I was nine years old, and I had engineered the rise of Richard Milhous Nixon to the Presidency rather than John F. Kennedy. Kennedy got the Massachusetts senatorship as a consolation prize, and avoided a trip to Dallas. America dodged the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then the Vietnam War.



Nixon was far too wily and strategic and ruthless, let’s not forget that one, to get drawn into such a conflict. Even though George Kennan told America’s elites that we needed to fight so as to give the Russians time to mellow out; instead Nixon kept the fire on them.



First he went to China, and turned an enemy into an ally of convenience, and he got the Nobel Peace Prize for this. I saw this on our b&w television and my eyes trained by modern day television watching (that is late ninties) saw the smirk in his eyes which showed what he really thought of that joke of a Prize usually given to dictators.



The Russians began the Berlin blockade, and Nixon began war games nearby with tanks. The blockade was hastily papered over as a misunderstanding. And then when he had the Bear on the ropes, Nixon went to Moscow.



I was enormously frustrated to find the meeting sealed, but both sides agreed to demilitarize Europe. The generals howled that we could not afford to leave Europe because it would take us weeks to resupply, and only days for the Russians to move in.



Still, it happened, and if Nixon had not already gotten the Peace Prize, he would have then. A fair number of fundamentalist churches speculated that he was the antichrist.



But I saw a method to his madness, after a while. Europe was forced to rearm itself with our help. In effect both sides began to have their puppets start an arms race, and since the Soviets had been ahead of us, starting over again at zero for both was an advantage.



And it freed our forces to maneuver around the globe, and defuse the Cuban exportation of mercenaries. And since we had not promised Cuba that we would not attack things were rather more nervous in Havana.



Nixon won in a landslide.



But enough about international politics, I was growing from eight to twelve. I made several friends of note during this time. We played basketball, and my insistence on running, and more running all summer long up to five and ten miles a day paid off. Even though we weren’t that talented, we worked together well, and we ran our opposition into the ground on our way to the semi-finals for the City Championship in our freshman year.



My friends had thought I was nuts; now they half-thought I was inspired.



Another thing I showed them the summer of ‘62 was a little game I called Dungeons & Dragons. I privately apologized to the spirit of Gygax, but I figured he’d invent something else cool, and the world would be a much better place with RPG’s a decade earlier. And I made a point of getting a number of ministers to put blurbs praising the game on the back cover.



I started the business with my Dad as official president, but I did all the work with my buds. The groundwork was not as well layed as in ‘73, but then I had a long history of future knowledge about games to help me out.



So the mail-order business was doing great in a few years, and I started advertising in Popular Science and some war-gaming magazines.



The other friend I had who thought the whole game was “stupid”, and she was the first person in this universe to sneer publically at “hack-and-slash” gaming as not being a story worthy of the name, was a young girl with a sad look, and sharp eyes, and big glasses.



She was right about it being hack-and-slash. Vampire would simply not have appealed. These were teenage boys in the sixties; they wanted to kill things and loot the bodies. It did remind me that if I could manage to alleviate the girl shortage in gaming that many geeks would thank me. I’d have to think about that one.



The girl was a poet, and a writer, and although I was better than her, that was practice, not natural talent. In fact her first words to me after reading one of my reports were…



“You have a very old soul.”



This was spookily close to the mark, seeing as I had a three hundred year old soul in a ten year old boy’s body. I almost turned around and ran right then.



She did not fit in. Her block sat around and played backgammon and charades. Mine played volleyball. I enjoyed volleyball; she hated backgammon and conformity and yearned to stretch her wings and be free.



Our town and our time were not friendly to non-conformists who would rather write scarily good poetry than play backgammon.



She started writing darker poetry, and frankly I was worried for her. Not right now, but in years to come.



Nixon had cracked down on the mobs, and despite some rather cowardly bits of hesitation which he fixed by firing the administrators, the crackdown held. Their were marches, but they were peaceful by and large.



Thing is my friend’s parents decided to follow Nixon’s example. Problem was that she was a genuine artist and noncomformist. Most of those in the street were goof-offs, or people seeking political power, but not willing to pay a hard price for it. My friend was willing to pay.



