Horsesense Hank
in the Parallel Worlds

The whole damn thing was Jamieson's fault. He was a snippy sort of somebody, anyway, even if he was head of the U. S. government's physics research department. He liked nothing more than to fling his physical and mental weight around. Because he had an exaggerated amount of the first, and an exaggerated opinion of the second, he riled Hank Cleaver worse than boils on the postscript.

"It ain't jest whut he says, Jim," Hank groused one night. "That don't matter. There's jest two opinions: right and wrong, logical an' illogical. As a human bein', it's his priv'lege to think as screwy as he wants. But, dag-gone, it's the way he says things! Like he was the oney one had a speck o' common-sense! Now, if I didn't have a little bit, would I be here?"

That question needed no answer. Hank was here—in Washington, D. C.—simply and solely because the men who run our nation had finally recognized his peculiar abilities.

"Horsesense Hank" Cleaver was not an educated man in the formal sense of the phrase. He had never completed college or high school, and it is an even money bet that he never got much farther than the sixth grade of the rural grammar school near his Lower Westville farm. But he had something greater, more important, than mere "book-larnin'." He had a gift for determining the answers to problems of any scientific nature by means of plain, old-fashioned, common-sense horse-logic.

It was this gift which had lifted him from his lonely turnip-patch to the ivy-covered walls of Midland University, which alleged institution of higher knowledge had installed him to the Chair of General and Practical Sciences ... and it was this same gift which had enabled him to serve his country well as Chief Estimator at the Northern Bridge, Steel and Girder Company during the first months of the war.[1]

Now a grateful government had transferred him to the nation's capital, where his straightforward reasoning might be at the service of the President himself ... and because Hank Cleaver and Jim Blakeson are as inseparable as corn pone and chitlins, I was here with him.

As a matter of fact, dear old Washington-on-the-Potomac was beginning to look like an overgrown Midland U. campus. H. Logan MacDowell, president of the college, was here as a "dollar a year man"—and worth every penny of it!—while his charming daughter, Helen, Hank's fiancée, was working in the U.S.O. headquarters.

"It ain't," complained Hank, scowling, "as if I was hard to git along with. Gosh knows I'm easy-goin' enough—"

There was no gainsaying that. Hank was as mild and gentle as a Carnation cow.

"—but he plagues me!" confessed Hank. "Disagrees with most everything I say. Spouts facts an' figgers at me, when he knows dingbusted well I can't understand that kind o' talk. My brain don't work thataway. I jest git the theories an' work 'em out by plain, dumb hoss-logic—"

I said, "Well, what's the trouble now?"

Hank fingered a paper of cut-plug, tucked enough in his cheek to make him look as if he were munching on a medium sized billiard ball. This was his one vice. When he married fair Helen a few months hence, it would probably become tabu. Meanwhile, in the privacy of the apartment we shared, he kept his molars and incisors well lubricated.

"Wa-a-all," he said, "it's time!"

I stared at the clock. "Time? Time for what?"

"Not that kind o' time, Jim. I mean the problem o' Time. Whut it is, and how you can shift around in it an' all that sort o' stuff."

I said, "Oh. In other words, pal Jamieson has been making with the meta-physics, eh? On account of what?"

"On account," explained Hank, "of I happened to say wouldn't it be swell if somebuddy could go backward in Time and do somethin' to stop the Nazi movement from ever gettin' organized. Then there wouldn't be no war like we're fightin' today."

"That," I approved, "sounds like a swell idea. Go back and push a little paperhanger named Adolph Shicklgruber under a Munich street-car, huh? I'd gladly volunteer for the job—if there was any way of doing it."

"So would most of us. Oney Jamieson," continued Hank, "'lowed as how it was impossible. He claims all this warfare and stuff is inescapable. Says the progress of mankind is foreordained, an' they can't nobuddy do nothin' to change it, ever. He says the Book o' Time was all writ up in advance, an' they wasn't no way to change it—" Hank squinted at me dubiously. "He quoted some pome out of a book called The Di'mond Sailboat, or somethin'—"

"Sue me if I'm wrong," I grinned, "but maybe it was the Rubaiyat? By an old Persian named Omar? He wrote:

"That's it, Jim," nodded Hank. "That's the poem he said. Well, I tried to reason with him. Told him he was all wrong. Things couldn't be thataway!"

I asked, "Why not, Hank? Lots of philosophers have reached the conclusion that existence is predestined."

"Mebbe so!" said Hank doggedly. "But it jest ain't logical. Life is chemical, an' existence is jest like a chemical equation, Jim—balanced on a hair-spring. Every little thing which happens: the fall of an empire, the discovery of a new element, somebody's cold in the head, anything an' everything, becomes a factor. We live in the world we live in today because it's the only possible world under the conditions of our past!

"Of course, there could be—" Hank's eyes clouded. "There could be—"

I laughed at him. "For once, pal, you're caught in a middle. Your theory is just as good as Jamieson's, but no better. You can't prove it. So how about a couple rounds of checkers before we turn in?"

Hank temporarily forgot whatever new conjecture had occurred to him. He looked a bit petulant as he aimed a shot of liquid brown at the distant bronze jug.

"Now, looky here, Jim—you don't deny things would be a heap diff'rent if you an' me'd never met, an' I'd stayed home on my turnip farm?"

"No."

"Well, then!"

"But," I pointed out, "perhaps it was ordained that we should meet and that you should come to Midland U."

Hank groaned.

"Jim Blakeson, you make me plumb sick! You're durn near as bad as Jamieson. That settles it! I began thinkin' this afternoon mebbe I'd do it; now I've made up my mind!"

"Do what?" I demanded.

"I'm gonna settle this question," he said firmly.

"I'm goin' back to the past an' find out if you two are right. If things is inevitable, or whether circumstances can change 'em."

I gulped. Hank sometimes said fantastic things but he never makes boasts he cannot fulfil. This, however—

"T—the past?" I faltered.

"You heard me," declared Hank petulantly. "I guess I'll be kinda busy f'r the next couple o' days. I'm goin' to build me one o' them there now time-travel machines!"

