Harry Turtledove - The Best Alternate History Stories Of The

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INTRODUCTION
Harry Turtledove
WHAT IF . . .
Most science-fiction ideas don’t come naturally. Most take a degree of intellectual sophistication
that came only with the Industrial Revolution. It’s hard to write about the effects of technology
before there’s much in the way of technology to write about. But alternate history isn’t like that. It’s
as natural as those two mournful little words up there. What if . . .
What if I’d married Lucy instead of Martha, George instead of Fred? What would my life be like?
Would I be richer? Happier? What would our kids have been like, if we’d had kids? What if there
hadn’t been that traffic accident that clogged three lanes of the freeway, so I wasn’t late to the
interview? How would things have looked if I’d got that job? Or—let’s not think small—what if I
won the lottery? How would I live if I had sixty million dollars in the bank?
In our own lives, we endlessly imagine these scenarios. We can’t help it. There’s always the feeling
that we’re inside God’s pinball machine, bouncing through life and off bumpers at random, and that
we could have ended up elsewhere as easily as where we did.
It’s certainly true for me. If I hadn’t read a particular book—Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de
Camp—when I was about fourteen years old, I wouldn’t have ended up with the degree I have (a
doctorate in, God help me, Byzantine history), wouldn’t have written much of what I’ve written (I
surely wouldn’t be working on this introduction now), wouldn’t have met the lady I’m married to,
wouldn’t have the kids I have. Other than that, it didn’t change my life a bit. If someone else had
taken that novel out of the secondhand bookstore where I found it . . .
And from there, from the sense that individuals’ lives might be plastic, mutable, comes the sense
that the wider world might work the same way. “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”
Richard III cried. What if he’d got that horse, instead of going down to defeat and death because he
didn’t? What would England be like today? No different at all? A little different? A lot different?
How can we know?
Well, we can’tknow , not in any absolute sense. Whatever else history may be, it’s not an
experimental science. How can we make plausible guesses, interesting guesses, entertaining
guesses? This is the way in which the alternate-history story was born.
The subgenre is a lot older than you might think, too. As I’ve noted, alternate history doesn’t
require a relatively high-tech background. All it requires is the ability to extrapolate from the
individual to the wider world, the intuitive leap that lets you see that, just as small things can change
individual lives, they can also change wider affairs.
The first person of whom I’m aware who made this leap was the Roman historian Livy, who wrote
about the time of Christ. In Book IX, sections 17–19, of his monumental (so monumental that it was
frequently abridged and extracted, and does not survive complete)History of Rome from Its
Foundation , Livy wonders what would have happened if Alexander the Great had turned his
attention to the west and attacked the Roman Republic in the late fourth centuryB .C. With fine
Roman patriotism, he tries to show that his countrymen could and would have beaten the
Macedonian king. My own opinion is that Livy was an optimist, but that’s neither here nor there.
He clearly invented the game of alternate history—not a small achievement for a man who has been
criticized for the past two thousand years as one who made his history with scissors and paste,
taking it all from the works of those who went before him and piecing those works together into a
continuous narrative as best he could.
Livy proved to be ahead of his time, as inventors sometimes are. In his case, he was further ahead of
his time than most: about eighteen hundred years ahead. Not till the aftermath of Napoleon’s
downfall did alternate history rear its head again, with several French novelists wondering what
might have been had the defeated emperor proved triumphant.
It is not till the twentieth century that most—not all, but most—alternate history came to be
reckoned part of that new and sometimes strange kid on the literary block, science fiction. To this
day, some people wonder why this identification was made. I have a couple of reasons to propose.
For one thing, people who wrote other forms of science fiction also came to write alternate-history
stories. And, for another, alternate history plays by some of the same rules as (other) varieties of
science fiction. In many science-fiction stories, the author changes one thing in the present or nearer
future, and speculates about what would happen in the more distant future as a result of the change.
Alternate history goes down the same road, but from a different starting point. It usually changes
one thing in the more distant past and speculates about what would have happened in the nearer past
or the present. The relationship seems obvious.
