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Title: Crossroads of Destiny

Author: Henry Beam Piper

Release Date: June 20, 2006 [EBook #18632]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe
Science Fiction July 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the copyright on this publication was renewed.




    Crossroads
       of
    Destiny

      by

  H. Beam Piper


  No wonder he'd been so interested in the talk of whether our
  people accepted these theories!


      *       *       *       *       *

Readers who remember the Hon. Stephen Silk, diplomat extraordinary, in
LONE STAR PLANET (FU, March 1957), later published as A PLANET FOR
TEXANS (Ace Books), will find the present story a challenging
departure--this possibility that the history we know may not be
absolute....

      *       *       *       *       *




CROSSROADS OF DESTINY


I still have the dollar bill. It's in my box at 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 at the
college, my History Department colleagues least of all. Merely to tell
the story would brand me irredeemably as a crackpot, but crackpots 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 a nightcap before going back to my
compartment 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 highball 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 the Seventh 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 and scribbled briefly.
"I'll hand that to the planning staff when I get to New York. That's
Henry the Seventh, not Henry the Eighth? 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 urged the 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're calling it _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 if something had
happened differently. We 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; we'll show how it could have happened, and end with
Columbus wading 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 the Seventh of England!'" He brandished
his drink, to the visible consternation of the elderly man beside him.
"And then, the sailors all sing _God Save the King_."

"Which wasn't written till about 1745," I couldn't help mentioning.

"Huh?" The plump man looked startled. "Are you sure?" Then he decided
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
this way."

The conservatively dressed gentleman beside him wanted to know how long
he expected to keep the show running.

"The crossroads will give out before long," he added.

"The sponsor'll 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 this century, we've had enough of
them to keep the show running for a year."

"We have about twenty already written and ready to produce," the plump
man said comfortably, "and ideas 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--" The television man was taken aback; one always seems
to be when a basic assumption is questioned. "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. There'd be some differences at the time, but over the years
wouldn't they all cancel out?"

"_Non, non, Monsieur!_" the man with the book, who had been outside the
conversation until now, told him earnestly. "Make no mistake; 'istoree
can be shange'!"

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
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 necktie.
The book he was reading was Langmuir'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 plump man 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," the colonel added. "Think of
the changes if this thing we were discussing, Columbus sailing under the
English flag, had happened. Or suppose Leif Ericson had been able to
plant a permanent colony in America in the Eleventh 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
errors you make in trying to imagine such a world will be on the side of
over-conservatism."

The sandy-haired man beside me, who had been using his highball for a
crystal ball, must have glimpsed in it 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 you realize 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 had 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 and unimaginative were 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 faceless 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 wading 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 time will he be
allowed?"

"Well, maybe three or four minutes. We can't cut the dramatization too
short--"

"And he'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 twelve-year-old kids in the country
will be rushing wild-eyed into school to slip the teacher the real
inside about the discovery of America. By the time he gets that done,
he'll be able to mumble a couple of generalities about vast and
incalculable effects, and then it'll be time to tell the public about
Widgets, the really safe 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 impresario said, "Gin-and-tonic," absently, 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 where Columbus would have gotten his
ships, as long as he got them and America got discovered. I can see it
would have 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'd
need a man with a powerful creative imagination, who is 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 would be a lot of hard and very exacting work, but
the result would be worth it." He took a sip 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 would be
able to prove that it wouldn't."

"Well, how could you present that?"

"As a play, with fictional characters and a plot; time, the present,
under the changed 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 be impossible in our
real world. As long as you stick to that, you're all right."

"Sure. I get that." The plump man was excited again; he was about half
sold on the idea. "But how will we get the audience to accept it? We're
asking them to start with an assumption they know isn't true."

"Maybe it is, in 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."

"Hah, that's it!" the sandy-haired man exclaimed. "World of alternate
probability. That takes care of that."

He drank about a third of his highball and sat gazing into the rest of
it, in an almost yogic trance. The plump man 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 groaned. "Fourth dimension! Good God,
are we going to talk about that?"

"It isn't anything to be scared of. You carry an instrument for
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 ride on a train or a
plane if we didn't. 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 instants. In one of these instants of Time-B, one of the
things that's happening is that King Henry the Seventh of England is
furnishing ships to Christopher Columbus."

