Crossroads of Destiny - H Beam Piper

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Crossroads of Destiny by H. Beam Piper.

I still have the dollar bill.

It's in my box of the bank, and I think that's where it will stay.

I simply won't destroy it, but I can think of nobody to whom I'd be willing to show it.

Certainly nobody of the college, my history department colleagues, least of all.

Really to tell the story would brand me irredeemingly as a crackpot.

The crackfocks are tolerated, even on college faculties.

It's only when they begin producing physical evidence that they get themselves actively

resented.

When I went into the club car for the nightcap, before going back to my apartment to

turn in, there were five men there, sitting together.

One was an army officer, with the insignia and badges of a staff intelligence colonel.

Next to him was a man of about my own age, with sandy hair and a bony Scottish-looking face,

who sat staring silently into a high ball which he held in both hands.

Across the aisle, an elderly man, who could have been a lawyer or a banker, was smoking

a cigar over a glass of port, and beside him sat a plump and slightly too well-groomed

individual who had a tall, colorless drink, probably gin and tonic.

The fifth man, separated from him by a vacant chair, seemed to be dividing his attention

between a book on his lap, and the conversation, in which he was taking no part.

I sat down beside the sandy-haired man, as I did so and rang for the waiter, the

colonel was saying,

No, that wouldn't. I can think of a better one. Suppose you have Columbus get his ships

from Henry VII of England, and sail under the English instead of the Spanish flag.

You know, he did try to get English backing before he went to Spain, but King Henry turned

him down. That could be changed. I pricked up my ears. The period from 1492 to the revolution

is my special field of American history, and I knew at once the enormous difference that

would have made. It was a moment later that I realized how oddly the colonel had expressed

the idea, and by that time the plump man was speaking.

Yes, that would work, he agreed. Those kings made decisions, most of the time, on whether

or not they had a hangover, or what some court-favorite thought. He got out a notebook and pen,

scribble briefly. I'll hand that to the planning staff when I get to New York. That's Henry

VII, not Henry VIII, right? We'll fix it so that Columbus will catch him when he's in

a good humor. That was too much. I turned to the man beside me.

What goes on, I asked, has somebody invented a time machine? He looked up from the drink

he was contemplating and gave me a grin. Sounds like it, doesn't it? Why, no. Our friend

here is getting up a television program. Tell the gentleman about it. He urges a plump

man across the aisle. The waiter arrived at that moment. The plump man, who seemed to

need little urging, waited until I had ordered a drink, and then began telling me what a

positively sensational idea it was.

We'll call it a crossroads of destiny, he said. It'll be a series, one half hour show

a week. In each episode, we'll take some historic event and show how history could have been

changed as something had happened differently. We'll dramatize the event up to that point

just as it really happened, and then a commentary voice comes on and announces that this is

the crossroads of destiny. This is where history could have been completely changed. Then

he gives a resume of what really did happen, and then he says, but, suppose so and so

had done this and that, instead of such and such. Then we pick up the dramatization at

that point, only we show it the way it might have happened. Like this thing about Columbus,

who show how it could have happened, and then with Columbus waiting ashore, with his

sword in one hand, and a flag in the other, just like the painting. Only it'll be the

English flag, and Columbus will shout, I take possession of this new land in the name

of his majesty, Henry VII of England. He brandished his drink to the visible consternation

of the elderly man beside him, and then the sailors will all say, God save the king.

Which wasn't written till about 81745, I couldn't help mentioning. Huh? The plump man

looks startled. Are you sure? Then he decides that I was, and shrugged. Well, they can all

shout, God save King Henry, or St. George for England, or something. Then at the end,

we introduce the program guest, some history expert, a real name, and he tells how he thinks

history would have been changed if it had happened that way. The conservatively dressed

gentlemen, beside him, wanted to know how long he expected to keep the show running.

