The affair of the time-tunnel began, so far as
Harrison was concerned, with a series of events so im-
probable as to seem lunacy, but which appear to have been
inevitable.  In  a  cosmos  designed  to  have  human  beings
live in  it, though,  there would  have  to  be  some  sort of
safeguards against the consequences of their idiocy. The
time-tunnel  may  have  been  such  a  safeguard. To  some
people, that seems a reasonable guess.

It  was  a  brisk,  sunshiny  Parisian  afternoon  when  the
matter really turned up. Harrison sat at a sidewalk table
outside the little cafe in the Rue Flamel. He'd never hap-
pened to notice its name. He sipped at an aperitif, thinking
hard and trying not to believe what he was thinking about.
He'd come from the Bibliotheque Nationale a good how
before. Today he'd found more of the completely incred-
ible.  He  didn't  believe  it,  but  he  knew  it  was  true.
His series of discoveries had reached the point where he
simply couldn't  tell  himself any longer  that they  were
coincidences.  They  weren't.  And  their implications  were
of a kind to make cold chills run up and down anybody's
spine. A really sensible man would have torn up his notes,
gotten drunk to confuse his memories, and then departed
7                                                 -
on the earliest possible plane for home. There he would
have denied to himself forever after that he had found
what Harrison had discovered in the dusty manuscript
section of the Bibliotheque Nationale.
But Harrison sipped at a drink and noted the small
cold chills running up and down his spine. He resented them
because he didn't believe in what caused them. But there
they were. They had to do with the cosmos in general.
Most men develop convictions about the cosmos and such
beliefs come in two varieties.  One kind is  a conviction
that the cosmos does not make sense. That it exists by
chance and changes by chance and human beings do not
matter. This view produces a fine complacency. The other
kind is a belief that the cosmos does make sense, and was
designed with the idea that people were going to live in
it,  and  that  what  they  do  and  what  happens  to  them  is
important. This theory seems to be depressing.
Harrison had accepted the second view, but he was
beginning to be frightened because of what he'd found in
dusty, quill-pen-written pages in  a library reading room.
And he didn't like to be frightened.
It was a very pleasant autumn afternoon, though. Leaves
had been falling, and they blew erratically about the pave-
ment in appropriate fall colorings, and the sky showed
through the nearly denuded branches of the trees that
lined the Rue Flamel. There was nobody on the sidewalks.
For minutes there had been no traffic going past the
small cafe. It was just cold enough so that Harrison was the
only customer at any of the outdoor tables.
Around him there were houses which had stood in their
places for centuries and thereby acquired a self-satisfied air.
From high overhead there came a rumbling, distant thunder.
A jet had made the sound, but there was no use in trying to
sight it. It had left its noise-trail far behind. It was now un-
doubtedly hidden by roofs or chimney-pots.
Then, at last, someone did come down the street. It was
an extremely improbable occurrence, not that somebody
should walk down the street, but who it happened to be. The
odds against anything that actually happens are always enor-
mous, when one considers the number of other things that
could have happened instead. But certainly the odds were
incalculably great that Pope Ybarra, who had been at Brevard
University with Harrison and had shared one course in statisti-
cal analysis with him, would not be walking down the Rue
Flamel at this particular moment, when Harrison had come
upon the preposterous and doubted his own sanity.
But there he was. He came briskly toward the cafe. Har-
rison hadn't seen him for four years. The last time had been in
Uxbridge, Pennsylvania, when Pepe was being hauled out
of the Roland River by an also-dripping policeman who was
going to arrest him within minutes, but was forced to accept
Pepe's warmly grateful handshake beforehand. Now he was
walking down the Rue Flamel on an autumn afternoon. It
was not a probable occurrence, but it was the kind of thing
that happens.
He greeted Harrison with a glad outcry.
"For the love of heaven! What are you doing here?
Where've you been? What gives? How long have you been in
Paris? Do you know any interesting girls?"
Harrison shook hands and Pepe dropped into a chair op-
posite him. He regarded Harrison with approving eyes.
"I've been here for two months," said Harrison wrily. "I
don't know any girls, and I think I'm going to try to forget
what I came for."
Pepe rapped on the table. He ordered a drink over his
shoulder. To Harrison he said warmly, "Now we have fun!
Where are you living? What are you doing? Why don't you
knotJeany girls?"
"I've been busy," said Harrison. He explained. "I've an
elderly aunt. She offered to stake me to a Ph.D. And she said
that since I lived here when I was a small boyuntil I was
twelve1 ought to try to get back my French. And I had a
crazy sort of idea that fitted into the proposal. It was some-
thing Professor Carroll said once in a lecture. Remember
him? So I came over to get back my French and dig up
the material for my thesis. My aunt is pleased. I wish I'd
never thought of it." Harrison was silent a moment. Then he
changed the subject. "What have you been doing?"
Pepe sketched, with enthusiasm, his activities since Har-
rison had last seen him. He'd been home in Mexico. For a
while he was in Tehuantepec. She was a lovely girl! Then he'd
been in Tegucigalpa. She was charming! And then he'd been
in Aguascalientes, and the name fitted! She was una rubaya,
a red-head. Mmmmmmmh! But there'd been trouble there.
His family had sent him to France until the affair blew over.
Now he was being very virtuous. Seriously, what was Harrison
doing in Paris?
"I've been digging," said  Harrison,  "in the manuscript
section of the Bibliotheque Nationale. Did you know, Pepe,
that a century and a half before Pasteur, there was someone
who described in detail the idea that living things too small
to be seengerms, in factcould be responsible for con-
tagious diseases?"*
Pepe accepted his drink, beaming. He nodded as he put
it  to  his  lips.  Overhead,  the  dull  rumble  of  the  jet-sound
died gradually away. A taxicab crossed the Rue Flamel at
the next corner. Blowing fallen leaves made faint whispering
sounds on the pavement.
"Pues?" said Pepe. He put down his glass. "What of it?"
"That's a freak," said Harrison. "But I just found in Cuvier's
notesthe naturalist, you knowthat in 1804 a man named
de Bassompierre wrote him a theory which might be of in-
terest to a savant concerned with natural history. And he out-
lined, very clearly and simply, the Mendelian laws of heredity.
But it happened to be more than half a century before Mendel
discovered them."
Pepe said, "That is not a freak?"
"No," said Harrison with some grimness. "Last week I
found in the laboratory notes of Amperethe man who dis-
covered so much about electricity, you knowthat someone
named de Bassompierre wrote him in 1805 to tell him very
respectfully that there were such things as alternating cur-
rents. He explained in words of one syllable how they could
be generated and what they could be used for."
Pepe raised his eyebrows.
"This Bassompierre," he observed, "was quite a character!
You interest me strangely. In tact . . ."
"He was more than a character," said Harrison. "He
wrote to Laplace, the astronomer, assuring him that Mars
had two moons, very small and very close to its surface. He
also said that there were three planets beyond Saturn, and
that the one next out had a period of eighty-four years and
two moons, one retrograde. He suggested that it should be
called Uranus. He added that in the year 1808 there would be
a nova in Persis, (which there was!) and he signed himself
very respectfully, de Bassompierre."
"I am getting  interested," said Pepe.  "There is a de
Bassompierre in . . ."
-Note: This is historical fact. The theory was recorded
with derisive gestures by John Asdruc, physician to
Louis XIV of France. The germ theory was held by
Augustine Hauptman and Christian Longius, among
others M. L.
"Someone wrote to Jean-Francois Champollion." Harrison
went on morbidly, "the Egyptologist. The Rosetta stone had
just been discovered, but nobody could make use of it yet.
The letter told him exactly how to decipher the Egyptian
inscription. Champollion paid no attention for sixteen years.
Then he tried the system suggested, but without referring to
the letter, which be may have forgotten. It worked. But it
had been described in 1806 by de Bassompierre."
"Evidently a universal genius," agreed Pepe. "But . . ."
"Lagrange, the mathematician," Harrison went on, dis-
tastefully, "had a correspondent who explained to him the
principles of statistical  analysis.  He died  before  finishing
his Mkchanique Analytique, so there's no way to know if he
paid any attention. But the description was so clear that you'd
swear Professor Carroll wrote it. But it happened to be de
Bassompierre. It was also de Bassompierre who around 1812
corresponded with the Academic des Sciences, and offered
the interesting theory that atoms might be compared to min-
iature solar systems, with negatively charged particles orbit-
ing complex nuclei of different masses. He added that all the
elements heavier than bismuth would be found to be unstable,
breaking down at different rates to other and lighter ele-
ments."
"Such statements," said Pepe with reserve, "are not easy to
believe. After all, Madame Curie . . ."
"I know!" said Harrison fretfully. "It isn't possible. But
this same de Bassompierre, who, by the way, died in 1858 at
the age of liinety-one, also wrote to Desmarest, the geologist,
and told him the facts of life about petroleum, including the
products of fractional distillation. Do you see why I wish
I'd never thought of looking up this stuff?"
Pepe sipped at his drink and put it down.
"I confess." be observed, "that I am interested in this de
Bassompierre! I knew nothing of this! But where does it
lead?"
"I'm afraid to find out," admitted Harrison. "But Talleyrand
is said to have been his close friend,  and Talleyrand never
made a real mistake in guessing what would come next. Na-
poleon said he was possessed of a devil. Instead, he possessed
the friendship of de Bassompierre. I can show you in Talley-
rand's papers that he'd predicted the American civil war.
Look, Pepe! De Bassompierre knew that there'd be a Maxi-
milian. Emperor of Mexico, fifty years in what was -then the
future!"
He stopped. He felt queer. He had experienced a momentary
giddiness. It was almost unnoticeable, but it seemed as if the
street changed subtly and the branches of the trees were no
longer exactly as they had been. There was a doorway in a
house on the opposite side of the street which abruptly
looked wrong.
Pepe looked at him curiously.
"What's that?" he asked. "An Emperor Maximilian of
Mexico? What are you talking about?"
Harrison turned pale. He remembered saying the words,
"Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico." When he'd said them,
they'd seemed perfectly reasonable. They were meaningful.
But now they weren't. They were associated with somebody
named Napoleon the Third, to be sure. And of course there'd
been a Napoleon the Third, just as there'd been a Napoleon the
Fourth, and so on. But somehow it had seemed wrong. And
there had never been a Maximilian of Mexico.
"I suspect," he said in a sudden mixture of aversion and
relief,  "that I've cracked up. I've been talking nonsense."
But Pope's expression had changed, also. He looked puzzled.
"I am not sure, but now it comes to me. I have a memory,
a vague one. It seems to me that there was some story, per-
haps a novel, about a Maximilian. His wife was named . . ."
"Carlotta," said Harrison.
"Pero si!" agreed Pepe, relievedly. "Certainly! We read
the same novel at some time or another! There have only
been four Emperors of Mexico and none Of them was
named..."
He stopped short. His mouth dropped open. There was
again a faint feeling of giddiness in the air. Again one could
not be sure that he felt it. The branches of the trees again
seemed changed, as if they'd grown differently from the way
they'd looked before. A door across the street looked right
again, where before it hadn't.
"Now, why the devil," demanded Pepe, "why did I say
that? Of course there was an Emperor Maximilian! He was a
fool! He spent his time compiling an official book of the
etiquette to be observed in his court, while he and all his
followers were being besieged by Juarez, who  presently
had him shot!** And Carlotta went mad and lived in
Belgium until 19271 Why did I say there was no Emperor
**The writing of a book of etiquette was, histori-
cally, the principal interest of Maximilian while he was
being besieged in Queretaro, before his capture and
execution. M.L.
Maximilian? Why did I suspect that we had both merely
read the same novel? AndDios miolwhere did I get the
idea that there had been four Mexican emperors? Am I in-
sane?"
Harrison was still very pale.
"Let's find out." He rapped on the table. The waiter came.
Harrison paid and tipped him. Then he said: "Do you know if
there was ever an Emperor of Mexico?"
The waiter beamed.
"Mais ouU He was the Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg,
placed on the throne of Mexico by Napoleon the Third. He
was shot by the Republicans at Queretaro. It is part of
history, m'sieur, which I read as an amusement."
Harrison gravely doubled the tip. He said, "Merci," and
he and Pepe rose from the table. As they went down the street
together, Pepe said ruefully:
"Now, I wonder how many waiters in Mexico could have
told us that! And it is our history! But why did I make
such a fool of myself? Why did I? Do I seem to act strangely?
Should I see a doctor? A psycho-analyst?"
Harrison said with some grimness:
"Remember Professor Carroll? I'd like to see him! He said
something that started me off on this business. Remember?
He said that the cosmos as known is merely the statistical
probability that has the value of unity? I'd like to see him
analyze the statistical probability of de Bassompierre!"
"Ah, yes! De Bassompiere! I . . ." Then Pepe stopped. After
an instant he <aid, "I also thought of Professor Carroll
today. There is a shop, a very curious one. The name is
Carroll, Dubois et Cie.  The window says that they  are
importers and exporters d'ans 1804. They display incredible
objects, apparently from the Napoleonic period, but abso-
lutely new and in perfect condition. They even offer reprints
of the Moniteur of 1804. But they say, 'exporters and im-
porters'!"
Then he said indignantly:
"But why did I make so insane a statement about four
emperors of Mexico? For seconds I believed tranquilly that
that was the history of my country!"
Harrison shrugged. He remained absorbed in his own prob-
lem. Presently he said with a sort of mirthless amusement,
"Would you like to hear something really insane, Pepe?
Make one impossible assumption, and the matter of de
Bassompierre and his correspondence becomes quite impos-
sible. There is only one fact to make the assumption unthink-
able."
"What is the assumption?"
"If it were possible to travel in time," said Harrison, "and
one had evidence that a man in the early 1800s knew about
Mendel's laws, and that alternating current could be useful
when at the time even D.C. was of no use to anybody
and facts about astronomy the telescopes weren't good
enough to find out, and how hieroglyphics could be deci-
phered, and perfectly valid principles of statistical analysis,
and the real structure of atoms, and radioactivity, and what
could be done with petroleum. // it were possible to travel in
time, all those bits of information could be known to a man
of Napoleon's era if he happened to be moderately well-
informed and had traveled back to then from here and now."
"But you don't believe that!" protested Pepe.
"Of course not. But it explains every fact but one."
"The one fact it does not explain," said Pepe, "should be
interesting."
"The fact is," Harrison told him, "that there was a man
named Bassompierre, and he was a friend of Talleyrand's. He
was born in 1767, he travelled in the Orient for several years,
and he returned to France to discover that an imposter had
assumed his identity and looted his estates. The imposter at-
tacked him when he was unmasked, and was killed. So de
Bassompierre resumed his station in society, corresponded
with men of scienceall this is in the official biographical
material about himand he was useful to Napoleon on one or
two occasions but was highly regarded by the Bourbons when
they returned. You see?"
Pepe frowned.
"There was a man named de Bassompierre!" said Harrison
harassedly. "He was born two hundred-odd years ago! He
died in 1858! He's authentic! There's no mystery about
him. He couldn't be a time-traveller!"
"Ah, I am relieved!" said Pepe amiably. "You see, I under.
stood that if one travelled into the past, he might by bad
fortune happen to kill his grandfather as a youth. In such a
case, he would not be born to go back in time to kill his
grandfather. But if he were not born, he could not kill his
grandfather, so he would be born to kill his grandfather.
So he would not. So he would. And so on. I have considered
that one could not travel into the past because of that little
difficulty about one's grandfather."
"But in an exceptional case," said Harrison, "a case, for
instance, in which a time-traveller did not happen to kill his
grandfather, that argument doesn't hold."
They went down the street together. Pepe made a grand
gesture.
"Again, if one could travel in time, then even without
killing one's  grandfather one might  change  the past  and
therefore the present. Even the history books would have
to change!"
"Yes," agreed Harrison wrily. "There might not be an
Emperor Maximilian, for example. There might not be a you.
Or a me. We might not ever have existed. I'd deplore that!"
"But do you mean," protested Pepe, "that because for a
few seconds it seemed to us that an historical character did not
exist" He grimaced. "Because for a few moments we were
confused, do you mean that during those few moments
history waswas other than as it is? That something else
was temporarily true?"
"No-o-o-o," admitted Harrison. "But if it had been, who'd
have noticed it? I agree that we went through a freak
occurrence, a shared delusion, you might say. But if it bad
been real, how many people would have been talking about a
thing when their memories changed and they could notice
it?"
"That is nonsense," said Pepe with decision, "and it is
not even amusing nonsense. You don't believe it any more
than I do."
"Of course not," said Harrison. But he added unhappily,
"At least I hope not. But this de Bassompierre business does
stretch the long arm of coincidence completely out of joint.
It's all in the library. I wish it weren't."
They strolled together. Pigeons flew overhead, careened
and came back, and coasted down to where two or three
energetic flappings would land them lightly. They began to
inspect a place where a tiny wind-devil had heaped fallen
leaves into a little pile. They moved suspiciously aside when
Harrison and Pepe walked by.
"No," said Pepe firmly. "It is all quite ridiculous! I shall
take you to the shop I mentioned, which reminded me of
Professor Carroll. It is foolish that anyone should pretend
to be in the business of importing and exporting commercial
articles between now  and the year eighteen  hundred  and
four! Yet if time-traveUwere possible, there would certainly
be somebody to make a business of it! And I have a grand-
mother who adores snuffboxes. We will go to the shop. If
the snuffboxes are not too bad, I will buy her one, and you
will see if they still claim to import and export to 1804. But
I will bet the snuffboxes are marked made in Japan!"
Harrison shrugged. He'd been worried. He'd come very
close to being frightened. In fact, he had been frightened. But
anticipations of modem discoveries had been made before.
There'd been a bronze, planetary-gear computer brought up
by a scuba diver from a Greek ship wrecked in the year
100, B.C. It could compute sunrise and sunset times and
even eclipses. There'd been objects discovered near Damascus
which were at least seven centuries old, and which were
definitely and inexplicably electroplated. A craftsman pre-
sented a crystal goblet to the Emperor Nero, and then
dashed it to the ground. It dented, but did not break. He
hammered out the dent and gave it to the Emperor, who had
him executed because his discovery would ruin the glass
blowers of Rome. The goblet was possibly a plastic one.***
Yes. Anticipations of modern knowledge were not uncom-
mon. But this was unusually disturbing.
It was  a  relief to have  told  Pepe  about it,  though.  It
was even reassuring for Pepe to have made that peculiar er-
ror about the history of his country. Of course the con-
sequences of changes in the present brought about by time-
travellers to the past would be horrifying to think about, if
time-travel were possible. But Harrison now saw that it was
wholly foolish. The evidence that had disturbed him wasn't
explained away. But since he'd told about it he was able
to be skeptical. Which was consoling.
Very, very thin and straight, a white pencil-line of vapor
moved across the sky. It was the contrail of a )et, flying so
high that even its roaring did not reach the ground. It was
probably a member of that precautionary patrol which
most of the larger cities of the earth maintained overhead
night and day. There was no particular diplomatic crisis in
the world at the moment-there were only two small brush-
fire wars smouldering in the Far East and one United Nations
force sitting on a trouble-spot nearer, with the usual turbu-
lences in Africa and South America. A jet patrol above
Paris did not mean that an unwarned atomic attack was more
** "These items are reported in reputable histories,
except the computer, which exists in an Athens museum
and which I heard about from someone working on it
from photographs, in the Princeton Institute for Ad-
vanced Studies. M.L.
likely than usual. But there was a jet patrol. There were also
atomic submarines under the Arctic ice-pack, ready to send
annihilation soaring toward predetermined targets in case
of need, and there were NATO ships at sea prepared to
launch other missiles, and there were cavernous missile bases
in divers countries, ready to send intercontinental rockets
beyond the atmosphere should the occasion require it.
But Harrison was used to hair-trigger preparations for
mutual suicide by the more modern countries of the world.
Such things didn't frighten him. They weren't new. Yet the
idea that history might be changed, so that a totally different
now might come about without warning, and that in that sub-
stituted present he might not even happen to have been born
. . . That was something to send cold tingles down his spine!
He was consciously glad that he'd talked it over with Pepe.
It was absurd! He was glad that he could see it as absurd!
A second contrail, miles high, made another white streak
across the sky. Harrison didn't notice.
"The shop I mentioned," said Pepe, "is just around the next
corner. I did not go into it, because I saw a woman inside
and she was stout and formidable and looked like a
shopkeeper. Truly practical shopkeepers should realize that
even reproductions of antiques should be sold by per-
sonable girls. But we will go there. We will inquire if they do
import from and export to another century. It will be in-
teresting. They will think us insane."
They turned the corner, and there was the shop. It was not
a large one, and the sign, "Carroll, Dubois et Cie" was not
conspicuous. The smaller lettering,  saying that the firm
were importers and exporters to the year 1804, looked
strictly matter-of-fact. The shop seemed the most common-
place of all possible places of business.
Harrison looked in the window. There were flint-lock
pistols of various sizes. No two were alike, except a pair of
duelling-pistols of incredibly fine workmanship. There were
sporting guns, flint-locks. There was a Jaeger, also a flint-
lock. But more than that, there was a spread-open copy of the
Moniteur for April 7th, 1804, announcing the suicide of
someone named Pichegru in his prison cell. He bad strangled
himself with a silk handkerchief. It was an amazingly per-
fect replica of the official Napoleonic newspaper.  But the
paper itself was perfectly new and fresh. It simply could
not be more than weeks old. At that, it would be a consid-
erable publishing enterprise to find the type and the paper and
make a convincing replica of any newspaper nearly two
hundred years old. And there were Moniteurs of other
dates in the window. Harrison suddenly realized that there
was seemingly a file for a month or more. And that was un-
reasonable!
He found himself reluctantly slipping back into the con-
dition ot mental stress and self-doubt that confiding in Pepe
had seemed to end. There had been a man named de Bas-
sompierre back in the days of Napoleon Bonaparte. He had
given important people important, exact, and detailed in-
formation about various things that nobody knew until fifty
and a hundred and a hundred and fifty years later. So Har-
rison felt acutely uncomfortable.
When Pepe opened the shop door and a bell tinkled he
followed dismally inside. Then a girl, a very pretty girl,
came out of the back of the shop and said politely:
"Messieurs?"
And Harrison's eyes popped wide. Against all reason and
all likelihood, he knew this sirl. Against all common sense,
she was somebody he recognized immediately. The fact was,
again, one of those that one evaluates according to whether
he believes the cosmos makes sense, or that it does not.
There were so many other things that could have happened
instead of this, that it was almost unbelievable that at this
exact moment he should meet and know this girl.
He said, startled:
"Valeric!"
She stared. She was astounded. Then she laughed in pure
pleasure and held out both hands to him.
And all this was improbable in the extreme, but it was the
sort of thing that does happen.  The combination ot im-
probability  with  commonplaceness  seems  to  have  been
characteristic ot the whole affair ot the time-tunnels. It ap-
pears that inevitability was a part of the pattern, too.
When Harrison woke next morning, before he
opened his eyes he was aware ol' violently conflicting emo-
tional states. On the one hand, be wished bitterly that he
had never essayed to write a doctoral thesis that called for
research in the Bibliotheque Nationale. On the other, he
felt a pleasant glow in recalling that through  that research
he'd sat down to brood where Pepe would find him, and
because of the research Pepe had carried him to the shop of
CarroU, Dubois et Cie, where he'd seen Valerie, and that she
remembered him with pleasure approaching affection.
Neither of the feelings could be justified. The only possible
explanation of his discoveries required either the acceptance
of an idea that was plainly insane, or that he abandon his
belief that the cosmos made sense. In the matter of Valerie
. . . But there is never a rational reason for a man to rejoice
that a certain pretty girl exists and that he has found her.
The experience, however, is universal.
When he was clothed, it was still hard to be sure that
he was in his right mind. Still, when he had his morning
coffee he felt a definite exhilaration  because Valerie had
remembered him. They had lived in the same building
when they were children. They both knew people lone
gone to a better world. Valerie remembered the smaU
black dog he'd owned more than a dozen years before,
and he remembered a kitten she'd forgotten, they recalled
19
fStes,  they recalled  a Twelfth Night celebration  of which
Valerie became queen at the age of eleven by virtue of hav-
ing the slice of cake with the bean in it, and they re-
membered the eccentricities of the concierge whom they had
occasionally outwitted. In general, they'd reminisced with a
fine enthusiasm. But it was not likely they'd have felt such
really great pleasure if, say, Harrison had married somebody
else in the years between or if Valerie had been less satis-
factory to look at.
Now, today, Harrison finished his morning coffee and
was pleased to remember that they would meet presently,
secretly, because Valerie's aunt, Madame Carroll, did not ap-
prove of her knowing young men. The prospect made Harrison
feel fully capable of facing a new day.
Then Pope arrived, fuming.
"The French," he said bitterly, "they are a noble race! I've
been asking about this Carroll, Dubois et Cie, and it's a
monstrous thing! You saw me buy a snuffbox yesterday. I
intended to send it to my grandmother. It would be just the
thing for her handbag, to hold her hay-fever pills. But I
examined it. And it is an outrage!"
