Time Travel Omnibus, page 706
When he said that I was listening, that’s for sure, and I tried to argue back. Imagine, a world without censors reading all the messages! I took him to task on that one, I can assure you. “Graham, if someone can pick up your telephone and speak to anyone else without a record being kept, it will lead to the breakdown of law and order as we know it.
“Besides,” I added, and Graham grew white about the eyes at this. Ha! I scared him properly! “If the censors get to hear about what you’re doing, why, you’ll do them out of a job” (and I was right about that!) “and they’ll be absolutely livid!”
Graham clutched his throat with a strangled cry. “The censors? After me? No! I’m only a child! My mother loves me! How would they get to know about it?”
“Walls have ears,” I said, very smugly.
“Alexia! No! Don’t tell on me! I’m your brother! You’d never!”
Ha! I had him worried! But he’s right. I’m not a censor-snooper. It’s true, I wanted a job as a censor, but I wanted it for the pay packet and the security. I didn’t have to believe all the guff they teach us about law and order. “Be careful,” I said to Graham, but of course he wasn’t. Once he found out what he was able to do, he just had to go ahead and do it. I didn’t tell on Graham. I now know I did wrong. After all, Graham succeeded in subverting the social fabric of twentieth-century society.
I was too busy to notice, at the time. I had my work to do. I confided to my friend Greta, though. We worked together at the telegraph office.
“Mind you, if Graham’s invention works, we’ll soon be out of a job,” I said to Greta, between the dots and the dashes.
Greta didn’t believe me. “At the telegraph office? At Central Message Control? No, Alexia, that won’t happen. No one ever gets sacked from here.”
“They can get you for unnatural interference with the messages,” I reminded her.
Greta was shocked. “Alexia, that’s never happened! No one would do that! It’d be. . . monstrous!”
“What about redundancy? They can get you on that.”
I shall always remember Greta’s patient reply. “Alexia,” she said, “morse code and semaphore and messenger boys have been around longer than your brother Graham and his crazy ideas. How’s the cat?”
“On the mend.”
“The ice-aeroplane, didn’t you say that was another of his latest inventions?”
“Yes, but the telephone is different! I think the telephone is going to work!”
Greta was unconvinced. “We’d be able to talk to each other without everyone in the teletype room knowing the message.”
“I know, I know.”
“It’ll mean the end of twentieth-century society as we know it!”
“No more censors!”
“Shhh!”
“Greta, I just can’t get through to Graham. I keep telling him: Graham, the telephone will lead to anarchy.”
“It won’t ever happen,” said Greta, as she lectured me on the moral desirability of the Censored State. “If we were meant to talk to each other down wires then God would have connected us up from birth.”
Graham just kept on working. “Today the passageway, tomorrow the world,” he announced when I came home one evening.
I found a land-line down the passage and a telephone hook-up in my bedroom. “Graham, you’ve gone too far this time,” I bellowed into the phone when it rang. “Get your inventions out of my room!”
“Alexia, will you step into the next room for a moment?” said Graham on the phone, polite and conscious of the historic moment.
I told him a thing or two. “Greta says you’re a social menace, and I agree with her!” This is a true account of the first telephone message. You may know part of the story.
First Graham wired up the passage, then he extended the line to every room in the house. Then he wanted more. He wanted to go down the street and clear across Australia, then out into the world.
And he managed to persuade people! Never mind the censors, they vanished, once the capitalist entrepreneurs took over. Graham had them convinced.
“Gas pipes, water pipes, and telephone pipes!” said Graham, his eyes gleaming and his fingers flying. “One system, one policy, one universal service!”
“One giant monopoly! And money!” replied the capitalist entrepreneur.
“One grand telephonic system linking each farm to its neighbor, each factory to its central office, each nation to the other!” said Graham, still the visionary.
Remember what it said in the paper? “We may confidently expect that Mr. Bell will give us the means of making voice and spoken words audible through the electric wires to an ear hundreds of miles distant.” It happened.