The crossroads would give out before long, he added. This plunso will give out first,

I said. History is just one damn crossroads after another. I mentioned in passing that

I taught the subject. Why, since the beginning of the century, we've had enough of them

to keep the show running for a year. We have about 20 already written, and ready to produce,

the plump man said, comfortably. An idea is for twice as many that the planning staff

is working on now. The elderly man accepted that, and took another cautious sip of wine.

What I wonder though, is whether you can really say that history can be changed. Well, of course,

television man was taken aback. One always seems to be when a basic assumption is question.

Of course, we only know what really did happen, but it stands to reason if something had

happened differently. The results would have been different, doesn't it? But it seems

to me that everything would work out the same in the long run. That'd be some differences

at the time, but over the years, wouldn't they all cancel out? No, no, Monsieur, the man

with the book, who had been outside the conversation until now, totally earnestly. Make no mistake.

History can be changed. I looked at him curiously. The accent sounded French, but it wasn't

quite right. He was some kind of a foreigner though. I'd swear that he'd never bought

the clothes he was wearing in this country. The way the suit fitted and the cut of it and

the shirt collar and the neck tie. The book he was reading was Langwear's social history

of the American people. Not one of my favorites, a bit too much on the doctrinaire side, but

what a bookshop clerk would give a foreigner looking for something to explain America.

What do you think, professor? The Plumman was asking me. It would work out the other way.

The differences wouldn't cancel out. They'd accumulate. Say something happened a century

ago to throw a presidential election the other way. You'd get different people at the

head of the government, opposite lines of policy taken, and eventually we'd be getting

into different wars with different enemies at different times, and different batches

of young men killed before they could marry and have families, different people being

born or not being born. That would mean different ideas, good or bad, being advanced, different

books written, different inventions, and different social and economic problems as a consequence.

Look, he's only giving himself a century of the coronal added. Think of the changes

of this thing we were discussing, Columbus sailing under the English flag had happened,

or suppose Laugh Ericsson had been able to plan a permanent colony in America in the

11th century, or if the Saracens had won the Battle of Tours. Try to imagine the world

today if any of those things had happened. One thing you can be sure of, any areas you

can make in trying to imagine such a world will be on the side of over-conservatism.

The sandy headman beside me, who had been using his high ball for a crystal ball, must

have glimpsed at what he was looking for. He finished the drink, set the empty glass on

the stand tray beside him, and reached back to push the button. I don't think he realized

just how good an idea you have here, he told the plump man abruptly. If you did, you wouldn't

ruin it with such timid and unimaginative treatment. I thought he'd been staying out of the

conversation because it was over his head. Instead, he'd been taking the plump man's

idea apart, examining all the pieces, and considering what was wrong with it and how

it could be improved. The plump man looked startled, and then angry. Timid it unimaginative

if for the last things he'd expected his idea to be called. Then he became uneasy. Maybe

this fellow was a typical representative of his Lord and Master, the facelift of abstraction

called the public. What do you mean, he asked? Misplaced emphasis, you shouldn't emphasize

the event that could have changed history, you should emphasize the changes that could

have been made. You're going to end this show you were talking about with a shot of

Columbus, waiting up to the beach with an English flag, aren't you? Well, that's the logical

ending. That's the logical beginning, the sandy-haired man contradicted. And after that,

your guest historian comes on. How much shine will he be allowed? Well, maybe three or four

minutes. We can't cut the dramatization too short. And I'll have to explain a couple

of times, and in words of one syllable, that what we have seen didn't really happen. Because

if he doesn't, the next morning half the 12-year-old kids in the country will be rushing

wild-eyed into school to slip the teacher to the real inside about the discovery of America.

By that time he gets that done, he'll be able to mumble a couple of generalities about

vast and incalculable effects, and that it will be time to tell the pluvting about widgets,

to really save cigarettes, all filter and absolutely free from tobacco. The waiter arrived

at this point, and the sandy-haired man ordered another rye highball. I decided to have another

bourbon on the rocks, and the TV in Prossario said, gin and tonic, absolutely, and went into

a reverie which lasted until the drinks arrived. Then he came awake again. I see what you

mean, he said. Most of the audience would wonder what difference it would have made when

Columbus had would have gotten his ships, as long as he got them and America got discovered.