Harrison biinked at him.
"What's the matter with it?"
"It is a work of art!" said Pepe indignantly. "It was made
by an artist! A craftsman! If it were an antique, it would be
priceless! But it was one of a drawer-full of similar snuff-
boxes, some inferior, to be sure, but others equally good. And
I bought it for peanuts!"
Harrison biinked again. "I don't quite see . . ."
"Somebody made it!" said Pepe. "By hand! He is capable
of magnificent work! This is magnificent! But he is turning
out things to be sold by Carroll, Dubois et Cie as curios!
Which is a crime! He should be found and told the facts of
life! Your Valerie says that her uncle, M. Dubois, is off on a
trip to secure more stock for the shop. She does not know
where he went. You may remember that I was enthusiastic
and asked where such things were manufactured. She does
not know that, either! Don't you see what has happened?"
Harrison shook his head. He was unreasonably pleased at
having rediscovered Valerie. It was something so unlikely
that he wouldn't have dreamed of it occurring.
"I've no idea what you're talking about," he admitted.
"I've made inquiries," said .Pepe. "I'm told that work-
manship like that snuffbox would entitle a craftsman to
plenty of money! If he made things of modern usefulness and
iii the modem taste, he'd grow rich!  But do you know what  I
paid for that snuffbox? Sixty-five hundred francs! Practi-
cally twenty dollars! Don't you see?"
"No," admitted Harrison again, "I don't."
"This Madame Carroll and this Monsieur Dubois have
found a gifted craftsman," said Pepe angrily, "he is capable
of masterpieces, and they have him making curios! Think
of the skill and labor that went into this snuffbox! Think
what they must have paid him for it, to offer it for sale as
a curio for twenty dollars!"
Harrison biinked yet again.
"But..."
"The stupidity of it!" insisted Pepe, botly. "The idiocy
of  it!  As  shopkeepers,  this  Madame  Carroll  and  this
M'sieur Dubois think only of how much they can get from
miniature works of art they don't even recognize as works
of art! They think only of a shopkeeper's profit! They keep a
craftsman of the highest order turning out gems of skill and
artistry so they can sell them to ignorant tourists! Like me!"
Harrison felt a very familiar depression creeping over him.
"Naturally Dubois would not let out where he gets his
stock!" said Pepe scornfully. "Someone might find his work-
man and let him know what his skill is really worth! It isn't
illegal to buy an artist's work for peanuts and sell it again
at any price one can get. But it is an outrage!"
"The workmanship is that good?" asked Harrison forlomly.
"I spoke to an expert in such things," fumed Pepe, "and
he said it could not be duplicated for ten times what I paid
for it! But, he also said there is no large market for snuff-
boxes. I'll make a bet that these shopkeepers are too stupid
to realize that work like this is different from any other
curio product!"
Harrison swallowed. He felt a suspicion. But it was totally
unrealistic to think that because there had been wildly un-
likely coincidences in the immediate past, that there would
be more wildly unlikely ones turning up in orderly succession.
Yet...
"Pepe," he said unhappily, "you say it would take weeks
to create that snuffbox. How many did you see, and how
much time would be required to make them, by hand? And
you saw the guns. They are not machine-made. They are
strictly hand-craft products. How many man-years of labor
do they represent? And there were some books in the shop,
set in type of the Napoleonic period and printed on paper
that simply is not made any more. How long to make the
paper and set the type and print and bind those books?
And how much investment in printing replicas of even one
issue of the Moniteur? There are weeks of the Moniteur
in the window, if not months! Do you think small shop-
keepers could finance all this? And do you think that
people who could finance such an enterprise would pick out
CarroU, Dubois et Cie for their only outlet?"
Pope swore. Then he admitted:
"I didn't think of those angles. But what is the answer?"
"I haven't the least idea," said Harrison unhappily. "It's
ridiculous to believe in the only explanation that would
explain it."
"That someone travels from now to then?" Pepe snorted.
"My dear fellow, that is nonsense! You know it is non-
sense!"
"I agree with you," said Harrison regretfully. "But I've
never noticed that being nonsensical keeps things from hap-
pening. Don't you ever read about politics?"
"I admit," Pepe conceded with dignity, "that foolish things
are done by governments and great men, but I cannot do
anything about them! But if there is a genuine artist working
for a pittance so that a French shopkeeper can make a shrewd
profit out of his commercial innocence . . . That I can do
something about!"
"Such as what?" asked Harrison. Internally, he struggled
against an appalling tendency to think in terms of the
preposterous.
"I am going to the shop again," said Pepe sternly. "I won't
talk to your Valerie, because you saw her first. But I shall
say that I want a special bit of work done, only it will be
necessary for me to discuss it with the workman. These shop-
keepers will see the chance to make an inordinate profit. I
will pay part of it in advance. They will gloat. And I will tell
this workman what an idiot he is to work for what they
pay him! I will advance him money to do such work for
modem millionaires! If necessary, I'll send people to him who
will pay him something adequate! Because he is an artist!"
Harrison stared at him in alarm.
"But look here!" he protested. "You can't do that!"
"Why not?"
"Why, Valerie! We were children together! And I knew
this Madame Carroll when she was a skinny virgin, trying
desperately to get herself a suitable husband! She's Valerie's
aunt  and she was a tartar then and she's worse now!
Valeric lives with her! She doesn't want Valeric to know
anybody because if she married, her aunt would have to
pay a decent wage for somebody to help in the shop!"
Pepe snorted.
"You talked to her for fifteen minutes and you have a
complete picture of the difficulties to romance with her! One
doesn't learn such things unless there's some thought of evad-
ing them!"
Harris said indignantly:
"But she's a nice kid! I liked her when we were children!
And dammit, I've been lonesome! I'm not interested in ro-
mance in the abstract, Pepe. You have to be a Frenchman
or a Mexican to do that! But Valerie's a nice kid! And I don't
want to make trouble for her!"
"She is not allowed to know young men," said Pepe in a
detached tone. "Have you arranged to meet her, ah, pri-
vately?"
"Well . . . yes," Harrison admitted.
"And you do not want to make trouble for her!" said Pepe
sardonically. "Ah, you rascal! In fifteen minutes you made
her remember you, you learned about her tragic and unhappy
life, and you made a date! You're a fast worker, my friend!"
Harrison said angrily:
"Look here, Pepe! I won't have that! I . . ."
Pepe waved his hand.
"Oh, I am helpless! I admit it! I've taken upon myself to
rescue a skilled craftsman from peonage to French shop-
keepers, than which there could be no worse slavery. But
you can spoil things for me. You could tell Valerie of my
noble purpose, and she could tell her aunt, which would spoil
my altruistic scheme. So I'll make a deal with you."
Harrison glared at him. Pepe grinned.
"We go to the shop together. Again. Maybe Madame Carroll
won't be there. In that case you can talk to Valerie. A bribe,
eh? All I'll do is plant the idea of a specially-made article.
If she or Dubois are there, I'll set up the idea of a fine
swindle of which I'm to be the victim. Then they'll be
amiable to you because you are my friend. They may even
try to enlist you to help them swindle me! They . . ."
"It won't work," said Harrison.
"But I shall try it," said Pepe, still grinning. "You can't
keep me from trying. But I'll let you come along if you like."
Very grudgingly, Harrison stood up. He was very far
from happy. He was again unable to dismiss the completely
foolish ideas stemming from dusty, elaborately shaded hand-
written documents in the BibliothBque Nationale. They were
too fantastic to be credited, but he needed badly to find some
excuse for dismissing them. He needed the excuse more than
ever today, because he'd been trying not to think of the
possibility that  if  the  past  could  be visited,  it could be
changed, and if it were changed the present might follow
and he, in person, could vanish like a puff of smoke. And
Valeric could vanish too!
"I'm crazy," he said bitterly, "but let's go!"
Pepe walked beside him with a splendid, self-satisfied air.
Presently they walked down the Rue Flamel and past the
little cafe where they'd encountered each other the day be-
fore.
"If Valerie tends the shop," Pepe observed, "I ask if I
can have a special article made, and then I'll browse among
the objects on sale while you chat. If her aunt is there, I'll
do all the talking."
"We're fools!" said Hamson. "Morons! Idiots!"
"If you speak of my altruism," said Pepe cheerfully, "I
agree. But if you speak of your interest in a very pretty
girl, then I point out that nobody is ever as happy as while
he is making a fool of himself over a woman. When, in
addition, his intentions are honorable . . ."
They reached the corner. They came to the shop. Only
Valerie was inside. She greeted Harrison with relief.
"I am so glad you came!" she said breathlessly. "Something
happened, and I won't be able to meet you as we agreed!
And you forgot to tell me where you are living, so I
couldn't have sent you word!"
Pepe said benignly:
"Providence arranges that I benefit all my friends! I am
responsible for your friend's presence, Ma'msellel"
Harrison found himself yearning over Valerie. The idea
that anything could happen to her was intolerable. The most
imaginary of dangers, if it might affect her, was appalling.
"My aunt was called to St. Jean-sur-Seine," explained Val-
erie,  looking  at Harrison.  "Her husband,  M'sieur  Carroll,
was . . . difficult. A crisis in the business developed. He
and my uncle M'sieur Dubois were unable to agree upon a
course of action. They actually telephoned by long-distance!
So she went to St. Jean-sur-Seine to decide the matter. And I
cannot leave the shop. So we would have missed our appoint-
ment."
Harrison was elated that Valerie hadn't wanted to miss
seeing him.
"Let us to business," said Pepe profoundly.  "I wish,
Ma'mselle Valerie, to arrange for an especially designed ob-
ject. The workmanship of your manufacturer is superb. Can
it be  arranged to have  something especially made for  me?"
"My aunt will tell you," said Valerie politely. But her
eyes went back to Harrison. "My uncle attends to buying
the stock for the shop, M'sieur Ybarra, but my aunt really
directs the business. You will have to consult her."
Her manner was strictly commercial, except when she
looked at Harrison. Then she seemed glad to be alive. He
knew the exquisite anguish of a young man who wants to be
all-important to a girl, when he cannot believe that she is
just as anxious to be all-important to him.
"Then," said Pepe, "I will look around the shop, if I may.
These are very skillful reproductions."
"But they aren't reproductions," said Valerie. "They are
all originals. No two are exactly alike. They  are  all  made
by hand by, as you said, very skilled craftsmen."
"But where?" demanded Pepe. "Where are they made?"
Valerie shrugged.
"My uncle, M. Dubois, keeps that information to himself.
He goes away, and he comes back with the articles the shop
deals in. I do not know where he goes. My aunt has never
mentioned it. It was M. Can-oil who determined that the
business should call itself a business of import and export
with the year 1804. My aunt conceded that it gave the shop
individuality."
Pepe said, "Hm." He began to prowl about. He examined a
shelf of brocades and fingered them with a knowledgeable
air.  Presently  he  was  looking  at  the  books  Harrison  had
mentioned. There were not more than a dozen of them. He
fingered the fly-leaves and muttered to himself. He looked
at the guns. He tested the balance of a sporting weapon. It
was a flint-lock, but it balanced as perfectly as the most
modern of sporting rifles. Presently he was reading a Moni-
teur. The paper was fresh, like the paper of the books. He
became absorbed.
Harrison found his tongue. It is, of course, characteristic
of all people in highly emotional states that they want to
talk about themselves. Harrison and Valerie had material for
just such talk. They had shared memories of a reasonably
happy childhood, but they did not confine themselves to that
topic.  Harrison listened  while  Valerie  explained  that  the
death of her parents had sent her to boarding-school, and
when that was ended there was only her aunt left to super-
vise her. Her aunt was then furiously occupied in directing
the affairs of her brother, M. Dubois, but very suddenly there
was a romance. Her aunt married, and there was a menage
d quatre, with Madame Carroll firmly directing the affairs of
her husband and her brother as well as Valerie. And things
did not go too well. But then, abruptly, the import-export
business with the year 1804 began. The shop was opened
and was immediately prosperous, but Madame Carroll ruled
sternly that there must be the strictest of economy until it
was thoroughly established and of course Valerie must help.
"M'mselle," said Pepe in a curiously muffled voice, " I take
it that this issue of the Moniteur."
"But of course, M'sieur Ybarra," said Valerie. "All of
them are for sale. At one hundred francs the copy. You will
find there the months of March and April, 1804."
"This one I buy!" said Pepe. "Of April second."
"They run, I think," said Valerie helpfully, "to the twenty-
fifth. But when my uncle returns there will be later ones."
Pepe made an inarticulate sound.
"My great-great-grandfather Ybarra," he said after a mo-
ment, "visited Paris during Napoleon's time. He fought a
duel with the Compte de Froude, and had his ear sliced. The
account of the affair is here! I did not know the details,
before."
"Indeed?" said Valerie politely. "That is doubtless inter-
esting!"
She turned back to Harrison. She asked questions about
what he had done with himself and what had happened to
him in the past dozen years. He told her. He asked about
Madame Carroll. He recalled her without affection. She'd
been an acid personality, even then, with no patience with
children. But since she was now Valerie's whole familyhe
did not think of her brotherit would be well to be informed.
Valerie explained with faint amusement that a small in-
heritance had fallen to her aunt, a tiny cottage in the town
of St. Jean-sur-Seine, and that her aunt had gone there to
make sure that she was not cheated of a single franc or
centime. She left her brother in Paris. Then something hap-
pened. Un ArnMcain,  said Valerie, had been taken ill
in the town. There was no hospital. There was no one to tend
him. Since her aunt had to stay in St. Jean-sur-Seine anyhow,
she undertook to care for the sick man for a reasonable fee.
It would be so much clear profit. Eventually she came back
to Paris, married to him. He was a M. Carroll, and Valeric
liked him very much. He was most intelligent. In fact, in
les Etats-Unis he had been a professor in a university. But
now he had no post. He possessed a small income, to be
sure, but he would not attempt to secure a position in a
university or even a lyc6e. Still, he was a very pleasant man.
Valerie regretted that he remained at St. Jean-sur-Seine while
Madame Carroll operated the shop in Paris.
Harrison came out of the absorption with which he'd lis-
tened.
"Wait!" he said uneasily. "This M. Carroll! He would not
be called Henry? He would not be a professor of method-
ology? The university would not have been Brevard?"
But it was. He was ex-Professor Henry Carroll, formerly
of Brevard University, who had given courses in methods
of research, including statistical analysis, when Harrison and
Pepe were undergraduates. He was married to Madame
Carroll, who was Valerie's aunt, who was the sister of the
M. Dubois who attended to purchases of stock for Carroll,
Dubois et Cie, importers and exporters to the year 1804.
Harrison found the news  startling.  When Pepe dis-
turbedly said that he would come back later about the
thing he wanted made, Harrison hastily made arrangements
with Valerie for the meeting that for today must be deferred.
He went out of the shop with Pepe.
"This," said Pepe in an irritated tone, "this has me stand-
ing on my head! I have read the account of my great-great-
grandfather's duel, and you are quite right. I have seen
nothing that could not be explained away if you had not
found those insane particulars in the Bibliotheque Nationale!
But I no longer believe those explanations. I displease my-
self! I cannot tell you why, but I no longer disbelieve in any-
thing, or else I believe in everything! I am not sure which!"
Harrison said:
"The Carroll of Carroll, Dubois and Company is Professor
Henry Carroll, late of Brevard. We took a course in statisti-
cal analysis under him, as you recalled yesterday."
Pepe stared. Then he said slowly:
"He was thrown out of his job, as I remember. There was
some scandal which would not have been scandal had it hap-
pened to us, but was a very grave matter for a professor of
statistical analysis and allied subjects."
"He's at St. Jean-sur-Seine," said Harrison, "wherever that
may be!"
"He was a good guy," said Pepe. "He didn't flunk anybody
without good reason."
"A very good guy," agreed Harrison. "What made you
change your mind about the stuff in the shop?"
"I did not say, butyou are right. I have changed my
mind. I cannot tell you why. Cumulative evidence that not
everything that is insane is necessarily untrue. More than
that, I feel that action of some sort is necessary. We have
credible proof of the starkly incredible. What do we do?"
Harrison frowned. He was at least as much upset as Pepe.
But besides, there was Valeric. Unless the shop could be ex-
plained completely, past all suspicion that it existed upon the
impossible, Harrison would be uneasy for himself but desper-
ately uneasy for Valerie. He would be wondering in panicky
fashion if hisand Valerie'shaving been born might not
be rescinded.
"I think," he said uncomfortably, "that we'd better go to
see Carroll. It seems to follow. We found each other, by ac-
cident, which led to my finding Valerie, by accident, and
brought it about, by accident, that she told me where he was.
It seems to make a sort of pattern. I think we ought to follow
it along."
"I didn't know you were superstitious," observed Pepe.
"Anyhow," said Harrison without conviction, "as former
students of his, it would be only natural for us to pay him a
visit. Pay our respects, so to speak."
"Oh, yes!" said Pepe ironically. "Oh, definitely! I spend
much of my time looking up professors who used to try to
educate me, to thank them for their efforts and display
their lack of success. But in this case I agree. Absolutely!"
"Let's get a cab," said Harrison. 'The American Express
can tell us how to get there."
They walked until a raffish Parisian taxicab hove into
sight. They climbed into it, with dignity. It took off at that
hair-raising speed all Parisian taxicabs affect.
On the way, Harrison said reflectively, "Do you know,
Pepe, this is a silly sort of thing for us to do! Carroll will
probably think us crazy!"
"If he will only convince me of it," said Pepe, "I will be
grateful to him forever!"
He sank back in his seat. The taxicab hurtled onward.
Somewhere very high overhead, a jet-plane dove and circled
and dove again. Somewhere on the high seas, the multi-
nation crew of a NATO rocket-carrying surface ship went
through a launching-driU, theoretically getting away all their
missiles at imaginary targets at intervals of twenty-two sec-
onds each. There were atomic submarines under the arctic
ice-pack. There were underground silos ready to fire trans-
continental rockets if or when they received properly au-
thenticated orders to do so. It was officially admitted that
enough atomic warheads existed to make, if detonated, the
very atmosphere of the earth lethal to all animal and vege-
table life.
In a universe designed for human beings to live in, there
would have to be safety-devices. People being as they are,
it would be necessary.  Harrison and Pepe  found out  where
St. Jean-sur-Seine  happened  to be  and  promptly  arranged
to be transported there. They did not feel any high sense of
mission, or that they acted with particular wisdom or to
great effect. Perhaps there was no reason for any such sen-
sations. Perhaps their journey was just another thing that
happened.
A decision on whether or not the happenings that gave
them so much concern amounted to a safety-device, of course,
would depend on whether one considers that the universe
makes sense, or that it does not.
The town of St. Jean-sur-Seme was remarkably like
very many other small municipalities over the length and
breadth of the French republic. Whenas rarely happened
tourists stumbled upon it, they found it both unspoiled and
unattractive. Some ate one meal at the principal cafe. Very,
very few returned for a second. It had once had a foundry
which had cast some guns for Napoleon's army. The guns were
unsatisfactory, and the foundry closed down. For a time there
had been a traffic in truffles, found by misguided pigs and
subdued trained dogs for the benefit of men. But truf-
fles, whose mode of propagation has never been satisfactorily
settled, did not propagate with much energy near St. Jean-sur-
Seine. That traffic died out. In the  1880's there was an
epidemic of measles in which the entire civic body, including
the mayor and the whole municipal  administration,  was
simultaneously incapacitated. There had been a murder in the
town in the early 1900's. There was no other history to
impress a visitor.
Harrison and Pepe Ybarra arrived on an asthmatic bus
in mid-afternoon. It took an inordinate time to locate M. ie
Professeur Carroll. Eventually they found someone who
made the identification of M. ie Professeur with the pleas-
antly regarded Americain Carroll. "// frequente ie chien et
ie chat," explained  the  citizen  who finally  realized  whom
they sought. "He talks to everyone." And therefore he had
not been thought of  a professor.
He escorted them to point out, helpfully, a not particularly
trim cottage built upon the site of some former industrial
complex. It could only have been the cannon foundry of
Napoleonic times. By that time the hour was not far from
sunset. There was a bed of flowers outside the cottage, badly
in need of attention. There was a section of antique stone
wall with the remnants of window-openings to be detected.
There were piles of stone, once painstakingly separated from
the walls whose upper courses they had formed. Now they
were moss-grown and grass-penetrated while they waited for
purchasers to cart them away for other structures. No pur-
chaser had appeared. Perhaps no new houses had been
built.
Pepe said;
"Dios mio! He lives here?"
"I think," admitted Harrison, "that we're making fools of
ourselves."
"Nothing," said Pepe, "would give me greater pleasure than
to find proof of exactly that statement! Let's hope!"
He advanced to the door of the cottage. He knocked. There
was a rustling inside. He knocked again. Dead silence. He
knocked a third time.
There were footsteps. They seemed reluctant. The door
opened a crack. An eye peered out. That was all. Then a
voice said irritably, within:
"Bien! Q'est?"
Pepe turned astonished eyes to Harrison. There are voices
one does not forget and which one recognizes even when they
are speaking in French and one has heard them speaking
only Mid-Western English with the words "Mary," "marry"
and "merry" not to be told from one another. Harrison nod-
ded. He swallowed.
The single eye continued to regard the two of them around
the barely-cracked door. The familiar voice said impatiently:
"Q'n est?"
The possessor of the eye did not answer. Harrison raised
his voice, in English:
"Professor Carroll, my name is Harrison and I have Pepe
Ybarra with me. We took statistical analysis under you at
Brevard. Remember?"
Silence for a moment. Then the familiar voice said:
"Now, what the hell?" It paused. "Wait a minute!"
There were scufflings. A woman's voice. Carroll's voice
said in an undertone something like,  "II n'parle." There
was a grunting, and footsteps moved heavily away. Less heavy
footsteps went with them. The eye at the cracked door re-
moved itself, but the door remained stationary, as if some
one had his foot firmly against it to prevent its being opened
by force. Carroll's voice said something indistinguishable
again in Frenchand then there were sounds as if someone
had been impatiently brushed out of the way. Then the door
opened. Carroll stared unbelievingly at Harrison and at Pepe
on his doorstep.
He was tall and broad as Harrison remembered him, but he
was clothed like a Frenchman, which is to say as no pro-
fessor of methodology and statistical analysis would ordi-
narily be clothed. He wore corduroy trousers, and his shirt
looked as if his wife had made it. He wore French shoes.
He looked from one to the other, and shook his head in
astonishment.
"It is Harrison!" he said profoundly. "And Ybarra! Who'd
have believed it? What in hell are you doing in France?
Particularly, what the hell are you doing in St. Jean-sur-
Seine? And what are you doing on my door-step? Come in I"
He stepped aside. Harrison entered with Pepe close behind
him. The room contained furniture of the sort an inhabitant
of St. Jean-sur-Seine would consider tasteful. It was atrocious.
It contained a short, plump Frenchman in a state of ap-
parently desperate agitation. He was attired like a minor
and not-too-prosperous bourgeois of the year approximately
1800. His shoes were clumsy. His stockings were of coarse
worsted. The cloth of his major garments was homespun.
He seemed to be entirely unconscious of any oddity in his
apparel, and his costume had the look of having been
worn as a matter of course. It did not look like fancy-dress.
And he looked like a man in acute distress. As Harrison and
Pepe entered, he wrung his hands. A door to another room
closed decisively.
Carroll ignored the short man for a moment. He shook
hands with his two visitors.
"This is a surprise!" he said in a tone compounded of
curiosity and vexation. "I didn't think anybody knew where
I was, or would give a damn if he did. How on earth did you
happen to find me? And when you found out, why on
earth . . . No. I won't ask why you bothered. You'll tell
me."
Then he said abruptly, "This is my brother-in-law, M.
Dubois." In French he said briskly, "These gentlemen were
students of mine, some years ago. They have come to pay
their respects."
The plump Frenchman in the astonishing costume seemed a
trifle, a small trifle, relieved, without being wholly reassured.
He said uncomfortably, "Enchante, messieurs."
"Have a chair," said Carroll, with the same briskness. He
continued to ignore the plump man's costume. "Tell me what
you've been doing, and that sort of thing. I take it you
graduated, and you're doing Europe, and somehowbut
Heaven knows how!you heard of me pining away in ob-
scurity and disgrace, and you've called on me for some
irrational reason."
Pepe sat down, rather gingerly. He eyed the man in the
antique-style garments. Harrison said awkwardly:
"I'm afraid you'll think I'm crazy, sir."
"Not at all! Not at all!" said Carroll. "Why should I?"
"Because," said Harrison, "I have to ask youand I
can't justify askingif you're acquainted with athat is
do you know . . ." He stopped. Then he said abruptly:
"There's a man named de Bassompierre. Have you ever heard
of him?"
"No," said Carroll briskly. "I haven't. Why?"
Harrison sweated. The plump Frenchman said:
"Pardonnez-moi, messieurs, mais . . ."
Carroll nodded to him and he went out, with something
of the air of a man escaping agitation in one place to go and
be more agitated somewhere else.
