[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes

by Anthology

  He sat, put the manuscript under his chair, took out the latest issue of Astounding which Campbell, as either a gift or hint, had enclosed. September, 1941, and there was Asimov on the cover. He stared. “Isaac Asimov,” he said. “Look who’s on the cover. With ‘Nightfall.’”

  “Oh?”

  “First time, I think. He’s a kid, you know. Twenty-one, twenty-two years old, that’s all. And he’s got the cover.”

  “I guess that’s good,” Hadley said without interest. She had been against the pulp markets from the first, had fought with some intensity, felt that no real writer would waste his time with these. Hemingway had tried to explain, patiently, that he wasn’t a real writer any more, the last real writer, maybe, had been James Joyce or maybe Geoffrey Chaucer, and look what had happened to them. Scott had thought he was a real writer but that was a fatal heart attack. Hadley leaned against his shoulder, stared at the magazine. ” ‘Nightfall,’ ” she said. “That’s a Daniel Fuchs title. Night Falls in Brooklyn, maybe.”

  She didn’t know Asimov from Heinlein, Nat Schachner from de Camp, but she was still trying to be supportive, still trying to be a writer’s wife. Ridiculous, Hemingway thought, flushing. Forty-two years old this year, forty-two with a war on, still in cafes, feeling bitter about Saroyan, torn up by Scott’s death, furious about Ulysses and now Finnegan’s Wake and trying to cobble up alternate worlds scenarios. Almost two decades out of the country and still not a word in print while kids like Asimov or this new Caleb Saunders seemed to have the formula. Sit down and turn out this stuff and take it as true. Paris is going to fall soon, he thought. I’m going to sit here with pulp magazines and torment and Der Führer is going to march right up these streets and clap me away.

  The waiter returned with two glasses. Hemingway hesitated, looked at Hadley, who scrambled through her handbag and put a couple of franc notes on the tray. The waiter looked at them one more time and then went away. People were going away a lot now, and not all of them were paid for the pleasure.

  “Drink up,” Hadley said, “it’s not going to stay too good too long.”

  “Is that a report from the front?”

  “This front. That’s all I know.”

  He put the issue away. “Scott Fitzgerald had the right idea, that’s what I think.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “He left with a little dignity. Kept his pride. He picked the right time to check out and there’s a whole hell of a lot of stuff he never has to face now.”

  “I hate to hear you talk like that.”

  “Hollywood,” Hemingway said. “I knew Scott would come to no good; I told him that in ‘29. I told him to dump that bitch and go out and live a little, didn’t I? He wouldn’t listen. I told him, ‘Scott, that woman is out to kill you unless you kill her first in the only way she knows.’ He wouldn’t have any of it.”

  “He was a sick man.”

  “Not back then. Not that way. I thought I was smarter than him, just like I thought I was smarter than Jim Joyce. I mean, I wasn’t banned in my own country or called a pornographer or made a fool of for something that I had written from the heart.” He drained the wine, feeling a little sick now, working on the rage, feeling it build in the only way possible to stave off the nausea. The nausea could send him back to pillow and rack but no fuck then for her old man. “But you see,” he said, “they didn’t end writing about robots, trying to beat out kids for a spot on yellow paper at a cent a word. So who was really smart, who had the right viewpoint on things after all?”

  “You got out of Paris, before.”

  “I wouldn’t call Madrid a vacation. Or Toledo.”

  “Oh come on,” Hadley said, “enough of this. I’m not going to sit around here and listen to you complain before noon. You don’t like your life, Hem, change it; if I’m not a part of the change then boot me out or go your own way. But stop complaining.” She disposed of her glass, her fine chin muscles working hard to make her not look like a drunk, put the glass on the table and stood.

  “I’m going to wander down the Boulevard,” she said. “I’ll be back in a while. I want to do some thinking. No, don’t reach toward me, don’t apologize. Nothing to apologize for. I’m not mad and I’m not sulking. I’m just getting older and I want to think. Sometimes that happens when it closes in.”

