Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (297 page)

The straggling Northerners had passed me by with the clouded perception of the retreating. These Southrons, however, were steadfastly attentive to every sight and sound. Too late I realized the difficulty of remaining unnoticed by such sharp, experienced eyes. Even as I berated myself for my stupidity, a great, whiskery fellow in what must once have been a stylish bottle-green coat pointed his gun at me.

“Yank here boys!” Then to me, “What you doing here, fella?”

Three or four came up and surrounded me curiously. “Funniest lookin’ damyank I ever did see. Looks like he just fell out of a bathtub.”

Since I had walked all night on dusty roads I could only think their standards of cleanliness were not high. And indeed this was confirmed by the smell coming from them: the stink of sweat, of clothes long slept in, of unwashed feet and stale tobacco.

“I’m a noncombatant,” I said foolishly.

“Whazzat?” asked the beard. “Some kind of Baptist?”

“Naw,” corrected one of the others. “It’s a law-word. Means not all right in the head.”

“Looks all right in the foot though. Let’s see your boots, Yank. Mine’s sure wore out.”

What terrified me now was not the thought of my boots being stolen, or of being treated as a prisoner, or even the remote chance of being shot as a spy. A greater; more indefinite catastrophe was threatened by my exposure. These men were the advance company of a regiment due to sweep through the orchard and the wheat field, explore that bit of wild ground known as the Devil’s Den, and climb up Little Round Top closely followed by an entire Confederate brigade. This was the brigade which held the Round Top for several hours until artillery was brought up, artillery which dominated the entire field and gave the South victory at Gettysburg.

There was no allowance for a pause, no matter how trifling, in the peach orchard, in any of the accounts I’d read or heard of. The hazard Barbara had warned so insistently against had happened. I had been discovered, and the mere discovery had altered the course of history.

I tried to shrug it off. Delay of a few minutes could hardly make a significant difference. All historians agreed that the capture of the Round Tops was an inevitability; the Confederates would have been foolish to overlook them—in fact it was hardly possible they could, prominent as they were both on maps and in physical reality—and they had occupied them hours before the Federals made a belated attempt to take them. I had been unbelievably stupid to expose myself, but I had created no repercussions likely to spread beyond the next few minutes.

“Said let’s see them boots. Ain’t got all day to wait.”

A tall officer with a pointed imperial and a sandy, faintly reddish mustache whose curling ends shone waxily came up, revolver in hand. “What’s going on here?”

“Just a Yank, Cap’n. Making a little change of footgear.” The tone was surly, almost insolent.

The galloons on the officer’s sleeve told me the title was not honorary. “I’m a civilian, Captain,” I protested. “I realize I have no business here.”

The captain looked at me coldly, with an expression of disdainful contempt. “Local man?” he asked.

“Not exactly. I’m from York.”

“Too bad. Thought you could tell me about the Yanks up ahead. Jenks, leave the civilian gentleman in full possession of his boots.”

There was rage behind that sneer, a hateful anger apparently directed at me for being a civilian, at his men for their obvious lack of respect, at the battle, the world. I suddenly realized his face was intimately familiar. Irritatingly, because I could connect it with no name, place, or circumstance.

“How long have you been in this orchard, Mister Civilian-from-York?”

The effort to identify him nagged me, working in the depths of my mind, obtruding even into that top layer which was concerned with what was going on.

What was going on?
Too bad. Thought you could tell me about the Yanks up ahead. How long have you been in this orchard?

Yanks up ahead? There weren’t any. There wouldn’t be, for hours.

“I said, ‘How long you been in this orchard?’

Probably an officer later promoted to rank prominent enough to have his picture in one of the minor narratives. Yet I was certain his face was no likeness I’d seen once in a steel engraving and dismissed. These were features often encountered.

“Sure like to have them boots. If we ain’t fightin’ for Yankee boots, what the hell we fightin’ for?”

What could I say? That I’d been in the orchard for half an hour? The next question was bound to be, Had I seen Federal troops? Whichever way I answered I would be betraying my role of spectator.

“Hey Cap’n—this fella knows something. Lookit the silly grin!”

