Time Tunnel

by Murray Leinster

  The bound man protested. They had held him captive for more than twelve hours, debating. It was illegal! Harrison said with a sort of stunned interest:

  “The problem is that this Albert is a burglar?”

  Carroll said vexedly that he’d been having a few glasses of wine in the town’s least offensive bistro. This man, Albert, doubtless saw him there and considered it an opportunity. When Carroll went home earlier than usual, he found Albert ransacking his possessions. Albert struggled desperately when Carroll seized him, but there he was. Carroll said ruefully, “And there he was, too, when Dubois came out of the time-tunnel. Which was unfortunate.”

  “Unfortunate?” cried Madame Carroll, in a passion. “It was a crime! You imbecile! This criminal…”

  “Just a moment,” said Pepe. “The gentleman is a burglar. He practises his profession privately, without witnesses. Perhaps he can understand that you prefer your business to be considered confidential, too.”

  The prisoner said shrewdly:

  “Counterfeiting, eh? We can make a deal.”

  “For the sake of privacy,” Pepe added, more nearly in his normal manner, “he can see that you might find it necessary to report to the police that M. Carroll was forced to injure him fatally in order to subdue him.”

  “That is not necessary!” objected Albert sharply. “It is not necessary at all! If I were a flic, perhaps! But since we are of similar professions…”

  “The matter could be solved,” said Pepe with a grand air, “by the use of professional courtesy and a gentleman’s agreement.”

  “C’est vrai!” said Albert. “Naturally! I will pledge my honor not to speak of anything that has occurred here! That will settle everything!”

  Carroll grunted. “Harrison, any ideas?”

  Harrison moistened his lips. Somehow he was still thinking of those vertical rays of sunlight beyond the tunnel in the other room, whereas he could look out of a window here and see the deep-red glow of the sky above a just-descended sun. That bright sunshine bothered him horribly. It was appalling; upsetting!

  “I think,” he said awkwardly, “that I’d let him see what you just showed Pepe and me. I don’t think it’s likely that he’d tell about that!”

  Carroll considered. Then he nodded. He picked up the bound man and walked effortlessly into the other room. Harrison heard the clatter of the opening door. There was silence.

  Then Madame Carroll said bitterly, “It is unfortunate that one cannot…”

  The hatchet in her hand moved suggestively. M. Dubois shivered. There was silence. A long silence. Then sounds in the next room again. The improvised door creaked and shut, and a moment later Carroll brought back the burglar. He laid him matter-of-factly on the floor. Albert’s face was ashen. His eyes rolled. Carroll regarded him meditatively, and then took a knife out of his pocket and opened it. He cut the cords which bound the prisoner.

  “I think,” he said, “that he is impressed.”

  “M-mon Dieu!” said the prisoner hoarsely, “M-mon Dieu!”

  Harrison saw Carroll bending to lift the small, scared Albert to his feet. He helped. The little man’s teeth chattered. Carroll nodded.

  “Let him out, Harrison. Good idea! He won’t talk!”

  Harrison led the burglar through the dining room and the room which opened toward the street. The small criminal wavered and shook upon his feet. His teeth continued to chatter. Harrison said, frowning, “You’ll attract attention if you stumble and shake like this! Have you any money?”

  Albert shook his head. Harrison handed him half a dozen hundred-franc notes.

  “Here,” he said distastefully. “You need a drink. Several of them. If I were you, I think I’d have about as many as I could find room for. I wouldn’t mind joining you! But anyhow I advise you to keep your mouth shut!”

  “Mais oui,” gasped the former prisoner. “Mon Dieu, oui!”

  Harrison opened the door for him. He watched as the little man went unsteadily out to the street and then turned to the left. There was a wine shop not more than a hundred yards away. The former prisoner headed for it. He walked fast. With purpose. Harrison watched him out of sight.

