Making History

by Rick Wilber

  “Instead . . .”

  “Instead, the trigger will spring and the enriched uranium will reach critical mass, and this war will come to an end.”

  “My god.”

  The ladder touched down on the wooden dock. Werner Heisenberg took Moe Berg’s hand to steady himself and then, with Berg’s help, got his right foot onto the first rung of the ladder. Berg held the ladder steady and the woman came over to help. Their hands met on the ladder as Heisenberg started climbing and Moe felt that now familiar nausea, the moment of disorientation. He knew to take a look toward the house. The lights were back on, a crowd again visible through the curtains. Did anyone miss Heisenberg? Was there another Heisenberg in there? Was this Heisenberg still here?

  Moe looked up and Heisenberg was already at the control car, hands reaching down to help him through the hatchway.

  The woman was gone. Moe’s Beretta was back in his pocket and he knew that here, now, it had never been taken.

  Someone was shouting. Moe felt the ladder being yanked upward, out of his hands, up into the belly of the beast. That was all right. He was sure of it, he was dead certain that it was all right, what Heisenberg had in mind.

  The shouts were closer, footsteps crunching through the few inches of snow that now covered the ground. The lake was frozen. It was very cold.

  Two men were coming, running, one ahead of the other. The first was Weizsäcker, waving a pistol, a Luger, shouting something in German about stopping, stop the zeppelin, you must stop the zeppelin. Behind him was Paul Scherrer, trying to catch up, yelling something himself: “Carl, don’t shoot, do not shoot. The hydrogen! The hydrogen!”

  So they knew, or at least Scherrer did. No surprise there. Moe reached into this pocket and pulled out the Beretta. Weizsäcker was a good thirty yards away. It would take a very lucky shot.

  Weizsäcker stopped running and stood there, pulling a loaded magazine out of his coat pocket and fumbling with it as he loaded the Luger. There was an audible click as the magazine catch snapped into place.

  Scherrer reached him, grabbed his arm, and Weizsäcker turned and shoved him away and then shot him, close range, no more than five feet away. Scherrer spun once and fell.

  Moe Berg had taken a first in marksmanship in his training, though that was with the Colt .45. Still, he’d spent two days at Scherrer’s house a couple of months ago, standing right near this dock in some other reality a long way from this one, target shooting with the Beretta so he could shoot and kill a Nazi. OK, here was the chance. He took aim as Weizsäcker turned back around and fumbled with pulling the toggle joint in the rear of the Luger to bring a round into the chamber. That took two seconds and then he started to point the Luger at the Hindenburg.

  And died there, a hole made by the bullet from Moe Berg’s Beretta appearing above the left ear.

  Moe walked over briskly, clouds of vapor from his suddenly heavy breathing wreathing him as he reached Weizsäcker, who had fallen to his knees but still seemed to be alive. This man had shot Paul Scherrer. Moe put the second shot into the back of the head and as Weizsäcker fell to his side and then rolled, dead, onto his back, Moe put one more shot, for good measure, into the Nazi’s forehead.

  And suddenly it was very quiet. Moe could hear the crunching of snow as someone else approached. He looked up and it was, of course, the woman. She knelt over Scherrer, who was moaning.

  “The bullet went through the flesh of the forearm. Not much blood. He’s very lucky,” she said, “but I suppose his pitching career is over, right, Moe?”

  Scherrer wasn’t wearing a coat, it had all happened too fast for that. She began tearing away the long sleeve of his shirt to get a strip of cloth to tie around the wound.

  “You’re very funny,” Moe said.

  She rose to her feet. A number of people were coming, but they had a few seconds before help for Scherrer arrived. “You know, Moe, in some of the scenarios you never get to Europe.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, it’s true. Sometimes you’re a ballplayer and sometimes you’re a lawyer and sometimes you’re living at home with your sister, alone, reading your newspapers, afraid of the world.”

  “Not afraid, really; that’s not what it’s about.”

  Behind him, the engines roared to life and the zeppelin moved out over the lake, toward Lucarno, and tomorrow to Berchtesgaden and by noon to doing something real, something that mattered.