CHAPTER II

Double Feature

Well, you know me! Old brain-like-a-fish Blakeson. I stared at him foolishly for a moment, then, when he said no more about it, decided Hank had finally developed, along with his many other virtues, a sense of humor. So I chuckled, and he chuckled with me, and we went to bed a little while later, and I proceeded to forget all about it.

It didn't even dawn on me, when the next morning he went out and came home with a couple armloads of wires, tubes and miscellaneous doogadgets, that he meant business. He was always prancing home with some kind of lab equipment or other—you know how amateur scientists are.

So I went ahead with my duties, which were plugging the sale of U. S. Government Bonds and Stamps—and, by the way, you better buy 'em, kiddies!—and three days whisked by as days have a habit of doing.

Then Travis Tomkins, chief technician of the observatory, halted me one day on the street.

"Say, Blakeson, where's Cleaver hiding himself? He promised to help me plot the orbit on that new comet he and I discovered."

"He and you!" I snorted. "Where do you get the community spirit? All you did was point the telescope where Hank told you! Oh—he's places, doing things. I'll tell him you want him."

And less than an hour later I bumped into H. Logan MacDowell, himself, in person, and not the captive balloon he looked like, to meet the same query.

"James, my dear lad," puffed the erstwhile Prexy of our former Alma Mammy. "I have been endeavoring to ascertain the whereabouts of our erudite rural companion. If you could enlighten me—"

"If you mean," I interpreted, "where's Hank, I guess he's home."

H. Logan pawed his plump jowls speculatively. "You might inform him that my daughter is most disturbed about his apparent disinclination to seek her company."

"H-how's that again?" I asked. MacDowell frowned at me disapprovingly.

"The custom," he hrrumphed, "is commonly known as—er—dating."

"You mean she wants to fling woo," I said, "and old Hank ain't been parking on the divan lately? Now I know he's off his button. A gal like Helen, and with the marriage date already set—all right, Prexy. I'll tell him."

So I guess those two chance meetings served as eye-openers, because when I went home that evening, I came to the realization that Hank Cleaver had turned our tiny flat into a super-scientific workshop. There were odds and ends of things all over the living room; when I entered I heard a humming in Hank's bedroom, a curious, whining wail that stopped just as I entered, gave way to the tapping of a hammer on metal.

"Hank!" I yelled.

No answer. The lamps dimmed for a moment then rose again as the humming sound drowned out my call.

"Hank!" I cried again.

Still no answer. So I walked over to his door, and banged. "Hey! Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

And Hank came to the door, hair rumpled, a smear of grease running diagonally from his right temple to the tip of his nose, collar open, sleeves rolled high—

"Was you callin' me, Jim?" he asked.

"Who, me?" I retorted elaborately. "Oh, no! I was just addressing an envelope—hey, what the hell makes around here? Anyhow? Everybody and his brother has been asking me where I hid the corpus delicti. What are you making—"

Then I looked over his shoulder and saw it.

It was the wildest, weirdest looking thing you ever set eyes on in your life. I can't describe it exactly. They say English is the most elastic of all languages, but even it lacks the words to describe some things. Like this one.

But I'll take a running start and see what happens. It was a machine. It was made of metal and glass and gadgets and doolollies and sugar and spice and everything nice; that's what little girls are made of! It was shaped something like the tonneau of a 1931 model Packard, and somewhat more like a big, old-fashioned bathtub with a hood. It was roughly oval, but only roughly so, because you couldn't exactly decide what shape it was. It wriggled!

So help me, that's just what it did! Coils of wire wound around and around the tonneau part, in which there were two wide upholstered seats and an incomprehensible dashboard, bedecked with twelve or twenty dials; these coils twisted out to fore and aft of the egg-shaped structure—and vanished!

It had other features. But that's all I saw during that first, startled glance. And that was enough. I loosed a squawk of despair and held on to Hank for dear life.

"W—what is it?" I yelped. "Great whispering winds, what do you call that—that monstrosity?"

Hank said, "Now, ca'm down, Jim. It ain't like you to act thisaway. They ain't no cause for alarm."

"That's what they told Mrs. O'Leary when she bought a cow," I moaned, "only look what happened!" Then suddenly I remembered our conversation of a few nights ago, and I choked on my own incredulous words. "Hank—that's not it? Tell me it's not a—a time-machine?"

Horsesense Hank grinned and tugged at a straggling wisp of hair.

"Wa-a-all, I reckon I could tell you that, Jim, but it wouldn't be whut you mought call the truth. 'Cause that's jest whut it is. The machine that's gonna carry us back into the past to prove my theories!"

I said, "It's a time-machine," weakly. "A—a time-machine," I said—and then the double-take struck me. "Us!" I howled. "Us! Into the past? Oh, no! Gangway, pal—"

Hank grabbed me and held on tight. He's about four inches taller than I am, and dawn-to-dusk workouts behind the plow built him muscles like tension springs. My legs churned air, and I got nowhere. Hank said aggrievedly, "Now, Jim—I never thought you'd let me down like this—"

"Talking about letting down," I bleated, "how about me? Who's holding who? Leggo, Hank! I just remembered, I'm supposed to meet a guy about four thousand miles from here!"

"Now, durn it, you got to come with me!" said Hank. "It wouldn't do me no good to go gallivantin' off to the past by myself. I got to have witnesses. I'll have this machine all finished by tomorrow—"

Then it wasn't completed yet! That was a horse of a different collar. I stopped struggling. I said, "Will you be kind enough to take your greasy paws off me, you dope! My goodness, you act as if I were afraid of something!" I moved over to the machine, studied it with pacified interest. "How does it work?" I asked.

Hank grinned sheepishly and worked one bulldog tipped toe into the rug.

"Aw, it wasn't nothin' much, really. Not when you understand whut Time is."

"Oh, naturally!" I said. "But isn't it funny? For the moment it seems to have slipped my mind. What is Time?"

"Why, it's another dimension o' matter. Some calls it the 'fourth dimension,' but that's plumb silly, o' course. Dimensions is dimensions, an' it don't matter how you number 'em so long as you know how to use 'em.

