Timeslip Troopers

by Théo Varlet

  But that half-kilo would not be sufficient. In his turn, Renard envisaged a heroic expedient. In order to avoid the indiscretions of the orderlies, who had caught sight of him once or twice in the process of studying the Machine with the radio operator, he had told the faithful Jasmin that there were “interests of national defense” at stake. He therefore asked him to find the aluminum necessary to repair it—and after a hour, Saucisson returned triumphantly, carrying a satchel stuffed with mugs, plates, forks and spoons that he had pillaged from the dug-outs, and rings that he had “borrowed” in order to see the effect on his huge hairy paws.

  That complement of metal permitted Dupuy to reconstitute the damaged component, and to put the machine in working order, after four days’ work.

  III. Test Flights

  It was ten o’clock in the evening. A cold January shower was falling on the tranquil village. Monocard, on duty in the observation-post, did not get back until one o’clock. The orderlies were snoring on the ground floor of the villa.

  Renard and Dupuy were alone in the cellar with the Machine, on which the light of the lamp they had shifted fell directly. The copper and nickel, the glass of the dials and the ebonite controls, polished by Jasmin, were sparkling like the telephone exchange at the Palace Hotel. Two sheepskins spread on the seats offered themselves softly to the explorers, but they were in no hurry to take their places. The feverish desire and impatience of the preceding days had suddenly disappeared, and an anxiety to which they dared not admit was delaying the departure. Dupuy, oil-can in hand, had not finished oiling the axles and pivots. Renard, to maintain his composure, went to his desk and rang the three telephone posts.

  “Hello, Central. Nothing new at number one? Good—all right. And number two? What! No message from two! Find out why. And three? Good. Oh, the gentlemen are deigning to reply. Nothing new from number two either. Yes, yes, we know about the cut wire. All right. Bonsoir....”

  The radio operator, putting down his oil-can, looked for the twentieth time at the two small dials whose purpose he had been unable to discover in the notebook. “They must be for something, though, those clock-faces. One’s a genuine watch, which works, but what about the other? Why that indicator-needle? At any rate, the machine works without them. Shall we get in, Lieutenant?”

  “Let’s have a little drink first; we don’t want to get cold.”

  They drank—but as he set down his glass, an idea occurred to Renard.

  “What about our costumes, Dupuy? What if we run into an officer in Paris in our blue horizons, in 1912? He’ll have us banged up.”

  The Englishman’s trunk was still there. Dupuy put on one of the checkered suits and a superb hat. Renard took the dinner jacket and top hat. As the latter was too big for him, he had to stuck a wad of paper under the leather, furnished by an issue of L’Action Française, to which Jasmin was a subscriber. The two explorers, fortified by the Burgundy they had drunk, burst out laughing on looking at one other in their new outfits, and that fit of hilarity dispelled their final hesitation. They took their places in the seats.

  “Where shall we land in Paris, Monsieur Renard?” Dupuy asked, while meticulously checking the settings of the controls.

  “It doesn’t matter. Some not very crowded spot—put us down in the Square Saint-Pierre, in front of Sacré-Coeur. It’s closed at night. The Machine will be safe there. Is the slide-rule set at zero? We mustn’t take the sector with us.”

  “It is, Lieutenant. There—everything’s in place!”

  “We’re only staying ten minutes, you know—no longer.”

  “Yes, yes, Lieutenant. A simple reconnaissance. Are you ready? First, time: I’m starting up.” An oval indicator-light lit up, with a bright violet glow. There was a slight hum, a crackle of sparks, and a continuous vibration caused the apparatus to vibrate. “Look out—I’m releasing the safety catch. One…two…three!”

  A kind of shock—not unlike the sensation spread through the entire body procured by the abrupt ascent of an ultra-rapid elevator, but very violent and extremely unpleasant—gripped the two voyagers and cut off their breath, at the same time as a nauseating vertigo seemed to empty their heads and envelop them in a blue dazzle, as bright as the light of a mercury vapor lamp. Choking, their ears buzzing with a noise like the static of a gigantic telephone, compressed and anguished, they both closed their eyes and clenched their jaws, crouching in the seats into which they seemed to be encrusted, crushed as of their bodies had turned into platinum, as if their weight had suddenly been multiplied a hundredfold, or as if they were at the bottom of the ocean, under a pressure of a thousand atmospheres.

