Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Cross Roads of Destiny by H Beam Piper. I still
ad the dollar bill. It's in my box of 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 might 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 crack box are tolerated even on college faculties. It's
(00:23):
only when they began producing physical evidence that they get
themselves actively resented. When I went into the club car
for the 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
(00:45):
high ball 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 probalygient and tap.
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
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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.
(01:28):
I pricked up my ears. The period from fourteen ninety
two 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
(01:50):
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 eighth. Right, we'll fix it so the 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
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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 orders a 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 at cross Roads
of Destiny, he said. It'll be a series, one half
(02:33):
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'll 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 cross roads of destiny, this is where history could
have been completely changed. Then he gets a resume of
what really did happen, and then he says, but suppose
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so and so had done this and that instead of
such and such. Then we pick up the dramatization of
that point, only we show it the way it might
have happened, Like this thing about Columbus will show how
it could have happened. And then with Columbus wading ashore
with his thword 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
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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 will all saying God Save the King, which
wasn't written until about eight seventeen forty five. I couldn't
help mentioning, huh. The plump man looks startled, Are you sure?
Then he decided that I was and shrugged, Well, they
(03:35):
can all shout God save King Henry or Saint George
for England or something. Then at the end we introduced
the program guest, some history expert, a real name, and
he tells how he thinks history would have been changed
if it had happened that way. The conservatively dressed gentlemans
beside him wanted to know how long he expected to
keep the show running. The cross was will give out
before long, he added, The sponsor will give out first.
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I said, History's just one damn cross rose after another.
I mentioned, in passing that I taught the subject. Why
since the beginning of the 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
blunt 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.
(04:18):
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
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they all cancel out? No, no, monsieur. The man with
the book, who had been outside the conversation until now,
told him, moent earnestly, make no mistake, estri can be change.
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'd never bought the clothes he
was wearing in this country, the way the suit fitted
and the out of it, and the shirt collar and
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the necktie. The book he was reading was Languere'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,
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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
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problems as a consequence. Look, he's only giving himself a century,
the colonel added. Think of the changes of this thing
we were discussing Columbus sailing under the English flag had happened,
Or suppose leif Erickson had been able to plan 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 areas you
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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 high ball for
a crystal ball, must have glimpsed it at 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 he realized just
how good an idea you have here, he told the
plump Man abruptly. If you did, you wouldn't ruin it
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with such timid and unimaginative treatment. I thought he'd been
staying out of the conversation because it was over his head. Instead,
he'd 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 imaginative if were the last
things he'd expected his idea to be called. Then he
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became uneasy. Maybe this fellow was a typical representative of
his lord or master. The Facelik of abstraction called the public.
What do you mean, he asked, misplaced emphasis. You shouldn't
emphasize the event that could have changed him. 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
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the logical beginning. The sandy haired man contradicted. And after that,
your guest historian comes on. How much time would he
be allowed? Well, maybe three or four minutes. We can't
cut the dramatization too short, and I'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
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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 calculable effects, and that it will be time
to tell the public about widgets, the really saved cigarettes.
All filt are absolutely free from tobacco. The waiter arrived
at this point, and the sandy haired man ordered another
Rye high ball. I decided to have another bourbon on
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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 when Columbus would have gotten his
ships as long as he got them and America got discovered.
I could see would have made a hell of a
big difference. But how could it be handled any other way?
(08:14):
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 need a man with a powerful
creative imagination who's 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 fourteen ninety two
and decide on the immediate effects, and from that you
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have to carry it along, step by step down to
the present. It'd 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 to day would
be the way you set it up. All you have
to do is make sure that nobody else will be
able to prove that it wouldn't. Well, how can you
present that as a play with fictional characters in a plot?
(08:56):
Time the present, under the change 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. We'll have to go
out of this imaginary world you've constructed and being possible
in our weary world. As long as you stick to that,
you'll be all right. Sure, I get that. The plump
man was excited again. He was about half sold in
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the idea. But how will we get the audience to
accept it. We'll 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. Ha, that's it,
The sandy haired man exclaimed, World of alternate probability, that
takes care of that. He drank about a third of
his high ball and sat gazing into the rest of
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it in an almost yogut trance. The plump man looked
at the colonel em 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 groan, fourth dimension. Good,
gotta we going to talk about that? It isn't anything
(10:00):
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
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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 instances, and one of these
instants of time. B One of the things that is
happening is that King Henry the seventh of England is
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furnishing ships to Christopher Columbus. The man with the odd
close was getting excited again. You say this alternate probability.
