Time Tunnel

by Murray Leinster

“M’sieur,” he said warmly, “I am deeply in your debt.”

  “Then you can give me a receipt,” said Harrison amiably.

  “But of course!” The perfumer wrote out a receipt with a quill pen. “And I should pay for the merchandise—”

  “When Dubois comes to you for the money,” said Harrison. He did not want to have to account to Madame Carroll for any business transaction. “I am not in business.”

  The perfumer reflected. Then he said very carefully:

  “You said you wished to meet M. de Bassompierre. Have you paid your respects to the American ambassador as yet?”

  When Harrison shook his head, the perfumer said with even greater care:

  “I suggest it, m’sieur. He may give you valuable advice.”

  “About M. de Bassompierre’s reputation?”

  The perfumer shrugged.

  “I am in your debt,” he said. “I simply urge you to visit the American ambassador. I say no more.”

  He bowed. Harrison went out. In the street he said to Albert:

  “The man we want to find has so foul a reputation that even a tradesman tells me I’d better ask questions about him before I make his acquaintance. The devil!”

  He made the same comment to Carroll when Carroll returned to the inn near sundown. By that time he was depressed. He was desperately impatient to do something about de Bassompierre. He felt that within a week almost any change in the state of things in this period might have produced catastrophes in his own—and Valerie’s—era.

  “In a week,” said Carroll comfortably, “we’ll move to a more respectable address and bribe Ybarra’s footman to tip us when de Bassompierre turns up. I enjoyed myself today, Harrison!”

  Harrison spoke restlessly, not paying attention.

  “A week… Anything could happen in a week, back where we came from! History’s changing between now and the time we were born! It’s changed at least twice and each time it changed back but—”

  “I’m arranging that,” said Carroll blandly. “I begin to think I can handle de Bassompierre! But I still want to find out about that other time-tunnel! You see, Harrison, I went to see Cuvier, the naturalist, today. What name do you think I sent in to him?” He grinned. “I sent in my name as de Bassompierre! Do you see the point?”

  Harrison gazed at him, appalled. Carroll grinned more widely.

  “Think it over! Cuvier received me, a splendid, stout, gray-bearded character with a magnificent sense of his own importance! And my name was de Bassompierre! I congratulated him upon his eminence. I said that I’d been travelling for some years, but on my return to France I’d heard of nothing but his fame. I implied that nobody considered Napoleon especially important, compared to Cuvier! He thawed. He warmed up. We began to talk natural history. We discussed the recapitulation of primitive forms in the developing embryo. We discussed the metamorphosis of insects. We had the devil of a good time, Harrison! In spite of my disillusionment and disgrace, I was born to be a college professor, and we talked shop. I made a definite impression on Cuvier! He won’t forget me! I said that I planned to go to the United States to study the Red Indians. He almost begged me to stay here and meet his confrères…”

  Harrison said stridently:

  “But look here! That—that—”

  “That,” said Carroll amiably “means that the real de Bassompierre will be indignantly shown the door if he ever attempts to meet Cuvier! Cuvier knows M. de Bassompierre! Me! He will have no use for anybody else using that name! Tomorrow I visit the Marquis de La Place. We call him Laplace. I’ll dredge up some astronomy and flattery to deliver. When I’m through, anything de Bassompierre attempts to say to any learned man will be indignantly ignored! You see?”

  Harrison hesitated. He didn’t feel at ease in scheming. He couldn’t estimate the effectiveness of devious behavior. But his own efforts had produced nothing, so far. At least Carroll was getting something done. He was discrediting de Bassompierre in advance. Maybe this was why he, Harrison, had found the intellectual dynamite in the Bibliothèque Nationale completely disregarded. Maybe this trick of Carroll’s had prevented de Bassompierre’s letters from having any effect!

  But still there,was the other time-tunnel to be discovered, through which de Bassompierre had gotten the information he’d tried to disseminate before its proper time.

