Galactic Dreams

“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…?”