Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (48 page)

“Tell me.”

“I’d rather not. Not like this.” There was another, longer silence. “You
are
coming out, aren’t you?”

“Why do you think I’m on the telephone? Where should I fly to?”

“Christchurch. South Island. We’ll be going farther south, past Dunedin. Bring warm clothes. It’s winter here.”

“I know. I’ll call as soon as I have my arrival time.”

And that was the beginning.

* * *

The wavy mop of fair hair had turned to gray, and Bill Rigley now favored a pepper-and-salt beard which with his weather-beaten face turned him into an approximation of the Ancient Mariner. But nothing else had changed, except perhaps for the strange tension in his eyes.

We didn’t shake hands when he met me at Christchurch airport, or exchange one word of conventional greeting. Bill just said, as soon as we were within speaking range, “If this wasn’t happening to me, I’d insist it couldn’t happen to anybody,” and led me to his car.

Bill was South Island born, so the long drive from Christchurch to Dunedin was home territory to him. I, in that odd but pleasant daze that comes after long air travel—after you deplane, and before the jetlag hits you—stared out at the scenery from what I thought of as the driver’s seat (they still drive on the left, like the British).

We were crossing the flat Canterbury Plains, on a straight road across a level and empty expanse of muddy fields. It was almost three months after harvest—wheat or barley, from the look of the stubble—and there was nothing much to see until at Timaru we came to the coast road, with dull gray sea to the left and empty brown coastal plain on the right. I had visited South Island once before, but that had been a lightning trip, little more than a tour of Christchurch. Now for the first time I began to appreciate Bill’s grumbling about “overcrowded” Auckland on the North Island. We saw cars and people, but in terms of what I was used to it was a thin sprinkle of both. It was late afternoon, and as we drove farther south it became colder and began to rain. The sea faded from view behind a curtain of fog and drizzle.

We had been chatting about nothing from the time we climbed into the car. It was talk designed to avoid talking, and we both knew it. But at last Bill, after a few seconds in which the only sounds were the engine and the
whump-whump-whump
of windshield wipers, said: “I’m glad to have you here. There’s been times in the past few weeks when I’ve seriously wondered if I was going off my head. What I want to do is this. Tomorrow morning, after you’ve had a good sleep, I’m going to show you
everything
, just as I found it. Most of it just
where
I found it. And then I want you to tell me what
you
think is going on.”

I nodded. “What’s the population of New Zealand?”

Without turning my head, I saw Bill’s quick glance. “Total? Four million, tops.”

“And what was it in 1850?”

“That’s a hell of a good question. I don’t know if anyone can really tell you. I’d say, a couple of hundred thousand. But the vast majority of those were native Maori. I know where you’re going, and I agree totally. There’s no way that anyone could have built a version of the Analytical Engine in New Zealand in the middle of the last century. The manufacturing industry just didn’t exist here. The final assembly could be done, but the subunits would have to be built and shipped in big chunks from Europe.”

“From Babbage?”

“Absolutely not. He was still alive in 1854. He didn’t die until 1871, and if he had learned that a version of the Analytical Engine was being built
anywhere
, he’d have talked about it nonstop all over Europe.”

“But if it wasn’t Babbage—”

“Then who was it? I know. Be patient for a few more hours. Don’t try to think it through until you’ve rested, and had a chance to see the whole thing for yourself.”

He was right. I had been traveling nonstop around the clock, and my brain was going on strike. I pulled my overcoat collar up around my ears, and sagged lower in my seat. In the past few days I had absorbed as much information about Babbage and the Analytical Engine as my head could handle. Now I needed to let it sort itself out, along with what Bill was going to show me. Then we would see if I could come up with a more plausible explanation for what he had found.

As I drifted into half-consciousness, I flashed on to the biggest puzzle of all. Until that moment I had been telling myself, subconsciously, that Bill was just plain wrong. It was my way of avoiding the logical consequences of his being
right
. But suppose he
were
right. Then the biggest puzzle was not the appearance of an Analytical Engine, with its advanced programming tools, in New Zealand. It was the
disappearance
of those things, from the face of the Earth.