The American Civil War has offered aficionados of the subgenre a playground full of toys ever
since a still fell at Appomattox. In fact, many Civil War officers’ memoirs read as if they were
alternate history, with the authors trying to seize credit for everything that went right anywhere near
them and blaming incompetent subordinates and superiors for everything that went wrong. But, as
their purpose was to make themselves look good rather than really to examine what might have
been, they cannot in fact be included among early alternate historians.
The crowded, chaotic twentieth century saw the true rise of alternate history. Murray Leinster’s
seminal story, “Sidewise in Time” (after which the Sidewise Award for alternate history is named),
introduced this type of story to the science-fiction pulp magazines. But alternate history was also
the province of intellectuals on a lark. In 1931, for example, Winston Churchill’s essay “If Lee Had
Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg” examined the possible consequences of a Northern victory in the
Civil War in a world where the South won it—a neat double twist. And, in the second volume of
hisA Study of History , Arnold Toynbee, in “The Forfeited Birthright of the Abortive Far Western
Christian Civilization,” postulated a world in which Celtic Christianity had survived along with the
Roman variety, and in which the Muslims defeated the Franks at the Battle of Tours in 732.
This latter speculation was later fictionalized by L. Sprague de Camp in his classic novella, “The
Wheels of If,” which imagined a modern lawyer from our world transported to the twentieth century
of that one. That novella, along with de Camp’s even more important novel,Lest Darkness Fall, in
which an archaeologist is dropped back into the Rome of the sixth centuryA .D., and seeks to keep
the Dark Ages from descending on Europe by propping up the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy
against the resurgent Byzantine Empire and by improving technology, finished the job begun by
Leinster’s story and brought alternate-historical speculation into the orbit of science fiction.
In the years following World War II, a few writers followed de Camp’s lead and produced
thoughtful alternate histories of their own. H. Beam Piper’s Paratime stories and Poul Anderson’s
tales of the Time Patrol (and, in a different vein, his stories collected inOperation Chaos , in which
magic reappeared in the world as a technology around the beginning of the twentieth century) stand
out among these.
For the centennial of the War Between the States, Pulitzer Prize winner MacKinlay Kantor wroteIf
the South Had Won the Civil War , an optimistic scenario in which the severed parts of our nation
reunite in the 1960s. Also coming into prominence during the decades following the end of the
Second World War were stories in which the Axis won, which have challenged stories of
Confederate victories in the Civil War for popularity. Three of the best of the earlier ones were
Sarban’sThe Sound of His Horn , C. M. Kornbluth’s great novella, “Two Dooms,” and Philip K.
Dick’s Hugo-winning novel,The Man in the High Castle .
In the 1960s, two Englishmen, John Brunner and Keith Roberts, produced stimulating alternate
histories on a subject particularly relevant to British hearts: a successful invasion by the Spanish
Armada. Brunner’sTimes Without Number examined why travel between different time lines
doesn’t happen more often, while Roberts’ beautifulPavane looked at, among other things, the
consequences of slowing down technological growth (strictly speaking,Pavane isn’t an alternate
history, but a first cousin: a recursive future). At about the same time, Keith Laumer, inWorlds of
the Imperium and its two sequels, did a first-rate job of combining alternate history with fast-
moving adventure.
But alternate history really became a more prominent subgenre in the last two decades of the
twentieth century. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that, with our much greater
knowledge of the true nature of the solar system, we have found that it looks much less inviting
than it did a couple of generations ago. There are no canals on Mars, and no Martians, either; nor
are there oceans on Venus full of reptilian monsters. Before the space probes went out, these were
scientifically plausible speculations. No more; brute facts have killed such possibilities.
Furthermore, more people trained in history have begun writing science fiction, and have naturally
gravitated to areas with which they find themselves familiar: S. M. Stirling, with a law degree and
an undergraduate degree in history; Susan Shwartz and Judith Tarr, both with doctorates in western
medieval studies; and myself, with a doctorate in Byzantine history (a subject I was inspired to
study, as I’ve said, byLest Darkness Fall ).
