Alternate Empires

by Gregory Benford

  Andrew was about to tell him to go to hell. He didn’t. “I’m still talking. Why do you want to destroy the space program?”

  “I didn’t, at first. I was opposed to waste,” Proxmire said. “My colleagues, they’ll spend money on any pet project, as if there was a money tree out there somewhere—”

  “Milk price supports,” Andrew said gently. For several decades now, the great state of Wisconsin had taken tax money from the other states so that the price they paid for milk would stay up.

  Proxmire’s lips twitched. “Without milk price supports, there would be places where families with children can’t buy milk.”

  “Why?”

  The old man shook his head hard. “I’ve just remembered that I don’t have to answer that question anymore. My point is that the government has spent far more taking rocks from the Moon and photographs from Saturn. Our economy would be far healthier if that money had been spent elsewhere.”

  “I’d rather shoot Lyndon. Eliminate welfare. Save a lot more money that way.”

  “A minute ago you were opposed to murder.”

  The old man did have a way with words. “Point taken. Could you get us funding? It’d be a guaranteed Nobel Prize. I like the fact that you don’t need a scope-sighted rifle. A hypo full of sulfa drugs doesn’t have to be kept secret. What antibiotic?”

  “I don’t know what cures consumption. I don’t know which year or what ship. I’ve got people to look those things up, if I decide I want to know. I came straight here as soon as I read the morning paper. Why not? I run every day, any direction I like. But I haven’t heard you say it’s impossible, Andrew, and I haven’t heard you say you won’t do it.”

  “More coffee?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Proxmire left him alone while he was in the kitchen, and for that Andrew was grateful. He’d have made no progress at all if he’d had to guard his expression. There was simply too much to think about.

  He preferred not to consider the honors. Assume he had changed the past; how would he prove it before a board of his peers? “How would I prove it now? What would I have to show them?” he muttered under his breath, while the coffee water was heating. “Books? Books that didn’t get written? Newspapers? There are places that’ll print any newspaper headline I ask for. WAFFEN SS TO BUILD WORK CAMP IN DEATH VALLEY. I can mint Robert Kennedy half-dollars for a lot less than thirteen million bucks. Hmm…” But the Nobel Prize wasn’t the point.

  Keeping Robert Heinlein alive a few years longer: Was that the point? It shouldn’t be. Heinlein wouldn’t have thought so.

  Would the science fiction field really have collapsed without the Menace From Earth? Tradition within the science fiction field would have named Campbell, not Heinlein. But think: Was it magazines that had sucked Andrew Minsky into taking advanced physics classes? Or … Double Star, Red Planet, Anderson’s Tau Zero, Vance’s Tschai series? Then the newsstand magazines, then the subscriptions, then (of course) he’d dropped it all to pursue a career. If Proxmire’s staff investigated his past (as they must, if he was at all serious), they would find that Andrew Minsky, Ph.D., hadn’t read a science fiction magazine in fifteen years.

  Proxmire’s voice came from the other room. “Of course, it would be a major chunk of funding. But wouldn’t my old friends be surprised to find me backing a scientific project! How’s the coffee coming?”

  “Done.” Andrew carried the pot in. “I’ll do it,” he said. “That is, I and my associates will build a time machine. We’ll need funding and we’ll need active assistance using the Washburn accelerator. We should be ready for a man-rated experiment in three years, I’d think. We won’t fail.”

  He sat. He looked Proxmire in the eye. “Let’s keep thinking, though. A Navy officer walks the tilting deck of what would now be an antique Navy ship. An arm circles his throat. He grips the skinny wrist and elbow, bends the wrist downward, and throws the intruder into the sea. They train Navy men to fight, you know, and he was young and you are old.”

  “I keep in shape,” Proxmire said coldly. “A medical man who performs autopsies once told me about men and women like me. We run two to five miles a day. We die in our eighties and nineties and hundreds. A fall kills us, or a car accident. Cut into us and you find veins and arteries you could run a toy train through.”

  He was serious. “I was afraid you were thinking of taking along a blackjack or a trank gun or a Kalashnikov—”

  “No.”

  “I’ll say it anyway. Don’t hurt him.”

  Proxmire smiled. “That would be missing the point.”

  And if that part worked out, Andrew would take his chances with the rest.

  He had been reaching for a beer while he thought about revising the time machine paper he’d done with Tipler and Penrose four years ago. Somewhere he’d shifted over into daydreams, and that had sent him off on a weird track indeed.

