Harry Turtledove

by The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century

  “I didn’t think there was a machine in the world that could do that.”

  “Oh, yes.” He switched it off, and Shirley halted in midword. “This isn’t even state-of-the-art anymore. It was, when it was made, and it cost the earth. Next year it will be an antique, and they’ll give this much capability out in cereal packets. Come on, let’s go and join Shirley for a prelunch aperitif.”

  If John Martindale were angry with me or with his wife, he concealed it well. I realized that the mask extended well beyond the black casing.

  Five days later we flew to Argentina. When Martindale mentioned his idea of being in the Kingdom of the Winds in time for the winter solstice, season of the anomaly’s strongest showing, I dropped any thoughts of a trip back to Lausanne. I arranged for Helga to pack what I needed and meet us in Buenos Aires. She would wait at Ezeiza Airport without going into the city proper, and we would fly farther south at once. Even if our travels went well, we would need luck as well as efficiency to have a week near Paso Roballo before solstice.

  It amused me to see Martindale searching for Helga in the airport arrival lounge as we walked off the plane. He had seen her photograph, and I had assured him that she would be there. He could not find her. Within seconds, long before it was possible to see her features, I had picked her out. She was staring down at a book on her lap. Every fifteen seconds her head lifted for a rapid radarlike scan of the passenger lounge, and returned to the page. Martindale did not notice her until we were at her side.

  I introduced them. Helga nodded but did not speak. She stood up and led the way. She had rented a four-seater plane on open charter, and in her usual efficient way she had arranged for our luggage to be transferred to it.

  Customs clearance, you ask? Let us be realistic. The Customs Office in Argentina is no more corrupt than that of, say, Bolivia or Ecuador; that is quite sufficient. Should John Martindale be successful in divining the legendary treasures of Trapalanda, plenty of hands would help to remove them illegally from the country.

  Helga led the way through the airport. She was apparently not what he had expected of my wife, and I could see him studying her closely. Helga stood no more than five feet two, to my six-two, and her thin body was not quite straight. Her left shoulder dipped a bit, and she favored her left leg a trifle as she walked.

  Since I was the only one with a pilot’s license I sat forward in the copilot’s chair, next to Owen Davies. I had used Owen before as a bythe-day hired pilot. He knew the Kingdom of the Winds, and he respected it. He would not take risks. In spite of his name he was Argentina born—one of the many Welshmen who found almost any job preferable to their parents’ Argentinean sheep-farming. Martindale and Helga sat behind us, side-by-side in the back, as we flew to Comodoro Rivadavia on the Atlantic coast. It was the last real airfield we would see for a while unless we dipped across the Chilean border to Cochrane. I preferred not to try that. In the old days, you risked a few machine-gun bullets from frontier posts. Today it is likely to be a surface-to-air missile.

  We would complete our supplies in Comodoro Rivadavia, then use dry dirt airstrips the rest of the way. The provisions were supposed to be waiting for us. While Helga and Owen were checking to make sure that the delivery included everything we had ordered, Martindale came up to my side.

  “Does she never talk?” he said. “Or is it just my lack of charm?” He did not sound annoyed, merely puzzled.

  “Give her time.” I looked to see what Owen and Helga were doing. They were pointing at three open chests of supplies, and Owen was becoming rather loud.

  “You noticed how Helga walks, and how she holds her left arm?”

  The black shield dipped down and up, making me suddenly curious as to what lay behind it. “I even tried to hint at a question in that direction,” he said. “Quite properly she ignored it.”

  “She was not born that way. When Helga walked into my office nine years ago, I assumed that I was looking at some congenital condition. She said nothing, nor did I. I was looking for an assistant, someone who was as interested in the high border country as I was, and Helga fitted. She was only twenty-one years old and still green, but I could tell she was intelligent and trainable.”

  “Biddable,” said Martindale. “Sorry, go on.”

  “You have to be fit to wander around in freezing temperatures at ten thousand feet,” I said. “As part of Helga’s condition of employment, she had to take a full physical. She didn’t want to. She agreed only when she saw that the job depended on it. She was in excellent shape and passed easily; but the doctor—quite improperly—allowed me to look at her X rays.”

