Transcriber note: This etext was produced from Fantastic UniverseScience Fiction July 1959. Extensive research did not uncover anyevidence 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, inLONE STAR PLANET (FU, March 1957), later published as A PLANET FORTEXANS (Ace Books), will find the present story a challengingdeparture--this possibility that the history we know may not beabsolute. .. . * * * * * CROSSROADS OF DESTINY I still have the dollar bill. It's in my box at the bank, and I thinkthat's where it will stay. I simply won't destroy it, but I can think ofnobody to whom I'd be willing to show it--certainly nobody at thecollege, my History Department colleagues least of all. Merely to tellthe story would brand me irredeemably as a crackpot, but crackpots aretolerated, even on college faculties. It's only when they beginproducing physical evidence that they get themselves actively resented. * * * * * When I went into the club-car for a nightcap before going back to mycompartment to turn in, there were five men there, sitting together. One was an Army officer, with the insignia and badges of a StaffIntelligence colonel. Next to him was a man of about my own age, withsandy hair and a bony, Scottish looking face, who sat staring silentlyinto a highball which he held in both hands. Across the aisle, anelderly man, who could have been a lawyer or a banker, was smoking acigar over a glass of port, and beside him sat a plump and slightly toowell groomed individual who had a tall colorless drink, probablygin-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 theconversation, in which he was taking no part. I sat down beside thesandy-haired man; as I did so and rang for the waiter, the colonel wassaying: "No, that wouldn't. I can think of a better one. Suppose you haveColumbus get his ships from Henry the Seventh of England and sail underthe English instead of the Spanish flag. You know, he did try to getEnglish backing, before he went to Spain, but King Henry turned himdown. That could be changed. " I pricked up my ears. The period from 1492 to the Revolution is myspecial field of American history, and I knew, at once, the enormousdifference that would have made. It was a moment later that I realizedhow oddly the colonel had expressed the idea, and by that time the plumpman was speaking. "Yes, that would work, " he agreed. "Those kings made decisions, most ofthe time, on whether or not they had a hangover, or what some courtfavorite 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'sHenry the Seventh, not Henry the Eighth? Right. We'll fix it so thatColumbus 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 atelevision program. Tell the gentleman about it, " he urged the plump manacross the aisle. The waiter arrived at that moment. The plump man, who seemed to needlittle urging, waited until I had ordered a drink and then began tellingme 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 historicevent and show how history could have been changed if something hadhappened differently. We dramatize the event up to that point just as itreally happened, and then a commentary-voice comes on and announces thatthis is the Crossroads of Destiny; this is where history could have beencompletely changed. Then he gives a resumé 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 thatpoint, only we show it the way it might have happened. Like this thingabout Columbus; we'll show how it could have happened, and end withColumbus wading ashore with his sword in one hand and a flag in theother, just like the painting, only it'll be the English flag, andColumbus will shout: 'I take possession of this new land in the name ofHis Majesty, Henry the Seventh of England!'" He brandishedhis 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 decidedthat I was, and shrugged. "Well, they can all shout, 'God Save KingHenry!' or 'St. George for England!' or something. Then, at the end, weintroduce the program guest, some history expert, a real name, and hetells how he thinks history would have been changed if it had happenedthis way. " The conservatively dressed gentleman beside him wanted to know how longhe 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 damncrossroads after another. " I mentioned, in passing, that I taught thesubject. "Why, since the beginning of this century, we've had enough ofthem to keep the show running for a year. " "We have about twenty already written and ready to produce, " the plumpman said comfortably, "and ideas for twice as many that the planningstaff 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 canbe changed. " "Well, of course--" The television man was taken aback; one always seemsto be when a basic assumption is questioned. "Of course, we only knowwhat really did happen, but it stands to reason if something hadhappened differently, the results would have been different, doesn'tit?" "But it seems to me that everything would work out the same in the longrun. There'd be some differences at the time, but over the yearswouldn't they all cancel out?" "_Non, non, Monsieur!