former Senator from Missouri named Harry Truman. In my own time line there was never
a senator by that name but I do remember Brian speaking of a Captain Harry Truman
whom he knew in France. `A fighting son of a gun,’ Briney called him. `A real buzz
saw.’ But the Harry Truman whom Brian knew was not a politician; he was a
haberdasher, so it seems unlikely that it could be the same man. Briney used to go
out of his way to buy gloves and such from Captain Truman. He described him as ‘a
dying breed – an old-fashioned gentleman.’
In time line two, code Leslie LeCroix, my own native time line and that of Lazarus
Long and Boondock, Mr Roosevelt was nominated for a third term in july 1940, then
died from a stroke while playing tennis the last week in October, thereby creating a
unique constitutional crisis. Henry Wallace, the Democratic nominee for
vice-president, claimed that the Electors from the states that went Democratic were
bound by law to vote for him for president. The Democratic National Committee did
not see it that way and neither did the Electoral College – and neither did the
Supreme Court – three different points of view. Four, in fact, as John Nance Garner
was President from October on… but had not been nominated for anything and had
bolted his party after the July convention.
I will return to this subject as this was the world I grew up in. But note that Mr
Roosevelt was stricken `while playing tennis’.
I learned while studying comparative history that in all other time lines but mine
Mr Roosevelt had been a poliomyelitis cripple confined to a wheel chair!
The effects of contagious diseases on history are a never ending subject for debate
among mathematico-historians on Tertius. I often wonder about one case, because I
was there. In my time line Spanish influenza killed 528.000 US residents in the
epidemic of the winter of 1918-19, and killed more troops in France than had been
killed by shot and shell and poison gas. What if the Spanish flu had struck Europe
one year earlier? Certainly history would have been changed – but in what way?
Suppose a corporal named Hitler had died? Or an exile who called himself Lenin? Or a
soldier named Pétain? That strain of flu could kill overnight; I saw it happen more
than once.
Time line three, code Neil Armstrong, is the native world of my sister-wife Hazel
Stone (Gwen Campbell) and of our husband Dr Jubal Harshaw. This is an unattractive
world in which Venus is uninhabitable and Mars is a bleak, almost airless desert,
and Earth itself seems to have gone crazy, led by the United States in a
lemming-like suicide stampede.
I dislike studying time line three; it is so horrid. Yet it fascinates me. In this
time line (as in mine) United States historians call the second half of the
twentieth century the Crazy Years – and well they might! Hearken to the evidente:
a) The largest, longest, bloodiest war in United States history, fought by conscript
troops without a declaration of war, without any clear purpose, without any
intention of winning – a war that was ended simply by walking away and abandoning
the people for whom it was putatively fought;
b) Another war that was never declared – this one was never concluded and still
existed as an armed truce forty years after it started… while the United States
engaged in renewed diplomatic and trade relations with the very government it had
warred against without admitting it;
c) An assassinated president, an assassinated presidential candidate, a president
seriously wounded in an assassination attempt by a known psychotic who nevertheless
was allowed to move freely, an assassinated leading Negro national politician,
endless other assassination attempts, unsuccessful, partly successful, and
successful;
d) So many casual killings in public streets and public parks and public transports
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that most lawful citizens avoided going out after dark, especially the elderly;
e) Public school teachers and state university professors who taught that patriotism
was an obsolete concept, that marriage was an obsolete concept, that sin was an