The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century Read online

  Missing. Presumed dead. My son was . . . is . . . a hero. But presumed dead. After Ambassador Bunker died (that wasn’t supposed to get out yet, but he supposed I had a right to know), the surviving Marines were supposed to withdraw. But Barry gave his seat to a local woman and a child.

  “Probably knew them from the orphanage,” I muttered.

  “No doubt, sir,” said the Marine. It wasn’t his business to comment. He’d be glad to get out, even if he had more families’ hearts to break that day. Lord, I wished I could.

  At least he didn’t have a damn flag. As long as you don’t get the flag, you can still hope.

  HER SCHOOL SENT Steffie home, the way these schools do when there’s been a death in the family. Pinkos they may be, but I’ve got to admit each of her professors and the college president wrote us nice letters. Take as much time as you need before coming back to class, they told Steff. Better than she got from some of her friends. Once or twice, when she thought I wasn’t looking, I saw her throw out letters. And I heard her shouting on the phone at someone, then hang up with a bang. All she ever said was, “You never know who’s really your friend.”

  I thought she’d do better to stick out the term, but she decided to take the semester off. Seeing how Margaret brightened at that news, I didn’t insist she go back. And when my wife threw a major fit and screamed, “I can’t bear to lose both the men in our family!” at the dinner table and practically ordered me to get an EKG, I kept the appointment with our doctor that she’d made.

  Oddly enough, now that the worst had happened, I slept like a baby right through the next time the phone rang at 3:00 A.M.

  Steffie came into our room. She spoke to Margaret. “It’s from Frankfurt. West Germany.”

  Why would she be getting a call from West Germany of all places?

  Margaret got up and threw on a robe. “It’s in, then?”

  My daughter nodded. I stared at both women. Beyond family resemblance, their faces wore the same expression: guilt, fear, and a weird kind of anticipation under the sorrow that had put circles under their eyes.

  Like the damn fool husbands on TV, I waited for my womenfolk to explain what was going on. It didn’t much matter. After all, when your country’s lost a war and a son, what else can happen?

  “We have to talk,” Margaret said in that tone of voice. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

  So at three in the morning, we sat down to a family conference. Margaret poured coffee. To my surprise, she looked imploringly at Steffie.

  “The call from Frankfurt came through on my line,” she said.

  That stupid Princess phone!

  “That’s where they evacuate the refugees and process them.”

  My hand closed on the spoon till it hurt. How did that rate a transatlantic phone call?

  Stephanie took a deep, deep breath and drew herself up. For a moment, I thought I could see her brother, making up his mind at the Embassy to give up his place to a woman and a child.

  Our eyes met. She’d been thinking of Barry too.

  “You know that woman and kid Barry pushed onto the helicopter in his place?”

  “The ones he knew from the orphanage?”

  “Where’d you get that idea?” Margaret broke in.

  “Mom, he did meet Nguyen at the orphanage.”

  “Now wait a damn minute, both of you. Maybe it’s too early, but no one’s making sense!”

  Margaret set down her coffee cup. “Joe, please listen.”

  “Dad, about a year ago, Barry wrote me. He’d met a girl who worked at the French Embassy. She’s from Saigon and her name is Nguyen.”

  I held up a hand. I wanted to be stupid. I wanted to be Ward Cleaver and have this episode end. Margaret would switch off the TV set, the show would be over, we could all go back to bed, and none of this, none of the whole past miserable year would have happened.

  So my boy had sacrificed himself for a friend. . . .

  “She’s his wife, Daddy. And the child . . .”

  When you’re on the front lines and you get hit bad, it doesn’t hurt at first. You go into shock.

  “You knew about this?” I asked Margaret. She looked down, ashamed.

  “And didn’t tell me?” Both women looked down.

  “My son married—how do we know it’s true?—he says he married this goddamn gook! Her people killed him, and you have the nerve to say . . .”

