Time Tunnel

by Murray Leinster

  Albert looked at him inquisitively.

  “I’ll buy them,” said Carroll reluctantly.

  “At what price, m’sieur?”

  “Twelve hundred paper francs apiece,” Carroll told him impatiently. To Harrison he said almost angrily: “They’re stolen, but we can’t send them back. And I’ll need some gold-pieces presently! I didn’t expect ever to become a receiver of stolen goods!”

  “A most generous one, M’sieur!” said Albert profoundly. “It is a pleasure to do business with you!”

  He counted the golden disks. There was a good double-handful. He put them in Carroll’s hands and waited expectantly. Carroll counted them, in turn, and leafed out bills to a suitable total.

  “How,” asked Harrison, “did you get the nerve to go through that tunnel a second time?”

  Albert tucked the modern currency away as he donned present-day costume.

  “I am a Frenchman, m’sieur,” he said firmly. “I had an experience which was impossible. But I had had it. So I said to myself, ‘C’est n’pas logique!’ So it was necessary for me to learn if it was true. Therefore I repeated it. But then there were difficulties. I could not find my way back until the m’sieur here—” he bowed to Harrison—“called to me.”

  “You may go, this time,” said Carroll sourly, “but don’t come back again! Next time you’ll be in real trouble!”

  “M’sieur,” said Albert, “I shall not intrude again. But if you should need someone of my talents— It is a pleasure to deal with you!”

  Harrison ushered him out and came back.

  “I’ll get the devil of a good lock,” said Carroll, “and put it on that door! Maybe I’d better make the door stronger. I’ve no mind to be the sponsor of a crime-wave in St. Jean-sur-Seine in the time of Ybarra’s great-great-grandfather!”

  Harrison paced up and down the room.

  “Things pile up,” he said restlessly, “and we’re getting nowhere fast!”

  “My wife,” said Carroll drily, “thinks I’m impractical. Maybe you do too. But we can’t go hunting de Bassompierre in twentieth-century clothes! I’ve arranged for proper costumes. We have to wait for them. We’ll need money of the period if we’re to move about freely. I’m working on that, as you just observed. Also there’s information about de Bassompierre. We need all we can get, if we’re to persuade him to change his course of conduct and tell us where the other time-tunnel is. But still it’s incredible that somebody else made another to the same period!”

  Harrison stopped his pacing and opened his mouth to speak. Then he closed it and went back to restless stridings.

  “You probably think,” said Carroll evenly, “that I’m impractical about the time-tunnel itself. Why pick a hole like St. Jean-sur-Seine for my researches? Why bury myself here? Maybe you wonder why a supposedly sane man would marry the woman I did or how I came to be disgraced, discredited, despised in my profession?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Carroll with a fine air of candor. “I was stupid! I taught my classes that reality was the probability which had a numerical value of one. Remember? Then one day I overheard myself telling my students that time is the measure of things that change. And a little later I was astonished to hear myself say that an unchanging object is not affected by time.”

  “Yes-s-s-s,” agreed Harrison. “That should be true.”

  Harrison’s expression grew sardonic.

  “It was a dogmatic statement,” he said, “and I should have let that sleeping dogma lie. But I tried to test it experimentally. It looked like melted metal, solidified, would change at the moment it became solid. But if it wasn’t moved, wasn’t stirred, wasn’t bothered, it shouldn’t change again. It should—. I spare you the details, but it should be possible to make what I’ve called a time-tunnel back from now—whenever that was—for the number of hours, minutes, seconds, and so on between ‘now’ and the freezing of the metal. The trouble was that when that distance in time was short—days or weeks or thereabouts—the tunnels were unstable. They might last milliseconds. They might not. To prove that they existed at all required very special equipment. Like a fool I wrote an article about it. Foolishly, they printed it in a learned magazine. And then I caught the devil!”

  “And?”

  “You needed very special equipment to prove my results. Nobody else had it. But they didn’t need it to discredit me! If time-travel was possible, a man might go into the past and kill his grandfather—”

  “I know that one,” said Harrison. “Pepe—Ybarra, that is—sprang it on me. In theory, if a man went back in time and killed his grandfather, he wouldn’t be born to do it.”

