Crossroads of Destiny Read online

it as anexplanation, or pseudo-explanation, for the program," the television mansaid. "Fact is, we aren't married to this Crossroads title, yet; wecould just as easily all it _Fifth Dimension_. That would lead thepublic, to expect something out of the normal before the show started."

  * * * * *

  That got the conversation back onto the show, and we talked for sometime about it, each of us suggesting possibilities. The stranger evensuggested one--that the Civil War had started during the JacksonAdministration. Fortunately, nobody else noticed that. Finally, a portercame through and inquired if any of us were getting off at Harrisburg,saying that we would be getting in in five minutes.

  The stranger finished his drink hastily and got up, saying that he wouldhave to get his luggage. He told us how much he had enjoyed theconversation, and then followed the porter toward the rear of the train.After he had gone out, the TV man chuckled.

  "Was that one an oddball!" he exclaimed. "Where the hell do you supposehe got that suit?"

  "It was a tailored suit," the colonel said. "A very good one. And Ican't think of any country in the world in which they cut suits justlike that. And did you catch his accent?"

  "Phony," the television man pronounced. "The French accent of a Greekwaiter in a fake French restaurant. In the Bronx."

  "Not quite. The pronunciation was all right for French accent, but thecadence, the way the word-sounds were strung together, was German."

  The elderly man looked at the colonel keenly. "I see you'reIntelligence," he mentioned. "Think he might be somebody up your alley,Colonel?"

  The colonel shook his head. "I doubt it. There are agents of unfriendlypowers in this country--a lot of them, I'm sorry to have to say. Butthey don't speak accented English, and they don't dress eccentrically.You know there's an enemy agent in a crowd, pick out the most normallyAmerican type in sight and you usually won't have to look further."

  The train ground to a stop. A young couple with hand-luggage came in andsat at one end of the car, waiting until other accommodations could befound for them. After a while, it started again. I dallied over mydrink, and then got up and excused myself, saying that I wanted to turnin early.

  In the next car behind, I met the porter who had come in just before thestop. He looked worried, and after a moment's hesitation, he spoke tome.

  "Pardon, sir. The man in the club-car who got off at Harrisburg; did youknow him?"

  "Never saw him before. Why?"

  "He tipped me with a dollar bill when he got off. Later, I lookedclosely at it. I do not like it."

  He showed it to me, and I didn't blame him. It was marked _One Dollar_,and _United States of America_, but outside that there wasn't a thingright about it. One side was gray, all right, but the other side wasgreen. The picture wasn't the right one. And there were a lot of otherthings about it, some of them absolutely ludicrous. It wasn'tcounterfeit--it wasn't even an imitation of a United States bill.

  And then it hit me, like a bullet in the chest. Not a bill of _our_United States. No wonder he had been so interested in whether ourscientists accepted the theory of other time dimensions and other worldsof alternate probability!

  On an impulse, I got out two ones and gave them to the porter--perfectlygood United States Bank gold-certificates.

  "You'd better let me keep this," I said, trying to make it sound the wayhe'd think a Federal Agent would say it. He took the bills, smiling, andI folded his bill and put it into my vest pocket.

  "Thank you, sir," he said. "I have no wish to keep it."

  Some part of my mind below the level of consciousness must have takenover and guided me back to the right car and compartment; I didn'trealize where I was going till I put on the light and recognized my ownluggage. Then I sat down, as dizzy as though the two drinks I had had,had been a dozen. For a moment, I was tempted to rush back to theclub-car and show the thing to the colonel and the sandy-haired man. Onsecond thought, I decided against that.

  The next thing I banished from my mind was the adjective "incredible." Ihad to credit it; I had the proof in my vest pocket. The coincidencearising from our topic of conversation didn't bother me too much,either. It was the topic which had drawn him into it. And, as thesandy-haired man had pointed out, we know nothing, one way or another,about these other worlds; we certainly don't know what barriers separatethem from our own, or how often those barriers may fail. I might havethought more about that if I'd been in physical science. I wasn't; I wasin American history. So what I thought about was what sort of countrythat other United States must be, and what its history must have been.

  The man's costume was basically the same as ours--same general style,but many little differences of fashion. I had the impression that it wasthe costume of a less formal and conservative society than ours and amore casual way of life. It could be the sort of costume into which ourswould evolve in another thirty or so years. There was another odd thing.I'd noticed him looking curiously at both the waiter and the porter, asthough something about them surprised him. The only thing they had incommon was their race, the same as every other passenger-car attendant.But he wasn't used to seeing Chinese working in railway cars.

  And there had been that remark about the Civil War and the JacksonAdministration. I wondered what Jackson he had been talking about; notAndrew Jackson, the Tennessee militia general who got us into war withSpain in 1810, I hoped. And the Civil War; that had baffled mecompletely. I wondered if it had been a class-war, or a sectionalconflict. We'd had plenty of the latter, during our first century, butall of them had been settled peacefully and Constitutionally. Well, someof the things he'd read in Lingmuir's _Social History_ would besurprises for him, too.

  And then I took the bill out for another examination. It must havegotten mixed with his spendable money--it was about the size ofours--and I wondered how he had acquired enough of our money to pay histrain fare. Maybe he'd had a diamond and sold it, or maybe he'd had agun and held somebody up. If he had, I didn't know that I blamed him,under the circumstances. I had an idea that he had some realization ofwhat had happened to him--the book, and the fake accent, to cover anymistakes he might make. Well, I wished him luck, and then I unfolded thedollar bill and looked at it again.

  In the first place, it had been issued by the United States Departmentof Treasury itself, not the United States Bank or one of the StateBanks. I'd have to think over the implications of that carefully. In thesecond place, it was a silver certificate; why, in this other UnitedStates, silver must be an acceptable monetary metal; maybe equally sowith gold, though I could hardly believe that. Then I looked at thepicture on the gray obverse side, and had to strain my eyes on the fineprint under it to identify it. It was Washington, all right, but a mucholder Washington than any of the pictures of him I had ever seen. Then Irealized that I knew just where the Crossroads of Destiny for his worldand mine had been.

  As every schoolchild among us knows, General George Washington was shotdead at the Battle of Germantown, in 1777, by an English, or, rather,Scottish, officer, Patrick Ferguson--the same Patrick Ferguson whoinvented the breech-loading rifle that smashed Napoleon's armies.Washington, today, is one of our lesser national heroes, because he wasour first military commander-in-chief. But in this other world, he musthave survived to lead our armies to victory and become our firstPresident, as was the case with the man who took his place when he waskilled.

  I folded the bill and put it away carefully among my identificationcards, where it wouldn't a second time get mixed with the money I spent,and as I did, I wondered what sort of a President George Washington hadmade, and what part, in the history of that other United States, hadbeen played by the man whose picture appears on our dollarbills--General and President Benedict Arnold.

  THE END.

 

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