Chapter I: Front Matter

Horsesense Hank
in the Parallel Worlds

By NELSON S. BOND

What if Washington hadn't crossed the
Delaware? Horsesense Hank found the strange
answer when he traveled into the past.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories August 1942.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

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]

[Footnote 1: For previous adventures of "Horsesense Hank" Cleaver, see issues of AMAZING STORIES ... March and November, 1940, May, 1942.--Ed.]

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:

_The Moving Finger writes, and having writ
Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears erase a Word of it._"

"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!"