The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (48 page)

There’s no way to predict these things.

When the videotape started repeating itself I got bored, crossed the street, and lost myself in the crowd.

CHARLES SHEFFIELD

Charles Sheffield (1935–2002) was born in England and educated at St. John’s College,
Cambridge. He was president and fellow of the American Astronautical Society, a
fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a past president of
the Science Fiction Writers of America, a fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, a
distinguished lecturer for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a
member of the International Astronomical Union. His forty-one published books include
best-sellers of both fact and fiction. He wrote more than a hundred technical papers on
subjects ranging from astronomy to large-scale computer systems, and served as a
reviewer of science texts for the
New Scientist, The World and I,
and the
Washington Post
. His writing awards include the Hugo, the Nebula, the Japanese Sei-un Award, the
John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Isaac Asimov Memorial Award for writing
that contributes significantly to the public knowledge and understanding of science. He
was the creator of the Jupiter line of science fiction for young adults, and authored or
coauthored the first four books of that series. His 1999 book,
Borderlands of Science,
explored the boundaries of current science for the benefit of would-be writers. He was
married to fellow author Nancy Kress, who also appears in this volume.

“Trapalanda” embodies several pervasive human myths—the quest, the search for
lost lands, and the undeniable human urge to solve any mystery that is placed before us.

Sheffield’s novella brings together a group who go out looking for one thing and find
quite another, to the utter detriment of the narrator, illustrating the old truth that some
searches cause more questions than answers.

by Charles Sheffield

John Kenyon Martindale seldom did things the usual way. Until a first-class return air ticket and a check for $10,000 arrived at my home in Lausanne I did not know he existed. The enclosed note said only: “For consulting services of Klaus Jacobi in New York, June 6th–7th.” It was typed on his letterhead and initialed, JKM. The check was drawn on the Riggs Bank of Washington, D.C. The tickets were for Geneva–New York on June 5th, with an open return.

I did not need work. I did not need money. I had no particular interest in New York, and a transatlantic telephone call to John Kenyon Martindale revealed only that he was out of town until June 5th. Why would I bother with him? It is easy to forget what killed the cat.

The limousine that met me at Kennedy Airport drove to a stone mansion on the East River, with a garden that went right down to the water’s edge. An old woman with the nose, chin, and hairy moles of a storybook witch opened the door. She took me upstairs to the fourth floor, while my baggage disappeared under the house with the limousine.

The mansion was amazingly quiet. The elevator made no noise at all, and when we stepped out of it the deeply carpeted floors of the corridor were matched by walls thick with oriental tapestries. I was not used to so much silence. When I was ushered into a long, shadowed conservatory filled with flowering plants and found myself in the presence of a man and woman, I wanted to shout. Instead I stared.

Shirley Martindale was a brunette, with black hair, thick eyebrows, and a flawless, creamy skin. She was no more than five feet three, but full-figured and strongly built. In normal company she would have been a center of attention; with John Kenyon Martindale present, she was ignored.

He was of medium height and slender build, with a wide, smiling mouth. His hair was thin and wheat-colored, combed straight back from his face. Any other expression he might have had was invisible. From an inch below his eyes to two inches above them, a flat, black shield extended across his whole face. Within that curved strip of darkness colored shadows moved, little darting points and glints of light that flared red and green and electric blue. They were hypnotic, moving in patterns that could be followed but never quite predicted, and they drew and held the attention. They were so striking that it took me a few moments to realize that John Kenyon Martindale must be blind.

He did not act like a person without sight. When I came into the room he at once came forward and confidently shook my hand. His grip was firm, and surprisingly strong for so slight a man.

“A long trip,” he said, when the introductions were complete. “May I offer a little refreshment?”

Although the witch was still standing in the room, waiting, he mixed the drinks himself, cracking ice, selecting bottles, and pouring the correct measures slowly but without error. When he handed a glass to me and smilingly said “There! How’s that?” I glanced at Shirley Martindale and replied, “It’s fine; but before we start the toasts I’d like to learn what we are toasting. Why am I here?”

