Time Tunnel (9 page)

“Ah,” said Carroll pleasantly, “then as a member of the firm I must be getting rich!”

Dubois said painedly:

“Madame, my sister, considers that if the business is permitted to go on as it has done, some security for one’s old age should be possible. But only if the business goes on as it has!”.

Carroll shook his head. Dubois strapped up the second saddlebag.

“Georges,” said Carroll. “You are a very efficient man in your way. Granted that you have a particular correspondent in Paris, who buys all you take to him, you must have an arrangement with someone in St. Jean-sur-Seine for horses and so on. And they simply must consider you a smuggler! Has it occurred to you that some day they may decide to rob you? You couldn’t very well protest. Not to Napoleon’s police!”

Dubois said indignantly:

“But I do not deal with law-breakers! My arrangements are with persons of discretion and reputation!”

“But you wouldn’t tell me who they are?”

M. Dubois looked appalled. He did not answer.

“My poor Georges!” said Carroll kindly. “My wife, your sister, rules us both intolerably! She sends you back to eighteen-four when you have not rested from your last journey! She is prostrated because I want to use some of my own well-earned money, and takes elaborate precautions so I cannot get so much more as would buy me Caporals! What do we get out of this slavery of ours?”

Dubois said with dignity:

“I do not bandy words with you. I do what is appropriate. What is estimable. I have great confidence in the judgment of my sister. Her advice has invariably been correct And I find that so long as I behave with circumspection, following the ordinary rules of prudence, there is nothing to fear in an occasional journey to—ah—the place where I conduct business.”

He picked up the two saddlebags.

“
M’sieur
,” this was to Harrison, “I trust you will continue your discussions with M. Carroll and come to a desirable conclusion.”

He opened the crude door in the dining room. As it opened, there was a flash of light from the farther end. A roll of thunder followed immediately. The muted sound of rain could be heard. Air came into the dining-room from the tunnel and the year 1804. It was cool, wet air. It smelled of rain and green stuff and freshness.

“Georges,” said Carroll, “is it wise for you to go out into such a storm?”

The sky outside the cottage was full of stars, but thunder again rumbled faintly through the time-tunnel.

“That,” said Dubois reprovingly, “is one of the inconveniences of business. But no one will be about the streets. I should be well on my way before daybreak.”

He went heavily into the time-tunnel, carrying his saddlebags. Carroll grimaced. When Dubois had vanished he said almost sympathetically:

“He is not altogether absurd, this brother-in-law of mine. Except with his sister, he is even valiant in his own way. If she had married a Landru, who would have cut her throat, or if he had married a woman able to defend him from my wife, he might have been a poet or a psychoanalyst or perhaps a driver of racing automobiles. Something foolish and satisfying, at any rate. But—”

He shrugged and closed the door through which Dubois had vanished. Harrison was struck, suddenly, by the extreme commonplaceness of the transportation system between eras. He stirred restlessly. One expects the remarkable to be accomplished by remarkable means, but nothing out of the ordinary was apparent in this room or in the tunnel itself. There was no complex array of scientific apparatus. There was an ordinary dipole switch outside, just beyond the door. It was turned on. There was a door, which when opened disclosed a crudely-dug opening into heaped-up earth. It looked like it might be an improvised vegetable cellar. There was a mass of rusty iron sticking out of the dug-away dirt at one place. That was all.

At the moment Dubois went through, there’d been a lightning-flash which certainly wasn’t from the sky outside the cottage. But it was only a flicker of brightness in the untidy excavation. Afterward, there was only the lamp-light from the dining-room on the damp earth of the tunnel. Now, though the door was closed, there came the muted, almost completely muffled sound of thunder which did not originate in the twentieth century.

Harrison stirred again. He was moved to ask questions. Carroll had shown no particular pride in what might be called a time-tunnel. Having made it, he seemed to accept it as casually as a pot or pan or other item of domestic equipment. It was used to keep a shop supplied with articles of commerce not otherwise available. It did not appear to matter to him that it should, if demonstrated, call for the redesign of the entire public view of what the universe was like.