  Were the eyebrows raised, behind that obsidian visor? Martindale cocked his head to the right, a small gesture of inquiry. Helga and Owen Davies were walking our way.

  “She was put together like a jigsaw puzzle. Almost every bone in her arms and legs showed marks of fracture and healing. Her ribs, too. When she was small she had been what these enlightened times call ‘abused.’ Tortured. As a very small child, Helga learned to keep quiet. The best thing she could hope for was to be ignored. You saw already how invisible she can be.”

  “I have never heard you angry before,” he said. “You sound like her father, not her husband.” His tone was calm, but something new hid behind that mask. “And is that,” he continued, “why in New York—”

  He was interrupted. “Tomorrow,” said Owen from behind him. “He says he’ll have the rest then. I believe him. I told him he’s a fat idle bastard, and if we weren’t on our way by noon I’d personally kick the shit out of him.”

  Martindale nodded at me. Conversation closed. We headed into town for Alberto McShane’s bar and the uncertain pleasures of nightlife in Comodoro Rivadavia. Martindale didn’t give up. All the way there he talked quietly to Helga. He may have received ten words in return.

  It had been five years. Alberto McShane didn’t blink when we walked in. He took my order without comment, but when Helga walked past him he reached out his good arm and gave her a big hug. She smiled like the sun. She was home. She had hung around the Guanaco bar since she was twelve years old, an oil brat brought here in the boom years. When her parents left, she stayed. She hid among the beer barrels in McShane’s cellar until the plane took off. Then she could relax for the first time in her life. Poverty and hard work were luxuries after what she had been through.

  The decor of the bar hadn’t changed since last time. The bottle of dirty black oil (the first one pumped at Comodoro Rivadavia, if you believe McShane) hung over the bar, and the same stuffed guanaco and rhea stood beside it. McShane’s pet armadillo, or its grandson, ambled among the tables looking for beer heeltaps.

  I knew our search plans, but Helga and Owen Davies needed briefing. Martindale took Owen’s 1:1,000,000 scale ONC’s, with their emendations and local detail in Owen’s careful hand, added to them the 1:250,000 color photomaps that had been made for him in the United States, and spread the collection out to cover the whole table.

  “From here, to here,” he said. His fingers tapped the map near Laguna del Sello, then moved south and west until they reached Lago Belgrano.

  Owen studied them for a few moments. “All on this side of the border,” he said. “That’s good. What do you want to do there?”

  “I want to land. Here, and here, and here.” Martindale indicated seven points, on a roughly north-south line.

  Owen Davies squinted down, assessing each location. “Lago Gio, Paso Roballo, Lago Posadas. Know ’em all. Tough landing at two, and that last point is in the middle of the Perito Moreno National Park; but we can find a place.” He looked up, not at Martindale but at me. “You’re not in the true high country, though. You’re twenty miles too far east. What do you want to do when you get there?”

  “I want to get out, and look west,” said Martindale. “After that, I’ll tell you where we have to go.”

  Owen Davies said nothing more, but when we were at the bar picking up more drinks he gave me a shrug.
Too far east, it said. You’re not in the high country. You won’t find Trapalanda there, where he’s proposing to land. What’s the story?

  Owen was an honest man and a great pilot who had made his own failed attempt at Trapalanda (sometimes I thought that was true of everyone who lived below 46 degrees South). He found it hard to believe that anyone could succeed where he had not, but he couldn’t resist the lure.

  “He knows something he’s not telling us,” I said. “He’s keeping information to himself. Wouldn’t you?”

  Owen nodded. Barrels of star rubies and tons of platinum and gold bars shone in his dark Welsh eyes.

  When we returned to the table John Martindale had made his breakthrough. Helga was talking and bubbling with laughter. “How did you do that,” she was saying. “He’s untouchable. What did you do to him?” McShane’s armadillo was sitting on top of the table, chewing happily at a piece of apple. Martindale was rubbing the ruffle of horny plates behind its neck, and the armadillo was pushing itself against his hand.

