Chapter VIII: Part 8

The typewriter I have seen. It has developed along different and clumsier lines; inevitably, I suppose, given initial divergence. It may mean greater advances; more likely not. The universal use of gaslight must be far in the future if it is to come at all; certainly its advent is delayed by all this talk of inventing electric illumination. If we couldnt put electricity to work it’s unlikely my new contemporaries will be able to. Why, they havent even made the telegraph cheap and convenient.

And something like HX-1? It is inconceivable. Could it be that in destroying the future in which Haggershaven existed I have also destroyed the only dimension in which time travel was possible?

So strangely easily I can write the words, “I destroyed.”

Catty.

But what of Tyss’s philosophy? Is it possible I shall be condemned to repeat the destruction throughout eternity? Have I written these lines an infinite number of times before? Or is the mercy envisaged by Enfandin a reality? And what of Barbara’s expression as she bade me goodbye? Could she possibly

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Editorial note by Frederick Winter Thammis: Quite recently, in the summer of 1953 to be exact, I commissioned the remodelling of my family home near York, Pennsylvania. Among the bundles of old books and papers stored in the attic was a box of personal effects, labelled “H M Backmaker.” In it was the manuscript concluding with an unfinished sentence, reproduced above.

My father used to tell me that when he was a boy there was an old man living on the farm, nominally as a hired hand, but actually as a pensioner, since he was beyond the age of useful labor. My father said the children considered him not quite right in his mind, but very entertaining, for he often repeated long, disjointed narratives of an impossible world and an impossible society which they found as fascinating as the Oz books. On looking back, he said, Old Hodge talked like an educated man, but this might simply be the impression of young, uncultivated minds.

Clearly it was in some attempt to give form and unity to his tales that the old man wrote his fable down, and then was too shy to submit it for publication. This is the only reasonable way to account for its existence. Of course he says he wrote it in 1877, when he was far from old, and disconcertingly, analysis of the paper shows it might have been written then.

Two other items should be noted. In the box of Backmaker’s belongings there was a watch of unknown manufacture and unique design. Housed in a cheap nickel case, the jeweled movement is of extraordinary precision and delicacy. The face has two dials, independently set and wound.

The second is a quotation. It can be matched by similar quotations in any of half a hundred volumes on the Civil War. I pick this only because it is handy. From W. E. Woodward’s _Years of Madness_, p. 202:

“ ... Union troops that night and next morning took a position on Cemetery Hill and Round Top.... The Confederates could have occupied this position but they failed to do so. It was an error with momentous consequences.”

About Ward Moore

On the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, there is a small hill called Little Round Top. One morning in July, 1863, the Confederate Army made the tactical error of not occupying this hill. It was a mistake that cost them victory in a battle which—in the view of many historians—was the turning point of the Civil War. In the ninety years since Gettysburg one question has never been far from the minds of most Southerners—and a good many Yankees, too: What if the battle had gone the other way, what if the South had won the war? Ward Moore—a Northerner himself—has settled the matter at last in a book that might be called imaginative historical fiction, an excursion into the world of might-have-been so filled with exact and convincing detail that, for a few hours, it seems true.

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The author of _Bring the Jubilee_ was born in Madison, New Jersey, in 1903. “From the age of five,” he writes, “books have been for me the essential narcotic; as a natural consequence I detested school. When this detestation did not bring on psychosomatic illnesses to save me from the hated classrooms, I was not above malingering or playing hooky—now a lost art, but one practiced in my generation. Three weeks short of graduation I quit high school and have not been inside a school house since, except to vote.

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“My first short story was written at the age of eleven and was followed by a flood of juvenilia, some little of which was unfortunately published. Happily, markets and industry died simultaneously; I wrote only desultorily until my first novel _Breathe the Air Again_ was published in 1942. This was acclaimed by Max Eastman in the American Mercury, who predicted that I would fall heir to ‘the cloak of Upton Sinclair.’ Something went wrong with the tailoring arrangements; my next novel was _Greener Than You Think_ (Sloane, 1947), a satirical fantasy.”

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In addition to these two novels, Mr. Moore has published a number of short stories in such disparate media as Amazing Stories and Harper’s Bazaar, Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Reporter, Science Fiction Quarterly and Tomorrow.

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He concludes: “I have been intensely interested in the history of the Civil War ever since—at the age of six—I came across a book with nice black woodcuts showing the firing on Fort Sumter and the burning of Richmond. As an amateur I’ve read hundreds of dull volumes and a score of fascinating ones on the Irrepressible Conflict. A novel based on the concept ‘what would have happened if the South had won at Gettysburg,’ was practically inevitable. _Bring the Jubilee_ is it.”

_The Idea Behind_

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