  “It’s all very uncertain, Moe,” she said, smiling. He shook his head. A moment like this and she’s making Heisenberg jokes.

  “Moe,” she said, “There’s a place where you’re a catcher for the Senators.”

  “God forbid.”

  “But in all these places, all these myriad of possibilities, you’re reachable. You move through the frames easily. And you always get the job done. “

  “You know, I’m not stupid . . .”

  “Quite the contrary, Moe. Your intelligence, your languages, that and your ability to move through the frames; that’s why we need you.”

  “I got to admit I’m not real sure what’s going on here.”

  The crowd from the party had reached them; people were kneeling over Scherrer, trying to help, and looking, fascinated and horrified, at the bloody mess that had been Carl Weizsäcker.

  “OK,” Moe said, “I get it. Count me in.”

  She smiled at him, reached out to take him by the arm, and then, after the nausea, after the moment of dizziness, the two of them, Moe Berg and the woman, alone on the lakeshore, walked away into the quiet darkness of a strangely warm December night in Zurich.

  Nisi Shawl’s sequence of Everfair alternate-history stories includes several short stories and her debut novel Everfair, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Nebula Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. In 2019, Shawl was named a recipient of the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished contributions to the science-fiction and fantasy community. Her Everfair stories tell us about the rise and struggles of a utopian society in Africa that struggles to survive against colonial aggression. “Vulcanization” is connected to the Everfair stories but takes us to an alternate 1898 Brussels to show us there is a price to be paid for the genocidal cruelty of Belgium’s King Leopold II.

  A chemical process for converting natural rubber or related polymers into more durable materials via the addition of sulfur or equivalent curatives or accelerators. These additives modify the polymer by forming cross-links (bridges) between individual polymer chains.

  - Brussels, 1898

  Another black. A mere illusion, Leopold knew, but he flinched out of the half-naked nigger’s path anyway.

  Of course Marie Henriette noticed when he did so. The quick little taps of the queen’s high-heeled slippers echoed faster off the polished floor as she hastened to draw even with him. “My dearest - Sire-”

  Leopold stopped, forcing his entire retinue to stop with him. “What do you wish, my wife?” He refused to turn around. Once he had done so, and had seen then no sign of the savage who’d just the moment before brushed past him - through him - with a fixed and insolent stare. Not much longer till he would be rid of his ghosts for good.

  The queen reached for his sleeve but held her hand back to hover above the gold-embroidered cuff. “Are you quite sure you need to do this? Are you sufficiently well?”

  He had wondered whether to tell her about his appointment with Travert. In the end he hadn’t, dreading an increase in court gossip. “The Museum of the Congo is important to my legacy. We will not be late for the dedication, Marie,” he objected in his usual mild tone. She said nothing further, and he resumed his progress down the passage to the palace’s exit.

  Outside, the sky’s silver overcast was brighter than any light Leopold had experienced in more than a month. Perhaps he ought not to have confined himself so long. It didn’t seem to have decreased the apparitions. Nigger visions had plagued him night and day. Sometimes they held up their bleeding, handless arms, shaking them accusingly.
Gore fountained and dripped from their wounds, yet the carpets over which they passed remained stainless. Illusion only, but it would be a relief to be done with them.

  He settled himself comfortably in the royal steam barouche. Marie Henriette hesitated a moment before climbing in beside him. Her fondness for horses was well known, but Leopold had explained patiently the need to show support for the manufacture of rubber and its essential role in modern mechanization. Absently, he patted the reinforced fabric of the seat cushion: water repellent, elastically resilient, warm to the touch as-

  Involuntarily he jerked away. He met the eyes of Driessen, his personal physician, taking the opposite seat. Poorly concealed concern peered back at him. Deliberately, the king set his hand back on the spot from which he’d removed it. When he could turn his head casually, as if taking in a passing prospect, he saw nothing more than a vague cloudiness roiling the air of the steam barouche’s interior. Arriving at the site of the Museum and disembarking from the machine, he left it behind.

