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

by Howard Fast

  “You’ve drilled the hole already, haven’t you, Max?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How deep?”

  “Twenty-two thousand feet.”

  “And you have the bomb?”

  Max nodded. “We have the bomb. We’ve been working on this for five years, and seven months ago the boys in Washington cleared the bomb. It’s out there in Arizona waiting—”

  “For what?”

  “For you to look everything over and tell us to go ahead.”

  “Why? We have enough oil—”

  “Like hell we have! You know damn well why—and do you imagine we can drop it now after all the money and time that’s been invested in this?”

  “You said you’d drop it if I said so.”

  “As a geologist in our pay, and I know you well enough to know what that means in terms of your professional skill and pride.”

  I stayed up half that night talking with Martha about it and trying to fit it into some kind of moral position. But the only thing I could come up with was the fact that here was one less atom bomb to murder man and destroy the Me of the earth, and that I could not argue with. A day later I was at the drilling site in Arizona.

  The spot was well chosen. From every point of view this was an oil explorer’s dream, and I suppose that fact had been duly noted for the past half century, for there were the moldering remains of a hundred futile rigs, rotting patterns of wooden and metal sticks as far as one could see, abandoned shacks, trailers left with lost hopes, ancient trucks, rusting gears, piles of abandoned pipe—all testifying to the hope that springs eternal in the wildcatter’s breast.

  Thunder Inc. was something else, a great installation in the middle of the deep valley, a drilling rig larger and more complex than any I had ever seen, a wall to contain the oil should they fail to cap it immediately, a machine shop, a small generating plant, at least a hundred vehicles of various sorts, and perhaps fifty mobile homes. The very extent and vastness of the action here deep in the badlands was breathtaking; and I let Max know what I thought of his statement that all this would be abandoned if I said that the idea was worthless.

  “Maybe yes—maybe no. What do you say?”

  “Give me time.”

  “Absolutely, all the time you want.”

  Never have I been treated with such respect. I prowled all over the place and I rode a jeep around and about and back and forth and up into the hills and down again; but no matter how long I prowled and sniffed and estimated, mine would be no more than an educated guess. I was also certain that they would not give up the project if I disapproved and said that it would be a washout. They believed in me as a sort of oil-dowser, especially if I told them to go ahead. What they were really seeking was an expert’s affirmation of their own faith. And that was apparent from the fact that they had already drilled an expensive twenty-two-thousand-foot hole and had set up all this equipment. If I told them they were wrong, their faith might be shaken a little, but they would recover and find themselves another dowser.

  I told this to Martha when I telephoned her.

  “Well, what do you honestly think?”

  “It’s oil country. But I’m not the first one to come up with that brilliant observation. The point is—does their explanation account for the lack of oil?”

  “Does it?”

  “I don’t know. No one knows. And they’re dangling a million dollars right in front of my nose.”

  “I can’t help you,” Martha said. “You’ve got to play this one yourself.”

  Of course she couldn’t help me. No one could have helped me. It was too far down, too deeply hidden. We knew what the other side of the moon looked like and we knew something about Mars and other planets, but what have we ever known about ourselves and the place where we live?

  The day after I spoke to Martha, I met with Max and his board of directors.

  “I agree,” I told them. “The oil should be there. My opinion is that you should go ahead and try the blast.”

  They questioned me after that for about an hour, but when you play the roll of a dowser, questions and answers become a sort of magical ritual. The plain fact of the matter is that no one had ever exploded a bomb of such power at such a depth, and until it was done, no one knew what would happen.

  I watched the preparations for the explosion with great interest. The bomb, with its implosion casing, was specially made for this task—or remade would be a better way of putting it—very long, almost twenty feet, very slim. It was armed after it was in the rigging, and then the board of directors, engineers, technicians, newspapermen, Max, and myself retreated to the concrete shelter and control station, which had been built almost a mile away from the shaft. Closed-circuit television linked us with the hole; and while no one expected the explosion to do any more than jar the earth heavily at the surface, the Atomic Energy Commission specified the precautions we took.

  We remained in the shelter for five hours while the bomb made its long descent—until at last our instruments told us that it rested on the bottom of the drill hole. Then we had a simple countdown, and the chairman of the board pressed the red button. Red and white buttons are man’s glory. Press a white button and a bell rings or an electric light goes on; press a red button and the hellish force of a sun comes into being—this time five miles beneath the earth’s surface.

  Perhaps it was this part and point in the earth’s surface; perhaps there was no other place where exactly the same thing would have happened; perhaps the fault that drained away the oil was a deeper fault than we had ever imagined. Actually we will never know; we only saw what we saw, watching it through the closed-circuit TV. We saw the earth swell. The swell rose up like a bubble—a bubble about two hundred yards in diameter—and then the surface of the bubble dissipated in a column of dust or smoke that rose up perhaps five hundred feet from the valley bottom, stayed a moment with the lowering sun behind it, like the very column of fire out of Sinai, and then lifted whole and broke suddenly in the wind. Even in the shelter we heard the screaming rumble of sound, and as the face of the enormous hole that the dust had left cleared, there bubbled up a column of oil perhaps a hundred feet in diameter. Or was it oil?

