The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (51 page)

“Think we’ll find anything?” I said softly.

“I don’t know.” And then, after maybe one minute. “It’s not that. It’s you, Klaus.”

“I’ve never been better.”

“That’s the problem. I’ve seen you, these last few days. You love it here. I should never have taken you away.”

“I’m not complaining.”

“That’s part of the problem, too. You never complain. I wish you would.” I heard her turn to face me in the dark, and for one second I imagined a hand was reaching out toward me. It was an illusion. She went on, “When I said I wanted to leave Patagonia and live in Europe, you agreed without an argument. But your heart has always been here.”

“Oh, well, I don’t know...” The lie stuck in my throat.

“And there’s something else. I wasn’t going to tell you, because I was afraid that you would misunderstand. But I will tell you. John Martindale tried to touch me.”

I stirred, began to sit up, and felt the rough canvas against my forehead. Outside, the wind gave a sudden scream around the tent. “You mean he tried to—to—”

“No. He reached out, and tried to touch the back of my hand. That was all. I don’t know why he did it, but I think it was just curiosity. He watches everything, and he has been watching us. I pulled my hand away before he got near. But it made me think of you. I have not been a wife to you, Klaus. You’ve done your best, and I’ve tried my hardest but it hasn’t improved at all. Be honest with yourself, you know it hasn’t. So if you want to stay here when this work is finished...”

I hated to hear her sound so confused and lost. “Let’s not discuss it now,” I said. 

In other words, I can’t bear to talk about it.

We had tried so hard at first, with Helga gritting her teeth at every gentle touch. When I finally realized that the sweat on her forehead and the quiver in her thin limbs was a hundred percent fear and zero percent arousal, I stopped trying. After that we had been happy—or at least, I had. I had not been faithful physically, but I could explain that well enough. And then, with this trip and the arrival on the scene of John Kenyon Martindale, the whole relationship between Helga and me felt threatened. And I did not know why.

“We ought to get as much sleep as we can tonight,” I said, after another twenty seconds or so. “Tomorrow will be a tough day.”

She said nothing, but she remained awake for a long, long time.

And so, of course, did I.

The first quarter mile was easy, a walk down a gently sloping incline of weathered basalt. Owen Davies had watched us leave with an odd mixture of disdain and greed on his face. We were not going to find anything, he was quite sure of that—but on the other hand, if by some miracle we
did,
and he was not there to see it...

We carried minimal packs. I thought it would be no more than a two-hour trek to our target point, and we had no intention of being away overnight.

When we came to the field of boulders I revised my estimate. Every square millimeter of surface was coated with the thinnest and most treacherous layer of clear ice. In principle its presence was impossible. With an atmosphere of this temperature and dryness, that ice should have sublimed away.

We picked our way carefully across, concentrating on balance far more than progress.

The wind buffeted us, always at the worst moments. It took another hour and a half before we were at the bottom of the waterfalls and could see how to tackle the rock face.

It didn’t look too bad. There were enough cracks and ledges to make the climb fairly easy.

“That’s the spot,” said Martindale. “Right in there.”

We followed his pointing finger. About seventy feet above our heads one of the bigger waterfalls came cascading its way out from the cliff for a thirty-foot vertical drop.

“The waterfall?” said Helga. Her tone of voice said more than her words.
That’s
supposed to be a generator of two hundred and fifty miles of gale-force winds?
she was saying.
Tell me another one.

“Behind it.” Martindale was walking along the base of the cliff, looking for a likely point where he could begin the climb. “The coordinates are actually
inside
the cliff.

Which means we have to look
behind
the waterfall. And that means we have to come at it from the side.”

We had brought rock-climbing gear with us. We did not need it. Martindale found a diagonal groove that ran at an angle of thirty degrees up the side of the cliff, and after following it to a vertical chimney, we found another slanting ledge running the other way. Two more changes of route, neither difficult, and we were on a ledge about two feet wide that ran up to and right behind our waterfall.

