Produced by Greg Weeks, Geetu Melwani and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcriber note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe Science Fiction July 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright on this publication was renewed. Crossroads of Destiny by H. Beam Piper No wonder he'd been so interested in the talk of whether our people accepted these theories! * * * * * Readers who remember the Hon. Stephen Silk, diplomat extraordinary, in LONE STAR PLANET (FU, March 1957), later published as A PLANET FOR TEXANS (Ace Books), will find the present story a challenging departure--this possibility that the history we know may not be absolute.... * * * * * CROSSROADS OF DESTINY I still have the dollar bill. It's in my box at the bank, and I think that's where it will stay. I simply won't destroy it, but I can think of nobody to whom I'd be willing to show it--certainly nobody at the college, my History Department colleagues least of all. Merely to tell the story would brand me irredeemably as a crackpot, but crackpots are tolerated, even on college faculties. It's only when they begin producing physical evidence that they get themselves actively resented. * * * * * When I went into the club-car for a nightcap before going back to my compartment to turn in, there were five men there, sitting together. One was an Army officer, with the insignia and badges of a Staff Intelligence colonel. Next to him was a man of about my own age, with sandy hair and a bony, Scottish looking face, who sat staring silently into a highball which he held in both hands. Across the aisle, an elderly man, who could have been a lawyer or a banker, was smoking a cigar over a glass of port, and beside him sat a plump and slightly too well groomed individual who had a tall colorless drink, probably gin-and-tonic. The fifth man, separated from him by a vacant chair, seemed to be dividing his attention between a book on his lap and the conversation, in which he was taking no part. I sat down beside the sandy-haired man; as I did so and rang for the waiter, the colonel was saying: "No, that wouldn't. I can think of a better one. Suppose you have Columbus get his ships from Henry the Seventh of England and sail under the English instead of the Spanish flag. You know, he did try to get English backing, before he went to Spain, but King Henry turned him down. That could be changed." I pricked up my ears. The period from 1492 to the Revolution is my special field of American history, and I knew, at once, the enormous difference that would have made. It was a moment later that I realized how oddly the colonel had expressed the idea, and by that time the plump man was speaking.