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  She waved at him in that difficult gesture which had so entranced, had so ensnared him long ago when he and Scott and the others had been making big plans on this same Boulevard, and walked away. He watched her go, as fascinated but as detached as the waiter.

  Soon enough, like the ambulance and the tanks and the big guns on the plains, she was gone.

  Hemingway sighed, a great sigh, drained his own glass, picked up the Astounding yet again, leafing through it in a desultory way. Heinlein, de Camp, Caleb Saunders. The kid’s novelette with the Emerson quote, his first cover. Must be a big time for the kid. I hope he’s draft exempt, Hemingway thought. I hope they’re all draft exempt over there; I hope they have other avenues because there are big plans for them.

  Emerson and the stars and the City of God. Maybe there would be a clue there; maybe there would be something he could learn. Clutching the gearshift under fire, scuttling on those fields he had told himself that he would learn, thinking of Ulysses he had told himself he would learn, reeling with Scott and Zelda and Hadley through corridors of a different sort, he surely had told himself that he was busily storing experience, that it could turn out differently. Well, maybe he had, maybe he would. Was Hadley going to come back?

  Yes, she would come back. Like him, she had absolutely nowhere to go. He began to read dutifully, then with intensity. He would learn, forty-two was not too late, he would learn what he could. Joyce was destroyed; his novels would not be known. Scott was dead in Hollywood and the darkness was coming. All of the other markets were closed to him; he could sell nothing. He would learn how to write this stuff. He would make of himself a science fiction writer. Caleb Saunders had broken in this month, there was always a new guy coming. The machinery of time would not otherwise wait.

  The war was on. The war was coming. Bit by bit, one by one, the stars were coming out.

  LOOSE CANNON

  Susan Shwartz

  Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house, as a memory of you.

  But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished…

  —T.E. LAWRENCE, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

  The whining overhead crashed into a brief silence, and the ground shook from the bomb’s impact. The low, heavy vaulting in St. Paul’s crypt quivered in response. A thin trickle of dust fell past the bronze memorial statue that the man stood studying. Kennington had done his usual fine job on the portrait bust, which bore the watcher’s face: high brow, thick, side-parted metal waves of hair, eyes fixed, Alexander-fashion, on some goal only he could see. Had he really been that young? The face on the statue: was it the face of someone who had not lost youth, integrity, and honor? Then, in the motorcycle crash that he had only now begun to recall—he had lost everything else.

  “Except my life, except my life, except my life,” he murmured. He would willingly have parted with that before he lost the other things. The man standing in even deeper shadows—his “alienist,” the word was—muttered something. The watcher approved neither of the word nor of the idea that such a man was attending him, eager to discuss Shakespeare and Sophocles and the long-secret details of his family: that is, his mother, his father, and his brothers. He had no wife nor child of his own, nor ever would.

  Another crash, jolting the heavy pavement. This time, the dust that hid the funeral bust fell in a thicker stream, smelling of mold. His hearing, never good since the blow on his head—don ‘t strike those bicycles … swerve … van coming up fast … too fast! … falling … the handlebars flashed beneath his horrified gaze, and he was flying over them … falling … panic and a horror of pain he could not master…

  L
ight behind his eyes, before them, exploding in redness…

  … as the Turks thrust desperately toward Maan, he rode shouting toward Aba el Lissan, and his camel fell as if poleaxed … sailing grandly through the air to land with a crash that drove power … no, it drove the pain into him … must not think of pain, not while the wheel whirred idly overhead, and shouts … “Macht schnell! Er ist tot!” The van roared away.

  … Pain is only pain, punishment, atonement … don’t scream … what was that damned silly poem?

  ‘For Lord I was free of all Thy flowers, but I chose the world’s sad roses, And that is why my feet are torn and mine eyes are blind with sweat.’

  …Not sweat but blood and burning…

  The rest was silence until the bandages were unwrapped, the knives laid aside, and Dr. Jones’ clever, accented voice—terrifyingly like the voices crowing over his body—forced him back to life.