The man with the odd clothes was getting excited again.

"Zees--'ow you say--zees alternate probabeelitay; eet ees a theory
zhenerally accept' een zees countree?"

"Got it!" the sandy-haired man said, before anybody could answer. He set
his drink on the stand-tray and took a big jackknife out of his pocket,
holding it unopened in his hand. "How's 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, 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 twenty-five seconds," the plump man said, looking up from
his wrist watch. "And a trained announcer could maybe shave five seconds
off that. Yes, something like that, and at the end we'll have another
thirty seconds, and we can do without the guest."

"But zees alternate probibeelitay, in anozzer dimension," the stranger
was insisting. "Ees zees a concept original weet you?" he asked the
colonel.

"Oh, no; that idea's been around for a long time."

"I never heard of it before now," the elderly man said, as though that
completely demolished it.

"Zen eet ees zhenerally accept' by zee scienteest'?"

"Umm, no," the sandy-haired 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 sightings, or reported
falls of non-meteoric matter, theoretically respectable. Reports like
that usually get the ignore-and-forget treatment, now."

"Zen you believe zat zeese ozzer world of zee alternate probabeelitay,
zey exist?"

"No. I don't disbelieve it, either. I've 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
that look as though such other worlds, in 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, zings sometimes, 'ow-you-say, leak in from one of zees ozzer
worlds? Zat has been known to 'appen?"

"Things have been said to have happened that might, if true, be cases of
things leaking through from another time world," the sandy-haired man
corrected. "Or leaking away to another time world." He mentioned a few
of the more famous cases of unexplained mysteries--the English diplomat
in Prussia who vanished in plain sight of a number of people, the ship
found completely deserted by her crew, the lifeboats all in place;
stories like that. "And there's this rash of alleged sightings of
unidentified flying objects. I'd sooner believe that they came from
another dimension than from another planet. But, as far as I know,
nobody's seriously advanced this other-time-dimension theory to explain
them."

"I think the idea's familiar enough, though, that we can use it as an
explanation, or pseudo-explanation, for the program," the television man
said. "Fact is, we aren't married to this Crossroads title, yet; we
could just as easily all it _Fifth 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 inquired if any of us were getting off at Harrisburg,
saying that we would be getting in 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?"

"Phony," the television man pronounced. "The French accent of a Greek
waiter in a fake French restaurant. In the Bronx."

"Not quite. The pronunciation was all right 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 you're
Intelligence," he mentioned. "Think he 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 accented English, and they don't dress eccentrically.
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."

The train ground to a stop. A young couple with hand-luggage came in and
sat at one end of the car, waiting until other accommodations could be
found for them. After a while, it started again. I dallied over 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 had come in just before the
stop. He looked worried, and after a moment's hesitation, he spoke to
me.

"Pardon, sir. 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 do not like it."

He showed it to me, and I didn't blame him. It was marked _One Dollar_,
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 a 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
scientists 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'd better let me keep this," I said, trying to make it sound the way
he'd think a Federal Agent would say it. He took the bills, 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 of consciousness must have taken
over and guided me back to the right car and compartment; I didn't
realize where I was going till I put on the light and recognized my own
luggage. Then I sat down, as dizzy as though the two drinks I had 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 banished from my mind was the adjective "incredible." I
had to credit it; I had the proof in my vest pocket. The coincidence
arising 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 had pointed 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 might have
thought more about that if I'd been in physical science. I wasn't; I was
in American history. So what I thought about was what sort of 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
the costume of a 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'd 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 he 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 had baffled 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. Well, some
of the things he'd read in Lingmuir's _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 spendable 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 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. Well, 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'd have 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 metal; maybe equally so
with gold, though I could hardly believe that. Then I looked at the
picture on the gray obverse side, and had to strain my eyes on the fine
print under it to identify it. It was Washington, all right, 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
and mine had been.

As every schoolchild 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 breech-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 this 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 wondered what sort of a President George Washington had
made, and what part, in the history of that other United States, had
been played by the man whose picture appears on our dollar
bills--General and President Benedict Arnold.


THE END.






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