Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [12]
Eventually it told him to recharge the power pack.
He complied, grumbled, and stared at it. So what exactly do you do?
The Phillies had two players with seven-l etter names. Neither worked. Then he remembered Galileo.
He poked it in. Hit ENTER.
The screen flickered. Replied: INVALID ID.
Damn.
Maybe it was just as well.
He wondered whether Galileo had had a title? Professor, probably. But that wasn’t seven characters.
He did a search, but found nothing.
On the other hand, he did have a family name.
Galilei.
He tried it and pressed ENTER.
The screen blinked. DO YOU WISH TO TRAVEL?
He laughed. It was going to book a flight for him. Or a train.
He entered: Yes.
HERE?
Here? That made no sense to him. No.
DEST?
He tried to enter Cairo. But it repeated DEST? Then, after a delay: LAT/LONG?
He was getting spooked. What the hell was happening, anyhow? What were the local numbers? He shrugged. Punched in approximations. Latitude 41°40’N, longitude 79°03’W.
It gave him more blanks. Wanted him to narrow the target area. He added additional digits.
DATE?
He shrugged. Tomorrow? Why not? He entered October 24, 2018.
TIME?
What the hell? Get there for a late lunch. Three o’clock was as good as anything. He inserted it, checked P.M.
RESET DEFAULT?
Why not? Yes.
HERE?
Yes.
The screen read: READY.
A large black button was marked GO. He pressed it.
The lights dimmed and went out.
The sofa went away. The flo or tilted and turned to grass. Lights came back on, and he fell on his face and began rolling downhill.
CHAPTER 3
Physics tells us what is impossible, no matter what we spend. Engineering tells us what is possible, and how much it will cost.
—WALTER F. CUIRLE, NOTEBOOKS
SHEL bounced through a patch of brambles, picked up some thorns, and crashed into a tree. Overhead, a tangle of branches filtered sunlight. Birds sang, but other than that, the world was silent.
Sunlight.
He checked his watch. It said 2:35 A.M.
Where the hell was he?
In a bunch of trees. In the middle of the day. No. More like morning. The ground was still wet.
He picked himself up, struggling to maintain his balance on a grassy slope. A squirrel peeked at him from behind some shrubbery. It was cold. He was out here with no sweater or jacket. He began shivering. And not entirely from the temperature.
He couldn’t see more than a hundred feet in any direction. The Q-pod lay on the ground. He picked it up and looked at it. The display read RETURN?
He fished through his pockets for his cell phone. But he apparently didn’t have it. That happens when you don’t know you’re going out.
“Anybody here?” he said. Then he tried again. Louder. “Hello! Anyone here? Help!”
The squirrel scrambled up a tree trunk.
The Q-pod was too big to put into his trouser pockets, so he simply held on to it. And, picking a direction at random, he began to walk.
HE kept going over what had happened, how he had come back from the show and had been trying various combinations on the Q-pod. And suddenly he’d been here. He hadn’t awakened here. The place had simply shown up. As if he’d stepped out of his den into this forest. Into the sunlight.
He hadn’t been drinking. So the only thing that made sense was that he’d suffered a stroke of some sort, or a mental episode. He’d blacked out, gone amnesiac, gotten into his car, and driven out here.
Wherever here was.
But that was ridiculous. He had no history of anything like that.
And where was the car?
He listened for the sound of traffic. But heard nothing other than birds. And wind.
The walking got his circulation going, which helped a little. He arrived at a brook. It was too wide to jump, and the last thing he needed was to get his feet wet. He turned right and walked along the bank.
He’d gone about a mile when he arrived at a place where someone