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!
Randall Garrett got to wondering, recently, what kind of stories the true adventure magazines of the future would publish . To Make a Hero is his own answer to the question. It's science fiction told 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 the crime. — 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 minute detail. All of the data simply cannot be recovered.
In spite of this, if Man were an intellectually honest animal, it wouldn't be too difficult to get a reasonably accurate picture of the past. At least the data that could be recovered and retained would show a reasonably distinct picture of long gone events and their relationship to the present.
But Man isn't that kind of creature. Once men discovered the fact that the events of tomorrow are based on what is happening today, it didn't take them long to reach the conclusion that changing the past could change the present. Words are magic, and the more cleverly and powerfully 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 distorted history to conform to their own beliefs; they were convinced that if what they wrote were accepted as true, then it was true. Word magic had changed the past to conform to the present.
Now, one would suppose that, as methods of recording and verifying the contemporary happenings of a culture became more and more efficient and more easily correlated, the ability to change the past would become more difficult. Not true. The actual records of the past are not read by the average man; he is normally exposed only to biased, carefully selected excerpts from the past.