  He yielded. He knew frustration and the need for patience. He was excessively worried about Valerie. She’d be imagining all sorts of dangers for him. She’d imagine bandits and diseases and hardships and infections. Maybe she knew that in this period it was considered certain that everyone would have smallpox as, at a later date, everybody was sure to catch the measles. She’d be worried.

  It is typical of the romantic human male that he believes the girl he cherishes worries only about him. The girls, in turn, are convinced that romantic young men worry only about them. And they are right. Harrison, for example, was not disturbed about the possibility of atomic war in the time he’d come from. That prospect was so familiar that he didn’t worry about it at all. Anyhow he knew nothing of a yellow alert brought about by failure of radios on two supersonic passenger planes at once. He hadn’t heard of counter-attacks almost ordered because of an amorous sperm whale leaping out of the water to impress a coy lady whale off the Atlantic Coast of North America. Radar had reported the whale as a possible rocket-launching submarine, and it was a very close call indeed.

  Actually, if the situation had gone unresolved for just about five minutes more, unlimited catastrophe could have resulted. But Harrison did not think about such things. He worried about Valerie worrying about him, and he sweated in anguish whenever it occurred to him that Valerie might feel a slight dizziness, and find herself in a changed present in which she was married to somebody else. And that that present wouldn’t change back.

  In accomplished fact, of course, a sea patrol plane had dropped a flare where the possible submarine contact was reported by radar. It photographed the sperm-whale court-ship in progress. It so reported. And an Arctic patrol plane intercepted one of the two muted but properly lighted passenger planes over the Arctic, and made passes at it when it did not reply to radio signals. That patrol plane herded it back to its airport of departure. And the co-pilot of the other muted plane found a loose wire in his plane’s equipment, and fixed it, and there was no longer a condition of yellow alert.

  That whole matter ended with ponderous praise from high military officers on the splendid efficiency of response to a supposed emergency by the men and planes under their command. Et cetera and et cet. And that was the end of the incident.

  Valerie knew nothing about it. Her aunt was in St. Jean-sur-Seine, tending M. Dubois and Valerie was in complete charge of the shop. She knew of nothing to worry about except a discrepancy of twenty-two francs in the cash drawer. There was that much too much on hand. Valerie really worried only about Harrison.

  The rest of the affair of the time-tunnel continued in typically irrational fashion. Only commonplace things happened to the people involved, but they happened for preposterous reasons. There was also something of the inevitable about the various incidents, as if the cosmos had really been designed for people to live in and it would remain possible to survive despite their most earnest efforts to the contrary.

  Naturally, then, Harrison’s life remained a mixture of the unpredictable and the tedious. He remained in 1804. In Paris. He was seen in suitable public places and was casually accepted as a travelling American who must be rich to travel from so remote and savage a place as les Êtats-Unis. He kept his ears feverishly open for any clue however faint to the spread of information from the twentieth century into the nineteenth. If such leakage could be discovered, it would indicate another time-tunnel in operation.

  The only thing suspicious was that jokes told in the United States after nearly two hundred years were essentially the jokes told in the France of Napoleon. But they would probably be told centuries later still, and still be laughed at
.

  Carroll had a better time. He visited prominent scientists. He presented himself as M. de Bassompierre, returned to France after long travel, and filled with reverence for the learned men of the time. He discussed mathematics with Lagrange, and the fact that he’d specialized in statistical analysis made him a discerning and marvelously welcome visitor. He talked electricity with Ampère, and they got along so splendidly that Ampère made him stay to dinner and they talked garrulously of the recent discoveries made by M. Faraday in England.

  “I’ve been careful,” he told Harrison satisfiedly on the fifth night of their stay in Paris. “I haven’t told them anything they don’t know already. But I can understand what they’re driving at. When they say something, I know what they mean. And it’s pathetic how grateful they are to be admired by somebody who realizes what they should be admired for!”