  Again, the cathedral shuddered at the City’s agony. Rapid footsteps pounded behind them. Helmeted and booted for the air raid, the anxious verger approached, as appalled, probably, by the racket he made in church as he was by the blitz. The world might end, but propriety remained.

  “Colonel…”

  Behind him, the man he had learned to call Detective Thompson stirred uneasily.

  He and Dr. Jones would want him to leave the cathedral and seek shelter. After all, it would hardly do to waste the hopes and labor of the doctors, alienists, and police who had scraped him out from beneath his ruined motorcycle, then reassembled the remains first in hospital after hospital, then later in the peace of Clouds Hill.

  First, though, one more look at the shadowed, somber face, the heroic portrait that, they told him, had stood in the crypt for years. They had pronounced him dead, had praised him, mourned him, missed him. Just his rotten luck that the charade could not be made dead flesh: now they claimed they needed him.

  “Play the man,” he muttered at the bronze fraud. Turning his back, he walked rapidly, despite his limp from a twisted leg, past sand buckets and tombs, past scribbled placards and worn Latin inscriptions, unreadable in the darkness, up into the blacked-out nave. Light filtered through chinks in the boarded windows, and the building trembled once again.

  “A bad one, that,” Dr. Jones observed.

  Detective Inspector Thompson grimaced, and moved to escort him outside.

  He jerked away from the touch on his elbow. In hospital, he had had to submit to the ministrations and hurts of strange hands; he had always hated to be touched.

  “Sorry, Colonel.” The hand dropped away.

  “Lead on, Inspector.”

  The policeman almost snapped to attention, and the Colonel, as he supposed he would have to be called again, grimaced at his success in shamming leadership.

  They walked rapidly outside the cathedral. Sir Christopher Wren’s great dome was half shrouded in cloud, half illuminated by red flares and flames, as London burned and shuddered in its fever. More bombs dropped; the ground convulsed; and guns a d planes screamed defiance at each other over the crackle of flames and the crash of burning rubble.

  Shouts rose to one side, mingling with more feeble wails of pain. He forced his limping body into a run, grabbed a spar, and wedged it, lever-fashion, into the rubble….

  “Lumme, ‘e’s just a littl’ un.”

  “Help me, you men!” he gasped, and thrust his weight and the remnants of his strength against his lever. Thompson was at his side, lending him the advantages of his great height and bulk. The stone began to rock upward as two wardens pounced on the broken body beneath. It whined and moaned, too badly hurt to scream; but its eyes flickered open and fixed on Lawrence.

  Had he looked like that when the stretcher bearers came for him? A wonder they could patch him up at all.

  Pity, worse than a beating, twisted in him, and he laid a careful hand on the dusty, battered forehead. “Steady on there,” he whispered, and slipped his fingers down over the man’s eyes until they closed in a merciful swoon … at least he hoped it was only that.

  The ground shuddered again and again, the sky lighting with white and red, slashing through the clouds of burning London. The Great Fire had destroyed Old St. Paul’s; would this one perish in flames, too?

  “Sir…”

  He wanted to wait until he knew for certain whether the man lived or died, but he could see by Thompson’s face that the detective had granted him all the leeway that he dared.

  “‘E looks familiar, don’t ‘e?” He read the words on a warden’s chapped lips, rather than heard them in the din. A siren howled, first one note, then another, like the shrieks of Bedouin wives.

  He rose and dusted his hands, waving away thanks and averting his head lest some man with a longer memory decide that he had seen the ghost of a soldier from the Great War, come back to aid his country in its time of need.

  Breathing heavily—fifty-odd or not, he had gotten intolerably soft these past five years and more of convalescence—he trotted back to … “his staff.”

  “Lawrence, for God’s sake…” Dr. Ernest Jones, his alienist, began. Jones was frightened. Interesting. Able to delve into the intolerable muck of a man’s thoughts, but afraid of bombs. Well, Lawrence could understand it. He had set a few explosions himself, he and his friends; but the sheer magnitude of this bombardment appalled him.

