The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (24 page)

They started for the minibile, evidently realized they would not have time to get away in it, and began running down the street. Their indecision did for them. As the Grand Army men closed in around them I saw them raise their arms in the traditional gesture of surrender. Then they were struck down.

For the next days my reading was pretense. I used the opened book before me to mask my privacy from Tyss while I pondered the meaning and extent of that night’s events. From scraps of conversation on which I eavesdropped, from the newspapers, from deduction and remembered fragments I reconstructed the picture which made the background. Its borders reached a long way from Astor Place.

I have explained how the world had waited for years, half in dread, half in resignation, for war between the German Union and the Confederate States. Everyone expected the point of explosion would be the Confederacy’s ally, the British Empire, and that at least part of the war would be fought in the United States. Apparently we were helpless to prevent this.

The Grand Army’s scheme was evidently a far-fetched and fantastic attempt to circumvent the probable course of history. The counterfeiting of Spanish money on a large scale represented an aspect of this attempt, which was nothing less than trying to force the war to start, not through the Confederacy’s ally, but through the German Union’s—the Spanish Empire. With enormous amounts of the spurious currency, the Grand Army was planning to circulate it by means of emissaries passing as Confederate agents and thus embroil the Confederacy with Spain in the hope the war would commence and be fought in the Spanish Empire. It was an ingenuous idea, I see now, evolved by men without knowledge of the actual mechanics of world politics.

The second delivery had represented the less extravagant and romantic side of the Grand Army. Embarking, as they had years before, on activities of violence, the fine distinction between crimes undertaken to advance a cause and allied crimes undertaken to supply the organization with funds had become obscured. Relations of increasing intimacy were established with ordinary gangsters. The association was convenient to both, for the Grand Army often supplied weapons and information in return for more immediately political favors.

Thus, Sprovis had been engaged in comparatively innocent gunrunning to a gang which probably had no other connection with the Grand Army, when Tolliburr and his friends waylaid us in the minibile. Undoubtedly what they wanted was proof of the counterfeiting scheme, but they had overlooked or somehow missed the rendezvous on 26th Street—disastrously for them.

Any lingering sentimental notions I might have entertained about the nature of the Grand Army disappeared with the certainty Sprovis had killed his prisoners. At the first opportunity I used the card Tolliburr had given me, but the suspicion and lack of information with which I was received at the address confirmed my idea. No bodies were found and there was no mention in the newspapers of the disappearance of any Southrons. Naturally the Confederate government would call no attention to their fate, but I had no doubts.

Even as I reproached myself for the weakness and moral cowardice which had prevented me from refusing to be an accomplice to these crimes, I looked forward to my release. I had not seen Enfandin since his offer; in a week I should leave the bookstore for his sanctuary, and I resolved my first act should be to tell him everything. And then that dream was exploded just as it was about to be realized.

I do not know who broke into the consulate and was surprised in the act, who shot and wounded Enfandin so seriously he was unable to speak for weeks before he was finally returned to Haiti to recuperate or die. He could not get in touch with me and I was not permitted to see him; the police guard was doubly zealous to keep him from all contact since he was an accredited diplomat and a black man.

I did not know who shot him. It was quite probably no one connected either with the Grand Army or the gang to whom the guns were delivered. But I did not know. I could not know. He
might
have been shot with one of the revolvers which had been in the van that night, or by Sprovis or George Pondible. Since the ultimate chain could have led back to me, it did lead back to me.

The loss of my chance to escape from the bookstore was the least of my despair. It seemed to me I was caught by the inexorable, choiceless circumstance in which Tyss so firmly believed and Enfandin denied. I could escape neither my guilt nor the surroundings conducive to further guilt. I could not change destiny.

Was this all merely the self-torture of an introverted young man? Possibly. I only know that for a long time—long as one in his early twenties measures time—I lost all interest in life, even dallying at intervals with thoughts of suicide. I put books aside with distaste, or indifference—which was worse.

I cannot say precisely when it was my despair began to lift. I know that one day—it was cold and the snow was deep on the ground—I saw a girl walking briskly, red-cheeked, breathing in quick, visible puffs, and for the first time in months my glance was not one of indifference. When I returned to the bookstore I picked up Field Marshal Liddell-Hart’s
Life of General Pickett
and opened it to the place where I had abandoned it. In a moment I was fully absorbed.