"Anyhow, whut this here machine does is run down a pathway through the Time dimension jest like an auto runs on a road or an elevator runs up an' down or an airyplane flies 'round in circles. See?"

"No!" I said.

"Well, it's as simple as A-B-C, Jim. I just made a helical vortex with these here wires as the motivating cores, and slung the machine in it like a basket. Right now while I test it, I got it operatin' on A.C. house current, but when I push this little doogummy—" He pressed a small switch. "I shift it to self-generatin' D.C. These other levers control the distance in Time it travels, and there's space-location finders, too.

"Only thing I ain't figgered out yet is—"

"Yet!" I gasped. "Yet! You've done all this within four days. Solved a problem that has eluded men of genius for centuries, and you're worried about one minor detail!"

"Well, it ain't whut you might call minor, Jim—"

"Hank, you never had a day's mechanical training in your life. I know that. So tell me—how on earth could you know how to make this machine?"

Cleaver blushed.

"Why, it just come sort o' natcheral, Jim. 'Peared to me as if they was oney one way to make it, so—O golly!"

A stricken look swept suddenly over his face, and I spun to discover the reason. The Reason was five-foot-two of loveliness standing in the doorway of our apartment. Breath-taking but outraged loveliness, answering to the name of Miss Helen MacDowell.

Her dark eyes were like thunder-clouds, and her foot tapped the carpet angrily.

"Well!" she said. "Well, at last I find you!"

It was I who had to hold Hank Cleaver now. He was trying desperately to wriggle out of my grasp. I believe he had some idea of trying to crawl under the carpet. Finally he surrendered, turned to face his fiancée.

"H-hullo, honey!" he said.

"Don't 'honey' me!" snapped Helen. "What were you two talking about just now?"

Hank had temporarily suffered a paralysis of the vocal cords. I went to bat for him.

"Dimensions," I said. "Hank was explaining to me how the Time dimension operates."

Helen sniffed. "Time, indeed! Perhaps he needs an explanation of Time himself. I suppose you completely forgot you had a date with me an hour and a half ago, Hank Cleaver?"

Hank strangled. I said apologetically, "Now, Helen—don't be angry. I guess he forgot dimension it."

"That," scorned the girl, "is just the sort of poor joke I should expect from you, Jim. Well, I'm going to marry him and get him away from your bad influence soon—" Before I could think up a good comeback to that one, she shouldered past me into Hank's bedroom-laboratory, eyed with disdain the wavering, nebulous whatchamaycallit standing there. "What do you call this?" she demanded.

"It—it's a time-machine, honey," said Hank meekly.

"Hmmm! Funniest looking clock I ever saw!"

"Not that kind of Time, sugar-plum." Hank visioned forgiveness in her aroused interest. He sprang to her side, pointed at the various dials and gadgets. "This takes you to the past, so you can watch history being made. Or into the future—"

Helen, being a woman, had no time for nonsense like that. She got right down to fundamentals. "It's not streamlined," she said. "I don't like the color, and the dashboard isn't pretty. Where's the cigarette-lighter? And those seats don't look very comfortable—"

And she climbed into the front seat.

Hank said, "Now, Helen, don't git in there yet! It ain't quite finished, an'—"

She ignored him with magnificent aplomb. "I'm glad one of us has good common-sense," she said. "If you're going to be an inventor, someone has to keep an eye on you to make sure your inventions are practical.

"Just as I thought! These cushions aren't at all comfortable. They're not wide enough, either. Get in here, Jim. Beside me—that's right! And you, too, Hank. Now do you see what I mean? These seats should be lots wider—"

Hank said nervously. "All right, sweety-pie. Now let's go see a nice movie or—"

"And what," continued Helen blandly, "is this tiny key for? A glove compartment? Let me see inside—"

Hank stiffened like a strychnine victim. His eyes bulged, and his voice exploded in a sudden roar.

"Don't touch that! Helen, don't—!"

He spoke a split second too late. Already the key was turning. Freezing in my chair, I heard a thin, whining hum from the time-machine's motors. The framework shook, and I was suddenly aware that where about us, a moment before, we had seen a brightly illumined bedroom, now there was nothing but flickering mists of gray ... wavering ... bottomless ... formless....

"Dagnab it!" cried Hank. "Oh, dagnab it to blazes! Now you've went an' did it!"

He reached across the terrified girl, snapped over the key. Instantly the flickering ceased ... the gray, bottomless mists dissipated ... the illumination returned. We were once again back in the bedroom, sitting in the time-machine.

But—there was a startling difference.

Standing beside us, staring at us with eyes huge as moons and mouths incredulously agape, were three people. And those three people were—

Helen MacDowell ... Horsesense Hank ... and myself!

CHAPTER III

The Whacky Worlds of Maybe

I was the first to break the horrified silence, and I hereby claim the all-time, All-American and world's record for silence-shattering—because two of me broke it at once!

I wailed, "Omigawd!" Then started like a bishop in a burleyque as I heard my own voice wailing, "Omigawd!"—and saw myself whirl and make a bee-line for the door.

Then Horsesense Hank—my Horsesense Hank, I should say—put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Easy, Jim!" And the other Horsesense Hank put his hand on the other me's arm, and said, "Easy, Jim!", and two Helens asked, simultaneously, "Hank—what in the world has happened to us?"

Hank's brows were furrowed. He said slowly, "Well, it's this way, honey—" Then he stopped as he realized that his identical twin was saying the identical words in the same quiet voice. The two Hanks stared at each other for a second, then the other Hank nodded. "Go ahead," he said. "Mebbe you c'n explain it better'n me."

The Hank sitting beside me acknowledged the nod with its exact duplicate.

"Awright," he said. "Well, near's I c'n figger out, it's this way:

"Helen done went an' turned on the key while we was sittin' in the machine. Which set it into operation. Like I told you, this machine travels in time. An' that's jest whut it done!"

"But—but you said it wasn't working yet, Hank!" I moaned.

"No, Jim. I said it wasn't completed yet. There's a difference."

