The General Zapped an Angel: New Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction (15 page)

“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 intelligence. 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.

A Biography of Howard Fast

Howard Fast (1914–2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast's commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.

Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast's mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London's
The Iron Heel
, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.

Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel,
Two Valleys
(1933). His next novels, including
Conceived in Liberty
(1939) and
Citizen Tom Paine
(1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in
The American
(1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.

Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write
Spartacus
(1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast's appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release
Spartacus
. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including
Silas Timberman
(1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin's purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.

Fast's career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also,
Spartacus
was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of
Spartacus
inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast's books, and in 1961 he published
April Morning
, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography
Being Red
(1990) and the
New York Times
bestseller
The Immigrants
(1977).