Gino was being probed by a recently drafted history professor who wore oxidized captain’s bars and a gravy-stained battle jacket. Since his voice was hoarse from the days of prolonged questioning, Gino held the microphone close to his mouth and talked in a whisper.
“Can you tell me who was the Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln?” the captain asked.
“How the devil should I know? And I doubt very much if there is anyone else in this hospital who knows, besides you. And do you know?”
“Of course!”
The door burst open and a full colonel with an MP brassard looked in. A very high-ranking messenger boy: Gino was impressed.
“I’ve come for Major Lombardi.”
“You’ll have to wait,” the history-captain protested, twisting his already rumpled necktie. “I’m not quite finished ….”
“That is not important. The major is to come with me at once.”
They marched silently through a number of halls until they came to a dayroom where Dan lifted one weary hand in greeting. He was sprawled deep in a chair smoking a cigar. A loudspeaker on the wall was muttering in a monotone.
“Have a cigar,” Dan called out, and pushed the package across the table.
“What’s the drill now?” Gino asked, biting off the end and looking for a match.
“Another conference, big brass, lots of turmoil. We’ll go in in a moment as soon as some of the shouting dies down. There is a theory now as to what happened, but not much agreement on it even though Einstein himself dreamed it up ……
“Einstein! But he’s dead ….”
“Not now he isn’t, I’ve seen him. A grand old gent of over ninety, as fragile as a stick but still going strong. He … say, wait, isn’t that a news broadcast?”
They listened to the speaker that one of the MPs had turned up.
“… in spite of fierce fighting the city of San Antonio is now in enemy hands. Up to an hour ago there were still reports from the surrounded Alamo, where units of the 6th Cavalry have refused to surrender, and all America has been following this second battle of the Alamo. History has repeated itself, tragically, because there now appears to be no hope that any survivors. — . ”
“Will you gentlemen please follow me,” a staff officer broke in, and the two astronauts climbed wearily to their feet and went out after him. He knocked at a door and opened it for them.
“If you please.”
“I am very happy to meet you both,” Albert Einstein said, and waved them to chairs.
He sat with his back to the window, his thin, white hair catching the afternoon sunlight and making an aura about his head.
“Professor Einstein,” Dan Coye said, “can you tell us what has happened? What has changed?”
“Nothing has changed, that is the important thing that you must realize. The world is the same and you are the same, but you have — for want of a better word I must say — you have moved. I see that I am not being clear. It is easier to express in mathematics.”
“Anyone who climbs into a rocket has to be a bit of a science fiction reader, and I’ve absorbed my quota,” Dan said. “Have we got into one of those parallel worlds things they used to write about, branches of time and all that?”
“No, what you have done is not like that, though it may be a help to you to think of it that way. This is the same objective world that you left — but not the same subjective one. There is only one galaxy that we inhabit, only one universe. But our awareness of it changes many of its aspects of reality.”
“You’ve lost me,” Gino sighed.
“Let me see if I get it,” Dan said. “It sounds like you are saying that things are just as we think we see them, and our thinking keeps them that way. Like that tree in the quad I remember from college.”
“Again, not correct, but an approximation you may hold if it helps you to clarify your thinking. It is a phenomenon that I have long suspected, certain observations in the speed of light that might be instrumentation errors, gravitic phenomena, chemical reactions. I have suspected something, but have not known where to look. I thank you gentlemen from the bottom of my heart for giving me this opportunity at the very end of my life, for giving me the clues that may lead to a solution to this problem.”
“Solution …” Gino’s mouth opened. “Do you mean there is a chance we can go back to the world as we knew it?”
“Not only a chance — but the strongest possibility. What happened to you was an accident. You were away from the planet of your birth, away from its atmospheric envelope and during part of your orbit, even out of sight of it. Your sense of reality was badly strained, and your physical reality and the reality of your mental relationships changed by the death of your comrade. All these combined to allow you to return to a world with a slightly different aspect of reality from the one you have left. The historians have pinpointed the point of change. It occurred on the seventeenth of August, 1933, the day that President Roosevelt died of pneumonia.”
“Is that why there were all those medical questions about my childhood?” Dan asked. “I had pneumonia; I was just a couple of months old, almost died, my mother told me about it often enough afterwards. It could have been about the same time. Don’t tell me — I mean it isn’t possible that I lived and the president died…?”
Einstein shook his head. “No, you must remember that you both lived in the world as you knew it. The dynamics of the relationship are far from clear, though I do not doubt that there is some relevancy involved. But that is not important. What is important is that I think I have developed a way to mechanically bring about the translation from one reality aspect to another. It will take years to develop it to translate matter from one reality to a different order, but it is perfected enough now, I am sure, to return matter that has already been removed from another order.”
Gino’s chair scraped back as he jumped to his feet. “Professor — am I right in saying, and I may have got you wrong, that you can take us and pop us back to where we came from?”
Einstein smiled. “Putting it as simply as you have, Major … the answer is yes. Arrangements are being made now to return both of you and your capsule as soon as possible. In return for which we ask you a favor.”
“Anything, of course,” Dan said, leaning forward.
“You will have the reality-translator machine with you, and microcopies of all our notes, theories and practical conclusions. In the world that you come from all the massive forces of technology and engineering can be summoned to solve the problem of mechanically accomplishing what you both did once by accident. You might be able to do this within months, and that is all the time that there is left.”
“Exactly what do you mean?”
“We are losing the war. In spite of all the warnings that we had we were just not prepared. We thought, perhaps we just hoped, that it would never come to us. Now the Nazis are advancing on all fronts. It is only a matter of time until they win. We can still win, but only with your atom bombs.”
“You don’t have atomic bombs now?” Gino asked.
Einstein sat silent for a moment before he answered. “No, there was no opportunity. I have always been sure that they could be constructed, but have never put it to the test. The Germans felt the same, though at one time they even had a heavy-water project that was aimed towards controlled nuclear fission. But their military successes were so great that they abandoned it along with all other far-fetched and expensive schemes like their hollow world theory. I myself have never wanted to see this hellish thing built, and from what you have told about it, it is worse than my most terrible dream. But I must admit that I did approach the president about it, when the Nazi threat was closing in, but nothing was done. It was too expensive then. Now it is too late. But perhaps it isn’t. If your America will help us, the enemy will be defeated. And after that, what a wealth of knowledge we shall have once our worlds are in contact. Will you do it?”