Two feet is a lot less when you are seventy feet up and walking a rock ledge slippery with water. Even here, the winds plucked restlessly at our clothes. We roped ourselves together, Martindale leading, and inched our way forward. When we were a few feet from the waterfall Martindale lengthened the rope between him and me, and went on alone behind the cascading water.

“It’s all right.” He had to shout to be heard above the crash of water. “It gets easier.

The ledge gets wider. It runs into a cave in the face of the cliff. Come on.”

We were carrying powerful electric flashlights, and we needed them. Once we were in behind the screen of water, the light paled and dwindled. We shone the lights toward the back of the cave. We were standing on a flat area, maybe ten feet wide and twelve feet deep. So much for Owen’s dream of endless caverns of treasure; so much for my dreams, too, though they had been a lot less grandiose than his.

Standing about nine feet in from the edge of the ledge stood a dark blue cylinder, maybe four feet long and as thick as a man’s thigh. It was smooth-surfaced and uniform, with no sign of controls or markings on its surface. I heard Martindale grunt in satisfaction.

“Bingo,” he said. “That’s it.”

“The whole thing?”

“Certainly. Remember what I said last night, about advanced technology making this smaller? There’s the source of the line-vortex—the power unit for the whole Kingdom of the Winds.” He took two steps toward it, and as he did so Helga cried out, “Look out!” 

The blank wall at the back of the cave had suddenly changed. Instead of damp gray stone, a rectangle of striated darkness had formed, maybe seven feet high and five feet wide.

Martindale laughed in triumph, and turned back to us. “Don’t move for the moment.

But don’t worry, this is exactly what I hoped we might find. I suspected something like this when I first saw that anomaly. The winds are just an accidental by-product—like an eddy. The equipment here must be a little bit off in its tuning. But it’s still working, no doubt about that. Feel the inertial dragging?”

I could feel something, a weak but persistent force drawing me toward the dark rectangle. I leaned backward to counteract it and looked more closely at the opening. As my eyes adjusted I realized that it was not true darkness there. Faint blue lines of luminescence started in from the edges of the aperture and flew rapidly toward a vanishing point at the center. There they disappeared, while new blue threads came into being at the outside.

“Where did the opening come from?” said Helga. “It wasn’t there when we came in.”

“No. It’s a portal. I’m sure it only switches on when it senses the right object within range.” Martindale took another couple of steps forward. Now he was standing at the very edge of the aperture, staring through at something invisible to me.

“What is it?” I said. In spite of Martindale’s words I too had taken a couple of steps closer, and so had Helga.

“A portal—a gate to some other part of the universe, built around a gravitational line singularity.” He laughed, and his voice sounded half an octave lower in pitch.

“Somebody left it here for us humans, and it leads to the stars. You wanted Trapalanda?

This is it—the most priceless discovery in the history of the human race.”

He took one more step forward. His moving leg stretched out forever in front of him, lengthening and lengthening. When his foot came down, the leg looked fifty yards long and it dwindled away to the tiny, distant speck of his foot. He lifted his back foot from the ground, and as he leaned forward his whole body rippled and distorted, stretching away from me. Now he looked his usual self—but he was a hundred yards away, carried with one stride along a tunnel that ran as far as the eye could follow.

Martindale turned, and reached out his hand. A long arm zoomed back toward us, still attached to that distant body, and a normal-sized right hand appeared out of the aperture.

“Come on.” The voice was lower again in tone, and strangely slowed. “Both of you.

Don’t you want to see the rest of the universe? Here’s the best chance that you will ever have.”

Helga and I took another step forward, staring in to the very edge of the opening.

Martindale reached out his left hand too, and it hurtled toward us, growing rapidly, until it was there to be taken and held. I took another step, and I was within the portal itself. I felt normal, but I was aware of that force again, tugging us harder toward the tunnel.

Suddenly I was gripped by an irrational and irresistible fear. I had to get away. I turned to move back from the aperture, and found myself looking at Helga. She was thirty yards away, drastically diminished, standing in front of a tiny wall of falling water.