"This de Bassompierre," said Harrison painfully, "wrote
to Cuvier and explained the Mendelian laws of heredity to
him. In detail."
"He probably meant well," said Carroll charitably. "What
of it?"
"He also told Ampere about alternating currents," said
Harrison, "and Lagrange about statistical analysis, and Cham-
pollion about hieroglyphics. And be wrote to the Academy
of Sciences about nuclear physics."
"If they wanted the information and didn't have it," said
Carroll pleasantly, "I don't see why he shouldn't give it to
them." Then he stopped short. He stared. Then he said very
carefully: "Did you say Cuvier, and then Ampere, and then
Lagrange?"
"And Champollion," said Pepe wrily, "about hieroglyph-
ics."
Carroll stared hard at Harrison, and then at Pepe, and
then back again. He pursed his lips. Then he said with ex-
treme care, "Would you mind telling me when this hap-
pened?"
"He wrote to Cuvier about the Mendelian laws," said
Harrison, "in 1804. To Ampere, in 1807. To Laplace, whom
I didn't mention before, in 1808. To the Academy of Sci-
ences, in 1812."
Carroll remained conspicuously still for a long moment.
Then he spoke more carefully still:
"And he told them, you say . . ."
Harrison repeated what he'd told Pepe the day before.
The notes and correspondence of certain much-esteemed
learned men, in the custody of the Bibliotheque Nationale,
contained such-and-such items. One M. de Bassompierre
had written to those learned men and had given them exact
information which did not exist when he gave it. Harrison
explained in detail, feeling the frustrated confusion of one
who knows he is talking pure lunacy which happens to be
fact.
But Carroll listened with intense and concentrated atten-
tion.  When  Harrison  finished  he  said,  distastefully,  one
abrasive phrase in pure Middle-Western English. It indicated
that he was less than happy about what he'd just heard.
Then he said cagily:
"But why do you bring this news to me?"
Harrison stammered. Pepe spoke. He explained apologeti-
cally that the shop of Carroll, Dubois et Cie had aroused
his interest. He'd taken Harrison there. He'd met Ma'mselle
Valerie...
"Oh yes," said Carroll. "Nice girl. Pretty, too!"
Ma'mselle Valerie had known Harrison when they both
were children. Telling him the news of her family, she'd
mentioned Carroll, her uncle by marriage. Then Harrison
spoke awkwardly:
"And I'd started my research because of something you'd
said in class, sir. You said that the state of the cosmos at any
given instant was merely the probability which under the
circumstances had a value of one. And of course that im-
plied all sorts of other probabilities which had cancelled
each other out, so that a close examination of history ought
to show some anomalies, things which once were fact, but
whose factuality had been cancelled."
"I said that?" demanded Carroll.
"It follows from the first statement," explained Harrison.
"It was interesting. So when I got a chance to go after a
Ph.D. I started to do research on a well-documented period
of history. I picked the Napoleonic era and started to look
for events which at the time had really happened, but later
on turned out not to have happened at all."
Carroll shook his head, frowning.
"I shouldn't have said it," he said irritably. "It wasn't good
sense. It wasn't even so, though I thought it was. A fact is a
fact!  But  there  are  some  damned  queer  ones!  Go  on!"
Harrison explained his painstaking search through the
personal papers of historical characters. He repeated that
somebody named de Bassompierre had passed on facts that
nobody could possibly have known at the time.
"Wait a minute!" said Carroll darkly. "I wonder . . ."
He strode out of the room. He practically filled the doorway
as he passed through it. A moment later his voice boomed
in another part of the cottage. He sounded angry. A woman's
voice joined his. There was a first-rate squabble. It ended
with Carroll shouting. A door slammed, and he came back.
The woman's voice continued, shrill and muffled.
"It wasn't my brother-in-law," said Carroll irritably. "He
swears he didn't peddle such information. He wouldn't have
the brains to do it anyhow. And God knows my wife
wouldn't think of it! This is the devil of a mess!"
Harrison suddenly felt numb. He'd been clinging desper-
ately to the hope that his discoveries were deceptions. He'd
been lured to the shop by that hope, and then to St. Jean-sur-
Seine and to this present place and moment. Can-oil's history
had let him hope that it would all turn out to be eccentricity,
or mild lunacy, or something equally reassuring. But Carroll
took him seriously! Carroll did not think him insane! In-
stead, he accepted the incredible statements without question
and had moved to find out if the plump M. Dubois in the
antique costume was responsible for the facts of which Har-
rison had told him.
"I1" said Harrison. Then he was unhappily silent.
"It's the devil!" said  Carroll, scowling.  "Using the  thing
was against my better judgement to begin with! I was an ass
to. I was an ass from the beginning! But how the devil . . ."
Pepe stirred. It seemed to Harrison that Pepe was paler
than ordinary.
"Professor, sir," asked Pepe unsteadily, "do you mean
that these things we've been trying not to believe areare
not our delusions? It was very comforting to believe that I
was slightly cracked. You see, this de Bassompierre . . ."
"Delusions?" said Carroll irritably. "Unfortunately, no!
You aren't cracked that I can see. But who the devil has
committed the insanity that I can see? Who else listened to
my lectures when I thought I was only casting pearls, and
picked one up? You did," he nodded at Harrison, "and some-
body else must have done the same. I may have played hell
with the state of things in general!"
There were footsteps. The door to the inner room opened
violently. A short, stout Frenchwoman with a red face en-
tered with the stride of destiny. Her eyes were furious. Her
speech, which began instantly, was a frenzied denunciation
of Carroll, uttered with such speed and vehemence that
individual words could not be distinguished. She waved her
plump arms, glaring at him. She shook her fist in his face.
She stamped her feet. Her denunciation reached a crescendo.
"Les flies," said Carroll sternly. "Les flies"
She seemed to strangle. She subsided fiercely. She stood
formidably still, her arms folded defiantly, her face crimson,
her eyes snapping, breathing fast and furiously.
"The police," repeated Carroll firmly, switching to French
to include her with Harrison and Pepe in the conversation,
"would be interested to hear what you have just said of me.
But these are my friends, former students from les Etats
Unis. It appears that our enterprise has come to their
attention, doubtless through some blunder M. Dubois has
made. It is an emergency of importance. But perhaps it may
aid in the solution of our previous trouble." To Harrison and
Pepe he said, "I present you to my wife, Madame Carroll."
Harrison tried to bow politely. Pepe was more successful.
"And now," said Carroll firmly, "you will join your brother
in watching over our other problem!"
He turned her around and guided her irresistibly back
to the door. She squirmed. She resisted. He thrust her
bodily into the other room and pulled the door shut. She
made yelping outcries of fury. She went away, scolding
shrilly. There was the apologetic murmur of the plump man's
voice.
"I've made several mistakes in my life," said Carroll,
"and I thought she was the worst. I seem to have been delirious
when I married her. But this news you bring is really the very
devil! We'll have to do something about it!"
He sat down, scowling. Pepe asked:
"Are we to understand, sir, that someone, somewhere,
has made what one might call a time machine and is using
it?"
"Of course not!" snapped Carroll. "A time machine is out
of the question! Butdammit, I must have said something that
was more intelligent than I realized, and somebody must
have used it to upset a sorry scheme of things and now is
working busily to make it sorrier! But who the devil is it, and
how did he get back there?"
"Where?" asked Pope.
"To 1804!" snapped Carroll. He waved his bands. "Getting
there is possible enough. We supply our shop with goods by
doing it! But who else? And why the same period? Dam-
mit, that's too much of a coincidence!" He stopped. "Oh. You
think of a time machine. It's quite unnecessary. You don't
have to build an elevator to get to the second floor of a
building. You simply have to find the stairs. Then you walk
up. That's all. But this"
He swept his hand through bis hair, leaving it standing on
end. It had been a notable habit of his, at Brevard.
"There are so damned few of them!" he said in exaspera-
tion. "Damned few! You don't think I live in a hole like this
because I like it, do you? I'd say the odds were ten to the
ninth against anybody finding a second possibility to the
same period! There are more than that, no doubt, but find
them! There's the rub!"
Harrison drew a deep breath. Somehow the garments worn
by the plump man had helped him to believe that Carroll,
who had ignored them, was eccentric rather than an authority
about anything. But . ..
"Professor," he said painfully. "I started out not believing
this stuff. Then I did. Then I roped Pepe into the business, and
I managed to stop, but he came to believe it and again I
thought it was likely. You seem to understand it. I'm messed
up for the third or fourth time. Will you settle it so I'll know
what to believe?"
Carroll shrugged. He stood up.
"Come along."
He opened the door through which Madame Carroll had
been thrust some minutes before. Harrison followed, and Pepe
came after.
The next room was a dining room. Windows on one
side let in a certain amount of dusky twilight. The sun had
set upon St. Jean-sur-Seine since their arrival at the cottage,
but through the windows one could see grass and the
stones awaiting a purchaser, and part of the still-standing
massive wall of something built very long before. In the
wall opposite those windows there were no glazed openings,
but there was a door, a new door, crudely made of planks
and covering an unseen opening beyond it. It was self-evi-
dent that on that side the wall of the dining room was
practically underground. Stained plaster proved it.
"There was a foundry here once," said Carroll, continuing
to frown at his own thoughts. "They were casting cannon for
Napoleon's army. But with the inspired incompetence of
which some people are capable, they managed to cast them
with huge flaws so most of them blew up when proof-fired.
It looked like intended treason to the Empire, so they shut
down in a hurry. They left one gun in the mould in which
it had been cast."
He opened the homemade inside door. Earth did cover
that side-wall of the cottage. But there was a burrow beyond
the door. It was a man-height high and roughly as wide as the
doorway itself. There were some stones showing through
the dug-away dirt. In the  doorframe itself there was a
throw-switch with wires leading somewhere. It was turned
on. At one side of the burrow a mass of rusty iron pro-
truded. It could be identified as a six-pounder cannon, muzzle
up, without the cut-off end which was the next step in can-
non-founding after casting. It had been abandoned, undis-
turbed, when the foundry closed down.
"That's it," said Carroll. "It hasn't been disturbed since
casting was abandoned here. In fact, it hasn't been touched
since the melted metal was poured into the mould. I'm
going through here. Follow me closely. You'll be sick at your
stomach for a moment."
He moved confidently ahead. He disappeared. Harrison
biinked and stepped after him. He felt an instant of nausea
so intense as almost to be a cramp and a sudden violent
dizziness which was peculiarly like the almost imperceptible
giddiness that had accompanied talking with Pepe about
Maximilian of Mexico. Then there was light before him.
Carroll reappeared, waiting for him. Pepe came blundering
behind.
They were standing under the roof of a completely intact
stone building, which was obviously no longer in use. It had
been a foundry. There were brick furnaces and a heap of
charcoal plus enormous bellows to be operated by hand.
Such equipment indicated that the system of iron-founding
practised here dated from before modern processes were de-
vised. Vividly bright sunshine came through the cracks of
plank shutters that closed all high-up windows. There was
no cottage. None. Instead, the great roofed enclosure went
undisturbed to where there had been a ruined, largely torn-
down wall. But now the wall was not torn down. It was
erect and solid.
Harrison's eyes fixed themselves, fascinated, on the nearly
vertical slivers of noonday sunshine. Out of the windows of
the room he'd just left, the time was sunset.
Pepe said incredulously:
"This isthis is . . . When is it?"
The form of the question told of his complete, stunned
acceptance of everything that common sense and experience
still denied.
"This will be June tenth," said Carroll matter-of-factly,
"and the year is eighteen-four. It's," he glanced at his watch,
"eleven-forty A.M. Clock-time is different as well as calendar
time at the two ends of the . . ." He shrugged. "I spoke of a
stairway. It's more nearly a tunnel. A time-tunnel, which is
a hundred sixty-odd years and some weeks, days and hours
from one end to the other. We came through. We will
now go back. I'm going to ask you to help me solve our cur-
rent emergency, and then we'll set to work on the really
big problem you've brought."
He motioned for Harrison to go before him. Harrison
looked helpless. Carroll pointed to a small plank upon the
ground. It looked like a threshold with no wall or door
attached. Numbly, Harrison stepped over it and felt an in-
tense digestive disturbance and a monumental giddiness. But
he took one step more and he was in the burrowthe tun-
nelwith earth all around him and the home-made door-
way before him. He stepped out into the cottage dining
room. His forehead felt wet. He mopped it as Pepe came
stumbling back, with Carroll matter-of-factly in his rear.
"I'm not going to ask you to not to tell anybody what you
just saw," said Carroll casually. "You'd be an idiot if you
did. But you've brought me a hell of a problem and I'd be
foolish to try to be secretive with you. Come along!"
He opened another door, and they were in the kitchen of
the cottage. The cooking arrangements were of that extreme
primitiveness which an over-thrifty householder considers
economy. There was a stair which evidently led to sleeping
quarters overhead. There was a bench against one wall.
The short, plump M. Dubois sat on that bench in his un-
believable garments. He held a remarkably large carving
knife uncertainly in his hand. He looked woebegone. Be-
side him sat his sister, Madame Carroll, with a hatchet held
firmly in her grip.
And, lying on the floor with his hands and feet securely
bound with cords, there was a third individual. He wore
baggy corduroy trousers and a blue sash and a red-checked
shirt.  His  expression  alternated  between  extreme  appre-
hension and peevish resentment. He looked at Harrison and
Pepe with wide and at first scared eyes. But Harrison
flinched when Madame Carroll burst into shrill and infuriated
complaints, uttered with such rapidity that only one accus-
tomed to her speed could have understood her.
"M. Harrison and M. Ybarra," said Carroll calmly, "are
now involved with us. Not financially. They claim no share in
the enterprise. Their interest is scientific only." To Harrison
and Pepe he added: "Perhaps I should also introduce the
gentleman yonder. He is a burglar. His name is Albert. He
is our present problem."
Madame Carroll turned to them. Seething, she informed
them that her husband was a fool of the most extreme im-
becility.  But for her he would  be  robbed, he would  be
destroyed, he would be murdered by such criminals as they
observed had already made the attempt!
The bound man on the floor protested aggrievedly that he
had not attempted murder. He had only intended a small,
professional robbery. He was a burglar, not a murderer!
They had only to ask the police, and they would certify
that in all his career as a burglar he had never injured
anybody but one flic who was standing eagerly underneath a
window to trap him, when in his haste to escape he'd
jumped out of the window and on him.
Madame Carroll silenced him with a wave of her hatchet.
She was crimson with indignation, with desperation, per-
haps with despair.
"What are we to do with him?" she demanded dramati-
cally.  "If we give him to the police it will become public!
Our business will be revealed! We will have competitors
thronging to offer higher prices than we can pay, and
offering to sell for lower prices than we can afford! We
shall be ruined, because of this scoundrel, this murderer!"
The bound man protested. They had held him captive for
more than twelve hours, debating. It was illegal! Harrison
said with a sort of stunned interest:
"The problem is that this Albert is a burglar?"
Carroll said vexedly that he'd been having a few glasses
of wine in the town's least offensive bistro. This man, Albert,
doubtless saw him there and considered it an opportunity.
When Carroll went home earlier than usual, he found Albert
ransacking his possessions. Albert struggled desperately when
Carroll seized him, but there he was. Can-oil said ruefully,
"And there he was, too, when Dubois came out of the time-
tunnel. Which was unfortunate."
"Unfortunate?" cried Madame Carroll, in a passion. "It
was a crime! You imbecilel This criminal . . ."
"Just a moment," said Pepe. "The gentleman is a burglar.
He practises his profession privately, without witnesses. Per-
haps he can understand that you prefer your business to be
considered confidential, too."
The prisoner said shrewdly:
"Counterfeiting, eh? We can make a deal."
"For the sake of privacy," Pepe added, more nearly in his
normal manner, "he can see that you might find it necessary
to report to the police that M. Carroll was forced to injure
him fatally in order to subdue him."
"That is not necessary!" objected Albert sharply. "It is
not necessary at all! If I were a flic, perhaps! But since we
are of similar professions . . ."
"The matter could be solved," said Pepe with a grand air,
"by the use of professional courtesy and a gentleman's
agreement."
"C'est wail" said Albert. "Naturally! I will pledge my
honor not to speak of anything that has occurred here! That
will settle everything!"
Carroll grunted. "Harrison, any ideas?"
Harrison moistened his lips. Somehow he was still thinking
of those vertical rays of sunlight beyond the tunnel in the
other room, whereas he could look out of a window here
and see the deep-red glow of the sky above a just-de-
scended sun. That bright sunshine bothered him horribly.
It was appalling; upsetting!
"I think," he said awkwardly, "that I'd let him see what
you just showed Pepe and me. I don't think it's likely that
he'd tell about that!"
Carroll considered. Then he nodded. He picked up the
bound man and walked effortlessly into the other room.
Harrison heard the clatter of the opening door. There was
silence.
Then Madame Carroll said bitterly, "It is unfortunate
that one cannot . . ."
The hatchet in her hand moved suggestively. M. Dubois
shivered. There was silence. A long silence. Then sounds in
the next room again. The improvised door creaked and
shut, and a moment later Carroll brought back the burglar.
He laid him matter-of-factly on the floor. Albert's face was
ashen. His eyes rolled. Carroll regarded him meditatively,
and then took a knife out of his pocket and opened it. He cut
the cords which bound the prisoner.
"I think," he said, "that he is impressed."
"M-mon Dieu!" said the prisoner hoarsely, "M-mon Dieu!"
Harrison saw Carroll bending to lift the small, scared
Albert to his feet. He helped. The little man's teeth chattered.
Carroll nodded.
"Let him out, Harrison. Good idea! He won't talk!"
Harrison led the burglar through the dining room and the
room which opened toward the street. The small criminal
wavered and shook upon his feet. His teeth continued to
chatter. Harrison said,  frowning,  "You'll  attract attention
if you stumble and shake like this! Have you any money?"
Albert shook his head. Harrison handed him half a dozen
hundred-franc notes.
"Here," he said distastefully. "You need a drink. Several
of them. If I were you, I think I'd have about as many as I
could find room for. I wouldn't mind joining you! But anyhow
I advise you to keep your mouth shut!"
"Mais oui," gasped the former prisoner. "Mon Dieu, ouil"
Harrison opened the door for him. He watched as the little
man went unsteadily out to the street and then turned to
the left. There was a wine shop not more than a hundred
yards away. The former prisoner headed for it. He walked
fast.  With  purpose.  Harrison  watched  him  out  of  sight.
He went back to the kitchen. Carroll was saying briskly,
"Get out of those clothes, Georges, and into something be-
fitting a modern business man. Then we'll divide up the stock
you brought back and Harrison and Ybarra and you will take
it to Paris on the next bus out of town. If our friend Albert
should be indiscreet, I'll be here alone and of course can
deny everything. Naturally, I'll be believed."
He turned to Harrison.
"That's precaution. But you've brought a problem that's
much more important than our own affairs! What you've told
me is that most alarming news anybody could imagine! I
don't think," he added, "that my brother-in-law can be re-
sponsible for what you report. He could take a modern
scientific book back in time, but he wouldn't know where to
place it.  Anyhow, there is normally a sort of dynamic
stability in the grand outline of events.  But this de Bas-
sompierre seems to be tapping at history like a stone-cutter
tapping at a rock. Enough tappings, and the thing will
crack! We've got to stop him! So we'll get this stock for the
shop to Paris and set about handling this de Bassompierre!"
Perhaps an hour later, Hairison and Pepe passed the wine
shop a hundred yards from Carroll's cottage. A familiar figure
drooped over a table inside. It was Albert the burglar. He
was comatose. He had no troubles. Under the circumstances,
he was probably wise.
But Pepe shifted his heavy parcel and said detachedly:
"I observe one  sane and admirable  result of  our re-
searches so far. So far as you are concerned, anyhow."
"What?" asked Harrison.
"You have found this Valeric," said Pepe. "She is charming.
She remembers you with affection. True, her aunt is as un-
pleasant a character as one could wish to find, but now she
will not object to your friendship. She will not dare. You
know too much!"
Harrison wasn't altogether pleased with Pepe's viewpoint,
but that was the way Pepe's mind worked. He changed the
subject as he changed his own burden from his right hand
to bis left.
"Carroll's right," be said uneasily. "Something's got to
be done about this de Bassompierre trying to change all of
past history! Apparently there's no great damage done yet,
but if he keeps on passing out information a hundred-odd
years before its proper time. . . ."
"Yes," agreed Pepe. "From one point of view he should
be strangled. Yet that would be unfortunate, since history
says he was not."
He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Harrison said
gloomily, "I think Carroll will use the time-tunnel to try to
fix things up. If one can import snuffboxes from a former
time, one can certainly argue with somebody in the past!
He needs to be persuaded not to mess up all the present we
know and the future we guess at."
"The present," said Pepe, "is not intolerable, but the
future is less than satisfactory. I regret that I have to remain
only a bystander. I mentioned that my great-great-grand-
father, Ignacio Ybarra, was in Paris in 1804. Later, after the
independence of the colony of Mexico, be was Ambassador to
France. But if I went with you and Carroll to argue with this
de Bassompierre, it might happen that by some unhappy ac-
cident I might meet and cause the death of my great-great-
grandfather. In such a case, of course, I would not be born
to be the cause of his death. So he would not meet an
untimely fate, and I would be born to cause his death. So I
would not be born. So I would. So I would not. And so on.
I prefer not to try to solve this paradox. I shall remain
unwillingly a bystander."
Harrison said nothing. They trudged on together to where
the antiquated bus to Paris would be found. Presently Har-
rison ceased to think about Pepe, and Carroll, and Albert, and
Madame Carroll, and even about whoever de Bassompierre
might be and all the other things involved in the idea of a
possiblyor certainlyvariable history.
He thought about Valerie. He had a date with her for
tomorrow. He cheered up.
Valerie smiled cheerfully at Harrison and said:
"Shall we sit here?"
He agreed immediately, as he would have agreed to any-
thing else she said. This was Bonmaison, and all about them
there was the atmosphere of picnics and tranquil romance
and all the natural and ordinary affairs which are the only
truly important ones. Low down on the horizon, toward
Taris, there was a white streak of vapor in the sky. It was
unquestionably the contrail of a jet-plane flying so high
that it was invisible. Only the train of moisture condensed
upon flame-formed ions could be seen. The jet was part of that
round-the-world patrol maintained over Parisand London
and New York and nearly all the great cities of the worldin
case some person in authority somewhere should decide to
start a war. But it did not apply to Bonmaison. It was a
symptom of the insanity of human beings in a cosmos
obviously designed for them to live in, but which they in-
dustriously prepare to make unlivable.
But at Bonmaison one did not think of such things. There,
and at many similar places all over the world, people ad-
hered to an almost universal conspiracy to pretend that in-
ternational  organizations  and  agreements  had  made  the
world really safe, and that the alarming situations of which
one reads are actually only arrangements so the newspapers
will have something to print.
Harrison could not fully act according to this conspiracy
today. He'd encountered proof that possibilities existed which
were more horrifying even than atomic war. If history
changed, if past events were disrupted, if some day bygone
events would cease to have occurred and other quite different
events took their place, why, he might not ever have been!
Much worse, even Valeric might not ever have existed!
Valerie had seemed to choose this spot for them to repose
and talk comfortably, but she continued to look about her.
People of no importance go to Bonmaison to sit on the
grass and eat ices and solve such profound questions as to
what degree unparalleled affection justifies recklessness, and
to what degree one should be practical. Usually, the girls are
the practical ones. But they are disappointed if the young
men are not urgently impractical.
A carrousel made alleged music a little distance off. Chil-
dren rode on it, gleefully. There were booths where young
men were fleeced of five and ten-franc pieces as they tried
to demonstrate to their companions their skill at complicated
and rigged games. There were boats on the small meandering
stream, and shirt-sleeved swains rowed clumsily while girls
admired  them.  There  were  shrieks  of laughter when
Polichinelle behaved sadistically for the amusement of in-
nocent childhood. There were other couplesmany of them
who had either already settled themselves comfortably
or still sauntered in quest of exactly the spot the precise
development of their romance dictated.
"Perhaps," said Valerie reflectively, "over there might be
more pleasant."
Again Harrison agreed. Pepe's prediction that Harrison
would be tolerated as an acquaintance of Valerie had come
true. Madame Carroll had smiled frigidly when Valerie pre-
sented him as a friend of her childhood. Now they were to-
gether at Bonmaison, and provided that Valerie returned very
soon after sunset, they were permitted a temporary escape
from Madame Carroll's direction.
Valerie looked contented. Harrison, of course, looked fool-
ish. She sank gracefully to the ground and smiled warmly at
him.
"Now," she pronounced, "now we can talk!"
And Harrison immediately found it impossible to find any-
thing to say. He looked at her, and actually his manner of
looking said many things Valerie. appeared to find satisfac-
tory.
"My aunt," she observed, ignoring his silence, "was very
much pleased with this morning's business."
He managed to ask the obvious question.
"Why," said Valeric, "someone came into the shop and
bought lavishly. Not as one buys for one's hobby or for
curios, but in quantity! And he asked many questions about
where such items were made. My aunt was discreet. He
probed. He pumped. He tried to entrap her into revelations.