Stirling’s Draka universe, commencing withMarching Through Georgia , is as thoroughly
unpleasant a place as any ever envisioned by an alternate historian, but, especially inUnder the Yoke
, alarmingly convincing as well. His more recent trilogy, beginning withIsland in the Sea of Time ,
drops the entire island of Nantucket back to about 1250B .C. and examines the consequences with
fine writing, splendid research, and careful logic.
Shwartz and Tarr have both combined fantasy and alternate history in intriguingly different ways.
Shwartz’s series that begins withByzantium’s Crown looks at a magical medieval world that might
have sprung from Cleopatra’s victory over Octavian, while Tarr’s beautifully written the Hound and
the Falcon trilogy and other succeeding books examine what the world might have been like if
immortal elves were real rather than mythical.
My own book-length work includesAgent of Byzantium , set in a world where Muhammad did not
found Islam;A Different Flesh, in whichHomo erectus rather than American Indians populated the
New World;A World of Difference, which makes the planet in Mars’s orbit different enough to
support life; the Worldwar series, which imagines an alien invasion in 1942;The Guns of the South,
in which time-traveling South Africans give Robert E. Lee AK-47s; andHow Few Remain and the
Great War books, which embroil an independent Confederacy and the United States of America in
World War I.
In a slightly different vein, Kim Newman has imagined the Victorian age and the early years of this
century controlled by vampires inAnno Dracula andThe Bloody Red Baron . The really frightening
thing about the latter book is that the World War I he imagines is no bloodier than the one we really
had. Newman’s entertainingBack in the USSA looks at a Red revolution in the United States rather
than Russia, with Al Capone in the role of Stalin.
And alternate history has not become the sole province of escaped history buffs. Aerospace
engineer Stephen Baxter’sVoyage looks at a journey to Mars in 1986 that might have happened had
John Kennedy not been assassinated. This is hard science fiction at its best, as is Gregory Benford’s
award-winningTimescape , which touches on ecological disaster along with its main theme of
communicating across time lines.
Nor has alternate history remained the sole province of science-fiction writers. Spymaster Len
Deighton producedSS-GB , a chilling account of a Nazi-occupied Britain. And journalist Robert
Harris’sFatherland became an international best-seller—certainly a breakthrough for alternate
history.Fatherland, another tale of Germany triumphant, is carefully researched; its principal flaw
seems to be a conviction that the discovery of the Holocaust twenty years after the fact would be a
world-shaking event rather than a nine days’ wonder, if even that.
Several anthologies have also highlighted alternate history in recent years. Gregory Benford edited,
with Martin H. Greenberg,Hitler Victorious and the four volumes titledWhat Might Have Been ,
which examined different ways in which the past might have changed. And the prolific Mike
Resnick edited and wrote for a series ofAlternate anthologies, including such titles asAlternate
Kennedys andAlternate Tyrants . Alternate-history stories have found homes in magazines as
diverse asOmni andAnalog .
And there is a renewed interest in alternate history outside the confines of science fiction and
fantasy. Articles on the topic have appeared in such mainstream publications asUSA Today
andAmerican Heritage , and academic alternate histories, the parlor game of the 1930s, are
respectable once again. Serious historians have played the game in two collections of essays edited
by Kenneth Macksey,Invasion: The Alternate History of the German Invasion of England, July
1940 andThe Hitler Options: Alternate Decisions of World War II . Peter Tsouras’s recentDisaster
at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944 andGettysburg: An Alternate History recall, in
their detail and fictional critical apparatus, Robert Sobel’s classicFor Want of a Nail , which
imagines a failed American Revolution and the subsequent 180 years of history from the
perspective of a college history text.
The stories in this collection, in their quality and their variety, show where the field went during the
last century. I have no doubt that, with so many talented writers wondering what might have been,
we will continue to see many more fascinating, thought-provoking stories in the century just being
born. The purpose of any good fiction, after all, is not to examine the created world alone, but to
hold up that created world as a mirror to the reality we all experience. Alternate history gives us a
fun-house mirror that lets us look at reality in ways we cannot get from any other type of story.
That, to me, is its principal attraction—along with the joys of storytelling. Have fun!
Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson’s monumental Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars)—a future
history of the Red Planet from its colonization through its struggle for independence from Earth—
has been hailed a modern classic and acknowledged a landmark of twentieth-century science
fiction. Robinson’s first published story appeared in 1976, and since that time he has earned the
Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards for his short fiction and
novels. His first novel,The Wild Shore,published in 1984, produced two thematic sequels, The Gold
Coastand Pacific Edge, which form the Orange County trilogy, about the future development of the
California coast in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust. Robinson’s other novels includeThe
Memory of Whiteness, A Short, Sharp Shock, andAntarctica, the story of a future Antarctica
society threatened by ecological saboteurs. His short fiction has been collected inEscape from
Kathmandu, Remaking History,and Down and Out in the Year 2000.His doctoral dissertation has
been published as the critically acclaimed The Novels of Philip K. Dick.
THE LUCKY STRIKE
Kim Stanley Robinson
WAR BREEDS STRANGE PASTIMES.In July of 1945 on Tinian Island in the North Pacific,
Captain Frank January had taken to piling pebble cairns on the crown of Mount Lasso—one pebble
for each B-29 takeoff, one cairn for each mission. The largest cairn had four hundred stones in it. It
was a mindless pastime, but so was poker. The men of the 509th had played a million hands of
poker, sitting in the shade of a palm around an upturned crate sweating in their skivvies, swearing
and betting all their pay and cigarettes, playing hand after hand after hand, until the cards got so soft
and dog-eared you could have used them for toilet paper. Captain January had gotten sick of it, and
after he lit out for the hilltop a few times some of his crewmates started trailing him. When their
pilot Jim Fitch joined them it became an official pastime, like throwing flares into the compound or
going hunting for stray Japs. What Captain January thought of the development he didn’t say. The
others grouped near Captain Fitch, who passed around his battered flask. “Hey, January,” Fitch
called. “Come have a shot.”
January wandered over and took the flask. Fitch laughed at his pebble. “Practicing your bombing up
here, eh, Professor?”
“Yah,” January said sullenly. Anyone who read more than the funnies was Professor to Fitch.
Thirstily January knocked back some rum. He could drink it any way he pleased up here, out from
under the eye of the group psychiatrist. He passed the flask on to Lieutenant Matthews, their
navigator.
“That’s why he’s the best,” Matthews joked. “Always practicing.”
Fitch laughed. “He’s best because I make him be best, right, Professor?”
January frowned. Fitch was a bulky youth, thick-featured, pig-eyed—a thug, in January’s opinion.
The rest of the crew were all in their mid-twenties like Fitch, and they liked the captain’s bossy
roughhouse style. January, who was thirty-seven, didn’t go for it. He wandered away, back to the
cairn he had been building. From Mount Lasso they had an overview of the whole island, from the
harbor at Wall Street to the north field in Harlem. January had observed hundreds of B-29s roar off
the four parallel runways of the north field and head for Japan. The last quartet of this particular
mission buzzed across the width of the island, and January dropped four more pebbles, aiming for
crevices in the pile. One of them stuck nicely.
“There they are!” said Matthews. “They’re on the taxiing strip.”
January located the 509th’s first plane. Today, the first of August, there was something more
interesting to watch than the usual Superfortress parade. Word was out that General Le May wanted
to take the 509th’s mission away from it. Their commander Colonel Tibbets had gone and bitched
to Le May in person, and the general had agreed the mission was theirs, but on one condition: one
of the general’s men was to make a test flight with the 509th, to make sure they were fit for combat
over Japan. The general’s man had arrived, and now he was down there in the strike plane, with
Tibbets and the whole first team. January sidled back to his mates to view the takeoff with them.
“Why don’t the strike plane have a name, though?” Haddock was saying.
Fitch said, “Lewis won’t give it a name because it’s not his plane, and he knows it.” The others
laughed. Lewis and his crew were naturally unpopular, being Tibbets’ favorites.
“What do you think he’ll do to the general’s man?” Matthews asked.
The others laughed at the very idea. “He’ll kill an engine at takeoff, I bet you anything,” Fitch said.