Paradoxically, once I was myself again I was no longer the same Hodge Backmaker. For the first time I was determined to do what I wanted instead of waiting and hoping events would somehow turn out right for me. Somehow I was going to free myself from the dead end of the bookstore—and I wasn’t going to escape into indenture, either.

All this was pointed by my discovery that I was exhausting the possibilities of the volumes around me. The ones I now sought were rare and it became more difficult for me to find them. With the innocence of one who has not been part of academic life I imagined them ready to hand in a dozen college libraries.

Nor, to tell the truth, was I any longer completely satisfied with the second hand, the printed word. My friendship with Enfandin had shown me how a personal, face-to-face relationship between teacher and student could be so much more fruitful and it seemed to me such relationships could develop into ones between fellow scholars—a mutual pursuit of knowledge which was not competitive.

Additionally I wanted to search the real, the original sources, the unpublished manuscripts of participants or scholars, the old diaries and letters which might shade a meaning or subtly change the interpretation of some old, forgotten action.

Ideally my problems could be solved by a fellowship or an instructorship at some college. But how was this to be obtained without the patronage of a Tolliburr or an Enfandin? I had no credentials worth a second’s consideration. Even though the immigration bars kept out graduates of British, Confederate or German universities, no college in the United States would accept a self-taught young man who had not only little Latin and less Greek, but no mathematics, languages, or sciences at all.

For a long time I considered possible ways and means, an exercise rarely more practical than spinning daydreams without contriving any steps to attain their consummation. I knew I was waiting to be acted upon, rather than attempting to initiate action on my own account, but it seemed to me impossible to exercise that free will of which Enfandin had spoken.

At last, more in a spirit of whimsical absurdity than in sober hope, I wrote out a letter of application, setting forth the qualifications I imagined myself to possess, assaying the extent of my learning with a conceit which only ingenuousness could palliate, and outlining the work I had projected for my future. With much care and many revisions I set this composition in type. It was undoubtedly a foolish gesture, but not having access to so costly a machine as a typewriter, and not wanting to reveal this by penning the letters by hand, I used this transparent device.

Tyss read one of the copies I struck off. His expression was critical. “Is it very bad?” I asked hopelessly.

“Should have used more leading. And you could have lined it up better and eliminated the hyphens. It’s things like that—the details—which make a machine to set type, that inventors have been failing to invent for so long, impractical. I’m afraid you’ll never make a first-class printer, Hodgins.”

He was concerned only with the typesetting, uninterested in the outcome.

The government mails being one of the favorite victims of holdup men, and pneumatic post limited to local areas, I dispatched the letters by way of Wells, Fargo to a comprehensive list of colleges. I can’t say I then waited for the replies to flow in, for though I knew the company’s system of heavily armed guards would insure delivery of my applications, I had no anticipation that any of the recipients would bother to answer. As a matter of fact I put it pretty well out of my mind and divided my attention between my work for Tyss, my reading, and a fruitless endeavor to devise some new scheme.

It was several months later, toward the end of September, that the telegram came signed Thomas K. Haggerwells. It read, ACCEPT NO OFFER TILL OUR REPRESENTATIVE EXPLAINS HAGGERSHAVEN.

I had sent no copy of my letter to York, Pennsylvania—where the telegram had originated—nor anywhere near it. I knew of no colleges in that vicinity. And I had never heard of Mr. (or Doctor, or Professor) Haggerwells. I might have thought the message a mean joke, except that Tyss’s nature didn’t run to this type of humor and no one else knew of the letters except those to whom they were addressed.

I found no reference to Haggershaven in any of the directories I consulted, which was not too surprising, considering the slovenly way such things were put together. I decided that if such a place existed I could only wait patiently till the “representative”—if there really was one—arrived.

Tyss having left for the day, I swept a little, dusted some, straightened a few of the books (any serious attempt to arrange the stock would have been futile) and took up a new emendation of Creasy’s
Fifteen Decisive Battles
by one Captain Eisenhower.

I was so deep in the good captain’s analysis (what a strategist he would have made himself, given the opportunity!) that I heard no customer enter, sensed no impatient presence. I was only recalled from my book by a rather sharp, “Is the proprietor in?”