She gave him no information."
Pepe had also had an idea of finding out where the shop's
stock-in-trade was manufactured. Now he knew, and so did
Harrison. Neither of them was much happier for the in-
formation. Apparently Valerie did not share it. She laughed
a little.
"Ah, but he tried to find out where he could get such
. goods! He squirmed and sidled and tried innumerable tricks!
"He said he would like to have special items made. My aunt
told him that she would take his order. Then he confessed that
he was actually a dealeras if she had not known!and
offered a price for information about the manufacturer!"
Pepe had intended something of this sort, too. Harrison
listened emotionally to the sound of Valerie's voice.
"In the end," said Valerie pleasurably, "they struck a
bargain. On my aunt's terms! He is well known as an art
dealer in England and in America. It is a splendid bit of
business. She will order such items as he desires. He will pay
extravagantly. My aunt suspects that he will probably age
them artificially and sell them as true antiques. She does not do
that, because she does not wish for trouble with the authori-
ties. But what he does with them is not her affair. Still, she
put heavy prices upon them!"
Harrison mumbled. Valerie continued:
"He bought all the very best items in the shop. More than
my uncle just brought back! It will be necessary for him to
make another trip immediately to get more!"
"Maybe," said Harrison, "it was good humor brought
about by a good business deal that made her agree to let
us come here today."
"Mais non," said Valerie wisely. "It was M. CarroU! Anyone
but my aunt would be fond of him. But he angers her. He is
not practical, and above all things my aunt is practical! Yet
ww she dares to go only so far! He told her that she must
not offend you. He said that you were important to probable
developments in the shop. He said that if you were offended,
he would take measures. Ah, but my aunt was angry! She
brooded all the way back from St. Jean-sur-Seine! She likes to
direct. She does not like to be directed."
Harrison did not want to think, with Valeric, of St. Jean-
sur-Seine and the ghastly possibilities implied by the confir-
mation of all his most implausible suspicions. He wanted to
think only of Valeric. But thinking of Valeric made him think
of disasters that might come to her.
A soldier and a girl went by, and Harrison considered mor-
bidly what could be the result of a mere few boxes of percus-
sion-caps upon the history of Europe and the world, if they
happened to be demonstrated ahead of their normal time.
Napoleon was not receptive to the idea of submarines, to
be sure. The American Fulton had found that out. But he
would grasp instantly the advantage of percussion-cap guns
over the flint-locks his infantry used. Flint-locks, in action,
missed fire three times in ten. Merely changing muskets to
percussion guns would make the increased fire-power of his
armies equivalent to two hundred thousand added soldiers.
Napoleon would not miss a bet like that! There would be
no trouble with manufacture. The technology of the early
nineteenth century was quite up to the making of percussion-
caps once the idea and the proof of its practicality was
known.
Even one box of percussion-caps, put into the proper
hands in 1804, would mean that the invasion of Russia in
1812 would be successful. The Russian armies would not be
defeated, they would be destroyed. There would be no ab-
dication. There would be no Hundred Days. Waterloo would
never be fought. A million Frenchmen would not die before
their reasonable time, and instead would live to become
fathers instead of the left-overs from whom modern French-
men were descended. And of course the probability of exactly
those persons marrying, who had married in the past that
Harrison knew of, and of their having exactly those children
they'd begotten in that same past, and of Valerie sharing
his childhood and the two of them being here at this moment
on the grassy sward of Bonmaisonit would be improbable
past imagining!
Valerie talked, and he listened yeamingly. Presently there
was a movement nearby* and someone grunted in satis-
faction. Harrison looked up. There was Pepe, impeccably
dressed, and beside him there was the much larger figure of
Carroll.
"He was right," said Carroll largely, with a nod of his
head at Pepe. "He said he knew where to find you. I didn't
know where you lived, but he'd mentioned his hotel, so I
hunted him up to locate you." He switched to French. "Ah,
Valeric! I trust to your kindness not to remember having
seen me. There would be a great squabble to no purpose.
My intentions in Paris are most innocenti"
Valerie said tranquilly:
"But of course! Did you know that M. Dubois makes an-
other journey immediately? Someone came to the shop, a
most eminent dealer in art-objects, and most of the shop's
stock departed with him. It is necessary to get more."
Can-oil shrugged.
"No harm in that that I can see. Harrison"
"What?"
"This de Bassompierre, I have to talk to him! That's why
I came to Paris."
Harrison started slightly. De Bassompierre had been born
in 1767 and died in 1858 at the age of ninety-one. But
"I'm ordering clothes and equipment for the purpose," said
Carroll crisply. "But I need someone to go with me. This
whole thing is your baby. I hope you'll go with me. Will
you?"
Harrison swallowed. Then he looked at Valerie. She looked
as if she did not understand. He looked back.
"It is really possible to do anything?"
"Naturally!" said Carroll. "You and Ybarra had an odd
experience, remember? About the history of Mexico? It's proof
of two things, no, three. One is that history can be changed.
The second is that somebody's trying to change it. The third is
that even when it's changed it has a tendency to change back.
There's a sort of elasticity to events. Your theory that
things which at one time are facts can cease to be facts has a
certain amount of cockeyed sense to it. If something hap-
pens, and in consequence a given fact becomes inconsistent
with the rest of the cosmos, it stops being a fact. It vanishes.
History closes over it as water closes over a dropped stone.
There are ripples, but they die away. People sometimes re-
member and even write it in their memoirs, but it isn't true
any longer."
Harrison listened. He looked at Valerie. She looked patient,
as a girl does when talk is about something unrelated to her
own personal interests.
"You were looking for items of that sort," Carroll went
on, "and you found something much more serioussomeone
deliberately setting out to change the course of history. If
he isn't stopped, he'll stress the grand design of things be-
yond its elastic limit and things will stay changed! So some-
thing has to be done!"
Harrison was suddenly anxious about Valerie's opinion of
this talk. If she thought CarroU was out of his mind, she'd
think himHarrisonno less demented. But her expression
remained placidly unconcerned.
"So, I'm going to argue with him," said Carroll. "I've
got to find his tunnel, too, and see that it's collapsed. We can't
have this sort of thing going on! Dubois would be of no
possible use to me in an enterprise like this! I could never
make him see what it was all about. I want you to come
along. The number of people I could askas a gifted under-
statementis strictly limited. Ybarra would be handy, but be
says no. He had a great-great-grandfather"
"In all," said Pepe apologetically, "I had eight great-
great-grandfathers. The one I've mentioned was one Ignacio
Ybarra who spent some months in Paris in 1804. He made.
acquaintances there which later, when he returned as the
Ambassador from newly independent Mexico"
"He doesn't want anything to happen to him," finished
Carroll, "through his great-great-grandson. It's reasonable!
But I want you to go get yourself measured for an outfit
befitting a well-to-do American travelling in Napoleon's time.
I've picked out a tailor. He thinks the outfits are to be taken
to Hollywood for a television show. Do you need money?"
Harrison shook his head.
"I insisted," said Carroll with some humor, "that I must
be able to draw on the bank-account of Carroll, Dubois et
Cie. My wife will burst with fury when she finds out I've
done so! I've ordered books to do research on de Bas-
sompierre, memoirs, and so on. Ybarra is sympathetic enough
to dig out the forms used for laissez-passe and the identity
papers we'll need. Modern methods of forgery should take
care of them. If you'll get yourself measured for clothes, we'll
be all set. Right?"
Harrison nodded, more or less uneasily. Carroll said:
"Valeric, mon cherie, I count upon your friendship not
to mention that I have come to Paris. It is agreed?"
"But of course!" said Valeric. She smiled at him.
Carroll strode away. Pepe followed. Harrison, looking after
them, noticed for the first time that Carroll moved with a
certain unconscious ease, so that he couldn't have passed as
a man of no importance in any period of history.
Then Valeric said anxiously:
"You are to go towhere my uncle Georges goes to buy
the stock for the shop?" she asked uneasily.
"It seems to be necessary," admitted Harrison.
"How long will you be gone?"
Harrison knew an irrational elation. That was the angle
which first occurred to her!
There was no actual reason for him to seize upon such
an item; to find his tongue working freely though his breath-
ing became uncertain. He could have said the same things
at any other time,  and probably more effectively if he'd
practised them beforehand. But he heard his mouth saying
startling and impassioned things in a hoarse and quite in-
adequate manner. He overheard urgent insistences that he
had remembered her from their childhood and had never
been able to think romantically about anybody else, and a
large number of other unconvincing statements which he
believed implicitly as he made them.
Valeric did not seem to be offended. She listened, though,
with every appearance of astonishment. And suddenly he
was struck dumb by the realization that this was very hasty,
and she might not believe any of it. He regarded her miser-
ably.
"I1 hope you don't mind," he protested, panicked.
"Only I1 would have had to say it sooner or later . . ."
Valerie rose from where she sat.
"I do not think we should stay here," she said primly.
She moved away. He followed her miserably, not noticing
that they were not headed toward the carrousel or any of the
other more thickly populated parts of Bonmaison. He stumbled
in her wake.
She paused and looked around her. She did not seem as-
tonished to find that they had arrived where they were not
in sight of anybody else at all. But Harrison was astonished.
He' stared at her. She smiled very faintly.
Incredulously, he reached out his hands. She displayed
no indignation.
Presently they ate ices together and Valerie was composed,
though her eyes shone a little. She said:
"My aunt will be furious! But we will tell M. CarroU and
he will force her to agree."
In his then emotional state, this impressed Harrison as
the most brilliant and intelligent and admirable of all pos-
sible remarks.
When he got back to his hotel, Pepe was waiting for him.
Pepe frowned.
"Look here!" he said indignantly. "I've been thinking about
my great-great-grandfather, who was here in 1804. If any-
thing happens to him"
"Pepe," said Harrison raptly, "I'm going to marry Valeric!
We decided on it today!"
"If Can-oil goes back to 1804," fumed Pepe, "nobody can
tell what will happen! You know the theory about what if a
man kills his grandfather in the past. But it doesn't have to be
him! If anybody went back in time and killed my great-
great-grandfather, I wouldn't be born! And Can-oil's going
back!"
"She knew," said Harrison blissfully, "she knew the min-
ute she saw me again, that I was the one she wanted to
marry! The very minute, Pepe! The instant she recognized
me as her old playmate!"
"So I'm not going to take any chances!" said Pepe
fiercely. "There's de Bassompierre, too! I could blow up the
damned time-tunnel, but de Bassompierre does seem to be
doing some pretty undesirable stuff. So I'm going along! And
I'm going to see that none of my ancestors get killed!"
Harrison beamed.
"That's fine!" be said, not really aware of what Pepe had
said. "We're not going to tell Valerie's aunt just yet. There'd
be fireworks. And anyhow it wouldn't be fair to Valeric to
get married before I've made that trip with Can-oil. It could
be dangerous. I don't want her to be worried!"
Pepe stared at him. Hard. Then he said irritably:
"Dios miof As if this business weren't bad enough without
having only lunatics to carry it out!"
Harrison went to bed in that state of emotional semi-
narcosis which is appropriate to a newly-engaged man. He
was literally unaware that any other important thing had
happened in the world. The newspapers of that afternoon an-
nounced a new international crisis. He didn't notice. It
appeared that the mainland Chinese had exploded their first
atomic bomb.
The significance of the fact was, of course, that the com-
munist Chinese were now added to the nations threatening
the world's precarious peace. There were cabinet meet-
ings all over the world, where heads were shaken and help-
lessness admitted. It had not been expected that the Chinese
would have the bomb so soon. The individuals who seemed to
know most about it guessed that they hadn't developed it
entirety by themselves. There were indefinite surmises that
somebody had defected from the Russians, on the ground
that they were reactionary conservatives in their politics, and
had carried information to Peking which made the bomb
possible. It was even guessed that the defector had origi-
nally defected to Russia from France. There were despairing
speculations where hehis identity was strongly suspected
would defect to next.
To people not newly engaged, the explosion of an atomic
bomb by the communist Chinese seemed a very serious mat-
ter. Certain groups dusted off their "Better Red than Dead"
placards to carry in new demonstrations of reaction to the
news. On the other hand, much of the world grimly prepared
to live up to an exactly opposite opinion.
But Harrison slept soundly. He waked next morning with
en excellent appetite and in the most cheerful of moods. He
tried to think of an excuse to visit the shop of Carroll, Du-
bois et Cie. and was regretfully unable to contrive one. He
went to the tailors and felt remarkably idiotic while they
showed him fabrics and styles and were astonished that a
supposed television actor was not interested in clothes.
Later, though, M. Dubois called upon him.
"M'sieur," said the little man agitatedly, "my sister and I
wish to implore your aid! The most horrible, the most crim-
inal thing has happened! My sister is half-mad with grief!
She is distracted! We implore your assistance!"
Harrison biinked at him.
"What's the matter? What's happened? What can I do?"
"You know of our business and itsunusual nature,"
said Dubois. His voice trembled, and Harrison found him-
self thinking that he must have had a very bad half-hour
with Madame Carroll. "But perhaps you do not know that my
brother-in-law has acknowledged that he plans a journey to
theahthe place where I buy the stock for the shop! You
did not know that? But you will see at once that it is un-
thinkable! It is horrible to contemplate! It would be ruinous!
My sister is distracted!"
Harrison raised his eyebrows.
"I'm sorry that she feels badly," he said as soothingly a
he could, "but after all it's not my business!"
"The arrangements for my journeying," protested Dubois.
"They are most delicate! The business connections I have
madethey should be cherished with the greatest circum-
spection! If the nature of our operations should become
known, either here oror at the other end, the result would
be disaster!"
"More likely disbelief," said Harrison. "Nobody's likely to
credit the truth even if they hear it. They'll never guess it!"
Dubois waved trembling hands.
"I do not argue, m'sieur. I do not dispute. But I plead with
you to help us avoid ruin! M. CarroU must not make this
journey!"
"But it isn't any of my business!" protested Harrison.
"There's nothing I can do about the plans Carroll makes!
I've no influence."
"But you have, m'sieur! You are not being candid! He has
spoken to Madame Carroll about you! He wishes her to treat
you with distinction. He has commanded it! M'sieur, you do
not realize the enormity M. Carroll has already committed,
and who can tell what other enormity he plans?"
Harrison said nothing. Dubois mopped his forehead.
"M'sieur, he has withdrawn from the bank almost a fifth
of the accumulated profits of the business! He has with-
drawn money from the bank! My sister has now removed
the rest and placed it where he cannot lay hands upon it,
but m'sieur, it he will do this" Dubois seemed about to
strangle. "You should see my sister! She is pitiable! I almost
fear for her reason! Mon Dieu, one is frightened by the
violence of her suffering!"
Harrison rephrased the information in his own fashion.
M. Dubois had been led by the nose through all his life by
the tantrums of his sister, until he could imagine no more
terrible an event than another tantrum. It was understandable
that she would not want Carroll to travel where her brother
had stolidly ventured. But it was certain that the worst of all
possible crimes was the removal of money from where Mad-
ame Carroll controlled it, to any place or person where she
did not.
"Still," said Harrison, "I don't see what I can do."
M. Dubois wept. Literally, he wept. Madame Carroll must
have terrified him all the way down to his toes.
"M'sieur, use your influence with him! My sister, in her
despair, authorizes me to promise that it will be to your ad-
vantage. I open myself to you! I fear for my sister's reason
if M. Carroll carries out his insane plan! Therefore. I speak
of Ma'mselle Valerie! It has always been my sister's ardent
desire to place her in a situation of security, with a sub-
stantial fortune so that she can live happily. M. Carroll has
placed that desire in extreme danger! He has taken a fifth of
the profits of the shop! He has, in effect, robbed Ma'mselle
Valerie of a fifth of the fortune she should inherit from
my sister! Do you comprehend my meaning?"
"No," said Harrison.
"Ma'mselle Valeric is the most charming of girls," said
Dubois imploringly. "She is virtuous, she is intelligent, she
is affectionate. She will be my sister's heiress. And my sister
is convinced that with tact and gentle persuasion she could be
induced to consent to a marriage which"
Harrison started.
"Which would have the most favorable of financial pros-
pects," said Dubois desperately. "All that is required is that
you persuade M. Carroll to abandon his mad project, return
the money he has taken, and let things go on exactly as they
were before! Nothing more than that, m'sieur! And you will
be established for life!"
Harrison counted ten. He didn't even bother to think of the
fact that Dubois simply proposed that if he obeyed Madame
CarroU implicitly in this and all other matters for the rest
of his life, she mightmight!leave him some money and in
addition would promote an arrangement that he and Valeric
had already concluded on their own. It was almost humorous,
but not quite.
"I will have to consider it," he said. He didn't want to
send Dubois back to his sister with news that would infuriate
her more. So he said, "I would have to talk to Carroll and find
out how determined be is. I would have to Let it rest for the
time being, M. Dubois! We will talk of it later."
M. Dubois argued vehemently. Presently be rose to leave.
"Let me tell you, m'sieur," he said desperately, "My sis-
ter is distressed to distraction! I fear for her health if M.
Carroll should proceed with this ill-advised action. Even more,
I fear"
But then he stopped short as if he'd clapped his own hand
across his mouth. He went away, confused. And Harrison
realized that he was genuinely frightened. He hadn't the
imagination to see the hair-raising possibilities that Harrison
and Carroll and Pepe saw, alone among the human popula-
tion of earth. But he was frightened. And Harrison suddenly
realized that Dubois was actually scared by his guess of what
Madame Carroll might do if her husbandCarrolldid use
the money due him tor the use of his time-tunnel for his own
purposes. It is commonplace among the students of homicide
that murders are committed more often over money than for
any other motive. It is also a commonplace that the amount
of money involved may be trivial. To Madame Carroll, the
money earned by Carroll, Dubois et Cie was the object of
passion as genuine if not as understandable as that of a jealous
woman. She was capable of a crime of passionover money.
So Harrison distastefully prepared to make another bus-
trip to St. Jean-sur-Seine. He'd have to warn Carroll. He'd
have to make Valeric understand . . .
But still lomething had to be done about de Bassompierre,
back in the days of Napoleon Buonaparte! Something def-
initely had to be done! His activities could only be allowed
to go on if one believed that the cosmos did not make sense;
that there was no particular point in civilization, and that
the human race didn't matter because it was only an accident,
undesigned and without significance.
There have always been people believing this and ear-
nestly laboring to create a state of things humanity could
not survive. There will probably always be such people.
Clearly, however, if they are wrong they won't succeed. If
people are important, it has been arranged for them to sur-
vive. If the cosmos is designed for them to live in it, there
must be some safety device built into it to prevent their exter-
mination.
It didn't appear, though, that Harrison and Carroll and
Pepe, and Madame Carroll and Valerie and M. Dubois to-
gether amounted to anything so important.
Quite the contrary.
The world rolled sedately upon its axis, and tides
ebbed and flowed, and barometric highs produced winds flow-
ing clockwise about their center in the Northern hemisphere,
and counter-clockwise in the Southern. There were people
who casually mentioned coriolis forces in connection with
this subject. There were minor temblors in various places,
and the people supposed to know about them explained that
tectonic adjustments were their cause. There were forest-
fires and forestry officials explained that the woodland floors
had lacked humidity, and there were droughts and people
spoke with exactness of water-tables and floods, when there
was sure to be an authority on the subject to discourse on
abnormal precipitation in terms of inches of rain-fall or acre-
feet of run-off. But these were natural phenomena, about
which it is always possible to speak with understanding
and precision.
The Chinese, however, exploded an atomic bomb, and a
spy-plane was shot down over Western Europe, and a U.S.
anti-submarine force, having located a foreign submarine in
Caribbean waters, zestfully practised trailing it in spite of
its evasive tactics.  They  stayed  over  itwhere  they  could
have dropped depth-bombs if they'd wanted tofor seventy-
two hours hand-running. Then it surfaced angrily and the
squadron leader of the hunter-killer unit solicitously asked
if it was in need of assistance.
It was not possible to make exact statements about hap-
penings like that. They were things that people did. Unrea-
sonably. Irrationally. On what seemed to different people
appropriate occasions. But what seems appropriate to humans
isn't necessarily reasonable.
There was the fact, for example, that M. Dubois came
gloomily to St. Jean-sur-Seine, carrying a very considerable
number of very elaborate small bottles of perfume. The
weather in St. Jean-sur-Seine was clear and mild. M. Du-
bois arrived on the last wheezing bus, nearly four hours
after sunset. He trudged to the cottage in which Carroll
endured the tedium of existence in a provincial small town
with no alleviation whatever. Harrison and Carroll greeted
him pleasantly. Tacitly, all argument was avoided. Car-
roll even cooked an omelet for his brother-in-law by way of
refreshment. To be sure, M. Dubois took Harrison aside and
asked him disturbedly if there were any chance of Carroll
putting his money back in Madame Carroll's hands and aban-
doning his mad project of a journey into France d'ans
1804. Harrison said that the prospects were not yet good.
Dubois sighed heavily.
The time was then well after midnight. Carroll went
casually through the improvised  doorway in the sitting-
room and along the burrowed passage-way beyond. He came
back to observe that rain fell heavily in St. Jean-sur-Seine in
the year 1804 and it was deep night there, now.
M. Dubois went prosaically about his preparations. He
was deliberate and took a good deal of time about it. Harrison
went through the time-tunnel himself and stood for a moment
upon the plank threshold between centuries. The then-intact,
disused foundry resounded with the heavy drumming of rain
upon its roof. The air smelled of wetness. The blackness of
the night was unrelieved. Of course the foundry would be
particularly dark, but in the time at this end of the tunnel
there was nowhere outside of houses where there was any
light whatever. On the entire continent of Europe there was
no single room in which candles gave as much light as mod-
ern men considered a minimum for comfort.
Far away, over at the horizon, there was a dull nimble of
thunder. If anything moved anywhere on the earth it might
be a lumbering coach with twin candle-lanterns to cast a
feeble glimmer before it. But nobody moved faster than five
miles an hourseven at the utmosteven in the daytime.
At night three miles an hour was fast travelling. Especially
in rainy weather the overwhelming majority of people went
home at sundown and stayed there.
Harrison returned to the dining room of the cottage. Un-
comfortably, be looked out of a window and saw stars in the
heavens. And even in St. Jean-sur-Seine, in modern times
there were street lamps. Occasional buildings had lighted
windows in them. Desolate and dreary as the little town was
in the world of today, it was infinitely more liveable than
the same town of nearly two centuries before. There had been
much progress in how to do things. It was regrettable that
there was less progress in knowledge of things worth doing.
Dubois, presently, would walk heavily through the home-
made doorway. He would move through the tunnel which
infeet and inches was of negligible length, but which
had a difference of a hundred and sixty-odd years, some
weeks, and a certain number of hours between its ends. He
would come out where there was no cottage; where a ruined,
disused cannon-foundry was not ruined but only disused,
and where Napoleon was Emperor of the French and all the
world waited for him to lead an armada of flat-bottomed
boats in the invasion of England.
It was not reasonable for so remarkable an achievement
as a time-tunnel to be used only to deliver exotic perfumery
to Paris in which very few people  bathed.  It was not
reasonable for the return-traffic to be ornamental snuff-
boxes, out-of-date newspapers and flint-lock pistols to be used
as paper-weights. The fate of Europe hung in the balance at
one end of the time-tunnel, where Napoleon reigned. At the
other end the survival of the human race was in question.
The tunnel could have been used to adjust both situations.
But it was actually used to keep a shop going.
M. Dubois packed his stock-in-trade into saddlebags
under the eyes of CarroU and of Harrison. He had already
changed to a costume suited to another time.
"I notice," said Carroll, in the tone of one who politely
tries  to  make  conversation,  "that  you  specialize  now.  At
first you carried an assortment of products through the tun-
nel. Now you seem to take only perfume."
M. Dubois said depressedly, yet with a certain pride:
"These perfumes have no competition where I market them.
I have a business connection and it is mere routine
to deliver these and collect for them. These are the most
valuable objects I can transport with strict legality."
"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 per-
mitted 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 po-
lice"'
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 toahthe place where I conduct busi-
ness."
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 CarroU, "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 incon-
veniences 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 saddle-
bags. 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 per-
haps 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 ac-
complished 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 dis-
closed 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 light-
ning-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 com-
pletely 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 equip-
ment. 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.  In-
evitably, 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 frustro-
tion.
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. Any-
thing 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 ar-
ranged 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 in-
tact 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.
Anythingabsolutely anythingcould 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 atten-
tion 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-bloodedcold-blooded" Carroll searched for
a word which was strong enough. He burst out with it, "Busi-
ness 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 con-
duct 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 twen-
tieth-century costume tc 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 in-
volved. But that was not too likely. It would much more
plausibly be Albert. If the small burglar had gone throueh
the time-tunnel a second time, after being carried through it
first  by  Carroll  and  being  frightened  horribly  by  the  ex-
perience, he had probably made use of his professional ex-
perience. 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 sur-
vival 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 as-
sembled 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
the millions. Harrison realized that simply standing here
'gjr/~s a startling thing to do.