  “I’m going to send Albert to make a deal with Ybarra’s footman,” said Harrison restlessly. “De Bassompierre should be back in town in a day or so.” He added. “I can’t help worrying about Valerie. There’s always the chance that another time slip will happen. I know! There’s a modulus of elasticity in historic events. They can be stretched, in fact as well as by historians, and they can snap back. But there must be an elastic limit, too, and if they’re stretched just so far they won’t go back to normal! They’ll stay stretched! I’m thinking that we could go back and find—”

  He made a helpless gesture. Everything that had happened or that he’d done had been drudgery or common sense, and there was no feeling of achievement. Right now it was a painful business, simply sitting and waiting for the fate of all the world he knew to be decided by something it wasn’t time for him to do yet.

  Albert, however, seemed to enjoy life. Upon occasion he attended Carroll or Harrison when they went somewhere that an attending lackey was called for. Once Harrison went to the theater and saw Thalma playing a translation—and revision—of the School for Scandal. Nobody mentioned its English origin. Harrison thought it intolerably over-acted. Once he saw the Emperor, in an open carriage with a cavalry guard, driving like mad for somewhere or other. Doubtless he saw other historic figures, but nobody identified them and he didn’t know. Which was the sort of thing that will happen to any stranger in any city. But it was not amusing. Only Albert wore the air of someone who loves the life he lives.

  Once Harrison asked him almost enviously if Paris-this-side-of-the-tunnel was still as diverting as at the beginning. Albert said zestfully:

  “Ah, m’sieur, you would have to be a retired burglar to realize what it is like! The locks are of an age of barbarism! The strong-boxes, one could make better ones of cheese! Had I a farm-wagon, and if I were not retired, I could load it to capacity without an atom of risk!”

  “Look here, Albert,” said Harrison firmly, “you can’t go burgling here! We can’t risk anything like that! Our mission—”

  Albert said reproachfully:

  “But did I not tell you that I am retired? Of course on my first visit to St. Jean-sur-Seine this side of the tunnel,—you comprehend, m’sieur! There was an emergency! As was the need for identity papers. But I have acted truly only as an amateur here! It would be undignified to take advantage! These childish locks, these prehistoric strong-boxes… I would be ashamed! I have had but one real temptation since we arrived, M’sieur Harrison!”

  Harrison regarded him suspiciously:

  “Resist it!” he warned. “You could ruin everything! And the task M. Carroll and I have set ourselves is so important that I do not know how to tell you of its necessity! You mustn’t risk burglaries here, Albert!”

  “The danger is over,” said Albert. “I yielded to the temptation at two hours after midnight last night. Strictly as an amateur, m’sieur! It is ended. Do not reproach me! I achieved what no man of my former profession has ever achieved in all of history! There was once a Colonel Blood who attempted it in England, but—”

  Harrison’s blood tended to run cold.

  “What did you do?” he demanded.

  “M’sieur,” said Albert, grinning, “I ventured into the establishment of the jeweller who bad made the crown for the Emperor’s coronation. And I, m’sieur, took the crown in my hands, and I sat upon the throne made ready for the coronation ceremony, and—I crowned myself, m’sieur! No other burglar in all of history, retired or active, has ever had an Emperor’s crown in his hands with a way to carry it away quite open, but who instead has simply crowned himself with it. But I did!”

  Harrison tried to swallow.

  “The crown,” confided Albert, “was a trifle small. It would have had to be altered to fit me. But in any case my action was purely that of an amateur. I pursued a hobby, only. So I put it back in its place and only you and I know of the event. But consider, m’sieur! Where but beyond M. Carroll’s tunnel could such a thing occur? Here it is true that anything at all—even that I did not take such trumpery—anything at all is much more than likely to happen!”

  Albert went proudly away and Harrison held his head.

  He already had a nightmarish suspicion that at any instant he might do something, without even knowing it, which would cause something else to happen, and that something else would cause something other, and so on and so on until by the late twentieth century all of Europe would be totally unlike the Europe he’d known. And—this was especially nightmarish—if the future from here, which was the present as he knew it, if the future from here was changed, when he went back to it he would never meet Valerie. Or, he might not have been born.

