—1456, Gut. Bi. pr.; 1492, Am. dis.; 1945, at. b. ex. Almgdo.; 1971, mn. rchd., they wove.
—2004, Sir. rchd.; 2005-6, Sir.—E. wr.; 2042, Btlgs. rchd.; 2043-4, Btlgs.—E. wr.
They wove and wove and wove.
15,000, E. Emp. clpsd.; 15,038, E. dstryd.; Hist. E., end of.
It was a fine hammock, the best the two squixes had ever wove. But they didn’t sleep well that night. They twisted and turned and tossed, and they dreamed the most fantastic dreams—
Which isn’t particularly surprising, considering what they were sleeping on. Sleeping on the history of Earth would be enough to give anybody nightmares.
Even squixes.
Crossroads of Destiny
by H. Beam Piper
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....
No wonder he’d been so interested in the talk of whether our people accepted these theories!
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 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 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’sSocial 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,