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"Two Dooms" is a 20,000 word story by C. M. Kornbluth, about a Los Alamos scientist who travels into the future, to see what the world would be like without the atom bomb. The story was first published in the July, 1958 issue of Venture Science Fiction.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

Al Rowland is a scientist at Los Alamos in 1944. He has just made an important discovery which shows the way to making an a-bomb, but he naturally worries about the consequences of giving such a weapon to the world. Before reporting his discovery to his bosses, he drives out to the desert to clear his head, and meets with an Indian friend of his. The Indian gives him some strange mushrooms, and does a weird ceremony. Al collapses, and when he wakes up, his Indian friend and car are both gone.

He eventually finds out that he is now 150 years into the future. The a-bomb, in this version of the future, was never invented, and the Axis won the Second World War, finally conquering the United States in 1955. The American west is now occupied by Asians (Chinese, Korean, east Indians, etc), who work as a subservient, peasant class to their Japanese masters, although everyone in the country speaks English. Rowland saves a drunken Chinese man from drowning, and to thank him, the man invites Rowland to live in his village. Rowland settles in there, but about a month later the town is visited by a Samurai, who had heard of a white man in this village. The Samurai pulls his sword out, but the man whose life Rowland had saved earlier now takes the blow, and is beheaded in Rowland’s place. Rowland is horrified, and he leaves the village, heading west to Los Angeles.

He is disgusted by the poverty, overpopulation, and lack of progress he sees, as well as by the disparities between the poor masses and the apparently wealthy but rarely seen rich Japanese. Rowland goes to the German consulate, tells them his story, and offers to show them how to make an atomic bomb—he feels that even a nuclear war would be better than this world, and he does not believe the extreme stories he had heard earlier about Nazi atrocities. But the Nazis think he’s insane, and they send him to a work-death camp, where Rowland finally realizes what the Nazis really are. He volunteers to be a guinea pig in a lab experiment, but convinces the scientist in charge that he is in fact a time traveler, who was sent forward in time by Jewish magic and the sacrifice of “seven Nordic virgins”. The Nazi “race scientist” believes his story, and studies Rowland for weeks. Rowland gains access to another scientist with a large stash of exotic herbs, where he manages at last to find some of the same mushrooms his Indian friend had used to send him forward into the future. After a final confrontation with the Nazi race scientist, who now questions some of the details of his story, Rowland takes the mushrooms and wakes up back in the New Mexico desert, alongside his Indian friend. He returns to the Los Alamos lab, where he now eagerly reports his atomic bomb discovery to his superiors, convinced now that the a-bomb will make the world a better place.

Additional Notes

This story has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 20 (1958). Editor Martin H. Greenberg says Two Dooms is "arguably the best short fiction on the 'What if Germany Had Won World War 2?' theme."

Kornbluth died a few months before this story was published.

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