  That lasted for a second—or ten minutes. Then the horrible constriction relaxed rapidly; their weight became normal gain; the ankylosis and the anguish vanished; a cool wind caressed their cheeks and put the exhilarating sensation of fresh air into their lungs...

  They opened their eyes...

  No more cellar, no more lamp. A dark night, a wintry sky, clear and icy, where Orion sparkled before them, above the vague silhouettes of trees and tall buildings.

  “Well, Dupuy, my lad…!”

  “Well, Monsieur Renard, here we are. Not as difficult as all that!”

  Intimidated by the suddenness of the change of scene, they peered into the darkness, chortling quietly at their success.

  “Everyone descends on Paris!” joked the radio-operator, showing his companion the Byzantine cupolas of Sacré-Coeur, which stood out against the night sky, high to the left, aureoled by the luminous mist of the capital. And taking his torch from his pocket, he illuminated the gravel of a path, half-overlapped by the base of the machine, and then the lawn and the foliage of the square, He was setting foot on the ground when shouting burst out at a lower level, a hundred meters away, in the open space that was visible through the railings. Several disreputable individuals emerged into the light from a door that had been abruptly flung open, pursued by others. Gunshots resounded, knives flashed, and a furious skirmish began in the open space.

  “Apaches!” Renard muttered, forcing his companion to sit down again.

  “And the flics, for once,” Dupuy added.

  Indeed, four motorcycle policemen, arriving from the left, leapt off their machines and moved to surround the combatants, all too visible in the light from the doorway, still gaping, into which spectators were crowding.

  In the blink of an eye, the shooting stopped. Leaving a wounded man behind them on the pavement, clutching his belly and howling, the apaches dispersed. Five or six ran to their right, but the majority ran toward the square and leapt over the railings, pursued by the policemen.

  “Damn it!” Renard exclaimed, grabbing hold of the torch, which he aimed at the control panel. We’re in trouble—and we don’t have any weapons! Get going, my lad—get us back to Port, double quick!”

  The muffled gallop of espadrilles and the thudding of heavy police boots were coming straight toward them. “Death to the pigs!” howled the bandits, pointing at the torch and the two travelers, whom they mistook for enemy reinforcements.

  The electrician leaned over his controls and activated them precipitately, one after another. Fortunately, the return maneuver did not require delicate focusing. The indicator lit up; the apparatus hummed and shook...

  “Hold on, Monsieur Renard, I’m letting go!”

  Just as the nearest apache was aiming his Browning at the violet light of the indicator, the last lever was pulled back, and the Machine escaped in the departure’s surge of vertigo, anguish and dazzlement—with the difference that, this time, the imaginary elevator seemed to be falling away beneath the travelers’ feet, and the sensation of crushing was replaced by a lightening, a loss of weight, a temporary quasi-imponderability.

  Nothing prevented them, obviously, as soon as they had returned to Port-sur-Seille on January 17, from hitting the road again—if that banal expression can be applied here—for a more hospitable place and moment of the past than the Square Saint-Pierre
while the apaches and the police were irrupting into it. Wells’s hero, or his imitator the English engineer, would not have failed to do so. The latter’s opportunistic and posthumous pupils did not think of that immediately, however.

  They had had their fill of excitement and shocks, and as soon as they recovered from the vertiginous semi-consciousness that accompanied the journey—or, to put it more accurately, the double spatial and temporal dislocation—to find themselves under the gross lamp and the enclosed warmth of the silent cellar, Renard and Dupuy were in no hurry to do anything but leap out of their seats and take off their tourist outfits, in order to resume their regulation uniforms. It was only after having downed a glass of wine and at down face to face in the peaceful and familiar atmosphere, that they stopped speaking in interjections—furious, about their misadventure; admiring, as to the correct functioning of the machine; and joyful, for their safe return home—and were able to converse more sanely.

