The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (68 page)

“So now you claim to understand bolshevism?”

“I always have. True bolshevism contains enough constructive ideas to make possible a high social justice. It shares that with Christianity and the French Revolution, but it’s the likes of you, Comrade Stalin, who will prevent a proper wedding of ideals and practical government.” He smiled. “Well, perhaps the marriage will take place despite you. The little Soviets may hold fast to their democratic structures and bring you down in time. Who knows, they may one day lead the world to the highest ideal of statesmanship - internationalism.”

“Fine words,” I said, tightening my grip on the revolver, “but the reality is that you’ve done our Soviet cause a great service - by being a foreign agent, a counter-revolutionary, a Jewish bastard, and Lenin’s assassin, all in one.

“I’ve only done
you
a service,” he said bitterly, and I felt his hatred and frustration.

“You simply don’t understand the realities of power, Rosenblum!”

“Do tell,” he said with derision.

“Only limited things are possible with humanity,” I replied. “The mad dog within the great mass of people must be kept muzzled. Civil order is the best any society can hope to achieve.”

The morning sun was hot on my face. As I reached up to wipe my forehead with my sleeve, Reilly leaped over Lenin’s body and fled down the long stairs.

I aimed and fired, but my fingers had stiffened during our little dialogue. My bullet got off late and missed. I fired again as he jumped a dozen steps, but the bullet hit well behind him.

“Stop him!” I shouted to a group of people below him. They had just come out of the church at the foot of the stairs. “He’s killed Comrade Lenin!”

Reilly saw that he couldn’t get by them. He turned and started back towards me, drawing a knife as he went. He stopped and threw it, but it struck the steps to my right. I laughed, and he came for me with his bare hands. I aimed, knowing that he might reach me if I missed. It impressed me that he would gamble on my aim rather than risk the drop over the great railings.

I pulled the trigger. The hammer struck a defective cartridge. Reilly grunted as he sensed victory, and kept coming.

I fired again.

The bullet pierced his throat. He staggered up and fell bleeding at my feet, one hand clawing at my heavy boots. His desperation was both strange and unexpected. Nothing had ever failed for him in quite this way. Its simplicity affronted his intelligence.

“I also feel for dogs,” I said, squeezing a round into the back of his head. He lay still, free of life’s metaphysics.

I holstered my revolver and nudged his body forward. It sprawled next to Lenin, then rolled down to the next landing. The people from the church came up, paused around Vladimir Ilyich, then looked up to me.

“Vladimir Ilyich’s assassin is dead!” I shouted. “The counterrevolution has failed.” A breeze blew in from the sea and cooled my face. I breathed deeply and looked saddened.

Reilly was hung by his neck in his hometown, but I was the only one who knew enough to appreciate the irony. Fishermen sailed out and towed his seaplane to shore.

Lenin’s body was placed in a tent set up in the harbor area, where all Odessans could come to pay their last respects. Trotsky and I stood in line with everyone else. One of our warships fired its guns in a final salute.

* * * *

10

We sent the news to Moscow in two carefully timed salvos.

First, that Reilly, a British agent, had been killed during an attempt on Lenin’s life; then, that our beloved Vladimir Ilyich had succumbed to wounds received, after a valiant struggle.

We went north with our troops, carrying Lenin’s coffin, recruiting all the way. Everywhere people met our train with shouts of allegiance. Trotsky appointed officers, gathered arms, and kept records. He also scribbled in his diary like a schoolgirl.

I knew now that I was Lenin’s true heir, truer than he had been to himself in his last weeks. I would hold fast to that and to Russia, especially when Trotsky began to lecture me again about the urgent need for world revolution.

In the years that followed, I searched for men like Reilly to direct our espionage and intelligence services. If he had been turned, our KGB would have been built on a firmer foundation of skills and techniques. He would have recruited English agents for us with ease, especially from their universities, where the British played at revolution and ideology, and sentimentalized justice. I could not rid myself of the feeling that in time Rosenblum would have turned back to his mother country; he had never been, after all, a Czarist. I regretted having had to kill him on that sunny morning in Odessa, because in later years I found myself measuring so many men against him. I wondered if a defective cartridge or a jammed revolver could have changed the outcome. Probably not. I would have been forced to club him to death. Still, he might have disarmed me . . .

But on that train in 1918, on the snowy track to Moscow, I could only wonder at Reilly’s naive belief that he could have altered the course of Soviet inevitability, which now so clearly belonged to me.

<>

* * * *

The Einstein Gun

Pierre Gévart

Right now, pen in hand, I’m well aware that what I’m about to do is probably of no use whatsoever. Yet it seems to me that I ought to write this memoir, even if nobody ever reads it; even if I myself, at some point,
lose the ability
to remember the events I’m describing! Even if all of this has never actually been.

My name is Otto-Abram Siesienthal. I was born in Gloggnitz about 100 kilometers south of Vienna, where my father was a watchmaker. However, this noble profession didn’t appeal to me. I preferred to study history at university in the capital. Thanks to the old Emperor Franz-Joseph, I won a scholarship and obtained my diploma in 1913. A year later, I had the great good fortune to follow my supervisor Albrecht Finnmayer as head of Modern History in Linz, before returning to the University of Vienna three years later.

What changed my life radically - and the lives of millions of others - was the ill-omened 6 February 1934.