I can see what it made a hell of a big difference, but how could it be handled any other way?

How could you figure out just what the difference would have been? Well, you need a man who'd

know the historical background, and you need a man with a powerful creative imagination,

who's used to using it inside rigorously defined limits. Don't try to get them both in

one, a collaboration would really be better. Then you work from the known situation in

Europe and in America in 1492, and decide on the immediate effects, and from that you have

to carry it along, step by step, down to the present. It'd be a lot of hard and very

exacting work, but the result would be worth it. He took us up from his glass and added,

remember, you don't have to prove that the world today would be the way you set it up.

All you have to do is make sure that nobody else will be able to prove that it wouldn't.

Well, how can you present that? As a play, with fictional characters and a plot, time,

the present, under the change conditions, the plot, the reason the coward conquers his

fear and becomes a hero, the obstacle to the boy marrying the girl, the reason the innocent

man is being persecuted, will have to grow out of this imaginary world you've constructed,

and being possible in our weird world. As long as you stick to that, you'll be all right.

Sure I get that, the Plumman was excited again, he was about half-sold in the idea, but

how will we get the audience to accept it? When asking them to start with an assumption

they know isn't true. Maybe it is, and another time dimension, the Colonel suggested.

You can't prove it isn't. For that matter, you can't prove there aren't other time

dimensions.

Ha, that's it, the sandy-haired man exclaimed. World of Alternate Probability, that takes

care of that. He drank about a third of his high ball and sat gazing into the rest

of it, and an almost yoga trance. The Plumman looked at the Colonel in bafflement. Maybe

this alternate probability time-dimension stuff means something to you, he said. Be damned

if it does to me. Well, as far as we know, we live in a four-dimensional universe the

Colonel started, the elderly man across from him grown.

Fourth Dimension, good god, are we going to talk about that? It isn't anything to be scared

of. You carry an instrument from measuring in the fourth dimension all the time, a watch.

You mean it's just time? But that isn't, we know of three dimensions of space the Colonel

told him, gesturing to indicate them. We can use them for coordinates to locate things,

but we also locate things in time. I wouldn't like to write on a train or a-

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Well, let's call the time we know, the time your watch registers, time A. Now, suppose

the entire infinite extent of time A is only an instant in another dimension of time,

which we'll call time B. The next instant of time B is also the entire extent of time A,

and the next, and the next. As in time A, different things are happening at different

instance. And one of these instances of time B, one of the things that's happening is

that King Henry VII of England is furnishing ships to Christopher Columbus. The man with

the odd clothes was getting excited again. This, I you say, this alternate probability is

a series generally accepted in this country. Got it, the Sandy Hamman said, before anybody

could answer. He said his drink on the chan tray and took a drink jack knife out of

his pocket, holding it unopened in his hand. Pounds this sound, he asked, and hit the

edge of the tray with the back of the knife. Bong crossroads of destiny, he intoned, and

hit the edge of the tray again. Bong, this is the year 1959, but not the 1959 of our

world, for we are in a world of alternate probability, and in another dimension of time,

a world parallel to and coexistent with, but separate from our own, in which history

has been completely altered by a single momentous event. He shifted back to his normal voice.

