“It’s like a mirror image of the world—a warped mirror,” Dan said, drawing savagely on his cigarette. “While we were going around the moon something happened to change the whole world to the way it would have been if history had been altered some time in the early thirties.”
“World didn’t change, boys,” Reeves said, “it’s always been just the way it is now. Though I admit the way you tell it it sounds a lot better. But it’s either the whole world or you, and I’m banking on the simpler of the two. Don’t know what kind of an experiment the Air Corps had you two involved in but it must have addled your grey matter.”
“I can’t buy that,” Gino insisted. “I know I’m beginning to feel like I have lost my marbles, but whenever I do I think about the capsule we landed in. How are you going to explain that away?”
“I’m not going to try. I know there are a lot of gadgets and things that got the engineers and the university profs tearing their hair out, but that doesn’t bother me. I’m going back to the shooting war where things are simpler. Until it is proved differently I think that you are both nuts, if you’ll pardon the expression, sirs.”
The official reaction in Denver was basically the same. A staff car, complete with M.P. outriders, picked them up as soon as they had landed at Lowry Field and took them directly to Fitzsimmons Hospital. They were taken directly to the laboratories and what must have been a good half of the giant hospital’s staff took turns prodding, questioning and testing them. They were encouraged to speak—many times with lie-detector instrumentation attached to them—but none of their questions were answered. Occasional high-ranking officers looked on gloomily, but took no part in the examination. They talked for hours into tape recorders, answering questions in every possible field from history to physics, and when they tired were kept going on benzedrine. There was more than a week of this in which they saw each other only by chance in the examining rooms, until they were weak from fatigue and hazy from the drugs. None of their questions were answered, they were just reassured that everything would be taken care of as soon as the examinations were over. When the interruption came it was a welcome surprise, and apparently unexpected. Gino was being probed by a drafted history professor who wore oxidized captain’s bars and a gravy-stained battlejacket. Since his voice was hoarse from the days of prolonged questioning, Gino held the microphone close to his mouth and talked in a whisper.
“Can you tell me who was the Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln?” the captain asked.
“How the devil should I know? And I doubt very much if there is anyone else in this hospital who knows—besides you. And do you know?”
“Of course—”
The door burst open and a full colonel with an M.P. brassard looked in. A very high-ranking messenger boy: Gino was impressed.
“I’ve come for Major Lombardi.”
“You’ll have to wait,” the history-captain protested, twisting his already rumpled necktie. “I’ve not finished. …”
“That is not important. The major is to come with me at once.”
They marched silently through a number of halls until they came to a dayroom where Dan was sprawled deep in a chair smoking a cigar. A loudspeaker on the wall was muttering in a monotone.
“Have a cigar,” Dan called out, and pushed the package across the table.
“What’s the drill now?” Gino asked, biting off the end and looking for a match.
“Another conference, big brass, lots of turmoil. We’ll go in in a moment as soon as some of the shouting dies down. There is a theory now as to what happened, but not much agreement on it even though Einstein himself dreamed it up. …”
“Einstein! But he’s dead. …”
“Not now he isn’t, I’ve seen him. A grand old gent of over ninety, as fragile as a stick but still going strong. He … say, wait—isn’t that a news broadcast?”
They listened to the speaker that one of the M.P.’s had turned up.
“… in spite of fierce fighting the city of San Antonio is now in enemy hands. Up to an hour ago there were still reports from the surrounded Alamo where units of the 5th Cavalry have refused to surrender, and all America has been following this second battle of the Alamo. History has repeated itself, tragically, because there now appears to be no hope that any survivors. …”
“Will you gentlemen please follow me,” a staff officer broke in, and the two astronauts went out after him. He knocked at a door and opened it for them. “If you please.”
“I am very happy to meet you both,” Albert Einstein said, and waved them to chairs.
He sat with his back to the window, his thin, white hair catching the afternoon sunlight and making an aura about his head.
“Professor Einstein,” Dan Coye said, “can you tell us what has happened? What has changed?”
“Nothing has changed, that is the important thing that you must realize. The world is the same and you are the same, but you have—for want of a better word I must say—moved. I am not being clear. It is easier to express in mathematics.”
“Anyone who climbs into a rocket has to be a bit of a science fiction reader, and I’ve absorbed my quota,” Dan said. “Have we got into one of those parallel worlds things they used to write about, branches of time and all that?”
“No, what you have done is not like that, though it may be a help to you to think of it that way. This is the same objective world that you left—but not the
