Crossroads of Destiny | Page 5

conversation, 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 suppose he got that suit?"
"It was a tailored suit," the colonel said. "A very good one. And I can't think of any country in the world in which they cut suits just like that. And did you catch his accent?"
"Phony," the television man pronounced. "The French accent of a Greek waiter in a fake French restaurant. In the Bronx."
"Not quite. The pronunciation was all right for French accent, but the cadence, the way the word-sounds were strung together, was German."
The elderly man looked at the colonel keenly. "I see you're Intelligence," he mentioned. "Think he might be somebody up your alley, Colonel?"
The colonel shook his head. "I doubt it. There are agents of unfriendly powers in this country--a lot of them, I'm sorry to have to say. But they 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 normally American 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 and sat at one end of the car, waiting until other accommodations could be found for them. After a while, it started again. I dallied over my drink, and then got up and excused myself, saying that I wanted to turn in early.
In the next car behind, I met the porter who had come in just before the stop. He looked worried, and after a moment's hesitation, he spoke to me.
"Pardon, sir. The man in the club-car who got off at Harrisburg; did you know him?"
"Never saw him before. Why?"
"He tipped me with a dollar bill when he got off. Later, I looked closely 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 thing right about it. One side was gray, all right, but the other side was green. The picture wasn't the right one. And there were a lot of other things about it, some of them absolutely ludicrous. It wasn't counterfeit--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 our scientists accepted the theory of other time dimensions and other worlds of alternate probability!
On an impulse, I got out two ones and gave them to the porter--perfectly good United States Bank gold-certificates.
"You'd better let me keep this," I said, trying to make it sound the way he'd think a Federal Agent would say it. He took the bills, smiling, and I 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 taken over and guided me back to the right car and compartment; I didn't realize where I was going till I put on the light and recognized my own luggage. 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 the club-car and show the thing to the colonel and the sandy-haired man. On second thought, I decided against that.
The next thing I banished from my mind was the adjective "incredible." I had to credit it; I had the proof in my vest pocket. The coincidence arising from our topic of conversation didn't bother me too much, either. It was the topic which had drawn him into it. And, as the sandy-haired man had pointed out, we know nothing, one way or another, about these other worlds; we certainly don't know what barriers separate them from our own, or how often those barriers may fail. I might have thought more about that if I'd been in physical science. I wasn't; I was in American history. So what I thought about was what sort of country that 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 was the costume of a less formal and conservative society than ours and a more casual way of life. It could be the sort of costume into which ours would 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, as though something about them