  The moment we saw it, a tremendous cheer went up in the shelter, and then the cheer cut off in its own echo. Our closed-circuit system was color television, and this column of oil was bright red.

  “Red oil,” someone whispered.

  Then it was quiet.

  “When can we get out?” someone else demanded.

  “Another ten minutes.”

  The dust was up and away in the opposite direction, and for ten minutes we stood and watched the bright red oil bubble out of the hole, forming a great pond within the retaining walls, and filling the space with amazing rapidity and lapping over the walls, for the flow must have been a hundred thousand gallons a second or even more, and then outside of the walls and a thickness of it all across the valley floor, rising so quickly that from above, where we were, we saw that we would be cut off from the entire installation. At that point we didn’t wait, but took our chances with the radiation and raced down the desert hillside toward the hole and the mobile homes and the trucks—but not quickly enough. We came to a stop at the edge of a great lake of red oil.

  “It’s not red oil,” someone said.

  “Goddamnit, it’s not oil!”

  “The hell it’s not! It’s oil.”

  We were moving back as it spread and rose and covered the trucks and houses, and then it reached a gap in the valley and poured through and down across the desert, into the darkness of the shadows that the big rocks threw—flashing red in the sunset and later black in the darkness.

  Someone touched it and put a hand to his mouth.

  “It’s blood.”

  Max was next to me. “He’s crazy,” Max said.

  Someone else said that it was blood.

  I put a finger into the red fluid and raised it to my nose. It was warm, almo
st hot, and there was no mistaking the smell of hot, fresh blood. I tasted it with the tip of my tongue.

  “What is it?” Max whispered.

  The others gathered around now—silent, with the red sun setting across the red lake and the red reflected on our faces, our eyes glinting with the red.

  “Jesus God, what is it?” Max demanded.

  “It’s blood,” I replied.

  “From where?”

  Then we were all silent.

  We spent the night on the top of the butte where the shelter had been built, and in the morning, all around us, as far as we could see, there was a hot, steaming sea of red blood, the smell so thick and heavy that we were all sick from it; and all of us vomited half a dozen times before the helicopters came for us and took us away.

  The day after I returned home, Martha and I were sitting in the living room, she with a book and I with the paper, where I had read about their trying to cap the thing, except that even with diving suits they could not get down to where it was; and she looked up from her book and said:

  “Do you remember that thing about the mother?”

  “What thing?”

  “A Very old thing. I think I heard once that it was half as old as time, or maybe a Greek fable or something of the sort—but anyway, the mother has one son, who is the joy of her heart and all the rest that a son could be to a mother, and then the son falls in love with or under the spell of a beautiful and wicked woman—very wicked and very beautiful. And he desires to please her, oh, he does indeed, and he says to her, ‘Whatever you desire, I will bring it to you’—”

  “Which is nothing to say to any woman, but ever,” I put in.

  “I won’t quarrel with that,” Martha said mildly, “because when he does put it to her, she replies that what she desires most on this earth is the living heart of his mother, plucked from her breast. So what does this worthless and murderous idiot male do but race home to his mother, and then out with a knife, ripping her breast to belly and tearing the living heart out of her body—”

  “I don’t like your story.”

  “—and with the heart in his hand, he blithely dashes back toward his ladylove. But on the way through the forest he catches his toe on a root, stumbles, and falls headlong, the mother’s heart knocked out of his hand. And as he pulls himself up and approaches the heart, it says to him, ‘Did you hurt yourself when you fell, my son?’”

  “Lovely story. What does it prove?”

  “Nothing, I suppose. Will they ever stop the bleeding? Will they close the wound?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then will your mother bleed to death?”

  “My mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  “My mother,” Martha said. “Will she bleed to death?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “That’s all you can say—I suppose so?”

  “What else?”

  “Suppose you had told them not to go ahead?”

  “You asked me that twenty times, Martha. I told you. They would have gotten another dowser.”

  “And another? And another?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” she cried out. “For God’s sake, why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you lousy men know everything else.”

  “Mostly we only know how to kill it. That’s not everything else. We never learned to make anything alive.”

  “And now it’s too late,” Martha said.

  “It’s too late, yes,” I agreed, and I went back to reading the paper. But Martha just sat there, the open book in her lap, looking at me; and then after a while she closed the book and went upstairs to bed.

  TOMORROW’S

  “WALL STREET

  JOURNAL”

  AT precisely eight forty-five in the morning, carrying a copy of tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal under his arm, the devil knocked at the door of Martin Chesell’s apartment. The devil was a handsome middle-aged businessman, dressed in a two-hundred-dollar gray sharkskin suit, forty-five-dollar shoes, a custom-made shirt, and a twenty-five-dollar iron-gray Italian silk tie. He wore a forty-dollar hat, which he took off politely as the door opened.