  “If you say that word, I’ll never speak to you again!” Stephanie was on her feet, her big flannel nightgown billowing in flowers and hearts about her. “Nguyen’s not a bar girl. Barry said she’s a lady. She worked at the French Embassy. She speaks French and Vietnamese . . . some English.”

  “They seem to have communicated just fine without it!” I snapped, hating myself.

  They’d hidden this from me! Barry had written to Stephanie, and all those calls when she’d said, “I need to talk to Mom,” they were talking about this unknown girl. This gook girl. Who my son had planned to bring home. I could just see Ronnie the Racist’s face.

  They’d hidden this from me.

  “Oh Mom, I’m making such a mess of this!” Steffie cried. “I didn’t really believe he’d take it like this . . .”

  “Give him some time, darling,” said my wife. “We were caught by surprise, too.”

  “You give him some time,” my daughter burst into tears. “The only grandkid he may ever have, and all he can think of is to ask, ‘Are they really married?’ and call the mother a gook and a bar girl! I haven’t got time for this! I have to pack and go to Washington to meet Nguyen, and then I have to go . . .”

  I reached up and grasped my daughter’s wrist.

  “Just where do you think you’re going?”

  That little bit of a thing faced me down. “I’m joining the Red Cross relief effort.” She laughed, shakily. “I wish I’d listened to you and become a nurse after all. It’s a hell of a lot more useful than a poli-sci major for what I need to do. We’re going over there.”

  “That hellhole’s already swallowed one of my kids!”

  “That’s right. So I’m going over there to look for him.”

  I shook my head at her. Just one small girl in the middle of a war zone. What did she think she could do?

  “Daddy, you know I’ve always looked after my brother. No matter how big he got. Except with this . . . this mess about the war. I did what I thought was right, and see how it worked out.” She wiped at her eyes.

  “Somehow, I have to make up for that. All of us do. So I’m going to look for him. And if I . . . when I find him . . . so help me, I am going to beat the crap out of him for scaring us this way!” She was sobbing noisily now, and when I held out my arms, she flung herself into them.

  “Oh Daddy, I was wrong, it all went wrong and it got so fucked up!”

  “Don’t use words like that,” I whispered, kissing my girl’s hair. “Not in front of your mother.”

  “It’s all right,” said Margaret. “I feel the same way.”

  “Unless I find him, Nguyen and the little boy are all we’ve got of Barry. And we’re all they’ve got. But all you can do is call them bad words and . . . and . . .”

  I patted her back and met my wife’s eyes. She nodded, and I knew we’d be having guests in the house. No, scratch that. We’d be having new family members come to live here. And if my sister’s husband even thought of opening his big fat mouth, I’d shut it for him the way I’d wanted to for the past thirty years.

  Stephanie pulled out of my arms and pushed her bangs out of her eyes. I sighed and picked my words. If I said things wrong, I was scared I’d lose her.

  “We’ve been in this town for five generations,” I began slowly. “I think our family has enough of a reputation so people will welcome . . . what did you say her name was?”

  “Nguyen,” Margaret whispered. Her eyes were very bright. “I’ll brush up on my French.” She used to teach it before we got married. “And the little boy—our grandson—is Bar
ry, Jr. I can’t imagine how that sounds in a Vietnamese accent, can you?”

  A tiny woman in those floaty things Vietnamese women wore. A little lady. My son’s wife . . . or widow. And one of those cute little black-eyed kids, unless he looked like Bear. Family. Just let anyone dare say anything.

  “We can put them in Barry’s room,” I stammered. “I suppose.”

  “Nguyen can have mine,” said Steffie. “I won’t need it. Oh, Daddy, I was wrong about so many things. But I was right about you after all.”

  She kissed me, then ran upstairs, a whirlwind in a flowered nightgown. I could hear closets and drawers protesting and paper ripping.

  “I wish she’d been right about all of them,” I told Margaret. She took my hand.

  “I’m going with Stephanie to pick up . . . Nguyen,” my wife informed me.

  It would get easier, I sensed, for both of us to think of her and the boy as family once we met them. My son’s wife. My son’s son. This wasn’t how I’d thought that would be.