* * * *

As the century wore on, increasingly dominated by uncertainty caused by the financial crisis which began seven years earlier, that very same 6 February saw the French aviator Georges Guynemer become the first person to complete a transatlantic crossing by airship. Everybody had thought that Von Richtoffen would win the race. In Berlin they were getting ready to celebrate; they’d hung up paper lanterns and decked the streets with bunting. A fervent supporter of the Germans, poor Albert was almost sick at the news of the Frenchman’s victory. An exceptional fellow, Albert, very wide-ranging in his interests!

Of course nowadays there’s only one reason to remember that date. The election to the Diet had taken place three weeks earlier. That very day, the Emperor named a new Chancellor, who was supposed to figure out - at last! - a way out of the political crisis. Franz-Ferdinand was definitely less gifted and diligent than his predecessor Franz-Joseph. He also had some scary notions. His support for the Czechs during the second decade had slid bit by bit into wholesale antipathy towards the Slavs, which quickly shook hands with the new Chancellor’s gut-instinct anti-Semitism. For long enough the Emperor had been lending an all too willing ear to all those extremists who unhesitatingly blamed the Slavs or the Jews for being at the root of the crisis. As though the crisis wasn’t incurably global, tied up with the excesses of free trade politics; or at least in my opinion.

This Adolph Hitler didn’t tick the box for me at all. For years he’d hung around the disreputable world of would-be artists in our capital before he found his vocation as an orator. He created an opposition group and, during his time in jail after a failed attempted murder, he even wrote a book called
My Protest.
You’d think a book with a title like that would go nowhere, but you’d be wrong. Hitler’s star was forever on the rise thanks to his masterly use of the timeworn cliché of the scapegoat. Well, a double-headed goat in this case: Slavic and Jewish. So long as Hitler only had a few deputies in the Diet, that didn’t matter too much. But after the Great Crash in ‘26, “Black Friday” on the Budapest Stock Exchange, and the explosion of unemployment that followed, his constituency swelled with every election.

The date, 6 February 1934 remains a sad day in all our memories: after Hitler had allied with the Liberals and the Conservatives, who were under pressure from the Emperor, he was appointed Chancellor.

Surprisingly, Albert didn’t seem to pay much heed to this. You’d think his attention was all taken up by his own research - and by Guynemer. That was
so
Albert: one day passionately defending a righteous cause and the next day getting ail wrapped up in the products of his mighty brain.

That was also the very day when Albert decided to reveal the results of an experiment to a close circle of Viennese intellectuals from various backgrounds. I was among the guests as much due to my friendship with Albert as my status in the Faculty of History’.

As soon as the maid shut the door behind me, Albert welcomed me with words which I recall precisely: “Otto, I do believe we’re well on our way to a
third of those things!”
I didn’t need to ask what he meant. I
knew
he was implying a third Nobel Prize!

“Watch this clock”, he carried on without troubling to introduce me to the other guests already present, most of whom I knew in any case, such as Freud, the doctor who strove to analyse the human mind; and from abroad there was an Italian scientist I’d met the previous year at a conference in Trieste - he’d constructed in the science labs of the university some kind of atomic pile, as he called it. Fermo?
Fermi?
Many other eminences were present, as well as various artists and journalists. However, Albert seemed to have forgotten their very existence, and insisted I focus my attention on a pendulum clock standing on a lab bench next to something covered by a piece of old cloth. The clock seemed nothing out of the ordinary - unless somehow it worked by atomic energy, which might explain the presence of the Italian, he of the atomic pile! By now there was a similar experimental pile in Vienna, on which the Italian may have been advising. If I recall aright, Fermi’s pile - that was his name for sure -required something the size of a swimming pool and all we had here was a little clock. But I bided my time. I knew that Albert liked a joke, yet this didn’t seem on the cards at such a moment.

“Yesterday this clock and its exact duplicate were set in exactly the same way in the presence of Herr Zacharius, Watchmaker to His Majesty the Emperor, and of Dr Dummliebe, who kindly agreed to seal the two clocks.” While Albert was explaining to us what was presumably the prelude to some scientific experiment, the two men in question rose to take a bow. Zacharius acknowledged me with a friendly smile, since he’d been my father’s apprentice. Somehow I felt unsettled. This seemed like a magic act in some variety show. Albert placed his hand on the cloth. “And here is the second clock!” he declared in a tone which I thought frivolous, and whisked away the cloth to reveal that second sealed clock, which looked identical . . . except that the time it showed was three minutes faster.

Albert made us take special note of this fact. Whereupon Freud responded that, so far as he was concerned, he had better things to waste his time on. Still, he pulled out a notebook and scribbled a few lines. An officer whom I didn’t know declared his amazement that clocks made by Herr Zacharius could fall out of line in such a brief period. The Imperial Watchmaker angrily retorted that his clocks never ever . . . The officer retorted that nevertheless . . . Somebody got up and departed without a word of goodbye. Albert rapped the side of the bench with a piece of metal to call for silence.

“Herr Zacharius’ clocks are in perfect synchrony.
The second one simply benefitted by spending three minutes in the future.
What you have here in front of you is proof that it’s possible to travel in time, provided that the necessary energy is available.”

This was greeted at first by a leaden silence. Then came an outburst of protest. I myself rebuked Albert with having confused 6 February with 1 April and departed, slamming the door; and I don’t believe I was the only one. It has to be said we were all of us preoccupied by Hitler’s rise to power, and with all that that might imply.