Rut it wan not wrv pTritinff The rain noured down. drum-

fgf.  But it was not vf-ry exciting, l ne ram pourea aowa, arum-
' ming on the foundry roof. Astonishing as being here might
be, it became tedious. Regardless of its splendid meaning-
fulness, 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 modem 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 mut-
tered 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
yea 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'estOui, m'sieurl 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 Al-
bert'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 bad enough ofbeyond 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.
"Better take a good look at them," growled Carroll. "They
won't be easy to spend!"
The little burglar squinted. His mouth dropped open.
"Butm'sieur! These are not There is the head of Na-
poleon, and there are the words "twenty francs" upon it,
but"
"Twenty francs gold," said Carroll, grunting again. "Before
the franc was devalued. In money of today a gold napoleon is
worthhmsomewhere around twelve hundred depreciated
paper francs. But you'll be a.ked where you got them."
Albert looked at him inquisitively.
"I'll buy them," said Carroll reluctantly.
"At what price, m'sieur?"
"Twelve hundred paper francs apiece," Carroll told him
impatiently. To Harrison he said almost angrily: "They're
stolen, but we can't send them back. And I'll need some
gold-pieces presently! I didn't expect ever to become a re-
ceiver of stolen goods!"
"A most generous one, M'sieur!" said Albert profoundly.
"It is a pleasure to do business with you!"
He counted the golden disks. There was a good double-
handful. He put them in CarroU's hands and waited expect-
antly. Carroll counted them, in turn, and leafed out bills to
a suitable total.
"How," asked Harrison, "did you get the nerve to go
through that tunnel a second time?"
Albert tucked the modem currency away as he donned
present-day costume.
"I am a Frenchman, m'sieur," he said firmly. "I had an
experience which was impossible. But I had had it. So I said
to myself, 'C'est n'pas logiquel' So it was necessary for me
to learn if it was true. Therefore I repeated it. But then
there were difficulties. I could not find my way back until the
m'sieur here" he bowed to Harrison"called to me."
"You may go, this time," said Carroll sourly, "but don't
come back again! Next time you'll be in real trouble!"
"M'sieur," said Albert, "I shall not intrude again. But if
you should need someone of my talents It is a pleasure to
deal with you!"
Harrison ushered him out and came back.
"I'll  get  the  devil  of  a  good  lock,"  said  Carroll,  "and
put it on that door! Maybe I'd better make the door stronger.
I've no mind to be the sponsor of a crime-wave in St. Jean-
sur-Seine in the time of Ybarra's great-great-grandfatheri"
Harrison paced up and down the room.
"Things pile up," he said restlessly, "and we're getting
nowhere fast!"
**My wife," said Can-oll drily, "thinks I'm impractical.
Maybe you do too. But we can't go hunting de Bassompierre
in twentieth-century clothes! I've arranged for proper cos-
tumes. We have to wait for them. We'll need money of the
period if we're to move about freely. I'm working on that,
as you just observed. Also there's information about de Bas-
sompierre. We need all we can get, if we're to persuade him
to change his course of conduct and tell us where the
other time-tunnel is. But still it's incredible that somebody
else made another to the same period!"
Harrison stopped his pacing and opened his mouth to
speak. Then he closed it and went back to restless stridings.
"You probably think," said Carroll evenly, "that I'm im-
practical about the time-tunnel itself. Why pick a hole like
St.  Jean-sur-Seine  for  my  researches?  Why  bury  myself
here? Maybe you wonder why a supposedly sane man would
marry the woman I did or how I came to be disgraced,
discredited, despised in my profession?"
"I didn't mean"
"I'll tell you," said Carroll with a fine air of candor.  "I
was stupid! I taught my classes that reality was the prob-
ability which had  a numerical value of one.  Remember?
Then one day I overheard myself telling my students that
time is the measure of things that change. And a little
later I was astonished to hear myself say that an unchanging
object is not affected by time."
"Yes-s-s-s," agreed Harrison. "That should be true."
Harrison's expression grew sardonic.
"It was a dogmatic statement," he said,  "and  I should
have let that sleeping dogma lie. But I tried to test it ex-
perimentally. It looked like melted metal, solidified, would
change at the moment it became solid. But if it wasn't
moved, wasn't stirred, wasn't botbered, it shouldn't change
again. It should. I spare you the details, but it should be
possible to make what I've called a time-tunnel back from
nowwhenever that wasfor the number of hours, minutes,
seconds, and so on between 'now' and the freezing of the
metal. The trouble was that when that distance in time was
shortdays or weeks or thereaboutsthe tunnels were
unstable. They might last milliseconds. They might not. To
prove that they existed at all required very special equip-
ment. Like a fool I wrote an article about it. Foolishly, they
printed it in a learned magazine. And then I caught the
devil!"
"And?"
"You needed very special equipment to prove my results.
Nobody else had it. But they didn't need it to discredit me!
If time-travel was possible, a man might go into the past
and kill his grandfather"
"I know that one," said Harrison. "PepeYbarra, that is
sprang it on me. In theory, if a man went back in time and
killed his grandfather, he wouldn't be born to do it."
"But facts," said Can-oil stubbornly, "are facts! If he
did it, it would be done! If he killed his grandfather, his
grandfather would have been killed, impossible or not!" Then
he said wrily, "Anyhow, nobody else had the equipment to
try my experiments. But the reputation of a young girl is a
lot harder to hurt than the reputation of a researcher! I was
denounced as a liar, a faker, a forgerpractically a mur-
derer of my own grandfather. Professionally, I was ruined!"
"I'msorry," said Harrison.
"So am I," said Carroll. "Because I got mad. I resolved
to prove I was right. My trouble was having a short time-
length to work with. I needed a metal casting that had
solidified a long while ago and had never been moved. By
pure chance I heard that this foundry shut up shop so fast it
left its last cannon in the mould. So I had to have that cannon,
undisturbed. That meant I had to have this cottage. Andthe
woman who is now Madame Carroll had just inherited it!"
Harrison said:
"And you married her for it?"
"No. I'm not that big a fool. I tried to buy it. She kept
trying to get the last franc out of me. I must have acted
rich. I offered twice its value and she asked three times. I
agreed to three times and she demanded four. I fretted. I was
taken ill. And she nursed me. Maybe she hoped to find out
how far I'd go from hearing my delirium! Anyhow, one day
the maire came to my room wearing his sash of office. And
he married us! I must have been delirious at the time!
But there it was! When I recovered, there was the devil
of a row! She'd married me for money, and I wanted to spend
it on scientific experiments!  Harrison,  you  wouldn't  believe
such rows could end without homicides! But I made the
time-tunnel, of nearly two centuries' reach. And it is stable!
It can last forever!  Butdo you see the charming,  ironic
fact?"
"No-o-o...."
"I found out that the past can be changed, and therefore
the present, but  there is  no  conceivable  way to  know
what change will produce what result! I daren't use it, Har-
rison, not even to regain my reputation! It's too dangerous to
be used by anybody but shopkeepers like my wife and
M'sieur Dubois!"
Can-oil grimaced.
"So I let them use it for a shop's supply of curios! I was
a fool, but you can't say I wasn't practical, turning a means
of time-travel into a shopkeeper's supply of back-number
newspapers and similar oddments!"
He strode out of the room. Harrison looked after him. He
felt singularly helpless. He was.
For the next three days he was acutely uncomfortable.
He did not think it wise to write to Valeric because Mad-
ame CarroU would read the letter. He had to wait without be-
ing sure what he waited for. Once, half-heartedly, he tried to
inform himself about the France he would presently visit.
He learned that in 1804 handkerchiefs were not carried for
the utilitarian purposes of more recent times. Smoking was
practised, but snuff was more elegant. The reputations of
many of the members of the Imperial courtincluding the
Imperial familywere approximately those of domestic ani-
mals. And he learned that the sanitary arrangements in cities
of the first decade of the 1800's were not primitive. They were
non-existent.
He was waked on the third night after Dubois' departure.
There was a terrific pounding on the home-made door to the
time-tunnel. CarroU was there before him, unfastening the
elaborate lock he'd installed the day after Albert's reappear-
ance.
He opened the door. A sneeze came through it. Another
sneeze. Strangling coughs. A moan.
M. Dubois came feebly into the cottage dining room from
the year 1804. His eyes watered. His nose ran. He was half-
starved and disreputably dirty, and he had a fever of thirty-
eight degrees centigrade. Between coughs, sneezes, and moans
of despair he confided to Carroll that he had been continually
soaked to the skin for the past three days; that his horse
had been stolen, and that his saddlebags with their precious
contents of high-priced perfume were buried at the foot of
a large tree a kilometer down-stream from a bridge beyond
the village of St. Fiacre on the way to Paris.
Carroll gave him hot rum-and-water and got him into dry
clothing. He put the plump little man to bed, where he moaned
and wheezed and coughed himself into exhausted sleep.
Pepe Ybarra arrived next morning with the costumes and
forged identity-papers and other documents to be filled in as
the occasion .demanded. He had a certain quantity of counter-
feit assignatsauthentic  ones were too ancient to have, a
chance of passing unquestionedand a note for Harrfton
from Valerie. The note was not remarkable at its beginning,
but Harrison read the last page with enormous apprehension.
Valerie mentioned as a curious experience that she was
in the shop, quite alone, when she felt oddly giddy for a
moment. Then it seemed to her that the shop was strange.
It was not the shop of Carroll, Dubois et Cie at all, but a
place where pots and pans were on sale for housewives. And
she was there to purchase something. She was not astonished.
It seemed quite natural. Then she heard someoneperhaps the
shop-keepermoving in the back room as if to come and
wait on her. She waited to be waited on. And then she felt
the giddiness again and she was once more in her aunt's
place of business and everything was as it should be. Then
she was astounded. But she said that she had felt much
ennui and undoubtedly had dozed for a moment and this
peculiar dream was the result. It was the more singular be-
cause Harrison was not in it. She did not even think of him
in it. He was, she confessed, present in most of her more
ordinary dreams.
He went frantically to Carroll. Valerie had evidently had
an experience like the one they'd shared, when he was
convinced there'd never been a Maximilian, and Pepe had
been sure there'd been four emperors of Mexico. The hap-
pening was pointless, and so was Valerie's, but there'd been
a moment when she did not think of him! There'd been a
temporary, substitute present in which she'd never met him!
It could be a present in which he'd never been born! Some-
thing had to be done! This crazy de Bassompierre was
trying to change past history! He was succeeding! At any
moment another such thing might happen, and Can-oil could
talk all he pleased about history's modulus of elasticity and
claim that events could be changed and of their own nature
change back again. But there was also such a thing as an
elastic limit!  If the past were  changed enough,  it would
stay changed! Something had to be done!
It was pure coincidence,  of course, but  while  Harrison
protested in a frenzy of apprehension, some eight thousand
miles away the mainland Chinese exploded a second atomic
bomb. It appeared that they intended a series of such ex-
plosions, by which they'd acquire the experience to make them
equal to the other atom-armed nations in their ability to make
earth uninhabitable.
Naturally, this was inconsistent with the theory that the
cosmos was designed for people to live in, and therefore
nothing would happen to stop them from doing it. This
seemed to imply that humans didn't count; everything was
chance; that the cosmos did not make sense, after all.
Which was deplorable.
Carroll made a definitely handsome figure in the
costume of a well-to-do traveller in the France of an earlier
time. He did not seem as ornamental as Harrison expected,
but that was because he wore travelling-clothes. There were
hessian-cloth breeches and high boots, and he wore an
enormous cloak and a three-cornered hat. He didn't wear a
periwig; such things went out of style during the 1790's.
But he was impressive enough so that Harrison felt a little
less foolish in his own get-up. He decided that nobody would
look .at him while Carroll was around.
Pepe, in a sports costume strictly of the present, re-
garded the two of them with uneasy eyes.
"I don't like this business of you going to Paris and me
staying behind!" he said bitterly. "After all, it's my great-
great-grandparents who're in Paris! And if anything hap-
pens"
"Look!" said Harrison, fiercely. "Valerie went through a
temporarily  changed presenta  time-shiftlike we  did.
And in it there wasn't any shop of Carroll, Dubois et Ciel It
was a pots-and-pans shop! And Valerie'd never met me!
She didn't know I existed! Maybe I didn't! The normal
past came back to her, as it did to us, but I can't have that
sort of thing happening! We've got to get to Paris and find de
Bassompierre! Fast!"
"But my great-great-"
"Dammit!" snapped Harrison. "If anything happened
to your great-great-grandfather you'd never have existed and
you wouldn't have spotted that shop and I'd never have seen
Valeric again! I'll take better care of your great-great-grand-
father than you would! But we can't waste time! We've lost
enough waiting for these clothes!"
There came a knock on the outside door of the cottage.
There should be no callers here. Pepe jumped. CarroU said
irritably:
"My wife can't have gotten here this soon! Answer the
door, Ybarra, and get rid of whoever's there."
Pepe went uneasily into the next room. Harrison drew
a deep breath. He was feverishly anxious to start the search
for de Bassompierre and the rival time-tunnel which ob-
viously wasn't being used with proper regard to the elastic
limits of history. It must be that de Bassompierre didn't
realize the damage be was doing and the destruction he must
cause, by passing out twentieth-century information in the
early nineteenth. A reasoned explanation would certainly
make him stop. Harrison was prepared to make any imagin-
able bargain as an inducement.
He heard the door open in the other room. There was a
murmur of voices. Pepe tried to dismiss someone. That some-
one objected. Pepe was impatient. The someone else was
firm. The door closed. Two sets of footsteps sounded inside.
Pepe said, from the other room:
"Stay here! I will speak to M. Carroll"
The voice of Albert the burglar said respectfully:
"Say that Albert needs most urgently to make a proposal
of interest to him."
Carroll raised his eyebrows. He said angrily:
"Bring him in, Ybarra!"
Pepe came in, excessively uneasy. Behind him marched
the reedy small burglar. He carried a pargel wrapped in
newspaper and tied with string. His eyes widened as he
saw Carroll's attire. He beamed when he saw Harrison sim-
ilarly clad.
"What the devil do you want?" demanded Carroll.
"M'sieur," said Albert politely, "I came to make a pro-
posal. Beyond that door I had an experience which you
know about. I made a splendid haul, of which you are
aware. You, m'sieur, purchased some small things I brought
back. N'est-ce pas?"
"I told you not to come back here again!" snapped Carroll.
"But m'sieur," protested Albert. "It is a matter of business!
You cannot dream how primitive, how foolish are the locks
of the citizens ofbeyond that doorway! It would be ridicu-
lous to abandon such an opportunity! So I have come,
m'sieur, to propose a business arrangement. Let us say that
I can acquire more such coins as you purchased for twelve
hundred francs each. I will sell them to you for six hundred
francs each! All I ask is the use of your doorwaydid you
call it a tunnel?to pass through and after a suitable in-
terval to return through! You evidently plan to make a
journey yourselves. I am prepared for a journey also. Behold!"
He opened the newspaper-wrapped parcel. He spread out a
costume of the very early eighteen hundreds. It was not the
apparel of a rich man. It was not even the costume of a
bourgeois. It was what a servant would wear. A lackey.
Albert held it up with pride.
'There is no costumier in St. Jean-sur-Seine," he con-
fided. "So I took a bus. Last night I examined the stock of a
business supplying costumes to actors and persons attending
fancy-dress balls. I chose this. Before, I could not move about
freely at the other end of the tunnel. I was not clothed to pass
unnoticed. But I observed from hiding. "This is suitable. This
is perfection! Now, m'sieur, I am prepared! It remains only
to conclude an arrangement with you!"
There was silence. Carroll swore. Then Harrison spoke
urgently, willing to make any sort of settlement that would
get things in motion.
"We considered," he said impatiently, "that we ought to
have a servant, but we couldn't imagine one. Maybe Albert
would be willing to postpone hisprofessional activities to
help us for a few days. He coulderlook over the ground.
If he would play the part of a lackey for a few days"
He made a hurried mental reservation, of course, that
Albert would be rewarded for his efforts, but that his pro-
posal for transportation to and from a life of crime in Na-
poleonic France would not actually be accepted. Harrison
had fretted himself into a fever for haste, while waiting for
the clothes he now wore. He wanted to get moving.
"Hm," said Carroll drily. "That's an idea! And he has his
own wardrobe, too!" He said formidably to Albert: "Will you
play the part of a lackey for M. Harrison and me and pledge
your word not to steal from us forsaythree days? We
will pay you, of course. But you will not rob us"
"Not conceivably, m'sieurl" protested Albert.
"And at the end of three days we will decide whether or
not you can be trusted. Then we will make some arrangement,
but I do not promise what it will be!"
"We begin at once?" asked Albert hopefully.
"At once," agreed Carroll.
Albert instantly stripped off baggy corduroy trousers, a
blue sash, and a red-checked shirt. He put on the costume
from the newspaper parcel. He began to transfer a series
of small metal objectslike thin files turned into varied
button-hooksto his newly-donned clothing.
"Wait!" said Harrison. "Those are pick-locks, aren't they?
You'd better leave them behind!"
"But m'sieurl" protested Albert, "I would feel unclothed
without them!"
Carroll said tolerantly:
"Let them go, so long as he doesn't use them."
"Alorsi" said Albert briskly. "I am ready!" He regarded
the saddlebags lying on the floor. They were obviously Har-
rison's and Carroll's baggage for a trip into the past. He
pointed to them and said, "Messieurs?"
Carroll nodded. He stood. Harrison shook his unfamiliar
cloak to a more tidy arrangement. He felt absurd, clothed
like this. But he wanted to make haste.
"Keep the door locked," said Carroll, "and don't let
anybody through but us. I'm taking a chance on Albert, but
nevertheless"
Pepe looked extremely unhappy. Carroll opened the door.
Albert festooned himself with saddlebags with a professional
sort of air. Carroll went through the door first. Harrison
followed, and after him came Albert with his burdens.
There was the wrenching discomfort and giddiness of time-
translation in  the  tunnel.  They  arrived  in  the  resonant
emptiness of the disused foundry. It was night. Very far
away, a cock crowed. There was no other sound in the
town of St. Jean-sur-Seine in the year 1804.
Albert said softly:
"Messieurs, I know the way to the door you established."
Carroll grunted for him to lead. They followed, stumbling.
They went past the huge, cold brick furnaces which were but
the vaguest of objects inside the building. Harrison heard the
saddlebags brushing against what was probably a giant, man-
handled bellows. A turn. Another turn. Albert said:
"Here, messieurs!"
A hinge squeaked. There was a slightly lesser darkness
ahead. Albert went through. He waited for them. As Carroll
came through last, Albert murmured admiringly:
"All excellent idea, that doorl It cannot be detected from
outside! Nowwe eo to Paris? You wish post-horses?"
"Naturally," said~Carroll. He added: "We were landed from
a boat, you understand."
"Mais non!" protested Albert. "I have listened to many
conversations! You travelled by carriage, messieurs, and it
broke down. So your driver departed to secure aid, and you
reason naturally enough that he had gone to assemble brig-
ands to rob and murder you. So when he had gone you came
on to St. Jean-sur-Scine, and you proceed toward Paris. That
is most probable!"
"Very well," agreed Carroll. "That's the story."
"AllansI" said Albert gaily.
They went along the unpaved street. Dark structures, rose
about them. Harrison continued to feel the need for haste.
It did occur to him to wonder how Albert could take so
calmlyafter reflectionthe utterly preposterous fact that
there were two St. Jean-sur-Seines, remarkably similar in the
streets and buildings that dated back for centuries, yet thor-
oughly different in all other respects. But he couldn't make
any satisfying guess about Albert.
He stumbled. The street was not only unpaved, it was
rough. He became aware of smells. They were noisome.
They turned a corner. They went past a particularly redolent
compost heap, doubtless prized by the man to whom
it  belonged.  There  was  a  small,  flickering,  yellowish  glow
some distance ahead.
"There is the inn," said Albert. "You may recognize it.
The money is kept in a wooden shoe behind a cheese. Or
it was."
They went on until they saw a whiskered man in an
apron, dozing over what might be a counter. One candle
vaguely illuminated the room in which he napped. The
smell of wine was strong.
"Holloa!" said Albert briskly. "Up! Up! You have cus-
tomers! We demand three horses, immediately!"
There followed confusion, beginning with the half-awake
whiskered roan, who was truculent until he saw the majestic
appearance of Carroll and Harrison in their flowing cloaks.
He shouted, and presently a hostler appeared, and then an-
other, and another. There was argument. Debate. Bargain-
ing.  Harrison  grew  unbearably  impatient.  The  innkeeper
waved his arms. Albert spoke confidentially to him.
Horses appeared. There was more argument. Then the
three of them were mounted. They trotted away through
the narrow, abysmally dark streets. There were no lights any-
where. St. Jean-sur-Seine could have been a town of mauso-
leums for any sign of life it displayed except that twice, as
the horses moved through the blackness, there were scurry-
ings as of mice, only larger. They would be rats. There
were smells. Incredible smells. It was a very great relief to
get out of the town and to open country.
Harrison relaxed a little. He'd been impatient to get into
the time where the destruction of all he knew was in process
of arrangement. Now he wanted feverishly to get to work
upon those eccentricities of the time-space continuum which
nobody knew about or could be convinced of aside from
himself and Carroll and Pepe and perhaps Albert the burglar.
It had seemed urgently necessary to get into clothes that
wouldn't draw attention and start to do something about
the most appalling possibility the human race had ever faced.
He had the clothing. He moved toward the action. Now he
wanted to know what that action would be. Then he'd be im-
patient to start it.
He raised the question of how they could make de
Bassompierre cooperate, even to the collapsing of the other
tunnel. How?
"I don't know!" said Carroll. "I've got a sort of dossier
on him. BourrieneNapoleon's secretarymentioned him
as a scoundrel who used perfume as lavishly as Napoleon
himself,  but  added  that  he  still  stank  in  decent  men's
nostrils. Fouchethe secret police ministerused him but
didn't trust him. Cambacieres the consul despised him and
even Savary would have nothing to do with him. Madame
d'Epinay said he was a perfumed villain and Madame de
Stael wouldn't let him in her house. And they were pretty
tolerant people, too!"
"It looks," said Harrison, discouraged, "like he's a pretty
low specimen!"
"You have a certain gift for understatement, Harrison,"
said Carroll. "But this whole thing is bad!  My damned
tunnel should never have been made! Before that, I shouldn't
have lectured. When I contrived some interesting theories I
should have kept them to myself instead of spouting them to
young and eager minds, among which yours must be included,
though you didn't make a time-tunnel and somebody else did.
I made a fool of myself and I may have brought the ultimate
disaster on the human race. And my only alibi is that I
didn't mean to do it."
Harrison said in alarm:
"But you haven't given up hope?"
"The devil, no!" said Can-oil. "I've been storing up in-
formation that might be useful. Now that we're starting out
though, I have to figure out how to use it. I suggest that
you let me!"
Harrison fell uneasily silent. The three horses went on
through the night. The stars were few and very faint. A
mistiness in the air made the Milky Way invisible. The ground
on either side was abysmally dark. Where trees overhung the
roadand France of this period had many more trees than it
would have laterthe blackness was absolute.
He racked his brains. He'd been doing little else foErdays,
pending the arrival of suitable garments for a journey back
in time. All his ideas were stale.
He tried to see things from a new viewpoint. After all,
he'd been in normal time when be tried to think before,
and there was inevitably a certain abstract quality in his
estimate of what was practical. This period couldn't seem en-
tirely real.
Now, though, he rode through darkness. It was real black-
ness. His horse was a real horse. It plodded on doggedly
through the night. He breathed the air of early nineteenth-
century France. There were thirty millions of people about
him, of whom not one would ever see Valerie's next birthday.
They were actual people. They had innumerable hopes and
fears and aspirations. They loved each other, and lied to
each other and betrayed each other and made magnificent
sacrifices for each other. They cherished their country, and
they dodged its taxes, and they died for it very valiantly
and they were fortunate not to know as much of its future
history as Harrison did.
They were particularly fortunate not to realize that
presently, truly and actually, other persons would take their
places and they would not be remembered any more, and
those who succeeded them in this nation and on this con-
tinent and on this world would make exactly the same mis-
takes they had.
To know this, genuinely, would be intolerable. Harrison
almost came to realize it, and hastily thrust the thought away.
He rode on, brooding, and presently thought' of Valeric. He
resolutely kept his mind on her and avoided even attempts to
make plans for winning friends and influencing de Bas-
sompierre.
Long, long hours later there was a grayness in the air, and
presently the black shapes of trees were vaguely limned
against it. Again presently they rode through a pre-dawn
mistiness in which the trees and the roadway and all other
objects appeared as ghostly, vaporous shapelessnesses, which
took form and substance as they drew near, and when within
yards were solid and real. But then as the horses plodded
onward they became unsubstantial and ghostlike again, and
vanished in the grayness left behind.