Then Harrison suddenly realized a completely confusing fact. If Carroll did reveal his discovery of a process by which men of modern times could travel into the past, he might be much admired and he might contribute as much to human knowledge as was popularly credited to Einstein. But inevitably there would be other time-tunnels made. Inevitably, sooner or later someone would fail to consider the elastic limit of reality. Eventually somebody would change the past in a manner to modify the present. Ultimately, some modification would come about in which Carroll had not discovered how to make a time-tunnel.

Harrison tried to think it out. He arrived at pure frustration.

Suddenly there were sounds beyond the clumsy door. It pushed open. Harrison started to his feet. He was instantly convinced that somehow somebody from the past had stumbled on the tunnel-mouth and now came through it. Anything or anybody might appear.

But M. Dubois came back out of the tunnel. He carried the saddlebags, as before. But he also carried a mass of bundled-up cloths.

He looked at the fabric in his hand.

“I went,” he said unhappily, “to the place where we arranged a door to the foundry that could be opened for our own use. I was about to open it and start on my journey when I stumbled on something that should not be there. This is it. I thought it wise to bring it into the light to look at it.”

Carroll took the stuff from his hand. He spread it out. There was a pair of baggy corduroy trousers. They had been neatly folded. There was a blue sash. There was a red checked shirt. They were not garments worn by the lower orders in 1804. They were garments of the late twentieth century. They were, in fact, the clothes worn by the burglar named Albert when his fate was discussed in this same cottage’s kitchen. But Dubois had brought them from the intact disused foundry of 1804.

Carroll swore. Harrison was alarmed. M. Dubois looked woodenly at the garments. Plainly, somebody had gone through the time-tunnel without authority. Somebody from the late twentieth century was loose in the early nineteenth. That somebody was a small, reedy burglar named Albert. Anything—absolutely anything—could happen!

“Ah!” said Dubois. “These belonged to the burglar of the other day. He has somehow gone through the tunnel again. There he must have robbed someone else of clothing so he can mingle unnoticed by the people about him. My sister will be relieved.”

“Relieved!” snorted Carroll. “Relieved!”

“My sister has been distressed,” said Dubois, “that he might become drunk, tell strange things, and so draw attention to this house. Even attention is undesirable! But I have rented the foundry building, in 1804. I said that I wished it ultimately for the storage of grain. I can employ a watchman… I will see about it.”

He picked up his saddlebags and moved to the clumsy door again. He went through it. This time he closed it behind him. Carroll stared after him.

“The cold-blooded—cold-blooded—” Carroll searched for a word which was strong enough. He burst out with it, “Business man! But my wife figured that one out! I said I was going through. She figured out a watchman to threaten me that I couldn’t get back. So I wouldn’t interfere with her damned shop-keeping! Damnation!”

Harrison said uneasily:

“But there is that poor devil of an Albert marooned yonder. What’ll he do? And how did he get the nerve to go through the tunnel, anyhow? He must have done it while you were in Paris!”

“No doubt,” said Carroll furiously, hardly paying any attention. “But my wife has got me really angry!”

He paced up and down the room, kicking furniture out of the way. Harrison went to the tunnel door, and hesitated, and went through again. It occurred to him that so casually to change from one era to another was only less ridiculous than to do it for no better reason than to peer into the blackness of the foundry and to listen to the falling rain.

He stood, carefully with the threshold-plank under his foot so he could not fail to find the way back again. The ii rain fell and fell and fell. There was no sound anywhere except falling water. Then a lightning flash and after it a peal of thunder, and presently a lightning flash again. It was a wet night. Rain water beat into the shuttered foundry in the most minute of mist drops. Somewhere out yonder Dubois trudged through the downpour in the stygian streets of St. Jean-sur-Seine of 1804. He was firmly intent upon the conduct of business with whatever law-abiding and reputable business men believed him a smuggler.

Then, above the drumming of the rain, there came the booming of a fire-arm. A voice shouted loudly:

“Thieves! Burglars! Assassins!”

There was another explosion. Harrison believed it the second barrel of a shot-gun. He was wrong. It was a second flint-lock pistol.

