Crossroads of Destiny | Page 4

a four-dimensional universe," the colonel started.
The elderly man across from him groaned. "Fourth dimension! Good God, are we going
to talk about that?"
"It isn't anything to be scared of. You carry an instrument for measuring in the fourth
dimension all the time. A watch."
"You mean it's just time? But that isn't--"
"We know of three dimensions of space," the colonel told him, gesturing to indicate them.
"We can use them for coordinates to locate things, but we also locate things in time. I
wouldn't like to ride on a train or a plane if we didn't. Well, let's call the time we know,
the time your watch registers, Time-A. Now, suppose the entire, infinite extent of
Time-A is only an instant in another dimension of time, which we'll call Time-B. The
next instant of Time-B is also the entire extent of Time-A, and the next and the next. As
in Time-A, different things are happening at different instants. In one of these instants of
Time-B, one of the things that's happening is that King Henry the Seventh of England is
furnishing ships to Christopher Columbus."
The man with the odd clothes was getting excited again.

"Zees--'ow you say--zees alternate probabeelitay; eet ees a theory zhenerally accept' een
zees countree?"
"Got it!" the sandy-haired man said, before anybody could answer. He set his drink on
the stand-tray and took a big jackknife out of his pocket, holding it unopened in his hand.
"How's this sound?" he asked, and hit the edge of the tray with the back of the knife,
Bong!
"Crossroads--of--Destiny!" he intoned, and hit the edge of the tray again, Bong! "This is
the year 1959--but not the 1959 of our world, for we are in a world of alternate
probability, in another dimension of time; a world parallel to and coexistent with but
separate from our own, in which history has been completely altered by a single
momentous event." He shifted back to his normal voice.
"Not bad; only twenty-five seconds," the plump man said, looking up from his wrist
watch. "And a trained announcer could maybe shave five seconds off that. Yes,
something like that, and at the end we'll have another thirty seconds, and we can do
without the guest."
"But zees alternate probibeelitay, in anozzer dimension," the stranger was insisting. "Ees
zees a concept original weet you?" he asked the colonel.
"Oh, no; that idea's been around for a long time."
"I never heard of it before now," the elderly man said, as though that completely
demolished it.
"Zen eet ees zhenerally accept' by zee scienteest'?"
"Umm, no," the sandy-haired man relieved the colonel. "There's absolutely no evidence
to support it, and scientists don't accept unsupported assumptions unless they need them
to explain something, and they don't need this assumption for anything. Well, it would
come in handy to make some of these reports of freak phenomena, like mysterious
appearances and disappearances, or flying-object sightings, or reported falls of
non-meteoric matter, theoretically respectable. Reports like that usually get the
ignore-and-forget treatment, now."
"Zen you believe zat zeese ozzer world of zee alternate probabeelitay, zey exist?"
"No. I don't disbelieve it, either. I've no reason to, one way or another." He studied his
drink for a moment, and lowered the level in the glass slightly. "I've said that once in a
while things get reported that look as though such other worlds, in another
time-dimension, may exist. There have been whole books published by people who
collect stories like that. I must say that academic science isn't very hospitable to them."
"You mean, zings sometimes, 'ow-you-say, leak in from one of zees ozzer worlds? Zat
has been known to 'appen?"

"Things have been said to have happened that might, if true, be cases of things leaking
through from another time world," the sandy-haired man corrected. "Or leaking away to
another time world." He mentioned a few of the more famous cases of unexplained
mysteries--the English diplomat in Prussia who vanished in plain sight of a number of
people, the ship found completely deserted by her crew, the lifeboats all in place; stories
like that. "And there's this rash of alleged sightings of unidentified flying objects. I'd
sooner believe that they came from another dimension than from another planet. But, as
far as I know, nobody's seriously advanced this other-time-dimension theory to explain
them."
"I think the idea's familiar enough, though, that we can use it as an explanation, or
pseudo-explanation, for the program," the television man said. "Fact is, we aren't married
to this Crossroads title, yet; we could just as easily all it Fifth Dimension. That would
lead the public, to expect something out of the normal before the show started."
* * * * *
That got the conversation back onto the show,