The General Zapped an Angel

by Howard Fast

  “There is a natural balance to this kind of thing—an ecological whole. Insects eat each other and birds eat insects and certain animals join in, and even nature in some mysterious way restrains any part of the circle that gets out of hand. But we have killed the birds without mercy and now we are trying to kill the insects, and we keep chopping pieces out of that ecological circle and heaven knows where it will end.”

  But the main fact presented to the committee was that the high-frequency messages had stopped, and once that visible manifestation of so unnatural a desire as survival had ceased, the party of doubt took over and proceeded to prove that the public had been hoaxed. Since aside from the single fact of devastation in Nebraska there had been no noticeable change in insect behavior anywhere on earth, the fact of a hoax took hold very readily. We appointed Frank Meyers as a one-man subcommittee to investigate the pros and cons of the matter and to report back to us in two weeks.

  “This,” I explained to my wife, “is the normal process of a committee—not to find but to lose. We shall lose this crisis in very short order.”

  “In two weeks we are leaving for Vermont,” my wife said.

  “We’ll adjourn for the summer,” I assured her. “That too is the normal business of committees.”

  When we reconvened two weeks later, both Krummer and Meyers delivered reassuring reports.

  With great delight Krummer told us that the Pentagon had joined forces with the Department of Agriculture to produce an insecticide so deadly that a quart of it turned into a fine spray would kill any and all insects in a square mile. However, it was almost as deadly to animal and human existence—a matter they hoped to solve in very short order. But Meyers thought it was all to little purpose.

  “The people at the C.I.A.,” he said, “are just about decided that the Russians are responsible for the high-frequency hoax. They have secret transmitters all over the place, and it’s a part of their overall plan to sow fear and discord in the Free World. More to the point, knowing they had blown it, Pravda yesterday published a long article blaming it on us. I have also interviewed twenty-three leading naturalists, and all except one agree that the notion of a collective insect intelligence on a par with the intelligence of man is preposterous.”

  “Of course, our work isn’t wasted,” Krummer said. “I mean, a new insecticide is worth its weight in gold, and since it will in its present form kill men as readily as insects, it joins our arsenal of secret weapons. It’s an excellent example of how the various sciences tend to overlap, and I think we can salute it as a vital part of the American Way.”

  “Who was the scientist who did not agree?” I asked.

  “Basehart here,” Meyers said.

  Basehart smiled modestly and replied, “I don’t think I can properly be counted, since I am a member of the committee. Which makes the scientific opinion unanimous. Or at least I think that is how it should go into the record.”

  “You still think it was the insects?” Mrs. Kinderman asked.

  “Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.”

  “Why?”

  “Only because it’s logical and exciting,” said Basehart, “and you know the Russians are so utterly dreary and unimaginative—they would never think of such an idea, not in a thousand years.”

  “But a collective intelligence,” I objected. “I dislike the word preposterous—but surely rather unbelievable.”

  “Not at all,” Basehart replied, almost apologetically. “It’s a concept quite familiar to entomologists, and we have discussed it for generations. I will admit that we use it pragmatically when we run out of more acceptable explanations, but there are so many things about the social insects that do not submit to any other explanation. Naturally, we are dealing here with a far more developed and complex intelligence—but who is to say that this is not a perfectly legitimate line of evolution? We are like little children in our understanding of the manner of evolution, and as for its purpose, why, we haven’t even begun to inquire.”

  “Oh, come now,” said Kate Gordon, or snorted would be more descriptive, “you are becoming positively teleological, Dr. Basehart, and among scientists I think that is indefensible.”

  “Oh?” But Basehart did not desire to battle. “Perhaps.” He nodded. “Yet some of us cannot help being just a bit teleological. One doesn’t always surmount one’s childhood religious training.”

  “Intellectually, one must,” said Kate Gordon primly.

  “Basehart,” I said, “suppose we were to accept this intelligence, not as a reality, but as a matter for discussion. Should we have cause to fear it? Would it be malignant?”

  “Malignant? Oh, no—not at all. That has never been my notion of intelligence. Evil is mediocre and rather stupid. No, wisdom is not a malignancy, quite to the contrary. But whether or not we have to fear them—well, that’s something else entirely. I mean, we have not come back with a single response. Oh, I don’t mean us on this committee. I talk of mankind. Mankind moved only in two directions, to convince itself that an insect intelligence did not exist and to make a new insecticide. But they ask us to stop killing them. What are they to do?”

