by Jimmy Guieu
Seeing the ambassador’s obvious astonishment, Leconte realized that he was not the only one seeing this ship for the first time.
The two pilots, none other than Professor Red Harrington and the physicist Kurt Streiler, bowed before the ambassador who introduced them to the “kidnapped” engineer, saying, “I don’t think I should explain anything, Monsieur Leconte. Professor Harrington and Dr. Kurt Streiler, to whom I hand you over, can tell you everything that I couldn’t tell you before, regretfully. But let me thank you in the name of the USA and the confederated nations for the assistance that you will be giving these two remarkable scientists.”
Leconte became more and more bewildered. He ended up shrugging in surrender. “So be it. Since I’m assumed to be helping, I might as well do it willingly.” Smiling, he added, “Let’s go, gentlemen, whatever I can do… if you really think I can be of some use.”
“You will be, I guarantee it. Would you accompany us?”
They said goodbye to the ambassador and Captain Martin and climbed the stairs of the big metal rocket.
The three of them hurried through an inner passageway, quite like a luxury cruise liner, and climbed nine more narrow steps that led them to the upper deck. At the end of a long corridor with luminous walls they entered the cockpit.
Leconte carefully examined all the controls, screens, the blinking lights on the semi-circular control panel and, accepting a cigarette from Streiler, observed, “Very recently I also had the chance to visit a Polarian Fimn’has, or Flying Saucer as we used to call these spaceships, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“This is not a spaceship,” Harrington corrected him. “And before telling you more, I have to ask you to give us the same personal assurance that the ambassador to your country gave, namely that you will swear to reveal nothing of the true nature of this… ship.”
“You have my word. And I will never break it.”
“The efforts you made to find any traces of our friends Kariven, Dormoy, Angelvin and their wives in the writings of the past inspired us to contact you through the ambassador. In order to send you on a… top-secret mission whose importance you will understand. This machine that so intrigues you is not a spaceship but a Retrotimeship, meaning a machine capable of moving through Time. Or rather into the Past only because we haven’t been able to discover the means of traveling into the Future even though we’ve been slaving away at it for five years.”
This information left the engineer dumbfounded. He stammered, “You… Into the Past? So, you’ve already experimented on this truly fantastic machine?”
“Several times but in absolute secrecy6,” Streiler confirmed. “Even though peace reigns on Earth now and all nations are fraternally united, it would be dangerous to reveal the existence of a Retrotimeship. Just imagine what would happen to world peace if let’s say a secret political group, that doesn’t exist thank God, managed to get hold of it. The present stability would collapse from the actions of this imaginary group in some period of the Past.
“That’s why there is and will always be, most likely, only two prototypes of the Retrotimeship in the world, whose use is exclusively reserved for missions of… the utmost importance. Our mission falls into this category.”
“I think I’ve understood the purpose of our mission, Professor,” the engineer was just realizing the staggering truth. “We’re going back into the Past—to 1843—to free Kariven and the others.”
“Yes and no,” Harrington smiled ambiguously. “Haven’t you noticed the total absence of traces of our friends in the writings of that time?”
“Yes, but I don’t see the link… Unless we admit that they were never there, which is impossible since they are prisoners of the Past.”
“Yes and no,” the celebrated physicist from the California Institute of Technology repeated. “Sit down there and you’ll understand this paradoxical mystery.”
Leconte obeyed, confused by these obscure statements.
Harrington and Streiler sat at the controls of the Retrotimeship, but only Streiler worked his. A low rumbling echoed through the machine room. A green light lit up and the ship slowly ascended.
On the ground the 500 military guards watched curiously as it went up.
At 3,000 feet altitude the ship turned upward and at a steady speed shot into space. Safe from the dangerous effects of acceleration thanks to an anti-g device, they passengers felt nothing when the ship stopped in outer space, apparently without slowing down, 30,000 miles from Earth.