He pointed at the wrecked B-29s that marked the end of every runway, planes whose engines had
given out on takeoff. “He’ll want to show that he wouldn’t go down if it happened to him.”
“ ’Course he wouldn’t!” Matthews said.
“You hope,” January said under his breath.
“They let those Wright engines out too soon,” Haddock said seriously. “They keep busting under
the takeoff load.”
“Won’t matter to the old bull,” Matthews said. Then they all started in about Tibbets’ flying ability,
even Fitch. They all thought Tibbets was the greatest. January, on the other hand, liked Tibbets even
less than he liked Fitch. That had started right after he was assigned to the 509th. He had been told
he was part of the most important group in the war, and then given a leave. In Vicksburg a couple of
fliers just back from England had bought him a lot of whiskies, and since January had spent several
months stationed near London they had talked for a good long time and gotten pretty drunk. The
two were really curious about what January was up to now, but he had stayed vague on it and kept
returning the talk to the blitz. He had been seeing an English nurse, for instance, whose flat had
been bombed, family and neighbors killed. . . . But they had really wanted to know. So he had told
them he was onto something special, and they had flipped out their badges and told him they were
Army Intelligence, and that if he ever broke security like that again he’d be transferred to Alaska. It
was a dirty trick. January had gone back to Wendover and told Tibbets so to his face, and Tibbets
had turned red and threatened him some more. January despised him for that. The upshot was that
January was effectively out of the war, because Tibbets really played his favorites. January wasn’t
sure he really minded, but during their year’s training he had bombed better than ever, as a way of
showing the old bull he was wrong to write January off. Every time their eyes had met it was clear
what was going on. But Tibbets never backed off no matter how precise January’s bombing got.
Just thinking about it was enough to cause January to line up a pebble over an ant and drop it.
“Will you cut that out?” Fitch complained. “I swear you must hang from the ceiling when you take
a shit so you can practice aiming for the toilet.” The men laughed.
“Don’t I bunk over you?” January asked. Then he pointed. “They’re going.”
Tibbets’ plane had taxied to runway Baker. Fitch passed the flask around again. The tropical sun
beat on them, and the ocean surrounding the island blazed white. January put up a sweaty hand to
aid the bill of his baseball cap.
The four props cut in hard, and the sleek Superfortress quickly trundled up to speed and roared
down Baker. Three-quarters of the way down the strip the outside right prop feathered.
“Yow!” Fitch crowed. “I told you he’d do it!”
The plane nosed off the ground and slewed right, then pulled back on course to cheers from the four
young men around January. January pointed again. “He’s cut number three, too.”
The inside right prop feathered, and now the plane was pulled up by the left wing only, while the
two right props windmilled uselessly. “Holy smoke!” Haddock cried. “Ain’t the old bull
something?”
They whooped to see the plane’s power, and Tibbets’ nervy arrogance.
“By God, Le May’s man will remember this flight,” Fitch hooted. “Why, look at that! He’s
banking!”
Apparently taking off on two engines wasn’t enough for Tibbets; he banked the plane right until it
was standing on its dead wing, and it curved back toward Tinian.
Then the inside left engine feathered.
War tears at the imagination. For three years Frank January had kept his imagination trapped,
refusing to give it any play whatsoever. The dangers threatening him, the effects of the bombs, the
fate of the other participants in the war, he had refused to think about any of it. But the war tore at
his control. That English nurse’s flat. The missions over the Ruhr. The bomber just below him
blown apart by flak. And then there had been a year in Utah, and the viselike grip that he had once
kept on his imagination had slipped away.
So when he saw the number two prop feather, his heart gave a little jump against his sternum and
helplessly he was up there with Ferebee, the first team bombardier. He would be looking over the
pilots’ shoulders. . . .
“Only one engine?” Fitch said.
“That one’s for real,” January said harshly. Despite himself hesaw panic in the cockpit, the frantic
rush to power the two right engines. The plane was dropping fast and Tibbets leveled it off, leaving
them on a course back toward the island. The two right props spun, blurred to a shimmer. January
held his breath. They needed more lift; Tibbets was trying to pull it over the island. Maybe he was
trying for the short runway on the south half of the island.