_" the man with the book, who had been outside theconversation until now, told him earnestly. "Make no mistake; 'istoreecan be shange'!" I looked at him curiously. The accent sounded French, but it wasn'tquite right. He was some kind of a foreigner, though; I'd swear that henever bought the clothes he was wearing in this country. The way thesuit 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 AmericanPeople_--not one of my favorites, a bit too much on the doctrinaireside, but what a bookshop clerk would give a foreigner looking forsomething 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 apresidential election the other way. You'd get different people at thehead of the government, opposite lines of policy taken, and eventuallywe'd be getting into different wars with different enemies at differenttimes, and different batches of young men killed before they could marryand have families--different people being born or not being born. Thatwould mean different ideas, good or bad, being advanced; different bookswritten; different inventions, and different social and economicproblems as a consequence. " "Look, he's only giving himself a century, " the colonel added. "Think ofthe changes if this thing we were discussing, Columbus sailing under theEnglish flag, had happened. Or suppose Leif Ericson had been able toplant a permanent colony in America in the Eleventh Century, or if theSaracens had won the Battle of Tours. Try to imagine the world today ifany of those things had happened. One thing you can be sure of--anyerrors you make in trying to imagine such a world will be on the side ofover-conservatism. " The sandy-haired man beside me, who had been using his highball for acrystal ball, must have glimpsed in it what he was looking for. Hefinished 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, " hetold the plump man abruptly. "If you did, you wouldn't ruin it with suchtimid and unimaginative treatment. " I thought he'd been staying out of the conversation because it was overhis head. Instead, he had been taking the plump man's idea apart, examining all the pieces, and considering what was wrong with it and howit could be improved. The plump man looked startled, and thenangry--timid and unimaginative were the last things he'd expected hisidea to be called. Then he became uneasy. Maybe this fellow was atypical representative of his lord and master, the faceless abstractioncalled the Public. "What do you mean?" he asked. "Misplaced emphasis. You shouldn't emphasize the event that could havechanged history; you should emphasize the changes that could have beenmade. You're going to end this show you were talking about with a shotof 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. "Andafter that, your guest historian comes on; how much time will he beallowed?" "Well, maybe three or four minutes. We can't cut the dramatization tooshort--" "And he'll have to explain, a couple of times, and in words of onesyllable, that what we have seen didn't really happen, because if hedoesn't, the next morning half the twelve-year-old kids in the countrywill be rushing wild-eyed into school to slip the teacher the realinside about the discovery of America. By the time he gets that done, he'll be able to mumble a couple of generalities about vast andincalculable effects, and then it'll be time to tell the public aboutWidgets, the really safe cigarettes, all filter and absolutely free fromtobacco. " The waiter arrived at this point, and the sandy-haired man orderedanother rye highball. I decided to have another bourbon on the rocks, and the TV impresario said, "Gin-and-tonic, " absently, and went into areverie which lasted until the drinks arrived. Then he came awake again. "I see what you mean, " he said. "Most of the audience would wonder whatdifference it would have made where Columbus would have gotten hisships, as long as he got them and America got discovered. I can see itwould have made a hell of a big difference. But how could it be handledany other way? How could you figure out just what the difference wouldhave been?" "Well, you need a man who'd know the historical background, and you'dneed a man with a powerful creative imagination, who is used to using itinside rigorously defined limits. Don't try to get them both in one; acollaboration would really be better. Then you work from the knownsituation in Europe and in America in 1492, and decide on the immediateeffects. And from that, you have to carry it along, step by step, downto the present. It would be a lot of hard and very exacting work, butthe 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 wayyou set it up. All you have to do is make sure that nobody else would beable 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 conquershis 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 outof this imaginary world you've constructed, and be impossible in ourreal 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 halfsold on the idea. "But how will we get the audience to accept it? We'reasking them to start with an assumption they know isn't true. " "Maybe it is, in another time-dimension, " the colonel suggested. "Youcan't prove it isn't. For that matter, you can't prove there aren'tother time-dimensions. " "Hah, that's it!" the sandy-haired man exclaimed. "World of alternateprobability. That takes care of that. " He drank about a third of his highball and sat gazing into the rest ofit, in an almost yogic trance. The plump man looked at the colonel inbafflement. "Maybe this alternate-probability time-dimension stuff means somethingto you, " he said. "Be damned if it