It still didn't make sense. I gestured towards the three "usses" standing beside us.

"But a time-machine ought to go into the future or the past. These people—"

Hank shook his head. "Jim, I showed you them dials on the dashboard. They control the future-past Time element. And—and they're the gadgets which wasn't completed yet!"

I pawed my hair feverishly.

"But if they weren't connected ... if we're neither in the future nor in the past ... where are we? And who in the world are they?"

"We're in the present," said Hank, "but we're in a different present. We didn't travel forward or backward. We slipped sideways across the Time dimension to another present based on an entirely different set of possibilities.

"Leastwise—" He glanced inquiringly at the other Hank. "—that's whut it 'pears like to me. Hank—er—Mr. Cleaver, how 'bout that? Whut happened in your past? Didn't she turn the key?"

"Are you crazy?" bleated my double. "Of course she didn't turn the key! She just this moment entered the room."

"Our" Helen seemed suddenly to understand. Some of the stupefaction left her eyes, a knowing look took its place and she nodded to "their" Helen.

"Delayed, dear? What was it? Your—?"

The other Helen blushed and nodded. "Yes. Just as I was leaving the house it snapped. I had to run back in and tack it up."

"I thought of doing that," said our Helen. "Then I decided to just pin it together and come along. Why, this is ridiculous! Surely a little thing like a broken—"

"But it did!" interrupted Hank hastily. "It's like I told you, Jim—any little thing will change the hist'ry of existence. You see whut happened now? Back there an hour or so ago, Helen broke her—something happened to Helen—Which give her a choice of decisions.

"That was a deciding p'int in the hist'ry of all of us. Way it happened to you folks, she went back an' sewed it up; that made her a few minutes late, an' she never got time to climb into the machine.

"Way it happened to us, Helen just jury-rigged her skivvies—'scuse me, honey-lamb!—an' come along. Got into the machine, turned the key an'—here we are!"

"Yes, here we are!" I squawked, "but where the hell are we? Logic or no logic, Hank, this is one time I will not believe my own eyes! These other 'usses' don't exist. Can't exist. Why, it violates the Law of Conservation of Matter! The same thing can't exist two places at the same time—"

"Sure it can't," agreed Hank impatiently. "But I'm tryin' to tell you, this ain't the same Time! This here is a diff'rent world entirely. This is one world from an infinite number o' possibilities arisin' out o' the past. That other Jim Blakeson looks like you, Jim. An'—" Hank studied him speculatively. My double had jerked a bottle of rye from the bedroom medicine cabinet, and was feverishly engaged in warding off pneumonia for the next ten years. "—an' I must admit he acts like you, too—but he ain't you. He's you like you woulda been under a different set of coordinates."

This time I had him! Had him cold! Triumphantly I cried, "Then if he's not me, this whole thing is a delirious dream. Otherwise we couldn't meet. Because one of us has no real existence. Even granting that at any given point in the past an infinitude of things could have happened, the fact remains that only one thing did happen! So one of us is alive, and the other has no real existence!"

But Hank shook his head slowly and sadly.

"Nope, Jim! I'm sorry, but you're wrong again. It don't work out that way. From the beginning o' Time I reckon they musta been billions o' different crooshul situations—an' each one o' them has made way to another possible future, each one as true an' valid as the rest.

"The big trouble is—" And here he looked worried for the first time, stared at his silent prototype. "But you built the machine, too. You know whut the trouble is."

And the other Hank nodded his head soberly.

"Mmm-hmm. Been wonderin' about it ever since you arrove. Whut you goin' to do about it?"

"I dunno exactly," confessed Cleaver No. 1. "I—I mean we—had planned on installin' a magnetic grapple in the machine so's we c'd alluz get back where we come from—but now, ding-bust it, I'm in the machine an' can't git out, an' the equipment ain't installed—"

That was too much! It was bad enough arguing with Hank Cleaver, but to sit there listening to two Hank Cleavers talking and arguing with one another—that was a little too much for me! I sent out an SOS to my alter ego.

"Look, Buster, or Blakeson, or Narcissus,[2] how about a Share-the-Health plan with that bottle? After all, I'm the guy who bought it."

He said, "The hell you did! But here—" And held out the bottle. I reached for it—

His hand passed completely through the walls of the machine in which I sat! My hand passed completely in and out of the bottle he handed me; the bottle fell right through my fingers, my arm, and my right foot—and crashed on the floor below! Both of me wailed, good dusty rye gurgled cheerfully into the carpet, and I stared at Hank Cleaver dismally.

"Now what?" I demanded. "Now who did what when?"

And Hank, a haunted look in his eyes, said, "Sorry, Jim—but that's another o' the drawbacks to this time-travel business. You c'n see things an' hear 'em and smell 'em, but you can't tetch 'em. Because as fur's you're concerned, they ain't, an' as fur's they're concerned, you don't exist!"

Helen MacDowell stared at him.

"You mean we can't step out of this jaloppy when we take it into our minds to do so?"

"Nope!" said Hank miserably. "We're locked in like caged mice."

The thought was right, but he expressed it much too masculinely. At his words, both Helens emitted little squeals of fright. And "our" Helen swung into action.

"Then I," she cried, "am getting out of here! Right away! I'm going back where I belong—"

"Helen!" howled Hank, agonized. "Hank—try to—!"

But both roar and plea were bootless. For again my brainy chum's fiancée had clicked the key, the room had faded and all sights and sounds were lost in that gray, flickering veil. Once more we were on our way!

Once when I was a kid in knee-britches I hitched my express-wagon on behind what I thought was a leisurely, local truck. A few minutes later I was startled to find I was tied to a private ambulance on emergency call! Worse yet, I could not unscramble my amateurish knot. I have never forgotten my wild, heart-pounding ride through the crowded city streets ... lashing back and forth giddily like a bob in a boiling cauldron ... glimpsing through terrified eyes the unfamiliar streets through which we whirled at lightning speed ... viewing a weird kaleidoscope of running feet, dodging autos, skyscrapers that seemed to topple precariously toward me as I rocked and swayed and trembled....

