The Gallatin Divergence

by L. Neil Smith

  Lightning flashing above his head, Washington teetered, a ghastly expression on his face. Twenty yards away, Gallatin let the heavy pistol slip from his fingers, slumped to the pavement, and was still. Washington threw his pistol to the ground. It splashed in a puddle, pivoted on some projection, and came to rest.

  The uproar was overwhelming—and it came from human throats. Like the frantic rush to demolish goalposts at the end of a game, the street was filled with people. Quite a few would go home with bruises—one, I’m sure, with a broken arm—owing to my rapid passage among them.

  When I got to Gallatin’s side, Lucy was already there. “He’s gone!” she cried, pointing to the black-edged cavity in the unmoving scholar’s shirtfront. Gallatin’s legs were crossed at the ankles; his face showed no expression. Already the fatal wound had stopped bleeding.

  “Albert Gallatin’s dead!” she repeated, as close to hysteria as I’d ever seen her. “That ain’t supposed t’happen! He ain’t supposed t’die for fifty-eight years!” I opened my mouth—what the hell was there to say?

  A grim-faced Cato joined us, along with Ed. The black man had to yell over voices and the weather. “Let’s get him outa the street, folks.” Cato wasn’t crying, now. There wasn’t time. The wounded retainer had one more service to perform before he could succumb to grief.

  So did I. “Okay, get his feet, Ed. Himschlag, get his shoulder, will you? There’s something I have to do.” I karated my way through the thinning crowd to where the President had stood. His back to me, a souvenir-hunter was bending over the weapon that had been used to kill Gallatin. I kicked upward with every ounce of energy I had. Between his legs. He rose, fell, and lay there, splashing his breakfast on the bricks. I picked up the pistol, inserted a fingernail under the offside lockplate, and opened it to inspect the lighted dial inside.

  I pulled Washington’s unfired dueler from my belt where I’d stuck it after the slapstick routine. Waiting for a clap of thunder, I discharged it into an already leaking rain-barrel, then tossed it toward the preoccupied would-be collector. I’d remembered right: Last time I’d used this piece, it had been adjusted to its lowest intensity. Ooloorie and the entire universe might be gone, but, thanks to the fact that it had once existed,

  fatal bullet-wound or not, Gallatin still had twenty-three minutes to live.

  Lightning flashed.

  Thunder echoed in its wake.

  23

  The Big Freeze

  I turned the dial as far as it would go.

  Slapping the deceptive brass cover back into place, I strode through the rain-soaked street toward my friends where they crouched about the fallen statesman. “Stand back, you guys!”

  Lucy and Ed looked up as I pivoted the hammer back. Ochskahrt was overcome with grief and unprepared to notice anything going on around him. I pointed the pistol at Gallatin’s head.

  “Whatcha think you doin’, crazy white man?” Cato seized the pistol, twisting it in my grasp.

  “Let him alone, he knows what he’s doing!” That was Ed, and he was right. Cato looked at him, then backed off. I reaimed the piece and let the hammer fall.

  “This gun got mixed up with Washington’s before the duel,” I explained, now that I had time. “He’s shot—the thing was loaded with a real ball—but the bullet hasn’t had time to kill him yet.” Thanks to this second dose, Gallatin had twenty-four hours before his wound became a problem. The process could be repeated as long as the batteries held out. And Confederate batteries last a long time.

  I tossed the pistol aside and sat down in the mud. Night had fallen, and nobody had noticed. The Rebellion—this one, anyway—was over.

  Ochskahrt looked up. “Ve tried. At least ve tried.” “We sure did, Himie.” Lucy sniffed back tears. There was an odd light in her eyes. I couldn’t remember seeing her cry before. She had good reason.

  Ed noticed the odd light, too. He rose, leaning on my shoulder. “Win!”

  “Now what?”

  “Win, I think—”

  “Therefore / am.” I finished for him.

  “This ain’t no time for clownin’. Lookit what’s going on behind you!”

  I cranked my head around further. A tiny, brilliant pinpoint had blossomed, giving her eyes the weird gleam Fd thought was incipient senility. A thrill went through me. Wonder spread on Ochskahrt’s face. Catching it from us, Cato began laughing.

  The pinpoint opened into an azure-edged circle through which an inhuman face was visible. A beautiful, gray, inhuman face. “You landlings had better hurry. I am holding this aperture open across three centuries and a tangle of world-lines.”