She had come to the conclusion at the age of eleven that integrity was worth imprisonment. More courageous than ninety-nine percent of the population, and a bit lack in perspective as well. Her parents threatened a mental hospital, and she dared them to do it.



I tried to intervene, but got told roundly to stay out of their business. So, no surprise, I was ticked off which probably influenced my choice of tactics.



A little b&e followed by swiping of the audio tapes and the application for admittance files, and the theft of several valuable pieces of electronics which I dumped at the mission across town combined with some vandalism resulted in a dead standstill to their lives for several weeks as they pulled things back together.



Then I approached my friend with an offer. Publication to a wide audience, for pay, good pay indeed. I just needed poetry to fit into my D&D modules. And poetry that would appeal to girls; make them buy the modules.



She said no. Then she yelled she would never be a sell-out; especially to such a low-class outfit as mine. I mentioned our sales figures as compared to a leading poetry magazine. She said yes, and that poetry annoyed many a guy who wrote me long letters complaining about it while they ordered the next module. The girls letters started to turn up as well, but they were shorter and used words like “incredibly moving”.



I sent an envelope with money to cover twice the cost of the stolen items in the mail a month later. Naturally, it was anonymous.



On the national political scene, things were less polarized. Nixon was not so suspicious, and without Vietnam to terrorize a generation and with firm, but polite police force we had a much calmer Sixties.



The Northern Democrats and the Republican Party still united to do away with Jim Crow, and although I think Goldwater raised some good points about state’s rights, I couldn’t say he was right. And I enjoyed very much the classic D&D module where the paladins rescued some slaves from a swampland, and gave them swords to help them get the right to control their own city by voting. Of course the paladins fought in front. And the orcs who opposed this had wolves on leashes. Heh.



There was no Race to the Moon. Russia was finding out that without its armies in Eastern Europe and with Warsaw Pact owning their own weapons that independence of thought was circulating through the land. Heh. I think Nixon planned it.



We did have a race to orbit and a race to make cheap heavy-lift capability. A lot more astronauts died in the race, but we went a lot faster too. X Prizes and such helped a lot, but I made a point of memorizing the names of everyone who died in the space race. Because in a very real sense, I had chosen their destiny.



Prague Spring came and melted into Summer. They did not openly defy the Bear, but liberalization was very evident. Even if they called it Marxist-Leninist; it was more a Nordic socialism.



Robert Dole, the vice-president went on to win in 1968, and he did show some of his wit in the fight.



We had a smaller, but more effective socialism than LBJ’s Great Society. This made it more popular, and lessened the backlash. The Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the Conservative Movement in general were looking like non-starters in this timeline. It took quite a bit to offend the Christians who had really wanted to stay home and out of politics; in this reality it looked like they would.



So we baby-stepped quite successfully toward liberalism. Woodstock still happened, and I went to see it. It was cool in that everybody was so pumped up, but at the same time, it wasn’t all that much. I’ve been to lots better concerts.



That reminded me. I had two people I wanted to see in 1969. One, I used my D&D connection to make an offer to the King to have him in a gaming module. I could not begin to pay him what he was worth, but he was a nice guy, and I was representing a new, cool thing, so we met for lunch. I used it to point out the errors of drugs. Finally, he got a little ticked at me, and asked me what I knew.

So I told him. What had happened. Who I was. All that. I hoped it helped.



Then I went to see Gygax, and he was a lot easier to meet, if harder to track down. I offered him and Arneson a combined twenty-five percent share in my company if they would work for TSR, Inc. Naturally, they took it, and I started his first day, by announcing that within six weeks I was going to take a sabbattical, and thus he would be president. He gulped and jumped in.



I bought out most of my friends at the time, and cheerily advised them that they might want to invest say ten percent of their money in a company that would be starting up soon I thought. The company would be run by a guy named Gates. Thing is I could be wrong. Either my memory did not have the data needed, or the ripple of my changes could have altered history such that Microsoft never takes over the world. But ten percent was a good bet balanced between an affordable loss and great gain, I thought.