Where the devil had they gone?

* * *

Our destination was a farmhouse about fifteen miles south of Dunedin. I didn’t see much of it when we arrived, because it was raining and pitch-black and I was three-quarters asleep. If I had any thoughts at all as I was shown to a small, narrow room and collapsed into bed, it was that in the morning, bright and early, Bill would show me everything and my perplexity would end.

It didn’t work out that way. For one thing, I overslept and felt terrible when I got up. I had forgotten what a long, sleepless journey can do to your system. For the past five years I had done less and less traveling, and I was getting soft. For another thing, the rain had changed to sleet during the night and was driving down in freezing gusts. The wind was blowing briskly from the east, in off the sea. Bill and I sat at the battered wooden table in the farm kitchen, while Mrs. Trevelyan pushed bacon, eggs, homemade sausage, bread, and hot sweet tea into me until I showed signs of life. She was a spry, red-cheeked lady in her middle sixties, and if she was surprised that Bill had finally brought someone else with him to explore Little House, she hid it well.

“Well, then,” she said, when I was stuffed. “If you’re stepping up the hill you’ll be needing a mac. Jim put the one on when he went out, but we have plenty of spares.”

Jim Trevelyan was apparently off somewhere tending the farm animals, and had been since dawn. Bill grinned sadistically at the look on my face. “You don’t want a little rain to stop work, do you?”

I wanted to go back to bed. But I hadn’t come ten thousand miles to lie around. The “step up the hill” to Little House turned out to be about half a mile, through squelching mud covered with a thin layer of sour turf.

“How did you ever find this place?” I asked Bill.

“By asking and looking. I’ve been into a thousand like this before, and found nothing.”

We were approaching a solidly built square house made out of mortared limestone blocks. It had a weathered look, but the slate roof and chimney were intact. To me it did not seem much smaller than the main farmhouse.

“It’s not called ‘Little House’ because it’s
small
,” Bill explained. “It’s Little House because that’s where the little ones are supposed to live when they first marry. You’re seeing a twentieth century tragedy here. Jim and Annie Trevelyan are fourth generation farmers. They have five children. Every one went off to college, and not a one has come back to live in Little House and wait their turn to run the farm. Jim and Annie hang on at Big House, waiting and hoping.”

As we went inside, the heavy wooden door was snug-fitting and moved easily on oiled hinges.

“Jim Trevelyan keeps the place up, and I think they’re glad to have me here to give it a lived-in feel,” said Bill. “I suspect that they both think I’m mad as a hatter, but they never say a word. Hold tight to this, while I get myself organized.”

He had been carrying a square box lantern. When he passed it to me I was astonished by the weight—and he had carried it for half a mile.

“Batteries, mostly,” Bill explained. “Little House has oil lamps, but of course there’s no electricity. After a year or two wandering around out-of-the-way places I decided there was no point in driving two hundred miles to look at something if you can’t see it when you get there. I can recharge this from the car if we have to.”

As Bill closed the door the sound of the wind dropped to nothing. We went through a washhouse to a kitchen furnished with solid wooden chairs, table, and dresser. The room was freezing cold, and I looked longingly at the scuttle of coal and the dry kindling standing by the fireplace.

“Go ahead,” said Bill, “while I sort us out here. Keep your coat on, though—you can sit and toast yourself later.”

He lit two big oil lamps that stood on the table, while I placed layers of rolled paper, sticks, and small pieces of coal in the grate. It was thirty years since I had built a coal fire, but it’s not much of an art. In a couple of minutes I could stand up, keep one eye on the fire to make sure it was catching properly, and take a much better look at the room. There were no rugs, but over by the door leading through to the bedrooms was a long strip of coconut matting. Bill rolled it back, to reveal a square wooden trapdoor. He slipped his belt through the iron ring and lifted, grunting with effort until the trap finally came free and turned upward on brass hinges.

“Storage space,” he said. “Now we’ll need the lantern. Turn it on, and pass it down to me.”

He lowered himself into the darkness, but not far. His chest and head still showed when he was standing on the lower surface. I switched on the electric lantern and handed it down to Bill.

