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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Crossroads of Destiny, by Henry Beam Piper
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Crossroads of Destiny
+
+Author: Henry Beam Piper
+
+Release Date: June 20, 2006 [EBook #18632]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CROSSROADS OF DESTINY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Geetu Melwani and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+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 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'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.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Crossroads of Destiny, by Henry Beam Piper
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CROSSROADS OF DESTINY ***
+
+***** This file should be named 18632-8.txt or 18632-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/8/6/3/18632/
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Geetu Melwani and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Crossroads of Destiny, by H. Beam Piper
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p { margin-top: .75em; text-align: justify; margin-bottom: .75em;}
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+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Crossroads of Destiny, by Henry Beam Piper
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Crossroads of Destiny
+
+Author: Henry Beam Piper
+
+Release Date: June 20, 2006 [EBook #18632]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CROSSROADS OF DESTINY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Geetu Melwani and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<p class="tr"> <b>Transcriber's note.</b>
+<br />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.</p>
+
+
+
+<h1>Crossroads of Destiny</h1>
+
+<h4>by</h4>
+
+<h2>H. Beam Piper</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No wonder he'd been so interested in the talk of whether our
+people accepted these theories!</p></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>Readers who remember the Hon. Stephen Silk, diplomat extraordinary, in</i>
+<span class="smcap">Lone Star Planet</span> (FU, <i>March 1957</i>), <i>later published as</i> <span class="smcap">A Planet For
+Texans</span> <i>(Ace Books), will find the present story a challenging
+departure&mdash;this possibility that the history we know may not be
+absolute....</i></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;' />
+
+
+
+<h2>CROSSROADS OF DESTINY</h2>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>That was too much. I turned to the man beside me.</p>
+
+<p>"What goes on?" I asked. "Has somebody invented a time machine?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked up from the drink he was contemplating and gave me a grin.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"We're calling it <i>Crossroads of Destiny</i>," 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 resum&eacute; of what really did happen,
+and then he says, '<i>But</i>&mdash;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 <i>God Save the King</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Which wasn't written till about 1745," I couldn't help mentioning.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>The conservatively dressed gentleman beside him wanted to know how long
+he expected to keep the show running.</p>
+
+<p>"The crossroads will give out before long," he added.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>The elderly man accepted that and took another cautious sip of wine.</p>
+
+<p>"What I wonder, though, is whether you can really say that history can
+be changed."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, of course&mdash;" 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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Non, non, Monsieur!</i>" the man with the book, who had been outside the
+conversation until now, told him earnestly. "Make no mistake; 'istoree
+can be shange'!"</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Social History of the American
+People</i>&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think, Professor?" the plump man was asking me.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;any
+errors you make in trying to imagine such a world will be on the side of
+over-conservatism."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's the logical ending."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, maybe three or four minutes. We can't cut the dramatization too
+short&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, how could you present that?"</p>
+
+<p>"As a play, with fictional characters and a plot; time, the present,
+under the changed conditions. The plot&mdash;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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Hah, that's it!" the sandy-haired man exclaimed. "World of alternate
+probability. That takes care of that."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe this alternate-probability time-dimension stuff means something
+to you," he said. "Be damned if it does to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, as far as we know, we live in a four-dimensional universe," the
+colonel started.</p>
+
+<p>The elderly man across from him groaned. "Fourth dimension! Good God,
+are we going to talk about that?"</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't anything to be scared of. You carry an instrument for
+measuring in the fourth dimension all the time. A watch."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean it's just time? But that isn't&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>The man with the odd clothes was getting excited again.</p>
+
+<p>"Zees&mdash;'ow you say&mdash;zees alternate probabeelitay; eet ees a theory
+zhenerally accept' een zees countree?"</p>
+
+<p>"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, <i>Bong</i>!</p>
+
+<p>"Crossroads&mdash;of&mdash;<i>Destiny</i>!" he intoned, and hit the edge of the tray
+again, <i>Bong</i>! "This is the year 1959&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"But zees alternate probibeelitay, in anozzer dimension," the stranger
+was insisting. "Ees zees a concept original weet you?" he asked the
+colonel.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; that idea's been around for a long time."</p>
+
+<p>"I never heard of it before now," the elderly man said, as though that
+completely demolished it.</p>
+
+<p>"Zen eet ees zhenerally accept' by zee scienteest'?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Zen you believe zat zeese ozzer world of zee alternate probabeelitay,
+zey exist?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean, zings sometimes, 'ow-you-say, leak in from one of zees ozzer
+worlds? Zat has been known to 'appen?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"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 <i>Fifth Dimension</i>. That would lead the
+public, to expect something out of the normal before the show started."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Was that one an oddball!" he exclaimed. "Where the hell do you suppose
+he got that suit?"</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Phony," the television man pronounced. "The French accent of a Greek
+waiter in a fake French restaurant. In the Bronx."</p>
+
+<p>"Not quite. The pronunciation was all right for French accent, but the
+cadence, the way the word-sounds were strung together, was German."</p>
+
+<p>The elderly man looked at the colonel keenly. "I see you're
+Intelligence," he mentioned. "Think he might be somebody up your alley,
+Colonel?"</p>
+
+<p>The colonel shook his head. "I doubt it. There are agents of unfriendly
+powers in this country&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon, sir. The man in the club-car who got off at Harrisburg; did you
+know him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never saw him before. Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"He tipped me with a dollar bill when he got off. Later, I looked
+closely at it. I do not like it."</p>
+
+<p>He showed it to me, and I didn't blame him. It was marked <i>One Dollar</i>,
+and <i>United States of America</i>, 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&mdash;it wasn't even an imitation of a United States bill.</p>
+
+<p>And then it hit me, like a bullet in the chest. Not a bill of <i>our</i>
+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!</p>
+
+<p>On an impulse, I got out two ones and gave them to the porter&mdash;perfectly
+good United States Bank gold-certificates.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, sir," he said. "I have no wish to keep it."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The man's costume was basically the same as ours&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Social History</i> would be
+surprises for him, too.</p>
+
+<p>And then I took the bill out for another examination. It must have
+gotten mixed with his spendable money&mdash;it was about the size of
+ours&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;General and President Benedict Arnold.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>THE END.</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Crossroads of Destiny, by Henry Beam Piper
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Crossroads of Destiny, by Henry Beam Piper
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Crossroads of Destiny
+
+Author: Henry Beam Piper
+
+Release Date: June 20, 2006 [EBook #18632]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CROSSROADS OF DESTINY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Geetu Melwani and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Crossroads of Destiny, by Henry Beam Piper
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