But Harrison's sense of frustration returned as the light
grew brighter. He was tired, and he was impatient with
himself because he felt commonplace fatigue upon the most
desperately necessary enterprise in huriian history. It was
also for Valerie, and therefore he should be superior to mere
physical weariness. He remembered that he'd felt a certain
scorn of Dubois when he returned wretched and wheezing
from sad adventure in the rain now ended. Now he felt some
scorn of himself.
Dubois had ridden his horse off a flooded-over bridge some
distance beyond the village of St. Fiacre. He'd managed
to get ashore while his horse went splashing down-stream.
He'd followed it down the stream-bank, and managed to catch
it  as  it  came  ashore,   just  in  time  to  hide  from  some
remarkably rough-looking characters who'd also seen it
swimming and were hunting for it too. They began to search
interestedly for it, and Dubois slipped off the saddlebags and
drove the animal out to where they could find it without
finding him as well. The horse satisfied them. They caught it
and went off with it, doubtless to sell it. And Dubois hid
the saddlebags and trudged back to the foundry, wheezing
and developing a chest-cold on the way.
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 Can-oil. 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 vil-
lage, whose houses were characterless and dismal. It was a
small place; there could hardly be a hundred houses alto-
gether. 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."
CarroU grunted. He turned in bis saddle and looked at Al-
bert. 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, cook-
ing, 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 ob-
served zestfully:
"C'est comme les films!"
They breakfasted, which in this area 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  dis-
solved 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 Car-
roll 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 Ihappened 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 splen-
didly upon the rescue of Valerie from danger. Most men
imagine deeds of derring-do to be performed tor 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 plod-
ding post-horses and malodorous towns, and upstart scheming
emperors and grandiose proclamations andin shortin
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. Car-
roll grunted:
"There's one of them!"
He swung his horse about and spurred it. It bounded for-
ward, toward a figure which had believed itself creeping un-
noticed 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 CarroU. 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 some-
body'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 mur-
dered 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 pain-
fully:
"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 cos-
tume of the time. They reloaded as they rode. They over-
took 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 pres-
ently 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. Har-
rison 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 trans-
lated 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 won-
dered how Albert accounted to himself for the totally un-
imaginable 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 lanternmore often
glazed with horn than with glassand 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 simul-
taneous 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, butthis was where the danger
laya 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 pos-
sible 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 com-
pletely explained within five  minutes, there  would be  a
condition red  alert over all the Western Hemisphere.
Counter-measures would begin. Warning was already trans-
mitted to Europe. All the world was ready for that Armaged-
don 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 inhab-
ited. 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 cen-
tury 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 accidentnot 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
Next morning Harrison waked and breakfasted
badly, because there was no coffeeand presently set out
upon a business errand. Paris of 1804 was a city of half a
million people. It had no railroads. It had no police in any
modern sense of the word. Save for certain particular ave-
nues, its streets were unpaved. It had no street-lights; not
electric, not gas, not oil, not even publicly provided candles.
It was supplied with food by creaking, oilless farm-wagons,
except for such foodstuff as came down the Seine by barge
and was distributed in unbelievably clumsy carts. It had no
potable water-supply. There were wells and cisterns and
buckets, to be sure, but nobody who could help it ever drank
water. The reason was that there was then no known ob-
jection to the use of wells for drowning puppies and the
like, and most well-water was unwholesome in the extreme.
There were not even horse-drawn omnibusses in Paris.
The city had no sewers. Its streets had no street-signs, be-
cause only a small part of the population could read or
write, and signs would have been useless. In all its sprawl-
ing noisomeness there was not one water-tap, nor any way
more convenient than flint and steel to make a fire. There
was not one postage-stamp in all of France, and cotton
cloth was  practically unknown.  All fabric  was linen  or
wool or, rarely, silk. In all the world nobody had conceived
of power which was not water-power or animal-power, save in
R7
Holland where some folk got motion from the winds by
wind mills. In all of France, though, every horse power of
usable energy save water mills was provided by a horse, and
only three people then alive had ever conceived of a steam-
ship, and all of them were across the ocean in America.
It did not seem that such a city could exist in a cosmos
in which human beings were intended to survive. Humans
had invented cities, apparently, with something of the in-
vincible wrong-headedness that in Harrison's own era had
made them construct atomic bombs. It appeared that through-
out all the ages mankind had tried zestfully to arrange
for its own extinction. It was difficult to think of Paris
as anything but a vast device for the development and
propagation of diseases. The death-rate was unbelievable. Ig-
norance of sanitation was unimaginable. And in a city- whose
most aristocratic quarters swarmed with flies, the idea of
filth-borne disease did not exist and the washing of one's
face and body was done for cosmetic reasons only. Nobody
not even surgeonsdreamed of washing for any abstruse
idea of cleanliness. The slums were like the dens of beasts,
and their inhabitants took on much of the quality of their
environment.
But even so, matters were better than in older times. There
had been a time when it was said that Paris could be smelled
down-wind for thirty leagues. Now it could hardly be
detected for more than fifteen. But to Harrison the im-
provement was not noticeable.
He left the inn with Albert in his wake, carrying Dubois*
saddlebags over his shoulder. Harrison saw the citizens of
Paris going about their business. Some were sturdy and well-
fed and complacent. Some looked hawklike and tense, which
was a reasonable response to the state of things at that time.
There were beggars. There were children performing the
office of scavengers.  Judging  by their starveling look, it
was not profitable occupation.
The two of themHamson and Albertwent almost
wordlessly from the middle-middle-class quarter in which
the inn operated, to an upper-middle-class section where no
inns were to be seen. Here the people were better dressed.
There were fewer beggars. Begging is not a paying proposi-
tion where people  are well-to-do.  There  were stepping-
stones at some of the comers. Presently they came to a
wider street than usual. It had a cobblestone surface, which
was remarkable.
"This," said Harrison over his shoulderAlbert followed
respectfully behind him, as a servant should"this is prob-
ably the street we are looking for."
"But yes, m'sieur," said Albert cheerfully. "Paris has
changed much since I saw it last week, but I think this is
the Boulevard des Italiens.  The perfumer you look for
should have his shop in that direction."
He waved his hand. Harrison accepted the direction. He
turned, Albert following as before. A vast and stately coach,
drawn by four horses, rolled and lumbered down the street.
It was accompanied by outriders, servants in livery prepared
to defend it against brigands in the rude environment outside
the metropolis, or to force aside any traffic that got in the
coach's way. There were other horsemen on the street. Hoofs
clattered on the cobblestones. There was a sedan chair, oc-
cupied by a bearded man with lace at his collar. There was
Harrison said suddenly:
"Albert, you just said that Paris has changed."
"Yes, m'sieur, it is very different indeed."
Harrison said with a sort of grim curiosity:
"How do you account for it? St. Jean-sur-Seine, on this
side of M. Carroll's tunnel, is very different too. You must
have some explanation for yourself!"
Albert was behind him, but somehow he knew that Al-
bert shrugged.
"M'sieur, you know that I was a burglar by profession. I
did not say that I had retired, save for strictly amateur mo-
ments. But I am professionally retired, m'sieur, and since I
do not need to struggle for a competence any longer, I have
adopted a hobby. The strangeness you speak of fits in
admirably with it. If you think of explaining matters to me, I
beg you not to do so."
Harrison biinked. He went on. Albert followed. A knot of
perhaps a dozen cavalrymen came down the street, their
horses' hoofs clattering loudly. The uniforms of the cavalry-
men were ornate, but untidy and soiled. Evidently elaborate
equipment was worn as service dress.
"When I retired, m'sieur," said Albert comfortably, "I
resolved that I would change all I did not like about my life
as a burglar. For success, you will comprehend, I had con-
stantly to plan, to anticipate, to foresee. Nothing is more
fatal to a burglar than to be surprised! One must anticipate
everything!"
"I can see that," said Harrison. A bugle blew somewhere.
No one paid any attention.
"So for my hobby in retirement," said Albert, "instead of
avoiding surprises, I sought them! I became an amateura
connoisseur of surprises! I began to live a life of adventure,
such as the demands of my profession had forbidden. Each
morning I would say to myself, 'Albert, at any instant ab-
solutely anything is more than likely to happen!' And the
thought was pleasing, but it was unfortunately not quite true.
It is terribly difficult to arrange surprises for oneself! But
when M. Carroll had once taken me through his tunnelah,
I was terrified! But I forced myself to go through again.
Whatever happened was bound to be a surprise! And so it
was! I was surprised at the strange St. Jean-sur-Seine that I
encountered. I was surprised at the costumes, at the in-
habitants, when I could not return, when you called to me,
when M. Carroll bought the gold-pieces I had acquired!
Everything was astonishing! So long as I have no explana-
tion for this milieu, m'sieur, I shall find surprises. I may say
that it was surprising to find what is practically paradise for
a competent burglar! I revel in all this, M'sieur Harrisonl I
would regret infinitely if I became able to anticipate events
here, as one cannot help doing in St. Jean-sur-Seine the other
side of M. CarroU's tunnel!"
Fifty yards ahead, a footman in livery held the heads of
two horses. The livery was distinctive. Harrison had noted
other uniformed servants, but all were distinctively French.
"This was different. Harrison was somehow reminded of the
paintings of Goya. He guessed at a Spanish origin for the
costume of this lackey.
"M'sieur," said Albert behind him, "there is the per-
fumer's."
The held horses were in front of the perfumer's shop. Har-
rison nodded and walked ahead. He turned into the shop.
It was not an ordinary place of business. It looked like
a drawing-room for the reception of persons of rank. There
were carpets. There were paintings. There was statuary
and there were silken hangings. But it was a shop, because
a man in the costume of a well-to-do bourgeois listened
patiently while a dark-haired man in riding clothes rated him
icily for having failed to fill some order. The dark-haired man
haughtily refrained from anger, but in Spanish-accented
French he gave the perfumer the devil.
"But, M'sieur Ybarra," said the perfumer politely, "Mad-
ame the Empress herself sent a lady-in-waiting to secure all
of that special perfume that I possessed! She wishes to have
it exclusively  for herself!  I could not refuse  to  obey  her
command! But when more arrives"
"It is not often,"  said  the dark  man  coldly,  "that  I
dispute with a merchant. But this I say, the Senora Ybarra
ordered you to furnish her this special perfume! And you
will do it or my lackeys will make you regret your failure!"
Harrison had started slightly at the name Ybarra when
the perfumer spoke it. Its second use made him stare. But
there was a certain family resemblance between this man
and Pepe.
"Pardon," he said politely, "but perhaps my errand will
solve the difficulty."
The dark man stared haughtily at him. Harrison told
himself that this arrogant young man was Pope's great-
great-grandfather-to-be. It was an odd sensation. He said
pleasantly:
"I travel in France for pleasure" It was not true, but
he could hardly tell his real purpose"and some few days
back I stopped at an inn . . ."
He told the story he'd made ready before. He said that
he'd found a poor devil of a merchant in the inn, sneezing his
head off and in sad estate after an encounter with brig-
ands. He'd had to hide in a stream from them, and he'd
gotten back to the inn with his precious stock-in-trade, but
he was still fearful that the robbers would come to the inn
itself to plunder him. So he had begged Harrison, as a gentle-
man whom brigands might hesitate to rob, to carry his treas-
ure to Paris where it would be safe.
"His treasure, he said," added Harrison amiably, "was
perfume. It may be"
The perfumer stared at the saddlebags. Albert handed
them over and stood respectfully against the wall.
"M'siew, was the merchant's name Dubois?"
"Probably," said Harrison. "I think so. He was short and
plump and miserable."
"Ah, M'sieur Ybarra!" said the perfumer, "This is provi-
dential! Let me make sure." He opened the saddlebags and
sniffed rapidly at one bottle after another. "But yes! The
perfume that Madame the Empress has chosen to have ex-
clusively  tor  herself!  M'sieur,"this  to  Harrison"my
obligation to you has no limit! Now I can serve M'sieur
Ybarra to the limit of his desires! I beg you to name any
way in which I can discharge my gratitude for your con-
descension to this Duboisi"
Harrison said mildly:
"I will be happy if you supply M. Ybarra with whatever
be wishes. But, to be truthful, I am most anxious to make the
acquaintance of a M. de Bassompierre. If among your
patrons"
The dark-haired manPepe's great-great-grandfather
said with dignity:
"I have his acquaintance. He has been in Paris. He is
not here now. I expect to see him within a week."
Hamson's pulse had leaped at the beginning of the state-
ment. Then he was bitterly disappointed. The perfumer re-
garded him shrewdly before he tactfully offered Ybarra
whatever he chose of the saddlebags' contents. It occurred
to Harrison, despite his disappointment, that his willingness
to sell the Empress' special perfume to someone else came
from the fact that Josephine would buy anything from any-
body, but paying for it was another matter.
Ybarra, with vast dignity, ordered the entire shipment of
the Empress' perfume delivered to his wife. Madame
SenoraYbarra would be pleased. He added negligently that
his major-domo would have orders to pay the price in gold
on its delivery. Which was grandeur. Gold was at a premium
in Paris because of the English war.
Before he left, he assured Harrison profoundly that he
would inform M. de Bassompierre that M. Harrison of les
Etats-Uilis wished urgently to speak to him.
He left, but before Harrison could leave the perfumer made
a gesture asking him to stay.
"M'sieur," he said warmly, "I am deeply in your debt."
"Then you can give me a receipt," said Harrison amiably.
"But of course!" The perfumer wrote out a receipt with a
quill pen. "And I should pay for the merchandise"
"When Dubois comes to you for the money," said Harri-
son. He did not want to have to account to Madame CarroU
for any business transaction. "I am not in business."
The perfumer reflected. Then he said very carefully:
"You said you wished to meet M. de Bassompierre. Have
you paid your respects to the American ambassador as yet?"
When Harrison shook his head, the perfumer said with
even greater care:
"I suggest it, m'sieur. He may give you valuable advice."
"About M. de Bassompierre's reputation?"
The perfumer shrugged.
"I am in your debt," he said. "I simply urge you to visit
the American ambassador. I say no more."
He bowed. Harrison went out. In the street he said to Al-
bert:
"The man we want to find has so foul a reputation that
even a tradesman tells me I'd better ask questions about him
before I make his acquaintance. The devil!"
He made the same comment to Carroll when Carroll re-
turned to the inn near sundown. By that time he was
depressed. He was desperately impatient to do something
about de Bassompierre. He felt that within a week almost any
change in the state of things in this period might have pro-
duced catastrophes in his ownand Valerie'sera.
"In a week," said Carroll comfortably, "we'll move to a
more respectable address and bribe Ybarra's footman to tip
us when de BassompiSrre turns up. I enjoyed myself today,
Harrison!"
Harrison spoke restlessly, not paying attention.
"A week . . . Anything could happen in a week, back where
we came from! History's changing between now and the
time we were born! It's changed at least twice and each time
it changed back but"
"I'm arranging that," said Carroll blandly. "I begin to
think I can handle de Bassompierre! But I still want to find
out about that other time-tunnel! You see, Harrison, I went
to see Cuvier, the naturalist, today. What name do you
think I sent in to him?" He grinned. "I sent in my name as
de Bassompierre! Do you see the point?"
Harrison gazed at him, appalled. Carroll grinned more
widely.
"Think it over! Cuvier received me, a splendid, stout,
gray-bearded character with a magnificent sense of his own
importance! And my name was de Bassompierrel I con-
gratulated him upon his eminence. I said that I'd been
travelling for some years, but on my return to France I'd
heard of nothing but his fame. I implied that nobody con-
sidered Napoleon especially important, compared to Cuvieri
He thawed. He warmed up. We began to talk natural history.
We discussed the recapitulation of primitive forms in the
developing embryo. We discussed the metamorphosis of in-
sects. We had the devil of a good time, Harrison! In spite of
my disillusionment and disgrace, I was born to be a college
professor, and we talked shop. I made a definite impression
on Cuvier! He won't forget me! I said that I planned to go to
the United States to study the Red Indians. He almost begged
me to stay here and meet his confreres . . ."
Harrison said stridently:
"But look here! Thatthat"
"That," said Carroll amiably "means that the real de
Bassompierre will be indignantly shown the door if he ever
attempts to meet Cuvier! Cuvier knows M. de Bassompierre!
Me! He will have no use for anybody else using that name!
Tomorrow I visit the Marquis de La Place. We call him La-
place. I'll dredge up some astronomy and flattery to deliver.
When I'm through, anything de Bassompierre attempts to say
to any learned man will be indignantly ignored! You see?"
Harrison hesitated. He didn't feel at ease in scheming.
He couldn't estimate the effectiveness of devious behavior.
But his own efforts had produced nothing, so far. At least
Carroll was getting something done. He was discrediting
de Bassompierre in advance. Maybe this was why he, Har-
rison, had found the intellectual dynamite in the Bibliotheque
Nationale completely disregarded. Maybe this trick of Car-
roll's had prevented de Bassompierre's letters from having
any effect!
But still there,was the other time-tunnel to be discovered,
through which de Bassompierre had gotten the information
he'd tried to disseminate before its proper time.
He yielded. He knew frustration and the need for pa-
tience. He was excessively worried about Valeric. She'd be
imagining all sorts of dangers for him. She'd imagine bandits
and diseases and hardships and infections. Maybe she knew
that in this period it was considered certain that everyone
would have smallpox as, at a later date, everybody was
sure to catch the measles. She'd be worried.
It is typical of the romantic human male that he believes
the girl he cherishes worries only about him. The girls, in
turn, are convinced that romantic young men worry only
about them. And they are right. Harrison, for example, was
not disturbed about the possibility of atomic war in the time
he'd come from. That prospect was so familiar that he didn't
worry about it at all. Anyhow he knew nothing of a yellow
alert brought about by failure of radios on two supersonic
passenger planes at once. He hadn't heard of counter-attacks
almost ordered because of an amorous sperm whale leaping
out of the water to impress a coy lady whale off the Atlantic
Coast of North America. Radar had reported the whale as
a possible rocket-launching submarine, and it was a very
close call indeed.
Actually, if the situation had gone unresolved for just
about five minutes more, unlimited catastrophe could have
resulted. But Harrison did not think about such things. He
worried about Valerie worrying about him, and he sweated in
anguish whenever it occurred to him that Valerie might feel
a slight dizziness, and find herself in a changed present in
which she was married to somebody else. And that that
present wouldn't change back.
In accomplished fact, of course, a sea patrol plane had
dropped a flare where the possible submarine contact was
reported by radar. It photographed the sperm-whale court-
ship in progress. It so reported. And an Arctic patrol plane
intercepted  one of the two muted but properly lighted
passenger planes over the Arctic, and made passes at it when
it  did  not  reply  to  radio  signals.  That  patrol  plane  herded
it back to its  airport  of departure.  And the co-pilot of the
other muted plane found a loose wire in his plane's equip-
ment, and fixed it, and there was no longer a condition of
yellow alert.
That whole matter ended with ponderous praise from high
military officers on the splendid efficiency of response to
a supposed emergency by the men and planes under their
command. Et cetera and et cet. And that was the end of the
incident.
Valerie knew nothing about it. Her aunt was in St. Jean-
sur-Seine, tending M. Dubois and Valerie was in complete
charge of the shop. She knew of nothing to worry about except
a discrepancy of twenty-two francs in the cash drawer.
There was that much too much on hand. Valerie really wor-
ried only about Harrison.
The rest of the affair of the time-tunnel continued in
typically irrational fashion. Only commonplace things hap-
pened to the people involved, but they happened for pre-
posterous reasons. There was also something of the inevitable
about the various incidents, as if the cosmos had really been
designed for people to live in and it would remain possible to
survive despite their most earnest efforts to the contrary.
Naturally, then, Harrison's life remained a mixture of
the unpredictable and the tedious. He remained in 1804. In
Paris. He was seen in suitable public places and was casually
accepted as a travelling American who must be rich to travel
from so remote and savage a place as les Etats-Unis. He
kept his ears feverishly open for any clue however faint to the
spread of information from the twentieth century into the
nineteenth. If such leakage could be discovered, it would
indicate another time-tunnel in operation.
The only thing suspicious was that jokes told in the
United States after nearly two hundred years were essentially
the jokes told in the France of Napoleon. But they would
probably be told centuries later still, and still be laughed at.
Can-oil had a better time. He visited prominent scientists.
He presented himself as M. de Bassompierre, returned to
France after long travel, and filled with reverence for the
learned men of the time. He discussed mathematics with
Lagrange, and the fact that he'd specialized in statistical
analysis made him a discerning and marvelously welcome
visitor.  He talked electricity  with Ampere,  and  they got
along so splendidly that Ampere made him stay to dinner
and they talked garrulously of the recent discoveries made
by M. Faraday in England.
"I've been careful," he told Harrison satisfiedly on the
fifth night of their stay in Paris. "I haven't told them any-
thing they don't know already. But I can understand what
they're driving at. When they say something, I know what
they mean. And it's pathetic how grateful they are to be
admired by somebody who realizes what they should be ad-
mired for!"
"I'm going to send Albert to make a deal with Ybarra's
footman," said Harrison restlessly. "De Bassompierre should
be back in town in a day or so." He added. "I can't help
worrying about Valerie. There's always the chance that an-
other time slip will happen. I know! There's a modulus of
elasticity in historic events. They can be stretched, in fact as
well as by historians, and they can snap back. But there must
be an elastic limit, too, and if they're stretched just so far
they won't go back to normal! They'll stay stretched! I'm
thinking that we could go back and find"
He made a helpless gesture. Everything that had happened
or that he'd done had been drudgery or common sense, and
there was no feeling of achievement. Right now it was a pain-
ful business, simply sitting and waiting for the fate of all
the world he knew to be decided by something it wasn't time
for him to do yet.
Albert, however, seemed to enjoy life. Upon occasion he
attended Carroll or Harrison when they went somewhere that
an attending lackey was called for. Once Harrison went to
the theater and saw Thalma playing a translationand re-
visionof the School for Scandal. Nobody mentioned its
English origin. Harrison thought it intolerably over-acted.
Once he saw the Emperor, in an open carriage with a
cavalry guard, driving like mad for somewhere or other.
Doubtless he saw other historic figures, but nobody identi-
fied them and he didn't know. Which was the sort of thing
that will happen to any stranger in any city. But it was not
amusing. Only Albert wore the air of someone who loves
the life he lives.
Once Harrison asked him almost enviously if Paris-this-
side-of-the-tunnel was still as diverting as at the beginning.
Albert said zestfully:
"Ah, m'sieur, you would have to be a retired burglar to
realize what it is like! The locks are of an age of barbarism!
The strong-boxes, one could make better ones of cheese!
Had I a farm-wagon, and if I were not retired, I could load
it to capacity without an atom of risk!"
"Look here, Albert," said Harrison firmly, "you can't go
burgling here! We can't risk anything like that! Our mis-
sion"
Albert said reproachfully:
"But did I not tell you that I am retired? Of course on
my first visit to St. Jean-sur-Seine this side of the tunnel,
you comprehend, m'sieurl There was an emergency! As
was the need for identity papers. But I have acted truly only
as an amateur here! It would be undignified to take advant-
age! These childish locks, these prehistoric strong-boxes . . - I
would be ashamed! I have had but one real temptation since
we arrived, M'sieur Harrison!"
Harrison regarded him suspiciously:
"Resist it!" he warned. "You could ruin everything! And
the task M. Carroll and I have set ourselves is so important
that I do not know how to tell you of its necessity! You
mustn't risk burglaries here, Albert!"
"The danger is over," said Albert. "I yielded to the temp-
tation at two hours after midnight last night.  Strictly as
an amateur, m'sieur! It is ended. Do not reproach me! I
achieved what no man of my former profession has ever
achieved in all of history! There was once a Colonel Blood
who attempted it in England, but"
Harrison's blood tended to run cold.
"What did you do?" he demanded.
"M'sieur," said Albert, grinning, "I ventured into the es-
tablishment of the jeweller who bad made the crown for the
Emperor's coronation. And I, m'sieur, took the crown in
my hands, and I sat upon the throne made ready for the
coronation ceremony, and1 crowned myself, m'sieurl No
other burglar in all of history, retired or active, has ever
had an Emperor's crown in his hands with a way to carry
it  away quite  open,  but who instead has  simply  crowned
himself with it. But I did!"
Harrison tried to swallow.
"The crown," confided Albert, "was a trifle small. It
would have had to be altered to fit me. But in any case my
action was purely that of an amateur. I pursued a hobby, only.
So I put it back in its place and only you and I know of the
event. But consider, m'sieur! Where but beyond M. Can-oil's
tunnel could such a thing occur? Here it is true that any-
thing at alleven that I did not take such trumperyany-
thing at all is much more than likely to happen!"
Albert went proudly away and Harrison held his head.
He already had a nightmarish suspicion that at any instant
he might do something, without even knowing it, which
would cause something else to happen, and that something
else would cause something other, and so on and so on un-
til  by  the  late  twentieth  century  all  of  Europe  would  be
totally unlike the Europe he'd known. Andthis was es-
pecially nightmarishif the future from here, which was the
present as he knew it, if the future from here was changed,
when he went back to it he would never meet Valeric. Or, he
might not have been born.
