The General Zapped an Angel

by Howard Fast

  “It is nothing, Kiley,” the projectionist said gently, while I stared at him in astonishment. “You deserve many things, and they will come to you. Now wait here for a little while. Dorey and I must step outside and have a few words in private concerning this momentous happening. You understand?”

  With tears in his eyes Kiley nodded and then he said to me, “Believe me, Dorey, I hold nothing against you. How could you know? How could anyone know without seeing it with his own two eyes? I mean anyone but the projectionist. He knew. He knew immediately. Didn’t you, sir?”

  “Immediately,” the projectionist agreed.

  “God bless you!” Kiley exclaimed. “I shouldn’t be saying that to anyone so superior to me as yourself, but I must say it. God bless you, Projectionist.”

  “Thank you, my lad. Now wait here in peace. Dorey, come with me.”

  Still speechless and astonished, I followed the projectionist out into the hall, where he whispered sharply, “Get that stupid expression off your face, Dorey. You’re the President.”

  “But I thought, Projectionist—”

  “I know what you thought. I simply dissembled in front of the poor lad. His mind is gone and his disease is serious and infectious. He must be put away, you know.”

  “Put away?”

  “Yes, Dorey—put away.”

  “Where?”

  “In the subcellar, Dorey, deep down in the old coalpit.”

  “Forever?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Can’t he be cured?”

  “Not of this particular delusion, Dorey. He is like a man who believes that he has seen the face of God. The vision becomes more than the man.”

  “I hate to do it.”

  “Do you imagine I like it?”

  “Is there no other possible way, Projectionist?”

  “None.”

  The projectionist went back to his booth, and I went down to Schecter and told him what we had to do. He smiled and licked his lips with pleasure, and believe me, I could have killed him then and there, but being a President entails certain duties, and there is no way to avoid them. So I let Schecter be and instead faced the look on Kiley’s face when we walked into the projectionist’s office and arrested him, binding his hands in back of him.

  “Dorey, you can’t get away with this!” he shouted. “You heard what the projectionist said to me.”

  “I do this at his order,” I replied dully.

  “No. No, you’re lying.”

  “I’m not lying, Kiley. God help me, I am not lying.”

  “But why would he go back on his own word?”

  “He was humoring you.”

  Kiley began to weep. We took him down, balcony to balcony, and then into the basement. It was fortunate for all of us that the projectionist had begun the Fitzgerald travelogues, for everyone was in the theater now. They were of the nature of the world. How can man live and not be filled with curiosity about his world? As unhappy as I was for Kiley’s fate, I was also somewhat irritated that because of him I would miss the beginning of the travelogues. Still, duty is duty.

  The coalpit was the fourth level under the orchestra, a dark, low-ceilinged part of the basement. A great iron hinged cover had to be lifted, and then we untied Kiley’s hands, knotted a rope around his waist, and lowered him down into the coalpit.

  “It’s there!” he screamed up at me. “Dorey, it’s there! Do you think you can destroy it by destroying me?”

  And then the iron cover clanged shut. Poor Kiley!

  The Insects

  People heard about the first transmission in various ways. Although unidentified radio appeals are fairly frequent and not generally subject to any general news dissemination—being more or less of oddities and often the work of cranks—they are not jealously guarded. The interesting part of this signal was that it had been repeated at least two dozen times and had been picked up in various parts of the world in various languages, in Russian in Moscow, in Chinese in Peking, in English in New York and London, in Swedish in Stockholm. In all these various places it was on the high-frequency band, somewhat less than twenty-five megacycles.

  We heard about it from Fred Goldman, who runs the monitor room for the National Broadcasting Company, when he and his wife dined with us early in May. He has his ear to things; he listens to the whole damn world breathing in a half a dozen languages, and he likes to drop things, like a ship at sea pleading for help and then silence and not one word in the press, or a New Orleans combination playing the latest hard rock—if such a thing is possible—in Yarensk, which is somewhere in the tundra of Northern Siberia, or any other of a dozen incongruous daily happenings across the radio waves of the earth. But on this night he was rather suppressed and thoughtful, and when he came out with it, it was less odd than reasonable.

  “You know,” he said, “there was a sort of universal complaint today and we can’t pinpoint it.”

  “Oh?”

  My wife poured drinks. His own wife looked at him sharply, as if this was the first she had heard of it and she resented being put on parity with us.

  “Good, clear signal,” he said. “High frequency. Queer voice though—know what it said?”

  There was another couple there—the Dennisons; he was a rather important surgeon—and Mrs. Dennison made a rather inept attempt at humor. I try to remember her first name, but it escapes me. She was a slim, beautiful blonde woman, but not very bright; yet she managed to turn it on Fred and he retreated. We tried to persuade him, but he turned the subject away and became a listener. It wasn’t until after dinner that I pinned him down.

  “About that signal?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You’ve become damn sensitive.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Nothing very special or mysterious. A voice said, ‘You must stop killing us.’”

  “Just that?”

  “It doesn’t surprise you?” Fred asked.

