"Back where I came from, everyone knows your name," I said. "Reichmarshall Goering...."
"Reichmarshall!" Goering repeated. "What an intriguing title!" He looked around at the others. "Is this not a most interesting and magnificent information?" He beamed. "I, poor fat Hermann, a Reichmarshall, and known to all." He was delighted.
"Multi-phased reality is, of course, rather a shocking thing to encounter suddenly," the general said, "after a lifetime of living in one's own narrow world. To those of us who have grown up with it, it seems only natural and in keeping with the principles of multiplicity and the continuum. The idea of a monolinear casual sequence is seen to be an artificially restrictive conception, an oversimplification of reality growing out of human egotism."
The other four men listened as attentively as I. It was very quiet, with only the occasional faint sounds of traffic from the street below.
"Insofar as we have been able to determine thus far from our studies of the B-I Three line, from which you come, our two lines share a common history up to about the year 1790. They remain parallel in many ways for about another century; thereafter they diverge rather sharply.
"Here in our world, two Italian scientists, Giulio Maxoni and Carlo Cocini, in the year 1893, made a basic discovery, which, after several years of study, they embodied in a device which enabled them to move about at will through a wide range of what we now term Alternative lines, or A-lines.
"Cocini lost his life in an early exploratory test, and Maxoni determined to offer the machine to the Italian government. He was rudely rebuffed.
"After several years of harassment by the Italian press, which ridiculed him unmercifully, Maxoni went to England, and offered his invention to the British government. There was a long and very cautious period of negotiation, but eventually a bargain was struck. Maxoni received a title, estates, and one million pounds in gold. He died a year later.
"The British government now had sole control of the most important basic human discovery since the wheel. The wheel gave man the power to move easily across the surface of his world; the Maxoni principle gave him all the worlds to move about in."
Leather creaked faintly as I moved in my chair. The general leaned back and drew a deep breath. He smiled.