Was I smiling? In what? Terror? Perplexity? In the mere effort of keeping silent, so as to be involved no further?

“Tell yah—he’s laughin’ cuz he knows somethin’!”

Let them hang me, let them strip me of my boots; from here on I was dumb as dear Catty had been once.

“Out with it, man—you’re in a tight spot. Are there Yanks up ahead?”

The confusion in my mind approached chaos. If I knew the captain’s eventual rank I could place him. Colonel So-and-so. Brigadier-General Blank. What had happened? Why had I let myself be discovered? Why had I spoken at all and made silence so hard now?

“Yanks up ahead—they’s Yanks up ahead!”

“Quiet you! I asked him—he didn’t say there were Yanks ahead.”

“Hay! Damyanks up above. Goin’ to mow us down!”

“Fella says the bluebellies are layin’ fur us!”

Had the lie been in my mind, to be telepathically plucked by the excited soldiers? Was even silence no refuge from participation?

“Man here spotted the whole Fed artillery up above, trained on us!”

“Pull back, boys! Pull back!”

I’d read often enough of the epidemic quality of a perfectly unreasonable notion. A misunderstood word, a baseless rumor, an impossible report, was often enough to set a troop of armed men—squad or army—into senseless mob action. Sometimes the infection made for feats of heroism, sometimes for panic. This was certainly less than panic, but my nervous, meaningless smile conveyed a message I had never sent.

“It’s a trap. Pull back boys—let’s get away from these trees and out where we can see the Yanks!”

The captain whirled on his men. “Here, damn you,” he shouted furiously, “you all gone crazy? The man said nothing. There’s no trap!”

The men moved slowly, sullenly away. “I heard him,” one of them muttered, looking accusingly toward me.

The captain’s shout became a yell. “Come back here! Back here, I say!”

His raging stride overtook the still irresolute men. He grabbed the one called Jenks by the shoulder and whirled him about. Jenks tried to jerk free. There was fear on his face, and hate. “Leave me go, damn you,” he screamed. “Leave me go!”

The captain yelled at his men again. Jenks snatched at the pistol with his left hand; the officer pulled the gun away. Jenks brought his musket upright against the captain’s body, the muzzle just under his chin, and pushed— as though the firearm somehow gave him leverage. They wrestled briefly, then the musket went off.

The captain’s hat flew upward, and for an instant he stood, bareheaded, in the private’s embrace. Then he fell. Jenks wrenched his musket free and disappeared.

When I came out of my shock I walked over to the body. The face had been blown off. Shreds of human meat dribbled bloodily on the gray collar and soiled the fashionably long hair. I had killed a man. Through my interference with the past I had killed a man who had been destined to longer life and even some measure of fame. I was the guilty sorcerer’s apprentice.

I stooped down to put my hands inside his coat for papers which would tell me who he was and satisfy the curiosity which still basely persisted. It was not shame which stopped me. Just nausea, and remorse.

* * * *

I saw the Battle of Gettysburg. I saw it with all the unique advantages of a professional historian thoroughly conversant with the patterns, the movements, the details, who knows where to look for the coming dramatic moment, the recorded decisive stroke. I fulfilled the chroniclers’ dream.

It was a nightmare.

* * * *

To begin with, I slept. I slept not far from the captain’s body in the peach orchard. This was not callousness, but physical and emotional exhaustion. When I went to sleep the guns were thundering; when I woke they were thundering louder. It was late afternoon. I thought immediately, this is the time for the futile Union charge against the Round Tops.

But the guns were not sounding from there. All the roar was northward, from the town. I knew how the battle went; I had studied it for years. Only now it wasn’t happening the way it was written down in the books.

True, the first day was a Confederate victory. But it was not the victory we knew. It was just a little different, just a little short of the triumph recorded. And on the second day, instead of the Confederates getting astride the Taneytown Road and into the position from which they tore Meade’s army to bits from three sides, I witnessed a terrible encounter in the peach orchard and the wheat field—places known to be safely behind the Southron lines.