Through the transparent cockpit Leconte was admiring the curve of the Earth, an enormous globe with a pale halo of atmosphere. A dark crescent divided the Earth, leaving the old continent in shadow while the sun shining in the black sky lit the West Atlantic and the three Americas. The Moon, partially lit, was also shining brightly among the familiar constellations.
“You’re up, Harrington,” Streiler said, leaving the space propulsion commands to his friend for the delicate job of retrogradation in Time.
Harrington typed something on a keyboard that looked like an electronic calculator and entered in the column marked Present: Departure 23:57. In the next columns with the respective titles: Temporal Transfers/Arrival/Date/Target Hour-Minutes-Seconds—he entered 1843/August 29/15:30 and pressed a button.
The green indicator light went out, replaced by a red one that started blinking. The ship started vibrating gently. The vibrations grew stronger and suddenly the darkness of cosmic space disappeared, replaced by an endless gray, the weird environment where the Retrotimeship traveled in its voyage to the Past.
A few minutes passed in this dimensionless environment, then the gray thinned out, seemed to move away, gradually absorbed by the blackness of interplanetary space becoming visible again with its numberless stars. The vibrations stopped. The red indicator light went out; the green came back on blinking.
“Your turn, Kurt.”
Streiler, in normal space propulsion, started a steep descent at 25,000 mph. Ten minutes later he slowed down and glided into Earth’s atmosphere, still reducing the speed to a very modest 125 mph.
The trajectory through the atmosphere brought it almost without transition from darkness into sunlight. The ship flew over the suburbs and hovered directly over Paris—a smaller Paris than today and lacking the Eiffel Tower.
“Here he are in 1843, August 29,” Harrington glanced at the control panel and clarified, “3:33 pm and 20 seconds. We’re three and a half miles above and won’t be noticed. At this altitude our ship looks like a thin, shiny spindle, practicable undetectable.”
“Why not land? At 3:33 pm, the area around Champ de Mars was already in the Space-Time fold. Kariven, his friends, me and many other Parisians from 1961 were already stuck in 1843 for about 15 minutes.”
“It isn’t necessary to land and it would complicate things. Intervening effectively to free our friends would change the course of Time. Such an event could have unforeseen consequences. Kariven’s intrusion has already shaken up the Parisians of this Time enough, believe me. We have to erase this unexpected and excessive episode from History but not act in this era.”
“In that case, and supposing that such an… erasure is possible, what did we come back here to do?”
“To film it, which will be useful for us later on,” Harrington answered as he pulled a chrome lever.
The tilted screen on the control panel lit up and the image of the Champ de Mars, seen from about 300 feet up, appeared in the screen.
Leconte leaned over excitedly and pointing at himself stammered, “But… that’s… me!”
Indeed, just like a movie the screen showed Maurice Leconte talking with Kariven. In a circle around them were Yuln, Angelvin, Dormoy, their wives and a few other people thrown back into the bygone era. To their right were the three cars parked at the curb while people dressed in the day’s fashion were scurrying through the paths, fleeing these “diabolical machines” and the funny looking but troubling human beings.
&
nbsp; Harrington turned a knob, zoomed in and framed the group formed by Leconte, Kariven and his friends. A speaker boomed out the voice of the anthropologist being automatically recorded: “… right, Monsieur Leconte. We’re… prisoners of the Past.”
The background was filled with the shouts and cries of the group around them.
Then Kariven’s voice came out again, “Whining or wailing isn’t doing us any good, my friends…”
Harrington turned off the sound although the cameras and audio detectors continued recording.
“The recording will be very useful when we show it our friends… to convince them of their adventure.”
“To convince them?” Leconte parroted. “Will we really need to convince them of the reality of the… mess we’re getting them out of?”
“You’re not used to the unsettling possibilities and complexities of Time travel,” Streiler smiled. “How do you think we’ll convince our friends about a misadventure… that hasn’t happened yet… and that will never happen?”
“Listen, Streiler,” Leconte frowned in bewilderment, “You and Harrington have had enough fun with me! Explain this mumbo jumbo or I think I’ll lose my mind.”