Curiously, though, he only worried about possible disasters
in the line of danger he'd discovered. He didn't think of the
longer-established perils the twentieth century tried not to
think about. For example, he didn't worry at all about
atomic war. He didn't think of it.
But it was danger enough. Harrison had known without
interest of the explosion of an atomic bomb by China. He
was in his own time then, and absorbed in his romance
with Valerie. He had not noticed that the Chinese atomic
potentiality was said to be the work of a Frenchman who'd
decided that the Russians were political reactionaries. He'd
been unaware of a near escape from nuclear war when a
sperm whale and two plane radios conking out nearly
touched off a red alert. He'd missed the explosion of the
second Chinese bomb, which emphasized the message of the
first. But now, when he was separated from Valerie by nearly
two centuries, the real danger, the deadly danger, the cer-
tain catastrophe which meant the end of the world took
place.
The Chinese exploded a fifty megaton bomb. In less than
three calendar weeks the celestial kingdom had changed from
a seemingly sleeping giant to a modern atomic-armed Great
Power. But it was different from the other great powers. Its
rulers were calmly prepared to lose half or more than half
of their population in war. So they couldand wouldstart
a war if they were crossed.
They said so, frankly. To begin with, they demanded the
surrender of Formosa, with no guarantees for its population.
They observed that China was now the greatest of great
powers, and it expected to exercise much influence in the
world from this time on. And it wanted Formosa surrendered
as the first exercise of that influence.
"There was the dubious possibility that it bluffed; that it
didn't have the atomic weapons needed to smash the rest of
the world while being blasted from without. If it bluffed,
it might be destroyed. If it didn't bluff, history would simply
come to an end. So the rest of the world drearily prepared to
act as if it were a bluff, and call it. There wasn't anything else
to do except surrender. Which wasn't worth while.
Harrison was in the Inn when Pepe Ybarra arrived from
St. Jean-sur-Seine with the news. Pepe had been prepared to
travel with the others. Now he arrived dusty and exhausted
and pale, and gave them the news. Madame Carroll tended
her brother, still sneezing and still coughing but likely to
survive until the bombs began to fall. Valeric was anxious
about Harrison. But Pepe was beside himself.
The Chinese could start atomic war. They would. Some
damned renegade Frenchman, defecting from Russia, had
given the Chinese, the bomb. One crazy, fanatic French-
man. And the world was doomed. Even the atmosphere of
Earth would become poisonous when enough bombs had been
detonated in it. Not one animal or plant or moss or lichen
would survive. Perhaps no fish or crustacean in all the world's
seas would continue to live. It might be that not even single-
celled  creatures  would  go  on  abstractedly  feeding  upon
organic debris, with pauses to multiply by division, in the
deepest trenches of the ocean's depths. It was at least prob-
able that Earth would die to the last least quasi-living virus
particle under its skies. And history would end.
From one viewpoint this would appear to settle per-
manently the abstract question of whether or not the uni-
verse 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 de-
stroy itself, it was merely an unedifying random happening
on an unimportant planet.
Butthere 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 twentiethwhyif 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 Harri-
son 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 somethingsmokeless 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
somethinganythingto 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'11 be bombs and
devastation and fall out where she is! I'm getting Valeric!"
"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. Hamson 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 pre-
determine 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 tolerableat
least  non-lethallatter  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 CarroU'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'siew," said Albert apologetically. "I do not
anticipate events, as I told M'siew Harrison. I prefer sur-
prises. 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 Can-oil, 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 de-
cide to stay here, we'll buy your gold pieces, Albert. Cer-'
tainly M. Harrison has decided to emigrate to this time, be-
cause 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 suc-
ceeded. 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 CarroU'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 C.arroll, 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 lengthduration, time-intervalbetween 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 un-
stable. 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 with-
out 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 refresh-
ment 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. Har-
rison 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 Val-
erie's age, with Valerie's coloring. Her expression was in-
finitely 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.
He returned, followed by his coachman, dripping and en-
raged. 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 an-
other 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 ac-
commodations 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
bagof all imaginable objectswas female garments.
Harrison was very weary, but he came back to full wake-
fulness at sight of a woman's costume among their posses-
sions. 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 coach-
man 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 denunci-
ation. "Albert made the uproar so he could get this out of
the coach's trunk. Probably because he was bound to be sur-
prised 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, Har-
rison! 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. Car-
roll said detachedly:
"Georges, what are the Chinese doing? Have they bombed
Formosa yet?"
M. Dubois' mouth dropped open. He could imagine noth-
ing more irrelevantwith his sister kicking her heels and
screaming on the floor abovethan a question about inter-
national politics or Far Eastern Affairs.
"Mymy sister," he said, trembling, "I fear for her health!
She is insuch extreme distress! She has waited so anxiously
to receive the shipment fromwhere 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! Iwillreturntomywifewhat
moneyisleft! 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 perhapsjust
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
againand she'll be more prosperous than ever before!"
M. Dubois seized upon the faintest possible hope of calming
his sister.
"Thatthat 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! Ham-
son, 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 modificationssuch
as street-lightsbut it was very similar,  quaint and un-
spoiled 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 cocsider
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 reason-
able 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 mur-
derers-to-be asked nicely.
The rest of the news story dealt with negotiations, with pro-
found 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 Col-
bert which was precious to the hearts of all Frenchmen be-
cause in it had lived Julie d'Arnaud, mistress of Charles VII
of France. It was considered the most ancient wooden struc-
ture 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 sap-
phires. 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 wrily:
"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 mis-
tress 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 con-
sidered a non-aggression pact with China. Les Btats-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 neu-
trality. West Germany demanded atom bombs for its own
defense. But there were no gatherings of people to buy news-
papers. 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 par-
ticular 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 Valerieat least,
not yetbut 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-Seme. Valeric dutifully delivered to her
aunt the contents of the shop's cash drawer. Madame Carroll
retired with her, immediately, to count the money and de-
mand 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-grand-
mother."
He hadn't thought to tell Pepe about it before. But Albert
interposed as Pepe would have asked morbid questions.
"M'sieur, my clothing of this period"
"Ask Dubois," said Harrison. "Hold it! Are you going to
stay in this time? This side of the tunnel?"
"M'sieur," said Albert in a subdued tone, "I think I shall
do so. I could not possibly do anything more magnificent
than I achieved in the jewellers' you know of. I wore Na-
poleon's crown before he did! I shall remain here and con-
template that achievement. I shall retire contentedly even
from my hobby! I shall make a hobby of my recollections!"
"Read these newspapers," commanded Harrison, "and if
you don't change your mind I've a pocketful of paper cur-
rency with which to buy any gold pieces you may have ac-
cumulated."
Albert waved the papers aside. He shook his head.
"M'sieur," he said firmly, "M'sieur Carroll explained to
me the France behind the tunnel. I now understand it. Un-
happily I can now anticipate events in it. I even understand
your and M. Carroll's intention to change the past so the
present will become other than as it is. But that cannot be
predicted! It is impossible to guess what it may be! And it will
no longer be my hobby, but it will give me pleasure to ob-
serve. So as a former connoisseur of surprises I shall remain
at this end of the tunnel to see what comes next. I shall be
surprised at anything that happens, and most of all if noth-
ing happens. So I will be happy to exchange my napoleons
for the paper money of modern France!"
He dumped out the contents of his individual saddlebags.
Gold coins seemed to cover the floor. He stacked them mat-
ter-of-factly while Harrison counted his paper money. Albert
named a sum. Harrison paid it. There was paper money left
over. Harrison said:
"You may as well take this too."
"No, m'sieur," said Albert proudly. "We are friends. If you
will arrange to get my proper costume for the present time,
I will leave you and return to my retirement."
Dubois came down the stairs. He looked precariously re-
lieved. His sister seemed to be talking almost tranquilly with
Valerie. She had even determined that Valeric should wear
the female costume of 1804 in the shop. It would make the
shop distinctive. And if Carroll would take up his residence
in the era of Napoleon, and if he would supply from that
period the stock she required, M. Dubois need never again risk
pneumonia by travelling in the past. And M. Dubois was al-
most cheerful, because his sister was less agitated than he'd
seen her for months.
He gave Albert his corduroy trousers and sash and the
red-checked shirt. Albert put them on and stuffed his pockets
with paper money. He swaggered to the door. Then he
stopped. He returned to shake hands emotionally with Car-
roll  and  Pope  and  Harrison.  Then,  from  apparently no-
where, he produced a much-folded scrap of paper. He pressed
it into Harrison's hand.
"Do not read this," he said unhappily, "until I have gone."
He went swiftly to the door, gazed back at them as if
through brimming eyes, and went out. They heard his foot-
steps hastening away.
Harrison unfolded the paper. Crudely written with a
strictly improvised pen, he read:
"Monsieur; I have to confess. It was after I had put the
bucket on the coachman's head and taken the parcel from the
coach that I learned from the innkeeper that the gentleman
in the black cloak was M. de Bassompierre. Then I dared not
reveal it. I weep that I disarranged your plans. I beg your
forgiveness,
Albert."
Carroll said:
"The devil! We missed a possibly lucky break! But it's
too late to repair it now! We're starting back, anyhow. Get
into your 1804 clothes, Harrison. Ybarra, you don't have to
change. Pack these books with that newspaper. The paper
should convince de Bassompierre when we find him again!
You've got a good lot of cash, Harrison!"
Harrison looked up. He was startled by what he'd just
found out.
"Albert told me how much I owed him, and I paid him. But
he figured the napoleons at six hundred francs each, instead
of twelve!"
"That was the bargain he offered," said Carroll dryly. "A
most admirable character! But get changed. We want to get
moving!"
Harrison changed. And he was thinking morbidly that he
hadn't yet gotten Valeric to consent to move into the past as
an atom-bomb-proof shelter when he heard her come down
the stairs from the upper floor. He looked yearningly at the
door of the kitchen, to which the stairs descended.
She came through that door, smiling. She looked to Har-
rison for approval. She wore the costume looted from the
coach at the post-house.
"Ma tante," she said demurely, "told me to try on the
costume I am to wear in the shop. Does it become me?"
Harrison could only babble. Anguish filled him. Valeric
mustn't share the disaster due to come upon the earth! He
remembered the fields and towns and highways on the way to
Paris. He'd imagined them as they seemed certain to become
if the events  of  1804 were not  changed  so  definitely  that
reality could not cover them up by making them never to
have been. He'd pictured all living things as alive no longer.
Trees no longer in leaf. Grass no longer green. Cities no
longer inhabited. All solid ground mere lifeless dust or else
thick mud; all the seas empty of life; the air never echoing
the sounds of birds or insects or anything but thunder and
rain and wind and surf with no ears anywhere to hear. . . .
"Listen!" he said thickly, "Come through the tunnel with
me, Valerie. I want to talk to you!"
She followed him unquestioningly. He warned her of the
symptoms she'd feel during the passage through the tunnel.
Then they were together in the resonant, echoing emptiness
of the foundry building which did not exist in the same
century as the cottage.
He tried to explain. She looked about her. She was as-
tonished. "There was brand new daylight filtering through the
cracks in boarded-up windows of the foundry. But it was deep
night outside the cottage! Here it was dayl He explained
that oddity, desperately aware that what he told her was no
less preposterous than what she saw.
Carroll appeared behind them. He carried saddlebags. He
put them down, nodded, and said:
"There is going to be an argument with your aunt, Valerie.
For some unknown reason I feel responsibility for her. I
shall try to persuade her to join us. Heaven knows why!"
He went back through the tunnel and therefore nearly two
centuries into what was here the future. Valerie said uneasily,
"But is this the arrangement my uncle uses to get the
merchandise for the shop?"
"He came through here, yes," said Harrison. "You see"
He tried again to explain. She put her hand tremblingly
upon his arm. He ceased to explain. There were matters
much more urgent than explanations. Carroll returned with
more saddlebags. He deposited them and said dryly, "I'm only
Valerie's uncle by marriage, Harrison, but I think I should
ask your intentions!"
Harrison swore at him and then hastily apologized to
Valerie.
"The war has begun," said Carroll. At Harrison's violent
reaction he explained. "No, not the world war. Not atomic
war. But my wife is in action. I've told her I want her to
come through the tunnel because I intend for Valerie to stay
there until the war scare's over. She can't imagine such a
thing. She hasn't bothered to refuse. She's just working up to
a completed description, in detail, of my criminal insanity."
He went back. Valerie said shakily, "Shouldshould I try
to calm her?"
"Have you ever managed it?" asked Harrison. "Look!
There's going to be atomic war! But Carroll and Pepe and I
have some faint chance of preventing it! We don't know what
will take its place, but I won't let anything happen to you! I
won't do it!"
Pepe came out of the tunnel, carrying bags. He put them
down. He said distressedly:
"Dios miof If Carroll does persuade her to come"
He made an appalled gesture. He went back. Valerie said:
"I am frightened. Of my aunt. Notof anything else."
Perhaps ten minutes later Carroll came through again. M.
Duboiscame with him. Dubois said agitatedly:
"Valerie, your aunt commands that you return! At once!
She is agitated! She is angry! I have never seen her so
angry! Come!"
Valerie stirred in Harrison's arms. He tightened them
about her. She said faintly:
"I1 cannot!"
"But your aunt demands it! She threatensshe threat-
ens"
Pepe came out of the tunnel with a last parcel. He said
with some grimness:
"She swears that if Ma'mselle Valerie does not return at
once that she will disown her forever! She will endure this
state of things no longer! She will abandon her and"
Carroll said kindly:
"Maybe you can calm her down, Georges. This thing is
more important than her getting her way again. Better try
to make her see it."
Dubois went shakily back to the world of the future. Al-
most instantly thereafter Madame Carroll's voice reached
them. It was thin and muted by its passage through time, just
a muttering. Madame Carroll cried out fiercely in the totally
uncontrolled fury of a bad-tempered woman. Her voice
sounded far away but shrieking. Then things came flying out
into the foundry. They were the twentieth-century garments
Valerie had removed to put on the costume for the shop.
Madame Carroll's voice shrieked like the ghost of an outcry
of rage.
Then there came a peculiar, echoing, musical sound. It
was like the string of some incredible harp, plucked once and
then very gradually dying away. It seemed to make all the
ground hereabouts vibrate. Their bodies vibrated with it. It
ended.
Carroll jumped, startled and angry.
"Damnation! She saw me throw a switch on to make the
tunnel! To make a threat, she's thrown it off! And the tun-
nel's collapsed and can't be made again! We're stuck herel"
Four days later they arrived at an inn still a few
hours' journey from Paris. As inns go, it was distinctly an
improvement on most such stopping places in the France of
the period. Harrison felt that their appearance was improved,
too. Carroll and Valeric rode grandly in the lumbering coach
they'd acquired. He was the uncle by marriage and he wore
the air of an uncle-in-fact. He'd mentioned that she ought to
have a maid along as a travelling companion, but an extra
pair of listening ears would have been a nuisance. Harrison
and Pepe rode beside the coach, armed as a matter of course.
Pepe's regard for Harrison's priority with Valerie made him
act with the perfect, amiable disinterest of a cousin. Harrison
had the role of fiance. He could not have played any other.
He tended to bristle when anybody tried to look into the
coach where Valerie was. "There were two mounted lackeys
trailing  behind.  They  resembled  Albert  solely  in  being
wholly without conscience.
All these semblances of respectability had been secured
by the use of gold napoleons and a swaggering air, plus
complete disregard of the literal truth. Carroll seemed to
take pleasure in inventing grotesque but convincing lies to
make whatever they did seem perfectly natural.
The coach turned into the inn courtyard and there was
another coach already there. A liveried servant held the
horses of the other vehicle. There were yet other horses,
saddled and tied to hitching posts. There was a cheerful,
comfortable bustle round about. There was smoke from a
badly drawing chimney. There was the smell of strongly-
odored cooking. The courtyard was mostly mud, though
straw had been spread here and there for better footing.
"Ybarra," said CarroU amiably, "see if we can get suitable
quarters here."
Pepe beckoned to one of their two lackeys, rode to where
the ground was not wholly mud, and dismounted. He tossed
his reins to the lackey and went inside.
"I think," said Carroll reflectively, "that I'll call myself de
Bassompierre from now on. I'm anxious to find that char-
acter! I shall expect to make a deal with him for the use of
his time-tunnel. But that's in addition to reforming him so
he won't write to learned men."
Harrison bent over to look inside the coach.
"Are you all right, Valerie? Comfortable?"
She smiled at him. He felt a desperate pride in her. But
she felt safe, and she felt approved of, and a girl can face
most things with such assurances.
The time and place and atmosphere were totally common-
place, for Napoleonic Prance. There was nothing remarkable
in view. Some two or three post-stages to the south-east lay
Paris. In it candles and torches prepared to substitute, feebly,
for the light by which people saw during the day. Travelling
coaches like theirs would be hastening to arrive at stopping
places for the night. In an hour all of France would be in-
doors. Nothing out of the ordinary appeared to be in prospect.
But actually the ordinary is remarkable. Nothing ever happens
unless the odds against it are astronomical. Nobody in all of
history has ever anticipated an event and had it come out in
all its details as it was foreseen.
Certainly nobody could have guessed at any imaginable
actual linkage between the pause of a particular travelling
coach in the France of 1804 and the events on the island of
Formosa nine thousand miles away and nearly two centuries
later. But the events were intimately connected.
The island of Formosa lay in bright sunshine under
threat of destruction by atomic bombs from the mainland.
One would have anticipated swarming panic and flight,
especially by foreigners. One would have looked to see its
harbors empty and its cities seething masses of humanity,
frenziedly killing other humans, in the hope that through
murder they could avoid being murdered from the sky.
But it wasn't that way at all. There were ships steaming
away from it at topmost speed, to be sure. But there were
other ships rushing toward it at full speed ahead. Its harbors
were crowded with vessels, taking on refugees to the limit of
sitting-down space on their decks. As they were loaded,
they headed away to the nearest unthreatened harbor to dis-
charge them and go back for more. There was an incredible
stream of planes flying to and from the island. Every air field
was devoted exclusively to the landing, loading, and dispatch
of a most motley assortment of flying machines, which
descended to take in passengers and immediately flew away
again.
There were no men in uniform among the refugees.
Women, yes. Children, in multitudes. Ships of the sea and
air swarmed to carry away as many of its helpless population
as could be removed. But among the men left behind there
was no resignation. There was no despair. There was fury
and resolve, instead. When a flying transport landed and
brought a ground-to-air missile and a crew to launch it, there
was grim rejoicing. Formosa was going to attempt a defense
against atomic attack. The military of a hundred nations
wanted passionately to know whether defense was possible.
All the world had defenses of which much was hoped, but too
little known, just as all the world had bombs for attack. If
Formosa could be defended, then war need not mean despair.
But if Formosa could be bombed against all-out defense, then
there was not much point to anything. Already it was under-
stood that if war came all the West would act as one. It was
more than suspected, though, that some nations had made
private bargains to send their rockets at Chinese-chosen
targets,  in return for a promise of more-than-slave-status
when the Chinese ruled the earth. But Formosa would be
defended. If there was no longer any real hope of avoiding
nuclear war, there was at least some sort of hope for
humanity's survival.
This was the situation nine thousand miles, a hundred-odd
years, some weeks and days and a few hours from the inn
courtyard where Harrison assured himself that Valerie was
comfortable. There was another coach in the yard. Pepe was
inside the inn, asking questions. It seemed that nothing could
conceivably bemore unconnected than the situation in this
inn yard in Napoleon's time and the situation on Formosa
nearly two hundred years later.
In the later time and far-away place, a broadcast was re-
ceived. It was from the mainland government, and it was
bland and confident. It announced that planes carrying
atomic bombs would shortly appear over Formosa. If they
were fired on, they would drop their bombs and a full-scale
bombardment by all the mainland air force would follow. If
they were not fired on, the granted time for revolt and sur-
render would still be allowed. The broadcast seemed incredi-
ble,  but  the  local  military  rejoiced  by  anticipation.  No
planes would ever reach Formosa to drop bombs! An air um-
brella already existed above the island. Ground-to-air missile
crews were already on twenty-four-hour alert. When and as
the radar screen notified approaching planes, they would be
blasted to atoms!
Then the Chinese bombers came. The radars detected them
at once. But they could not locate them. The Chinese had a
radar jamming device, as effective as the radio jamming de-
vice used within the iron curtain. The radar showed something
in the sky. But they said it existed at all altitudes up to eighty
thousand feet, and at every spot along an eighty-mile front.
It was a target worse than useless to shoot at.
Presently the clumsy Chinese bombers circled placidly
over Formosa. They stayed an infuriating six thousand feet
up. They were vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire. To anti-missile
missiles. They were sitting ducks! But they couldn't be de-
tected on the way to Formosa, and when they arrived de-
fense was useless.
They were not fired on, and they circled placidly until
night fell. Then they climbed up and up and up until they
couldn't be spotted by telescopes, and then they went away.
It was not possible to trail them. The radar jamming radia-
tion dimmed and dimmed. Presently it stopped. It had been
demonstrated that Formosa could be bombed whenever the
mainland Chinese felt like bombing it.
So could any other city in the world.
In the inn yard in France, somebody in the other, waiting
coach summoned a servant to the coach window. That
servant turned to look at the coach with Harrison close by it
and Carroll and Valeric still within.
Pepe came out of the inn; hastily, almost running. It was
dusk, now, though the sky was still a lucent blue overhead.
Pepe came hastily across the mud and straw. He reached the
coach-side.
"He's in there," panted Pepe. "I saw him! De Bassom-
pierre! To make sure, I asked the innkeeper! He's sitting
there with food and wine before him! The man whose coach
Albert robbed!"
Carroll was instantly outside the coach.
"Ah! And this is a good place to talk to him!"
"But Valeric"
"Stay with her," commanded Carroll. "This is going to
take time, anyhow. There'11 be argument. You can bring her
in later."
He went swiftly after Pepe. Harrison looked irresolutely
after them. But, servants or no servants, he wasn't going to
leave Valeric alone in the coach in an inn yard of this period!
"This is bad!" he said restlessly. "We've got to talk to him,
but"
A voice said obsequiously:
"Your Excellency's pardon! Madame de Cespedes begs
that she may speak to you!"
Harrison swung about. A liveried servant from the other
coach stood hat in hand beside him. He bowed.
"Madame de Cespedes, Excellency, begs your Excellency's
aid in a matter of life and death! She is in the coach yonder."
The lackey's French was thick with a Spanish accent.
Harrison recognized his livery. He'd seen it outside the door
of a perfumer's shop in Paris. Ybarra.
He gestured to his own lackey to bring the coach after
him. He rode to the other coach. He started. Peering ap-
pealingly at him from the coach window, he saw the woman
who with a dark-haired girl had been in the travelling
coach six days previously, when Albert abstracted a travel-
ling case from the coach's trunk. She had looked plump and
good-natured then. Now, as then, she wore the headdress of a
Spanish widow. Then, but not now, she looked amiable and
contented. Now she was composed but fiercely in earnest.
"M'sieur," she said desperately, "I am in most great need
of the aid of a gentleman. I am the Comtesse de Cespedes.
I am the sister-in-law of Don Ignacio Ybarra. His wife and I
we have been robbed of our jewels by M'sieur de Bas-
sompierre, who is in the inn yonder. My servants do not dare
lay hands upon a gentleman. I beg your aid!"
Valerie in the coach had followed closely enough to hear
every word. Now she said warmly:
"But of course, Madame! M'sieur Harrison and his friends
will be happy to serve you!"
Harrison closed his mouth; opened it, and suddenly saw
the possibilities. De Bassompierre had the very worst of all
possible reputations. They had need to stop him from chang-
ing the past to bring about who-knew-whatbut certainly
atomic warto the time they'd come from. If they could
prove him a common thief, he must meet any terms they
chose to set, including the revelation of the other time-
tunnel Carroll at once could not believe in and could not
fully deny. In short, Madame Cespedes' predicament might be
the solution to their problem.
He gave crisp orders to the lackeys, who led the two
coaches to where it was possible for a woman to alight with-
out spoiling her foot-gear. He helped Valerie to the ground,
and then the slightly chubby occupant of the other coach.
Grandly, he escorted them into the inn.
They entered a large, smoke-stained, odorous room in
which a huge fire burned. There were some rough tables.
Some travelers, by their attire merchants or the like, ate
rather noisily by one wall. At the choicest table, because
nearest the fire, sat the scowling, becapped individual Albert
and this innkeeper had identified as M. de Bassompierre.
Carroll loomed over him, stiffly polite but not to be put off.
Pepe stood nearby, in a state of inexplicable agitation. The
scowling man waved Carroll aside, as one too insignificant
to be listened to.
Then Madame de Cespedes said in a clear, indignant voice:
"That is he! Messieurs, I ask you to request him to return
my and my sister-in-law's jewels!"
De Bassompierre jerked his head around. His face went
blank. Then he ground his teeth. Madame de Cespedes, de-
spite her plumpness, was a perfect picture of dignity and
contempt.
