Quarks at Appomattox

by Charles L. Harness

Release: October 1983
Format: Short Story
Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Adults
Content: Definite Time Travel
Original Language: English

Colonel von Mainz travels back from the 21st century to 1865 Appomattox with weapons that can make the South win the war and thereby keep America divided, allowing Germany to win the wars of the 20th century.

This is one of the stories that I read in my dad’s Analogs at the end of my tricycle trip to Seattle.

I left the American sector of Berlin this morning, April 8, in the year two thousand five and sixty, almost exactly two hundred years in your future. I am indeed a colonel, but not in the Prussian army. I am a colonel in the Neues Schutz-Staffeln—the NSS—an underground paramilitary organization devoted to reuniting West and East Germany.

DEBUT

“Quarks at Appomattox,” in Analog, October 1983.

VARIANTS

1 English variant

TAGS(SPOILERS!)

Groupings

Cited in Time Machines by Paul J. Nahin ()

TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY: We haven’t yet mapped out the time travel itinerary.