  In a few minutes, once the shock wore off, I supposed I’d get to see the pictures. I knew there had to be pictures. But you don’t live with a woman for this many years without knowing when she has more to say. And having a pretty good idea of what it is—most of the time.

  This time, though, my guess was right. “Joe, I want you to come with us to Washington so we can all meet as a family. Nguyen must be terrified. She’s lost everything and, and everyone.”

  Her voice trembled, but she forced it to calm. “It would mean a lot to her. Steff says the Vietnamese are Confucian. If the head of our family were there to greet her, she’d know she was welcome, she and the little one.”

  A smile flickered across her face. “I wonder where we can get a crib,” she mused. “All our friends’ children are grown and haven’t started having babies yet. We’ll be the first to have a grandchild.”

  I bent over and hugged her. “Did you make a third plane reservation?”

  She smiled at me. “What do you think?”

  “I’LL CARRY YOUR SUITCASE downstairs for you, baby,” I told my daughter.

  “Oh, Dad, you know I’ll have to lug my own stuff once I go overseas . . .”

  “As long as you’re in my house, young lady—”

  “It’s on my bed.” I went into her room to get it. She’d taken a cheap plaid fabric thing, not one of the good, big Samsonite cases she’d gotten for high school graduation. Her room wasn’t just clean: it was sterile. She’d even torn down her posters and hung the crewelwork back up. I wondered what this strange new daughter-in-law of mine would make of the pretty blue and lilac room.

  My foot sent something spinning and rolling. I bent to retrieve the thing, which promptly jagged my finger. One of Stephanie’s protest buttons, hurled away as if in despair, poor girl. “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?” it asked.

  Suppose they did? It had never happened yet.

  Suppose, instead, they gave a peace? That hadn’t worked, either.

  But I can always hope, can’t I?

  After all, I have a grandson to look out for.

  Larry Niven

  Larry Niven established his credentials as a provocative writer of hard science fiction with his Nebula Award–winning novel Ringworld, about an artificial ring-shaped planetary body with a million-mile radius and six-hundred-million-mile circumference that poses unusual technical problems in navigation and escape for its human inhabitants. The novel, and its sequels Ringworld Engineers and The Ringworld Throne, are part of Niven’s vast Tales of Known Space saga, an acclaimed future history of interstellar space that has accommodated a wide variety of themes including alien culture, immortality, time travel, terraforming, genetic engineering, teleportation, and exotic alien cultures in such novels as The World of Ptavvs and A Gift from Earth, and the short-fiction collections Neutron Star, The Shape of Space, and Tales of Known Space. Between 1988 and 1991 the series spun off a quartet of shared-world anthologies, The Man-Kzin Wars, concerned with human and extraterrestrial conflict. Niven’s collaborations extend to novel-length works of fiction and include The Mote in God’s Eye, Inferno, Oath of Fealty, and Lucifer’s Hammer, all co-authored with Jerry Pournelle, and the Dream Park series, written with Steve Barnes. Niven has also written a series of fantasies concerned with primitive concepts of magic, including The Magic Goes Away and the collection Time of the Warlock. A representative sampling of his short fiction and nonfiction can be found in N-Space.

  ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS

  * * *

  Larry Niven

  THERE WERE TIMELINES branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? Trimble didn’t understand the theory, though God knows he’d tried. The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman and child on Earth was reversed in the universe next door. It was enough to confuse any citizen, let alone Detective-Lieutenant Gene Trimble, who had other problems.

  Senseless suicides, senseless crimes. A city-wide epidemic. It had hit other cities too. Trimble suspected that it was worldwide, that other nations were simply keeping it quiet.

  Trimble’s sad eyes focused on the clock. Quitting time. He stood up to go home, and slowly sat down again. For he had his teeth in the problem, and he couldn’t let go.

  Not that he was really accomplishing anything.

  But if he left now, he’d only have to take it up again tomorrow.

  Go, or stay?

