"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,