  It was like double vision in his head. The time machine (never built) had put William Proxmire (the ex-senator!) on the moving deck of the U.S.S. Roper on a gray midmorning in December 1933. Andrew never daydreamed this vividly. He slapped his flat belly, and wondered why, and remembered: He was ten pounds heavier in the daydream, because he’d been too busy to run.

  So much detail! Maybe he was remembering a sweaty razor-sharp nightmare from last night, the kind in which you know you’re doing something bizarrely stupid, but you can’t figure out how to stop.

  He’d reached for a Henry Weinhart’s (Budweiser) from the refrigerator in his kitchen (in the office at Washburn, where the Weinhart’s always ran out first) while the project team watched their monitors (while the KCET funding drive whined in his living room). In his head there were double vision, double memories, double sensations. The world of quantum physics was blurred in spots. But this was his kitchen and he could hear KCET begging for money a room away.

  Andrew walked into his living room and found William Proxmire dripping on his yellow rug.

  No, wait. That’s the other—

  The photogenic old man tossed the spray hypo on Andrew’s couch. He stripped off his hooded raincoat, inverted it, and dropped it on top. He was trying to smile, but the fear showed through. “Andrew? What I am doing here?”

  Andrew said, “My head feels like two flavors of cotton. Give me a moment. I’m trying to remember two histories at once.”

  “I should have had more time. And then it should have been the Washburn accelerator! You said!”

  “Yeah, well, I did and I didn’t. Welcome to the wonderful world of Schrödinger’s Cat. How did it go? You found a young lieutenant junior grade gunnery officer alone on deck”—The raincoat was soaking his cushions—“in the rain—”

  “Losing his breakfast overside in the rain. Pulmonary tuberculosis, consumption. Good riddance to an ugly disease.”

  “You wrestled him to the deck—”

  “Heh, heh, heh. No. I told him I was from the future. I showed him a spray hypo. He’d never seen one. I was dressed as a civilian on a Navy ship. That got his attention. I told him if he was Robert Heinlein I had a cure for his cough.”

  “Cure for his cough?”

  “I didn’t say it would kill him otherwise. I didn’t say it wouldn’t, and he didn’t ask, but he may have assumed I wouldn’t have come for anything trivial. I knew his name. This was Heinlein, not some Wisconsin dairy farmer. He wanted to believe I was a time traveler. He did believe. I gave him his shot. Andrew, I feel cheated.”

  “Me too. Get used to it.” But it was Andrew who was beginning to smile.

  The older man hardly heard; his ears must be still ringing with that long-dead storm. “You know, I would have liked to talk to him. I was supposed to have twenty-two minutes more. I gave him his shot and the whole scene popped like a soap bubble. Why did I come back here?”

  “Because we never got funding for research into time travel.”

  “Ah … hah. There have been changes. What changes?”

  It wasn’t j
ust remembering; it was a matter of selecting pairs of memories that were mutually exclusive, then judging between them. It was maddening … but it could be done. Andrew said, “The Washburn accelerator goes with the time machine goes with the funding. My apartment goes with no time machine goes with no funding goes with … Bill, let’s go outside. It should be dark by now.”

  Proxmire didn’t ask why. He looked badly worried.

  The sun had set, but the sky wasn’t exactly black. In a line across a smaller, dimmer full Moon, four rectangles blazed like windows into the sun. Andrew sighed with relief. Collapse of the wave function: This is reality.

  William Proxmire said, “Don’t make me guess.”

  “Solar-powered satellites. Looking Glass Three through Six.”

  “What happened to your time machine?”

  “Apollo Eleven landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969, just like clockwork. Apollo Thirteen left a month or two early, but something still exploded in the service module, so I guess it wasn’t a meteor. They … shit.”

  “Eh?”

  “They didn’t get back. They died. We murdered them.”

  “Then?”

  Could he put it back? Should he put it back? It was still coming together in his head. “Let’s see, NASA tried to cancel Apollo Eighteen, but there was a hell of a write-in campaign—”

  “Why? From whom?”

  “The spec-fic community went absolutely apeshit. Okay, Bill, I’ve got it now.”

  “Well?”

  “You were right, the whole science fiction magazine business just faded out in the fifties, last remnants of the pulp era. Campbell alone couldn’t save it. Then in the sixties the literary crowd rediscovered the idea. There must have been an empty ecological niche and the litcrits moved in.