  “But facts,” said Carroll stubbornly, “are facts! If he did it, it would be done! If he killed his grandfather, his grandfather would have been killed, impossible or not!” Then he said wryly, “Anyhow, nobody else had the equipment to try my experiments. But the reputation of a young girl is a lot harder to hurt than the reputation of a researcher! I was denounced as a liar, a faker, a forger—practically a murderer of my own grandfather. Professionally, I was ruined!”

  “I’m—sorry,” said Harrison.

  “So am I,” said Carroll. “Because I got mad. I resolved to prove I was right. My trouble was having a short time-length to work with. I needed a metal casting that had solidified a long while ago and had never been moved. By pure chance I heard that this foundry shut up shop so fast it left its last cannon in the mould. So I had to have that cannon, undisturbed. That meant I had to have this cottage. And—the woman who is now Madame Carroll had just inherited it!”

  Harrison said:

  “And you married her for it?”

  “No. I’m not that big a fool. I tried to buy it. She kept trying to get the last franc out of me. I must have acted rich. I offered twice its value and she asked three times. I agreed to three times and she demanded four. I fretted. I was taken ill. And she nursed me. Maybe she hoped to find out how far I’d go from hearing my delirium! Anyhow, one day the maire came to my room wearing his sash of office. And he married us! I must have been delirious at the time! But there it was! When I recovered, there was the devil of a row! She’d married me for money, and I wanted to spend it on scientific experiments! Harrison, you wouldn’t believe such rows could end without homicides! But I made the time-tunnel, of nearly two centuries’ reach. And it is stable! It can last forever! But—do you see the charming, ironic fact?”

  “No-o-o…”

  “I found out that the past can be changed, and therefore the present, but there is no conceivable way to know what change will produce what result! I daren’t use it, Harrison, not even to regain my reputation! It’s too dangerous to be used by anybody but shopkeepers like my wife and M’sieur Dubois!”

  Carroll grimaced.

  “So I let them use it for a shop’s supply of curios! I was a fool, but you can’t say I wasn’t practical, turning a means of time-travel into a shopkeeper’s supply of back-number newspapers and similar oddments!”

  He strode out of the room. Harrison looked after him. He felt singularly helpless. He was.

  For the next three days he was acutely uncomfortable. He did not think it wise to write to Valerie because Madame Carroll would read the letter. He had to wait without being sure what he waited for. Once, half-heartedly, he tried to inform himself about the France he would presently visit. He learned that in 1804 handkerchiefs were not carried for the utilitarian purposes of more recent times. Smoking was practised, but snuff was more elegant. The reputations of many of the members of the Imperial court—including the Imperial family—were approximately those of domestic animals. And he learned that the sanitary arrangements in cities of the first decade of the 1800’s were not primitive. They were non-existent.

  He was waked on the third night after Dubois’ departure. There was a terrific pounding on the home-made door to the time-tunnel. Carroll was there before him, unfastening the elaborate lock he’d installed
the day after Albert’s reappearance.

  He opened the door. A sneeze came through it. Another sneeze. Strangling coughs. A moan.

  M. Dubois came feebly into the cottage dining room from the year 1804. His eyes watered. His nose ran. He was half-starved and disreputably dirty, and he had a fever of thirty-eight degrees centigrade. Between coughs, sneezes, and moans of despair he confided to Carroll that he had been continually soaked to the skin for the past three days; that his horse had been stolen, and that his saddlebags with their precious contents of high-priced perfume were buried at the foot of a large tree a kilometer down-stream from a bridge beyond the village of St. Fiacre on the way to Paris.

  Carroll gave him hot rum-and-water and got him into dry clothing. He put the plump little man to bed, where he moaned and wheezed and coughed himself into exhausted sleep.

