At a small enough scale, nothing is deterministic. The distinction between waves and particles becomes meaningless, at least in terms of the future. But in the present, that tiniest Planck time, the tick of the universe's clock, one thing or another must happen—the wave function collapses to a point of certainty.
Except when it doesn't. Every now and then, the wave function collapses to two points, both certain, and so both happen. In most cases, the churning chaos of Brownian motion washes away the differences, and the wave function converges again. But if, in a very rare case, the particle behavior influences others in a manner starts a positive feedback, the wave function never properly converges. A switch is laid down, a second track—and both are followed.
It was over a patch of nondescript desert in Syria that such an event occurred, in the year 1947. Anyone standing there would have seen a startling sight—a massive airplane, plummeting to earth from the east, flames trailing from two engines, and other points on the body.
Within the plane, the passengers screamed or prayed. A man, the copilot, hurried from the cockpit, trying to calm them and ensure they were all fastened in their seats. He scrambled across the wildly pitching deck, approaching a woman who couldn't fasten her seatbelt—
The aluminum of the plane's wing, softened by the fire's heat, suddenly yielded. The number two engine came free, plummeting away, the fuel lines were exposed, and fuel spurted forth. Fire spread everywhere it could—
The copilot had strapped himself into a seat, but he pulled himself loose, seeing another woman, in hysterics, struggling to get her seatbelt loose—
The plane struck the desert with a tremendous crash. Sand and fire filled the air, and the copilot was flung wildly, crashing into something, then something else, something went crack in his side, and an instant of quiet.
Then the fuel, pouring down from the broken connections through the plane, splashed down on top of him. This fuel was not ablaze, by whatever quirk of physics and fate, but all around it and the man were burning droplets, drifting and splashing and catching—
On one track, an electron of no other particular importance dropped one orbital. A photon burst forth, speeding into an oxygen molecule just as the oxygen struck a long hydrocarbon chain—but it wasn't enough energy. Both molecules ricocheted away, intact, their destructive energies still caged—
And on the other track, the electron dropped two orbitals. Speeding along the same path, it drove the oxygen home. The molecules came apart, chaos reigned as photons burst in every direction, driving more reactions, and still more, and—
On the first track, the copilot, uniform soaked with fuel, but not ablaze, staggered to his feet. Despite the agony in his side, he set to work at once, pulling those more seriously injured than himself clear of the burning aircraft. He saved at least three lives, and more in the ensuing hours, walking four miles in the hellish heat with no water and no certainty where he was going to find civilization and telephone for aid.
On the second track, a spark ignited on his chest, in the coating of fuel. The fire spread. His end was neither quick nor pleasant. To those in the plane who had no choice but to hear, the mindless screams of agony and the sizzling of burnt flesh seemed to last an eternity. Several others died in the plane, without the copilot to aid them. Others would search for aid, but it took longer to come, and two more passengers would die from their injuries, the heat, and the lack of water, before the Syrian Army arrived.
Some weeks later, and a world away, a letter arrived at a nondescript house in Los Angeles, in the shadow of Mount Washington. A woman drew it from the mailbox, and opened it.
"On behalf of Pan American World Airways," the letter's body read, "I regret to inform you that your son, Eugene P. Roddenberry, was killed after his aircraft crashed in..."
The letter went on, but the woman didn't read it. She dropped it, and cried. To her, and others who knew him, the news was anything from the end of the world, to one of those darn rotten things that happened. No one knew how fate had cheated them: of hope, of vision, of a dream of a better world, of the idea that the great conflict against Communism might be won without devastating the world, or a new system with the best of each approach might be put in place.
Without that vision, America stagnated, luxuriating in what good there was, dismissing the bad as the way things had to be. When the good began to vanish, it was easy not to think, easy to fall in line and blame the Communists, Chinese, pinkos, and traitors, to say there were five lights, to hope for nothing but that things would go back to the way they had been. It was easy for people like that to elect leaders who chose to scrabble for the last scraps far harder than they searched for alternatives. And it was easy for those leaders to decide that no choice remained but to burn it all and hope to build anew, for no one had ever thought of a way to avoid the burning.