“No messing about, eh? You are very direct. Very Swiss—even though you are not one.” He turned his head to his wife, and the little lights twinkled behind the black mask.

“What did I tell you, Shirley? This is the man.” And then to me. “You are here to make a million dollars. Is that enough reason?”

“No. Mr. Martindale, it is not. It was not money that brought me here. I have enough money.”

“Then perhaps you are here to become a Swiss citizen. Is that a better offer?”

“Yes. If you can pay in advance.” Already I had an idea what John Martindale wanted of me. I am not psychic, but I can read and see. The inner wall of the conservatory was papered with maps of South America.

“Let us say, I will pay half in advance. You will receive five hundred thousand dollars in your account before we leave. The remainder, and the Swiss citizenship papers, will be waiting when we return from Patagonia.”

“We? Who are ‘we’?”

“You and I. Other guides if you need them. We will be going through difficult country, though I understand that you know it better than anyone.”

I looked at Shirley Martindale, and she shook her head decisively. “Not me, Klaus.

Not for one million dollars, not for ten million dollars. This is all John’s baby.”

“Then my answer must be no.” I sipped the best pisco sour I had tasted since I was last in Peru, and wondered where he had learned the technique. “Mr. Martindale, I retired four years ago to Switzerland. Since then I have not set foot in Argentina, even though I still carry those citizenship papers. If you want someone to lead you through the
echter Rand
of Patagonia, there must now be a dozen others more qualified than I.

But that is beside the point. Even when I was in my best condition, even when I was so young and cocky that I thought nothing could kill me or touch me—even then I would have refused to lead a blind man to the high places that you display on your walls. With your wife’s presence and her assistance to you for personal matters, it might barely be possible. Without her—have you any idea at all what conditions are like there?”

“Better than most people.” He leaned forward. “Mr. Jacobi, let us perform a little test.

Take something from your pocket, and hold it up in front of you. Something that should be completely unfamiliar to me.”

I hate games, and this smacked of one; but there was something infinitely persuasive about that thin, smiling man. What did I have in my pocket? I reached in, felt my wallet, and slipped out a photograph. I did not look at it, and I was not sure myself what I had selected. I held it between thumb and forefinger, a few feet away from Martindale’s intent face.

“Hold it very steady,” he said. Then, while the points of light twinkled and shivered,

“It is a picture, a photograph of a woman. It is your assistant, Helga Korein. Correct?”

I turned it to me. It was a portrait of Helga, smiling into the camera. “You apparently know far more about me than I know of you. However, you are not quite correct. It is a picture of my wife, Helga Jacobi. I married her four years ago, when I retired. You are not blind?”

“Legally, I am completely blind and have been since my twenty-second year, when I was foolish enough to drive a racing car into a retaining wall.” Martindale tapped the black shield. “Without this, I can see nothing. With it, I am neither blind nor seeing. I receive charge-coupled diode inputs directly to my optic nerves, and I interpret them. I see neither at the wavelengths nor with the resolution provided by the human eye, nor is what I reconstruct anything like the images that I remember from the time before I became blind; but I see. On another occasion I will be happy to tell you all that I know about the technology. What you need to know tonight is that I will be able to pull my own weight on any journey. I can give you that assurance. And now I ask again: will you do it?”

It was, of course, curiosity that killed the cat. Martindale had given me almost no information as to where he wanted to go, or when, or why. But something was driving John Martindale, and I wanted to hear what it was.

I nodded my head, convinced now that he would see my movement. “We certainly need to talk in detail; but for the moment let us use that fine old legal phrase, and say there is agreement in principle.”

There is agreement in principle.
With that sentence, I destroyed my life.

Shirley Martindale came to my room that night. I was not surprised. John Martindale’s surrogate vision was a miracle of technology, but it had certain limitations. The device could not resolve the fleeting look in a woman’s eye, or the millimeter jut to a lower lip.

