Time Tunnel Read Free Page A

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 modern 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 presented 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. [3]
    Yes. Anticipations of modern knowledge were not uncommon. 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 error about the history of his country. Of course the consequences 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 turbulences in Africa and South America. A jet patrol above Paris did not mean that an unwarned atomic attack was more 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 substituted 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 personable girls. But we will go there. We will inquire if they do import from and export to another century. It will be interesting. 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