TO MAKE A HERO By RANDALL GARRETT Illustrated by EMSH _Fraud? Larceny? Murder? All in a days work to Leland Hale--the savior of Cardigan's Green!_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Infinity October 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] RANDALL GARRETT _got to wondering, recently, what kind of stories the "true adventure" magazines of the future would publish_. To Make a Hero _is his own answer to the question. It's science fiction told from a historian's viewpoint--an attempt to set the "record" straight on one Leland Hale, a hero who is guaranteed to fascinate you, even if you hate him! "_One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero; numbers sanctify the crime._" --_Porteus_ CHAPTER I History, by any reckoning, is a fluid thing. Once a thing has happened, no instrument yet devised by man can show exactly what it was in minute detail. _All_ of the data simply cannot be recovered. In spite of this, if Man were an intellectually honest animal, it wouldn't be too difficult to get a reasonably accurate picture of the past. At least the data that could be recovered and retained would show a reasonably distinct picture of long gone events and their relationship to the present. But Man isn't that kind of creature. Once men discovered the fact that the events of tomorrow are based on what is happening today, it didn't take them long to reach the conclusion that changing the past could change the present. Words are magic, and the more cleverly and powerfully they are connected together, the more magic they become. The ancient "historians" of Babylon, Egypt, Israel, Sumeria, Judea, and Rome did not conceive of themselves as liars when they distorted history to conform to their own beliefs; they were convinced that if what they wrote were accepted as true, then it _was_ true. Word magic had changed the past to conform to the present. Now, one would suppose that, as methods of recording and verifying the contemporary happenings of a culture became more and more efficient and more easily correlated, the ability to change the past would become more difficult. Not true. The actual records of the past are not read by the average man; he is normally exposed only to biased, carefully selected excerpts from the past. Granted, with a few thousand civilized and tens of thousands semi-civilized planets in the occupied galaxy, the correlation of data is difficult. But, nonetheless, errors of the magnitude of the one made in the history of Cardigan's Green shouldn't be committed.