What happened now made that childhood memory appear as gentle and undisturbing as Tit-tat-toe Night at the Old Ladies' Home. It was the same thing, only more so! Again I experienced that sensation of wild, headlong, uncontrollable flight—but this time not only was the destination unfathomable, but also were the sights I saw and the sounds I heard so weirdly incredible as to half madden the brain!

And that was because Horsesense Hank would not let bad enough alone. He kept reaching over and fingering studs, keys, and gadgets on the dashboard. He pushed one doojigger, and the sensation of rising joined in with the other stomach-churning feelings we were undergoing; he pushed another, and I felt a swift surge forward; to complete my feeling of utter rout, he kept turning off and on the motivating key. It was whenever he did so, whenever the gray flickering disappeared, that we—we saw things!

And what things we saw!

Here was a world of science, where rocket ships made trips to other planets in space....

Our first "stop," I plainly recall, was on the main street of a great city. We were right smack-dab in the middle of the street, which didn't seem to affect us one way or the other, but it sure raised hob with the people amongst whom we suddenly and, I suppose miraculously, appeared.

One of them walked right through us, then, discovering what he had done, loosed a howl of terror and went racing down the street, trailed by a streamer of polysyllables which had, so far as I was concerned, absolutely no meaning.

It was a scandal to the jaybirds that he should be out walking anyway, because all he had on was a pair of soft sandals and a loose, flowing gown that looked like somebody's bleached bathrobe.

The streets were narrow and cobbled, the buildings tall and graceful, colonnaded with pillars, each of which was carven into the form of some heroic male or bulgy shemale. A fountain tinkled on a grassy lawn some few yards from us, and a bevy of olive-skinned babes were doing the family wash in the basin beneath it. When they clapped peepers on us, they joined voices in one chorus of fright, picked up their skirts and dusted.

Hank snapped the key.

His next random stop was no better. If anything it was worse. We found ourselves on a dusty road, surrounded by trees and fields in which labored scores upon endless scores of—American Indians! They bent diligently to the labor of harvesting, while over them stood a grim-visaged soldier clad in glistening buckler, greaves and helm. As we sat watching, a mounted band of similarly clad warriors swung up the road. They saw us. Instantly their leader bellowed a command—and dust flew as they charged down upon us.

I'll never forget the look on the leader's face as, with lances levelled, banner flying, swords drawn, they came banging hell-for-leather right up to, into and through us!

Hank snapped the key again.

The next sights came and went so fast that I never fully saw nor comprehended any of them. In turn and variously we found ourselves in: a quiet village inhabited by plump little farmers who spoke German; a towering city lighted only by flickering gas-lamps; a dirty little slum-section wherein evil roisterers roared bawdy songs in a French patois; a big temple, gilded and magnificent, surrounded by chanting rows of priests; the middle of a brick-and-plaster wall; a huge airfield upon which were reared fully a dozen monstrous egg-shaped crafts, one of which, as we stared bewildered, hurled itself heavenward in a tremendous burst of flame to be lost, a flaming dot, in the ebon reaches of the sky.

Then a thriving little town, where for the first time we saw printed words we could understand. "POST OFFICE ... Hunter's Fort ... Virginia ... C.S.A."

All these and dozens more, until my brain staggered before the questions it could not answer. And Hank continued to punch keys with—I could not help thinking—a desperate intentness.

But it was Helen who broke first. She was atremble with emotion as she reached forward and stayed Hank's fingers on the studs, stayed our mad voyage in what was, by now, the almost pleasant grayness of the void. And, "Hank!" she cried. "No more, Hank! Oh, please, no more! I can't stand it. Not without knowing where we are, what these places are, what it all means...."

Hank took his hands from the controls reluctantly. For a long moment he studied us. Then,

"I should think you'd understand by now," he said. "I been tryin' to 'splain it to you all along. What we been seein' is just a fraction o' them other possible worlds I was talkin' about. These are the worlds that might o' been!"

CHAPTER IV

"A Stitch in Time"

"M-might have been?" I repeated.

I didn't say it just like that, I guess. I said it more like, "M-m-m-might have b-b-been?" All right, so my teeth were chattering! So what? So maybe it was cold; how do you know?

Hank said woefully, "There's millions of 'em, mebbe billions. Mebbe trillions; I dunno. I was just 'sperimentin', tryin' to find which course this here machine took—if any—so I'd know—"

Helen's eyes were deep with surmise. She said, "Do you mean, Hank, that any of these different existences might have been the history of the United States if other things had happened?"

"Might have been," agreed Hank, "and is. You gotta get that clear in your minds. These places is just as real to the people in 'em as our world is to us. If we was to try to tell 'em about our civilization, they'd think we was nuts. Because things took a different twist for them, and they got a way of livin' which don't even conceive of our ways."

"And I can't conceive of their ways!" I interrupted flatly. "Hank, this is going too far! You admit we've been in the United States—all right, make it the North American continent if you want to!—all along. But we've seen men of a dozen different races, heard a dozen tongues spoken—"

Hank scratched his head.

"Well, now, Jim, I guess you know I'm not what you mought call a scholar. But I done read up a leetle bit about hist'ry. An' it 'pears to me like all them things we seen could o' happened, if things had tooken jest the littlest bit of shift somewheres in the past.

"Take that first city we seen, f'rninstance. Kinda funny, accordin' to American standards, I'll admit. But suppose the Greek Empire hadn't never fell? Ain't it plausible to figger as how maybe some day the expandin' Greeks might o' colonized America? They was a sea-farin' people, you know—an' great lovers o' beauty, Art and the social graces. But they was rotten bad scientists, f'r the most part. Seems to me like their civilization woulda reached a high peak, then never got no higher...."

Helen, her fears assuaged by a reasonable explanation, nodded vehement agreement.

"He's right, Jim. And those women were talking in Greek—or at least a modified form of it. I remember, now, a few words—"

"Them other guys," mused Hank, "them sojers, seems like they mought o' been Romans. They was great ones to let the conquered people work the fields for them, an' I noticed they had the Injuns on W.P.A.

