The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Avery pauses for a long time, watching the quarter spin. “Are you me?”

“You’ll have to forgive me, Avery,” the man says. The expression on his face reminds Avery of the time he asked his father how eyelashes knew when to stop growing. “I only know so much.”

“But you know about this war that hasn’t happened, and you’re telling me about atomic bombs and going to the moon,” Avery protests. “How do you know one thing and not something else?”

“Because some things haven’t been decided yet. Call the toss, Avery.”

“Not until you tell me where I am. Where we are.”

“We aren’t anywhere. For us to be somewhere, you would have to have made a decision. And when you’ve made a decision, I won’t be here. I won’t be anywhere. I only exist in the space of your uncertainty.”

“Who are you, then? Are you God or something?”

The man shakes his head.

“Did God send you? Is there a God? How come He doesn’t decide this instead of leaving it to me?”

Still shaking his head, the man says, “I can’t answer any of those questions. I have told you all I can. You’ve already ensured that Moe Berg will attend Heisenberg’s lecture; now you decide what will happen when he does.”

“No,” Avery says. “All I’m doing is calling a coin toss. I gave you the ball. That was a decision. This isn’t.”

“True. It has to happen this way, though. Conservation of information. I violated causality by telling you what would happen as a result of your last choice. Now you have to choose without knowing, even though I could tell you, so it balances out.” Something flickers on his face, Avery’s father’s face. It looks like guilt.

“What am I deciding?”

“Whether Moe Berg kills Werner Heisenberg.”

“It’s not fair,” Avery says. “That’s why I gave you the ball, so Heisenberg wouldn’t get killed. Stupid German. I should have kept the ball. Why couldn’t I keep the ball and call the toss?”

“I already explained that. Call the toss, Avery. Collapse the wave function,” the man says. “Either it happens or it doesn’t.” “Tails,” Avery says. And it is.

And I am back in Briggs Stadium with Bobby Doerr leading off the fourth inning, and my father holding me up with his scarred welder’s hands. “Avery,” he says. “You okay, son?”

“Yeah, Dad. I’m okay.” I look around at Briggs Stadium, at the worn patches in the outfield, the flakes of rust on the bolts that hold the seats in the concrete floors. I have done something, I realize. It is all the same, but it will be different.

My father looks closely at me, concern in his eyes. “I’m okay, Dad,” I insist.

“Okay, bud,” he says. “That was your last hot dog for the day, though.”

I feel the back of my head. No lump, no sore spot, no nothing. The Tigers lose, there are no home runs hit to left-center, and the next time I read a newspaper article about Moe Berg, it says he hit six home runs over the course of a major-league career that ended in 1939.

And Werner Heisenberg dies in Munich at the ripe old age of seventy-five, and atomic bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Neil Armstrong lands on the moon instead of a man named Yevgeny or Sergei or Yuri.

And my father dies in World War II, on December 11, 1944, when a plane that had recently carried Moe Berg to France crashes in the English Channel.

I was forty-one years old, watching on television from my new house in Farmington Hills, when Neil Armstrong spoke from the surface of the moon. The Tigers had won the World Series the year before, salving the wounds from the ’67 riots that prompted me, like so many other white folks, to leave for the suburbs. I had long since given up on being an astronaut.

My father had been dead for nearly twenty-five years.

Ripples, the man with my father’s face had said. Ripples propagate until they run into something, or until entropy robs them of their energy and they subside back into the flat surface of the water. I caught a ball once, at Briggs Stadium in the summer of 1940, and my father helped me up and said, “Look at you, Avery my boy.”

Look at me, Dad. Briggs Stadium has been Tiger Stadium for thirty-five years now, and the welder’s son from East Detroit became an executive with a custom-built home in the suburbs, and I saved Werner Heisenberg’s life, and maybe I cost you yours.

I sit on the porch of my house in Maine, watching the waves come in and wondering where they come from. I wonder where the still point is, the place where waves are born and decisions hang between heads and tails.

Sometimes I talk to myself. More often I fall asleep and the sea breeze brings me dreams of men who are almost my father.

When I talk to myself, this is the question: If you had called heads, would your father be alive? If Moe Berg had never gone to France with Werner Heisenberg’s life in his hands, a different plane would have been waiting for Dad at the cratered airstrip outside of Lyon.

Would that other plane have crashed?

I was twelve years old. I thought I did the right thing.

Would Moe Berg’s seventh home run have put my father on a different plane?

The cat is alive. The cat is dead.