“No, ma’am,” I answered, reluctantly abandoning the page. “He’s out for the moment. Can I help you?”

My eyes, accustomed to the store’s poor light, had the advantage over hers, still adjusting from the sunlit street. Secure in my boldness, I measured her vital femininity, a quality which seemed—if such a thing is possible—impersonal. I recognized an insistent sensuality (I think I have indicated my susceptibility to women; such a susceptibility I’m sure acts as an intuitive, a telepathic device) as I recognized the fact she was bareheaded, and almost as tall as I, and rather large-boned. There was nothing immediate or related to myself about it.

Nor was it connected with surface attributes; she was not beautiful, certainly not pretty, though she might have been called handsome in a way. Her hair, ginger-colored and clubbed low on her neck, waved crisply; her eyes seemed slate gray. (Later I learned they could vary from paleness to blue-green.) The fleshly greediness was betrayed, if at all, only by the width and set of her lips and the boldness of her expression.

She smiled, and I decided I had been wrong in thinking her tone peremptory. “I’m Barbara Haggerwells. I’m looking for a Mr. Backmaker”—she glanced at a slip of paper—“a Hodgins M. Backmaker who evidently uses this as an accommodation address.”

“I’m Hodge Backmaker,” I muttered in despair. “I—I work here.”

I suppose I expected her to say nastily, So I see! or the usual inane, It must be fascinating! Instead she said, “I wonder if you’ve run across a book called
The Properties of X
by Whitehead?”

“Uh—I... is it a mystery story?”

“I’m afraid not. It’s a book on mathematics by a mathematician very much out of favor. It’s quite scarce; I’ve been trying to get a copy for a long time.”

So naturally and easily she led me away from my embarrassment and into talking of books, relieving me of self-consciousness and some of the mortification in being exposed at my humble job by the “representative” of the telegram. I admitted deficient knowledge of mathematics and ignorance of Mr. Whitehead, though stoutly maintaining—truthfully—that the book was not in stock, while she assured me only a specialist would have heard of so obscure a theoretician. This made me ask, with the awe one feels for an expert in an alien field, if she were a mathematician, to which she replied, “Heavens, no—I’m a physicist. But mathematics is my tool.”

I looked at her with respect. Anyone, I thought, can read a few books and set himself up as an historian; to be a physicist means genuine learning. And I doubted she was much older than I.

She said abruptly, “My father is interested in knowing something about you.”

I acknowledged this with a gesture somewhere between a nod and a bow. What could I say? She had been examining and gauging me for the last half hour. “Your father is Thomas Haggerwells?”

“Haggerwells of Haggershaven,” she confirmed, as though explaining everything. There was pride in her voice, and a hint of arrogance.

“I’m dreadfully sorry, Miss Haggerwells, but I’m afraid I’m as ignorant of Haggershaven as of mathematics.”

“I thought you said you’d been reading history. It’s odd you’ve come upon no reference to the haven in the records of the past 75 years.”

I shook my head helplessly. “I suppose my reading has been scattered. Haggershaven is a college?”

“No. Haggershaven is—Haggershaven.” She resumed her equanimity, her air of smiling tolerance. “It’s hardly a college since it has neither student body nor faculty—rather, both are one at the haven. Anyone admitted is a scholar or potential scholar anxious to devote himself to learning. Not many are acceptable.”

She need hardly have added that; it was obvious I could never be one of the elect, even if I hadn’t offended her by never having heard of the haven. I knew I couldn’t pass the most lenient of entrance examinations to an ordinary college, much less the dedicated place she represented.

“There are no formal requirements for fellowship,” she went on, “beyond the undertaking to work to full capacity, to pool all knowledge and hold back none from scholars anywhere, to contribute economically to the haven in accordance with decisions of the majority of fellows, and to vote on questions without consideration of personal gain. There! That certainly sounds like the stuffiest manifesto delivered this year.”

“It sounds too good to be true.”

“Oh, it’s true enough. But there’s another side, not so theoretical. The haven is neither wealthy nor endowed—we have to earn our living. The fellows draw no stipend; they have food, clothes, shelter, whatever books and materials they need—no luxuries. We often have to leave our work to do manual labor to bring in food or money for all.”