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 some things are different. Too many things. It's all the same up to a point, then changes 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 had 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 that 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 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 some time 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 think about the capsule we landed in. How are you going to explain that away?"
"I'm not going to try. I know there are a lot of gadgets and things 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 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 and 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 questions were answered. Occasional high-ranking officers looked on gloomily, but took no part in the examination. They talked for hours into tape recorders, answering questions in every possible field from history to physics and when they tired were kept going on Benzedrine. There was more than a week of this in which they saw each other only by chance in the examining room, until they were weak from fatigue and hazy from the drugs. None of their questions were answered, 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. Gino was being probed by a drafted history professor who wore oxidized captain's bars and a gravy-stained battlejacket. 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 Lombard!."
"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 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 Sixth 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 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 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."