Time Tunnel (11 page)

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.

“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 particularly 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.