"But all them guys talking Dutch—I can't figger that. It ain't reasonable to suppose it would be on account of if Germany had won the first World War. Even if they did, they couldn't o' made the United States talk German an' act German in twenty-five years!"

For once I knew more than Hank Cleaver! I gloried in my little instant.

"I'll bet I know what 'moment in history' made that existence possible! Back around the time of 1776, Hank, the fathers of the infant United States gathered to decide which language should be the official tongue of their new nation. The choice was a toss-up between English and German. English became the official language of our country by the slim margin of one vote—cast by a German-American who based his decision on the belief that English was the more pliable tongue!"

Hank smacked his hands together. "That's it, by gum! Purty nigh has to be! Now you see whut a diff'rence one little incident makes? If that man had voted f'r his native tongue, this country woulda become a lazy, self-contained Tootonic colony, 'stead of an up-an'-at-'em, commercial sea-power. An' them other places we seen—"

It was easy now that we understood the system.

"Gas lights," supplied Helen, "if Spencer Tracy—I mean Thomas Edison—hadn't been fired from his job as candy-butcher on the railroad." "America a French colony," I suggested, "if Napoleon hadn't been defeated at Waterloo. He had designs on us, you know. That's why he placed Maximilian in Mexico—"

"A powerful priesthood governing the world," broke in Helen again. "Would that be the Papal State? Or could it have been—Atlantis? If that island had not sunk?"

"That there 'C.S.A.' had me stumped f'r a minute," said Hank, "but I got it now. That stands f'r the 'Confederate States of America!' If Pickett had come up at Gettysburg!"

"But that other world of 'might-have-been'?" I demanded eagerly. "The most awe-inspiring one we saw? The one where giant spacecraft lay in their cradles? What could that have sprung from?"

There was silence for a moment. Then Hank queried, "Did either o' you happen to notice the name o' that port?"

Helen said, "I—I'm not exactly sure, but I thought it was the daVinci Spaceport—"

"That's whut I thought, too," said Hank. "I reckon there's your answer, Jim. Back there in the Middle Ages, one day old Leonardo musa blew his nose or stubbed his toe or done somethin' he didn't do in our hist'ry—an' as a result, he succeeded in doin' whut he never done in our time, though he spent half his life atryin' to. He invented aircraft.

"Which give man a flyin' start o' four hundred years or so over where he is in our universe. So that in the mebbe world which sprung from daVinci's accident, man has learned how to navee-gate space."

Well, that was all very well. I suppose I was getting an education in cockeyed history that Beard or Gibbon or any tome-pedant would have swapped his eyeteeth for. But I'm not the kind of guy who exists on brain-food alone. I've got a hollow, pear-shaped bulb a few inches south of my diaphragm, and regularly, about six times a day, this aforesaid vacancy declares itself ready, willing and able to take care of a few pecks of assorted groceries.

A mild attack of looseness around the belt reminded me that this was one of those times. I said, "Talking about space, Hank, that's what I've got the most of in my stomach. What say we tool this period-perambulating push-cart up to an 'ought-to-have-been' café and give the inner man something to think about?"

Helen nodded approval to my idea.

"I could use a little food myself, Hank."

Hank wet his lips. "J-jim—" he faltered.

"Now, look, pal," I declared firmly, "I know you're having a good time. This sort of thing is right up your pet alley. But have a little consideration for your passengers. All Helen and I want is victuals, and we'll travel with you from here to the universe where Adam didn't eat the apple—right, Helen? A round trip for a square meal; that's a fair exchange, isn't it?"

Hank said, "Jim—Helen—whut I got to say ain't nice. From the minute we started this trip, I been worryin' about one thing. The other 'me' which we met back there in the room realized it, too, an' he was also worried. You see, like Jim oughta realize atter he couldn't grab aholt o' that likker bottle—we can't eat or drink while we're travelin' in this crate!"

"We can't—!" I realized, suddenly and completely, that he was right. That was one of the things he had tried to make clear. We had no real existence to these other worlds, nor they to us. I'm afraid I went into a sort of panic, then. I said, "Then we've got to get back to our own time, Hank, or we'll starve to death!"

Hank said miserably, "But that's jest it, Jim—how are we gonna git back to our own Time? We don't know where it is. Like I awready said, we seem to be travelin' sideways across a billion possible Times. An' since I didn't get the temporal grapple installed, like I planned to before Helen—"

He stopped. But Helen had caught the implication of his words. She cried suddenly, "It's all my fault! Because I thought I knew it all, Hank, I've let us in for this. Oh, I wish I'd never tried to be so smart—"

"That's a woman for you!" I grunted disconsolately. "Better late than clever! Hell, Hank—you mean we're doomed to sit here in nothing, looking at worlds of food and liquid, until we check out from malnutrition?"

Hank said staunchly, "We ain't gonna give up that easy, Jim. We're gonna keep on tryin'. Mebbe by plain dumb luck I can work us back to our own proper place in Time."

And thus we started anew our time-hopping. Hank's fingers went to work on the cryptic studs and keys. Again we became the wraithlike visitants of fourscore and umpteen odd, incredible worlds. We saw one in which great bearded Norsemen ruled America ... another in which the Union Jack flapped above the docks of a great sea-port ... dozens upon dozens of Americas we saw, and each of them was, by some guess, quite plausible and logical. Had Leif the Lucky's colony not been wiped out by the pox ... had the Sons of Liberty not roused the colonists to rebellion against George III ... had Aaron Burr not duelled and killed Hamilton ... had Columbus not believed himself headed toward the Indies....

Hank's brow was as smooth as a corrugated washboard by now, and there was nervous haste to even his customarily placid fingers as he continued to press our shimmering buggy forward along the transverse lines of maybe.

"It ain't logical!" he moaned once, softly. "Even if they is diff'rent circumstances, they oughta spring from each other outa certain points. Like the pictures you see of fam'ly trees, or genee-ologies. But we ain't getting nowhere an' we ain't gettin' there fast!"