  The quiet crunch of the gravel walk comforted him. Climbing granite steps to the half-round portico where he would speak, Leopold threw back his shoulders and gave Driessen and Marie Henriette what he hoped was a reassuring smile. Approaching the podium, he pulled his memorandum pad from his military-style jacket’s inner pocket and opened it to the relevant page. He looked out at an audience abruptly filled with hundreds of weeping black faces and with a cry let it fall to the ground.

  A stifled gasp came from his queen, counterpoint to the sobs only he could hear. Then the pad was set into his nerveless hand, his fingers bent to curl around and hold it. Driessen. The physician was asking him something. Leopold nodded - he hadn’t heard the question clearly, but assumed it concerned his welfare. He would go on with his speech. Noblesse oblige.

  “Learned and generous contributors to our great enterprise, the enlightenment of the savage inhabitants of heathen Africa,” he began, “it is with joy I invite you today to enter with me the magnificent edifice created to shelter the fruits of our noble laboring.” Continuation became easier with every word. With his mental faculties fully exercised by the demands of his oratory, Leopold’s visions faded till they were virtually invisible. To convince himself those faint specters were truly immaterial he had only to remind himself that mere minutes remained now till the appointment.

  ***

  Travert was sallow-skinned and pitiably slight - also balding and bespectacled. Perhaps a clandestine Israelite? Quite likely. They were everywhere, and for the most part harmless. This one waited on the king in one of the Museum’s private rooms, which Leopold found rather plain. Undistinguished paneling, ugly gas lamps affixed to it such as he would never choose. The smell of some crude cleaning compound troubled his nostrils.

  The Jew bowed deeply. “Majesty,” he began, “I am mindful of the great favor you do me in granting me permission to share with you my new invention. The Variable Pressure Ethereo-Vibrative Condenser displays the most interesting principles discovered to date in the field to which I’ve devoted so much study, so much-”

  Mary Henriette wrinkled her pretty brow. “But were you not hired to oversee the care of the inhabitants of the museum’s model village?” In the confusion following the king’s public appearance, she had shed her attendants and somehow insinuated herself into the room, taking a seat at Leopold’s side. “I’m afraid I see no connection between that and your - Elusively Gyrating - whatever you may say.” Her white shoulders shrugged off their covering of lace. “The king is busy. He has been ill, overwrought-”

  Driessen coughed meaningfully into his fist.

  “My queen,” said Leopold, “this very illness is the cause of my curiosity regarding Dr. Travert’s investigations. They may perhaps be of help in curing me-” He swept one shapely hand in the little Hebrew’s direction. “-By means he was just about to explain.”

  “Yes, of course.” The bald head ducked in acknowledgement. “You see, my Condenser renders palpable the vaporous emanations of the spirit world so that they may be, ah, dealt with in a corporeal manner: jailed, burnt, buried, dissected-”

  “It is due to evil spirits you’ve gone on so poorly? You never told me!” Marie Henriette twisted and leaned toward the king. Her breasts huddled forward, threatening to spill over the loose confines of her satin bodice. “Let me bring my confessor to you - tonight, after supper!”

  “Why?” demanded Driessen.

  Leopold dragged his eyes to where Driessen rocked heel to toe, toe to heel. His brusqueness was to be expected. The royal physician tolerated this latest attempt at reconciliation with Marie Henriette, but made no secret of his cynicism in regard to her.

  “Why?” the queen retorted. “To disavow the guilty sorrows such things find attractive. You will feel much better, dearest, once you’ve relinquished your burden of sin.”

  But Leopold had done nothing wrong. The casualties in the Congo were necessary to the extraction of its wealth. He looked at Marie Henriette as blandly as possible. With age, her fascination was shrinking. “Perhaps,” he temporized. “However, first we’ll try Travert’s method.” It seemed more certain, more scientific.

  Though there was one point about which he felt concern. “You have tested the procedure?” he asked.

  “Naturally. With the access to your African subjects you have so kindly granted, I was well able. In fact, I have prepared a demonstration for you to view before your own Condensation. It only remains for me to outline for you the particulars of the apparatus’s operation and we’ll get started.”

