The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith Page A

but a little. I hadn’t liked doing it any more than, say, washing dishes, but I’d do it again. I’m not for capital punishment, a useless, stupid ritual, degrading to everyone involved— except at the scene and moment of the crime, preferably at the hands of the intended victim.
    Rattlesnakes with machine guns. Wish I’d aimed for their goddamned boiler too.
     
    EXPLAINING TO CLARISSA how I’d ended up in her competent hands was difficult. I didn’t really know. I was fairly confident I wasn’t bananas: I could remember the first house I’d ever lived in, the name of my second-grade teacher, what I wore at my wedding—all the nuts and bolts. Somebody was persecuting me, but I had the persecution marks to prove it.
    This was northern Colorado. Out my second-floor bedroom window, I could see Horsetooth Mountain, an unmistakable Fort Collins landmark. I could reel off everything that had happened, from the moment the investigation began at Sixteenth and Gaylord, to the moment the bad-guys done me dirt at the corner of Genet and Tabor. But according to my shapely physician, today was Thursday, July 9, 211 A.L. After reflecting, she added that A.L. stands for Anno Liberatis.
    “That’s something, anyway. Mind if I asked what happened two hundred and eleven years ago?”
    Clarissa shook her head in bewilderment. “But how can you not know? That’s when the thirteen North American colonies declared their independence from the Kingdom of Britain. Every schoolchild knows—”
    “Maybe I need to go back to school. Let’s see … 1987, minus 211 … six, seven, seven, one—You’re right! July Fourth, 1776! Obvious!”
    She sadly shook her head again. “No, it was the Second of July—firecrackers, rockets, guns firing into the air … Lee and Adams—”
    “July second—rings a bell somehow. Well, set it aside a minute. Now tell me where we are: this city of yours doesn’t amount to a wide spot in the road, where I come from.”
    She shook her head a third time. It was becoming a habit. “Win, I’ll be what help I can, even it if means playing silly games. Laporte is a very wide spot indeed. One of the largest cities in the North American Confederacy. In—”
    “Hold it! Confederacy? Let me think—who won the Civil War?”
    “Civil War?” she blinked—at least it was a change from headshaking. “You can’t mean this country, unless you count the Whiskey—”
    “I mean the War Between the States—tariffs and slavery, Lee and Grant, Lincoln and Jefferson Davis? 1861 to 1865. Lincoln gets killed at the end—very sad.”
    Clarissa looked very sad, systematic delusions written all over her face. “Win, I don’t know what you’re talking about. In the first place, slavery was abolished in 44 A.L., very peaceably, thanks to Thomas Jefferson—”
    “Thomas Jefferson?”
    “And in the second place, I didn’t recognize those names you rattled off. Except Jefferson Davis. He was President—no, it would have been the Old United States, back then—in, oh, I just can’t remember! He wasn’t very important.”
    “Is there a third place? I can’t stand the suspense.”
    “Why, yes. There wasn’t any 1865. The date that would have been 1865 was …” She looked up at the ceiling. “89 A.L.”
    I wouldn’t give up. “Okay, who was president in 89? Wasn’t it Abraham Lincoln—or maybe Andrew Johnson?”
    “No, now you’ve asked an easy one: Lysander Spooner, one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. I don’t remember the dates, offhand, but he went on to be president for a long time after that. I guess the only president more important was Gallatin.”
    “Gallatin! Albert Gallatin?”
    “Why, yes—second President of the United States, and …” I felt dizzy. What had become of John Adams? Where were Andrew Johnson and the Civil War? What had happened to Lincoln, and who in hell’s name was Lysander Spooner?
    “Wait a minute, Clarissa, I didn’t catch that last bit.”
    She