“Wait!” said Harrison. “Those are pick-locks, aren’t they? You’d better leave them behind!”
“But m’sieur!” protested Albert, “I would feel unclothed without them!”
Carroll said tolerantly:
“Let them go, so long as he doesn’t use them.”
“Alors!” said Albert briskly. “I am ready!” He regarded the saddlebags lying on the floor. They were obviously Harrison’s and Carroll’s baggage for a trip into the past. He pointed to them and said, “Messieurs?”
Carroll nodded. He stood. Harrison shook his unfamiliar cloak to a more tidy arrangement. He felt absurd, clothed like this. But he wanted to make haste.
“Keep the door locked,” said Carroll, “and don’t let anybody through but us. I’m taking a chance on Albert, but nevertheless—”
Pepe looked extremely unhappy. Carroll opened the door. Albert festooned himself with saddlebags with a professional sort of air. Carroll went through the door first. Harrison followed, and after him came Albert with his burdens. There was the wrenching discomfort and giddiness of time-translation in the tunnel. They arrived in the resonant emptiness of the disused foundry. It was night. Very far away, a cock crowed. There was no other sound in the town of St. Jean-sur-Seine in the year 1804.
Albert said softly:
“Messieurs, I know the way to the door you established.”
Carroll grunted for him to lead. They followed, stumbling. They went past the huge, cold brick furnaces which were but the vaguest of objects inside the building. Harrison heard the saddlebags brushing against what was probably a giant, man-handled bellows. A turn. Another turn. Albert said:
“Here, messieurs!”
A hinge squeaked. There was a slightly lesser darkness ahead. Albert went through. He waited for them. As Carroll came through last, Albert murmured admiringly:
“All excellent idea, that door! It cannot be detected from outside! Now—we go to Paris? You wish post-horses?”
“Naturally,” said Carroll. He added: “We were landed from a boat, you understand.”
“Mais non!” protested Albert. “I have listened to many conversations! You travelled by carriage, messieurs, and it broke down. So your driver departed to secure aid, and you reason naturally enough that he had gone to assemble brigands to rob and murder you. So when he had gone you came on to St. Jean-sur-Seine, and you proceed toward Paris. That is most probable!”
“Very well,” agreed Carroll. “That’s the story.”
“Allons!” said Albert gaily.
They went along the unpaved street. Dark structures, rose about them. Harrison continued to feel the need for haste. It did occur to him to wonder how Albert could take so calmly—after reflection—the utterly preposterous fact that there were two St. Jean-sur-Seines, remarkably similar in the streets and buildings that dated back for centuries, yet thoroughly different in all other respects. But he couldn’t make any satisfying guess about Albert.
He stumbled. The street was not only unpaved, it was rough. He became aware of smells. They were noisome. They turned a corner. They went past a particularly redolent compost heap, doubtless prized by the man to whom it belonged. There was a small, flickering, yellowish glow some distance ahead.
“There is the inn,” said Albert. “You may recognize it. The money is kept in a wooden shoe behind a cheese. Or it was.”
They went on until they saw a whiskered man in an apron, dozing over what might be a counter. One candle vaguely illuminated the room in which he napped. The smell of wine was strong.
“Holloa!” said Albert briskly. “Up! Up! You have customers! We demand three horses, immediately!”
There followed confusion, beginning with the half-awake whiskered roan, who was truculent until he saw the majestic appearance of Carroll and Harrison in their flowing cloaks. He shouted, and presently a hostler appeared, and then another, and another. There was argument. Debate. Bargaining. Harrison grew unbearably impatient. The innkeeper waved his arms. Albert spoke confidentially to him.
Horses appeared. There was more argument. Then the three of them were mounted. They trotted away through the narrow, abysmally dark streets. There were no lights anywhere. St. Jean-sur-Seine could have been a town of mausoleums for any sign of life it displayed except that twice, as the horses moved through the blackness, there were scurryings as of mice, only larger. They would be rats. There were smells. Incredible smells. It was a very great relief to get out of the town and to open country.