  “He thinks I’m one of them.” Martindale touched the black screen across his eyes. “See? We’ve both got plates. I’m just one of the family.” His face turned up to me. I read the satisfaction behind the mask. And should I do to your wife, Klaus, what you did to mine? it said. It would be no more than justice.

  Those were not Martindale’s thoughts. I realized that. They were mine. And that was the moment when my liking for John Kenyon Martindale began to tilt toward resentment.

  ———

  At ground level, the western winds skim off the Andean slopes at seventy knots or more. At nine thousand feet, they blow at less then thirty. Owen was an economy-minded pilot. He flew west at ten thousand until we were at the preferred landing point, then dropped us to the ground in three sickening sideslips.

  He had his landing already planned. Most of Patagonia is built of great level slabs, rising like terraces from the high coastal cliffs on the Atlantic Ocean to the Andean heights in the west. The exception was in the area we were exploring. Volcanic eruptions there have pushed great layers of basalt out onto the surface. The ground is cracked and irregular, and scarred by the scouring of endless winds. It takes special skill to land a plane when the wind speed exceeds the landing airspeed, and Owen Davies had it. We showed an airspeed of over a hundred knots when we touched down, light as a dust mote, and rolled to a perfect landing. “Good enough,” said Owen.

  He had brought us down on a flat strip of dark lava, at three o’clock in the afternoon. The sun hung low on the northwest horizon, and we stepped out into the teeth of a cold and dust-filled gale. The wind beat and tugged and pushed our bodies, trying to blow us back to the Atlantic. Owen, Helga, and I wore goggles and helmets against the driving clouds of grit and sand.

  Martindale was bareheaded. He planted a GPS transponder on the ground to confirm our exact position, and faced west. With his head tilted upward and his straw-colored hair blowing wild, he made an adjustment to the side of his visor, then nodded. “It is there,” he said. “I knew it must be.”

  We looked, and saw nothing. “What is there?” said Helga.

  “I’ll tell you in a moment. Note these down. I’m going to read off heights and headings.” Martindale looked at the sun and the compass. He began to turn slowly from north to south. Every fifteen degrees he stopped, stared at the featureless sky, and read off a list of numbers. When he was finished he nodded to Owen. “All right. We can do the next one now.”

  “You mean that’s it? The whole thing? All you’re going to do is stand there?” Owen is many good things, but he is not diplomatic.

  “That’s it—for the moment.” Martindale led the way back to the aircraft.

  I could not follow. Not at once. I had lifted my goggles and was peering with wind-teared eyes to the west. The land there fell upward to the dark-blue twilight sky. It was the surge of the Andes, less than twenty miles away, rolling up in long, snowcapped breakers. I walked across the tufts of bunchgrass and reached out a hand to steady myself on an isolated ten-foot beech tree. Wind-shaped and stunted it stood, trunk and branches curved to the east, hiding its head from the deadly western wind. It was the only one within sight.

  This was my Patagonia, the true, the terrible.

  I felt a gentle touch on my arm. Helga stood there, waiting. I patted her hand in reply, and she instinctively recoiled. Together we followed Martindale and Davies back to the aircraft.

  “I found what I was looking for,” Martindale said, when we were all safely inside. The gale buffeted and rocked the craft, resenting our presence. “It’s no secret now. When the winds approach the Andes from the Chilean side, they shed all the moisture they have picked up over the Pacific; and they accelerate. The energy balance equation is the same everywhere in the world. It depends on terrain, moisture, heating, and atmospheric layers. The same equation everywhere—except that here, in the Kingdom of the Winds, something goes wrong. The winds pick up so much speed that they are thermodynamically impossible. There is a mechanism at work, pumping energy into the moving air. I knew it before I left New York City; and I knew what it must be. There had to be a long, horizontal line-vortex, running north to south and transmitting energy to the western wind. But that too was impossible. First, then, I had to confirm that the vortex existed.” He nodded vigorously. “It does. With my vision sensors I can see the patterns of compression and rarefaction. In other words, I can see direct evidence of the vortex. With half a dozen more readings, I will pinpoint the exact origin of its energy source.”