  Overriding the foreign doctor’s fears, Detective Thompson leaned toward Lawrence, calmly asking, “Shall we head on over to Number 10, Colonel? The P.M. is waiting for you.”

  The area around Whitehall had been bombed repeatedly, and Number 10 Downing Street bore evidence of hasty reinforcement.

  “They’re going to move the offices over to St. James Park by Storey Gate soon,” said Thompson. “There’s a shelter downstairs, though. Go right ahead, sir.”

  As Lawrence approached the door of Number 10 Downing Street, it was flung wide, and he walked in ahead of the others. He frowned to himself. After so many years of being an aircraftsman, who saluted and opened doors for his betters, he found it all too easy to walk again through doors held for him, to note and acknowledge the recognition in the eyes of the tired but distinguished men who had been awaiting his convenience, to pretend to ignore the susurrus of whispers, “Lawrence, Lawrence, Lawrence…” that heralded him, just as he had ignored the cries of “Aurens! Aurens!” from his bodyguard. But it was all a lie. Those whispers were water in the desert to him.

  Never learn your lessons, do you, my lad? You’ll have to pay for that, you know, he told himself, and planned to keep that vow a secret from the alienist, who frowned on his habits of penance.

  The whispers continued, and he stiffened at their tone. There was no need to pity him. Was that pride too? The schoolmen had called it the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. He had forgotten his Milton … what was it? “If thou beest he…” No, that wasn’t it. Something about “Why then, how changed?” It bothered him that he could not remember. Would all that careful five years of healing come apart, now that he had been summoned?

  No doubt of that. He had been summoned. The P.M. had plans for him again. Half a lifetime ago, he’d had to beg to get Churchill to release him from the Middle East Department of the Colonial Office.

  “This way, sir.”

  Odd to be called sir again. God knows, he himself would have been glad enough to be one of the spruce messengers who kept Number 10’s street floor spotless in uncomplicated humility.

  “You’ll want to wash up before you see the P.M., sir.”

  Not a suggestion. Lawrence let himself be steered past a comfortable-looking coal fire toward a cloakroom, a dazzling luxury of thick towels, ivory combs, and the unwelcome brightness of mirrors that showed the thick shock of hair much whitened, the blue eyes paler now, embedded in wrinkles etched by desert sun, sandstorms, and pain. It was too opulent. He washed his hands and waved them until they dried.

  Churchill’s private secretary, a Mr. John Colvin, waited for him. Harrow and Cambridge, La
wrence remembered; a fine young man with a fine future ahead of him, and probably a place in the Honours list if he behaved with more sense and circumspection than Lawrence had. Odd to see a young man out of uniform.

  “Feeling quite fit, sir?” Colvin asked.

  Lawrence nodded. “Well enough. How is the P.M. ?”

  Colvin grinned. “Shouting about the Lend/Lease program and how the bloody Yanks had better hurry up and get into the war before there’s noth—” he broke off, shaking his head apologetically. “Begging your pardon, sir.”

  Lawrence waved his chagrin aside. He’d heard that word and far worse; used them, if the truth be known, in The Mint, so full of oaths that it had had to be printed with holes in the text, as if moths had gotten at a soldier’s blouse.

  “If Roosevelt doesn’t listen to him, he may have more to worry about than the Jerries,” he said. He had always valued the company of younger people and was good at getting them to unbend. “Remember, I’ve worked with Mr. Churchill before. He’s a demanding master.”

  “So he is, sir. But this is my last month on the job. I’m joining the R.A.F. Pilot training.”

  “Good man!” Lawrence shook Colvin’s hand enthusiastically. For once, he forgot to recoil from the contact. “He’d be the last man to hold you back from that.” But, if you had simply wanted to change your name to Ross, say, and join up as an aircraftsman, he’d have pitched a fit that would make the carnage outside look like a picnic.

  Colvin led him to the Private Office, through room after paneled room, past clusters of desks and suited male secretaries. The lady clerks had been sent down from London; Lawrence felt better for their absence.