"M'sieur de Bassompierre," she said icily, "you greeted me
in my brother-in-law's coach on the Avenue des Italiens to-
day, as I waited for my sister-in-law. You dismounted and
spoke to me at the coach door. And m'sieur, I smelled per-
fume upon you. And it was a very special perfume, possessed
only by my sister-in-law and Her Majesty the Empress herself!
You went on. I sent a servant to call my sister-in-law. I told
her of the event. We went immediately and my sister-in-law
found her perfume disturbed and her jewels gone. Mine were
gone, also. My sister-in-law instantly sent servants in search
of her husband, Don Ignacio Ybarra. I ordered the coach-
man to drive me in the direction you had taken, to keep
watch for you. I have overtaken you. Now, in the presence of
these gentlemen I request that you return my jewels and
those of my sister-in-law!"
Madame de Cespedes was a small woman, but her manner
was dignity itself. She held her head high.
De Bassompierre said roughly:
"I have never seen this woman before. I know nothing of
her jewels!"
He stood up, arrogantly.
"I do not care to know you or her!"
He flung his cloak about himself. His hidden hand took
an odd position, if as threatening the use of a weapon. Carroll
made an exactly similar gesture. The innkeeper came wad-
dling anxiously:
"Messieurs! Messieurs! I beg you"
Pepe said imploringly, and Harrison wondered even then
why be was so disturbed, "Let's talk this over! M. de Bas-
sompierre, we mean no harm! To the contrary, we've been
looking for you very urgently"
He stammered suddenly. To recite, in public, the facts of
time-travel to a man just accused of robbery is not the most
convincing way to argue with him. Pepe realized the fact.
"Messieurs!" protested the innkeeper "I beg you not to
quarrel in my innl There is all outdoors to quarrel in! I
beg"
"Give us a room where we can be alone," snapped Carroll,
not taking his eyes from the arrogant dark man. "I agree
that there is no need to quarrel! I prove it! M'sieur" Then
he said, very distinctly: "United Nations! Communist Russia!
Electronics! Railroads! Airplanes! Those words will tell you
where we come from!"
The dark man sneered. Pepe was trembling, deathly white.
Harrison found that he bitterly regretted that he had left his
pistols in their saddle holsters.  Then the dark man said,
again arrogantly:
"If they are code words for recognition, I do not know
them. But I take it you think you have business with me?"
"Very much so," said Carroll coldly. Over his shoulder he
said, in English:  "Harrison, what the devil's this robbery
business?"
"It seems the truth," said Harrison. "And if he's de Bas-
sompierre we've got him where we want him."
"Then we negotiate," said Carroll, again in English, "for
the use of his time-tunnel and other assurances." He switched
back to French to command the landlord to show them to a
private room. "There is no need for violence."
"Mais non!" chattered the landlord. "This way, mes-
sieurs! this way!"
He backed before them. He came to a door. He opened it.
He bowed them through it, babbling. A candle burned on a
table. The dark man noted the position of the windows.
"You may speak," he said harshly. "Of what?"
Pepe edged close to Hamson. He whispered in English:
"Harrison, what's this? Who's the woman? What's she got
to do with our affairs?"
"She's Madame de Cespedes," said Harrison in the same
language. "She says he robbed her and Ybarra's wife. Your
great-great-grandmother. She's Ybarra's sister-in-law."
"Dios mio!" panted Pepe. "Dios miol"
The dark man said scornfully:
"I hear words which may be l'Anglais. Are you English
spies who hope to bribe me to aid you?"
Pepe chattered hoarsely in Harrison's ear:
"This is awful! I told you I had a great-great-grandfather
in Paris! You met him! But I've got two! M-madame de Ces-
pedes is going to marry de Bassompierre! They'll have a
daughter who'll marry Ignacio Ybarra's son, who'll be born
next year or the year after! So she's to be my great-great-
grandmother tool And-and de-de Bassompierre's another
great-great-grandfather of mine! So if anything happens . . .
I won't be born!"
Harrison biinked. There was the sound of another arrival
in the inn yard. There were the creakings of a heavy coach,
and very, very many horses made hoof sounds on the ground.
Then Carroll said suavely:
"M'sieur, I believe we share a secret with you, but you
cannot believe we share it! I mention more words. Metro!
Underground! Eiffel Tower! World War Two! Those names
have meanings to us. Will you deny that they have meanings
to you?"
"The dark man stared.
"I'll give you proof you can't deny!" said Carroll coldly.
"I'll"
Harrison said:
"Look! What we want is important, but Madame de Ces-
pedes has been robbed. If he'll give back her jewels we'll get
along better."
"No!" snapped Carroll. "We'll take up the jewels later.
First, hold this!"
He thrust a small and very elegant flint-lock pistol into
Harrison's hand. It was probably from the stock of the shop.
It was grotesque to be holding it, and embarrassing to wonder
what exactly he should do with it. There was no present excuse
to hold it aimed at de Bassompierre. It was an awkward situa-
tion to be in. Carroll went out. Long seconds passed.
Then a voice outside the building boomed:
"De Bassompierre! De Bassompierrel Holdt"
The face of the dark man filled with astonishment. The
voice that called "De Bassompieire" was not an authorita-
tive voice. It was a friendly one, calling recognition in a tone
of pleased surprise. But the greeting was for someone out-
side the inn, not inside. The same voice boomed on in a
lower, confidential tone. Harrison's scalp crawled. He knew
what was going on in the other man's mind. Somebody else
had been called by his name. That somebody else was now in
conversation with the person who'd called him. It would be a
nightmarish sensation to anybody. But
The door opened. A short, stout, beaming man marched in,
saying over his shoulder:
"Nonsense, de Bassompierre! It was the most pleasant of
surprises to see you, but an even greater pleasure"
He saw Valerie and the plump Madame de Cespedes. He
stopped and removed his hat with something of a flourish.
"Pardon."
A thin man in a long gray cloak followed him into the
room. This man limped slightly. Carroll, his face singularly
set and grim, followed the second individual. Madame de
Cespedes gave a cry of satisfaction.
"M. de Talleyrand! Ah, you can attend to everything! This
scoundrel has robbed my sister-in-law and myself! These
gentlemen were trying to make him yield his booty. These
two and that gentleman also."
The thin man in the gray cloak smiled pleasantly. He
looked at the man in the black velvet cloak, and de Bas-
sompierre sweated suddenly. Charles Maurice Talleyrand de
P6rigord, once Bishop of Autun, now Grand Chamberlain of
the Empire, and eventually to be Prince of Benevento, was
not a welcome sight to a man accused of robbery despite his
supposed status as a gentleman. When Talleyrand smiled
gently and benignly upon de Bassompierre, and Valerie and
Madame de Cespedes and Harrison and Pepe, all but de
Bassompierre felt comforted. De Bassompierre sweated and
went starkly white.
"Ah!" said Talleyrand, in a mild tone but in a voice which
even his enemies admitted was strong and deep, "but Madame,
we will have to look into this! Pray tell me"
Madame de Cespedes told with dignity the story she'd told
before, as an accusation of de Bassompierre. That he'd
stopped at her coach door and she smelted the perfume only
her sister and the Empress possessed. The quick suspicion
and investigation. The valiant, angry pursuit by coach of de
Bassompierre on horseback.
"M. de Bassompierre?" asked Talleyrand mildly. "You are
sure it was he?"
"Yes! He!" said Madame with superb indignation, pointing
to the dark man, now very pale indeed.
The short stout man who'd first entered the room now said
indignantly:
"But Madame! You are mistaken! He may be a robber, but
he is not M. de Bassompierre! I have the honor to be ac-
quainted with M. de Bassompierre! We have talked often to-
gether! He is my friend! Not five men in France have the
knowledge of the sciences that he possesses! Madame, you
are mistaken! He is not M. de Bassompierrel M. de Bas-
sompierre stands there!"
He extended a fat hand dramatically toward Carroll.
Harrison's scalp crawled again. Carroll, his features still
peculiarly set, bowed politely. Valerie drew in her breath
sharply. Pepe uttered an inarticulate sound. Madame de
Cespedes gasped.
"As surely," pronounced the stout man firmly, "as surely as
my name is Georges L6opold Cretien Frederic Dagobert
Cuvier, the name of this gentleman is de Bassompierre, and
of thatthat robber and imposter1 do not know!"
The tall man with the slight limp spread out his hands.
"So it would appear," he said as mildly as before. "But let
ns make quite certain. M'sieur," he bowed with infinite
politeness to the dark man, "Madame de Cespedes accuses
you of the robbery of her jewels. Where are they?"
De Bassompierre could have been half-mad of bewilder-
ment. Perhaps he was half-mad with despair. Tracked down
iwben it should have been impossibleafter a robbery of
which be should not have been suspected, he was denied his
own name and found someone else credited with his identity.
And this before the second or third most powerful man in
France!
Talleyrand's smile faded. His face in repose was not be-
nign. It was utterly, terrifyingly cold. He repeated:
"M'sieur?"
The man in the black cloak reacted in a fashion which in
a woman would have been called hysterical. He cried out in
a terrible voice. His hand darted inside his cloak, and Har-
rison instinctively leaped before Valerie. The band came out
wilh a pistol in it. Harrison shouted fiercely. He was not
really aware of what be did. But the heavy pistol roared,
and the smaller weapon in Hamson's hand made a lighter
sound in the same fraction of an instant.
Then the room was full of stinging powder-smoke. The
figure in the dark cloak seemed to stagger toward a window,
as if to carry out his purpose and leap out to flee. But he did
not reach it. He went somehow bone] essly down to the floor.
The candle, after wild leapings and gyrations of its flame,
steadied and gave light again. Harrison, numbed with sudden
horror, realized that Carroll was in front of Madame de
Cespedes as he was where he would shield Valerie.
"Dios mio!" said Pepe in a thin voice, "Ah, Dios mio!"
Then Talleyrand's voice said with perfect mildness:
"But we should be quite certain! M. Cuvier, you are cer-
tainly impartial, and as a naturalist you may feel less of
repugnance. Will you see if Madame de Cespedes' and Mad-
ame Ybarra's jewels have been recovered?"
The stout man knelt on the floor. Harrison swallowed.
Cuvier looked up.
"A necklace, at least," he said professionally. "Andah!
Yes. Rings. Bracelets. He had stuffed his garments with
jewels.!"
Talleyrand said inexorably:
"But one more question. He has been proved a thief, and
has paid for it. M'sieur, you are called de Bassompierre. Have
you proof that that is correct?"
Harrison felt Valerie grow tense. His own scalp crawled
yet again. Carroll stood quite still for a moment, except that
one hand dabbled a handkerchief at his temple. Blood flowed
where a bullet had just barely grazed the skin. Half an inch to
the right and he would have been a dead man. A quarter-inch
and he'd have had a serious wound. But now there was only
a small, steady welling of red stuff which tried to run down
his cheek.
"Can you," repeated Talleyrand politely, "prove that you
are M. de Bassompierre?"
Carroll dabbed at his temple again. Then he said care-
fully:
"I have been travelling for some years, M. de Talleyrand.
I have the usual papers, but they could be forged. But since
Madame de Cespedes' jewels are found, perhaps these . . ."
His hand disappeared. It came out with a small cloth bag
in it. He unknotted the string and poured out a dazzling
array of cut stones. There were rubies and sapphires, all of
them large. None was under two carats and most were nearer
five.  Harrison  said to himself,  "Synthetics!"  He  was  not
surprised when a pearl necklace slithered snakily out on top
of the rest.
"They are cut," said Talleyrand, "in a strange fashion. I
would guess the Orient."
Carroll brought out a second bag. He displayed its con-
tents.
"There are more," he said, "but these"
"They prove," said Talleyrand in  gentle cynicism, "that
you cannot be other than a gentleman of rank. It is modesty
not to claim a dukedom, M. de Bassompierre!"
Then there was confusion. Valerie whispered warmly to
Harrison:
"Oh, my dear! You made a shield of your body for me,
when he drew that dreadful pistol!"
Harrison felt numb. He'd killed someone. Perhaps he'd
saved Carroll's life, but it had been completely automatic.
He was numbed by the shock of what had happened.
"I have an escort," said Talleyrand benignly. "M. Cuvier
and myself planned to dine here and then drive on to Paris.
On a metalled road one may doze while travelling. If you
will join us we will make a grand cavalcade that bandits
would not dream of hailing."
Talleyrand went out the door, limping slightly. Cuvier
followed him. Carroll said in a queer voice:
"Harrison, he didn't know about a time-tunnel! He didn't
know at all! Do you suppose there is one? What the devil
has happened?"
Harrison shook his head. Then his eyes fell upon Pepe's
face. Pepe looked like a desperately ill man. And Harrison
suddenly realized what was the matter.
Pepe had confided to him that besides his great-great-grand-
father  Ybarra,  in  Paris,  he'd  had  another  great-great-
grandfather,  who  was  de  Bassompierre.  And his  great-
great-grandfather had been killed,  without  arranging  for
Pepe to possess a mere great-grandfather. Pepe had ap-
parently never been born, and the fact would have to appear.
One would expect him to vanish instantly.
Nearly two hundred years later, plus some weeks and
days and hours, and nine thousand miles away, some mil-
lions of people were vaguely aware of a fugitive sort of
dizziness. It was very slight. Not one of all the innumerable
people who experienced it was really' sure that he or she had
actually felt giddy. In any case there seemed to be no conse-
quences. None at all. The world rolled on its axis and the
sun shone and rain fell and everything proceededwell-it
seemed to proceed exactly as usual. Nobody noticed any
change.
But there were changes in the time of Napoleon. M.
Georges Leopold Cretan Pr6d6ric Dagobert Cuvier, per-
petual secretary of the Institut Nationale in the natural and
physical sciences, made sure that all the jewelry belonging
to Madame de Cespedes and the Dona Mercedes Ybarra was
removed from the cadaver of someone who insolently and
for years had posed as M. de Bassompierre. Before that task
was complete, the Senor Don Ignacio Ybarra came pounding
up to the inn on horseback, with an accompanying dozen
troopers borrowed from the military governor of Paris.
He was infinitely relieved and grateful to find his widowed
sister-in-law quite safe and again in possession of the jewels
which were her and his wife's treasures. He was admiring of
Carroll and Harrisonbut Pope's stricken pallor did not at-
tract himfor their services to his sister-in-law and himself.
He recognized Harrison as having been kind to a poor devil of
a merchant named Dubois, and that his kindliness at that
time had secured a full shipment of the Empress' exclusive
perfume for his wife. He mentioned that the perfume was the
cause of the pseudo de Bassompierre's immediate detection as
a thief. He was politebut with vast dignityto M. Talley-
rand de PBrigord, who happened to be Grand Chamberlain
of France, but naturally would not awe the head of a great
family in the Spanish colony of Mexico.
They dined; Carroll with some appetite, Harrison with
very little, and Pepe with none at all. He was convinced that
he had never been born, because his great-great-grandfather
had been killed before his eyes, without having begotten a
great-grandmother who was necessary for Pope's existence.
Valerie regarded Harrison with shining eyes because he'd put
his body between her and danger. Madame de Cespedes ate
composedly and with careful moderation because of a slight
plumpness which to a widow of thirty-and-something was
undesirable.
M. Talleyrand asked questions. They were searching ques-
tions. Toward the end of the meal Carroll gave him the
newspaper he'd left the candle-lit room to get, when he'd met
the newly-alighted Cuvier and Talleyrand. The newspaper
was of the late twentieth century. It developed that the
cavalry escort had not been provided with a meal. M. Talley-
rand ordered a delay while he read the newspaper and they
were fed. He set up six candles for good light and perused the
newspaper carefully and with an enigmatic expression. When
he had finished, be took Can-oil aside for a conference.
Therefore it was very late when the three coaches set out
for Paris with their escort augmented by the troopers who'd
come with Ybarra. They would arrive in Paris not long be-
fore sunrise. But on a metalled highwayand the rest of
their journey would be on cobblestonesone might doze.
Valeric rode with Madame de Cespedes, and the Senor Don
Ignacio Ybarra rode with Cuvier and Talleyrand for the
conversation. With plenty of escort outside,  Carroll and
Harrison and Pepe rode and tried to relax in a heavy coach
swaying on an uneven cobblestone highway. The interior of
the coach was abysmally dark. Harrison  still felt numb and
shocked. Pepe was practically wordless because he considered
that he should not be alive. Carroll was partly disturbed and
partly satisfied.
"De Bassompierre," said Carroll, frowning, "didn't recog-
nize words a time-traveller to our era would certainly have
recognized. So I have to revise my opinion. There was no
second time-tunnel. But the identity of the de Bassompierre
who wrote those letters you learned of, Harrison, is still in
doubt. For the moment the name is mine. But Talleyrand is
too shrewd a man to attempt to deceive. That's why I loaned
him the newspaper. He suspects that I mayjust possibly
have told him the truth. He is resolved to find out. I could be
of great value to him, if I'm not a liar."
Harrison numbly did not comment. Pepe remained speech-
less. He swayed and stirred with the motion of the coach in
the darkness. From time to time he moistened his lips.
"He wants to be sure I really know French history before
it happens," said Carroll meditatively. "He set me a test. Na-
poleon has twelve hundred flat-bottomed boats ready to land
a hundred and twenty thousand men and ten thousand horses
on the English coast. Talleyrand asked me when the invasion
will take place. I've told him never, because Napoleon will
make a fool of himself and send an insulting note to Russia,
and Russia will get ready to declare war, and that will be no
time to invade England! It'll never be time for it."
"But"
"Historically,"  said  Carroll,  "those  are  the  facts.  I've
simply stated them before they become factual. Talleyrand
has probably guessed what's in the cards, anyhow. He' knows
Napoleon. But he was interested that I could tell him. He read
every word in that newspaper. He's a brilliant man, Talley-
rand!"
The coach swayed and lurched and rolled and rumbled. If
one were weary enough, it might be possible to sleep. But
one would have to be very weary! Harrison said helplessly:
"I can't understand it! De Bassompierre was supposed to
be Pepe's great-great-grandfather! And he's dead. And there's
Pepe."
Carroll sat up sharply.
"What's that?"
"It's  Pepe's  family  tree,"  said  Harrison.  "Madame  de
Cespedes is the widow of Dona Mercedes Ybarra's brother.
That's where the sister-in-law business comes in. Pepe's
family tree says that de Bassompierre married her, and they
had a daughter who married Ignacio Ybarra's sonwhom he
hasn't got yetsome time in the 1820's when Ybarra's back
as ambassador from Mexico. And they'll be Pepe's great-
grandparents. But de Bassompierre is dead. So he can't marry
Madame de Cespedes. So Ignacio Ybarra's son can't marry his
daughter, so he can't be Pepe's great-great-grandfather. There-
fore Pepe's great-grandfather won't exist, naturally his grand-
father can't beget his father, and if none of them ever exists,
why, Pepe couldn't be born!"
Caroll 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-grandfatherthe
living oneto seize de Bassompierre, and the liveried lackeys
belonging to each coach separately. There was a very con-
siderable 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 pointthe basis of every-
thing we've been trying to dois 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."
"Whywhyif a thing has consequences, it is real! It
is actual! It hasn't been changed from something that hap-
pened into something that didn't! It hasn'tunhappened! 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 an-
cestors 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 fatheror himself. He wouldn't be!
But there he sits! So he must be the consequences of mar-
riagescall them eventswhich 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 Bassom-
pierre was killed! Ask Talleyrand! Ask Gay-Lussac and La-
grange and ChampoUion. No. Not Champollion. He's a prig.
But ask Laplace! You ask! They'll think you're crazy! Be-
cause 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 bis 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!
Ybarral Ybarra! How'd you like to be my great-great-grand-
son?"
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 18041 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 Bassornpierre
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 youll 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 cobble-
stone 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 un-
conscious great-great-grandparental tavoritism! 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 de-
stroyed, in theory, by the Revolution of the 1790's, but had
now been reestablished 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 lodgingsthe four of themin 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 habit-
ual 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-erandfatherbe was
actually a year or so younger than Pepehad generously
provided her with a dowry and arranged a marriage for her.
He'd sent de Bassompierre to bring her to Paris, duly chaper-
oned by Madame de Cespedes. She now came to pay her
respects. Her expression of sadness was now heart-breaking.
Valeric did not like this period of time. Pepe restlessly ex-
plored the city. Can-oil 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 Valeric 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 Valeric 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 Bassom-
pierre.
"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 cyni-
cal, 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 Valeric. I suspect she'd con-
sider me a bigamist. Which is my second problem. Our time-
tunnel was destroyed. But I would like tc know that in
causing the death of this de Bassompierre who stole jewels
and perfumery together, we prevented him trom having a
renegade great-great-grandson who would defect to the Rus-
sians 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 yeamingly:
"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. "Noth-
ing 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 wellValerie's clothes are ready for her
too. Andahthose 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 barri-
caded, blackened ruin of an old, old, heavy-beamed house.
"It happened!" he said exultantly, back in the First Em-
pire. "The headlines  are about a monte pietd 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 twen-
tieth-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 gi-
gantic 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, OMrnloading 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 be-
fore 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
Valeric 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 look-
ing 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.
"Itit is he!" said Valerie breathlessly.
Harrison nodded. He read the identification plate. It read,
"Portait 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.
Behind him, for background, there were various cryptic
symbols and bits of alchemical apparatus. And there was a
glowing design which didn't belong in a picture painted in
the 1830's. It was a perfectly modern symbol for an atom of
something or other, but it didn't belong so far back. Yet it be-
longed in a picture of Carrol], if he'd had it painted expressly
to tell somebody in the remote future that he'd made out all
right.
They didn't comment. They looked, and looked, and then
they went quietly away. And as they went down the wide,
long steps to the street again, Harrison said:
"He handled it just right. De Bassompierre didn't have a
son, which he would have had but for our appearance on the
scene. But Carroll, marrying Madame de Cespedes as he, had
a daughterso there wasn't a renegade to give China the
bomb. So Carroll wrote those letters to Cuvier and Ampere
and Lagrange and all the rest. If he hadn't written them,
there might have been other changes. When, our present de
Bassompierre didn't have a son, DO other changes were
needed"
He felt slightly giddy. He stopped. It was not a marked
giddiness. It was not easy to be sure he felt it. Still, Valerie
pressed closer to him again, and for an instant it seemed that
all the world blurred just a little. Buildings became indistinct
and clarified again not exactly as they'd been. The taxicabs
were longer and lower. The noises of the city became con-
fused, and then cleared again. Harrison biinked.
A canaon boomed somewhere, and the humming of in-
numerable saucer-shaped aircraft overhead wavered in a
peculiarly flute-like fashion. The cannon boomed again. Of
course! "The guns were firing a salute -to the brand-new son
and heir of Napoleon the Fifth, born that morning and al-
ready King of Rome.
Harrison watched the ground-cars, floating swiftly through
the streets of Paris, not on wheels, like the coaches of
ancient days, but on sustaining columns of rushing air. The
costumes were familiar, too; men wearing furs and women
garbed in those modern, brilliant, and practical fabrics of
metal foil. 
"Nothing's changed!" said Harrison, in satisfaction. "Noth-
ing!"
He and Valerie continued down the steps. Halfway to
the bottom, there was the feeling of giddiness again. It was
very slight, and the fresh blurring of all outlines and their
re-solidification happened so quietly and quickly that one
could ignore it. A chuffing taxicab with badly-worn tires came
to a halt at the curb in response to Harrison's gesture. He
helped Valerie in. He felt slightly puzzled; just slightly. But
then he didn't remember what he'd been puzzled about.
"Yes," said Harrison. "Nothing's changed at all. Just there's
no more threat of immediate atomic war."
And he was quite right. Nothing had changed. Not so one
would notice. It couldn't. Because Paris was part of the
cosmos and the cosmos was made for people to live in. And
since it happens that humans will always try industriously
to destroy themselves there have to be safety devices built
into the scheme of things. So they go into operation if atomic
war becomes really inevitable, for one example. They may
turn up as time-tunnels, or somebody going back in time and
accidentally killing their grandfathers, oror.
But it could be anything. For example, a man needn't kill
his own grandfather. If somebody else, however accidentally,
killed somebody who was somebody else's great-great-grand-
father, and this happened before his great-grandfather was
fathered, then obviously his great-grandfather could not have
existed to carry on the family name, nor his father, nor he
himself. And a radical nuclear scientist would never be born
to defect to Russia and afterward to China. Somebody else
might be born instead. For instance, Pepe.
It was perfectly simple. The mainland Chinese didn't have
an atom bomb. They'd never had one. They'd never fired off
even low-yield ones, and certainly no fifty-megaton ones.
They hadn't exploded any atomic bombs at all. So there'd
never been a threat to Formosa or the rest of the world, and
therefore no time-tunnel, and therefore no Carroll, Dubois
et Cie, and therefore . . ..
Harrison thrust things out of his mind. They would only be
confusing. They were useless.
"Nothing's changed!" said Harrison doggedly. "Facts are
facts! And if they're impossible, they're still facts!"
It was true. Harrison was pleased that it was true.
He and his wife went back to their hotel.