Harrison relaxed a little. He’d been impatient to get into the time where the destruction of all he knew was in process of arrangement. Now he wanted feverishly to get to work upon those eccentricities of the time-space continuum which nobody knew about or could be convinced of aside from himself and Carroll and Pepe and perhaps Albert the burglar. It had seemed urgently necessary to get into clothes that wouldn’t draw attention and start to do something about the most appalling possibility the human race had ever faced. He had the clothing. He moved toward the action. Now he wanted to know what that action would be. Then he’d be impatient to start it.
He raised the question of how they could make de Bassompierre cooperate, even to the collapsing of the other tunnel. How—?
“I don’t know!” said Carroll. “I’ve got a sort of dossier on him. Bourriene—Napoleon’s secretary—mentioned him as a scoundrel who used perfume as lavishly as Napoleon himself, but added that he still stank in decent men’s nostrils. Fouche—the secret police minister—used him but didn’t trust him. Cambacières the consul despised him and even Savary would have nothing to do with him. Madame d’Epinay said he was a perfumed villain and Madame de Staël wouldn’t let him in her house. And they were pretty tolerant people, too!”
“It looks,” said Harrison, discouraged, “like he’s a pretty low specimen!”
“You have a certain gift for understatement, Harrison,” said Carroll. “But this whole thing is bad! My damned tunnel should never have been made! Before that, I shouldn’t have lectured. When I contrived some interesting theories I should have kept them to myself instead of spouting them to young and eager minds, among which yours must be included, though you didn’t make a time-tunnel and somebody else did. I made a fool of myself and I may have brought the ultimate disaster on the human race. And my only alibi is that I didn’t mean to do it.”
Harrison said in alarm:
“But you haven’t given up hope?”
“The devil, no!” said Carroll. “I’ve been storing up information that might be useful. Now that we’re starting out though, I have to figure out how to use it. I suggest that you let me!”
Harrison fell uneasily silent. The three horses went on through the night. The stars were few and very faint. A mistiness in the air made the Milky Way invisible. The ground on either side was abysmally dark. Where trees overhung the road—and France of this period had many more trees than it would have later—the blackness was absolute.
He racked his brains. He’d been doing little else for days, pending the arrival of suitable garments for a journey back in time. All his ideas were stale.
He tried to see things from a new viewpoint. After all, he’d been in normal time when be tried to think before, and there was inevitably a certain abstract quality in his estimate of what was practical. This period couldn’t seem entirely real.
Now, though, he rode through darkness. It was real blackness. His horse was a real horse. It plodded on doggedly through the night. He breathed the air of early nineteenth-century France. There were thirty millions of people about him, of whom not one would ever see Valerie’s next birthday. They were actual people. They had innumerable hopes and fears and aspirations. They loved each other, and lied to each other and betrayed each other and made magnificent sacrifices for each other. They cherished their country, and they dodged its taxes, and they died for it very valiantly and they were fortunate not to know as much of its future history as Harrison did.
They were particul
arly fortunate not to realize that presently, truly and actually, other persons would take their places and they would not be remembered any more, and those who succeeded them in this nation and on this continent and on this world would make exactly the same mistakes they had.
To know this, genuinely, would be intolerable. Harrison almost came to realize it, and hastily thrust the thought away. He rode on, brooding, and presently thought of Valerie. He resolutely kept his mind on her and avoided even attempts to make plans for winning friends and influencing de Bassompierre.
Long, long hours later there was a grayness in the air, and presently the black shapes of trees were vaguely limned against it. Again presently they rode through a pre-dawn mistiness in which the trees and the roadway and all other objects appeared as ghostly, vaporous shapelessnesses, which took form and substance as they drew near, and when within yards were solid and real. But then as the horses plodded onward they became unsubstantial and ghostlike again, and vanished in the grayness left behind.