  “Oh, no—hardly. As you said, it’s a sort of universal plea. I can think of at least seven places on earth where those would be the most important words they could broadcast.”

  “I suppose so. But it did not originate in any of those places.”

  “No? Where, then?”

  “That’s it,” Fred Goldman said. “That’s just it.”

  That’s how I heard about it first. I put it out of mind as I imagine so many others did, and the truth is that I forgot about it. Two weeks later I delivered the second lecture in the Goddard Free Series at Harvard, and during the question period one student demanded:

  “What is your own reaction, Dr. Cornwall, to the curtain of silence the Establishment has thrown around the radio messages?”

  I was naïve enough to ask what messages he referred to, and a ripple of laughter told me that I was out of it.

  “‘You must stop killing us.’ Isn’t that it, Dr. Cornwall?” the boy shouted, and more applause greeted this than I had gotten on my own. “Isn’t that the crux of it?” the student went on. “‘You must stop killing us’—isn’t that it?”

  I took a brandy afterward with Dr. Fleming, the dean, in front of the fire in his own warm and comfortable study, and he mentioned that the university did a certain amount of monitoring of sorts. “The kids weren’t too disturbing, were they?” he asked.

  I assured him that I agreed with them. “We’re both Establishment of sorts,” I said, “so I don’t want to wriggle out of it. But isn’t that the radio signal? A friend of mine was telling me something about it. Did it come across again?”

  “Every day now,” the dean said. “The kids have taken it up as a sort of battle cry.”

  “But I saw nothing in the papers.”

  “That’s curious, isn’t it?” Fleming said. “I suppose some wraps are being put on it in Washington, although I can’t imagine why.”

  “They couldn’t locate the source the first day.”

  “We’ve tried on our own, and they’ve tried even harder over at M.I.T. It’s plaintive e
nough, but of what import I don’t know. Only the student body is very hot about it.”

  “So I noticed,” I agreed.

  A few days later at breakfast my wife informed me that she had lunched the previous day with Rhoda Goldman. The information was dropped like a small, careful bomb.

  “Go on,” I said with great interest.

  “You’ll pooh-pooh it.”

  “Try me.”

  “They have some background on the signals down at the station. Or at least they think they have.”

  “Oh?”

  “They think they know who is sending them.”

  “Thank God for that. Maybe we can stop killing them—or stop whoever is doing the killing. It’s the most God-awful plaintive thing I ever heard of.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I said no, we can’t stop,” my wife replied very seriously, “because it’s the insects.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what Rhoda Goldman said—insects. They are sending the messages.”

  “I am pooh-poohing it,” I agreed.

  “I knew you would,” my wife said.

  I have been on four of the mayor’s special committees, and the following day his assistant called and asked me whether I would serve on another. However, he refused to spell out the purpose, except to say that it was connected with the high-frequency messages.

  “Surely you’ve heard of them,” he said.

  I agreed that I had heard of them and I agreed to serve on the committee, chiefly out of curiosity. The day I went downtown for the meeting of the new committee was the same day that General Carl de Hargod, the new chief of staff, had arrived in New York to address a dinner group at the Waldorf; and now he was being welcomed at City Hall by both the mayor and about a thousand pickets. The pickets were a conglomeration of pacifist groups and hippies, and they marched back and forth in front of City Hall in silence, carrying signs which read: “You must stop killing us.”

  I had arrived early enough to get inside just before the welcoming ceremonies began, and when I joined the others of the newly formed committee I listened to an apology for the mayor’s absence and an assurance that he would be with us within the half hour. There were five others on the committee, three men and two women. I knew both women, Kate Gordon, who was Commissioner of Health, and Alice Kinderman, who was associated with the Museum of Natural History and newly named consultant to the Parks Department, and one of the men—Frank Meyers, a lawyer with important contacts in Washington. Meyers introduced me to the others, Basehart, who was the head of the Department of Entomology in the huge City University, and Krummer, from the Department of Agriculture in Washington.

  It was the presence of the entomologist that bounced off my mind incredulously, and when Meyers asked me whether I knew what we had been gathered together for, I replied only that it had something to do with the radio signals.

  “The point is, we know who is sending them.”

  “What is,” Alice Kinderman amended. “Who is is rather disturbing.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. “I prefer the communists.”

  “We have been killing a good many communists,” Basehart agreed, with that curious detachment of a scientist. “I’m sure they don’t like it. Well, no one likes to be killed, do they? This time it’s the insects, however.”

  “Fudge!” said Kate Gordon.

  Then we talked about it, calmly, in a manner befitting the six middle-aged, civilized men and women that we were, and if there were doubters among us, Basehart convinced them. He convinced me. He was a small, long-nosed man with electric blue eyes and an exciting smile. Anyone could see that what had happened was, so far as he was concerned, the most wonderful and exciting thing that had ever happened, and as he explained it, the preposterous disappeared and the inevitable took over. He convinced us that it had been inevitable all along. The only thing he could not persuade us to do was to share his enthusiasm.

