ss 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 ours--same 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 been a class-war, or a sectional
conflict. We'd had plenty of the latter, during our first century, but
all of them had been settled peacefully and Constitutionally. Well, some
of the things he'd read in Lingmuir's _Social History_ would be
surprises for him, too.

And then I took the bill out for another examination. It must have
gotten mixed with his spendable money--it was about the size of
ours--and