"Murray Leinster - Time Tunnel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

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 shop seemed the most common-
place 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 per-
fect 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 consid-
erable 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 un-
reasonable!
He found himself reluctantly slipping back into the con-
dition ot mental stress and self-doubt that confiding in Pepe
had seemed to end. There had been a man named de Bas-
sompierre back in the days of Napoleon Bonaparte. He had
given important people important, exact, and detailed in-
formation about various things that nobody knew until fifty
and a hundred and a hundred and fifty years later. So Har-
rison 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 sirl. 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:
"Valeric!"
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 ot im-
probability with commonplaceness seems to have been