  “Come now”—Meyers laughed—“aren’t we playing the game too well? We have been a committee of sincere and interested citizens, and I don’t think we have shirked the problem. I move that we adjourn now and reconvene in September.”

  The motion was seconded and carried.

  DRIVING UP TO OUR SUMMER PLACE in Vermont, my wife, Jane, said rather sadly, “If the boy were alive, I wouldn’t sleep too well. Do you know, it’s three years since he died—and it seems like only yesterday.”

  “We are beginning a vacation and rest,” I told her, “and I will not countenance this kind of mood.”

  “It’s just that I sometimes feel we have stopped caring. Is it a part of growing old?”

  “We still care,” I said sharply. But I knew exactly what she meant.

  Our summer place is in a wonderful, isolated upland valley, like so many of the upland valleys in Vermont, full of sunny days and cool nights and a starry sky over the green folds of earth. It’s a place where time moves differently, and after we are there for a while, we move with the time of the place.

  We had occasional company, but not too often or too much, and mostly on the weekends. Town was six miles on a dirt road, and twenty miles away was a fair-sized artist colony with a summer symphony and theater and a great many people to talk to if we got lonely. But our visits there were few, two or three times a summer, and we were rarely lonely in the way people understand loneliness. Down the road about a mile lived our nearest neighbor, an old widower named Glenn Olson, who made honey in the summer and maple sugar in the winter. Both were delicious. His maples were old and strong and his bees worked among the wild flowers in the abandoned pastures.

  I had been meaning to visit him for both honey and sugar, but put it off from day to day. On the third week the thing happened in the cities. But until then, nothing was very different, only the warm summer days and the birds and the insects humming lazily in the hot air. We could have forgotten the whole thing if only we had disbelieved; but somewhere in both of us was a nugget of belief. We had a postcard from Basehart, who was in the Virgin Islands, where he was cataloguing species and types of insects. The postcard ended with a rather sentimental good-by. Neither my wife nor I remarked on that because, as I said, we had a nugget of belief.

  And of course, then, toward the beginning of the summer, the cities died.

  There had been a great deal of speculation about the insects and what they might do if they were as some thought. Articles were written, books rushed into print, and even films were planned. There were nightmare things about super-insects, armies of ants, winged devils; but no one anticipated the simple directness of the fact. The insects simply moved against the cities to begin it. Apparently a single intelligence controlled all the movements of the insects, and the millions who perished made no great difference to the survival of the intellige
nce. They filled the aqueducts and stopped the flow of water. They short-circuited the wires and halted the flow of electricity. They ate the food in the cities and swarmed by the millions over the food coming in. They clogged the valves and intakes of motors and stalled them. They clogged the sewers and they spread disease and the cities died. The insects died by the billions, but this time it was not necessary to kill them. They imposed death on themselves, and the festering, malaria-ridden, plague-ridden cities died with them.

  First we watched it happen on television, but the television went very soon. We have a relay tower, and it ceased to function on the third day after the attack on the cities began; after that the picture was so bad as to be meaningless, and a few days later it ceased. We listened to the radio then, until the radio stopped. Then there was the valley as it had always been, and the silence, and the insects hanging in the hot air and the sunlight and the nights.

  My own feeling was to drive down to the town, and from day to day I felt that this had to be, but my wife would not have it. Her dread of leaving our place and going to the town was so great that it was not until our food began to run low that she agreed to my going—providing she went with me. Our own telephone had stopped functioning long ago, and it was only after days of not seeing a plane overhead that we realized no planes flew any longer.

  Driving down toward town finally, we stopped at Glenn Olson’s place, to ask him whether he knew how it was in the village, and perhaps to buy some honey and sugar. We found him in his bedroom, dead—not long dead, perhaps only a day. He had been stung three times on the forearm while he slept. My wife had been a nurse once, and she explained the process whereby three consecutive bee stings would work to kill a man. The air outside was full of bees, humming, working, hanging in the air.

  “I think we’ll go back to the house,” I said.

  “We can’t leave him like that.”