But Harrison’s sense of frustration returned as the light grew brighter. He was tired, and he was impatient with himself because he felt commonplace fatigue upon the most desperately necessary enterprise in human history. It was also for Valerie, and therefore he should be superior to mere physical weariness. He remembered that he’d felt a certain scorn of Dubois when he returned wretched and wheezing from sad adventure in the rain now ended. Now he felt some scorn of himself.
Dubois had ridden his horse off a flooded-over bridge some distance beyond the village of St. Fiacre. He’d managed to get ashore while his horse went splashing down-stream. He’d followed it down the stream-bank, and managed to catch it as it came ashore, just in time to hide from some remarkably rough-looking characters who’d also seen it swimming and were hunting for it too. They began to search interestedly for it, and Dubois slipped off the saddlebags and drove the animal out to where they could find it without finding him as well. The horse satisfied them. They caught it and went off with it, doubtless to sell it. And Dubois hid the saddlebags and trudged back to the foundry, wheezing and developing a chest-cold on the way.
There were chickens cackling, off in the mist.
“That’ll be a village. St. Fiacre, most likely,” said Harrison restlessly. “I suppose we’ll stop to eat.”
“Naturally,” said Carroll. He yawned. “I’ve been thinking of my sins. Thinking of breakfast will be a welcome change.”
An angular shape appeared at the side of the road. It was a house. Another. And another. They were suddenly in a village, whose houses were characterless and dismal. It was a small place; there could hardly be a hundred houses altogether. But there were more than a hundred smells.
Harrison suddenly thought of another frustration that was possible. He said:
“I just thought of a complication. Albert has no papers. Maybe they’ll be asked for. The police of this time are inquisitive.”
Carroll grunted. He turned in bis saddle and looked at Albert. Albert was unalarmed. He turned back.
“We’ll worry about it after breakfast.”
They drew rein at the village inn. The fact that it was an inn was made evident by the combined smell of wine, cooking, smoke, and of the stable attached to it. Albert leaped to the ground. He took charge with a fine assurance. He hustled here and there, commanding this service and that for Harrison and Carroll. Once, as he passed close by Harrison, he observed zestfully:
“C’est comme les films!”
They breakfasted, which in this era was more than rolls and coffee. They had eggs, fresh. Meat, not fresh. The bread was coarse. There was no coffee at all, which was a result of the subsisting war with England. Obviously coffee and sugar and colonial products generally were in short supply.
Albert’s voice raised in a fine, infuriated tone. This inn, like the one in St. Jean-sur-Seine, was a post-house. Horses were to be had. There was a document that travellers by post should carry, but Albert quarrelled so shrilly over the animals offered that the question did not come up.
Presently, fed, they rode on. The morning mist dissolved away and sunshine played upon the trees and roadway. To someone acquainted with France of a later date, the amount of uncultivated land was astonishing. Presently Carroll said drily:
“Albert, you saw me about to pay for my breakfast with a gold napoleon. You slipped smaller coins into my hand.”
“The innkeeper could not have made change, m’sieur,” said Albert discreetly. “I thought you would not wish a long discussion, and I—happened to have coins such as he would expect. You can repay me at your leisure, m’sieur.”
Harrison frowned. Carroll grunted. After a hundred yards or so he asked:
“Do you happen to have identity papers now, Albert?”
“But yes, m’sieur.”
Harrison said hotly:
“Look here, Carroll! Albert will be making changes in the course of future events all along our route! He’s stolen identity-papers and he undoubtedly robbed the inn-keeper! I know you say history isn’t easily upset, and we’re going after somebody working at it deliberately! But if this keeps up—”
“It is not important,” said Carroll, “that every small detail in a given time be left undisturbed by travellers from another period, like ourselves. The important thing is that nothing inconsistent with the time takes place. And to travel in France of this year with a completely honest servant… It could smash the Empire!”
