The General Zapped an Angel: New Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction by Howard Fast Page A

and he was up and dressed with the first gray presence of dawn. The priest walked to the porch of the cathedral, and there was the Indian exactly as the priest had left him. So erect, so unmoving was his body that, were it not for the slight motion of his bare stomach, the priest might have thought him dead.
    As for the Indian, Clyde Lightfeather, he was alert and within himself, and his mind was clear and open. Eyes closed, he felt the breezes of dawn on his cheek, the scent of morning in his nostril. He had no need for prayer; his whole being was a gentle reminder; and that way he heard a bird singing.
    He allowed the sound to pass through him; he experienced it but did not detain it. And then he heard the leaping, gurgling passage of a brook. That too he heard without detention. And then he smelled the smell of the earth in June, the wonderful wet, sweet, thick smell of life coming and life going, and this smell he clung to, for he knew that his meditation was finished and that he had been granted a moment of God’s time.
    He opened his eyes, and instead of the great masses of Rockefeller Center, he saw an ancient stand of tulip trees, each of them fifteen feet across the base and reaching so high up that only the birds knew where they topped out. Thin fingers of the dawn laced through the tulips, and out of the great knowledge that comes with the great time, the Indian knew that there would be birch-bark canoes on the shore of the Hudson, carefully sheltered for the day they would be needed, and that the Hudson was the road to the Mohawk Valley where the longhouses stood. He waited no longer but leaped to his feet and raced through the tulip trees.
    The priest had turned for a moment to regard the soaring majesty of St. Patrick’s; when he looked again, the Indian was gone. Instead of being pleased that he had accomplished what the Cardinal desired, the priest felt a sense of loss.
    A few hours later the Cardinal sent for Father O’Conner, and the priest told him that the Indian had left very early in the morning.
    â€œThere was no unpleasantness, I trust?”
    â€œNo, Your Eminence.”
    â€œNo police?”
    â€œNo, sir—only myself.” Father O’Conner hesitated, swallowed, and instead of departing, coughed.
    â€œYes?” the Cardinal asked.
    â€œIf I may ask you a question, Your Eminence?”
    â€œGo ahead.”
    â€œWhat is God’s time, Your Eminence?”
    The Cardinal smiled, but not with amusement. The smile was a turning inward, as if he were remembering things that had happened long, long ago.
    â€œWas that the Indian’s notion?”
    Father O’Conner nodded with embarrassment.
    â€œDid you ask him?”
    â€œNo, I did not.”
    â€œThen when he returns,” the Cardinal said, “I suggest that you do.”

THE WOUND
    M AX G AFFEY always insisted that the essence of the oil industry could be summed up in a simple statement: the right thing in the wrong place. My wife, Martha, always disliked him and said that he was a spoiler. I suppose he was, but how was he different from any of us in that sense? We were all spoilers, and if we were not the actual thing, we invested in it and thereby became rich. I myself had invested the small nest egg that a college professor puts away in a stock Max Gaffey gave me. It was called Thunder Inc., and the company’s function was to use atomic bombs to release natural gas and oil locked up in the vast untouched shale deposits that we have here in the United States.
    Oil shale is not a very economical source of oil. The oil is locked up in the shale, and about 60 percent of the total cost of shale oil consists of the laborious methods of mining the shale, crushing it to release the oil, and then disposing of the spent shale.
    Gaffey sold to Thunder Inc. an entirely new method, which involved the use of surplus atomic bombs for the release of shale oil. In very simplistic terms, a deep hole is bored