  Pepe Ybarra arrived next morning with the costumes and forged identity-papers and other documents to be filled in as the occasion demanded. He had a certain quantity of counterfeit assignats—authentic ones were too ancient to have a chance of passing unquestioned—and a note for Harrison from Valerie. The note was not remarkable at its beginning, but Harrison read the last page with enormous apprehension.

  Valerie mentioned as a curious experience that she was in the shop, quite alone, when she felt oddly giddy for a moment. Then it seemed to her that the shop was strange. It was not the shop of Carroll, Dubois et Cie at all, but a place where pots and pans were on sale for housewives. And she was there to purchase something. She was not astonished. It seemed quite natural. Then she heard someone—perhaps the shop-keeper—moving in the back room as if to come and wait on her. She waited to be waited on. And then she felt the giddiness again and she was once more in her aunt’s place of business and everything was as it should be. Then she was astounded. But she said that she had felt much ennui and undoubtedly had dozed for a moment and this peculiar dream was the result. It was the more singular because Harrison was not in it. She did not even think of him in it. He was, she confessed, present in most of her more ordinary dreams.

  He went frantically to Carroll. Valerie had evidently had an experience like the one they’d shared, when he was convinced there’d never been a Maximilian, and Pepe had been sure there’d been four emperors of Mexico. The happening was pointless, and so was Valerie’s, but there’d been a moment when she did not think of him! There’d been a temporary, substitute present in which she’d never met him! It could be a present in which he’d never been born! Something had to be done! This crazy de Bassompierre was trying to change past history! He was succeeding! At any moment another such thing might happen, and Carroll could talk all he pleased about history’s modulus of elasticity and claim that events could be changed and of their own nature change back again. But there was also such a thing as an elastic limit! If the past were changed enough, it would stay changed! Something had to be done!

  It was pure coincidence, of course, but while Harrison protested in a frenzy of apprehension, some eight thousand miles away the mainland Chinese exploded a second atomic bomb. It appeared that they intended a series of such explosions, by which they’d acquire the experience to make them equal to the other atom-armed nations in their ability to make earth uninhabitable.

  Naturally, this was inconsistent with the theory that the cosmos was designed for people to live in, and therefore nothing would happen to stop them from doing it. This seemed to imply that humans didn’t count; everything was chance; that the cosmos did not make sense, after all.

  Which was deplorable.

  6

  Carroll made a definitely handsome figure in the costume of a well-to-do traveller in the France of an earlier time. He did not seem as ornamental as Harrison expected, but that was because he wore travelling-clothes. There were hessian-cloth breeches and high boots, and he wore an enormous cloak and a three-cornered hat. He didn’t wear a periwig; such things went out of style during the 1790’s. But he was impressive enough so that Harrison felt a little less foolish in his own get-up. He decided that nobody would look .at him while Carroll was around.

  Pepe, in a sports costume strictly of the present, regarded the two of them with uneasy eyes.

  “I don’t like this business of you going to Paris and me staying behind!” he said bitterly. “After all, it’s my great-great-grandparents who’re in Paris! And if anything happens—”

  “Look!” said Harrison, fiercely. “Valerie went through a temporarily changed present—a time-shift—like we did. And in it there wasn’t any shop of Carroll, Dubois et Cie! It was a pots-and-pans shop! And Valerie’d never met me! She didn’t know I existed! Maybe I didn’t! The normal past came back to her, as it did to us, but I can’t have that sort of thing happening! We’ve got to get to Paris and find de Bassompierre! Fast!”

  “But my great-great-”

  “Dammit!” snapped Harrison. “If anything happened to your great-great-grandfather you’d never have existed and you wouldn’t have spotted that shop and I’d never have seen Valerie again! I’ll take better care of your great-great-grandfather than you would! But we can’t waste time! We’ve lost enough waiting for these clothes!”

  There came a knock on the outside door of the cottage. There should be no callers here. Pepe jumped. Carroll said irritably:

  “My wife can’t have gotten here this soon! Answer the door, Ybarra, and get rid of whoever’s there.”

