Time Tunnel (20 page)

Carroll said skeptically:

“How do you feel, Ybarra? Do you feel anything missing since you lost a great-great-grandfather?”

“I feel horrible,” said Pepe in a thin voice. “I’m waiting to just vanish. It’s not pleasant.”

There were hoofbeats on the cobbled highway over which the coach rolled toward Paris. There were three coaches in train, with cavalrymen to escort the Grand Chamberlain, troopers brought to help Pepe’s great-great-grandfather—the living one—to seize de Bassompierre, and the liveried lackeys belonging to each coach separately. There was a very considerable clatter as they made their way through the night.

Harrison spoke suddenly, in an astonished voice:

“Look here! We’re going at this thing the wrong way! Look at it in a new fashion! Our whole point—the basis of everything we’ve been trying to do—is that the past can be changed! We want to change it because the consequences of the things that formerly had happened were appalling. The consequences! You see?”

Carroll shook his head in the blackness.

“I agree with what you say, but I don’t know where you go from there.”

“Why—why—if a thing has consequences, it is real! It is actual! It hasn’t been changed from something that happened into something that didn’t! It hasn’t—unhappened! It’s really a part of the actual past and its consequences are really a part of the present. But an event that has no consequences wasn’t a real event and didn’t happen. That’s clear, isn’t it?”

“Clear,” admitted Carroll, “but not lucid. What follows?”

“Look at Pepe,” said Harrison, almost stridently. “He considers’ that he’s lost an essential ancestor and must silently fade away. But if he didn’t have a full set of ancestors he wouldn’t have been born! If de Bassompierre was his great-great-grandfather and died before marrying Madame de Cespedes, Pepe wouldn’t have had one great-grand-mother, one grand-father, one father—or himself. He wouldn’t be! But there he sits! So he must be the consequences of marriages—call them events—which had consequences! That were actual! That didn’t unhappen! And therefore nothing which would make him impossible can have taken place such as the premature killing of his great-great-grandfather!”

“I admit the logic,” said Carroll. “But de Bassompierre—”

“Ask Cuvier,” said Harrison triumphantly, “if de Bassompierre was killed! Ask Talleyrand! Ask Gay-Lussac and Lagrange and Champollion. No. Not Champollion. He’s a prig. But ask Laplace! You ask! They’ll think you’re crazy! Because you’re de Bassompierre, now! You can write letters about science. Who else could? You’ve the beginning of a friendship with Talleyrand. Who else can advise him about French history in advance, so he’ll call the turn for the rest of his life without one blunder? There isn’t any other time-tunnel! You’ll—”

Harrison found himself tripping over his own words. He stopped, for the breath he’d lost in his haste to get the thing said.

Carroll said surprisedly:

“Well, I’ll be damned! Maybe you’ve something there! Ybarra! Ybarra! How’d you like to be my great-great-grandson?”

Pepe said in a thin voice:

“What’s this? A joke?”

Carroll stirred. Harrison knew, despite the darkness in the coach, that he’d run one hand through his hair and left it standing on end, which had been a familiar gesture in his classroom in Brevard University a couple of centuries from now.

“When you think of it,” said Carroll thoughtfully, “it is perfectly reasonable! After all, this is 1804 and I certainly haven’t gotten married in 1804! Or 1803 or 1802 or any year before that! So that as of the first of August in 1804, I have never been married! Quaint, eh? And if I’m the Bassompierre who’ll write the letters you’ll discover, Harrison, nearly a score of decades in the future, I will die in 1858 at the age of ninety-one. And that will be almost a safe century before Valerie’s aunt comes into the world! So I obviously can’t marry her!” he added. “Somehow I am not moved to tears.”

Harrison said, with the beginning of doubt:

“But you did marry her… If you hadn’t married her there’d have been no Carroll, Dubois et Cie, I wouldn’t have met Valerie, I wouldn’t have found you, and you wouldn’t have come back here. None of this would have happened!”

“True,” agreed Carroll, with a vast calm. “But you’re on no rational foundation either, Harrison! This is eighteen-four, and you were born at least a century and a half in the future. If you stay here you’ll die of old age some decades before you’re born! What are you going to do about that?”