All my life I’d heard of Pickett’s charge on the third day. Of how the disorganized Federals were given the final killing blow in their vitals. Well, I saw Pickett’s charge on the third day, and it was not the same charge in the historic place. It was a futile attempt to storm superior positions (positions, by established fact, in Lee’s hands since July 1) ending in slaughter and defeat.

Defeat for the South, not the North. Meade’s army was not broken; the Confederates could not scatter and pursue them now. The capitulation, if it ever took place, would come under different circumstances. The independence of the Confederate States might not be acknowledged for years. If at all.

All because the North held the Round Tops.

Years more of killing, and possibly further years of guerrilla warfare. Thousands and thousands of dead, their blood on my hands. A poisoned continent, an inheritance of hate. Because of me.

I cannot tell you how I got back to York. If I walked, it was somnambulistically. Possibly I rode the railroad or in a farmer’s cart. Part of my mind, a tiny part that kept coming back to pierce me no matter how often I crushed it out, remembered those who died, those who would have lived, but for me. Another part was concerned only with the longing to get back to my own time, to the Haven, to Catty. A much larger part was simply blank, except for the awesome, incredible knowledge that the past could be changed—that the past
had
been changed.

I must have wound my watch—Barbara’s watch—for it was ten o’clock on the night of July 4 when I got to the barn. Ten o’clock by 1863 time; the other dial showed it to be 8:40, that would be twenty of nine in the morning, 1952 time. In two hours I would be home, safe from the nightmare of happenings that never happened, of guilt for the deaths of men not supposed to die, of the awful responsibility of playing destiny. If I could not persuade Barbara to smash her damnable contrivance I would do so myself.

The dogs barked madly, but I was sure no one heeded. It was the Fourth of July, and a day of victory and rejoicing for all Pennsylvanians. I stole into the barn and settled myself in the exact center, even daring the use of a match, my last one, to be sure I’d be directly under the reflector when it materialized.

I could not sleep, though I longed to blot out the horror and wake in my own time. Detail by detail I went over what I had seen, superimposing it like a palimpsest upon the history I’d always known. Sleep would have kept me from this wretched compulsion and from questioning my sanity, but I could not sleep.

I have heard that in moments of overwhelming shock some irrelevancy, some inconsequential matter persistently forces itself on the attention. The criminal facing execution thinks, not of his imminent fate or of his crime, but of the cigarette stub he left burning in his cell. The bereaved widow dwells, not on her lost husband, but on tomorrow’s laundry. So it was with me. Behind that part of my mind reliving the past three days, a more elementary part gnawed at the identification of the slain captain.

I knew that face. Particularly did I know that face set in a sneer, distorted with anger. But I could not remember it in Confederate uniform. I could not remember it with sandy mustaches. And yet the sandy, reddish hair, revealed in that terrible moment when his hat flew off, was as familiar as part of the face. Oh, I thought, if I could only place it once and for all and free my mind at least of this trivial thing.

I wished there were some way I could have seen the watch, to concentrate on the creeping progress of the hands and distract myself from the wave after wave of wretched meditations which flowed over me. But the moonlight was not strong enough to make the face distinguishable, much less the figures on the dials. There was no narcotic.

As one always is at such times I was convinced the appointed moment had passed unnoticed. Something had gone wrong. Over and over I had to tell myself that minutes seem hours in the waiting dark; it might feel like two or three in the morning to me; it was probably barely eleven. No use. A minute—or an hour or a second—later I was again positive midnight had passed.

Finally I began to suffer a monstrous illusion. I began to think it was getting lighter. That dawn was coming. Of course, I knew it could not be; what I fancied lifting darkness was only a sick condition of swollen, overtired eyes. Dawn does not come to Pennsylvania at midnight, and it was not yet midnight. At midnight I would be back at Haggershaven, in 1952.

Even when the barn was fully lighted by the rising sun and I could see the cattle peaceful in their stalls I refused to believe what I saw. I took out my watch only to find something had disturbed the works; the hands registered five o’clock. Even when the farmer, milk pails over arm, started in surprise, exclaiming, “Hey, what you doing here?”—even then, I did not believe.