Time Tunnel (12 page)

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 brought 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:

“We may as well trot our horses for a while.”

And as the animals moved more swiftly, Harrison said:

“I poked my pistol at that character until it almost touched him. I wanted to be sure he wasn’t killed. He might be somebody’s great-great-grandfather.”

Then he was suddenly sick. A man of modern times is not accustomed to death and destruction on a small scale. He thinks with composure of atomic war, and he is not disturbed by the statistic of so many tens of thousands of persons killed each year by automobiles. But it is unnerving to think of having used a pistol on a brigand to keep from being murdered by him. That is not part of the pattern of existence in the latter part of the twentieth century.

They rode on, and on. Presently they let their horses drop back to a steady, purposeful walk. Harrison said painfully:

“We’d better reload our pistols.”

He managed his own, clumsily, more by theory than any actual knowledge of the art. From somewhere in the depths of his mind he recalled that the charge for a muzzle-loader was enough powder to cover the ball held ready in the palm of one’s hand. They had powder and ball and coarse paper patches, carried as part of the authentic costume of the time. They reloaded as they rode. They overtook an ox-car heading as they were headed.

“How far to Paris?” asked Harrison when it had been left behind.

“Dubois makes it in a day and a night,” said Carroll.

Harrison went on gloomily. What savor of adventure this journey might have possessed was gone now. Men had matter-of-factly intended to kill him for what possessions he carried with him. It was not a glamorous affair. From now on, Harrison would regard this enterprise as something to be accomplished for the benefit of two people who would presently be Mr. and Mrs. Harrison. It was no longer splendid and romantic. It was something that had to be done. Grimly.

It was very late when Paris appeared before them. Its buildings made a jagged edge to the horizon on ahead. Harrison said:

“I’ve thought of a possible way to find de Bassompierre.”

Carroll turned his head. Harrison explained. M. Dubois might have thought of it, if he’d needed to discover somebody from the world of Madame Carroll who’d been translated back to the time of the Empress Josephine. It was quite commonplace.

“Try it, by all means,” said Carroll. “I’ve got another approach. You try your way and I’ll try mine.”

Albert, riding subduedly in the rear, said:

“Pardon,
messieurs
. If I am informed of the purpose of your journey, it might be well… Perhaps I can find information which will serve you.”

Carroll said:

“We want to find a man called de Bassompierre. We want to talk to him. If you should hear of such a person, it will be well worth your while.”

“We will see,
m’sieur
,” said Albert. “Have you a choice of an inn in the city yonder, and do you know where it is to be found?”

Carroll named the inn used by Dubois on his journeys to this extraordinary metropolis which gradually spread out to either side as they approached it.

Albert settled back in his saddle. Again Harrison wondered how Albert accounted to himself for the totally unimaginable world the time-tunnel had opened to him. But again he dismissed the question. The three horsemen rode forward into the Paris of 1804. Night fell before they quite reached it and they rode into a blackness more dense and more abysmal than anywhere outside the city. There was smoke, to dim the stars. There were tall buildings, to channel movement within narrow, malodorous, winding canyons. Only occasionally did a candle burn in a lantern—more often glazed with horn than with glass—and there were only rare and widely separated moving lights carried by lackeys or burning faintly in lurching coaches to break the look of gloom and desolation.

It was coincidence, of course, but in a peculiarly simultaneous fashion, at just that moment in the latter part of the twentieth century, a supersonic passenger plane crossing the Arctic had its radio equipment go dead. Therefore it did not give the usual continuous advance notice of its identity, course, and speed. This would have caused no more than a precautionary alert, but—this was where the danger lay—a second plane’s radio went out at the same instant. Radar immediately reported the suspicious fact of two supersonic objects without identification moving across the North Pole. The immediate consequence was a yellow alert. Then there came a third unfortunate report, of a possible contact with a surfacing submarine off the Atlantic coast of the United States.

Automatically, the situation developed in gravity. Strategic air-force planes, aloft with the weapons they were meant to carry, swerved from their rendezvous patterns and moved toward their assigned positions of maximum availability for counter-bombardment. If the unidentified objects over the Pole and the possible rocket-firing submarine were not completely explained within five minutes, there would be a condition red alert over all the Western Hemisphere. Counter-measures would begin. Warning was already transmitted to Europe. All the world was ready for that Armageddon which all the world wearily expected almost any day.

But in the inn in Paris, Harrison followed a candle-bearing inn servant to the rooms assigned to him and to Carroll. Albert followed with the saddlebags. It was Albert who suspiciously examined the beds. It was he who pointed out by the feeble candle-light that the beds were already inhabited. The candle-bearer was astonished that anybody would expect the beds of an inn to be free of insects.

Wearily, Harrison prepared to go to sleep on the floor.

The tense situation in the latter half of the twentieth century could provide, of course, conclusive evidence about whether the universe made sense or not. Obviously, if the cosmos was designed for human beings to live in, it would have built-in safeguards so that human beings could continue to live in it. They would not be destroyed by an atomic war set off by accident—not if the universe was designed with meaning.

But on the other hand, if it didn’t make sense; if all was chance and random happen-chance—