Time Tunnel (17 page)

He hadn’t thought to tell Pepe about it before. But Albert interposed as Pepe would have asked morbid questions.

“
M’sieur
, my clothing of this period—”

“Ask Dubois,” said Harrison. “Hold it! Are you going to stay in this time? This side of the tunnel?”

“
M’sieur
,” said Albert in a subdued tone, “I think I shall do so. I could not possibly do anything more magnificent than I achieved in the jewellers’ you know of. I wore Napoleon’s crown before he did! I shall remain here and contemplate that achievement. I shall retire contentedly even from my hobby! I shall make a hobby of my recollections!”

“Read these newspapers,” commanded Harrison, “and if you don’t change your mind I’ve a pocketful of paper currency with which to buy any gold pieces you may have accumulated.”

Albert waved the papers aside. He shook his head.

“
M’sieur
,” he said firmly, “
M’sieur
Carroll explained to me the France behind the tunnel. I now understand it. Unhappily I can now anticipate events in it. I even understand your and M. Carroll’s intention to change the past so the present will become other than as it is. But that cannot be predicted! It is impossible to guess what it may be! And it will no longer be my hobby, but it will give me pleasure to observe. So as a former connoisseur of surprises I shall remain at this end of the tunnel to see what comes next. I shall be surprised at anything that happens, and most of all if nothing happens. So I will be happy to exchange my napoleons for the paper money of modern France!”

He dumped out the contents of his individual saddlebags. Gold coins seemed to cover the floor. He stacked them matter-of-factly while Harrison counted his paper money. Albert named a sum. Harrison paid it. There was paper money left over. Harrison said:

“You may as well take this too.”

“No,
m’sieur
,” said Albert proudly. “We are friends. If you will arrange to get my proper costume for the present time, I will leave you and return to my retirement.”

Dubois came down the stairs. He looked precariously relieved. His sister seemed to be talking almost tranquilly with Valerie. She had even determined that Valerie should wear the female costume of 1804 in the shop. It would make the shop distinctive. And if Carroll would take up his residence in the era of Napoleon, and if he would supply from that period the stock she required, M. Dubois need never again risk pneumonia by travelling in the past. And M. Dubois was almost cheerful, because his sister was less agitated than he’d seen her for months.

He gave Albert his corduroy trousers and sash and the red-checked shirt. Albert put them on and stuffed his pockets with paper money. He swaggered to the door. Then he stopped. He returned to shake hands emotionally with Carroll and Pope and Harrison. Then, from apparently nowhere, he produced a much-folded scrap of paper. He pressed it into Harrison’s hand.

“Do not read this,” he said unhappily, “until I have gone.”

He went swiftly to the door, gazed back at them as if through brimming eyes, and went out. They heard his footsteps hastening away.

Harrison unfolded the paper. Crudely written with a strictly improvised pen, he read:

“
Monsieur; I have to confess. It was after I had put the bucket on the coachman’s head and taken the parcel from the coach that I learned from the innkeeper that the gentleman in the black cloak was M. de Bassompierre. Then I dared not reveal it. I weep that I disarranged your plans. I beg your forgiveness,

Albert
.”

Carroll said:

“The devil! We missed a possibly lucky break! But it’s too late to repair it now! We’re starting back, anyhow. Get into your 1804 clothes, Harrison. Ybarra, you don’t have to change. Pack these books with that newspaper. The paper should convince de Bassompierre when we find him again! You’ve got a good lot of cash, Harrison!”

Harrison looked up. He was startled by what he’d just found out.

“Albert told me how much I owed him, and I paid him. But he figured the napoleons at six hundred francs each, instead of twelve!”

“That was the bargain he offered,” said Carroll dryly. “A most admirable character! But get changed. We want to get moving!”

Harrison changed. And he was thinking morbidly that he hadn’t yet gotten Valerie to consent to move into the past as an atom-bomb-proof shelter when he heard her come down the stairs from the upper floor. He looked yearningly at the door of the kitchen, to which the stairs descended.

She came through that door, smiling. She looked to Harrison for approval. She wore the costume looted from the coach at the post-house.

