In Quest of Time

(September-October 2014)

Chapter 1: In a Dry Land

From the Journals of Stanford Pines: I owe my brother Stanley a lot. I have to keep reminding myself of that so I will not bash him over the head. Since we left Gravity Falls four days ago, he has done nothing but complain!

He complained about the long flight from Portland to New York. He complained about the airport hotel where we stayed overnight. He complained about the trip from JFK to Madrid—why did we have to stop in England? He complained about the heat in Spain as we took the high-speed train from Madrid to Valladolid. He complained about how dry it was when we got off the train at the Estación de Valladolid-Campo Grande.

He complained about the streets. Some were too narrow. Others were too wide. He complained about the location of the Hotel Quijote. I finally said, "Stanley, it's clean, air-conditioned, and comfortable! There are restaurants all around with good food! We have a room with a wonderful view! It's only one block away from the Biblioteca de Antiquites! What in heaven's name is wrong with the location of the hotel?"

"It's in Spain!" he shot back.

Oh, well. I anticipate my research will last a week if I spend at least fourteen hours a day in the library, and I MAY wind up spending twenty-four hours a day there.

(Afternoon, same day) Stan has mellowed a little since this morning. I think he was edgy because he despises air travel. He told me once he regretted that my old government contacts had managed to expunge our "records" (actually, both were his, but he was posing as me for part of the time) and get our passports restored and have our names taken off the no-fly list. I've tried explaining to him that flying is safer than driving, but he says, "Only the way YOU drive, Brainiac!"

Anyway, we had a wonderful lunch at the Restaurante de Jardines, and that put him in a better mood. Then he saw a group of men at a nearby table playing a betting game with cards. He wandered over there and despite not being able to speak the language, joined the game. He'll probably be broke by this evening, but at least he seems happy. Now I'm off to the Biblioteca to meet Fr. Mendez, with whom I corresponded over the summer. I'm hoping for luck!

Ford returned to the hotel at a little past nine that evening, although he was jet-lagged and it felt later. The air-conditioning had been cranked way down, and a comfortable-looking Stan, propped up on a chair cushion and two pillows, lay stretched out on one of the beds and wearing an undershirt and boxer shorts while he watched a fútbol game on TV. "Cripes!" Stan said the moment Ford let himself into the room, "you smell like the first time I swept out the attic for the kids to come visit!"

"It's just dust. That's because old maps and manuscripts are quite dusty, Stanley," Ford said. "But what a treasure house of information!"

Stan muted the TV and sat up in bed, his eyes gleaming behind his spectacles. "Treasure, you say?"

"Yes—a wealth of information, Stanley, not of money."

"Meh." Stan lay back and turned up the sound again, and the announcers were going wild in Spanish over some play that had either succeeded or failed spectacularly.

"How did your card game go?" Ford asked with an edge of sarcasm as he took off his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair.

"Dunno. What's a Euro?"

Ford sat on the edge of his bed and took off his shoes. "Ahh, that feels good after those long flights and hours in the library stacks. Stanley, a Euro is the currency of Spain—and most of Europe! You should know that."

With a cocky grin, Stan replied, "All I know's I won 1,205 of 'em."

Ford stared at his twin. "What!"

With a shrug, Stan said, "Yeah, that'll probably buy, like, what, a taco?"

"Tacos are Mexican food, not Spanish," Ford told him. "And twelve hundred Euros is about, let me see, sixteen hundred dollars!"

"Ya don't say!" Stan looked surprised but pleased. "In that case, I may want to extend our stay here, Ford! These Spanish guys are plain nuts about gambling. There's a casino about half a mile from here. Tomorrow while you're pokin' around your maps and manuscripts, I think I'll visit it and see if I can build up my winnings."

"Fine," Ford said, lying back on his bed. "But set a limit! Take the Eruos you won as your stake, and when you lose that, walk away."

"We could go together," Stanley said slyly. "You always calculate the odds, and then we do great!"

"Not tomorrow," Ford told him. He lay down on his own bed, still wearing trousers and shirt and socks. "If you're interested, I found the long-lost atlas of hand-drawn maps of Simon de Ortiz. That's a key element. About a hundred maps and charts dating back to 1523. Tomorrow I have permission to photograph pertinent pages, providing I don't use a flash."

"Conned the librarian, huh? She a looker?" Stanley asked.

"She's a he. A Jesuit priest, and I wouldn't say I conned him, though I'm afraid the good Father Mendez thinks I'm an academic working on a history of Spanish expeditions to the New World in the sixteenth century. This town is incredibly rich in history."

"Tell me about it. I walked past Cervantes's house today," Stanley said, yawning. "He's the guy who wrote The Count of Monte Cristo, right?"

"Wrong," Ford said. "He wrote El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. That's usually translated into English as just Don Quixote."

"About a coyote?"

"Quixote, not coyote! Stanley, it's a masterpiece of world literature!"

