“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