Meanwhile, I was getting hungrier by the minute. I don't know why it is, but there's nothing will make a man want to eat more than the knowledge that the cupboard is bare. My thoughts were not nearly so concerned with the wonders I was viewing than with visions of ten-inch T-bone steaks smothered in mushrooms ... roast fowl ... cranberry sauce and gravy ... fried country ham with apples ... things like that.

And the drink question was even more acute. After all, we had been caged up in our little egg, now, for several hours. We were beginning to feel puh-lenty thirsty, and our desire for water was not lessened by the thought that it was impossible to get any.

That's when it began to seem to me that everywhere we visited, food and drink were prominently displayed. Once we landed in the middle of a gigantic banquet-hall. Tables groaned with dainties fit for a king—and sure enough, there was a king seated at the head of the table! He was a mighty sick-looking king, though, when he laid eyes on us! He let loose a howl in what Helen claimed was modified Spanish, and dived under the table. We left hastily, before his Kingship should leave his subjects kingless.

I've often wondered, since, how many legends sprang from our visitations. There must have been hundreds of wild stories told by Indians, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards and Dutch who saw a shadowy egg with three wraiths in it appear suddenly out of nowhere, and as quickly disappear.

It was probably because of this that Hank turned to me, finally, with a pledge.

"Tell you one thing, Jim," he said earnestly. "If we get outa this here now mess, the fust thing I'm gonna do is bust this machine into a million pieces. I done learned a lesson. It ain't right to go messin' around in things like this when you can't control 'em perfect. It just ain't according to Hoyle to do it."

"But if it contributes to science—" I said.

"It don't, Jim. It's all puffectly clear an' logical to me, now. You see, it wouldn't do a man no good to go gallivantin' off into the past, because all he'd do is start a new chain of could-bes. An' it don't do no good for a man to slide sideways through Time, because whut he learns ain't of no consequence to him in his Time, an' just disturbs the folks he meets. So after this, I'm gonna confine myself to tryin' to improve the affairs o' the world we do live in—

"Hey! What was that?"

I had heard it, too. I stared at him wildly. "It sounded like—like somebody calling your name!" I said doubtfully.

"That's whut I thought!" yelled Hank. "Listen—it's a voice, comin' closer!"

We all heard it plainly now. A voice calling curiously, pleadingly, through the gray mists that engulfed us.

"Hank! Oh, Hank Cleaver! Where are you?"

We all yelled. And what I mean, we yelled loud!

And then, out of the formless veil, came a shimmer of light. A nebulous something that grew more solid, became more and more sharply visible as our cries attracted it, and finally coalesced into—

Our own time-machine! With us sitting in it!

CHAPTER V

The Time Twins

It's funny how, in moments of stress, dejection, or great elation, your mind will focus upon some tiny, relatively unimportant point.

I should have been whooping with joy to look upon a set of familiar faces, even though those faces were our own. But do you know, my first conscious reaction was one of rage? And why? Because, naturally, the first guy I looked at was myself—and there I was, sitting in that other ship, calmly munching on a great big rosy apple!

I said, "Why, you damn glutton! You ought to be ashamed! I've got half a notion to—"

I grinned at me ... I mean, he grinned at me ... or I mean I grinned at he ... oh, hell, you know what I mean! The other Jim Blakeson grinned at me and said, "What's the fuss, pal? Hungry? We figured you might be. Here, catch!"

And he tossed the remainder of his apple at me. I clutched at it greedily. But of course it fell right into and through my grasping fingers, through my lap and the base of the time-ship, and into the emptiness below. I've often wondered what became of that apple. At that particular moment, we had just lifted ourselves from a weird America where the ruling class was made up of magicians, necromancers and students of demonology. I've often wondered if the apple came tumbling out of the sky to smack some son of a witch on the head.

Then the other Hank leaned forward and yelled to our Hank. "Got here soon as I could, Cleaver. I had to get the machine finished proper so they wouldn't be no mess this time!"

And our Hank nodded. "Figgered as much," he replied. "Kinda thought you'd come atter us, but I didn't know whether you'd find us or not. How'd you trail us?"

Hank Number 2 looked sort of modest. He said, "Why, I had to fix up a new type o' gadget. 'Peared like since me an' you was almost identical the same person, so to speak, we ought to have sort of psychic bonds. You know, like this E.S.P. they talk about? So I whipped up a psychic trailer an'—an' it seemed to work right well."

If I had needed any further proof that these Hanks were, fundamentally, the same person, I had it now. Both of them were 'scientific pioneers'. They had a native, inborn ability to create, seemingly at a moment's notice, gadgets of such scientific scope that no other man would have believed them possible. But neither of them could ever give a plain, coherent reason as to how their invention worked or why they had dared think it would work in the first place!

My Hank accepted the statement as if it were quite commonplace.

"Nice goin'!" he said calmly. "You gonna lead us back where we belong?"

The other Hank shook his head.

"It's a leetle more complicated than that," he demurred. "I been figgerin' it out, an' it works oney up to a certain point. You see, I c'n oney take you back to where I was where I fust seen you. If I take you back to your place, I don't exist. But you do exist in my place, because you was in it once, see? So—"

"Mmm-hmm!" nodded our Hank gravely. And he glanced at Helen and me speculatively. "Did you tell them the rest of it?"

"Why, no, I didn't. I figgered whut they don't know won't disturb 'em. O' course there'll be a leetle bit o' confusion at first, but—"

"What," demanded both Helens simultaneously, "are you two talking about?"

The query silenced both Hanks suddenly. Then Hank Number 2 said, "Well, come on. Follow me. I'll go slow an' call the stud settin's for you so's you can follow. One-oh-four—"

"One-oh-four!" repeated our Hank dutifully, and he pushed a button. So off we went again!

Even I could see that this time our journey was a shorter, more direct and more logical one than the haphazard voyage on which our incomplete time-machine had borne us. I began to recognize a certain form, a certain coherence, to the unfolding "historic" or pseudo-historic stops we made from time to time to check our course.