does to me. " "Well, as far as we know, we live in a four-dimensional universe, " thecolonel 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 formeasuring 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, gesturingto indicate them. "We can use them for coordinates to locate things, butwe also locate things in time. I wouldn't like to ride on a train or aplane if we didn't. Well, let's call the time we know, the time yourwatch registers, Time-A. Now, suppose the entire, infinite extent ofTime-A is only an instant in another dimension of time, which we'll callTime-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 happeningat different instants. In one of these instants of Time-B, one of thethings that's happening is that King Henry the Seventh of England isfurnishing ships to Christopher Columbus. " The man with the odd clothes was getting excited again. "Zees--'ow you say--zees alternate probabeelitay; eet ees a theoryzhenerally accept' een zees countree?" "Got it!" the sandy-haired man said, before anybody could answer. He sethis 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 hitthe edge of the tray with the back of the knife, _Bong_! "Crossroads--of--_Destiny_!" he intoned, and hit the edge of the trayagain, _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 oftime; a world parallel to and coexistent with but separate from our own, in which history has been completely altered by a single momentousevent. " He shifted back to his normal voice. "Not bad; only twenty-five seconds, " the plump man said, looking up fromhis wrist watch. "And a trained announcer could maybe shave five secondsoff that. Yes, something like that, and at the end we'll have anotherthirty seconds, and we can do without the guest. " "But zees alternate probibeelitay, in anozzer dimension, " the strangerwas insisting. "Ees zees a concept original weet you?" he asked thecolonel. "Oh, no; that idea's been around for a long time. " "I never heard of it before now, " the elderly man said, as though thatcompletely demolished it. "Zen eet ees zhenerally accept' by zee scienteest'?" "Umm, no, " the sandy-haired man relieved the colonel. "There'sabsolutely no evidence to support it, and scientists don't acceptunsupported assumptions unless they need them to explain something, andthey don't need this assumption for anything. Well, it would come inhandy to make some of these reports of freak phenomena, like mysteriousappearances and disappearances, or flying-object sightings, or reportedfalls of non-meteoric matter, theoretically respectable. Reports likethat 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 oranother. " He studied his drink for a moment, and lowered the level inthe glass slightly. "I've said that once in a while things get reportedthat look as though such other worlds, in another time-dimension, mayexist. There have been whole books published by people who collectstories like that. I must say that academic science isn't veryhospitable to them. " "You mean, zings sometimes, 'ow-you-say, leak in from one of zees ozzerworlds? Zat has been known to 'appen?" "Things have been said to have happened that might, if true, be cases ofthings leaking through from another time world, " the sandy-haired mancorrected. "Or leaking away to another time world. " He mentioned a fewof the more famous cases of unexplained mysteries--the English diplomatin Prussia who vanished in plain sight of a number of people, the shipfound completely deserted by her crew, the lifeboats all in place;stories like that. "And there's this rash of alleged sightings ofunidentified flying objects. I'd sooner believe that they came fromanother dimension than from another planet. But, as far as I know, nobody's seriously advanced this other-time-dimension theory to explainthem. " "I think the idea's familiar enough, though, that we can use it as anexplanation, or pseudo-explanation, for the program, " the television mansaid. "Fact is, we aren't married to this Crossroads title, yet; wecould just as easily all it _Fifth Dimension_. That would lead thepublic, to expect something out of the normal before the show started. " * * * * * That got the conversation back onto the show, and we talked for sometime about it, each of us suggesting possibilities. The stranger evensuggested one--that the Civil War had started during the JacksonAdministration. Fortunately, nobody else noticed that. Finally, a portercame 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 wouldhave to get his luggage. He told us how much he had enjoyed theconversation, 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 supposehe got that suit?" "It was a tailored suit, " the colonel said. "A very good one. And Ican't think of any country in the world in which they cut suits justlike that. And did you catch his accent?" "Phony, " the television man pronounced. "The French accent of a Greekwaiter in a fake French restaurant. In the Bronx. " "Not quite. The pronunciation was all right for French accent, but thecadence, the way the word-sounds were strung together, was German. " The elderly man looked at the colonel keenly. "I see you'reIntelligence, " he mentioned. "Think he might be somebody up your alley, Colonel?" The colonel shook his head. "I doubt it. There are agents of unfriendlypowers in this country--a lot of them, I'm sorry to