“So where is it?” Ratner asked. “Where is the demonstration?”
Klondike had personally escorted his boss down hallways and through workshops from the director’s office to his own lab, deep in the bowels of the building.
“Right through there,” Klondike said, gesturing to the closed door with the sign that read: ROOM TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTOR TEST IN PROGRESS.
ENTRY BY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!
Feeling flushed with triumph, Ratner flung open the insulated door and stepped into a solid wall of frozen air. He banged his nose painfully and bounced off, staggering back into Klondike’s waiting arms.
Eyes tearful, nose throbbing, he could see dimly through the frozen-solid air a small magnet coil sitting atop a lab bench. It was a superconductor, of course, working fine in the room temperature of that particular room.
Klondike smiled grimly. “There it is, boss, just like management asked for. I couldn’t raise the bridge so I lowered the river.”
THE CAFÉ COUP
This tale also deals with time travel, and the intriguing question of whether history could be changed by time travelers.
One of the standard arguments against the possibility of time travel is that if time travel actually existed, time travelers would be deliberately or accidentally changing history. Since we have not seen our history changing, time travel has not happened. If it hasn’t happened yet, it never will. QED.
But if time travelers were altering history, would we notice? Or would our history books and even our memories be changed each time a time traveler finagled with our past?
Leaving aside such philosophical speculations, this story originated in a panel discussion of time travel at a science-fiction convention. It occurred to me during the panel’s discussion of time-travel stones that while many, many tales have been written about a world in which Nazi Germany won World War II, no one that I know of has tackled the idea of having Imperial Germany win World War I. Introduction to “The Café Coup”
The Kaiser’s Germany actually came very close to winning the First World War. It was the intervention of the United States, brought about by U-boat sinkings of ships with Americans aboard them, that turned the tide against Germany.
Prevent the sinking of the Lusitania, I reasoned, and Germany could win World War I. In a victorious Germany, Hitler would never have risen to power. No Hitler, no World War II. No Holocaust. No Hiroshima.
Maybe.
Paris was not friendly to Americans in the soft springtime of 1922. The French didn’t care much for the English, either, and they hated the victorious Germans, of course.
I couldn’t blame them very much. The Great War had been over for more than three years, yet Paris had still not recovered its gaiety, its light and color, despite the hordes of boisterous German tourists who spent so freely on the boulevards. More likely, because of them.
I sat in one of the crowded sidewalk cafes beneath a splendid warm sun, waiting for my lovely wife to show up. Because of all the Germans, I was forced to share my minuscule round table with a tall, gaunt Frenchman who looked me over with suspicious eyes.
“You are an American?” he asked, looking down his prominent nose at me. His accent was worse than mine, certainly not Parisian.
“No,” I answered truthfully. Then I lied, “I’m from New Zealand.” It was as far away in distance as my real birthplace was in time.
“Ah,” he said with an exhalation of breath that was somewhere between a sigh and a snort. “Your countrymen fought well at Gallipoli. Were you there?”
“No,” I said. “I was too young.”
That apparently puzzled him. Obviously I was of an age to fight in the Great War. But in fact, I hadn’t been born when the British Empire troops were decimated at Gallipoli. I hadn’t been born in the twentieth century at all.
“Were you in the war?” I asked needlessly.
“But certainly. To the very last moment I fought the Boche.”
“It was a great tragedy.”
“The Americans betrayed us,” he muttered.
My brows rose a few millimeters. He was quite tall for a Frenchman, but painfully thin. Half starved. Even his eyes looked hungry. The inflation, of course. It cost a basketful of francs, literally, to buy a loaf of bread. I wondered how he could afford the price of an aperitif. Despite the warm afternoon he had wrapped himself in a shabby old leather coat, worn shiny at the elbows.
From what I could see there were hardly any Frenchmen in the cafe, mostly raucous Germans roaring with laughter and heartily pounding on the little tables as they bellowed for more beer. To my amazement, the waiters had learned to speak German.
“Wilson,” my companion continued bitterly. “He had the gall to speak of Lafayette.”
“I thought that the American president was the one who arranged the armistice.”
“Yes, with his fourteen points. Fourteen daggers plunged into the heart of France.”
“Really?”
“The Americans should have entered the war on our side! Instead they sat idly by and watched us bleed to death while their bankers extorted every gram of gold we possessed.”
