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

don’t know. No one knows. And they’re dangling a million dollars right in front of my nose.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œRed oil,” someone whispered.
    Then it was quiet.
    â€œWhen can we get out?” someone else demanded.
    â€œAnother 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