Time Tunnel Read Free Page B

shop seemed the most commonplace 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 perfect 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 considerable 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 unreasonable!
    He found himself reluctantly slipping back into the condition of mental stress and self-doubt that confiding in Pepe had seemed to end. There had been a man named de Bassompierre back in the days of Napoleon Bonaparte. He had given important people important, exact, and detailed information about various things that nobody knew until fifty and a hundred and a hundred and fifty years later. So Harrison 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 girl. 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:
    “ Valerie! ”
    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 of improbability with commonplaceness seems to have been characteristic of the whole affair of the time-tunnels. It appears that inevitability was a part of the pattern, too.

2
    When Harrison woke next morning, before he opened his eyes he was aware of violently conflicting emotional states. On the one hand, be wished bitterly that he had never essayed to write a doctoral thesis that called for research in the Bibliothèque 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 Carroll, 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 small black dog he’d owned more than a dozen years before, and he remembered a kitten she’d forgotten, they recalled fêtes , they recalled a Twelfth Night celebration of which