  Curiously, though, he only worried about possible disasters in the line of danger he’d discovered. He didn’t think of the longer-established perils the twentieth century tried not to think about. For example, he didn’t worry at all about atomic war. He didn’t think of it.

  But it was danger enough. Harrison had known without interest of the explosion of an atomic bomb by China. He was in his own time then, and absorbed in his romance with Valerie. He had not noticed that the Chinese atomic potentiality was said to be the work of a Frenchman who’d decided that the Russians were political reactionaries. He’d been unaware of a near escape from nuclear war when a sperm whale and two plane radios conking out nearly touched off a red alert. He’d missed the explosion of the second Chinese bomb, which emphasized the message of the first. But now, when he was separated from Valerie by nearly two centuries, the real danger, the deadly danger, the certain catastrophe which meant the end of the world took place.

  The Chinese exploded a fifty megaton bomb. In less than three calendar weeks the celestial kingdom had changed from a seemingly sleeping giant to a modern atomic-armed Great Power. But it was different from the other great powers. Its rulers were calmly prepared to lose half or more than half of their population in war. So they could—and would—start a war if they were crossed.

  They said so, frankly. To begin with, they demanded the surrender of Formosa, with no guarantees for its population. They observed that China was now the greatest of great powers, and it expected to exercise much influence in the world from this time on. And it wanted Formosa surrendered as the first exercise of that influence.

  There was the dubious possibility that it bluffed; that it didn’t have the atomic weapons needed to smash the rest of the world while being blasted from without. If it bluffed, it might be destroyed. If it didn’t bluff, history would simply come to an end. So the rest of the world drearily prepared to act as if it were a bluff, and call it. There wasn’t anything else to do except surrender. Which wasn’t worth while.

  Harrison was in the Inn when Pepe Ybarra arrived from St. Jean-sur-Seine with the news. Pepe had been prepared to travel with the others. Now he arrived dusty and exhausted and pale, and gave them the news. Madame Carroll tended her brother, still sneezing and still coughing but likely to survive until the bombs began to fall. Valerie was anxious about Harrison. But Pepe was beside himself.

  The Chinese could start atomic war. They would. Some da
mned renegade Frenchman, defecting from Russia, had given the Chinese, the bomb. One crazy, fanatic Frenchman. And the world was doomed. Even the atmosphere of Earth would become poisonous when enough bombs had been detonated in it. Not one animal or plant or moss or lichen would survive. Perhaps no fish or crustacean in all the world’s seas would continue to live. It might be that not even single-celled creatures would go on abstractedly feeding upon organic debris, with pauses to multiply by division, in the deepest trenches of the ocean’s depths. It was at least probable that Earth would die to the last least quasi-living virus particle under its skies. And history would end.

  From one viewpoint this would appear to settle permanently the abstract question of whether or not the universe made sense. If war came and Earth died, it didn’t make sense. The cosmos would not have been designed with any special solicitude for the human race. If humanity could destroy itself, it was merely an unedifying random happening on an unimportant planet.

  But—there were still the time-tunnels. There was strong reason to believe that through the time-tunnels the past could be changed. If the past changed, the present must also change. If the present changed, the future must be modified. And since it appeared in the early nineteenth century that history would end in the late twentieth—why—if the present in the nineteenth century could be changed sufficiently, it might change the state of things in the twentieth so that history might stagger along for a few more chapters. Pepe was a tragic figure, explaining the situation to Harrison and Carroll.

  “But we can do something!” he said savagely. “Even if we can’t guess what the result will be, it can’t be worse than is getting ready to happen now! We start things! We do things! It’s a gamble, but to hell with that! We can’t lose and we might win!”

  He turned to Carroll.

  “Look!” he said fiercely. “You know science! Give Napoleon something—smokeless powder, percussion caps, dynamite! Start new industries! Give them steam-engines! Let ’em have dynamos. Show them how to prevent diseases and then they can get to work on how to cure them! Do something—anything—to change the future, whatever the future may turn out to be! Anything’s better than what will happen otherwise!”