  Pepe went uneasily into the next room. Harrison drew a deep breath. He was feverishly anxious to start the search for de Bassompierre and the rival time-tunnel which obviously wasn’t being used with proper regard to the elastic limits of history. It must be that de Bassompierre didn’t realize the damage be was doing and the destruction he must cause, by passing out twentieth-century information in the early nineteenth. A reasoned explanation would certainly make him stop. Harrison was prepared to make any imaginable bargain as an inducement.

  He heard the door open in the other room. There was a murmur of voices. Pepe tried to dismiss someone. That someone objected. Pepe was impatient. The someone else was firm. The door closed. Two sets of footsteps sounded inside. Pepe said, from the other room:

  “Stay here! I will speak to M. Carroll—”

  The voice of Albert the burglar said respectfully:

  “Say that Albert needs most urgently to make a proposal of interest to him.”

  Carroll raised his eyebrows. He said angrily:

  “Bring him in, Ybarra!”

  Pepe came in, excessively uneasy. Behind him marched the reedy small burglar. He carried a parcel wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. His eyes widened as he saw Carroll’s attire. He beamed when he saw Harrison similarly clad.

  “What the devil do you want?” demanded Carroll.

  “M’sieur,” said Albert politely, “I came to make a proposal. Beyond that door I had an experience which you know about. I made a splendid haul, of which you are aware. You, m’sieur, purchased some small things I brought back. N’est-ce pas?”

  “I told you not to come back here again!” snapped Carroll.

  “But m’sieur,” protested Albert. “It is a matter of business! You cannot dream how primitive, how foolish are the locks of the citizens of—beyond that doorway! It would be ridiculous to abandon such an opportunity! So I have come, m’sieur, to propose a business arrangement. Let us say that I can acquire more such coins as you purchased for twelve hundred francs each. I will sell them to you for six hundred francs each! All I ask is the use of your doorway—did you call it a tunnel?—to pass through and after a suitable interval to return through! You evidently plan to make a journey yourselves. I am prepared for a journey also. Behold!”

  He opened the newspaper-wrapped parcel. He spread out a costume of the very early eighteen hundreds. It was not the apparel of a rich man. It was not even the costume of a bourgeois. It was what a servant would wear. A lackey. Albert held it up with pride.

  “There is no costumier in St. Jean-sur-Seine,”
he confided. “So I took a bus. Last night I examined the stock of a business supplying costumes to actors and persons attending fancy-dress balls. I chose this. Before, I could not move about freely at the other end of the tunnel. I was not clothed to pass unnoticed. But I observed from hiding. This is suitable. This is perfection! Now, m’sieur, I am prepared! It remains only to conclude an arrangement with you!”

  There was silence. Carroll swore. Then Harrison spoke urgently, willing to make any sort of settlement that would get things in motion.

  “We considered,” he said impatiently, “that we ought to have a servant, but we couldn’t imagine one. Maybe Albert would be willing to postpone his—professional activities to help us for a few days. He could—er—look over the ground. If he would play the part of a lackey for a few days—”

  He made a hurried mental reservation, of course, that Albert would be rewarded for his efforts, but that his proposal for transportation to and from a life of crime in Napoleonic France would not actually be accepted. Harrison had fretted himself into a fever for haste, while waiting for the clothes he now wore. He wanted to get moving.

  “Hm,” said Carroll drily. “That’s an idea! And he has his own wardrobe, too!” He said formidably to Albert: “Will you play the part of a lackey for M. Harrison and me and pledge your word not to steal from us for—say—three days? We will pay you, of course. But you will not rob us—”

  “Not conceivably, m’sieur!” protested Albert.

  “And at the end of three days we will decide whether or not you can be trusted. Then we will make some arrangement, but I do not promise what it will be!”

  “We begin at once?” asked Albert hopefully.

  “At once,” agreed Carroll.

  Albert instantly stripped off baggy corduroy trousers, a blue sash, and a red-checked shirt. He put on the costume from the newspaper parcel. He began to transfer a series of small metal objects—like thin files turned into varied button-hooks—to his newly-donned clothing.