Crossroads of Destiny | Page 6

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 surprised him. The only thing they had in common 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 Jackson Administration. I
wondered what Jackson he had been talking about; not Andrew Jackson, the Tennessee
militia general who got us into war with Spain in 1810, I hoped. And the Civil War; that
had baffled me completely. I wondered if it had been a class-war, or a sectional conflict.
We'd had plenty of the latter, during our first century, but all of them had been settled
peacefully and Constitutionally. Well, some of the things he'd read in Lingmuir's Social
History would be surprises for him, too.
And then I took the bill out for another examination. It must have gotten mixed with his
spendable money--it was about the size of ours--and I wondered how he had acquired
enough of our money to pay his train fare. Maybe he'd had a diamond and sold it, or
maybe he'd had a gun 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 of what had happened
to him--the book, and the fake accent, to cover any mistakes he might make. Well, I
wished him luck, and then I unfolded the dollar bill and looked at it again.
In the first place, it had been issued by the United States Department of Treasury itself,
not the United States Bank or one of the State Banks. I'd have to think over the
implications of that carefully. In the second place, it was a silver certificate; why, in this
other United States, silver must be an acceptable monetary metal; maybe equally so with
gold, though I could hardly believe that. Then I looked at the picture on the gray obverse
side, and had to strain my eyes on the fine print under it to identify it. It was Washington,
all right, but a much older Washington than any of the pictures of him I had ever seen.
Then I realized that I knew just where the Crossroads of Destiny for his world and mine
had been.
As every schoolchild among us knows, General George Washington was shot dead at the
Battle of Germantown, in 1777, by an English, or, rather, Scottish, officer, Patrick
Ferguson--the same Patrick Ferguson who invented the breech-loading rifle that smashed
Napoleon's armies. Washington, today, is one of our lesser national heroes, because he
was our first military commander-in-chief. But in this other world, he must have survived
to lead our armies to victory and become our first President, as was the case with the man
who took his place when he was killed.
I folded the bill and put it away carefully among my identification cards, 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 had made, and what part, in the history of that
other United States, had been played by the man whose picture appears on our dollar

bills--General and President Benedict Arnold.
THE END.

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