“
Ma tante
,” she said demurely, “told me to try on the costume I am to wear in the shop. Does it become me?”

Harrison could only babble. Anguish filled him. Valerie mustn’t share the disaster due to come upon the earth! He remembered the fields and towns and highways on the way to Paris. He’d imagined them as they seemed certain to become if the events of 1804 were not changed so definitely that reality could not cover them up by making them never to have been. He’d pictured all living things as alive no longer. Trees no longer in leaf. Grass no longer green. Cities no longer inhabited. All solid ground mere lifeless dust or else thick mud; all the seas empty of life; the air never echoing the sounds of birds or insects or anything but thunder and rain and wind and surf with no ears anywhere to hear…

“Listen!” he said thickly, “Come through the tunnel with me, Valerie. I want to talk to you!”

She followed him unquestioningly. He warned her of the symptoms she’d feel during the passage through the tunnel. Then they were together in the resonant, echoing emptiness of the foundry building which did not exist in the same century as the cottage.

He tried to explain. She looked about her. She was astonished. There was brand new daylight filtering through the cracks in boarded-up windows of the foundry. But it was deep night outside the cottage! Here it was day! He explained that oddity, desperately aware that what he told her was no less preposterous than what she saw.

Carroll appeared behind them. He carried saddlebags. He put them down, nodded, and said:

“There is going to be an argument with your aunt, Valerie. For some unknown reason I feel responsibility for her. I shall try to persuade her to join us. Heaven knows why!”

He went back through the tunnel and therefore nearly two centuries into what was here the future. Valerie said uneasily, “But is this the arrangement my uncle uses to get the merchandise for the shop?”

“He came through here, yes,” said Harrison. “You see—”

He tried again to explain. She put her hand tremblingly upon his arm. He ceased to explain. There were matters much more urgent than explanations. Carroll returned with more saddlebags. He deposited them and said dryly, “I’m only Valerie’s uncle by marriage, Harrison, but I think I should ask your intentions!”

Harrison swore at him and then hastily apologized to Valerie.

“The war has begun,” said Carroll. At Harrison’s violent reaction he explained. “No, not the world war. Not atomic war. But my wife is in action. I’ve told her I want her to come through the tunnel because I intend for Valerie to stay there until the war scare’s over. She can’t imagine such a thing. She hasn’t bothered to refuse. She’s just working up to a completed description, in detail, of my criminal insanity.”

He went back. Valerie said shakily, “Should—should I try to calm her?”

“Have you ever managed it?” asked Harrison. “Look! There’s going to be atomic war! But Carroll and Pepe and I have some faint chance of preventing it! We don’t know what will take its place, but I won’t let anything happen to you! I won’t do it!”

Pepe came out of the tunnel, carrying bags. He put them down. He said distressedly:

“
Dios mio!
If Carroll does persuade her to come—”

He made an appalled gesture. He went back. Valerie said:

“I
am
frightened. Of my aunt. Not—of anything else.”

Perhaps ten minutes later Carroll came through again. M. Dubois came with him. Dubois said agitatedly:

“Valerie, your aunt commands that you return! At once! She is agitated! She is angry! I have never seen her so angry! Come!”

Valerie stirred in Harrison’s arms. He tightened them about her. She said faintly:

“I—I cannot!”

“But your aunt demands it! She threatens—she threatens—”

Pepe came out of the tunnel with a last parcel. He said with some grimness:

“She swears that if
Ma’mselle
Valerie does not return at once that she will disown her forever! She will endure this state of things no longer! She will abandon her and—”

Carroll said kindly:

“Maybe you can calm her down, Georges. This thing is more important than her getting her way again. Better try to make her see it.”

Dubois went shakily back to the world of the future. Almost instantly thereafter Madame Carroll’s voice reached them. It was thin and muted by its passage through time, just a muttering. Madame Carroll cried out fiercely in the totally uncontrolled fury of a bad-tempered woman. Her voice sounded far away but shrieking. Then things came flying out into the foundry. They were the twentieth-century garments Valerie had removed to put on the costume for the shop. Madame Carroll’s voice shrieked like the ghost of an outcry of rage.

