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]