  Their absence had only lasted thirty minutes, all told. They had left at half past ten; Renard’s chronometer and the Machine’s clock—whose dial was next to the other dial, function of which remained enigmatic—now showed nearly eleven o’clock. Monocard would not be back for two hours. Dupuy, now sure of the controls, was almost inclined to “have another go.” Breathing the air of pre-war Paris, if only for ten minutes, had stimulated him strangely.

  “Just think, Monsieur Renard, that we were in Montmartre, five minutes from the Place Pigalle, the Abbaye de Thélème, the Rat-Mort—all the nice places where one can have a bit of fun…oh, just time to drink a glass and to remember how it was before this holy mess of a war!”

  But Renard, slightly thirsty as he was himself, made him listen to the voice of reason. It was necessary to check the Machine, whose batteries might no longer have an adequate charge, and think about a safer place in which to park their vehicle during their stroll to the Rat-Mort—still on the condition of only drinking a single modest glass...

  The next day, Monocard was slightly astonished by the lieutenant’s insistence that he take his turn of guard duty in the observation-post, but he agreed to it in the end—and the two accomplices found themselves back in the cellar after ten o’clock.

  Dupuy had recharged the batteries, and he proposed for a landing-point, not the square, which was too risky, but the derelict ground cluttered with building-materials and rubble at the top of the butte, behind the statue of the Chevalier de La Barre.4 The lieutenant agreed, but for further safety, on top of their civilian clothes, they both put on an ulster this time, into whose pockets they each put two grenades and an automatic pistol.

  Beneath the violent electric lighting, the orchestra of the Rat-Mort poured out its languorous strains into the atmosphere of rooms in which a dust-cloud of luxury and pleasure seemed to be floating. On the shining parquet, couples were dancing the tango. On the tables around the periphery, painted and plumed women were eyeing up potential clients while sipping orangeade.

  Among the twenty party-people, cosmopolitans and foreigners perched on high stools on front of the bar, sparkling with nickel and mirrors, Renard and Dupuy were savoring their martinis more slowly than their original program had permitted. Although they had taken care to retain their somewhat baroque ulsters, their entrance had passed unperceived, and at this hour they could see themselves in the large mirror behind the bar as a plausible pair of foreigners. The tall blond fellow next to them, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a green hat, who was talking loudly—in German! What a cheek! Dupuy observed, with a momentary flicker of amazement—looked much more ridiculous. Their embarrassment and their initial timidity had melted away like sugar in a cup of tea; they were enjoying themselves blissfully, delightfully, in that atmosphere of insouciant joy, of which they had almost lost the memory...

  “Why, but it’s Marcel Renard! How are you, old chap!”

  And a gentleman in a smoking-jacket clapped the explorer on the shoulder. The latter started with fright as he recognized a friend he had seen fall beside him at the battle of the Marne, his head blown off by a shell!

  “Georges Daufresne! You! But…you’re dead!”

  The other bridled. “You’ve had one too many, you know. Me, dead! I have no desire to be, I can assure you. I’ve never felt better, and the fortune-teller at the Neuilly fair told me I’d live to be 90. But what’s become of you since we last met?”

  “Still with the eighth, with my poilus,” the lieutenant replied, automatically, in spite of the dig in the ribs that the radio operator gave him.

  “Completely drunk!” murmured Daufresne. “Go on, sleep well, old chap—another time!” And he turned back to his companions.

  Having paid the bill, Dupuy dragged Renard to a table where, he said, it would be quiet—but where, in reality, he had noticed a girl in a blue toque, who had smiled at him in an alluring manner. Her blonde companion, in a pink dress, would do for the lieutenant; he liked them plump.

  They offered the girls champagne. There was no urgency; it was scarcely eleven o’clock; if they left around midnight, that would be perfect. The two chicks, who also had their plans, deployed the treasures of seduction. Renard and Dupuy, gradually arming up, amused themselves with no further scruples. They even consented, at about midnight, to take off their ulsters in order to dance a two-step. But the group that Daufresne had informed about Renard’s singular remarks was watching them with an ill-disguised suspicion.

