"How's this sound?" he asked, and hit
the edge of the tray with the back of the knife, _Bong_!
"Crossroads--of--_Destiny_!" he intoned, and hit the edge of the tray
again, _Bong_! "This is the year 1959--but not the 1959 of our world,
for we are in a world of alternate probability, in another dimension of
time; a world parallel to and coexistent with but separate from our own,
in which history has been completely altered by a single momentous
event." He shifted back to his normal voice.
"Not bad; only twenty-five seconds," the plump man said, looking up from
his wrist watch. "And a trained announcer could maybe shave five seconds
off that. Yes, something like that, and at the end we'll have another
thirty seconds, and we can do without the guest."
"But zees alternate probibeelitay, in anozzer dimension," the stranger
was insisting. "Ees zees a concept original weet you?" he asked the
colonel.
"Oh, no; that idea's been around for a long time."
"I never heard of it before now," the elderly man said, as though that
completely demolished it.
"Zen eet ees zhenerally accept' by zee scienteest'?"
"Umm, no," the sandy-haired man relieved the colonel. "There's
absolutely no evidence to support it, and scientists don't accept
unsupported assumptions unless they need them to explain something, and
they don't need this assumption for anything. Well, it would come in
handy to make some of these reports of freak phenomena, like mysterious
appearances and disappearances, or flying-object sightings, or reported
falls of non-meteoric matter, theoretically respectable.
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