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

beginnings of an entire world program began to take shape there in the board room of Boil Enterprises. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the pattern of world psychology that reduced practically all of the human race to half of its size; but there the foundation was laid—and there Milty Boil became Milty Boil, benefactor, underwriting that first, initial effort with a cool twenty million dollars of his own money.
    For the rest of his life Milty had a goal—a reason and a meaning for the tremendous effort that produced one of the great fortunes of our time. Cynical people say that the first five years of the program created a condition where Milty Boil could begin to build his gigantic structures—one hundred floors with ceilings only four feet and six inches high—without opposition. Others—so-called reformers—held that it was an indignity for man to spend his life in a place where he could never hope to stand up straight, but Milty answered that charge with his ringing Declaration of Purpose, a document which takes its place in American history alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. I quote only the first paragraph of Milty’s Declaration, for I am sure that most of my readers know it by heart.
    â€œLife without purpose,” wrote Milty (or some unknown ghost writer who took his inspiration from the dynamic leadership of Milton Boil), “is neither life nor death but a dull and wretched existence unworthy of man. Man must have a goal, a purpose, a destination, a shining goal for which he struggles. We saw in the hapless youth of the sixties and seventies what it meant to be without a purpose in life; but never again shall the world face that quandary. People—shameless people—have accused me of building for profit; they charge that I reduce man with my low ceilings, that I take away his dignity. But the reverse is true. Through my splendid houses, man has found both dignity and purpose—the purpose to be small and to raise small children, so that the world may increase in size, and the dignity of men who must always fight their environment, who cannot stand in decadent comfort, who must struggle and grow through struggle.”
    In the year 2010, when Milty was seventy years old, he achieved his ultimate goal. Through his ever expanding influence, he persuaded the New York City Council to pass a law cutting Central Park in half, granting all that part of it north of Eighty-second Street and south of Ninety-eighth Street to Milton Boil, so that he might fulfill his lifelong dream and build an apartment house two hundred stories tall with ceilings three feet and six inches high. Over a hundred people were killed in the riots that followed this action of the City Council, but progress is never achieved without paying a price, and Milty saw to it that no widow or child of those who had perished went hungry. Also, he guaranteed living space in his new building to all those made fatherless by the riots—at one-half the rent paid by the regular tenants.
    After that, only fanatics and hippies would deny that Milty was the gentlest and kindest of landlords in all the history of landlordism. Indeed, after his death, the Pope instituted proceedings that would result in Milty’s eventually becoming the patron saint of all landlords; but this is still in the future—with many thorns strewn on the path to sainthood, not to mention certain confusion about Milty’s religion, that is, considering that he had any.
    Milty died in his eighty-seventh year, and we can be pleased that he lived long enough to see his dream begin to come to fruition. His coffin was carried by eight young men, no one of them more than four feet eight inches in height, and here and there in the audience that packed the chapel were grown men and women no taller than four feet. Of course, these were the exceptions, and it was not until almost half a century