Time Tunnel (15 page)

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!”

Harrison was deathly pale.

“Right!” he said evenly. “You attend to that, Carroll. I’ve got something else that has to be done first. I’m going back—”

“Are you crazy?” demanded Pepe. “We’ve got to do things here!”

Harrison began to change to clothing in which a man travelling by post-horse would seem merely to be a man in a hurry.

“Surely,” he said grimly. “We do have to do things back here! But Valerie’s not in this time. There’ll be bombs and devastation and fall out where she is! I’m getting Valerie!”

“But—”

“Dammit!” said Harrison violently. “If I were with her when bombs began to fall, don’t you think I’d try to get her into a bomb shelter or a fall-out shelter where she’d be safe?”

“But there’ll be no place—”

“No?” Harrison jerked on his riding-boots. “Can you think of a better shelter against atom bombs or fall out than the year eighteen hundred and four?”

He snatched up the clumsy flint-lock pistols that were essential parts of a gentleman’s travelling costume. With a peculiarly practised gesture, he made sure of their priming.

But all four of them started back to St. Jean-sur-Seine, instead of one. Harrison and Carroll and Pepe Ybarra and Albert set out together and at once. Pepe was a pathetic figure. He was exhausted when he arrived, and once he’d told his story he seemed to sink into bitter despair. But he, would not stay in Paris while they went back to St. Jean-sur-Seine. He seemed to think that continual urging would make them take the actions which would be the wildest and most reckless of gambles, but still might give the world he remembered at least a faint chance of surviving. Otherwise there could be no hope.

His reasoning was emotional, and therefore simple. They alone were able to treat two widely separated historical moments as separate present times. But one of those presents followed the other. Therefore events in the later were at least partly determined by what happened in the earlier. They could change what happened in that earlier. They could then find out what resulted in the later. They couldn’t predetermine the result of what they did, because the cosmos is much too complex to be manipulated for one’s individual ends. But by changes, and if necessary changes of those changes, they should ultimately arrive at a tolerable—at least non-lethal—latter part of the twentieth century. It was by no means sure. But they should try it.

Carroll soothingly agreed with him. But nevertheless they made their way out of the city. Once they had to stop, at the barriers where the
octroi
was due. All persons entering and leaving the city had to pay this tax, but the collectors were sleepy and bored, even when three gentlemen and one man-servant seemed in such haste at such an unseemly hour. Carroll paid the toll for all of them by the light of a flaring torch. When they rode on he said annoyedly:

“Damnation! It’s lucky you came when you did, Ybarra! I didn’t realize how low my funds were getting! Did you bring any currency of this period?”

Pepe said dully:

“There were some coins. I used them, Madame Carroll sold them to me. She is indignant because you haven’t gotten back with new stock for the shop.”

Carroll grunted.

“And we didn’t collect for the perfume, either! I’ll catch the devil when we get back!” They went on through the darkness. Carroll said, “Harrison, you’re planning to bring Valerie back to 1804 for safety. I’m sure your intentions are honorable. But I have a question. I didn’t bring enough money here to live on indefinitely. You’ll need to. How are you going to do it?”

Harrison had been absorbed in the frantic necessity to get back to St. Jean-sur-Seine, and from there to Paris, and then to explain to Valerie the desperate need for her to go through the time-tunnel with him to reside in the period of Napoleon. She’d need to stay there until either atomic war destroyed the world they were born in, or his and Carroll’s actions made that war unlikely. He’d been worried for fear she’d hesitate to take so drastic a step. Now he had a new worry. They’d need money on which to live, even in 1804. He set a corner of his mind to work on that problem. It was a part of the commonplaceness of all the preposterous angles of this whole business of travel in time. But mostly he tried feverishly to calculate whether the war would have begun before he could get to St. Jean-sur-Seine, and from there to Paris, and back through the tunnel with Valerie.

Carroll spoke again in the darkness, with the horses’ hoofs making muffled sounds on the roadway.

“Yes… Money’s something we’ve got to think about. Hm… Albert, have you any to speak of? Money that’s good here?”

“But yes,
m’sieur
,” said Albert apologetically. “I do not anticipate events, as I told
M’sieur
Harrison. I prefer surprises. But the kind of surprises I prefer are more likely when one has money. I will be happy to share with you.”

To Harrison this sounded nightmarish. To worry about money when all the world of his generation seemed certain to commit suicide very shortly, seemed insane. But it no longer seemed peculiar to him to be clothed in the costume and to be riding on this highway of a hundred years before his grandfather was born.

“Better think it over,” said Carroll, very seriously. “I suspect Harrison will emigrate to this period, with Valerie. If you’re wise, you’ll probably do the same. In that case you’ll need all the money you’ve got.”

“I can always get more,
m’sieur
,” said Albert. “I have retired, but for emergencies…”

“Another problem,” said Carroll, reflectively. “For you, Harrison. Valerie will need clothes of this period, at the beginning, anyhow. And we can’t risk waiting for them to be made for her.”

Pope said fiercely:

“The thing to do is to prevent the need of it! To do things! Now! What can you do after the bombs fall?”

“That’s the odd part,” said Carroll. “In your experience you’ve known that things that had happened changed, and hadn’t. Maximilian and the four emperors of Mexico, for example. If we change things so bombs didn’t fall, even after they did, it’ll be all the same, apparently… But somehow I don’t think they’ll fall.”

“Why?”