  He went back to the kitchen. Carroll was saying briskly, “Get out of those clothes, Georges, and into something befitting a modern business man. Then we’ll divide up the stock you brought back and Harrison and Ybarra and you will take it to Paris on the next bus out of town. If our friend Albert should be indiscreet, I’ll be here alone and of course can deny everything. Naturally, I’ll be believed.”

  He turned to Harrison.

  “That’s precaution. But you’ve brought a problem that’s much more important than our own affairs! What you’ve told me is that most alarming news anybody could imagine! I don’t think,” he added, “that my brother-in-law can be responsible for what you report. He could take a modern scientific book back in time, but he wouldn’t know where to place it. Anyhow, there is normally a sort of dynamic stability in the grand outline of events. But this de Bassompierre seems to be tapping at history like a stone-cutter tapping at a rock. Enough tappings, and the thing will crack! We’ve got to stop him! So we’ll get this stock for the shop to Paris and set about handling this de Bassompierre!”

  Perhaps an hour later, Harrison and Pepe passed the wine shop a hundred yards from Carroll’s cottage. A familiar figure drooped over a table inside. It was Albert the burglar. He was comatose. He had no troubles. Under the circumstances, he was probably wise.

  But Pepe shifted his heavy parcel and said detachedly:

  “I observe one sane and admirable result of our researches so far. So far as you are concerned, anyhow.”

  “What?” asked Harrison.

  “You have found this Valerie,” said Pepe. “She is charming. She remembers you with affection. True, her aunt is as unpleasant a character as one could wish to find, but now she will not object to your friendship. She will not dare. You know too much!”

  Harrison wasn’t altogether pleased with Pepe’s viewpoint, but that was the way Pepe’s mind worked. He changed the subject as he changed his own burden from his right hand to bis left.

  “Carroll’s right,” be said uneasily. “Something’s got to be done about this de Bassompierre trying to change all of past history! Apparently there’s no great damage done yet, but if he keeps on passing out information a hundred-odd years before its proper time…”

  “Yes,” agreed Pepe. “From one point of view he should be strangled. Yet that would be unfortunate, since history says he was not.”

  He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Harrison said gloomily, “I think Carroll will use the time-tunnel to try to fix things up. If one can import snuffboxes from a former time, one can certainly argue with somebody in the past! He needs to be persuaded not to mess up all the present we know and the future we guess at.”

  “The present,” said Pepe, “is not intolerable, but the future is less than satisfactory. I regret that I have to remain only a bystander. I mentioned that my great-great-grandfather, Ignacio Ybarra, was in Paris in 1804. Later, after the independence of the colony of Mexico, be was Ambassador to France. But if I went with you and Carroll to argue with this de Bassompierre, it might happen that by some unhappy accident I might meet and cause the death of my great-great-grandfather. In such a case, of course, I would not be born to be the cause of his death. So he would not meet an untimely fate, and I would be born to cause his death. So I would not be born. So I would. So I would not. And so on. I prefer not to try to solve this paradox. I shall remain unwillingly a bystander.”

  Harrison said nothing. They trudged on together to where the antiquated bus to Paris would be found. Presently Harrison ceased to think about Pepe, and Carroll, and Albert, and Madame Carroll, and even about whoever de Bassompierre might be and all the other things involved in the idea of a possibly—or certainly—variable history.

  He thought about Valerie. He had a date with her for tomorrow. He cheered up.

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  Valerie smiled cheerfully at Harrison and said: “Shall we sit here?”

  He agreed immediately, as he would have agreed to anything else she said. This was Bonmaison, and all about them there was the atmosphere of picnics and tranquil romance and all the natural and ordinary affairs which are the only truly important ones. Low down on the horizon, toward Paris, there was a white streak of vapor in the sky. It was unquestionably the contrail of a jet-plane flying so high that it was invisible. Only the train of moisture condensed upon flame-formed ions could be seen. The jet was part of that round-the-world patrol maintained over Paris—and London and New York and nearly all the great cities of the world—in case some person in authority somewhere should decide to start a war. But it did not apply to Bonmaison. It was a symptom of the insanity of human beings in a cosmos obviously designed for them to live in, but which they industriously prepare to make unlivable.