  “We can,” I said, thinking of how many millions of others were like that.

  Olson had a well-stocked cupboard. I filled some bags with canned goods, flour, beans, honey in jars, and maple sugar, and I carried them out to my car, while Jane remained in the house. Then I pulled the blanket over Olson and took Jane by the arm.

  “I don’t want to go out there,” she said.

  “Well, we must, you know. We can’t stay here.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “But we can’t stay here.”

  Finally I convinced her to come to the car. Her arms were covered and she held a towel over her face, but the bees ignored us. In the car we raised the windows and drove back to our summer place—and then almost ran into our house.

  Yet I got over the panic and resisted the temptation to cover myself with mosquito netting. I talked to Jane and finally convinced her that this was not a thing one could avoid or take measures against. It was like the wind, the rain, the sunrise and the sunset. It was happening and nothing we could do would alter it.

  “Alan—will it be everyone?” she asked. “Will it be the whole world?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What good would it do them to make it the whole world?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I would not want to live if it were the whole world.”

  “It’s not a question of what we want. It’s the way it is. We can only live with it the way it is.”

  Yet when I went out to the car to bring in the supplies we had taken from Olson’s place, I had to call upon every shred of courage and strength I possessed.

  It was a little better the next day, and by the third day I convinced Jane to leave the house with me and to walk a little. She covered herself at first, but after a while her fear began to dissipate, and then, bit by bit, it became something you live with—as I suppose anything can. The following week I sat down to write this account. I have been working on it for three days. Yesterday a bee lighted on the back of my hand, a large, fuzzy, working bumblebee. I held my hand firmly and looked at the bee, and the bee returned my stare.

  Then the bee flew away, and I had a feeling that it was over and that what would happen had happened. But how we will pick it up and what we will put together, I don’t know. I talked about it with my wife last night.

  “I hope Basehart is alive and well,” she said. “It would be nice to see him again.” Which was rather curious, since all she knew about Basehart was what I had told her. Then she began to cry. She was not a woman who cries a great deal, and soon she dried her eyes and took up some sewing that she had laid aside weeks before. I lit my pipe. It was the last of the day. We sat there in silence as darkness fell.

  I lit our single kerosene lamp, and she said to me, “We will have to go down to the village sooner or later, won’t we?”

  “Sooner or later,” I agreed.

  About the Author

  HOWARD FAST was one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century. He was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. The son of immigrants, Fast grew up in New York City and published his first novel upon finishing high school in 1933. In 1950, his refusal to provide the United States Congress with a list of possible Communist associates earned him a three-month prison sentence. During his incarceration, Fast wrote one of his best-known novels, Spartacus, which was adapted into a movie by Stanley Kubrick. Fast died in Greenwich, Connecticut in 2003.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Howard Fast

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS BY HOWARD FAST

  Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel, and Other Stories of a Young Nation (1945)

  Departure, and Other Stories (1949)

  The Last Supper and Other Stories (1955)

  The Howard Fast Reader: A Collection of Stories and Novels (1960)

  The Edge of Tomorrow (1961)

  The Hunter and The Trap (1967)

  The General Zapped an Angel (1970)

  A Touch of Infinity (1973)

  Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (1975)

  The Call of Fife and Drum: Three Novels of the Revolution (1987)

  ECCO ART OF THE STORY

  The Delicate Prey by Paul Bowles

  Catastrophe by Dino Buzzati

  The Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

  Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins

  Continent by Jim Crace

  The Vanishing Princess by Jenny Diski

  The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield

  Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates

  Mr. and Mrs. Baby by Mark Strand

  In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff

  Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger

  Hue and Cry by James Alan McPherson

  Copyright

  THE GENERAL ZAPPED AN ANGEL. Copyright © 1969, 1970 by Howard Fast. Preface copyright © 2019 by Mark Harris. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Cover design by Allison Saltzman

  Cover art: The Catalogue of Imaginary Beings, Plate No. 73 © Johanna Goodman

  Background Texture on Title Page by Ethnic Design /Shutterstock, Inc.

  Originally published in 1969 by Ace Books, a division of Charter Communications Inc., by arrangement with William Morrow & Co., Inc.

  FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2019.

  Digital Edition DECEMBER 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-290845-2

  Version 10232019

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-290844-5

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