  It required the full force of Driessen’s insistence to make the self-aggrandizing Jew realize he could deliver this outline while simultaneously enacting his far more germane demonstration.

  Of Leopold’s personal guard only Gagnon, its head, had entered the room with him. In the crowded corridor they joined the rest of the detachment, descending thence via unfinished steps to a basement, where the odor of the cleaning compound threatened to overwhelm him, though he couldn’t determine if it affected anyone else. After they had negotiated several jogs and branchings, Travert called a halt to the procession and unlocked a large wooden door in the passageway’s right hand wall.

  The space they entered held charcoal-colored benches, one covered in a jumble of equipment: glass tubes, snakelike hoses, metal fixtures glittering in the scanty light falling from small windows near the room’s bare rafters. Its far end was obscured by a brown velvet curtain. Travert drew that aside to reveal a lectern and, looming behind it, a tall, narrow booth. Or a cage - that might be a better word for it, since bars of brass stretched from its raised floor to a height crowned with a barrel-like tank and some geared apparatuses he couldn’t quite descry.

  Travert swung the cage’s barred door open as they approached. A pale face seemed to coalesce behind it, to shiver and deform itself. Then Leopold realized this was but his own reflection. The bars were backed with smooth panes of leaded crystal, as its inventor explained. At length. They helped to hold in certain vibrations which it was desirable to contain in order to concretize the evanescent portion of the targeted phenomenon. Certain chemicals in combination with steam-driven increases in atmospheric pressure wrought bridging chains of causality between the captive spiritual energy’s various potential states and resulted in manifestations tangible to all.

  Before the fumes of whatever nauseating substance was so prevalent here bested his control completely, a scuffle at the room’s entrance ensued. “Ah! Here is my favorite now-” The Hebrew urged a pair of working men forward. In their grip they propelled a struggling nigger woman who slapped and kicked them ineffectually, screeching at them an endless stream of what were doubtless heathen maledictions. Reaching the cage they flung her inside. Like a wild beast she leapt snarling to her feet and charged the door - but Travert speedily shut and secured it.

  Her stink fought strenuously against the chemical scent overlaying everything else. Raising to his nose a cologne-soaked handkerchief
he hoped would block these disagreeable odors, Leopold leaned forward to scrutinize the lectern to which Travert now advanced. It had been modified by the addition of a peculiar wheel like a gleaming halo and several switches and levers. Manipulating one of these, the doctor set off a low, heavy-sounding hum. The king looked an inquiry.

  “Power from that rank of batteries to your right-” Travert pointed to a row of crates formed of some black, dull-surfaced metal. “-Primes the mechanism while the generators build up sufficient steam.” The nigger wench had ceased her wailing imprecations and sunk to lie sullenly on the cage’s bottom. “Much as when the heat and pressure employed in vulcanization collects prior to . . .” Ensorcelled by his own arcane activities, Travert allowed the explanation to trail away. Frowning, he slid a yellow-enameled lever down to a position approximating that of a neighboring blue one.

  “Go on,” Leopold commanded. His stern tone woke Travert from his trance.

  “Whatever manifestations Fifine accords us-”

  “‘Fifine’?”

  The doctor’s sallow cheeks blushed like a maiden’s. “My name for the subject - I must call her something, and her African name is far too outlandish.”

  With the nipples of her flat dugs aimed at the cage floor like dusky arrowheads, the drab resembled no Fifine Leopold had ever known. And he had known a few. But let the man indulge his fancy. “Very well. What would you tell us about the manifestations of this ‘Fifine’?”

  “The Condenser will render them visible, palpable, subject to study and measurement. From mere ectoplasmic excrescences they will be focused and solidified-”

  “Yes, yes.” The soft hum stealing out of the rafters had been growing steadily louder. Leopold pitched his invitation above it. “Driessen, if you will do the honors?” The royal physician laid his hand over the Israelite’s and gave the lectern’s wheel a swift spin. It connected to the apparatus above the cage by a series of looping belts and toothed cogs, all of which now began to turn. They did not cease to do so when the wheel did.