“Just a second,” I said. I went across to the fireplace, added half a dozen larger lumps of coal, then hurried back to the trapdoor. Bill had already disappeared when I lowered myself into the opening.

The storage space was no more than waist high, with a hard dirt floor. I followed the lantern light to where a wooden section at the far end was raised a few inches off the ground on thick beams. On that raised floor stood three big tea-chests. The lantern threw a steady, powerful light on them.

“I told you you’d see just what I saw,” said Bill. “These have all been out and examined, of course, but everything is very much the way it was when I found it. All right, hardware first.”

He carefully lifted the lid off the right-hand tea-chest. It was half full of old sacks. Bill lifted one, unfolded it, and handed me the contents. I was holding a solid metal cylinder, lightly oiled and apparently made of brass. The digits from 0 through 9 ran around its upper part, and at the lower end was a cogwheel of slightly greater size.

I examined it carefully, taking my time. “It could be,” I said. “It’s certainly the way the pictures look.”

I didn’t need to tell him which pictures. He knew that I had thought of little but Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engines for the past few weeks, just as he had.

“I don’t think it was made in England,” said Bill. “I’ve been all over it with a lens, and I can’t see a manufacturer’s mark. My guess is that it was made in France.”

“Any particular reason?”

“The numerals. Same style as some of the best French clock-makers—see, I’ve been working, too.” He took the cylinder and wrapped it again, with infinite care, in the oiled sacking.

I stared all around us, from the dirt floor to the dusty rafters. “This isn’t the best place for valuable property.”

“It’s done all right for a hundred and forty years. I don’t think you can say as much of most other places.” There was something else, that Bill did not need to say. This was a perfect place for valuable property—so long as no one thought that it had any value.

“There’s nowhere near enough pieces here to make an Analytical Engine, of course,” he went on. “These must have just been spares. I’ve taken a few of them to Auckland. I don’t have the original of the programming manual here, either. That’s back in Auckland, too, locked up in a safe at the university. I brought a copy, if we need it.”

“So did I.” We grinned at each other. Underneath my calm I was almost too excited to speak, and I could tell that he felt the same. “Any clue as to who ‘L.D.’ might be, on the title page?”

“Not a glimmer.” The lid was back on the first tea-chest and Bill was removing the cover of the second. “But I’ve got another L.D. mystery for you. That’s next.”

He was wearing thin gloves and opening, very carefully, a folder of stained cardboard, tied with a ribbon like a legal brief. When it was untied he laid it on the lid of the third chest.

“I’d rather you didn’t touch this at all,” he said. “It may be pretty fragile. Let me know whenever you want to see the next sheet. And here’s a lens.”

They were drawings. One to a sheet, Indian ink on fine white paper, and done with a fine-nibbed pen. And they had nothing whatsoever to do with Charles Babbage, programming manuals, or Analytical Engines. What they did have, so small that first I had to peer, then use the lens, was a tiny, neat “L.D.” at the upper right-hand corner of each sheet.

They were drawings of
animals
, the sort of multilegged, random animals that you find scuttling around in tidal pools, or hidden away in rotting tree bark. Or rather, as I realized when I examined them more closely, the sheets in the folder were drawings of
one
animal, seen from top, bottom, and all sides.

“Well?” said Bill expectantly.

But I was back to my examination of the tiny artist’s mark. “It’s not the same, is it. That’s a different ‘L.D.’ from the software manual.”

“You’re a lot sharper than I am,” said Bill. “I had to look fifty times before I saw that. But I agree completely, the ‘L’ is different, and so is the ‘D.’ What about the animal?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it. Beautiful drawings, but I’m no zoologist. You ought to photograph these, and take them to your biology department.”

“I did. You don’t know Ray Weddle, but he’s a top man. He says they have to be just drawings, made up things, because there’s nothing like them, and there never has been.” He was carefully retying the folder, and placing it back in the chest. “I’ve got photographs of these with me, too, but I wanted you to see the originals, exactly as I first saw them. We’ll come back to these, but meanwhile: next exhibit.”