“That’s only a diversion, just six guys and a lot of noise. Though they did get one of the fuel trucks. These krautheads are going to find this out pretty quickly and start heading back here on the double. So let’s make tracks — now!”
He slipped from behind the trucks and the three of them ran into the darkness of the desert. After a few yards the astronauts were staggering, but they kept on until they almost fell into an arroyo where the black shape of a jeep was sitting. The motor started as they hauled themselves into it and, without lights, it ground up out of the ditch and bumped off through the brush.
“You’re lucky I saw you come down,” their guide said from the front seat. “I’m Lieutenant Reeves.”
“Colonel Coye — and this is Major Lombardi. We owe you a lot of thanks, Lieutenant. When those Germans grabbed us, we found it almost impossible to believe. Where did they come from?”
“Breakthrough, just yesterday from the lines around Corpus. I been slipping along behind this division with my patrol, keeping San Antone posted on their movements. That’s how come I saw your ship, or whatever it is, dropping right down in front of their scouts. Stars and stripes all over it. I tried to reach you first, but had to turn back before their scout cars spotted me. But it worked out. We grabbed the tank carrier as soon as it got dark and two of my walking wounded are riding it back to Cotulla where I’ve got some armor and transport. I set the rest of the boys to pull that diversion and you know the results. You Air Corps jockeys ought to watch which way the wind is blowing or something, or you’ll have all your fancy new gadgets falling into enemy hands.”
“You said the Germans are near Corpus — Corpus Christi?” Dan asked. “What are they doing there? How long have they been there-and where did they come from in the first place?”
“You flyboys must sure be stationed in some really hideaway hole,” Reeves said, grunting as the jeep bounded over a ditch. “The landings on the Texas side of the Gulf were made over a month ago. We been holding them but just barely. Now they’re breaking out and we’re just managing to stay ahead of them.”
He stopped and thought for a moment. “Maybe I better not talk to you boys too much until we know just what you were doing there in the first place. Sit tight and we’ll have you out of here inside of two hours.”
The other jeep joined them soon after they hit a farm road and the lieutenant murmured into the field radio it carried. Then the two cars sped north, past a number of tank traps and gun emplacements, until finally they drove into the small town of Cotulla, straddling the highway south of San Antonio. They were led into the back of the local supermarket where a command post had been set up. There were a lot of brass and armed guards about, and a heavy-jawed one-star general behind the desk. The atmosphere and the stares were reminiscent in many ways of the German colonel’s tent.
“Who are you two, what are you doing here — and what is that thing you parachuted down in?” The general snapped the questions in a no-nonsense voice.
Dan had a lot of questions he wanted to ask first, but he knew better than to argue with a general. He told about the Moon flight, the loss of communication, and their return. Throughout the general looked at him steadily, nor did he change his expression. He did not say a word until Dan was finished. Then he spoke.
“Gentlemen, I don’t know what to make of all your talk of rockets, Moon-shots, Russian sputniks or the rest. Either both of you are mad or I am, though I admit you have an impressive piece of hardware out on that tank carrier. You sound just as American as I do but what you say just doesn’t make any kind of sense. I doubt if the Russians have time or resources now for rocketry, since they are slowly being pulverized and pushed back across Siberia. Every other country in Europe has fallen to the Nazis and they have brought their war to this hemisphere, have established bases in Central America, occupied Florida and made more landings along the Gulf Coast. I can’t pretend to understand what is happening here so I’m sending you off to the national Capitol in Denver in the morning.”
In the plane next day, somewhere over the high peaks of the Rockies, they pieced together part of the puzzle. Lieutenant Reeves rode with them, ostensibly as a guide, but his pistol was handy and the holster flap loose.
“It’s the same date and the same world that we left,” Gino explained, “but a lot of things are different. Too many things. Everything seems all the same up to a point, then history begins to change radically. Reeves, didn’t you tell me that President Roosevelt died during his first term?”
“Pneumonia, he never was too strong, died before he had finished a year in office. He had a lot of wild-sounding schemes but they didn’t help. Vice-President Garner took over. Things just didn’t seem the same when John Nance said them, not like when Roosevelt said them. There were lots of fights, trouble in Congress, the depression got worse, and the whole country didn’t start getting better until about 1936, when Landon was elected. There were still a lot of people out of work, but with the war starting in Europe they were buying lots of things from us, food, machines, even guns.”
“Britain and the Allies, you mean?”
“I mean everybody, Germans too. Though that made a lot of people here mad. But the policy was no-foreign-entanglements and do business with anyone who’s willing to pay. It wasn’t until the invasion of Britain that people began to realize the Nazis weren’t the best customers in the world, but by then it was too late.”
“It’s like a mirror image of the real world, a warped mirror,” Dan said, drawing savagely on his cigarette. “While we were going around the Moon something happened to change the whole world to the way it would have been if history had been altered sometime in the early thirties.”
“World didn’t change, boys,” Reeves said, “it’s always been just the way it is now. Though I admit the way you tell it, it sure does sound a lot better. But it’s either the whole world or you, and I’m banking on the simpler of the two. Don’t know what kind of an experiment the Air Corps had you two involved in but it must have addled your gray matter.”
“I can’t buy that,” Gino insisted. “I know I’m beginning to feel like I have lost my marbles, but whenever I do I just think about the capsule we landed in. How are you going to explain that away?”
“I’m not even going to try. I know there are a lot of gadgets and things in it that got the engineers and the university profs tearing their hair out, but that doesn’t bother me. I’m going back to the shooting war where things are simpler. Until it is proved differently I think that you are both nuts, if you’ll pardon the expression, sirs.”
The official reaction in Denver was basically the same. A staff car, complete with MP motorcycle outriders, picked them up as soon as they had landed at Lowry Field and took them directly to Fitzsimmons Hospital. They were taken directly to the laboratories, where what must have been a good half of the giant hospital’s staff took turns prodding, questioning and testing them. They were encouraged to speak many times with lie-detector instrumentation attached to them-but none of their own questions were ever answered. From time to time high-ranking officers looked on gloomily, but took no part in the examination. They talked for hours into tape recorders, answering questions about every possible field from history to physics. When they got too tired to talk they were kept going on Benzedrine. There was more than a week of this in which the two officers saw each other only by chance in the examining rooms, until they were weak from fatigue and hazy from the drugs. None of their questions were answered, and they were just reassured that everything would be taken care of as soon as the examinations were over. When the interruption came it was a welcome surprise, and apparently unexpected.