The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (70 page)

“What’s the practical problem?”

“Well actually, what you’re describing would take more energy because you’d need to send a second machine to accompany whatever you sent into the past, in order to allow retrieval. A second machine, with enough stored energy to power it. So frankly I don’t think time tourism is on the cards any time soon.”

I felt shattered. During those long nights spent under the stars or in some risky refuge, I’d gone over my notion again and again, considering every angle. But it would only work if travel into the past was doable. Now Albert had flat out squashed the idea. I decided to level with him.

He listened to me attentively, as was his way, and needless to say brilliance sparkled in his eyes, but I couldn’t say that the basic idea enthused him. That his discovery could be used to shed blood didn’t please him one bit. And yet he had to agree that what I was suggesting might be the best solution. But the problem of the energy source remained. In Vienna he’d used the energy produced by the prototype pile, and that only sent a clock weighing a few hundred grams three minutes into the future. As for what I envisaged . . .

Of a sudden he exclaimed, “We shan’t be able to transport a person any time soon, Otto - but, short-term, there’s an option you’re neglecting! You don’t need to go there yourself. All we need to do is open a window - quite a small one will do - and exchange the two objects, B for A. As for returning object A, I believe we could handle this with, well, let’s call it an auto-glider.”

“Meaning—?”

“Meaning it moves with its load and its own power unit, like an automobile.”

“Can such a thing be made quickly?”

“Alas, it’ll take several months since I’ll have to go about this discreetly. You do understand that from now on we’ll need to observe the utmost discretion?”

* * * *

The following months dragged. I kept in touch with Albert through Ester when she returned to Vienna with her husband - I too had gone back there as clandestinely as I’d left. Emma had thrown me out and the situation was getting worse by the day. Pogroms were reported in the regions of Salzburg, Timifloara, Lake Balaton and Carinthia. In Turkey, the progressive government of Mustapha Kemal’s successors, which had massacred the Armenians and forced the survivors into exile, were rattling sabres, seeing a chance to grab territory from the Empire in disarray.

The situation was growing tense everywhere. Csar Michael had appointed old social democrat leader Kerensky as Prime Minister; so a united front was on the go from Saint Petersburg to Madrid, including Berlin where a revolutionary government had kicked out the old Kaiser and proclaimed a republic - which promptly went on to establish a long-term alliance with France in exchange for partial return of the areas confiscated in 1871 along with the breaking off of diplomatic and commercial relations with Franz-Ferdinand. Prince Otto, whom I liked not merely because we shared the same name, had publicly broken with his father and quit the country. All of this intensified my determination.

* * * *

Through the Network, with the help of the Slav Resistance Front, I was able to get photos and detailed notes about the room in Sarajevo which Albert would need to carry out the plan; fortunately it seemed the room was just as it had been.

Things were getting urgent. It was already April 1943, and Franz-Ferdinand had surprised everyone by declaring his support for the Pact of Ceuta, and in this very same month the two other signatories to the pact, Franco and Gamelin, rebelled against their respective governments.

This didn’t suit the business we had in hand, not one little bit. Albert let me know, via Ester, that he’d been registered as a suspect person and suspended from teaching because he hadn’t spoken out clearly enough against the rebellions. Of course this delayed his work on our project.

I must confess I felt so discouraged that I thought of throwing in the towel even though I was well aware that our plan was the only thing that could stop our twentieth century from becoming known to history as the era of a world war, which I could see fast approaching.

With the shock of the Japanese landing in California in July, and the occupation of Provence by Gamelin a month later, matters became even more pressing. If we did nothing, the world was rushing towards doom. We absolutely had to succeed and there was no time to waste.

* * * *

Another problem was that Fermi was supporting Mussolini’s national fascist government in Italy. But Albert let me know, always by way of Ester, that he hoped he still had enough contact with the scientific community to be sure of access to the necessary energy when the moment came. Nevertheless, he had to decamp, this time to Germany, which meant more delay.

Thus far, war was raging in Spain and in the French colonial empire as well as in the USA; the Americans were hard put to block the Japanese advance at the Rocky Mountains. Meanwhile, my own life was getting harder. We were totally at the mercy of Hitler’s gangs of thugs, abusing and assaulting us freely. I’d started attending the synagogue and became friends with the rabbi, Eliazar Ben Rahhem, with whom I studied the Torah twice a week. The rest of the time I spent struggling to survive, mostly by giving lessons to the kids of our community, who weren’t allowed into the state schools any more.

Ester’s husband was now ambassador in Rio de Janeiro, at the cost of leaving his wife behind - there was some Jewish blood in her ancestry. She let me know that she was now under surveillance; contact between us was increasingly difficult.

By the start of 1945 I was seriously thinking of giving up and going to join our people’s settlements in Palestine. Then the Emperor suddenly banned all emigration and decided to gather all the Jews into special camps. Happily for me, the Network helped me get out of Austria so that I could finally meet Albert and hand over the object which Ester had managed to get to me the day before her arrest. Namely, the very gun which the Crime Department of the Ministry of the Interior had kept stored in the capital. In Berlin a gunmaker friend, to whom I couldn’t of course spill the beans, quickly worked out why the pistol had jammed and supplied me with an identical, but functioning, twin.

In September Albert and I both took up residence in Munich where we could now work together. At last Comrade Albert (as one needed to call oneself under Rosa Luxemburg’s regime) and I had almost reached our goal. Munich was the right place to be because of its close proximity to the German Energy Commissariat, which now had a Fermi-style pile in operation. Albert managed to get me a post as a secretary in the Physics department of the university, and in any spare time I worked on the necessary geographical co-ordinates while he was busy perfecting the autoglider. A wit once said that history is geography in practice, yet I had to be so exact with the maps and large-scale street plans.

