"H. Beam Piper - Crossroads of Destiny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

after a moment's hesitation, he spoke to me.

"Pardon, sir. The man in the club-car who got off at Harrisburg; did you know him?"

"Never saw him before. Why?"

"He tipped me with a dollar bill when he got off. Later, I looked closely at it. I do not like it."

He showed it to me, and I didn't blame him. It was marked One Dollar, and United States of America,
but outside that there wasn't a thing right about it. One side was gray, all right, but the other side was
green. The picture wasn't the right one. And there were a lot of other things about it, some of them
absolutely ludicrous. It wasn't counterfeitтАФit wasn't even an imitation of a United States bill.

And then it hit me, like a bullet in the chest. Not a bill of our United States. No wonder he had been so
interested in whether our scientists accepted the theory of other time dimensions and other worlds of
alternate probability!

On an impulse, I got out two ones and gave them to the porterтАФperfectly good United States Bank
gold-certificates.

"You'd better let me keep this," I said, trying to make it sound the way he'd think a Federal Agent would
say it. He took the bills, smiling, and I folded his bill and put it into my vest pocket.

"Thank you, sir," he said. "I have no wish to keep it."

Some part of my mind below the level of consciousness must have taken over and guided me back to the
right car and compartment; I didn't realize where I was going till I put on the light and recognized my own
luggage. Then I sat down, as dizzy as though the two drinks I had had, had been a dozen. For a moment,
I was tempted to rush back to the club-car and show the thing to the colonel and the sandy-haired man.
On second thought, I decided against that.

The next thing I banished from my mind was the adjective "incredible." I had to credit it; I had the proof
in my vest pocket. The coincidence arising from our topic of conversation didn't bother me too much,
either. It was the topic which had drawn him into it. And, as the sandy-haired man had pointed out, we
know nothing, one way or another, about these other worlds; we certainly don't know what barriers
separate them from our own, or how often those barriers may fail. I might have thought more about that if
I'd been in physical science. I wasn't; I was in American history. So what I thought about was what sort
of country that other United States must be, and what its history must have been.

The man's costume was basically the same as oursтАФsame general style, but many little differences of
fashion. I had the impression that it was the costume of a less formal and conservative society than ours
and a more casual way of life. It could be the sort of costume into which ours would evolve in another
thirty or so years. There was another odd thing. I'd noticed him looking curiously at both the waiter and
the porter, as though something about them surprised him. The only thing they had in common was their
race, the same as every other passenger-car attendant. But he wasn't used to seeing Chinese working in
railway cars.

And there had been that remark about the Civil War and the Jackson Administration. I wondered what
Jackson he had been talking about; not Andrew Jackson, the Tennessee militia general who got us into
war with Spain in 1810, I hoped. And the Civil War; that had baffled me completely. I wondered if it had