The Dole Presidency went on without too much of note. He was more of a caretaker president although he did show his inner steel when informing Pakistan that it did not need to possess nuclear weapons. The U.S. would guarantee the security of the Kashimir border, and in light of that he started to negotiate with India for them to drop their nukes into our hands. I was seeing something surprising; Nuclear De-proliferation looked doable in this world. In fact, there was some talk, fairly serious, I think about Russia and the US drawing down their nukes to a lower level.



I began going to SF cons in seventy on a serious basis, and meeting a lot of my favorite writers. Asimov, Zelazny, Pournelle, and a bunch of others who autographed my little book. I had them autograph their novels as well, but I figured I could not take everything with me to the next world whenever that was, so I had my little book as well.



The next two years were great. Helping to organize world cons and going to college to study foreign languages and mathematics was a blast. And at college, I met some of the people in the “Chicago School” of free-market economics which was pretty cool.



My friends were doing well; my parents were well set-up (and better than they knew seeing as I had some trust funds set up for them); my younger sister who hardly enters this piece was just entering high school and badgering me for a car which I intened to get her after I hired a very talented fellow off the racecar circuit to teach her and scare some sense into her, but other than her driving habits and her badgering she was great.



The Cold War had been running hotter than in our timeline. But it still kept cool, and I thought I could see signs the Russians were going to crack early without doing something unthinkable.



Seventy-two came and new elections, and I found myself gritting my teeth just a bit as I headed toward the voting booth, I was going to …vote Democratic. The thought made me a little queasy, but then I consoled myself that it was for Ronald Reagan. Reagan beat Dole, and soon started to say some speeches that sounded awful familiar.

Stuff about “an evil empire” and the “ashheap of history” came floating out of his golden throat. The Russians met him in Reykavik, and just like in my timeline they demanded he give up his latest weapons program in exchange for almost everything he wanted. He refused, and that was the begining of the end for World Communism.



It made me wonder if there was something fated about the city of Reykavik.



The oil shock of ‘73 hit us hard, and so we began to develop oil in Alaska and the North Sea helped along by some anonymous notes sent to certain ambitious petroleum engineers. And Reagan told the Saudi’s what for which broke the cartel over the next year.



Still, it was pretty severe, but no “stagflation”, and no double-digit inflation, and the Reagan tax cuts helped too. We got back on our feet, and watched the Wall come down in Seventy-Five.



The Bicentennial Celebration in ‘76 was a lot better than in my timeline. I have a theory, when it comes to a national party, you want the Republicans in charge. They throw better parties, or extravaganzas. But then Reagan was a Democrat, so there goes my theory.



I got a job translating German professional math papers into English after college, and wished I could be back home in my own timeline. There had been no me, and none I cared for here; I had checked.



Reagan came to Chicago, and so I went to see the parade. I picked the best spot for him to stop and have an “impromptu” chat with the crowd. And my guess was right. He stopped and started charming the crowd, and then I saw him, the Assasin. Not Hinckley, but some other madman stood but ten feet away from me and a few feet forward. He stood out because he had a grim look on his face in this crowd of adoring fans.



As I pushed toward him shouting “Gun!” to little avail in the midst of the cheers, I wondered about fate again. Maybe certain people are fated to meet certain types of things in their lives.



He pulled the gun out with terrible form, but I could see he had the luck of those who don’t care about life. He was dead on target despite holding his gun high and all wrong.



So, I dove at him using a nearby too large fellow as a springboard rather than an obstacle. I came down on him, and started to go over him, and to fall head-first to the ground. He pulled the gun’s trigger as I looked into his stark, staring insane eyes; as my weight threw him down; as I thought “drat, I hate this.”; he shot me between the eyes, and I versed out on national television.



Poof. The resulting little cloud of dust covered one assasin face-down on the ground with a Secret Service revolver pressed into his neck.



And I never got to find out if Reagan’s plan to de-nuclearize the whole planet would work.



Tadeusz