George Alec Effinger - Everything But Honor

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EVERYTHING BUT HONOR

George Alec Effinger

Dr. Thomas Placide, a black American-born physicist, decided to murder Brigadier General David E.

Twiggs, and he realized that it had to be done in December of 1860. He made this decision at the Berlin

Olympics of 1936. Jesse Owens had just triumphed over the world’s best runners in the

two-hundred-meter dash. The physicist jumped up and cheered for the American victory, while his

companion applauded politely. Yaakov Fein was one of the most influential scientists in the German

Empire, but he was no chauvinist. After the race, Owens was presented to Prince Friedrich. The papers

later reported that the prince had apologized for the absence of the seventy-seven-year-old Kaiser, and

Owens had replied, “I’m sure the most powerful man in the world has more important things to do than

watch six young men in their underwear run halfway around a circle.” The quotation may have been the

product of some journalist’s imagination, but it became so identified with Jesse Owens that there was no

point in arguing about it.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Placide settled back in his seat and looked at his program, getting

himself ready for the next event. “You must be proud of him,” said Fein. “A fellow Negro.”

“I am proud of him,” Placide said. “A fellow American.”

“But you are a naturalized German citizen now, Thomas. You should cheer for the German runners.”

Placide only shrugged.

Fein went on. “It’s a hopeful sign that a Negro has finally won a place on the American Olympic team.”

Placide showed some annoyance. “In America, Negroes have equal rights these days.”

“Separate, but equal,” said Fein. “

The black man turned to him. “They aren’t slaves anymore, if that’s what you’re implying. The German

Empire has this fatuous paternal concern for all the downtrodden people in the world. Maybe you

haven’t noticed it, but the rest of the world is getting pretty damn tired of your meddling.”

“We believe in using our influence for everyone’s benefit.”

That seemed to irritate Placide even more. “Every time some Klan bigot burns a cross in Mississippi, you

Germans—”

Fein smiled. “We Germans, you mean,” he said.

Placide frowned. “All right, we Germans send over a goddamn ‘peacekeeping force’ for the next nine

months.”

Fein patted the air between them. “Calm down, Thomas,” he said, “you’re being far too sensitive.”

“Let’s just watch the track and field events, and forget the social criticism.”

“All right with me,” said Fein. They dropped the subject for the moment, but Placide was sure that it

would come up again soon.

Two years later, in November 1938, Dr. Placide was selected to make the first full-scale operational test

of the Cage. He liked to think it was because of his contribution to the project. His journey through time

would be through the courtesy of the Placide-Born-Dirac Effect, and neither Max Born nor Paul Dirac

expressed any enthusiasm for the chance to act as guinea pig. In Berlin and Gottingen, there was a great

deal of argument over just what the Placide-Born-Dirac Effect was, and the more conservative theorists

wanted to limit the experiments to making beer steins and rodents disappear, which Placide and Fein had

been doing for over a year.

“My point,” said Placide at a conference of leading physicists in Gottingen, “is that after all this successful

study, it’s time for someone to hop in the Cage and find out what’s happening, once and for all.”

“I think it’s certainly time to take the next step,” said Werner Heisenberg.

“I agree,” said Erwin Schrodinger.

Dirac rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Nevertheless,” he said, “it’s much too soon to talk about human

subjects.”

“Are you seriously suggesting we risk a human life on the basis of our ill-fated and unproven theories?”

asked Albert Einstein.

Zach Marquand shrugged. “It would be a chance to clear up all the foggy rhetoric about paradoxes,” he

said.

Edward La Martine just stood to one side, sullenly shaking his head. He obviously thought Placide’s

suggestion was unsound, if not altogether insane.

“We have four in favor of using a human subject in the Cage, and four against,” said Fein. He took a

deep breath and let it out as a sigh. “I’m the project director, and I suppose it’s my responsibility to settle

this matter. God help me if I choose wrong. I say we go ahead and expand the scope of the experiment.”

Placide looked relieved. “Let me volunteer, then,” he said.