  “Speculative fiction, spec-fic, the literature of the possible. The New Yorker ran spec-fic short stories and critical reviews of novels. They thought Planet of the Apes was wonderful, and Selig’s Complaint, which was Robert Silverberg’s study of a telepath. Tom Wolfe started appearing in Esquire with his bizarre alien cultures. I can’t remember an issue of the Saturday Evening Post that didn’t have some spec-fic in it. Anderson, Vance, MacDonald … John D. MacDonald turns out novels set on a ring the size of Earth’s orbit.

  “The new writers were good enough that some of the early ones couldn’t keep up, but a few did it by talking to hard science teachers. Benford and Forward did it in reverse. Jim Benford’s a plasma physicist but he writes like he swallowed a college English teacher. Robert Forward wrote a novel called Neutron Star, but he built the Forward Mass Detector, too.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “There’s a lot of spec-fic fans in the military. When Apollo Twenty-one burned up during reentry, they raised so much hell that Congress took the manned space program away from NASA and gave it to the Navy.”

  William Proxmire glared and Andrew Minsky grinned. “Now, you left office in the sixties because of the cheese boycott. When you tried to chop the funding for the Shuttle, the spec-fic community took offense. They stopped eating Wisconsin cheese. The San Francisco Locus called you the Cheese Man. Most of your supporters must have eaten nothing but their own cheese for about eight months, and then Goldwater chopped the milk price supports. ‘Golden Fleece,’ he called it. So you were out, and now there’s no time machine.”

  “We could build one,” Proxmire said.

  Rescue Apollo Thirteen? The possibility had to be considered… . Andrew remembered the twenty years that followed the Apollo flights. In one set of memories, lost goals, pointlessness and depression, political faddishness leading nowhere. In the other, half a dozen space stations, government and military and civilian; Moonbase and Moonbase Polar; Life photographs of the Mars Project half-finished on the lunar plain, sitting on a hemispherical Orion-style shield made from lunar aluminum and fused lunar dust.

  I do not commit murder under any circumstances.

  “I don’t think so, Bill. We don’t have the political support. We don’t have the incentive. Where would a Nobel Prize come from? We can’t prove there was ever a timeline different from this one. Besides, this isn’t just a more interesting world, it’s safer too. Admiral Heinlein doesn’t let the Soviets build spacecraft.”

  Proxmire stopped breathing for an instant. Then, “I suppose he wouldn’t.”

  “Nope. He’s taking six of their people on the Mars expedition, though. They paid their share of the cost in fusion bombs for propulsion.”

  May 12, 1988—

  Greg Benford called me a couple of months ago. He wanted new stories about alternate time tracks for an anthology. I told him that the only sideways-in-time story in my head was totally unsaleable. It’s just recreation, daydreaming, goofing off. It’s about how William Proxmire uses a time machine and a hypodermic full of sulfa drugs to wipe out the space program.

  Greg made me write it.

  I called Robert to get dates and other data, and asked if I could use his name. I had so much fun with this story! I made lots of copies and sent them to friends. I sent one to Robert, of course. That was only a few weeks ago.

  And now I’m thinking that sometimes I really luck out. “The Return of William Proxmire” hasn’t yet been published. Robert’s death feels bad enough, but it would be one notch worse if I didn’t know he’d read this story.

  —LARRY NIVEN

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  GREGORY BENFORD is the author of several acclaimed novels, including Tides of Light, Great Sky River, Heart of the Comet (with David Brin), In the Ocean of Night, Across the Sea of Suns, and Timescape, which won the Nebula Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award. Dr. Benford, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He and his wife live in Laguna Beach.

  MARTIN H. GREENBERG is the editor or author of over 300 books, the majority of them anthologies in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and western fields. He has collaborated editorially with such authors as Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Gregory Benford, and Frederik Pohl. A professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, he lives with his wife and baby daughter in Green Bay.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  “In the House of Sorrows” copyright © 1989 by Poul Anderson.

  “Remaking History” copyright © 1989 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

  “Counting Potsherds” copyright © 1989 by Harry Turtledove.

  “Leapfrog” copyright © 1989 by James P. Hogan.

  “Everything But Honor” copyright © 1989 by George Alec Effinger.

  “We Could Do Worse” copyright © 1988 by Abbenford Associates.

  “To the Promised Land” copyright © 1989 by Agberg, Ltd.

  “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 31: The Covenant” copyright © 1989 by James Morrow.

  “All Assassins” copyright © 1989 by Barry N. Malzberg.

  “Game Night at the Fox and Goose” copyright © 1989 by Karen Joy Fowler.

  “Waiting for the Olympians” copyright © 1989 by Frederik Pohl.

  “The Return of William Proxmire” copyright © 1989 by Larry Niven.

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