All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
“Absolute tolerance is altogether impossible; the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who have stated clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things.”
Leo Strauss
This is a straight up time travel story. Peter Corrigan is a member of an elite club in Washington D.C. He and his fellow club members are debating whether it’s possible for someone to go back in time and thereby change history. As he leaves his club, he becomes dizzy outside the door and when he comes to himself, he realizes that everything has changed and appears as it would in the mid-nineteenth century. When he arrives at his home it isn’t his anymore. He talks to the landlady and she agrees to rent him a room. As he’s walking to his room, he hears an army officer who is leaving say that President Lincoln will be at the theater that the officer and his girlfriend are also about to attend. Upon cross-examining the officer, he confirms that the performance is the one that Lincoln attended when Booth assassinated him.
Peter rushes to the Ford Theater and tries to convince them that Lincoln’s life is in terrible danger. He makes a nuisance of himself and ends up arrested. At the police station he tries to convince the police about the assassination and is about to be jailed when a stranger intercedes with the police and has Peter remanded to his custody. The man introduces himself as Mr. Wellington and takes him to his rooms where he tries to understand how Peter knows what he says he knows. After Peter tells his story Mr. Wellington gives Peter a handkerchief for an injury he sustained with the police and a glass a wine to calm his nerves. But the wine is drugged and Peter passes out. When he awakens, he yells for help and the landlady and a police officer show up. Telling the landlady his story he finds out that the man wasn’t named Wellington but John Wilkes Booth. Now Peter is panicked and he tries to force the policeman to run to the theater and save the President. But it’s too late, Lincoln has already been shot and the news is being shouted on the street.
Now when Peter walks down the street he is back in the future and he arrives at his club and he tries to tell his former debaters that history cannot be changed even if a man can go back in town. But a curious thing has happened in his absence. A man who was a waiter previously is now a rich club member. By his own narration we find out that the family fortune was founded when his ancestor who was a Washington policeman forcefully attempted to convince the authorities that they should protect Lincoln at Ford’s Theater. This prescience so impressed everyone that he was advanced to authority where his performance brought him riches. So even if some things can’t be changed, others can. When Peter reaches for his handkerchief, he finds one monogrammed JWB (John Wilkes Booth).
Peter is played by Russell Johnson (the Professor from Gilligan’s Island). It’s a pretty clever story and somewhat fun. The only downside is the scene where Peter is at the door of the theater and he is pounding on the door and shouting. It hearkens back to my dislike for any Twilight Zone episode that degenerates into someone shouting wildly at no one visible.
Because of this I’ll take away a half point B-.
Dave Freer over at Mad Genius Club talks about the change in reading habits that has more or less done in the short story (specifically in the Sf&F genres). As a prospective author I am interested in the state of the publishing world. Having so little time left for writing, short stories interest me but reading this article was not particularly encouraging. Well, it’s interesting and comments to the post are good too.
Dave’s on our side of the political spectrum (part of the Sad Puppy brigade) and my grandson really liked his young adult fantasy book Changeling’s Island so I read his posts often.
“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.”
Carl Jung
A small town in the Old West. A peddler named Sykes arrives and walks into the town jail and goads the prisoner named Luis Gallegos about his imminent hanging. Sykes revels in the strength of the five-strand hemp rope that he sold to the town for the noose. The Sheriff berates Sykes and tells him to stop torturing the condemned man.
Sykes goes outside and watches the funeral procession for a little girl who was run down by a wagon driven by the man about to be hanged. As it comes out in various accounts Gallegos was depressed about his financial difficulties so he got drunk and riding home he struck the child without knowing it.
Sykes loudly celebrates to the girl’s parents the upcoming hanging of their daughter’s killer. They are too devastated to pay him any attention but head to the church for the funeral. Another viewer of the procession is Luis’s father. He apologizes for his son’s action and says that if he could exchange his life for the little girl’s he would gladly do it. But once again they move on thinking only of their lost daughter.
Sykes sees Luis’s father and has an idea. He sends a message to the old man saying that if he can obtain one hundred pesos then Sykes will sell him a bag of magic dust that will turn the hate in the hearts of the townspeople to love and thus save Luis’s life.
The old man begs and borrows the money and Sykes gives him a tobacco sack that he has filled with the dirt he found on the town’s main street. With the hanging about to begin Mr. Gallegos runs to the gallows and pathetically casts the “magic dust” into the air hoping it will sway the crowd. But as he does it, he hears the crack of the trap door opening and winces. But when he opens his eyes and turns around, he sees that the rope snapped and Luis is lying below the gallows alive.
Some of the crowd call out for the hanging to be repeated. The Sheriff asks the girl’s parents if they want it repeated. The father is unsure but his wife says Luis has suffered enough. Her husband agrees and the Sheriff releases Luis to his overjoyed father and they depart.
Now Sykes is looking at the broken rope and is perplexed how a brand new five strand hemp rope could fail on its first use. He concludes that the dust really was magic. And as proof of this he gives the one hundred gold pesos to some poor children who are near him in the street.
This one is a little too arch for me. Sykes is too creepy and Luis and his father are a little too sympathetic. Regardless of whether Sykes is a terrible man, Gallegos is not a blameless victim. Being poor and an outsider doesn’t automatically mean we just sympathize with the negligent killer of a little girl. Serling over did it here. C-.