Harrison found the statement irritating. He was filled with anxiety about Valerie and his own future and the existence of everything he’d ever known. He was bound rather splendidly upon the rescue of Valerie from danger. Most men imagine deeds of derring-do to be performed for the girls they happen at that time to adore. But Harrison could not satisfy himself with dreams. He really did have to perform the most remarkable feat that history would never record. He had to change the past so the time he considered the present would return to a proper stability. Such a feat seemed highly abstract, but it had to be accomplished in a world of plodding post-horses and malodorous towns, and upstart scheming emperors and grandiose proclamations and—in short—in a world of very unsatisfactory reality.
They rode, and rode. Presently Carroll said:
“There’s supposed to be a bridge somewhere near here.”
Almost as he spoke the unpaved highway turned, and there was the bridge. It was not an impressive one. It was made of roughly squared timbers with pit-sawed planks for a road. Some of the planks had floated away in an obviously recent flooding. With a foot of water over it, any horse could be expected to get into trouble when crossing it.
“To the left, downstream, and perhaps a kilometer,” said Carroll, “there ought to be a large tree beside the stream with a lightning-gash down its trunk.”
They picked their way off the highway beside the stream. The water had been higher. The stream meandered. Some distance down it there was a drowned pig, already swollen, caught in the brushwood near the water. Beyond that place a man of distinctly unprepossessing appearance gazed at them from the stream’s other side. He pushed bushes away and vanished when he saw that he was observed.
There appeared a huge tree, taller than its fellows. It almost leaned over the stream and there was a long slash down its trunk, where lightning had run downward under the bark and turned the sap to steam.
“This should be it,” observed Carroll. He reined in.
Albert said helpfully:
“M’sieur, would it be that something is hidden here?”
“It would,” agreed Carroll.
Albert dismounted. He delicately plucked a leaf from the ground. He held it up.
“There is mud on the top side of this,” he pointed out. “The m’sieur who hid something here does not know how to strew leaves over a hidden thing. The mud should always be underneath.”
He scratched away at dirt under a layer of dropped leaves. The dirt was soft. He plunged his hand down into the loose stuff. He tugged. He brou
ght out two saddlebags and brushed them off. He offered them to Carroll.
“You can carry them,” said Carroll.
Albert re-mounted. He listened suddenly.
“I trust,” he observed, “that the messieurs have pistols. It seems that persons approach with stealth.”
Carroll grunted. He took out two over-sized flint-lock pistols and examined them carefully.
“Do you know how to check a priming, Harrison?” he asked. “If not, lift the frizzen and squint to see if the priming powder’s still there.”
He demonstrated. Harrison looked at his own two weapons. He felt some indignation about this irrelevant emergency. It was absurd to be in danger from brigands when the future of all the world was in danger and only he and Carroll were doing anything practical about it. It was ridiculous!
“I,” said Albert, “have no pistols. So I will depart now.”
He rode toward the highway, looking behind him. Carroll grunted:
“There’s one of them!”
He swung his horse about and spurred it. It bounded forward, toward a figure which had believed itself creeping unnoticed toward him. Harrison dashed in his wake. A man leaped up and fled to one side, howling in terror. Harrison saw another to the left in the act of lifting a heavy musket to bear upon Carroll. Harrison plunged at him, shouting angrily:
“Watch out, Carroll!”
“Coming!” said Carroll.
On the instant the musket boomed thunderously. The man who’d fired it raised it frantically for use as a club when Harrison bore down on him. Harrison leaned far forward and thrust his pistol-muzzle forward like a stabbing weapon. He pulled trigger and was deafened by the roar. He heard Carroll fire.
Then the two horses, made uncontrollable by terror, plunged madly through the underbrush toward the road from which they’d come. There was a mighty thrashing ahead of them. They overtook Albert and Harrison struggled to get his mount in hand. He succeeded just as they broke out of the brush at the roadside.
Strangely, there was little comment when they had re-joined each other. Harrison was unhappy. He rode beside Carroll without speaking until after they’d crossed the bridge with due care for the missing planks. Then Carroll said:
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