  “They’re annoying us, those ambushers,” Duput groaned. “I have a yen to go teach them to mind their own business.” The chick in the blue toque held him back.

  The lieutenant sighed at the idea that he soon had to leave the plump blonde. Gallantly, he summoned the flower-seller and chose a branch of white lilac.

  “Keep the change,” he said, taking a five-franc bill from the pocket into which he had tucked a wad of cash before leaving.

  The woman examined the bill, and then looked her client up and down, her fist on her hip. “Don’t try to put one over on me. If you’re a forger, try to find some other mark to take your fake notes. Me, I’m not playing.”

  She had raised her voice. The chicks became anxious. Customers were turning round. A bouncer approached. Renard, furious about his gaffe, took back the unfortunate bill and reached into his waistcoat pocket, where he found a few pounds sterling. He held a sovereign out to the florist, who shrugged her shoulders, grumbling: “Bah! They’re only English!”

  Nevertheless, he had time to retreat.

  Dupuy sensed a hostile curiosity enveloping them. “There’s a bad smell in here—let’s get out,” he whispered to Renard, who consulted his watch regretfully.

  “Yes, it’ll soon be one o’clock. Let’s go.”

  They settled the bill and put their ulsters back on, but the chicks, in spite of their mistrust of these singular clients, protested, half-wheedling and half-peevish: “What? You’re not going?”

  Renard disengaged himself from the plump blonde by means of an English sovereign. The blue toque was still clinging to Dupuy. “You’re a nice boy—at least you’ll give me a little gift.”

  “Hurry up!” called Renard, from the doorway.

  The electrician took two black balls the size of oranges from his ulster. “Here, darlings—my lieutenant has given you gold; I’ll give you these Easter eggs.”

  “Oh, they’re funny, these things. What are they called?”

  “They’re called ‘lemon grenades.’”

  “And what’s inside them?”

  “A nice surprise.”

  And he decamped, following Renard.

  They went back up the Boulevard Rochechouart at the double, and were about to turn the corner of the Rue Steinkerque when a muffled detonation resounded behind them, and then another, from the direction of the Rat-Mort.

  “What can that be?” asked Renard.

  “Our chicks amusing themselves,” sniggered Dupuy.

  On the derelict ground, amid the building-materials and the rubble, the Machine
was waiting. The two tourists took their places therein.

  The Machine has functioned, the return has taken place; pre-war Paris is far away, in the mysterious compartments of Relativity. Here is the cellar in Port-sur-Seille…and yet further detonations are resounding! Illusion? The memory of the grenades in the Rat-Mort? But to the detonations of grenades is added the explosion of shells, the crackle of rifle-fire, the rattle of machine-guns…no doubt about it, it’s an attack: a Boche attack! A battle is raging in Port-sur-Seille, and neither Lieutenant Renard nor Radio-Operator Dupuy is at his post!

  In the blink of an eye they are out of the Machine, throwing off their outfits, putting on their blue uniforms...helmets...

  Outside. Dupuy gallops straight ahead toward his tower; Renard, crazed, runs to the right, toward the minor posts.

  After ten paces he ran into the breathless Monocard, who gasped: “Finally! There you are! I’ve been looking for you everywhere. This has been going on for two hours. The orderlies are asleep and I’ve made sure that they don’t suspect you. I’ve told the others that you were on duty in the tower, but I thought you’d been taken prisoner with the men at the post at the bridgehead. The swine had dozed off and were snoring like popes. They woke up under the pistols of the Boche, who asked them politely to follow therm. It’s Corporal Venette who escaped, barefoot, and who told the adjutant to raise the alarm. Barefoot! On duty! I’ll see to him! Anyway, we got out of it—it’s nearly all over. But where the hell have you been?”

  “My dear chap,” Renard began, trotting along the communication tunnel behind his subordinate, while searching desperately for a plausible explanation, “it’s fantastic—a long story…too long to tell now. I’ll tell you later.”

  They emerged on to the esplanade of the tower, and meeting Cipriani there provided a salutary diversion. The sergeant announced that the Boche had gone back over the Seille and were retreating; we had got out of it with the loss of the prisoners from the advance post and five or six slightly wounded.