Agent of Byzantium

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Sections of this book have appeared in different form in the July 1985, November 1985, and January 1986 issues of Amazing Science Fiction Stories, and in the August 1986, March 1987, April 1987 and December 1989 issues of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

For John and Steve, who went through it with me.

There have been so many occasions when the fate of humanity seems to have hung on the outcome of a single event that might have fallen this way or that with equal probability. What if Lincoln had said “I don’t feel like going to the theater tonight, Mother. I have a headache.” Or what if Gavrilo Princip’s gun had misfired when he aimed it at Franz Ferdinand of Austria?

My own favorite “if of history” involves a scientific discovery. Leo Szilard was a Hungarian scientist who had been driven out of Europe by Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies. He knew that uranium fission, recently discovered, might make a nuclear bomb possible and he wanted to be sure Hitler didn’t get it first. He labored to get scientists in the field to practice voluntary secrecy and keep their discoveries to themselves.

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