Streiler broke out laughing, imitated by Harrington who was starting up the temporal retrograde device.
“You’ll understand everything, even better than with words.”
After a new leap into space, the Retrotimeship returned to Earth and hovered over Guyancourt. The spotlight swept the night, found the detachment of soldiers guarding the airfield, then slowly came down to land.
The three men were quickly climbing down the telescopic stairs and heading toward Captain Martin.
Astonished, Leconte heard Harrington declare, “I’m Professor Harrington, Captain, and this is Streiler and Leconte.”
“Very pleased to meet you, gentlemen. I’ve been expecting you,” the officer responded.
“Am I dreaming? What is this ridiculous drama, Professor? We left…”
“Tsk, tsk,” Harrington hissed. “Please, Leconte, no questions right now. You’ll understand later.”
“Later! Later!” he shook his head.
Captain Martin held back his surprise and said, “I got instructions to keep your ship safe until you return, Professor. The embassy Sabres are waiting for you,” he added, pointing at the two long cars, low and streamlined with Plexiglas roofs.
“Thank you, Captain.” Then he seemed to remember something and said, “Oh, Captain, one question that might sound crazy but is vital to our mission: what day is it?”
The officer did not blink, aware of being on a “top secret” mission whose details were hidden from him. He answered, “It’s August 28, 1961, Professor.”
“Thanks. See you later.”
Harrington dragged away Leconte who could not believe what he had just heard. The two got in the second car while Streiler took the first.
“August 28, 1961,” Leconte thought out loud, staring at the road without seeing it. “I don’t get it! No, I don’t get anything at all!”
“Listen up,” Harrington advised, amused by the engineer’s confusion. “I told you it’d be better not to intervene in an era of the Past when we could disturb History. Okay. But if we intervene… 24 hours before your ‘slip’ into the Space-Time fold, meaning last week, no trouble can come of it. For example, as you saw the landing of the Retrotimeship didn’t cause a stir among the soldiers guarding the airport whereas it would have thrown them into a panic in… 1843. And this we didn’t want. Therefore, we took the following measures.
“Before coming to France, on September 4, 1961, and going to Guyancourt where our ambassador took us, we took a trip into the Past. Oh, a very short hop in Time only going back to August 28, 1961. On that day in Washington we told the military authorities about our intention to intervene in the near future to accomplish a… Rescue in Time. The President of the States was informed and knowing our service record he granted our requests. Following our plan Washington contacted Paris right away in code and got the abandoned Guyancourt airport under military guard for the night and two embassy Sabres for our use.
“Our orders, you see, have been carried out since we’re here in the cars after landing on the guarded airfield… tonight. In other words, eight days before the time we come from.”
Leconte furrowed his brow, thought hard and repeated out loud in order to get a grip on the befuddling ride into Time:
“So, with the Retrotimeship you brought us back from September 4 to August 28, 1961, eight or nine days ago. You had a meeting with the President of the USA and told him that in eight days an area of Paris would be swept away in a Space-Time fold just like Nagasaki on the 9th. We know that this happened since we came from after this time in the Retrotimeship. During this time warp our friends Kariven, Dormoy and Angelvin, world famous scientists, were left behind in the Past, prisoners of Time. Our duty is to free them… by intervening at the right moment.”
“That’s exactly how things happened,” Harrington confirmed.
“Hold on, don’t interrupt me,” Leconte wrinkled his brow even more, almost comically. “I’m still figuring things out, trying to put a little order in this temporal maze. I imagine that you told the President something like this: on the night of August 28, the night before the Space-Time slip we want to land the Retrotimeship in Guyancourt. It should be heavily guarded to keep anyone from approaching of ship while we’re gone. And we’ll need two cars. Okay, but did you figure out what to do next?”
Harrington smiled, then laughed on seeing the suspicion in the engineer’s eyes. “That, my dear Leconte, will be explained soon, in the presence of Kariven and our friends.”