Even though I can’t go into too much detail, I think that I can safely say that with the help of the Network I managed to have a beacon sent to Sarajevo to be installed inside the wall just above the table, in the drawer of which the man had confessed during his pre-trial interrogation to having kept his pistol. Whereupon Albert installed the geographic co-ordinates, then proceeded to adjust the device “bite by bite”, as he put it, to the date that concerned us.

I received news of Ester from a woman writer who’d been interned with her before being expelled, because of some quibblings about her national origin. This woman, Milena Jesenska, made no secret of how much worse conditions were in those special camps than anyone imagined. There’d been typhus epidemics. My poor Ester! I couldn’t help thinking that I was partly to blame for what had happened to her. We absolutely had to succeed!

* * * *

I can hardly believe it: the moment has come! Today, we did it. We met up at the nuclear lab at Dachau. The countryside was glorious in the May sunshine. In the morning I’d thought about Emma. Her birthday was on the 8 May .. . May the Lord (bless His name!) help me forget what she did to me. But in a few minutes that won’t matter and even the sheets of paper I’m writing on probably won’t have existed. Our task will be accomplished: Franz-Ferdinand will never have been the Emperor of Austria, never will he have called Hitler to power, and the twentieth century will be known to history as the century which brought happiness and prosperity to humanity.

I’m content. The involvement of a historian was essential to settle on the crucial moment as being the failed assassination attempt in Sarajevo, on the 28 June 1914. How often have we thought during the past years: “If only Prinzip’s pistol
hadn’t
jammed ...”

Well, in ten minutes, that’ll be it. Gavril Prinzip will be known as the one who assassinated Franz-Ferdinand, the world will be at peace and I, here in Dachau, will enjoy the happy tranquillity of a nice spring day, not even knowing what I’ve escaped.

Translated from the French by Sissy Pantelis and Ian Watson

<>

* * * *

Tales From the Venia Woods

Robert Silverberg

This all happened a long time ago, in the early decades of the Second Republic, when I was a boy growing up in Upper Pannonia. Life was very simple then, at least for us. We lived in a forest village on the right bank of the Danubius, my parents, my grandmother, my sister Friya, and I. My father Tyr, for whom I am named, was a blacksmith, my mother Julia taught school in our house, and my grandmother was the priestess at the little Temple of Juno Teutonica nearby.

It was a very quiet life. The automobile hadn’t yet been invented then--all this was around the year 2650, and we still used horse-drawn carriages or wagons--and we hardly ever left the village. Once a year, on Augustus Day--back then we still celebrated Augustus Day--we would all dress in our finest clothes and my father would get our big iron-bound carriage out of the shed, the one he had built with his own hands, and we’d drive to the great municipium of Venia, a two-hour journey away, to hear the Imperial band playing waltzes in the Plaza of Vespasianus. Afterward there’d be cakes and whipped cream at the big hotel nearby, and tankards of cherry beer for the grownups, and then we’d begin the long trip home. Today, of course, the forest is gone and our little village has been swallowed up by the ever-growing municipium, and it’s a twenty-minute ride by car to the center of the city from where we used to live. But at that time it was a grand excursion, the event of the year for us.

I know now that Venia is only a minor provincial city, that compared with Londin or Parisi or Urbs Roma itself it’s nothing at all. But to me it was the capital of the world. Its splendors stunned me and dazed me. We would climb to the top of the great column of Basileus Andronicus, which the Greeks put up eight hundred years ago to commemorate their victory over Caesar Maximilianus during the Civil War in the days when the Empire was divided, and we’d stare out at the whole city; and my mother, who had grown up in Venia, would point everything out to us, the Senate building, the opera house, the aqueduct, the university, the ten bridges, the Temple of Jupiter Teutonicus, the proconsul’s palace, the much greater palace that Trajan VII built for himself during that dizzying period when Venia was essentially the second capital of the Empire, and so forth. For days afterward my dreams would glitter with memories of what I had seen in Venia, and my sister and I would hum waltzes as we whirled along the quiet forest paths.

There was one exciting year when we made the Venia trip twice. That was 2647, when I was ten years old, and I can remember it so exactly because that was the year when the First Consul died--C. Junius Scaevola, I mean, the Founder of the Second Republic. My father was very agitated when the news of his death came. ‘It’ll be touch and go now, touch and go, mark my words,’ he said over and over. I asked my grandmother what he meant by that, and she said, ‘Your father’s afraid that they’ll bring back the Empire, now that the old man’s dead.’ I didn’t see what was so upsetting about that--it was all the same to me, Republic or Empire, Consul or Imperator--but to my father it was a big issue, and when the new First Consul came to Venia later that year, touring the entire vast Imperium province by province for the sake of reassuring everyone that the Republic was stable and intact, my father got out the carriage and we went to attend his Triumph and Processional. So I had a second visit to the capital that year.

Half a million people, so they say, turned out in downtown Venia to applaud the new First Consul. This was N. Marcellus Turritus, of course. You probably think of him as the fat, bald old man on the coinage of the late 27th century that still shows up in pocket change now and then, but the man I saw that day--I had just a glimpse of him, a fraction of a second as the Consular chariot rode past, but the memory still blazes in my mind seventy years later--was lean and virile, with a jutting jaw and fiery eyes and dark, thick curling hair.