The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (28 page)

“Where I live, they have routine segregation, so I can’t use any of the whites’ facilities. I’ve thought about applying to move to one of the larger cities where there’s elective segregation and nothing’s officially ‘white-only,’ but I hear the waiting lists are years long. And somebody told me that everything is really just as segregated as here, they’re just not as open and honest about it. So maybe I’d really be no better off…

“But I wish that I could have become a teacher— any kind of teacher—instead of a cook. I can’t even become a chef, because that’s another men-only field. I don’t want to be a chef necessarily, because I really don’t like to cook and I’m not very good at it. But it was all I could get. The list of available careers for non-whites gets smaller all the time.

“Sometimes, I think it actually wasn’t meant to be this bad. Sometimes I think that nobody really wanted the military to take over the government for real, I think it was just panic about so many of the Democratic candidates dying along with the President in that blast and the rioting that wouldn’t stop and all that. It did seem as if the country was completely falling apart and somebody had to do something fast and decisive. Well, sure, somebody should have. Somebody should have figured out who was the President, with Madman Johnson and Humpty Humphrey and all those Senators dead—there had to be
somebody
left, right? All of Congress wasn’t there. I mean, if I’d known, if a lot of us had known how things were going to come out, I think we’d have just let Ronald Reagan be President for four years, run him against Wallace or something and kept free elections, instead of postponing the elections and then having them abolished.

“People panicked. That’s what it all came down to, I think. They were panicking in the streets, they were panicking in the government, and they were panicking in their homes. Our own panic brought us down.”

Undated typescript found in
a locker in the downtown
San Diego bus terminal,
April 9, 1993

Our own panic brought us
down. For many who were eyewitnesses to certain events of 1968, this would seem to be a fitting coda, if coda is the word, for the ensuing twenty-five years…

Oh, hell, I don’t know why I’m bothering to try to sum this up. How do you sum up a piece of history gone wrong? How do you sum up the fall of a country that believes it was saved from chaos and destruction? And who am I asking, anyway? I’m out of the country now, another wetback who finally made it across the border to freedom. There was a time when wetbacks went north to freedom, but I’m pretty sure nobody would remember that now. Mexico is sad and dusty and ancient, the people poor and suspicious of Anglos, though I’m so brown now that I can pass convincingly as long as I don’t try to speak the language—my accent is still atrocious.

But the freedom here—nothing like what we used to have, but the constraints are far fewer. You don’t need to apply for a travel permit in-country, you just go from place to place. Of course, it’s not really that hard to get a travel permit in the U.S., they give them out routinely. But I’m of that generation that remembers when it was different, and it galls me that I would have to apply for one at all if I want to go from, say, Newark to, say, Cape May. I’ve deliberately chosen two cities I’ve never been to, just in case these papers fall into the wrong hands. God knows enough of my papers have been lost over the years. Sometimes I think it’s a miracle I haven’t been caught.

It’s a hell of a life when you’re risking prosecution and imprisonment just for trying to put together a true account of something that happened two and a half decades before.

Why I bothered—well, there are a lot of reasons. Because I’ve learned to love truth. And because I want to atone for what I did to “Carole Feeney” and the others. I’m still amazed that she didn’t recognize me, but I guess twenty years is a long time after all.

I really thought I was doing the right thing at the time. I thought infiltrating the leftist groups was all right if it was just to make sure that nobody was stockpiling weapons or planning to blow up a building. Or assassinate another leader. I truly wish I could have arrested Annie Phillips and her group long before Chicago. Some of the people I talked to who were in the streets that night blame Annie for everything that’s happened since, and I think that’s why the authorities kept her alive instead of killing her—so the old radicals could hate her more than the government.

After I talked to Annie, I understood why she turned violent, even if I didn’t condone it. If her voice could have been heard in 1964, maybe all these voices could be heard now, though they might not have so much to say…

How melodramatic, “Davis.” I can’t help it. I was actually just like any of them in the year 1968— I thought my country was in trouble, and I was trying to do something about it. And—

And what the hell, we won the Vietnam war. Hooray for America. The Vietnamese are all but extinct, but we brought the boys back home. We sent them right back out to the Middle East, and then down to Nicaragua, and to the Phillipines, and to Europe, of course, where they don’t protest our missile bases much anymore. That big old stick. We’ve gone one better than talking softly and carrying a big stick. Now we don’t talk at all....

In the weeks since I finally got out of the country, I’ve been having this recurring dream. I keep dreaming that things turned out differently, that there was even just one thing that didn’t happen, or something else that did happen, and the country just… went on. And so I keep thinking about it. If Johnson hadn’t run… if Kennedy hadn’t been killed… if that bomb hadn’t gone off… if it had only been half the number of demonstrators… if Dylan had showed up.

If Dylan had showed up… I wonder sometimes if that’s it. God, the world should be so simple. Instead of simple and brutal and crude.

Even after putting together this risky account, I’m not sure that I really know much more than I did in the beginning. I was hoping that I might figure it all out, how, instead of winning the battle and losing the war, we won the war and lost everything we had. But it could have been different. I don’t know why it’s so important to me to believe that. Maybe because I don’t want to believe that this was the way we were going no matter what. I don’t want to believe that everything that was of any value is stuck back there in the Sixties.

