Time Tunnel by Murray Leinster

asked if it was in need of assistance.
    It was not possible to make exact statements about happenings like that. They were things that people did. Unreasonably. 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. Dubois 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. Carroll 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 abandoning 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 modern 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 hour—seven at the utmost—even 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. Uncomfortably, 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 homemade doorway. He would move through the tunnel which in feet 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 snuffboxes, out-of-date newspapers and flint-lock pistols to be used as paper-weights. The fate of Europe hung