“It wouldn’t be sensible!” said Carroll vexedly. “It would mean that there was no point in existence! Coincidences would be only coincidences! There’d be no meaning in meaning. Nothing would mean anything, but we humans have been designed to see meanings! Patterns wouldn’t exist, and design wouldn’t exist, but we’re designed to see design and discover patterns, and it makes no more sense for us to be equipped to discover what isn’t there, than it would make sense for an animal to exist with needs that the universe didn’t supply. We’ve got to do something, yes! But there’s something for us to do! There apparently always has been. I suppose there always will be.”

Pepe was silent. But it was a scornful silence. Harrison worried. Albert seemed to be puzzling quietly in the darkness as the horses went on. Carroll did not object when Harrison pressed the pace.

“To be practical, again,” said Carroll, “if you don’t decide to keep them for yourself, which would be wise if you decide to stay here, we’ll buy your gold pieces, Albert. Certainly M. Harrison has decided to emigrate to this time, because he and Ma’mselle Valerie will be married and he wishes safety for her. He’ll need gold pieces, but I could not honorably advise you to sell them. They’re always worth something and paper need not be. You may need them.”

“But
m’sieur
,” said Albert politely, “I can always get more! I am retired, but for emergencies—”

“We’ve got to get more perfume, too,” said Carroll, to Harrison. “Dammit, we need capital! We need working capital! There’s no way to know how long we’ll be here! But of course we can tell through the tunnel when we’ve succeeded. You’ve got to think of clothes for Valerie! She can’t go around in modern dress. Not here! And we can’t wait for clothes to be made!”

Harrison’s mind dwelt harassedly on that problem for a moment. He thought of the costumier from whom Albert had secured his lackey’s outfit. That might or might not be a possibility. But he wanted Valerie safely on this side of the tunnel at the earliest possible instant. She’d pass through the tunnel practically only over Madame Carroll’s dead body, of course…

Pepe said bitterly:

“You haven’t said a word, yet, about doing something to keep the Chinese from starting a war! Damn people who won’t let other people live the way they want!”

Harrison heard Albert speak solicitously, and realized for the first time that out of habit they’d talked in French and that he could catch every word.

“
M’sieur
Carroll, will you tell me who attempts to change my way of life? I am a Frenchman, and I resist such things!”

The four post-horses went on through the night. Harrison heard Carroll explaining the consequences of time-travel as practised through his time-tunnel. It was not information to to spread abroad, yet there was no particular need to refuse to tell it, because nobody who hadn’t passed through the tunnel would believe either that it existed or that anybody who claimed to have passed through it was sane. It was a secret which would keep itself. Nobody who told it would be believed. Albert had even insisted that he did not want to understand the strangeness beyond the tunnel. But as Carroll explained, now he asked questions.

“Ah!” he said profoundly, “it is as if it were a way to walk through a tunnel into a motion picture, and the only way out were that same tunnel. Eh?”

Carroll agreed. He went on. Presently Albert was asking:

“But
m’sieur
, how did you make the tunnel in the wall act as a tunnel into the past?”

Here Carroll was less than explicit. Harrison only half-way listened. He had learned, said Carroll, of a cannon left in the mould in which it was cast. It therefore provided a fixed point in time. So it was possible to use it to produce an opening, a passage way, a tunnel between two eras. The statement was less than a complete explanation to Harrison. He could follow the statement that if one went through it on a Wednesday and remained a day, that one would come back into Thursday. But Harrison was not clear in his mind why every time one passed through it from the twentieth century one arrived at a later date in the nineteenth. It seemed, however, somehow to be tied in with the fact that if the time-tunnel ever collapsed it could never be reconstituted. It would be gone forever. A fresh item of once-melted metal which hadn’t been disturbed since its solidification would have to be found, and the new time-tunnel would only be of the length—duration, time-interval—between the time of the freezing of the metal and the formation of the tunnel.

Albert said respectfully:

“But suppose,
m’sieur
, that one went through a tunnel and then it collapsed?”

Carroll observed that tunnels of short period were unstable. If only of days or weeks they did collapse. But a tunnel a century in extent should last indefinitely. The tunnel in St. Jean-sur-Seine had almost two centuries between its ends. It could be broken and then would be gone forever, but it was inherently stable.

They covered the first distance between post-houses in little more than an hour. They changed horses and got fresh ones. They went on again through the night. Pepe was utterly weary. He’d ridden from St. Jean-sur-Seine to Paris without rest, and now was headed back to St. Jean-sur-Seine with no time out for repose.

The third post-house was an inn, and there was a coach in its courtyard. There were four liveried outriders, heavily armed, and they had stirred the inn awake and torches burned smokily and hostlers scurried about trying to supply horses while cooks supplied some sort of midnight refreshment for a scowling man in a black velvet cloak.

Pepe sagged in his saddle while Albert arranged for fresh horses. Carroll dismounted and went into the inn. Harrison paced back and forth, to loosen up his muscles after unaccustomed riding. Someone came out of the inn with a tray. He approached the coach with it. Harrison saw two heads at the coach windows. One was a girl of about Valerie’s age, with Valerie’s coloring. Her expression was infinitely sad. The other was an older woman, possibly in her middle thirties wearing the headdress of a Spanish widow. She had a plump figure and a cheerful expression. She looked like someone it would be pleasant to have around. She opened the door, received the tray, and drew it into the coach. The door closed again.

Carroll came out of the inn. Albert had disappeared. There came a sudden uproar. The inn servants rushed. The liveried outriders went to see. When a single bellowing voice could be picked out, howling curses, the scowling man in the black velvet cloak went authoritatively to end the tumult.