  But at Bonmaison one did not think of such things. There, and at many similar places all over the world, people adhered to an almost universal conspiracy to pretend that international organizations and agreements had made the world really safe, and that the alarming situations of which one reads are actually only arrangements so the newspapers will have something to print.

  Harrison could not fully act according to this conspiracy today. He’d encountered proof that possibilities existed which were more horrifying even than atomic war. If history changed, if past events were disrupted, if some day bygone events would cease to have occurred and other quite different events took their place, why, he might not ever have been! Much worse, even Valerie might not ever have existed!

  Valerie had seemed to choose this spot for them to repose and talk comfortably, but she continued to look about her. People of no importance go to Bonmaison to sit on the grass and eat ices and solve such profound questions as to what degree unparalleled affection justifies recklessness, and to what degree one should be practical. Usually, the girls are the practical ones. But they are disappointed if the young men are not urgently impractical.

  A carousel made alleged music a little distance off. Children rode on it, gleefully. There were booths where young men were fleeced of five and ten-franc pieces as they tried to demonstrate to their companions their skill at complicated and rigged games. There were boats on the small meandering stream, and shirt-sleeved swains rowed clumsily while girls admired them. There were shrieks of laughter when Polichinelle behaved sadistically for the amusement of innocent childhood. There were other couples—many of them who had either already settled themselves comfortably or still sauntered in quest of exactly the spot the precise development of their romance dictated.

  “Perhaps,” said Valerie reflectively, “over there might be more pleasant.”

  Again Harrison agreed. Pepe’s prediction that Harrison would be tolerated as an acquaintance of Valerie had come true. Madame Carroll had smiled frigidly when Valerie presented him as a friend of her childhood. Now they were together at Bonmaison, and provided that Valerie returned very soon after sunset, they were permitted a temporary escape from Madame Carroll’s direction.

  Valerie looked contented. Harrison, of course, looked foolish. She sank gracefully to the ground and smiled warmly at him.

  “Now,” she pronounced, “now we can talk!”

  And Harrison immediately found it impossible to find anything to say. He looked at her, and actually his manner of looking said many things Valerie. appeared to find satisfactory.

  “My aunt,” she observed, ignoring his silence, “was very much pleased with this morning’s business.”

  He managed to ask the obvious question.

  “Why,” said Valerie, “someone came into the shop and bought lavishly. Not as one buys for one’s hobby or for curios, but in quantity! And he asked many questions about where such items were made. My aunt was discreet. He probed. He pumped. He tried to entrap her into revelations. She gave him no information.”

  Pepe had also had an idea of finding out where the shop’s stock-in-trade was manufactured. Now he knew, and so did Harrison. Neither of them was much happier for the information. Apparently Valerie did not share it. She laughed a little.

  “Ah, but he tried to find out where he could get such goods! He squirmed and sidled and tried innumerable tricks! He said he would like to have special items made. My aunt told him that she would take his order. Then he confessed that he was actually a dealer—as if she had not known!—and offered a price for information about the manufacturer!”

  Pepe had intended something of this sort, too. Harrison listened emotionally to the sound of Valerie’s voice.

  “In the end,” said Valerie pleasurably, “they struck a bargain. On my aunt’s terms! He is well known as an art dealer in England and in America. It is a splendid bit of business. She will order such items as he desires. He will pay extravagantly. My aunt suspects that he will probably age them artificially and sell them as true antiques. She does not do that, because she does not wish for trouble with the authorities. But what he does with them is not her affair. Still, she put heavy prices upon them!”

  Harrison mumbled. Valerie continued:

  “He bought all the very best items in the shop. More than my uncle just brought back! It will be necessary for him to make another trip immediately to get more!”

  “Maybe,” said Harrison, “it was good humor brought about by a good business deal that made her agree to let us come here today.”