have to say. Butthey 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 normallyAmerican 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 andsat at one end of the car, waiting until other accommodations could befound for them. After a while, it started again. I dallied over mydrink, and then got up and excused myself, saying that I wanted to turnin early. In the next car behind, I met the porter who had come in just before thestop. He looked worried, and after a moment's hesitation, he spoke tome. "Pardon, sir. The man in the club-car who got off at Harrisburg; did youknow him?" "Never saw him before. Why?" "He tipped me with a dollar bill when he got off. Later, I lookedclosely 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 thingright about it. One side was gray, all right, but the other side wasgreen. The picture wasn't the right one. And there were a lot of otherthings about it, some of them absolutely ludicrous. It wasn'tcounterfeit--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 ourscientists accepted the theory of other time dimensions and other worldsof alternate probability! On an impulse, I got out two ones and gave them to the porter--perfectlygood United States Bank gold-certificates. "You'd better let me keep this, " I said, trying to make it sound the wayhe'd think a Federal Agent would say it. He took the bills, smiling, andI 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 takenover and guided me back to the right car and compartment; I didn'trealize where I was going till I put on the light and recognized my ownluggage. 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 theclub-car and show the thing to the colonel and the sandy-haired man. Onsecond thought, I decided against that. The next thing I banished from my mind was the adjective "incredible. " Ihad to credit it; I had the proof in my vest pocket. The coincidencearising from our topic of conversation didn't bother me too much, either. It was the topic which had drawn him into it. And, as thesandy-haired man had pointed out, we know nothing, one way or another, about these other worlds; we certainly don't know what barriers separatethem from our own, or how often those barriers may fail. I might havethought more about that if I'd been in physical science. I wasn't; I wasin American history. So what I thought about was what sort of countrythat 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 wasthe costume of a less formal and conservative society than ours and amore casual way of life. It could be the sort of costume into which ourswould 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, asthough something about them surprised him. The only thing they had incommon 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 JacksonAdministration. I wondered what Jackson he had been talking about; notAndrew Jackson, the Tennessee militia general who got us into war withSpain in 1810, I hoped. And the Civil War; that had baffled mecompletely. I wondered if it had been a class-war, or a sectionalconflict. We'd had plenty of the latter, during our first century, butall of them had been settled peacefully and Constitutionally. Well, someof the things he'd read in Lingmuir's _Social History_ would besurprises for him, too. And then I took the bill out for another examination. It must havegotten mixed with his spendable money--it was about the size ofours--and I wondered how he had acquired enough of our money to pay histrain fare. Maybe he'd had a diamond and sold it, or maybe he'd had agun 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 ofwhat had happened to him--the book, and the fake accent, to cover anymistakes he might make. Well, I wished him luck, and then I unfolded thedollar bill and looked at it again. In the first place, it had been issued by the United States Departmentof Treasury itself, not the United States Bank or one of the StateBanks. I'd have to think over the implications of that carefully. In thesecond place, it was a silver certificate; why, in this other UnitedStates, silver must be an acceptable monetary metal; maybe equally sowith gold, though I could hardly believe that. Then I looked at thepicture on the gray obverse side, and had to strain my eyes on the fineprint under it to identify it. It was Washington, all right, but a mucholder Washington than any of the pictures of him I had ever seen. Then Irealized that I knew just where the Crossroads of Destiny for his worldand mine had been. As every schoolchild among us knows, General George Washington was shotdead at the Battle of Germantown, in 1777, by an English, or, rather, Scottish, officer, Patrick Ferguson--the same Patrick Ferguson whoinvented the breech-loading rifle that smashed Napoleon's armies. Washington, today, is one of our lesser national heroes, because he wasour first military commander-in-chief. But in this other world, he musthave survived to lead our armies to victory and become our firstPresident, as was the case with the man who took his place when he waskilled. I folded the bill and put it away carefully among my identificationcards, 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 hadmade, and what part, in the history of that other United States, hadbeen played by the man whose picture appears on our dollarbills--General and President Benedict Arnold. THE END.