"Not now he isn't, I've seen him. A grand old gent of over ninety, as fragile as a stick but still going strong. He ... say, wait--isn't that a news broadcast?" * * * * * They listened to the speaker that one of the MP's had turned up. "... in spite of fierce fighting the city of San Antonio is now in enemy hands. Up to an hour ago there were still reports from the surrounded Alamo where units of the 5th Cavalry have refused to surrender, and all America has been following this second battle of the Alamo. History has repeated itself, tragically, because there now appears to be no hope that any survivors...." "Will you gentlemen please follow me," a staff officer broke in, and the two astronauts went out after him. He knocked at a door and opened it for them. "If you please." "I am very happy to meet you both," Albert Einstein said, and waved them to chairs. He sat with his back to the window, his thin, white hair catching the afternoon sunlight and making an aura about his head. "Professor Einstein," Dan Coye said, "can you tell us what has happened? What has changed?" "Nothing has changed, that is the important thing that you must realize. The world is the same and you are the same, but you have--for want of a better word I must say--_moved_. I am not being clear. It is easier to express in mathematics." "Anyone who climbs into a rocket has to be a bit of a science fiction reader, and I've absorbed my quota," Dan said. "Have we got into one of those parallel worlds things they used to write about, branches of time and all that?" "No, what you have done is _not_ like that, though it may be a help to you to think of it that way. This is the same _objective_ world that you left--but not the same _subjective_ one. There is only one galaxy that we inhabit, only one universe. But our awareness of it changes many of its aspects of reality." "You've lost me," Gino sighed. "Let me see if I get it," Dan said. "It sounds like you are saying that things are just as we think we see them, and our thinking keeps them that way. Like that tree in the quad I remember from college." "Again not correct, but an approximation you may hold if it helps you to clarify your thinking. It is a phenomenon that I have long suspected, certain observations in the speed of light that might be instrumentation errors, gravitic phenomena, chemical reactions. I have suspected something, but have not known where to look. I thank you gentlemen from the bottom of my heart for giving me this opportunity at the very end of my life, for giving me the clues that may lead to a solution to this problem." "Solution...." Gino's mouth opened. "Do you mean there is a chance we can go back to the world as we knew it?"