Time Tunnel by Murray Leinster Page B

psychoanalyst or perhaps 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 accomplished 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 disclosed 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 lightning-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 completely 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 equipment. 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. Inevitably, 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 frustration.
    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. Anything 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 arranged 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 intact 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. Anything—absolutely anything—could happen!
    “Ah!” said Dubois.