Read Online The General Zapped an Angel: New Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction by Howard Fast - Free Book Online

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.
    â€œOh, 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.”
    â€œOh, you’re a pessimist,” said Gaffey’s wife, who was young and pretty but no mental giant.
    â€œOf 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.”
    â€œThe 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?”
    â€œCome now,” I protested, “this is the way it is, and all of us are indignant about it, Martha.”
    â€œAre you, really?”
    â€œI think so.”
    â€œMen have always dug in the earth,” Gaffey said. “Otherwise we’d still be in the Stone Age.”
    â€œAnd perhaps a good bit happier.”
    â€œNo, no, no,” I said. “The Stone Age was a very unpleasant time, Martha. You don’t wish us back there.”
    â€œDo 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.”
    â€œShe still is.”
    â€œYou’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.”
    â€œThe 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