  “Mais non,” said Valerie wisely. “It was M. Carroll! Anyone but my aunt would be fond of him. But he angers her. He is not practical, and above all things my aunt is practical! Yet even she dares to go only so far! He told her that she must not offend you. He said that you were important to probable developments in the shop. He said that if you were offended, he would take measures. Ah, but my aunt was angry! She brooded all the way back from St. Jean-sur-Seine! She likes to direct. She does not like to be directed.”

  Harrison did not want to think, with Valerie, of St. Jean-sur-Seine and the ghastly possibilities implied by the confirmation of all his most implausible suspicions. He wanted to think only of Valerie. But thinking of Valerie made him think of disasters that might come to her.

  A soldier and a girl went by, and Harrison considered morbidly what could be the result of a mere few boxes of percussion-caps upon the history of Europe and the world, if they happened to be demonstrated ahead of their normal time.

  Napoleon was not receptive to the idea of submarines, to be sure. The American Fulton had found that out. But he would grasp instantly the advantage of percussion-cap guns over the flint-locks his infantry used. Flint-locks, in action, missed fire three times in ten. Merely changing muskets to percussion guns would make the increased fire-power of his armies equivalent to two hundred thousand added soldiers. Napoleon would not miss a bet like that! There would be no trouble with manufacture. The technology of the early nineteenth century was quite up to the making of percussion-caps once the idea and the proof of its practicality was known.

  Even one box of percussion-caps, put into the proper hands in 1804, would mean that the invasion of Russia in 1812 would be successful. The Russian armies would not be defeated, they would be destroyed. There would be no abdication. There would be no Hundred Days. Waterloo would never be fought. A million Frenchmen would not die before their reasonable time, and instead would live to become fathers instead of the left-overs from whom modern Frenchmen were descended. And of course the probability of exactly those persons marrying, who had married in the past that Harrison knew of, and of their having exactly those children they’d begotten in that same past, and of Valerie sharing his childhood and the two of them being here at this moment on the grassy sward of Bonmaison—it would be improbable past imagining!

  Valerie talked, and he listened yearningly. Presently there was a movement nearby and someone grunted in satisfaction. Harrison looked up. There was Pepe, impeccably dressed, and beside him there was the much larger figu
re of Carroll.

  “He was right,” said Carroll largely, with a nod of his head at Pepe. “He said he knew where to find you. I didn’t know where you lived, but he’d mentioned his hotel, so I hunted him up to locate you.” He switched to French. “Ah, Valerie! I trust to your kindness not to remember having seen me. There would be a great squabble to no purpose. My intentions in Paris are most innocent!”

  Valerie said tranquilly:

  “But of course! Did you know that M. Dubois makes another journey immediately? Someone came to the shop, a most eminent dealer in art-objects, and most of the shop’s stock departed with him. It is necessary to get more.”

  Carroll shrugged.

  “No harm in that that I can see. Harrison—”

  “What?”

  “This de Bassompierre, I have to talk to him! That’s why I came to Paris.”

  Harrison started slightly. De Bassompierre had been born in 1767 and died in 1858 at the age of ninety-one. But “I’m ordering clothes and equipment for the purpose,” said Carroll crisply. “But I need someone to go with me. This whole thing is your baby. I hope you’ll go with me. Will you?”

  Harrison swallowed. Then he looked at Valerie. She looked as if she did not understand. He looked back.

  “It is really possible to do anything?”

  “Naturally!” said Carroll. “You and Ybarra had an odd experience, remember? About the history of Mexico? It’s proof of two things, no, three. One is that history can be changed. The second is that somebody’s trying to change it. The third is that even when it’s changed it has a tendency to change back. There’s a sort of elasticity to events. Your theory that things which at one time are facts can cease to be facts has a certain amount of cockeyed sense to it. If something happens, and in consequence a given fact becomes inconsistent with the rest of the cosmos, it stops being a fact. It vanishes. History closes over it as water closes over a dropped stone. There are ripples, but they die away. People sometimes remember and even write it in their memoirs, but it isn’t true any longer.”