The clatter of horses’ hoofs outside was suddenly muffled, as if they trotted over earth washed by rain upon the cobblestone military highway. Carroll said reflectively:

“Anyhow, she looks good-natured…” He stirred. Then his tone changed. “Do you know, Ybarra wasn’t a very good student at Brevard. But I didn’t flunk him. Perhaps it was unconscious great-great-grandparental favoritism! Eh?”

Harrison did not like Paris. Pepe liked it less. Valerie liked it least of all. There were the smells. There were the shocking differences in social status which had been destroyed, in theory, by the Revolution of the 1790’s, but had now been re-established by the Emperor Napoleon. He was already Emperor of the French and would shortly be crowned by the Pope. These things offended Valerie. And there were others.

They had taken lodgings—the four of them—in the same building in which Ignacio Ybarra and his wife lodged in considerable grandeur. To that house there came a coach, one day, bringing a dark-haired girl with an expression of habitual sadness. She was the girl they’d seen in the post house yard when Albert unwittingly stole female garments from the coach’s boot. She was an orphaned female connection of the Ybarra family. Pepe’s great-great-grandfather—he was actually a year or so younger than Pepe—had generously provided her with a dowry and arranged a marriage for her. He’d sent de Bassompierre to bring her to Paris, duly chaperoned by Madame de Cespedes. She now came to pay her respects. Her expression of sadness was now heart-breaking. Valerie did not like this period of time. Pepe restlessly explored the city. Carroll spend much time with Talleyrand.

They’d been in Paris for two weeks, and Harrison was about to make depressed inquiries for an estate to which he and Valerie could retire after their marriage, when Carroll came zestfully to him. He spread out one of the newspapers of the twentieth century, now creased and beginning to be tattered. It had seemed to fascinate Talleyrand. He’d read even the advertisements over and over again, and cynically decided that he preferred the period in which he had been born.

“Harrison! Look at this!”

Harrison read where Carroll pointed. He’d bought the paper in Paris of the twentieth century when they went back for Valerie before the bombs should fall. It was an item in a grieved editorial, speaking of the tragedy it was for France that one of her sons, a renegade of renegades, had given the atom bomb to China. Disgracefully, it was a French nuclear scientist who’d first defected to Russia and then, dissatisfied by the reactionary policies of that nation, defected again to China. The editorial named him. The name was de Bassompierre.

“Talleyrand pointed it out,” said Carroll. “I guessed that this de Bassompierre could be my great-great-grandson, but more probably would be the great-great-grandson of the man who’d been impersonating me. Talleyrand looked very cynical, but he politely accepted my statement. Do you see?”

Harrison felt what might be called tentative relief.

“Maybe it’s all right, and if so I’m certainly glad. But—”

“The newspaper,” said Carroll, “is a remarkable invention. It enlightens, it informs, and sometimes it solves problems. I have two problems, Harrison. One is that Ybarra’s great-great-grandfather has hinted that he would consider the arrangement of a marriage between Madame Cespedes and myself. She is moderately dowered, and with my wealth in rubies and sapphires it would be an admirable match. And she seems to be an amiable woman.”

Harrison said restlessly:

“I suppose it’s all right…”

“But,” said Carroll, “there is Valerie. I suspect she’d consider me a bigamist. Which is my second problem. Our time-tunnel was destroyed. But I would like to know that in causing the death of this de Bassompierre who stole jewels and perfumery together, we prevented him from having a renegade great-great-grandson who would defect to the Russians and then the Chinese with very practical knowledge of how to make atomic bombs. If we prevented him from existing, and thereby avoided an atomic war, I would be pleased. But without a time-tunnel to our own era there is no way to be sure. I would like, Harrison, to feel that I helped avoid the extermination of the human race!”

“But there’s no way to make a time-tunnel—”

“Unless you know of metal,” said Carroll, “which has not been disturbed since it solidified from a melted state. But that’s why I eulogize the press.”

He turned back to the first page of the newspaper. He put down his finger on the news account of the conflagration that had destroyed the oldest wooden house in Paris. That very ancient dwelling in the Rue Colbert had belonged to Julie d’Arnaud, mistress of Charles VII in ages past. It had still been covered with the quarter-inch-thick leaden roof originally placed upon it. The roof had melted, of course, from the fire.

“I saw the ruin,” said Harrison. “On the way to the shop to try to persuade Valerie—” He stopped. “I saw what looked like an icicle, only it was lead from the melted-down roof, freezing to solidity as it dripped down. Do you mean—?”

