Time Tunnel (16 page)

He returned, followed by his coachman, dripping and enraged. Some person unknown had up-ended a wooden bucket of water on the coachman’s head and left the bucket sticking there. The bucket had had to be broken to get it off. Now the man in the black velvet cloak was icily angry with the coachman and savage with the outriders.

In minutes, the coach’s horses were back in place and it went rolling and rumbling toward Paris. The horses of the outriders made a steady mutter on the highway.

The four from the twentieth century rode away from Paris, on the way to St. Jean-sur-Seine. Pepe was utterly exhausted. It would be literally impossible for him to continue for another day and night of top-speed travel. Two post-houses beyond the inn, Harrison said anxiously:

“Carroll, we’re going to lose time with Pepe! He’d better stop for a few hours! You stay here with him! I’ll ride on ahead!”

Carroll said:

“Better not. I’ve got things to do, too! Albert, will you stay here to take care of M. Ybarra and get him to the tunnel at the earliest practical instant? M. Harrison and I should ride on. It’s urgent.”

“But certainly,
m’sieur
,” said Albert. “I myself would relish rest. I have moved about a great deal, by night.”

Carroll arranged with the post-master for Pepe to have accommodations at the post-house. Albert would sleep on the floor of the same room. Harrison verified that the door opened inward. It couldn’t be opened without waking Albert. Pepe stumbled up the stairs and collapsed, worn out.

Carroll and Harrison went on. They rode at a headlong pace, and walked their horses for a time, and went on again at top speed. It was the way to make the best time without exhausting their mounts. They arrived at post-houses, and changed horses, and continued their race against time and fate and the zestful efforts of the human race to destroy itself. Their rate of travel was unprecedented, in the Prance of 1804, except for couriers bearing military messages. The sky was just beginning to gray at the east when St. Jean-sur-Seine appeared.

They took a considerable risk. They unsaddled their horses and turned them loose. They hid their saddles. The horses being from the last post-house would eventually turn up at this one. And Harrison and Carroll made their way into the town on foot. But they reached the foundry and got into it unseen by any of the local citizenry.

There was tumult when Madame Carroll unlocked the door of the time-tunnel and let them into the cottage of their own era. Even M. Dubois came stumbling down the stairs in his nightshirt. He was evidently still treated as an invalid by Madame Carroll. She demanded fiercely to see the articles Carroll should have purchased and brought back with him for her new and profitable art-dealer customer. Ominously she began to open the saddlebags Carroll and Harrison had brought. Her face crimsoned with fury as she found no fresh stock for the business of Carroll, Dubois et Cie. She did not even find currency to pay for the perfume M. Dubois had risked his life to deliver! Then she tore open a bag which was not a saddlebag, and which Harrison didn’t recognize, though he’d probably carried it. She flung out its contents and displayed truly impressive rage. Because the contents of this bag—of all imaginable objects—was female garments.

Harrison was very weary, but he came back to full wakefulness at sight of a woman’s costume among their possessions. Then he remembered, vividly, the travelling coach in the inn-yard which was the third post-station out of Paris. There had been tumult, out of sight, and then the disclosure of a wooden bucket jammed down on the head of the coachman who drove that carriage. Everyone had gone to see what the uproar meant.

“That was Albert,” he said to Carroll, while Madame Carroll rose to unprecedented speed and fury in her denunciation. “Albert made the uproar so he could get this out of the coach’s trunk. Probably because he was bound to be surprised when he opened it!”

Carroll nodded. He looked at his red-faced, vociferating wife. He picked her up and carried her, kicking and yelping, into the kitchen. Harrison heard him ascend the stairs. He heard a door slam. A lock clicked. Carroll came downstairs again.

“Georges,” he said to the trembling Dubois, “can you tell me the time?” He looked out the window. “Clock time is different,” he commented to Harrison. “I tend to forget it. It was dawn at the other end of the tunnel. Get changed, Harrison! We’ve got to catch the bus to Paris!”

He began to strip off his costume of the early nineteenth century. M. Dubois, trembling, helped him find his garments of the late twentieth. He produced Harrison’s clothes. Carroll said detachedly:

“Georges, what are the Chinese doing? Have they bombed Formosa yet?”