  And the branchings began again. Gene Trimble thought of other universes parallel to this one, and a parallel Gene Trimble in each one. Some had left early. Many had left on time, and were now halfway home to dinner, out to a movie, watching a strip show, racing to the scene of another death. Streaming out of police headquarters in all their multitudes, leaving a multitude of Trimbles behind them. Each of these trying to deal, alone, with the city’s endless, inexplicable parade of suicides.

  Gene Trimble spread the morning paper on his desk. From the bottom drawer he took his gun-cleaning equipment, then his .45. He began to take the gun apart.

  The gun was old but serviceable. He’d never fired it except on the target range, and never expected to. To Trimble, cleaning his gun was like knitting, a way to keep his hands busy while his mind wandered off. Turn the screws, don’t lose them. Lay the parts out in order.

  Through the closed door to his office came the sounds of men hurrying. Another emergency? The department couldn’t handle it all. Too many suicides, too many casual murders, not enough men.

  Gun oil. Oiled rag. Wipe each part. Put it back in place.

  Why would a man like Ambrose Harmon go off a building?

  IN THE EARLY MORNING light he lay, more a stain than a man, thirty-six stories below the edge of his own penthouse roof. The pavement was splattered red for yards around him. The stairs were still wet. Harmon had landed on his face. He wore a bright silk dressing gown and a sleeping jacket with a sash.

  Others would take samples of his blood, to learn if he had acted under the influence of alcohol or drugs. There was little to be learned from seeing him in his present condition.

  “But why was he up so early?” Trimble wondered. For the call had come in at 8:03, just as Trimble arrived at headquarters.

  “So late, you mean.” Bentley had beaten him to the scene by twenty minutes. “We called some of his friends. He was at an all-night poker game. Broke up around six o’clock.”

  “Did Harmon lose?”

  “Nope. He won almost five hundred bucks.”

  “That fits,” Trimble said in disgust. “No suicide note?”

  “Maybe they’ve found one. Shall we go up and see?”

  “We won’t find a note,” Trimble predicted.

  EVEN THREE MONTHS earlier Trimble would have thought, How incredible! or, Who could have pushed him? Now, riding up in the elevator, he thought only, Reporters. For Ambrose Harmon was news. E
ven among this past year’s epidemic suicides, Ambrose Harmon’s death would stand out like Lyndon Johnson in a lineup.

  He was a prominent member of the community, a man of dead and wealthy grandparents. Perhaps the huge inheritance, four years ago, had gone to his head. He had invested tremendous sums to back harebrained, quixotic causes.

  Now, because one of the harebrained causes had paid off, he was richer than ever. The Crosstime Corporation already held a score of patents on inventions imported from alternate time tracks. Already those inventions had started more than one industrial revolution. And Harmon was the money behind Crosstime. He would have been the world’s next billionaire—had he not walked off his balcony.

  They found a roomy, luxuriously furnished apartment in good order, and a bed turned down for the night. The only sign of disorder was the clothing—slacks, sweater, a silk turtleneck shirt, knee-length shoesocks, no underwear—piled on a chair in the bedroom. The toothbrush had been used.

  He got ready for bed, Trimble thought. He brushed his teeth, and then he went out to look at the sunrise. A man who kept late hours like that, he wouldn’t see the sunrise very often. He watched the sunrise, and when it was over he jumped.

  Why?

  They were all like that. Easy, spontaneous decisions. The victim/killers walked off bridges or stepped from their balconies or suddenly flung themselves in front of subway trains. They strolled halfway across a freeway, or swallowed a full bottle of laudanum. None of the methods showed previous planning. Whatever was used, the victim had had it all along; he never actually went out and bought a suicide weapon. The victim rarely dressed for the occasion, or used makeup, as an ordinary suicide would. Usually there was no note.

  Harmon fit the pattern perfectly.

  “Like Richard Cory,” said Bentley.

  “Who?”

  “Richard Cory, the man who had everything. ‘And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet through his head.’ You know what I think?”

  “If you’ve got an idea, let’s have it.”