by now become so enormous that he was known throughout the business as the “golden boy” or, more often, “the golden boil”; but Milty was beyond the barbs of name-calling. His vision and imagination had lifted him to unprecedented heights, and once again he brought his influence to bear upon the lawmakers. In 1982 his workmen broke ground for a new building of one hundred stories, with ceilings five feet high. Biographers recall this as a moment of great crisis in the life of Milty Boil, and historians look back upon it as a turning point in man’s destiny. Suddenly all the forces of conservatism focused upon Milty; he was called everything from a depraved profiteer to public enemy number one; he was abused in the press, in Congress, on the air. There were, of course, a handful of farsighted people who applauded Milty’s courage and creativity, but mostly it was abuse that he received. And to this, at his now historic press conference, Milty replied simply and with dignity:

  “I give people a place to live at a reasonable rent. Especially the young people, who so desperately desire an urban condition. I give them a place to live at a rent they can afford.”

  “Do you, sir?” demanded the representative of The New York Times, bold and caustic as befitting his place, leading the attack upon Milty. “How can you say that in the light of the fact that we Americans are the tallest people on earth, especially our youth?”

  “I agree,” Milty replied. “This height is a tribute to the American way of life. All my life I have upheld the American way of life.”

  “That hardly answers the question,” said a CBS man.

  “I intend to answer it,” Milty assured them. “I have never been less than forthright about my plans. I have submitted this problem to a panel of forty-two physicians. They all agree that bending, crouching, and occasional creeping can only be beneficial t
o human health. Thereby a whole series of muscles formerly ignored are brought into play, and thus my own efforts coincide with the President’s plan for physical fitness. As for the defense of democracy on an international scale, nothing better develops a man for jungle combat than the alertness produced by life in a five-foot-high apartment. I have here a statement from the Secretary of Defense—mimeographed copies available—which says in part: ‘The constant concerns for his country’s welfare which dominate the thinking of Milton Boil deserve special mention and commendation.’ I also have statements from Generals Bosch and Korpulant, both of them experts—”

  “Mr. Boil,” he was interrupted, “are you trying to tell us that these low ceilings constitute a positive, progressive feature in apartment construction?”

  “They do indeed. Furthermore, an apartment is not a place where one lives vertically. We have conducted a survey of the habits of over ten thousand apartment dwellers, and the results show that ninety-two point eight percent of their hours spent in the apartment are spent in a sitting or reclining or prone position. With young married couples, the percentage is a trifle higher—”

  So did Milty Boil defend himself, a man alone fighting off the forces of reaction and always contemplating the gigantic profit produced by a building consisting of five-foot-high apartments. But a day later, at his regular board of directors’ meeting, Milty found that even those who shared the profits had their doubts.

  “It won’t work.”

  “Milty—you can’t go on this way. I hear Washington intends to step in.”

  “Did you hear what Pravda has to say? I have the translation here—‘the final step in the decadence of the United States.’ Well, it gives one pause.”

  “I don’t say it wasn’t a brilliant step, Milty. I simply ask: Will it work? Can it work? Life is not Pravda, but listen to its editorial: ‘Has Milty finally flipped? We don’t hold with those who characterize Milton Boil as a madman or public enemy. We recognize that the greatest builder of modern America does not make decisions lightly. But if Milton Boil is not mad, neither are Americans three feet tall. If—’”