Not bad, only 25 seconds. The Plutman said, looking up from his wristwatch, and a trained

announcer could maybe shave five seconds off that. Yes, something like that. At the

end, we'll have another 30 seconds, and we can do it without the guest. But this alternate

probability in another dimension, the stranger was insisting, is this a concept original

with you? He asked the Colonel, oh no, that idea has been around for a long time. I

never heard of it before now, the older man said, as though that completely demolished

it. Then it is generally accepted by the scientists? No, the sandy-hat man relieved the

Colonel. There's absolutely no evidence to support it, and scientists don't accept

unsupported assumptions unless they need them to explain something, and they don't need

this assumption for anything. Well, it would come in handy to make some of these reports

of freak phenomena, like mysterious appearances and disappearances, or flying object things,

or portive falls of non-medoric matter, theoretically respectable. Reports like that usually

get the ignore and forget treatment. Now, then you believe that this other world of

alternate probability, they exist? No, I don't disbelieve it either. I have no reason

to, one way or another. He studied his drink for a moment, and lowered the level in the

glass slightly. I've said that once in a while things get reported to look as though such

other worlds, and another time dimension may exist. There have been whole books published

by people who collect stories like that. I must say that academic science isn't very

hospitable to them. You mean Zing sometimes, I'll you say, leak in from one of these

other worlds? That has been known to Appen? Things have been said to have happened that

might, if true, becase of things leaking through from another time world, the San Diego-Headed

Man's corrected, or leaking away to another time world. He mentioned a few of the most

famous cases of unexplained mysteries, the English diplomat and pressure who vanished

in plain sight of a number of people. The ship found completely deserted by her crew.

Other lifeboots all in place, stories like that. And then there's this rash of alleged

sightings of unidentified flying objects. I'd soon believe that they came from another

dimension than from another planet. But as far as I know, nobody's seriously advanced the

other time dimension theory to explain them. I think the idea is familiar enough though,

that we can use it as an explanation or suit explanation for the program, the television

man said. In fact, as we aren't married to this crossroads title yet, we could just

as easily call it 5th Dimension. That would lead the public to expect something out

of the normal before the show started. That got the conversation back onto the show,

and we talked for some time about it, each of us suggesting possibilities. The stranger

even suggested one, that the Civil War had started during the Jackson administration. Fortunately

nobody else noticed that. Finally, a porter came through and acquired, if any of us were

getting off at Harrisburg, saying that they would be getting in five minutes. The stranger

finished his drink hastily and got up, saying that he would have to get his luggage.

He told us how much he had enjoyed the conversation, and then followed the porter toward the

rear of the train. After he had gone out, the TV man chuckled.

Was that one an oddball, he exclaimed? Where the hell do you suppose he got that suit?

It was a tailored suit, the Colonel said, a very good one, and I can't think of any country

in the world in which they cut suits just like that. And did you catch his accent? Fony,

the television man pronounced. The French accent of a Greek waiter and a fake French restaurant

in the Bronx. Not quite. The pronunciation was alright for French accent, but the cadence,

the way the word sounds were strung together, was German. The elderly man looked at the

Colonel keenly.

I see your intelligence, he mentioned. Thinking might be somebody up your alley, Colonel?

The Colonel shook his head. I doubt it. There are agents of unfriendly powers in this country,

a lot of them, I'm sorry to have to say. But they don't speak accent in English, and

they don't dress eccentricly. You know there's an enemy agent in a crowd, pick out the

most normally American type in sight, and you usually won't have to look further.

A train ground was stopped. A young couple with hand luggage came in and sat at one

into the car, waiting until other accommodations could be found for them. After a while, it

started again. I downloaded it with my drink, and then got up and excused myself, saying

that I wanted to turn in early. In the next car behind, I met the porter who'd come in

just before the stop. He looked worried, and after a moment's hesitation he spoke to me.

The man in the club car who got off at Harrisburg, did you know him? Never saw him before.

Why? He tipped me with a dollar bill when he got off. Later I looked closely at it. I

did not like it. He showed it to me, and I didn't blame him. It was marked $1, and United

States of America. But outside that, there wasn't a thing right about it. One side was

gray all right, but the other side was green. The picture wasn't the right one, and there

were a lot of other things about it. Some of them absolutely ludicrous. It wasn't counterfeit.