Papers found in a hastily vacated room
in an Ecuadorian flophouse
by occupying American forces
during the third South American War
October 13, 1998

<>

* * * *

Catch That Zeppelin!

Fritz Leiber

 This year on a trip to New York City to visit my son, who is a social historian at a leading municipal university there, I had a very unsettling experience. At black moments, of which at my age I have quite a few, it still makes me distrust profoundly those absolute boundaries in Space and Time which are our sole protection against Chaos, and fear that my mind—no, my entire individual existence—may at any moment at all and without any warning whatsoever be blown by a sudden gust of Cosmic Wind to an entirely different spot in a Universe of Infinite Possibilities. Or, rather, into another Universe altogether. And that my mind and individuality will be changed to fit.

But at other moments, which are still in the majority, I believe that my unsettling experience was only one of those remarkably vivid waking dreams to which old people become increasingly susceptible, generally waking dreams about the past, and especially waking dreams about a past in which at some crucial point one made an entirely different and braver choice than one actually did, or in which the whole world made such a decision, with a completely different future resulting. Golden glowing might-have-beens nag increasingly at the minds of some older people.

In line with this interpretation I must admit that my whole unsettling experience was structured very much like a dream. It began with startling flashes of a changed world. It continued into a longer period when I completely accepted the changed world and delighted in it and, despite fleeting quivers of uneasiness, wished I could bask in its glow forever. And it ended in horrors, or nightmares, which I hate to mention, let alone discuss, until I must.

Opposing this dream notion, there are times when I am completely convinced that what happened to me in Manhattan and in a certain famous building there was no dream at all, but absolutely real, and that I did indeed visit another Time Stream.

Finally, I must point out that what I am about to tell you I am necessarily describing in retrospect, highly aware of several transitions involved and, whether I want to or not, commenting on them and making deductions that never once occurred to me at the time.

No, at the time it happened to me—and now at this moment of writing I am convinced that it did happen and was absolutely real—one instant simply succeeded another in the most natural way possible. I questioned nothing.

As to why it all happened to me, and what particular mechanism was involved, well, I am convinced that every man or woman has rare, brief moments of extreme sensitivity, or rather vulnerability, when his mind and entire being may be blown by the Change Winds to Somewhere Else. And then, by what I call the Law of the Conservation of Reality, blown back again.

I was walking down Broadway somewhere near 34th Street. It was a chilly day, sunny despite the smog—a bracing day—and I suddenly began to stride along more briskly than is my cautious habit, throwing my feet ahead of me with a faint suggestion of the goose step. I also threw back my shoulders and took deep breaths, ignoring the fumes which tickled my nostrils. Beside me, traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York. I cheerfully ignored that too. I even smiled at the sight of a ragged bum and a fur-coated gray-haired society lady both independently dodging across the street through the hurtling traffic with a cool practiced skill one sees only in America’s biggest metropolis.

Just then I noticed a dark, wide shadow athwart the street ahead of me. It could not be that of a cloud, for it did not move. I craned my neck sharply and looked straight up like the veriest yokel, a regular
Hans-Kopf-in-die-Luft
(Hans-Head-in-the-Air, a German figure of comedy).

My gaze had to climb up the giddy 102 stories of the tallest building in the world, the Empire State. My gaze was strangely accompanied by the vision of a gigantic, long-fanged ape making the same ascent with a beautiful girl in one paw—oh, yes, I was recollecting the charming American fantasy-film
King Kong
, or as they name it in Sweden,
Kong King
.

And then my gaze clambered higher still, up the 222-foot sturdy tower, to the top of which was moored the nose of the vast, breathtakingly beautiful, streamlined, silvery shape which was making the shadow.

Now here is a most important point. I was not at the time in the least startled by what I saw. I knew at once that it was simply the bow section of the German zeppelin
Ostwald
, named for the great German pioneer of physical chemistry and electrochemistry, and queen of the mighty passenger and light-freight fleet of luxury airliners working out of Berlin, Baden-Baden, and Bremerhaven. That matchless Armada of Peace, each titanic airship named for a world-famous German scientist—the
Mach
, the
Nernst
, the
Humbolt
, the
Fritz Haber
, the French-named
Antoine Henri Becquerel
, the American-named
Edison
, the Polish-named
T. Sklodowska Edison
, and even the Jewish-named
Einstein!
The great humanitarian navy in which I held a not unimportant position as international sales consultant and
Fachmann
—I mean expert. My chest swelled with justified pride at this
edel
—noble—achievement of
der Vaterland
.

I knew also without any mind-searching or surprise that the length of the
Ostwald
was more than one half the 1,472-foot height of the Empire State Building plus its mooring tower, thick enough to hold an elevator. And my heart swelled again with the thought that the Berlin
Zeppelinturm
(dirigible tower) was only a few meters less high. Germany, I told myself, need not strain for mere numerical records—her sweeping scientific and technical achievements speak for themselves to the entire planet.

All this literally took little more than a second, and I never broke my snappy stride. As my gaze descended, I cheerfully hummed under my breath
Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles
.