Then there came a peculiar, echoing, musical sound. It was like the string of some incredible harp, plucked once and then very gradually dying away. It seemed to make all the ground hereabouts vibrate. Their bodies vibrated with it. It ended.

Carroll jumped, startled and angry.

“Damnation! She saw me throw a switch on to make the tunnel! To make a threat, she’s thrown it off! And the tunnel’s collapsed and can’t be made again! We’re stuck here!”

Four days later they arrived at an inn still a few hours’ journey from Paris. As inns go, it was distinctly an improvement on most such stopping places in the France of the period. Harrison felt that their appearance was improved, too. Carroll and Valerie rode grandly in the lumbering coach they’d acquired. He was the uncle by marriage and he wore the air of an uncle-in-fact. He’d mentioned that she ought to have a maid along as a travelling companion, but an extra pair of listening ears would have been a nuisance. Harrison and Pepe rode beside the coach, armed as a matter of course. Pepe’s regard for Harrison’s priority with Valerie made him act with the perfect, amiable disinterest of a cousin. Harrison had the role of fiancé. He could not have played any other. He tended to bristle when anybody tried to look into the coach where Valerie was. There were two mounted lackeys trailing behind. They resembled Albert solely in being wholly without conscience.

All these semblances of respectability had been secured by the use of gold napoleons and a swaggering air, plus complete disregard of the literal truth. Carroll seemed to take pleasure in inventing grotesque but convincing lies to make whatever they did seem perfectly natural.

The coach turned into the inn courtyard and there was another coach already there. A liveried servant held the horses of the other vehicle. There were yet other horses, saddled and tied to hitching posts. There was a cheerful, comfortable bustle round about. There was smoke from a badly drawing chimney. There was the smell of strongly-odored cooking. The courtyard was mostly mud, though straw had been spread here and there for better footing.

“Ybarra,” said Carroll amiably, “see if we can get suitable quarters here.”

Pepe beckoned to one of their two lackeys, rode to where the ground was not wholly mud, and dismounted. He tossed his reins to the lackey and went inside.

“I think,” said Carroll reflectively, “that I’ll call myself de Bassompierre from now on. I’m anxious to find that character! I shall expect to make a deal with him for the use of his time-tunnel. But that’s in addition to reforming him so he won’t write to learned men.”

Harrison bent over to look inside the coach.

“Are you all right, Valerie? Comfortable?”

She smiled at him. He felt a desperate pride in her. But she felt safe, and she felt approved of, and a girl can face most things with such assurances.

The time and place and atmosphere were totally commonplace, for Napoleonic Prance. There was nothing remarkable in view. Some two or three post-stages to the south-east lay Paris. In it candles and torches prepared to substitute, feebly, for the light by which people saw during the day. Travelling coaches like theirs would be hastening to arrive at stopping places for the night. In an hour all of France would be in-doors. Nothing out of the ordinary appeared to be in prospect. But actually the ordinary is remarkable. Nothing ever happens unless the odds against it are astronomical. Nobody in all of history has ever anticipated an event and had it come out in all its details as it was foreseen.

Certainly nobody could have guessed at any imaginable actual linkage between the pause of a particular travelling coach in the France of 1804 and the events on the island of Formosa nine thousand miles away and nearly two centuries later. But the events were intimately connected.

The island of Formosa lay in bright sunshine under threat of destruction by atomic bombs from the mainland. One would have anticipated swarming panic and flight, especially by foreigners. One would have looked to see its harbors empty and its cities seething masses of humanity, frenziedly killing other humans, in the hope that through murder they could avoid being murdered from the sky.

But it wasn’t that way at all. There were ships steaming away from it at topmost speed, to be sure. But there were other ships rushing toward it at full speed ahead. Its harbors were crowded with vessels, taking on refugees to the limit of sitting-down space on their decks. As they were loaded, they headed away to the nearest unthreatened harbor to discharge them and go back for more. There was an incredible stream of planes flying to and from the island. Every air field was devoted exclusively to the landing, loading, and dispatch of a most motley assortment of flying machines, which descended to take in passengers and immediately flew away again.