It wasn't even an imitation of the United States bill, and then it hit me, like a bullet

in the chest, not a bill of our United States. No wonder he had been so interested in whether

our scientist accepted the theory of other time dimensions and other worlds of alternate

probability. On an impulse, I got out two ones and gave them to the porter, perfectly

good United States bank gold certificates. You better let me heat this, I said, trying

to make it sound the way he'd think a federal agent would say it. He took the bill, smiling,

and I folded his bill and put it into my vest pocket. Thank you, sir, he said, I have

no wish to keep it. Some part of my mind, below the level consciousness, must have taken

over and got it back to the right car and compartment. I didn't realize where I was going until

I put it on the light and recognized my own luggage. Then I sat down, as dizzy as though

the two drinks I'd had had been a dozen. For a moment, I was tempted to rush back to

the club car and show the thing to the Colonel and the sandy-haired man. On second thought,

I decided against that. The next thing I'd banish for my mind was the adjective

incredible. I had to credit it. I had to prove in my vest pocket. The coincidence of rising

from our topic of conversation didn't bother me too much either. It was the topic which

had drawn him into it. And as the sandy-haired man applauded out, we know nothing, one way

or another, about these other worlds. We certainly don't know what barriers separate

them from our own, or how often those barriers may fail. I met a thought more about it

if I'd been in physical science. I wasn't. I was in American history. So what I thought

about was what sort of a country that other United States must be, and what its history

must have been. The man's costume was basically the same as ours. Same general style, but

many little differences of fashion. I had the impression that it was a costume of less

formal and conservative society than ours, and a more casual way of life. It could be

the sort of costume into which ours would evolve in another thirty or so years. There

was another odd thing. I noticed him looking curiously at both the waiter and the porter,

as though something about them surprised him. The only thing they had in common was their

race, the same as every other passenger car attendant, but he wasn't used to seeing

Chinese working in railway cars. And there had been that remark about the Civil War

and the Jackson administration. I wondered what Jackson had been talking about, not Andrew

Jackson, the Tennessee militia general, who got us into war with Spain in 1810, I hoped.

And the Civil War, that about me completely. I wondered if it had been a class war or

a sectional conflict. We'd had plenty of the latter during our first century, but

all of them had been settled peacefully and constitutionally. While some of the things

he'd read in lingmaris' social history would be surprises for him too. And then I took

the bill out for another examination. It must have gotten mixed with his blendable money.

It was about the size of ours, and I wondered how he had acquired enough of our money

to pay his train fare. Maybe he'd had a diamond and sold it, or maybe he'd had a gun and

held somebody up. If he had, I didn't know how that I blamed him, under the circumstances.

I had an idea that he had some realization of what had happened to him, the book and

the fake accent to cover any mistakes he might make. While I wished him luck, and then

I unfolded the dollar bill and looked at it again. In the first place it had been issued

by the United States Department of Treasury itself, not the United States Bank or one of

the state banks. I had to think over the implications of that carefully. In the second

place it was a silver certificate. Why, in this other United States, silver must be an

acceptable monetary medal. Maybe equally so was gold, though I could hardly believe that.

Then I looked at the picture on the gray-abverse side, and had to straighten my eyes on the

fine print under it to identify it. It was Washington alright, but a much older Washington

than any of the pictures of him I had ever seen. Then I realized that I knew just where

the crossroads of destiny for his world of mine had been. As every school child among

us knows, General George Washington was shot dead at the Battle of Germantown in 1777,

by an English or rather Scottish officer, Patrick Ferguson, the same Patrick Ferguson

who invented the breach-loading rifle that smashed Napoleon's armies. Washington today

is one of our lesser national heroes, because he was our first military commander in chief.

But in other world, he must have survived to lead our armies to victory and become our

first president, as was the case with the man who took his place when he was killed. I

folded the bill and put it away carefully among my identification cards, where it wouldn't

a second time get mixed with the money I spent. And as I did, I wanted what sort of

a president George Washington had made, and what part in the history of that other United

States have been played by the man whose picture appears on our dollar bills. General

and president Benedict Arnold. End of Crossroads of Destiny by H. Beam Piper.

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