Short Fiction

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 Answer

For a moment, after the screen door snapped and wakened him, Lee Richardson sat breathless and motionless, his eyes still closed, trying desperately to cling to the dream and print it upon his conscious memory before it faded.

“Are you there, Lee?” he heard Alexis Pitov’s voice.

“Yes, I’m here. What time is it?” he asked, and then added, “I fell asleep. I was dreaming.”

It was all right; he was going to be able to remember. He could still see the slim woman with the graying blonde hair, playing with the little dachshund among the new-fallen leaves on the lawn. He was glad they’d both been in this dream together; these dream-glimpses were all he’d had for the last fifteen years, and they were too precious to lose. He opened his eyes. The Russian was sitting just outside the light from the open door of the bungalow, lighting a cigarette. For a moment, he could see the blocky, high-cheeked face, now pouched and wrinkled, and then the flame went out and there was only the red coal glowing in the darkness. He closed his eyes again, and the dream picture came back to him, the woman catching the little dog and raising her head as though to speak to him.

“Plenty of time, yet.” Pitov was speaking German instead of Spanish, as they always did between themselves. “They’re still counting down from minus three hours. I just phoned the launching site for a jeep. Eugenio’s been there ever since dinner; they say he’s running around like a cat looking for a place to have her first litter of kittens.”

He chuckled. This would be something new for Eugenio Galvez⁠—for which he could be thankful.

“I hope the generators don’t develop any last-second bugs,” he said. “We’ll only be a mile and a half away, and that’ll be too close to fifty kilos of negamatter if the field collapses.”

“It’ll be all right,” Pitov assured him. “The bugs have all been chased out years ago.”

“Not out of those generators in the rocket. They’re new.” He fumbled in his coat pocket for his pipe and tobacco. “I never thought I’d run another nuclear-bomb test, as long as I lived.”

“Lee!” Pitov was shocked. “You mustn’t call it that. It isn’t that, at all. It’s purely a scientific experiment.”

“Wasn’t that all any of them were? We made lots of experiments like this, back before 1969.” The memories of all those other tests, each ending in an Everest-high mushroom column, rose in his mind. And the end result⁠—the United States and the Soviet Union blasted to rubble, a whole hemisphere pushed back into the Dark Ages, a quarter of a billion dead. Including a slim woman with graying blonde hair, and a little red dog, and a girl from Odessa whom Alexis Pitov had been going to marry. “Forgive me, Alexis. I just couldn’t help remembering. I suppose it’s this shot we’re going to make, tonight. It’s so much like the other ones, before⁠—” He hesitated slightly. “Before the Auburn Bomb.”

There; he’d come out and said it. In all the years they’d worked together at the Instituto Argentino de Ciencia Fisica, that had been unmentioned between them. The families of hanged cutthroats avoid mention of ropes and knives. He thumbed the old-fashioned American lighter and held it to his pipe. Across the veranda, in the darkness, he knew that Pitov was looking intently at him.

“You’ve been thinking about that, lately, haven’t you?” the Russian asked, and then, timidly: “Was that what you were dreaming of?”

“Oh, no, thank heaven!”

“I think about it, too, always. I suppose⁠—” He seemed relieved, now that it had been brought out into the open and could be discussed. “You saw it fall, didn’t you?”

“That’s right. From about thirty miles away. A little closer than we’ll be to