  “It’s so logical,” he maintained. “The insect is not a thing in itself but a fragment. The hive is the thing. Insects don’t think in our terms; they don’t have brains. At best they have something that might be thought of as one of these printed circuits we make for mass-produced radios. They are cells, not organs. But does the hive think? Does the swarm think? Does the city of insects think? That’s the question we have never been able to answer satisfactorily. And what of the super-swarm? We have always known that they communicate with each other and with the swarm or the hive. But how? Certainly some sort of wave—and why not high frequency?”

  “Power?” someone asked.

  “Power. My goodness—have you any notion as to how many of them there are? Of species alone—almost half a million. Of individuals—beyond our ability to compute. They could generate any power required. Accomplish any task—if of course they come together into the theoretical super-hive or super-swarm and become conscious of themselves. And it appears they have. You know, we’ve always killed them, but now perhaps too many of them. They have a great instinct for survival.”

  “And we seem to have lost ours somewhere along the line, haven’t we?” I wondered.

  The mayor had too many responsibilities, too many problems in a city that was close to unmanageable, and it was difficult to say how seriously he took the plea of the insects. People in public life tend to become defensive about such things. I had lectured often enough on questions of social ecology to know how difficult it was to impress political leadership with the possibility that we may just be working ourselves out of a livable future.

  “We have just had to arrest over a hundred pacifists,” the mayor said tiredly, “most of them from good families—which means I will not sleep tonight, and since I had only an hour or two last night, I think you will understand my reluctance, ladies and gentlemen, to become excited about radio messages sent by insects. I give it credence only because the Department of Agriculture insists that I do—and so I ask you to please serve on this very ad hoc committee and draw up a report on the matter. We are allocating five thousand dollars for clerical assistance, and we have also been promised the full cooperation of the Ford Foundation.”

  The mayor could not remain with us, but we spent another half hour chatting about the matter, arranged for our next meeting, and then went our several ways. Belief in the absurd is not very tenacious, and I think that by the time our meeting broke up, we had put away the insects under a solid cover of doubt. With many pressures, I had half forgotten the matter by dinnertime, when my wife asked me pertly:

  “Well, Alan—what will you do about the insects?”

  When I did not answer immediately, my wife informed me that she had been on the phone that afternoon for almost an hour with her sister, Dorothy, from Upper Montclair, and that they were taking it very seriously indeed. In fact, Dorothy’s son, a physics major at M.I.T., had worked out the electronics—or the physics; she couldn’t say for certain—underlying the high-frequency signals.

  “He’s a bright boy,” I said.

  “And that’s a very enlightening comment.”

  “Well, the mayor formed a committee. I have the honor to be a part of it.”

  “That’s just what I adore most about our handsome mayor,” Jane said. “He does have a committee for everything, doesn’t he? I’m sure his conscience is clear now—”

  “Good heavens,” I said, “must he have a conscience about this too—”

  I never finished my defense of a poor, harassed man. The telephone rang. It was Bert Clegmann, who was one of the editors of The New York Times and whom I knew slightly, and he informed me that they had decided to break the story in their morning edition, since it had already appeared in London and in Rome, and could I tell him anything about the committee?

  I told him about the committee, and then I asked him my question.

  “Do I believe it?” Clegmann said. “Well, thank heavens I don’t have to put my own opinion on the line. There’s apparently enough backgro
und now for us to quote some eminent people, and the Russians are taking it seriously enough to raise it in the UN. Next week. Also, the little buggers have eaten three thousand four hundred contiguous acres of wheat in eastern Nebraska. Clean as a whistle. That may simply be a coincidence.”

  “What little buggers?”

  “Locusts.”

  “Well, isn’t that a very old business—I mean they always seem to be devouring something, somewhere, don’t they?”

  But I couldn’t get any commitment from Clegmann. He always felt that he was the articulation of the Times, so as to speak, and very wary, but that made him no different from most. It was much too great a strain to believe.

  “If you are on a committee,” my wife said, “then you must believe it.”

  “I think that part of the work of the committee is to test the validity of the whole thing.”

  “Doesn’t anyone on the committee believe it?”

  “Basehart, perhaps. He’s an entomologist.”

  “I feel silly,” my wife said, smiling, “but I have been watching the water bugs. They’re such huge, dreadful things anyway—I mean even when they don’t resent being killed. But what a horrible thought! We simply take it for granted that anything not human doesn’t resent being killed.”

  At our first formal committee meeting, Krummer, the Department of Agriculture man, touched on the same theme, but he was rather acid-tongued about the humanists. After outlining the new program they had set up in Washington, a three-pronged drive, as he put it, insecticides, poison gas, and radiation, he touched on the position of those sensitive people who held that perhaps we killed too easily.

  “Can anyone imagine the disaster that would strike mankind if we should give the insects a free hand! Worldwide starvation—not to mention disease and a matter of discomfort.”

  He went on to paint a rather ghastly picture, to which only Basehart objected, and mildly at that. Basehart pointed out that man had existed before the time of insecticides and had fed himself very nicely.