  “But what’s all that got to do with finding . . . ” Owen trailed off and looked at me guiltily. I had told him what Martindale was after, but I had also cautioned him never to mention it.

  “With finding Trapalanda?” finished Martindale. “Why, it has everything to do with it. There must be one site, a specific place where the generator exists to power the vortex line. Find that, and we will have found Trapalanda.”

  Like God, Duty, or Paradise, Trapalanda means different things to different people. I could see from the expression on Owen’s face that a line-vortex power generator was not his Trapalanda, no matter what it meant to Martindale.

  ———

  I had allowed six days; it took three. On the evening of June 17th, we sat around the tiny table in the aircraft’s rear cabin. There would be no flying tomorrow, and Owen had produced a bottle of usquebaugh australis; “southern whiskey,” the worst drink in the world.

  “On foot,” John Martindale was saying. “Now it has to be on foot—and just in case, one of us will stay at the camp in radio contact.”

  “Helga,” I said. She and Martindale shook heads in unison. “Suppose you have to carry somebody out?” she said. “I can’t do that. It must be you or Owen.”

  At least she was taking this seriously, which Owen Davies was not. He had watched with increasing disgust while Martindale made atmospheric observations at seven sites. Afterward he came to me secretly. “We’re working for a madman,” he said. “We’ll find no treasure. I’d almost rather work for Diego.”

  Diego Luria—“Mad Diego”—believed that the location of Trapalanda could be found by a correct interpretation of the Gospel According to Saint John. He had made five expeditions to the altiplano, four of them with Owen as pilot. It was harder on Owen than you might think, since Diego sometimes said that human sacrifice would be needed before Trapalanda could be discovered. They had found nothing; but they had come back, and that in itself was no mean feat.

  Martindale had done his own exact triangulation, and pinpointed a place on the map. He had calculated UTM coordinates accurate to within twenty meters. They were not promising. When we flew as close as possible to his chosen location we found that we were looking at a point halfway up a steep rock face, where a set of broken waterfalls cascaded down a near-vertical cliff.

  “I am sure,” he said, in reply to my implied question. “The data-fit residuals are too small to leave any doubt.” He tapped the map,
and looked out of the aircraft window at the distant rock face. “Tomorrow. You, and Helga, and I will go. You, Owen, you stay here and monitor our transmission frequency. If we are off the air for more than twelve hours, come and get us.”

  He was taking this too seriously. Before the light faded I went outside again and trained my binoculars on the rock face. According to Martindale, at that location was a power generator that could modify the flow of winds along two hundred and fifty miles of mountain range. I saw nothing but the blown white spray of falls and cataracts, and a gray highland fox picking its way easily up the vertical rock face.

  “Trust me.” Martindale had appeared suddenly at my side. “I can see those wind patterns when I set my sensors to function at the right wavelengths. What’s your problem?”

  “Size.” I turned to him. “Can you make your sensors provide telescopic images?”

  “Up to three inch effective aperture.”

  “Then take a look up there. You’re predicting that we’ll find a machine which produces tremendous power—”

  “Many gigawatts.”

  “—more power than a whole power station. And there is nothing there, nothing to see. That’s impossible.”

  “Not at all.” The sun was crawling along the northern horizon. The thin daylight lasted for only eight hours, and already it was fading. John Kenyon Martindale peered off westward and shook his head. He tapped his black visor. “You’ve had a good look at this,” he said. “Suppose I had wanted to buy something that could do what this does, say, five years ago. Do you know what it would have weighed?”

  “Weighed?” I shook my head.

  “At least a ton. And ten years ago, it would have been impossible to build, no matter how big you allowed it to be. In another ten years, this assembly will fit easily inside a prosthetic eye. The way is toward miniaturization, higher energy densities, more compact design. I expect the generator to be small.” He suddenly turned again to look right into my face. “I have a question for you, and it is an unforgivably personal one. Have you ever consummated your marriage with Helga?”