Will THEY Never Come?

LOOKING FOR THE GENERAL by Warren Miller. 203 pages. McGraw-Hill. $4.95.

"Has Hubert Humphrey ever raised anyone from the dead? Who are these people down in Washington that we should place our lives in their care?" The speaker is Billy Brown, a dissident space-project physicist, and not since Humbert Humbert toured America with Lolita, strewing outrageous verbal brickbats along the way, has a zany voice like Billy's been heard in the land.

Of course, he is quite mad. With a heart torn by Angst for the decadence of the age, and a head full of apocalyptic hope, Brown keeps waiting for men from space to land on earth and solve all our problems with their miraculous source of power and wisdom. Through a mysterious, never elucidated grapevine, he gets word that the landing may soon occur in the tiny desert town of Twelvepalms, Arizona. Quitting his job and dodging inquisitive security men, he rushes off to meet THEM.

Fish from on High. In a style that can best be described as satiric slapstick fantasy, Author Miller follows

Brown's progress westward, abetted by a bizarre underground network of folk who believe as he does. To these cultists, the impending space visitors are far from the familiar three-eyed monsters of science fiction. Instead they are a race of supermen, perhaps descended from the inhabitants of the lost island of Atlantis (they were thought to have possessed flying machines, and so might have migrated to another planet). With mad logic, Brown's fellow fantasists have built a fabric of proof by linking together all manner of telltale occurrences, past and present--the disappearance of a man here, a successful experiment in levitation there, flying saucers, of course, and reports of fresh fish falling inexplicably on land (obviously droppings from space aquariums).

The superrace has even, upon occasion, secretly sent one of its number to earth. "She volunteered," explains one old man as he describes the Virgin Mary's role in the Nativity. "And we killed the boy! Killed the boy! Who could have saved us all. He was one of them, Billy; I am absolutely convinced He was one of them." During a service at the new Church of Christ, Astronaut, which Brown attends along the way, the preacher exhorts his flock to behave better or else: "When we get there, to the Kingdom Come Motel, there will be banners reading NO EARTHMEN NEED APPLY."

Hold Out! Hold Out! A general takes a patriotic view. He wants to enlist -THEM in the cold war. "We've got to make contact," he says. "Bring them in on our side. If they shared with us, told us all they knew . . . we'd be unbeatable." A small-town barber, who is planning to meet THEM by building a giant Jacob's ladder to heaven, raves on like a real estate developer. "Four soaring arches spanning the state," he proposes, "topped by a golden latticework of jointed metal. Build it up in easy stages. Hydraulic elevators. Restaurants and resthouses at every five-hundredth level."

Filtered through the mad wit of Billy Brown, these grotesque gyrations sometimes threaten to spin out of control into pure centrifugal farce. But at his best Novelist Miller has come close to creating a comic epic celebrating the lunatic fringes of a genuine American phenomenon--a young nation's yearning for final answers and impossible perfections, its fears that a great dream has somehow been laid waste in the pillaging of a rich continent for material wellbeing.

Inevitably the Second Coming at Twelvepalms is a fiasco, attended largely by crackpots ("You know, the ones who write books about their trips to Venus"). No one scorns them more than Brown. But, like them, he cannot give up his obsession. "I'll save (I will) this apple world," he says at last, "this sweet nut, this beauty, beauty. Ah, listen, hear the bugle blow. Beleaguered pioneers, hold out! Only hold out!"

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