“Typical American recklessness,” said La Martine in a sour voice.

“You mean,” said Placide, “that you’ll be happy if I’m the one in the Cage. Not as a reward for my

work, of course, but because if anybody’s alternate history is going to be screwed up, better it be

America’s than Germany’s.”

La Martine just spread his hands and said nothing.

“Then I volunteer to go along,” said Fein. “As copilot.”

“There’s nothing for a copilot to do,” said Placide. Even then, it may have been that Fein didn’t have

complete faith in Placide’s motives.

Placide had his own agenda, after all, but he kept it secret from the others.

“Why don’t you travel back a week or so,” suggested Bonn. “Then you can take a photograph or find

some other proof to validate the experiment, and return immediately to Gottingen and time T0.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” said Placide. “I’d like to choose my own destination, and possibly solve

a little historical problem while I have the chance.” The Cage would never have existed without him, and

so it didn’t take him long to persuade the others. Placide and Fein worked with Marquand and his team

for nine more weeks learning to calibrate the Cage. In the meantime, Placide studied everything he could

find about General Twiggs, and he carefully hid his true plan from the Europeans.

Placide should have known that his first attempt would not go smoothly, but as far as he could see, his

plan was foolproof. His reasoning was simple: His primary goal—greater even than testing the operation

of the Cage—was to relieve the barbaric conditions forced on American blacks following the

Confederate Insurrection of 1861.

Although he’d quit the land of his birth, he still felt an unbreakable bond between himself and others of his

race, who could never escape the oppression as he had. A white friend of his father had enabled Placide

to attend Yale University, where he’d studied math, and physics. During the middle 1930s, after he

joined the great community of experimental scientists working in the German Empire, he began to see

how he might accomplish something far more important than adding a new quibble to the study of particle

physics.

The Cage—his Cage, as he sometimes thought of it—gave him the opportunity to make a vital

contribution. His unhappy experiences as a child and a young man in the United States supplied him with

sufficient motive. All he lacked was the means, and this he found through historical research as

painstaking as his scientific work with Dirac and Born.

To Placide, Brigadier General David Emanuel Twiggs seemed to be one of those anonymous yet crucial

players in the long game of history. In 1860 he was the military commander of the Department of Texas.

Although few students of the Confederate Insurrection would even recognize his name, Twiggs

nevertheless had a moment, the briefest moment, when he determined the course of future events. Placide

had come to realize that Twiggs was his target. Twiggs could be used to liberate American blacks from

all the racist hardships and injustices of the twentieth century.

Leaving T0, the Cage brought Placide and Yaakov Fein to San Antonio on December 24, 1860. Fein

agreed to guard the Cage, which had come to rest in a wintry field about three miles from Twiggs’s

headquarters. Fein, of course, had no idea that Placide had anything in mind other than a quick scouting

trip into this city of the past.

Placide began walking. From nearby he could hear the lowing of cattle, gathered now in shadowed

groups beneath the arching limbs of live oaks. He climbed down a hill into a shallow valley of moonlit

junipers and red cedar. The air smelled clean and sharp, although this Christmas Eve in Texas was not as

cold as the February he’d left behind in Germany. Frosty grass crunched underfoot; as he passed through

the weeds, their rough seeds clung to his trouser legs.

His exhilaration at his safe arrival in another time was tempered almost immediately by anxiety over the

danger he was in. If anyone stopped and questioned him, he would have an impossible time explaining

himself. At best, he would be taken for a freed slave, and as such he could expect little if any help from

the local citizens. Worse was the fact that he had no proper identification and no money, and thus he

would certainly appear to be a runaway.

Placide had put himself in a grave and desperate situation. If he failed and was captured, his only hope

would be Fein, but Fein was a German with little knowledge of this period in American history, did not

have much faith in the other man’s ability to rescue him, if it came to that. It might happen that no one

would ever learn of Placide’s sacrifice. He was thinking of the black generations yet unborn, and not his

colleagues in Gottingen. He was in a unique position to do something remarkable for his oppressed

people.

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