Time Tunnel by Murray Leinster Read Free Book Online Page B

weeks, days and hours from one end to the other. We came through. We will now go back. I’m going to ask you to help me solve our current emergency, and then we’ll set to work on the really big problem you’ve brought.”
    He motioned for Harrison to go before him. Harrison looked helpless. Carroll pointed to a small plank upon the ground. It looked like a threshold with no wall or door attached. Numbly, Harrison stepped over it and felt an intense digestive disturbance and a monumental giddiness. But he took one step more and he was in the burrow—the tunnel—with earth all around him and the home-made doorway before him. He stepped out into the cottage dining room. His forehead felt wet. He mopped it as Pepe came stumbling back, with Carroll matter-of-factly in his rear.
    “I’m not going to ask you to not to tell anybody what you just saw,” said Carroll casually. “You’d be an idiot if you did. But you’ve brought me a hell of a problem and I’d be foolish to try to be secretive with you. Come along!”
    He opened another door, and they were in the kitchen of the cottage. The cooking arrangements were of that extreme primitiveness which an over-thrifty householder considers economy. There was a stair which evidently led to sleeping quarters overhead. There was a bench against one wall. The short, plump M. Dubois sat on that bench in his unbelievable garments. He held a remarkably large carving knife uncertainly in his hand. He looked woebegone. Beside him sat his sister, Madame Carroll, with a hatchet held firmly in her grip.
    And, lying on the floor with his hands and feet securely bound with cords, there was a third individual. He wore baggy corduroy trousers and a blue sash and a red-checked shirt. His expression alternated between extreme apprehension and peevish resentment. He looked at Harrison and Pepe with wide and at first scared eyes. But Harrison flinched when Madame Carroll burst into shrill and infuriated complaints, uttered with such rapidity that only one accustomed to her speed could have understood her.
    “M. Harrison and M. Ybarra,” said Carroll calmly, “are now involved with us. Not financially. They claim no share in the enterprise. Their interest is scientific only.” To Harrison and Pepe he added: “Perhaps I should also introduce the gentleman yonder. He is a burglar. His name is Albert. He is our present problem.”
    Madame Carroll turned to them. Seething, she informed them that her husband was a fool of the most extreme imbecility. But for her he would be robbed, he would be destroyed, he would be murdered by such criminals as they observed had already made the attempt!
    The bound man on the floor protested aggrievedly that he had not attempted murder. He had only intended a small, professional robbery. He was a burglar, not a murderer! They had only to ask the police, and they would certify that in all his career as a burglar he had never injured anybody but one flic who was standing eagerly underneath a window to trap him, when in his haste to escape he’d jumped out of the window and on him.
    Madame Carroll silenced him with a wave of her hatchet. She was crimson with indignation, with desperation, perhaps with despair.
    “What are we to do with him?” she demanded dramatically. “If we give him to the police it will become public! Our business will be revealed! We will have competitors thronging to offer higher prices than we can pay, and offering to sell for lower prices than we can afford! We shall be ruined, because of this scoundrel, this murderer!”
    The bound man protested. They had held him captive for more than twelve hours, debating. It was illegal! Harrison said with a sort of stunned interest:
    “The problem is that this Albert is a burglar?”
    Carroll said vexedly that he’d been having a few glasses of wine in the town’s least offensive bistro. This man, Albert, doubtless saw him there and considered it an opportunity. When Carroll went home earlier