M. Dubois’ mouth dropped open. He could imagine nothing more irrelevant—with his sister kicking her heels and screaming on the floor above—than a question about international politics or Far Eastern Affairs.

“My—my sister,” he said, trembling, “I fear for her health! She is in—such extreme distress! She has waited so anxiously to receive the shipment from—where I purchased the stock for the shop! She is beside herself! I fear—”

“We’re leaving for Paris,” Carroll told him. “Listen to me, Georges! I’ll be back perhaps tonight, if anybody is left alive. Then I’ll return to my wife every centime that’s left of my money. Listen! I—will—return—to—my—wife—what—money—is—left! Tell her that. Tell her I’ve spent only a fraction of it! I’ll give her back nearly all the money I drew out of the bank! She’ll rage, but she’ll still be a rich woman and she knows it! And without me she would not have been rich! I’m going back through the tunnel and perhaps—just possibly!—everything will go on as it has, except that I will live in Paris of 1804 and send you the goods you want in the shop and you will not ever have to go through the tunnel again—and she’ll be more prosperous than ever before!”

M. Dubois seized upon the faintest possible hope of calming his sister.

“That—that would be admirable,” he said, still trembling. “But, until it occurs—”

“She’ll raise hell. Of course!” Carroll fished in the pockets of his contemporary costume. “Damnation! She cleaned out my pockets! Lucky I put my money in another bank! Harrison, have you any modern currency to pay the bus fare to Paris?”

A little later they left the cottage. Harrison remembered to give warning that Pepe and Albert were still to arrive, probably twelve hours or so from now. The town of St. Jean-sur-Seine looked remarkably familiar, because it looked like parts of Paris of 1804. There were minor modifications—such as street-lights—but it was very similar, quaint and unspoiled and unattractive.

The bus waited, wheezing. Harrison bought a newspaper. The mainland Chinese had consented to delay the bombing of Formosa. They said blandly that they would not consider a change in their demand for its surrender, but if the people of Formosa chose to rise against their criminal bourgeois rulers, the mainland government would give them a reasonable time in which to do it. In effect, they offered to regard the people of the island more kindly if before surrendering they killed everybody the mainlanders disliked. They would give five days’ grace for the suggested murders if the murderers-to-be asked nicely.

The rest of the news story dealt with negotiations, with profound statements by the President of France, the debates in the United Nations, the remarkable refusal of some African countries to join in the United Nations protest, and so on. But it was not the exclusive news story on the first page. There had been a fire, and much editorial eloquence described the destruction of that ancient wooden building on the Rue Colbert which was precious to the hearts of all Frenchmen because in it had lived Julie d’Arnaud, mistress of Charles VII of France. It was considered the most ancient wooden structure still standing in Paris, and its leaden roof had resisted the rains and storms of six hundred years. There was also, on an inside page, an editorial about the tragedy, to France, that the Chinese threat to the rest of the world had come about through a French scientist, defected first to Russia and then to China. But Carroll did not read that editorial. It was unfortunate. It named the Frenchman.

Carroll read only the nuclear news. He put the paper aside.

“Better cash in your letter of credit,” he observed as the bus rolled on. “If we have to spend possibly months working on the future, from back where we’ll be, we don’t want to be having to try to find employment back there! I don’t know whether I told you about calling on Gay-Lussac, the chemist. He envisions great things for the science of chemistry. Of course he doesn’t believe that organic compounds can ever be synthesized, but he has an idea that precious stones may some day be synthesized. He’s very hopeful about artificial diamonds.”

Harrison was thinking anxiously about Valerie. He said absently:

“I think it’s been done.”

“Not gem stones,” said Carroll regretfully. “If we could take some of them back…”

Something clicked in Harrison’s mind. The part of it that he’d set to worry about money made a clamor against the rest. But he stared out the bus window. If the universe was not especially designed for humans to live in, then presently these fields would be thin dust or mud, with stark, bare trees in frozen gestures above a world on which there was nothing green anywhere. Houses that men had built would be abraded by desert winds blowing foolishly here and there. Eventually they would fall, but they would not decay because there would be no decay-bacteria alive to feed on them. There would be sunrises and sunsets with no eyes to see them, and there would be sounds of wind and rain and thunder, but no ears to hear.