He stood still. It would not be discreet for a man in twentieth-century costume to join the neighbors who would throng to aid a fellow-citizen two centuries back in time. He had a momentary feeling of anxiety that Dubois might be involved. But that was not too likely. It would much more plausibly be Albert. If the small burglar had gone through the time-tunnel a second time, after being carried through it first by Carroll and being frightened horribly by the experience, he had probably made use of his professional experience. Certainly he’d abandoned his own garments as not suited for the times, and he’d undoubtedly stolen substitutes. He might be practising his profession for further aids to survival in a time which was not his own.

Nothing happened. Long, long minutes passed. Doubtless there were angry citizens helping a fellow-householder search for a burglar. Probably there was a humming of indignant talk. But Harrison beard nothing. The rain drowned out all lesser noises.

He stood still, listening, for what seemed an interminable period. In theory, he was aware that this was a remarkable experience. Albert or no Albert, here and sheltered in the disused and wholly intact foundry, he was surrounded by the Prance of Napoleon Buonaparte. Across the ocean Thomas Jefferson was still alive, and Robert Fulton had not yet assembled the inventions of other men to constitute a steamboat. In Hawaii admiring warriors still dined on enemies whose bravery in battle merited the tribute. The Great Auk was not yet extinct, and buffalo roamed the Great American Plains by the millions. Harrison realized that simply standing here was a startling thing to do.

But it was not very exciting. The rain poured down, drumming on the foundry roof. Astonishing as being here might be, it became tedious. Regardless of its splendid meaningfulness, nevertheless he was simply standing in the middle of the night, while rain fell in a perfectly ordinary fashion. And nothing happened.

He had actually turned to go back into the time-tunnel when someone swore sharply in the disused foundry. The profanity was strictly modern French. The intonation said that somebody had barked his shin in the darkness and that he did not like it.

Harrison listened with all his ears. The rainfall drowned out minor noises. But more profanity came. Someone muttered peevishly.

Harrison said:

“Albert, if you want to get back where you came from, come this way.”

Dead silence, save for the rainfall.

“A few nights ago,” said Harrison conversationally, “I suggested to
M’sieur
Carroll that you be turned loose. I gave you some hundred-franc notes and advised you to get drunk. You did. Now if you want to get back where you came from—”

A voice said in astonishment:

“
Mon Dieu! C’est—Oui, m’sieur!
I very much want to get back!”

“Then come along,” said Harrison. “You could get in a lot of trouble, staying here!”

He waited. He heard sounds, which he realized were Albert’s approach. The small burglar stumbled, and Harrison spoke again to give him direction. Presently an outstretched hand touched Harrison. Albert drew in his breath sharply.

“Right!” said Harrison. “This way!”

He withdrew, and went through the area of giddiness and nausea. Then he went on into the dining room of the cottage. Albert came stumbling after him. He was soaked. Saturated. He’d been out in the rain storm in which Dubois travelled now.

“Carroll,” said Harrison, “here’s Albert again.”

Carroll scowled. Albert said with an air of immense relief:

“
M’sieur
, I am like the false coin. I return. I express my regret that I am again a problem to you. And,
m’sieur
,” he added gracefully to Harrison, “I congratulate you that I am a burglar and not an assassin. I could have knifed you in the dark. You should be more cautious. But I am grateful. I thank you.”

Carroll growled:

“I thought you had enough of—beyond that tunnel! How the devil did you get back through it?” Then he said, “and why?”

The little man shrugged. He looked down at his costume.

It did not fit him, but it had possessed a sort of
bourgeois
splendor before it was saturated with the rain. The only thing that could be said for it now was that at a sufficient distance he would seem to be clothed for the early 1800’s.

“There are your other clothes,” said Carroll coldly. He pointed. “You won’t want to be seen at this end of the tunnel in what you’ve got on. Change!”

Albert obediently began to strip off the elaborately be-frogged coat. There was a clanking, and coins rolled to the floor. They glinted gold. He looked fearfully at Harrison and Carroll. Neither stirred. He hastily picked up the coins.