TO MAKE A HERO
By RANDALL GARRETT
Illustrated by EMSH
Fraud? Larceny? Murder? All in a days work
to Leland Hale—the savior of Cardigan's Green!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity October 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Randall Garrett got to wondering, recently, what kind ofstories the "true adventure" magazines of the future would publish. ToMake a Hero is his own answer to the question. It's science fictiontold from a historian's viewpoint—an attempt to set the "record"straight on one Leland Hale, a hero who is guaranteed to fascinate you,even if you hate him!
"One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero; numbers sanctify thecrime."—Porteus
CHAPTER I
History, by any reckoning, is a fluid thing. Once a thing has happened,no instrument yet devised by man can show exactly what it was in minutedetail. All of the data simply cannot be recovered.
In spite of this, if Man were an intellectually honest animal, itwouldn't be too difficult to get a reasonably accurate picture of thepast. At least the data that could be recovered and retained wouldshow a reasonably distinct picture of long gone events and theirrelationship to the present.
But Man isn't that kind of creature. Once men discovered the factthat the events of tomorrow are based on what is happening today, itdidn't take them long to reach the conclusion that changing the pastcould change the present. Words are magic, and the more cleverly andpowerfully they are connected together, the more magic they become.The ancient "historians" of Babylon, Egypt, Israel, Sumeria, Judea,and Rome did not conceive of themselves as liars when they distortedhistory to conform to their own beliefs; they were convinced that ifwhat they wrote were accepted as true, then it was true. Word magichad changed the past to conform to the present.
Now, one would suppose that, as methods of recording and verifying thecontemporary happenings of a culture became more and more efficient andmore easily correlated, the ability to change the past would becomemore difficult. Not true. The actual records of the past are not readby the average man; he is normally exposed only to biased, carefullyselected excerpts from the past.
Granted, with a few thousand civilized and tens of thousandssemi-civilized planets in the occupied galaxy, the correlation of datais difficult. But, nonetheless, errors of the magnitude of the one madein the history of Cardigan's Green shouldn't be committed.
The average man doesn't give two hoots in hell about historical truth;he would much rather have romantic legends and historic myths. Thestory of Cardigan's Green is a case in point.
Call this a debunking spree if you wish, but the facts can be foundin the archives of the Interstellar Police and the InterstellarHealth Commission; and the news recordings on several nearby planetsuphold the story to a certain extent, although the beginnings of thedistortion were already visible.
Time and space have a tendency to dilute truth, and it is the job ofthe honest historian to distill the essence from the mixture.
The story proper begins nearly a century ago, just before Leland Halel