The General Zapped an Angel: New Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction Read Online Free PDF

morning, the man of the split-level suburban house went down into his cellar and let out a whoop of delight.
    â€œGot it,” he yelled up to his family. “I got the little bastard now.”
    But the man never really looked at anything, not at his wife, not at his kids, not at the world; and while he knew that the trap contained a dead mouse, he never even noticed that this mouse was somewhat different from other mice. Instead, he went out to the back yard, swung the dead mouse by his tail, and sent it flying into his neighbor’s back yard.
    â€œThat’ll give him something to think about,” the man said, grinning.

THE VISION
OF MILTY BOIL
    N APOLEON, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini all had one thing in common with Milton Boil: they were short men. But the most explosive moments in human history have often been the result of an absent six or seven inches in height, and while it is hardly profitable it is certainly interesting to speculate upon what might have been man’s destiny had Milton Boil been six feet and one inch instead of five feet and one inch—with a name like Smith or Jones or Goldberg instead of Boil.
    But at his maturity he was five feet and one inch, and his name had already caused him so much small suffering that no force on earth would have persuaded him to change it. All his life he had been stuck with pins, pinched and punned upon because of his name and his height; no wonder he was a millionaire before he reached thirty.
    He was born in 1940 and he grew up in the time of affluence. His father was a builder of small apartment houses. Milton (or Milty, as he came to be known the world over) came out of college, spent a year learning more about his father’s business than the old man ever knew, and then parted company with his father and built his first big apartment house. Milty was a genius. By 1970 he had become the largest builder of apartment houses in New York City. He married Joan Pebbleman, whose father was one of the country’s largest builders of office buildings, and they had three lovely children. Joan worked in charitable efforts. Her name was in The New York Times at least once a week. She was only four feet and ten inches tall, so from a reasonable distance they were a very handsome couple indeed.
    Milty respected money, rich people, brains, organizational drive, very rich people, the government, the church, and millionaires. In an interview, he was asked what he considered the first necessary attribute of a young man who desired to become a millionaire.
    â€œAmbition,” he replied promptly. He respected ambition.
    â€œAnd after that?”
    â€œInfluence,” he replied. “Proper friends.”
    And Milty made friends and built influence. By 1975, at the age of thirty-five, he was considered the most influential man in New York City. His influence was such that he was able to have a number of significant changes made in the building code—among them the lowering of the minimum height of the ceilings to seven feet. With this achieved, he built the first one-hundred-story apartment house in New York. In 1980, riding the crest of the wave created by the population explosion, Milty Boil managed to have the city council pass an ordinance permitting ceilings of six feet in all apartment buildings over fifty stories high.
    Rival builders sneered at Milty’s new house, claiming that no one would be so damn foolish as to rent an apartment with six-foot ceilings, but such was the housing shortage by then that the entire building, with its seven hundred apartments, was fully rented in sixty days.
    The cash flow that passed through Milty’s deserving hands had by now become so enormous that he was known throughout the business as the “golden boy” or, more often, “the golden boil”; but Milty was beyond the barbs of name-calling. His vision and imagination had lifted him to unprecedented heights, and once again he brought