  I got up, grabbed the comatose Gallatin by the shoulders. “We’re taking him with us! Cato, we’re going,.. someplace else. Mr. Gallatin’s not dead. If you want to go with us, give me a hand!”

  I don’t know what the man was thinking about all this, but he grabbed Gallatin’s muddy boots and heaved them off the ground.

  “Oh no you don’t!" I let Gallatin’s shoulders back down into the mud. A slim female figure had materialized out of the rain. Edna Janof, still in her kinky outfit, held her laser in one hand. She waved it around, from me to Lucy, from Ed to Ochskahrt. Cato and the fallen Gallatin she ignored. “I’m going through first! Then you’re all going to wait here until hell freezes over! I’ll blow the machinery on the other side to bits!” My fingers found the handle of the Rezin. Tickling it out of its scabbard by the guard, I watched Edna as she backed toward the Broach, lifting a foot over its deadly rim. I got hold of the back edge of the Bowie— And threw!

  The heavy blade whipped end over end, burying itself in Edna’s abdomen. She stumbled, let the laser fall. The edge cut her in half as she fell through. The Broach never quite collapsed; a muffled explosion spewed parts of her all over the street.

  I rose, kicked through the trash, and found my knife. I wiped it off on the tatters of a red-striped shirt and let it slide back into the scabbard.

  In the end, we are always alone.

  Taking a reluctant last drag on my imported Cen-taurian cigar, I stubbed it out in a self-cleaning tray and let the couch adjust itself to my contours. In the warm-decorated room, it was still cold. I hardly noticed it this time. I was too busy reflecting on what a strange life I’d lived.

  In my usual disorganized fashion, I’d witnessed three and a half hundred years of Confederate history, beginning with a scary and spectacular leap right into its middle, in 1987, then living conventionally to the end— mine, not the Confederacy’s—finishing with being there at its beginning, apocryphal unauthorized edition though it may have been.

  From the looks of things, Albert Gallatin would lead an even stranger life, before he was through. It was confusing to me, let alone an out-of-date philosopher. He wasn’t the Gallatin who’d served as Secretary of the Treasury for Jefferson in the universe I came from. He wasn’t the Gallatin who’d served as President of the Confederacy. He was a third Gallatin who, concerned with principle above all (just like the other two), had died in a duel with an expense-account general in 1794—and been rescued and revivified by time-travelers. In all three cases, he’d contrived to skip the middle of what he’d started. Now he’d have to get used to the fun of living in the latter portion I was doomed to miss.

  He’d paid me a visit just before I’d found the door back to the Venus Belt.

  “Mon ami, they tell me I am living in the twenty-second century.” He looked funny in his skinsuit. I’d gotten used to thinking of him in knee-britches. He’d brought other visitors with him.

  Lucy was a stranger to this new Earth, as much as

  Gallatin and I. She and Ed had been pioneering for decades. Now they’d taken an option on a mining planetoid “where diamonds’re big as houses, Winnie!” delighted to be heading back to the endless sky.

  Ochskahrt was the happiest of us all. He’d had a rough time. His nerves were gone. He’d stopped by to say his farewells before joining Tom Paine Maru— and my daughters in the fleet.
They knew their old man, but they were going to be surprised at what he’d been up to this time. With him, I sent my best regards. He planned to go off to a well-established, civilized colony, a planet-of-the-nerds, by-the-nerds, and for-the-nerds. He’d chosen a planet with plenty of closets, no doubt, and no physics laboratories.

  Ooloorie was going with him, at least as far as the starship. She was worse than her usual cranky self these days. Growing a new pair of hands will do that to you.

  As for us, Clarissa and me, it was more stasis. I hoped that, when they woke us up, they had a cure for freezer-bum.

  “Yes, sir,” I answered Gallatin at last. “The twenty-second century, and you’re responsible for its peace and prosperity.”

  “That is as it may be, my friend—I must read all of these books I do not recall having written. What if I should find myself disagreeing with them?”

  I laughed. Likely he’d take off from the point where an earlier Gallatin had passed away, and cause another two hundred years of revolution. Too bad I’d be missing it. But, with any luck, Clarissa would get better, and we’d jump right into the middle of it again, just as before, and see what he had wrought.

  There are worse prospects.