“You’re annoying, Harrington, with your explanations in installments.”
CHAPTER V
The two Sabres reserved for Harrington and Streiler by the embassy stopped at Place Adolphe Cherioux and the passengers went immediately up to see Kariven and his wife. The latter greeted them with joy although rather surprised by the visit at this late hour.
In the presence of Kariven, Leconte committed a blunder. “I really thought I’d never see you again, Kariven!”
He raised his eyebrows, not understanding, “Never see me… again? We’ve met before?”
“One second,” Harrington broke in, sitting down in an armchair. “My dear Kariven, and you, Yuln, are probably going to think I’ve gone nuts when you I start telling you what it’s about.”
Yuln and Kariven, intrigued by this prelude, exchanged an amused smile.
“Tomorrow, August 29, 1961, around 2 pm,” the mathematician began, “what happened on the 9th in Nagasaki, when you were there, will happen in Paris, minus the atomic destruction. The district of Champ de Mars will be cast into a Space-Time fold and into the year 1843.”
A smiling, skeptical frown crossed the anthropologist’s lips while Yuln brought up a small, rolling bar.
“I had no idea, Harrington, that one of your hobbies was reading tea leaves! But maybe you’re just… psychic?”
This friendly joke put a smile on the American’s face. “Go on, Kariven, joke all you want, but I’ll have the last laugh seeing your face when I give you proof of my… psychic powers.”
On saying this he opened the leather briefcase he had brought from the Retrotimeship and took out several newspapers. “Read these.”
The anthropologist unfolded the first paper and his eyes fell on the date. “September 1, 1961! But this paper doesn’t…”
“Come out for three days,” Streiler finished calmly. “It’s true. Why don’t you read out the headline, Kariven.”
He did so, speaking slowly and with an emotional voice: “Kariven, Dormoy and Angelvin—Prisoners of the Past!” He looked up at his friends, incredulous, and resumed, “The engineer Maurice Leconte, escaped from the Space-Time fold in which Champ de Mars was stuck, has described the final moments he spent with the three famous scientists. Kariven, Dormoy and Angelvin, along with their wives, are consi
dered lost forever in the Past!”
“It’s unbelievable,” Yuln murmured, dumbfounded. “But how did this paper get into your hands, Red, if it doesn’t come out for three days?”
Harrington turned serious, leaned forward and weighed his words. “Because we are coming… from next week, Yuln.”
“The Retrotimeship!” Kariven exclaimed. “I should have thought of that sooner.”
“That’s it, Kariven. The Retrotimeship brought us back to this August 28, 1961, the night before Champ de Mars slips into the Space-Time fold.”
Terribly intrigued, the anthropologist wondered, “So the six of us were… or rather will be carried away tomorrow into this Space-Time fold?”
“Exactly. Along with a bunch of Parisians like Maurice Leconte who followed your advice and got the people together in Place Joffre. In the meantime you six went in your cars to contact the authorities. But you weren’t back in the affected area when it returned to our Time. You missed the… replacement and remained prisoners of the Past.”
“I see,” Kariven figured, “that by staying out of the area tomorrow we’ll avoid the time warp. But the slip into 1843 will still take place.”
“Sure, but we’ve also thought about that and taken measures. This afternoon Washington sent a note to French authorities asking them to evacuate Champ de Mars between noon and midnight tomorrow. The real reason, you can imagine, won’t be made known to the public since it doesn’t know about the Retrotimeship. Besides, around the evacuation zone there will be guards armed with paralyzing rifles to forbid anyone from entering for 12 hours.
“Champ de Mars will be thrown into the Past but without any person knowing about it. In short, you will never have lived through the extraordinary journey. The ‘human side’ of this story will simply be erased from History… since it will never have taken place.”
“Well, there’s the Gordian knot,” the engineer Leconte spoke up. “I finally understand why, despite my research in the archives, I never found a trace of this episode that could not have passed by in silence.”