  Martin Chesell, who lived on the eleventh floor of one of those high-rise apartments that grow like mushrooms on Second Avenue in the seventies and eighties, was wearing pants and a shirt, neither with a lineage of place or price. His wife, Doris, had just said to him, “What kind of a nut is it at this hour? You better look through the peephole.”

  “Drop dead,” he replied as he looked through the peephole.

  Knowing a good tie and shirt when he saw them, Martin Chesell opened the door and asked the devil what he wanted.

  “I’m the devil,” the devil answered politely. “And I am here to make a deal for tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal.”

  “Buzz off, buster,” Martin said in disgust. “The hospital’s over by the river, six blocks from here. Go sign yourself in.”

  “I am the devil,” the devil insisted. “I am really the devil, scout’s honor.” Then he pushed Martin aside and entered the apartment, being rather stronger than people.

  “Martin, who is it?” his wife yelled—and then she came to see. She was dressed to go to her job at Bonwit’s, where she sold dresses until her feet died—every day about four-twenty—and she saw enough faces in a day’s time to smell the devil when he was near her.

  “Ask your wife,” the devil said pleasantly.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” said Doris. “What are you peddling, mister?”

  “Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal,” the devil repeated amiably. “Everyman’s desire and dream.”

  “It’s an old, tired saw,” Martin Chesell said. “It’s been used to death. Not only have a dozen bad stories been written to the same point, but the New Yorker ran a cartoon on the same subject. A tired old bum looks down, and there’s tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal at his feet.”

  “That’s where I picked up the notion.” The devil nodded eagerly. “Basically, I am conservative, but one can’t go on forever with the same old thing, you know.” He walked sprightly into their living room, merely glancing into the bedroom with its unmade bed, and measuring with another glance the cheap, tasteless furniture, and then spread the paper on the table. Martin and Doris followed him and looked at the date.

  “They print those headlines in a place on Forty-eighth Street,” Doris said knowingly.

  “Ah! And the inside pages as well?” The devil riffled the pages.

  “Suppose you let me have a look at the last page?” Martin said.

  “Ah—that costs.”

  “Mister, go away. There is no devil and you’re some kind of a nut. My wife has to go to work.”

  “But you don’t? No job. Bless your hearts, what does a devil do to prove himself. My driving license? Or this?” Blue points of fire danced oh his fingernails. “Or this?” Two horns appeared on his forehead, glistened a moment, and then disappeared. “Or this?” He held up finger and thumb and a twenty-dollar antique gold piece appeared between them. He tossed it to Martin, who caught it and examined it carefully.

  “Tricks, tricks,” said the devil. “Look into your own heart if you doubt me, my boy. Do we deal? I sell—you buy—one copy of tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. Yes?”

  “What price?” Doris demanded, precise, businesslike, and to the point, while her husband still stared bemused at the coin.

  “The usual price. The price never changes. A human soul.”

  “Why?” Martin snapped, holding out the coin.

  “Keep it, my son,” the devil said.

  “Why a human soul? What do you do with them? Collect them? Frame them?”

  “They have their uses, oh yes, indeed. It would make for a long, complicated explanation, but we value them.”

  “I don’t believe I have a soul,” Martin said bluntly.

  “Then what loss if you sell it to me? To sell what you do not
own without deceiving the purchaser, that is good business, Martin—all profit and no loss.”

  “I’ll sell mine,” Doris said.

  “Oh? Would you? But that won’t do.”

  “Why not?”

  “No—it just wouldn’t do.” He looked at his watch, a beautiful old pocket watch, gold and set with rubies and with little imps crawling all over it. “You know, I don’t have all the time in the world. You must decide.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Doris said, “sell him your damn soul or do we spend the rest of our lives in this lousy three-room rathole? Because if that’s the case, you spend them alone, Marty boy. I am sick to death of your sitting around on your ass while I work my own butt off. You’re a loser, sweety, and this is probably the last chance.”

  “Good girl,” the devil said approvingly. “She has a head on her shoulders, Martin.”

  “How do I know—”

  “Martin, Martin, what do you have to lose?”

  “My soul.”

  “Whose existence you sensibly doubt. Come, Martin—”

  “How?”

  “Old-fashioned but simple. I have the contract here, all very direct and legal. You read it. A pinprick, a drop of blood on your signature, and tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal is yours.”

  Martin Chesell read the contract. A pin appeared like magic in the devil’s hand. A thumb was pricked, and Martin found himself smearing a drop of blood across his signature.

  “All of which makes it legal and binding,” the devil said, smiling and handing Martin the paper. Doris forgot her job and Martin forgot his erstwhile soul, and they flung the paper open with trembling hands, riffled to the last page but one, where the New York Stock Exchange companies and prices were printed, and scanned the list. The devil watched this with benign amusement, until suddenly Martin whirled and cried:

  “You bastard—this is a rotten day. Everything is down.”

  “Hardly, Martin, hardly,” the devil replied soothingly. “Everything is never down. Some are up, some are down. I will admit that today is hardly the most inspiring of days, but there is a surprise or two. Just look at old Mother Bell.”