“Talleyrand,” said Carroll, “has agreed that it would be interesting to find out. There may be pools of solidified lead among the ruins. He’s arranged to borrow the house, which isn’t burned down here. I’m to make the necessary technical devices. Perfectly simple!”

Harrison said yearningly:

“If only everything’s all right and the war is cancelled! Valerie would like so much to leave here.”

“So would Ybarra,” said Carroll benignly. “I’ve no reason to leave and plenty of reason to stay. For one thing, I have some letters to write during the next few years. And for a reason affecting Ybarra.” He said vexedly, “Dammit, if I’m to be Ybarra’s great-great-grandfather, it seems I should be able to call him by his first name! But I can’t seem to do it! Anyhow, I think I can make a new time-tunnel. If there hasn’t been war, rather, if the war-scare is over, you and Valerie and Ybarra can go back to your own time, which won’t be mine any longer.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” asked Harrison feverishly.

The house was empty and even in the early nineteenth century smelled musty and ancient. Harrison and Valerie and Pepe rode to it in Carroll’s coach. Carroll had set up the technical part of the performance. It was irritatingly simple, but Harrison could make nothing of the circuit. Talleyrand, inscrutably smiling, looked on.

“It looks like everything’s all right,” said Carroll. “Nothing seems to have happened to Paris, but it’s been daylight. I’ve been waiting for dark, when somebody can appear from nowhere with a chance of not being seen. Change your clothes, Harrison, and you can make a trip through to get a newspaper. If all’s well—Valerie’s clothes are ready for her too. And—ah—those of my great-great-grandson-to-be.”

It happened that the time-tunnel existed at a spot closely corresponding to a doorway in the ancient house. Harrison went through. Giddiness. A spasm of nausea. Then he smelled charred wooden beams and wetness and ashes. He heard taxicabs. He heard the sounds of up-to-date Paris. It was night. There was a newspaper kiosk not far away. He went to it and bought newspapers. He scanned the headlines by the light of street lamps as he hurried back to the barricaded, blackened ruin of an old, old, heavy-beamed house.

“It happened!” he said exultantly, back in the First Empire. “The headlines are about a
monte pietá
scandal in Boulogne! There’s been a row in the Chamber of Deputies about a political appointment! There was an explosion in a coal mine in the Ruhr! Nothing about China! Nothing about Formosa! Nothing about atomic war! Not on the front pages, anyhow. We did it!”

So, very shortly, three figures in perfectly ordinary twentieth-century costume emerged inconspicuously from the scorched ruins and ashes of the very ancient residence of the mistress of a forgotten king. Immediately afterward there was a peculiar musical noise, like the string of a gigantic harp plucked once and then allowed to die away.

The sun shone placidly upon Formosa. People moved without haste through its cities’ crowded streets. There were steamships in its harbors, some of them languidly loading cargo, or unloading it, or laying at anchor. Nobody thought of killing anybody else except for strictly personal reasons. There was no haste. There was no tumult. There was no war or rumor of war. It was as placid and commonplace and tranquil a picture as, say, the great wide flight of steps before the principal entrance to the Louvre. Above and upon those steps pigeons fluttered. In the wide street before it, taxicabs trundled and on the sidewalks children walked sedately with grown-ups. Harrison was on those steps, and Valerie was with him, and they had come to see a picture Pepe had urged them to look at. Pepe seemed somewhat embarrassed about it.

They entered the splendid building. They consulted the memorandum Pepe had given them. They consulted a guard, who gave them directions. They wandered vaguely through the vast corridors. Presently they found what they were looking for.

It was a portrait by Antoine Jean Gros, though not of his best period. It was a bit late for that. It had been painted in the 1830’s, when Gros had passed his peak, but it was still a highly satisfactory piece of work. They stared at it, and Valerie shrank a little closer to Harrison. The portrait stared back at them. Humorously.

“It—it is he!” said Valerie breathlessly.

Harrison nodded. He read the identification plate. It read, “
Portrait of M. de Bassompierre as an Alchemist
.” There was other data, but Harrison did not need it. The portrait was of Carroll. He was older than when they’d left him a few days since. Naturally! He wore over his alchemists’ robe a cordon and the badge of one of the highest Bourbon decorations.