Crossroads of Destiny | Page 4

"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, and we talked for some time about it, each of us suggesting possibilities. The stranger even suggested one--that the Civil War had started during the Jackson Administration. Fortunately, nobody else noticed that. Finally, a porter came 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 would have to get his luggage. He told us how much he had enjoyed the