I tried to warn Graham. “There may be a few social problems.”
Graham didn’t pay attention. “Nothing a telephone in every house won’t fix,” he said.
“There may be a few economic problems,” I warned.
“Show me the economic problem that money won’t eliminate!” There was no stopping him.
“Contract distance, contract time!”
“Only a little bit! No one will ever notice!”
“Graham, don’t do it! You are going into the unknown.”
“No need to worry,” said Graham, “I know perfectly well what I’m doing.”
Of course, he got it wrong and we all paid the price. Poor old Greta was one of the first casualties.
“Alexia, what’s wrong? My life . . . it’s passing so quickly! It seems only yesterday that we worked in Central Control, and now . . . the telegraph! It’s vanished!”
I tried my best to distract her. “Happy birthday, darling! Fifty candles on the cake!”
“Then things changed so quickly. The telephone . . .”
“Time’s a funny thing.”
Greta blew at the candles. “Everything started to speed up, and things passed me by, so quickly!”
“There, there, you must have been enjoying yourself.”
“It’s not fair! I haven’t had time to enjoy myself!”
Of course, Graham could explain it. “The distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion,” he said.
“It seems real, to me. How can yesterday become tomorrow?”
“If time contracts!”
“That’s my problem! What’s the solution?”
“I’m working on it,” Graham muttered.
“I can’t wait,” said Greta, “I need it now.”
I discovered that time is more than my perception of it. Time depends on the telephone.
“Nonsense!” you will say. “Time has been around for simply ages, but the telephone, why, it’s only been around for a couple of years!”
“A couple of years? Did you say a couple of years? Why did you say that? I’ve got you, there!”
“Did I say a couple of years?” you’ll say, puzzled. “Why, of course I meant a hundred years. I don’t know why I said a couple of years, and with such conviction. It was just a silly mistake.”
Aha, but silly mistakes always mean something! You’re confused about the issue, admit it. There’s something not quite right about the telephone, something that’s hovering on the edge of your comprehension but which can’t quite make the break out into your conscious mind. You know, more than you can tell.
Greta and I both noticed something happening. I’ve worked it out since then.
When Graham got the marketing men interested in his invention, and phones started appearing in every home, time started to speed up for most people. You know how it is, you feel that last year was only yesterday, and that the years of your life are flitting by so quickly. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation. It’s because last year was only yesterday, for you, though not for me.
The censors joined the unemployed, the messenger boys went off to two world wars, and wherever the telephone spread, time accelerated in its course. It’s only in countries where there are no phones that people still get full value for their lives.
I don’t know why it was that Graham and I have not shared the experience. We’ve either been spared, or punished, for our knowledge. We have stayed outside the onward rush of time. Graham’s happy. He thinks he must have invented the elixir of youth in that first experiment. Only the elixir isn’t a drug made from gold, or precious herbs, or genetically engineered DNA. The elixir is a unique form of radiation which comes from standing too close to a few tin cans, a thermo-amp, old wires, and a teletype junked in a quite specific way, at a time when Jupiter is on the cusp of Uranus and the moon is in the fourth quarter.
I can’t turn the clock back. I can’t personally dynamite every telephone in Australia. But I see I shall have to hijack Graham and take him off to Antarctica. He’ll come with me willingly enough. Where better to design the ice-aeroplane?
There’s a new factor entering into the story. Graham’s started to mutter about a new device to contract distance, only this time on a cosmic scale. He can do it, too. The problem with space travel, says Graham, is that space is too big. It’s one thing to design a spaceship, but then it takes aeons to get anywhere in it. The stars are too far away. So Graham is working on a device to shrink the galaxy.
Instead of us reaching out to the stars, Graham will have the stars reach down to us.
This is the end. The world has suffered enough.
I, Alexia Bell, being of sound mind, must take my brother Graham to Antarctica, and there build him an ice-hangar for his ice-aeroplanes. I shall lock the door and throw the key from a high window. I make this sacrifice, for you.
TRAPALANDA
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.
