Howard Fast - The General Zapped an Angel - Stories

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “And now the floor is open for ideas and questions.”

No stodgy board of directors were these twenty-nine representatives of advertising and public relations. Their minds were as hard and bright as quartz. The first to rise was Jack Aberdeen, the young wonder boy of Carrol, Carrol, Carrol and Quince. Even as he snapped his fingers, Milty could see his mind crackle and snap.

“Got it, Mr. Boil. Round number one. You know the way the Kellogg Company pushes its cornflakes account. I see a new competitive product. Tinies. I got the slogan—‘Small and tight.’ Every company will have to fall in line. ‘Are you afraid of the big bully? Tinies will reduce your muscles to knots of steel. Tiny knots of steel. Small and tight.’ I got a tune for it—‘Small and tight, small and tight, who the hell needs height, if only I am small and tight?’ Of course we got to find something like an anti-vitamin, but we represent Associated Labs, and I’ll get to work on it.”

Milty could have hugged the kid, but already Steve Johnson of Kelly, Cohen and Clark was on his feet and speaking. He represented some of the biggest airlines on earth.

“Milty,” he said, “may we call you Milty?”

“Call me Milty, Steve. By all means.”

“Two things. Milty, you have just kicked off the biggest change in the history of airlines. That’s number one. I got the slogan—‘Weigh less, pay less.’ Why not? The small man weighs less, he pays less. Put a premium on small.”

Johnson, Milty noted, was no taller than he himself.

“Second thing—flights to the moon and Mars. All the airlines have been discussing the prospect of putting these flights on a tourist basis. But the cost is terrifying. We make it a bonus thing: ‘Do you want to see the moon? You can’t—you’re too tall. But your kids can. Keep them small. Feed them anti-vitamins. So that they may have what you never dreamed of having—a flight to the moon or Mars—a step into tomorrow, a glimpse of man’s glorious future. No tourist who is taller than five feet can get into outer space.’ How about that—is it not beautiful?”

Cathey Brodie, public relations for Jones and Keppleman, the largest ethical drug house in the world, leaped to her feet now and cried out:

“Moon pills—does that ever send me! It means the lab boys have to really dig for something to control height, but they’ve found everything else. Why not? Moon pills.”

“Moon pills,” Milty repeated, smiling.

Tab Henderson, who managed promotion for over eight hundred large hospitals, not to mention three of the leading insurance companies, jumped right into the gap Cathey Brodie had opened.

“We could just overlook the biggest little inducement in this whole splendid project. I mean health. Long life. Added years. We have statistical charts to show that over six feet three inches, life expectancy begins to decrease. We look at it the other way. Be small and stay healthy.”

There were a few sour faces, a few spoil-sports, but most of the team assembled threw their hats into the ring, and the plans came thick and fast.

“Tall, dark, and handsome—that must go. Small for tall—‘Small, dark, and handsome.’”

“Beautiful.”

“Get the sex angle. ‘Sex is better with a small man or a small woman.’”

“‘Try it with both—make your own decision.’ That gives it a do-it-yourself feeling.”

“How about this—‘Close the generation gap!’ For the past three or four generations the kids have all been bigger than their parents. No wonder a father can’t lay down the law. Now we reverse it, each generation smaller than the one that preceded it. We reestablish the authority of the father. The home once again becomes the sanctuary it was in olden times.”

One after another the ideas sparked forth, until the 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 it 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.

“Life 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 later that the first generation of adults who were less than three feet tall reached their maturity.