But Tinian was too tall, the plane too heavy. It roared right into the jungle above the beach, where
42nd Street met their East River. It exploded in a bloom of fire. By the time the sound of the
explosion struck them they knew no one in the plane had survived.
Black smoke towered into white sky. In the shocked silence on Mount Lasso insects buzzed and
creaked. The air left January’s lungs with a gulp. He had been with Ferebee there at the end, he had
heard the desperate shouts, seen the last green rush, been stunned by the dentist-drill-all-over pain
of the impact.
“Oh my God,” Fitch was saying. “Oh my God.” Matthews was sitting. January picked up the flask,
tossed it at Fitch.
“C-come on,” he stuttered. He hadn’t stuttered since he was sixteen. He led the others in a rush
down the hill. When they got to Broadway a jeep careened toward them and skidded to a halt. It
was Colonel Scholes, the old bull’s exec. “What happened?”
Fitch told him.
“Those damned Wrights,” Scholes said as the men piled in. This time one had failed at just the
wrong moment; some welder stateside had kept flame to metal a second less than usual—or
something equally minor, equally trivial—and that had made all the difference.
They left the jeep at 42nd and Broadway and hiked east over a narrow track to the shore. A fairly
large circle of trees was burning. The fire trucks were already there.
Scholes stood beside January, his expression bleak. “That was the whole first team,” he said.
“I know,” said January. He was still in shock, in imagination crushed, incinerated, destroyed. Once
as a kid he had tied sheets to his arms and waist, jumped off the roof and landed right on his chest;
this felt like that had. He had no way of knowing what would come of this crash, but he had a
suspicion that he had indeed smacked into something hard.
Scholes shook his head. A half hour had passed, the fire was nearly out. January’s four mates were
over chattering with the Seabees. “He was going to name the plane after his mother,” Scholes said
to the ground. “He told me that just this morning. He was going to call itEnola Gay .”
AT NIGHTthe jungle breathed, and its hot wet breath washed over the 509th’s compound. January
stood in the doorway of his Quonset barracks hoping for a real breeze. No poker tonight. Voices
were hushed, faces solemn. Some of the men had helped box up the dead crew’s gear. Now most
lay on their bunks. January gave up on the breeze, climbed onto his top bunk to stare at the ceiling.
He observed the corrugated arch over him. Cricketsong sawed through his thoughts. Below him a
rapid conversation was being carried on in guilty undertones, Fitch at its center.
“January is the best bombardier left,” he said. “And I’m as good as Lewis was.”
“But so is Sweeney,” Matthews said. “And he’s in with Scholes.”
They were figuring out who would take over the strike. January scowled. Tibbets and the rest were
less than twelve hours dead, and they were squabbling over who would replace them.
January grabbed a shirt, rolled off his bunk, put the shirt on.
“Hey, Professor,” Fitch said. “Where you going?”
“Out.”
Though midnight was near it was still sweltering. Crickets shut up as he walked by, started again
behind him. He lit a cigarette. In the dark the MPs patrolling their fenced-in compound were like
pairs of walking armbands. The 509th, prisoners in their own army. Fliers from other groups had
taken to throwing rocks over the fence. Forcefully January expelled smoke, as if he could expel his
disgust with it. They were only kids, he told himself. Their minds had been shaped in the war, by
the war, and for the war. They knew you couldn’t mourn the dead for long; carry around a load like
that and your own engines might fail. That was all right with January. It was an attitude that Tibbets
had helped to form, so it was what he deserved. Tibbets wouldwant to be forgotten in favor of the
mission, all he had lived for was to drop the gimmick on the Japs, he was oblivious to anything else,
men, wife, family, anything.