I had caught the signal in the first minute.

We did not speak until it was done and we were lying side by side in my bed. I knew it was not finished. She had not relaxed against me. I waited. “There is more than he told you,” she said at last.

I nodded. “There is always more. But he was quite right about that place. I have felt it myself, many times.”

As South America narrows from the great equatorial swell of the Amazon Basin, the land becomes colder and more broken. The great spine of the Andean cordillera loses height as one travels south. Ranges that tower to twenty-three thousand feet in the tropics dwindle to a modest twelve thousand. The land is shared between Argentina and Chile, and along their border, beginning with the chill depths of Lago Buenos Aires (sixty miles long, ten miles wide; bigger than anything in Switzerland), a great chain of mountain lakes straddles the frontier, all the way south to Tierra del Fuego and the flowering Chilean city of Punta Arenas.

For fourteen years, the Argentina–Chile borderland between latitude 46 and 50 South had been my home, roughly from Lago Buenos Aires to Lago Argentina. It had become closer to me than any human, closer even than Helga. The east side of the Andes in this region is a bitter, parched desert, where gale-force winds blow incessantly three hundred and sixty days of the year. They come from the snowbound slopes of the mountains, freezing whatever they touch. I knew the country and I loved it, but Helga had persuaded me that it was not a land to which a man could retire. The buffeting wind was an endless drain, too much for old blood. Better, she said, to leave in early middle age, when a life elsewhere could still be shaped.

When the time came for us to board the aircraft that would take me away to Buenos Aires and then to Europe, I wanted to throw away my ticket. I am not a sentimental man, but only Helga’s presence allowed me to leave the Kingdom of the Winds.

Now John Martindale was tempting me to return there, with more than money. At one end of his conservatory-study stood a massive globe, about six feet across. Presumably it dated from the time before he had acquired his artificial eyes, because it differed from all other globes I had ever seen in one important respect; namely, it was a relief globe.

Oceans were all smooth surface, while mountain ranges of the world stood out from the surface of the flattened sphere. The degree of relief had been exaggerated, but everything was in proportion. Himalayan and Karakoram ranges projected a few tenths of an inch more than the Rockies and the Andes, and they in turn were a little higher than the Alps or the volcanic ranges of Indonesia.

When my drink was finished Martindale had walked me across to that globe. He ran his finger down the backbone of the Americas, following the continuous mountain chains from their beginning in Alaska, through the American Rockies, through Central America, and on to the rising Andes and northern Chile. When he finally came to Patagonia his fingers slowed and stopped.

“Here,” he said. “It begins here.”

His fingertip was resting on an area very familiar to me. It was right on the Argentina–Chile border, with another of the cold mountain lakes at the center of it. I knew the lake as Lago Pueyrredon, but as usual with bodies of water that straddle the border there was a different name—Lago Cochrane—in use on the Chilean side. The little town of Paso Roballo, where I had spent a dozen nights in a dozen years, lay just to the northeast.

If I closed my eyes I could see the whole landscape that lay beneath his finger. To the east it was dry and dusty, sustaining only thornbush and tough grasses on the dark surface of old volcanic flows; westward were the tall flowering grasses and the thicketed forests of redwood, cypress, and Antarctic beech. Even in the springtime of late November there would be snow on the higher ground, with snow-fed lake waters lying black as jet under a Prussian-blue sky.

I could see all this, but it seemed impossible that John Martindale could do so. His blind skull must hold a different vision.

“
What
begins here?” I asked, and wondered again how much he could receive through those arrays of inorganic crystal.

“The anomalies. This region has weather patterns that defy all logic and all models.”

“I agree with that, from personal experience. That area has the most curious pattern of winds of any place in the world.” It had been a long flight and a long day, and by this time I was feeling a little weary. I was ready to defer discussion of the weather until tomorrow, and I wanted time to reflect on our “agreement in principle.” I continued,