He turned suddenly from the window.

“Synthetic rubies,” he said. “Synthetic sapphires. That’s the answer! At cents per carat. They’re real rubies and sapphires. They’re genuine. They simply aren’t natural ones. And there are cultured opals, too. They’re genuine. They just aren’t wild. They’re cultivated.”

Carroll said wryly:

“I suspect my wife never happened to think of that! Yes. We’ll get some. But not for trade. In case of emergency only. I don’t mind Albert stealing. It’s his nature. But I’ve a quaint objection to acting like a tradesman.”

Harrison made no comment. His thoughts went back to Valerie.

The bus reached Paris. Harrison went to the Express office. He acquired flat packets of currency for his letter of credit. He got a cab to the shop of Carroll, Dubois et Cie.

The streets were the same. There was a blockade across the front of a scene of much destruction by a recent fire. It was that very, very old wooden house once occupied by the mistress of a forgotten king. From one gaunt blackened timber there dangled a peculiar glittering shape of metal. It was like an icicle, except that solidified lead from the roof had formed it.

Harrison saw posters on the kiosks where newspapers were sold. Russia offered alliance with the West. India considered a non-aggression pact with China.
Les Êtats-Unis
announced that the bombardment of Formosa would be considered an act of war. England attempted to negotiate a compromise. France warned the world that it would use the atom in its own defense. The Scandinavian countries joined Switzerland in proclaiming their unalterable policy of neutrality. West Germany demanded atom bombs for its own defense. But there were no gatherings of people to buy newspapers. The public was accustomed to crises.

Harrison’s cab stopped before the shop. There was an elderly customer inside. He chatted amiably and interminably before he purchased a copy of the
Moniteur
of March 20th, 1804. It contained a mention of his great-grandfather. He confided gleefully that he would yellow it with coffee and antique its texture with a flat-iron, and frame it for his descendants to consider an original.

He went out, chuckling to himself. And Harrison acted as an engaged man is likely to, when be has not seen his particular girl for well over a week.

Presently he explained the situation. Valerie smiled at him and objected that the shop had to be kept open. She could not leave Paris. Harrison spread out the newspaper and pointed out that Paris was not likely to exist for more than a limited number of days. Valerie permitted him to kiss her and said regretfully that her aunt would be frantic if she lost money by the closing of the shop for a single day.

When Carroll appeared at dusk Harrison was in a highly unstable condition. Valerie wanted to do as he asked, but she was alarmed. She tried to change the subject. She told him that she had witnessed part of the conflagration when the most ancient wooden building in Paris burned. He wouldn’t listen. She had to come to St. Jean-sur-Seine and go through the tunnel.

But Carroll’s arrival solved the problem. Carroll explained that though Harrison had not been present at the time, her aunt wished Valerie to come at once to St. Jean-sur-Seine to receive instructions about the shop. It was, of course, a whopping lie. Harrison couldn’t lie to Valerie—at least, not yet—but he didn’t feel that he had to contradict so useful a prevarication.

They took the seven o’clock bus out of Paris. They reached St. Jean-sur-Seine. Valerie dutifully delivered to her aunt the contents of the shop’s cash drawer. Madame Carroll retired with her, immediately, to count the money and demand precise and particular accounts of every transaction and sale.

Pepe and Albert arrived later, from 1804. Pepe was again in a passion of desperate anxiety, and the newspapers Carroll had brought from Paris were not in the least reassuring. The tone of all the news accounts was that this was another crisis; a grave and indeed an appalling crisis. But every one found room on its front page for a news item about the destruction of the residence of the mistress of a long-ago ting. Not one made the statement that history could be about to end, the human race to become extinct, and that it would thereby be demonstrated that the universe was not designed for humans to live in, because they were going to stop living in it. Pepe read, and reached the verge of tears. He had a grandmother who was in Tegucigalpa, but that would be no safer than anywhere else on earth.

“I saw your great-great-grandfather,” Harrison told him. “I provided him with perfume for your great-great-grandmother.”