It is a ziri generally exhipted in Z's country. Got it,
the sandy hand man said. Before anybody could answer, he said,
drink on the shand tray, and took a big jackknife
out of his pocket, holding it unopened in his hand.
(11:05):
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 nineteen fifty nine,
but not the nineteen fifty nine of our world, for
we are in a world of alternate probability, and in
another dimension of time, a world parallel to and coexistent with,
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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 plum man said, looking up from his wristwatch, 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 it without the guest.
But zis alternate probability in another dimension. The stranger was insisting,
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is this a gunceipt? Original? Wid you? He asked the colonel. Oh, No,
that idea has been around for a long time. I
never heard of it before. Now, the elderly man said,
as though that completely demolished it. Zen, it is genuinely
accept by ZID scientists. No, the Sandy had men relieved
the colonel. There's absolutely no evidence to support it, and
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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 a freak phenomena like mysterious appearances and disappearances, or
flying object things or reportive falls of non meteoric matter.
Theoretically respectable reports like that usually get the ignore and
forget treatment. Now, Zen, you believe that Zi's other world
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of the alternate probability zey exist. No, I don't disbelieve
it either, I have 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 to look as though such
other worlds and another time to mention may exist. There
have been whole books published by people who collect stories
like that. I must say that icademic science isn't very
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hospitable to them. You mean Zing's sometimes how you say,
leak in from one of Zi's ozer worlds. Z has
been known to happen. Things have been said to have
happened that might, if true, be a case of things
leaking through from another time world, the sandy unhited man corrected,
or leaking away to another time world. He mentioned a
few of the most famous cases of unexplained mysteries, the
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English diplomat and Preussia, 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 then 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 the other time to mention theory to
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explain them. I think the idea is familiar enough, though,
that we can use it as an explanation or suit
explanation for the program, the television man said. Fact is,
we aren't married to this Crossroads title, yet, we could
just as easily call it fifth dimension. That would lead
the public to speck something out of the normal before
the show started. That got the conversation back on to
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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 jackcent administration.
Fortunately nobody else noticed that. Finally, a porter came through
and inquired if any of us were getting off at Harrisburg,
saying that they would be getting on in in five minutes.
The stranger finished his drink hastily and got up, saying
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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 odd ball? 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?
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Phony the television man pronounced the French accent of a
Greek waiter and 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 your intelligence, he mentioned, think he might be
somebody up your ally, Colonel. The colonel shook his head.
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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. A trained
ground was stop. A young couple with hand luggage came
in and sat at one end of the car, waiting
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until other accommodations could be found for them. After a
while it started again. I downed 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 men at the club car
who got off at Harrisburg? Did you know him? Never
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saw him before? Why he tipped me with the dollar
bill when he got off. Later, I look 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 you know, 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
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wasn't counterfeit. It wasn't even an imitation of the 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 I
signed has 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
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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 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
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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 vanished from my mind was the adjective incredible. I
had to credit it. I had the proof in my
best pocket. The coincidence arising from our topic of conversation
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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
it if i'd been in physical science. I wasn't. I
was in American history. So what I thought about was
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what sort of a 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 a 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
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another odd thing. I noticed him looking curiously at both
the waiter and the porter, as though something about then
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 had been
talking about. Not Andrew Jackson, the Tennessee militia general who
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got us into war with Spain in eighteen ten, I hoped,
and the Civil War that aboutled me completely. I wonder
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 Lingmore's social history
would be surprises for him too. And then I took
the bill out for another examination. It must have gotten
(18:41):
mixed with his spleendable 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 accent to
cover any mistakes he might make. While I wished him luck,
(19:03):
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 medal,
maybe equally so with gold, though I could hardly believe that.
(19:25):
Then he looked at the picture on the gray of
verse side and had to strain my eyes on the
frying 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 cross roads of
destiny for his world of mine had been, As every
school child among us knows. General George Washington was shot
dead at the Battle of german Town in seventeen seventy
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seven by an English or rather Scottish officer, Patrick Ferguson,
the Saint Patrick Ferguson, who embedded 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 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
(20:09):
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 have been played by
the man whose picture appears on our dollar bills, General
and President Benedict Arnold end of cross Roads of Destiny
(20:32):
by H. Beam Piper