Free Time Tunnel by Murray Leinster Page B

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 sister 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 population 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 husband—Carroll—did 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 passion—over 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 Valerie understand…
    But still something had to be done about de Bassompierre, back in the days of Napoleon Buonaparte! Something definitely 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 earnestly 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 survive. If the cosmos is designed for them to live in it, there must be some safety device built into it to prevent their extermination.
    It didn’t appear, though, that Harrison and Carroll and Pepe, and Madame Carroll and Valerie and M. Dubois together amounted to anything so important.
    Quite the contrary.

5
    The world rolled sedately upon its axis, and tides ebbed and flowed, and barometric highs produced winds flowing 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 it—where they could have dropped depth-bombs if they’d wanted to—for seventy-two hours hand-running. Then it surfaced angrily and the squadron leader of the hunter-killer unit solicitously