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.
"Yes, that would work," he agreed. "Those kings made decisions, most of the time, on whether or not they had a hangover, or what some court favorite thought." He got out a notebook and pen and scribbled briefly. "I’ll hand that to the planning staff when I get to New York. That’s Henry the Seventh, not Henry the Eighth? Right. We’ll fix it so that Columbus will catch him when he’s in a good humor."
That was too much. I turned to the man beside me.
"What goes on?" I asked. "Has somebody invented a time machine?"
He looked up from the drink he was contemplating and gave me a grin.
"Sounds like it, doesn’t it? Why, no; our friend here is getting up a television program. Tell the gentleman about it," he urged the plump man across the aisle.
The waiter arrived at that moment. The plump man, who seemed to need little urging, waited until I had ordered a drink and then began telling me what a positively sensational idea it was.
"We’re calling it Crossroads of Destiny," he said. "It’ll be a series, one half-hour show a week; in each episode, we’ll take some historic event and show how history could have been changed if something had happened differently. We dramatize the event up to that point just as it really happened, and then a commentary-voice comes on and announces that this is the Crossroads of Destiny; this is where history could have been completely changed. Then he gives a resumé of what really did happen, and then he says, ‘But—suppose so and so had done this and that, instead of such and such.’ Then we pick up the dramatization at that point, only we show it the way it might have happened. Like this thing about Columbus; we’ll show how it could have happened, and end with Columbus wading ashore with his sword in one hand and a flag in the other, just like the painting, only it’ll be the English flag, and Columbus will shout: ‘I take possession of this new land in the name of His Majesty, Henry the Seventh of England!’" He brandished his drink, to the visible consternation of the elderly man beside him. "And then, the sailors all sing God Save the King."
"Which wasn’t written till about 1745," I couldn’t help mentioning.
"Huh?" The plump man looked startled. "Are you sure?" Then he decided that I was, and shrugged. "Well, they can all shout, ‘God Save King Henry!’ or ‘St. George for England!’ or something. Then, at the end, we introduce the program guest, some history expert, a real name, and he tells how he thinks history would have been changed if it had happened this way."
The conservatively dressed gentleman beside him wanted to know how long he expected to keep the show running.
"The crossroads will give out before long," he added.
"The sponsor’ll give out first," I said. "History is just one damn crossroads after another." I mentioned, in passing, that I taught the subject. "Why, since the beginning of this century, we’ve had enough of them to keep the show running for a year."
"We have about twenty already written and ready to produce," the plump man said comfortably, "and ideas for twice as many that the planning staff is working on now."
The elderly man accepted that and took another cautious sip of wine.
"What I wonder, though, is whether you can really say that history can be changed."
"Well, of course—" The television man was taken aback; one always seems to be when a basic assumption is questioned. "Of course, we only know what really did happen, but it stands to reason if something had happened differently, the results would have been different, doesn’t it?"
"But it seems to me that everything would work out the same in the long run. There’d be some differences at the time, but over the years wouldn’t they all cancel out?"
"Non, non, Monsieur!" the man with the book, who had been outside the conversation until now, told him earnestly. "Make no mistake; ‘istoree can be shange’!"
I looked at him curiously. The accent sounded French, but it wasn’t quite right. He was some kind of a foreigner, though; I’d swear that he never bought the clothes he was wearing in this country. The way the suit fitted, and the cut of it, and the shirt-collar, and the necktie. The book he was reading was Langmuir’sSocial History of the American People—not one of my favorites, a bit too much on the doctrinaire side, but what a bookshop clerk would give a foreigner looking for something to explain America.
"What do you think, Professor?" the plump man was asking me.
"It would work out the other way. The differences wouldn’t cancel out; they’d accumulate. Say something happened a century ago, to throw a presidential election the other way. You’d get different people at the head of the government, opposite lines of policy taken, and eventually we’d be getting into different wars with different enemies at different times, and different batches of young men killed before they could marry and have families—different people being born or not being born. That would mean different ideas, good or bad, being advanced; different books written; different inventions, and different social and economic problems as a consequence."
"Look, he’s only giving himself a century," the colonel added. "Think of the changes if this thing we were discussing, Columbus sailing under the English flag, had happened. Or suppose Leif Ericson had been able to plant a permanent colony in America in the Eleventh Century, or if the Saracens had won the Battle of Tours. Try to imagine the world today if any of those things had happened. One thing you can be sure of—any errors you make in trying to imagine such a world will be on the side of over-conservatism."
The sandy-haired man beside me, who had been using his highball for a crystal ball, must have glimpsed in it what he was looking for. He finished the drink, set the empty glass on the stand-tray beside him, and reached back to push the button.
"I don’t think you realize just how good an idea you have, here," he told the plump man abruptly. "If you did, you wouldn’t ruin it with such timid and unimaginative treatment."
I thought he’d been staying out of the conversation because it was over his head. Instead, he had been taking the plump man’s idea apart, examining all the pieces, and considering what was wrong with it and how it could be improved. The plump man looked startled, and then angry—timid and unimaginative were the last things he’d expected his idea to be called. Then he became uneasy. Maybe this fellow was a typical representative of his lord and master, the faceless abstraction called the Public.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Misplaced emphasis. You shouldn’t emphasize the event that could have changed history; you should emphasize the changes that could have been made. You’re going to end this show you were talking about with a shot of Columbus wading up to the beach with an English flag, aren’t you?"
"Well, that’s the logical ending."
"That’s the logical beginning," the sandy-haired man contradicted. "And after that, your guest historian comes on; how much time will he be allowed?"
"Well,