One more step would have taken me outside again to safety, clear of the aperture and its persistent, tugging field. But as I was poised to take that step, Helga acted. She closed her eyes and took a long, trembling step forward. I could see her mouth moving, almost as though in prayer. And then the action I could not believe: she leaned forward to grasp convulsively at John Martindale’s outstretched hand.

I heard her gasp, and saw her shiver. Then she was taking another step forward. And another.

“Helga!” I changed my direction and blundered after her along that endless tunnel.

“This way. I’ll get us out.”

“No.” She had taken another shivering step, and she was still clutching Martindale’s hand. “No, Klaus.” Her voice was breathless. “He’s right. This is the biggest adventure ever. It’s worth everything.”

“Don’t be afraid,” said a hollow, booming voice. It was Martindale, and now all I could see of him was a shimmering silhouette. The man had been replaced by a sparkling outline. “Come on, Klaus. It’s almost here.”

The tugging force was stronger, pulling on every cell of my body. I looked at Helga, a shining outline now like John Martindale. They were dwindling, vanishing. They were gone. I wearily turned around and tried to walk back the way we had come. Tons of weight hung on me, wreathed themselves around every limb. I was trying to drag the whole world up an endless hill. I forced my legs to take one small step, then another. It was impossible to see if I was making progress. I was surrounded by that roaring silent pattern of rushing blue lines, all going in the opposite direction from me, every one doing its best to drag me back.

I inched along. Finally I could see the white of the waterfall ahead. It was growing in size, but at the same time it was losing definition. My eyes ached. By the time I took the final step and fell on my face on the stone floor of the cave, the waterfall was no more than a milky haze and a sound of rushing water.

Owen Davies saved my life, what there is of it. I did my part to help him. I wanted to live when I woke up, and weak as I was, and half-blind, I managed to crawl down that steep rock face. I was dragging myself over the icy boulders when he found me. My clothes were shredding, falling off my body, and I was shivering and weeping from cold and fear. He wrapped me in his own jacket and helped me back to the aircraft.

Then he went off to look for John Martindale and Helga. He never came back. I do not know to this day if he found and entered the portal, or if he came to grief somewhere on the way.

I spent two days in the aircraft, knowing that I was too sick and my eyes were too bad to dream of flying anywhere. My front teeth had all gone, and I ate porridge or biscuits soaked in tea. Three more days, and I began to realize that if I did not fly myself, I was not going anywhere. On the seventh day I managed a faltering, incompetent takeoff and flew northeast, peering at the instruments with my newly purblind eyes. I made a crash landing at Comodoro Rivadavia, was dragged from the wreckage, and flown to a hospital in Bahía Blanca. They did what they could for me, which was not too much. By that time I was beginning to have some faint idea what had happened to my body, and as soon as the hospital was willing to release me I took a flight to Buenos Aires, and went on at once to Geneva’s Lakeside Hospital. They removed the cataracts from my eyes.

Three weeks later I could see again without that filmy mist over everything.

Before I left the hospital I insisted on a complete physical. Thanks to John Martindale’s half-million dollar deposit, money was not going to be a problem. The doctor who went over the results with me was about thirty years old, a Viennese Jew who had been practicing for only a couple of years. He looked oddly similar to one of my cousins at that age. “Well, Mr. Jacobi,” he said (after a quick look at his dossier to make sure of my name), “there are no organic abnormalities, no cardiovascular problems, only slight circulation problems. You have some osteoarthritis in your hips and your knees. I’m delighted to be able to tell you that you are in excellent overall health for your age.”

“If you didn’t know,” I said, “how old would you think I am?”

He looked again at his crib sheet, but found no help there. I had deliberately left out my age at the place where the hospital entry form required it. “Well,” he said. He was going to humor me. “Seventy-six?” 

“Spot on,” I said.

I had the feeling that he had knocked a couple of years off his estimate, just to make me feel good. So let’s say my biological age was seventy-eight or seventy-nine. When I flew with John Martindale to Buenos Aires, I had been one month short of my forty-fourth birthday.