So it wasn’t the lack of feeling in his mates that bothered January. And it was natural of them to
want to fly the strike they had been training a year for. Natural, that is, if you were a kid with a
mind shaped by fanatics like Tibbets, shaped to take orders and never imagine consequences. But
January was not a kid, and he wasn’t going to let men like Tibbets do a thing to his mind. And the
gimmick . . . the gimmick was not natural. A chemical bomb of some sort, he guessed. Against the
Geneva Convention. He stubbed his cigarette against the sole of his sneaker, tossed the butt over the
fence. The tropical night breathed over him. He had a headache.
For months now he had been sure he would never fly a strike. The dislike Tibbets and he had
exchanged in their looks (January was acutely aware of looks) had been real and strong. Tibbets had
understood that January’s record of pinpoint accuracy in the runs over the Salton Sea had been a
way of showing contempt, a way of sayingyou can’t get rid of me even though you hate me and I
hate you . The record had forced Tibbets to keep January on one of the four second-string teams,
but with the fuss they were making over the gimmick January had figured that would be far enough
down the ladder to keep him out of things.
Now he wasn’t so sure. Tibbets was dead. He lit another cigarette, found his hand shaking. The
Camel tasted bitter. He threw it over the fence at a receding armband, and regretted it instantly. A
waste. He went back inside.
Before climbing onto his bunk he got a paperback out of his footlocker. “Hey, Professor, what you
reading now?” Fitch said, grinning.
January showed him the blue cover.Winter’s Tales, by an Isak Dinesen. Fitch examined the little
wartime edition. “Pretty racy, eh?”
“You bet,” January said heavily. “This guy puts sex on every page.” He climbed onto his bunk,
opened the book. The stories were strange, hard to follow. The voices below bothered him. He
concentrated harder.
As a boy on the farm in Arkansas, January had read everything he could lay his hands on. On
Saturday afternoons he would race his father down the muddy lane to the mailbox (his father was a
reader too), grab theSaturday Evening Post and run off to devour every word of it. That meant he
had another week with nothing new to read, but he couldn’t help it. His favorites were the
Hornblower stories, but anything would do. It was a way off the farm, a way into the world. He had
become a man who could slip between the covers of a book whenever he chose.
But not on this night.
THE NEXT DAYthe chaplain gave a memorial service, and on the morning after that Colonel
Scholes looked in the door of their hut right after mess. “Briefing at eleven,” he announced. His
face was haggard. “Be there early.” He looked at Fitch with bloodshot eyes, crooked a finger.
“Fitch, January, Matthews—come with me.”
January put on his shoes. The rest of the men sat on their bunks and watched them wordlessly.
January followed Fitch and Matthews out of the hut.
“I’ve spent most of the night on the radio with General Le May,” Scholes said. He looked them
each in the eye. “We’ve decided you’re to be the first crew to make a strike.”
Fitch was nodding, as if he had expected it.
“Think you can do it?” Scholes said.
“Of course,” Fitch replied. Watching him January understood why they had chosen him to replace
Tibbets: Fitch was like the old bull, he had that same ruthlessness. The young bull.
“Yes, sir,” Matthews said.
Scholes was looking at him. “Sure,” January said, not wanting to think about it. “Sure.” His heart
was pounding directly on his sternum. But Fitch and Matthews looked serious as owls, so he wasn’t
going to stick out by looking odd. It was big news, after all; anyone would be taken aback by it.
Nevertheless, January made an effort to nod.
“Okay,” Scholes said. “McDonald will be flying with you as copilot.” Fitch frowned. “I’ve got to
go tell those British officers that Le May doesn’t want them on the strike with you. See you at the
briefing.”
“Yes, sir.”
As soon as Scholes was around the corner Fitch swung a fist at the sky. “Yow!” Matthews cried. He
and Fitch shook hands. “We did it!” Matthews took January’s hand and wrung it, his face plastered
with a goofy grin. “We did it!”
摘要：

INTRODUCTIONHarryTurtledoveWHATIF...Mostscience-fictionideasdon’tcomenaturally.MosttakeadegreeofintellectualsophisticationthatcameonlywiththeIndustrialRevolution.It’shardtowriteabouttheeffectsoftechnologybeforethere’smuchinthewayoftechnologytowriteabout.Butalternatehistoryisn’tlikethat.It’sasnatural...

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