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because it's the real one."
After that, Jan was able to work exclusively from a theory.
This was the same one he had first developed only days after what
he now described as the cataclysm the moment when time had changed.
He let Gail work with him. She read the history book he had uncovered
in the attic and agreed that it had to be so. For the moment at least,
he chose to keep the explanation he had devised to himself. There
was no need to make her feel worse than she already did. Not once
after their return from 2169 the Watcher's World had she asked him to
activate the time traveling equipment in case Kirk was trying to reach them.
He was beginning to think she might be coming to guess the truth, too.
His theory was not complex. It said simply that there were two
histories. One of these was true and the other was false and the sad fact was
that it was the false history into which he and
Gail and everyone else he knew had been born. His own history what
he now called the Homestead World was a lie. It had never really happened;
it should never properly have been allowed to happen at all.
American history this was the true one, the Watcher's
World included a successful Revolutionary War fought from
1775 to 1783. George Washington, the winning general in this war, was
chosen six years later as the country's first President. In
1800, Jefferson had indeed been elected but he was by then third in the line
of chief executives and not first. There had been no
slave revolt in the 185O's. Instead, the festering sore of human
slavery had been permitted to grow until, in the early sixties, a terrible
Civil War had erupted between North and South, a conflict far more
devastating than its counterpart in false history. In true history,
Lincoln was a great war President, not a healer. There were other differences,
too; the apparently minor ones a different President elected, a new
invention, an old face who did not exist were far more prevalent than the
really major ones. The whole thing culminated in a series of worldwide wars in
the late twenty-first century and there, of course, was where history at
least in the form presented in
The United States of
America
came to an end. Jan knew the next part anyway. The final conclusion of the
story. It was the Watcher.
Laying the two histories side-by-side, it was difficult to determine
which, if either, was better or worse. And what about the rest of the world?
He could only guess that it had not been directly interfered with but had
been drastically altered in any event by the changes occurring in
America. Still, the divergent endings of the two histories could not
be ignored. If his own
Homestead World had emerged new and better from the burnt-out husk
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of the old world, then in true history it was simply the old ugly
world being superseded by a newer one that was even uglier.
Kirk had said the same, of course. Kirk had said the history serviced by
the corps was a lie and now Jan knew this was so.
More than that, he now believed that changing history was the primary goal
of the corps: the rest, the research and scholars, was mere
subterfuge. Time, as he saw it, was like a great river following the
course it had followed through all eternity; it could not be easily deflected
from this path. To prevent William Waite from meeting with his friend the
Southern dandy, it was necessary to knock the dandy into a horse trough
not once but rather to do it time and time again. And so the corps had been
created to do just that it was the only means by which the river of time could
be prevented from returning to its natural banks.
Then Kirk had interceded and with apparent ease had cracked the dams
erected by the corps and true history was once more flowing effortlessly
toward the sea. Now William Waite met with his Southern friend and together
they devised the prototype for
the later Native American party. So in Dallas, Texas, on
November 22, 1963, a man named Oswald shot and killed the
President of the United States from the sixth story window of a building
overlooking the route of the President's motorcade. And so, in 1776, George
Washington succeeded in evacuating his troops from Long Island and was not
captured, tried, and killed.
But what about Kirk? Who was he and why had he acted as he had? Jan could only
speculate. His opinions did not even deserve to be called theory. But
this is what he thought: Kirk was a representative from that other
time; he was one of the Watcher's men. Somehow he (and plainly others) had
infiltrated the corps and then managed to manipulate himself into the
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