Out of the scramble of heterogeneous possibilities we merged into a "history" which was based on certain fundamentals every American schoolchild knows. We left those impossible Americas where foreign nations ruled, settled into a background approximating that I was accustomed to. There were still differences. Once we bumped into a political meeting of a party known as the "Bull Moose"; Helen said, "Why, I remember reading about that party! Theodore Roosevelt—"

"In 1912," finished the other Helen. "We must be getting close, Hank."

"Yes, sweety-pie," said our Hank abstractedly, and blushed a brilliant crimson as he saw our Helen glare at him.

We had one frightening experience. We came to a Time wherein we looked out upon our little college town—we had set the positional stops by now, and were hovering above the possibilities of that place—to find it a smouldering pile of wreckage and ruin. We were so horrified by this that we had to stop and discover the reason. It took some little doing, but finally we succeeded in learning the whole story. This desolate scene was my fault!

In one of my possible existences I had made the horrible mistake of paying my favorite tailor the money I owed him. Overcome by this unexpected fortune, he had gone out on a big drunk. As a result, he had come home and set his shop on fire. The fire, getting swiftly out of control, had laid the entire city to ruin, killing hundreds and making thousands homeless.

My double and I shuddered when we heard this awful tragedy. Helen shuddered, too, and stared at me severely.

"Let that be a lesson to you, Jim Blakeson! Never run up bills like that again!"

"It is a lesson," I promised her. "I swear I will never pay any tradesman every cent I owe him so long as I live!"

And then, finally, the last stud had been pressed, the last instruction given and taken. And for the final time our two ships were hovering in the gray mists which are above Time's passageways, and our two pilots were preparing for the move which they seemed to believe would solve our difficulty. And Hank Number 2 said, "You've got it straight, now, Hank! You sit perfectly still. I'll guide my machine into yours, an' at the moment of impact, you and I will both press our temporal landin' studs—right?"

"Right!" said our Hank. "I guess it's the oney way to do it, huh?"

"Oney way I c'n see. We got to make a merger—"

"A what?" I yelled, sitting bolt upright.

Hank said, "Now, ca'm down, Jim. Me'n me figgered this all out, an' it's the oney way we can get back to normal. You see, we an' ourselves in the other ship is almost identical. Within five minutes or so of each other we got the same brains, mem'ries an' bodies.

"It's absolutely impossible for us here in this car to ever get back to exactly the sitchyation we left. Because under them circumstances, the ship wasn't never completed.

"So we got to do the next best thing. That is, we got to merge with ourselves an' become the same person again except that we will never have made this trip? Get it?"

"If I do," I howled wildly, "I'm crazy—and if I don't, I'm crazy anyhow. I lose whether I win or lose. But if you think I'm going to become part of that silly-looking ape over there—"

The other me was howling with equal frenzy. "Silly-looking ape yourself! Let me out of here, Hank! I'm not going to let him be part of me—"

And the two Helens were squawking, too. Neither of them entirely fancied the other. Now both began yammering at the same time. The two Hanks looked at each other. And our Hank said, "Now?"

"Now!" said the other Hank.

I saw the two machines drifting together. I cried aloud. I felt the hulls contact ... then there came a moment of brilliant dizziness ... a jolting sense of concussion ... and a prickling sense of motion....

Helen eyed with disdain the wavering, nebulous egg-shaped machine standing before us. "And what," she demanded, "do you call this?"

"It—it's a time-machine, honey," said Hank. Then a strange look dawned in his eyes. "Hey!" he said. "Hey—it worked!"

I couldn't answer him. Because momentarily I was a riot of mental confusion. My thoughts were so wild, and so chaotic, that they simply didn't make sense. Here I was, Jim Blakeson, standing in a room before Hank Cleaver's brand-new time-machine. Helen had just entered the room a moment ago. And yet—and yet my memory told me that hours had passed in this room, and that Helen and Hank and I had not only talked about the machine, but had stepped into it, had gone places in it, seen incredible things....

Then it all came back to me in a flash. Just as it came back to Helen and Hank. And the three of us stood there like wide-eyed cretins, trying to arrange our minds to fit an impossible situation.

It was Helen who spoke first. She moaned weakly,

"I—I'm her, now!"

"And if you're her," I quavered, "I'm him! What a mess! I'm that heel who was eating the apple ... I mean, I'm that wise-cracking guy who was hungry ... I mean, I'm both of me!"

Only Hank retained a vestige of self-control. He put his arms around Helen, placed one warm hand on my shoulder. "Now, don't git all het up, Jim. You're both of 'em—that's right. But it don't make no diff'rence, you see, because the time lapse was so small. Atter the merger we became both ourselves, which was lost in Time, an' ourselves which, atter seein' ourselves, went out an' rescued us. Do you understand?"

"Only too well," I moaned. "I understand that the biggest mistake of my life was finding you in that Westville turnip-patch. Oh, if I'd only left you there—"

I tottered toward the medicine cabinet. It was after I groped for the missing bottle that I remembered having handed it to me and breaking it before. I buried my face in my hands, clinging tightly to one reassuring sanity in a mad world. At least I had only one personal history up to a few minutes ago!

Then Hank disengaged Helen gently and moved to the side of his machine. He stared at it long and mournfully—then picked up a screwdriver.

"I promised me," he said, "I'd dismantle this here thing. An' I'm agonna do it, too, afore my good intentions weaken. It's too dangerous f'r a man to have around. Seein' other time-possibilities, experiencin' twin memories—" He stopped suddenly, stared at us. "Twin memories: the ideers o' two minds! I wonder—"

"Wonder what?"

"Them mental cases in hospitals, Jim. You know—them what do you call 'ems?—schizophrenics? Fellers with split personalities. I wonder if maybe somehow or other them poor guys ain't just fellers which somehow or other managed to git shunted off their own proper time-track into another one? An' got their personalities so balled up that they go plumb loco tryin' to straighten 'em out again? It could be. It's logical enough...."

I groaned and lurched out.

Behind me boomed the merry clank of metal on metal. Hank was cheerfully dismantling his machine. He had already chosen to forget our recent adventure. Tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow he would be off on still another dark quest down the mysterious byways of law and logic.

And why not? For he was the scientific pioneer—Horsesense Hank. And who ever heard of a horse with nerves?