"OK, I'm impressed. So, do the maps help ya?"

"I'll know tomorrow. I must go carefully through the atlas page by page, using a magnifying glass. I'm also looking for a rumored but unpublished manuscript, 'Una Cuenta de tres expediciones al Nuevo Mundo para la gloria de Dios y España,' by Renaldo de Delgado y Ramos. He was a navigator for Ponce de Leon and three of his surviving letters make passing mention of the manuscript, and one even mentions our goal. The manuscript is three or four hundred pages long—if I can find it—and may have fuller information."

"Good thing you can read Spanish."

"Yes, though this is a little difficult. Remember, this is early 16th Century stuff. It's a little like reading Chaucer in Middle English."

"Is that hard?"

Ford cleared his throat and said, "Byfore the temple-dore ful soberly / Dame Pees sat, with a curtyn in hire hond, / And by hire syde, wonder discretly, / Dame Pacience syttynge there I fond, / With face pale, upon an hil of sond."

"That's Spanish, huh?"

"English, Stanley. Middle English. The Spanish in the records is nearly, but not quite, as difficult to read as that."

Stan stretched. "They got room service. Wanna order dinner?"

"You order for both of us."

"Ya don't care what you eat, Sixer?"

Stanford shook his head. "I rarely pay attention to such details. Order what looks good, and I'll eat it."

Stanley did, and the food was good, and the elder Pines twins ate and then showered and prepared for bed. As he reached to switch off the bedside lamp, a more contented-sounding Stanley said, "Hey, about your trip to the library tomorrow, good luck, Poindexter."

"Thank you. Good luck to you at the casino."

Stanley winked at him and then clicked off the light. In the darkness, he said, "It ain't luck that does it, Sixer. It's skill—and chutzpah!"

Two days later, after Ford had exhausted the main-floor collection of books, Fr. Mendez led him down a narrow, crumbling set of stone steps. "These," he said in flawless English—he had been educated at Oxford, among other places—"date from when the building was first erected as a home for orphans, in 1601." With thin, long-fingered hands he patted the ancient stone wall. "When these were put into place, the English had yet to establish even one permanent colony in the Americas. Spain had dozens—in Mexico, certainly, but throughout South and Central America. Even St. Augustine, in Florida! From 1492 on, records and maps came here, where they were stored and—alas, mostly forgotten."

They emerged in a windowless, vaulted, stone-walled room. An electric cable ran overhead, with bare light bulbs hanging at intervals. The air felt still and stale, unbreathed for a long time. There was no air conditioning down here. "These," Fr. Mendez explained, "are the vaults. The catacombs of history!" He stopped in the center of the long room, his body lean and gaunt, like a figure in an El Greco painting, a white-haired, bespectacled man wearing a black cassock and a clerical collar. "You see the shelves in the alcoves, stacked high with boxes. In each box, there are stacks of ancient papers. You must handle them very carefully. You have the gloves?"

Ford held up a pair of white cotton gloves—modified ones. He had taken two pairs of extra-large gloves and had cut the pinky fingers from one pair. A local seamstress had altered the remaining pair, stitching the extra finger in. Though when she'd first noticed Ford's hands she had murmured, "Madre de Dios!" she did not seem to think him a freak and smiled when she turned the gloves over to him.

"You must wear them at all times when you handle the documents," the priest told Stanford. "The air here is very dry, remember. That is the salvation of these records—the bookworm does not flourish here, and mold can get no foothold." He stopped at a massively-built oak table, its surface covered with a four-by-six-foot slab of thick tempered glass. "Keep the pages in strict order. You may photograph, without a flash—the light speeds the deterioration of the paper, you understand. I will leave you here. You must also understand, the guard at the top of the steps will search you to make sure you are not taking anything away."

"I wouldn't do that, Father," Ford told him in Spanish. "I'm a scholar, not a thief. I will submit to the search without protest."

"Yes, my son," the priest replied in English, smiling. "Your Spanish is very good grammatically, but you have that strong American accent!"

Ford chuckled. "Your English is better than my Spanish. I'll stick to that."

"I will leave you to your work, my son. The boxes numbered 1301 to 1321 are the ones you will be interested in. May God bless your efforts."

"Thank you, Father," Ford said, feeling a little twinge of guilt.

The priest left him. Ford took box 1301 to the table, sat, and carefully began to unpack it. This far below street level, everything was as quiet as a tomb—and smelled as dusty. The light was adequate, but not as bright as he would have preferred. Still, he had selected a digital camera that was extraordinarily good in low-light situations.

Valladolid had a long history, and much of it touched on Spanish exploration of the New World. In 1506, a worn-out Christopher Columbus, only 54 years old, had died in Valladolid, following four voyages to what he persisted in thinking of as Asia. He probably never realized he had discovered two major continents previously unknown to Spanish scholars.

His body traveled almost as much in death as he had in life: he was first buried in Valladolid, then his son had his body re-interred in Seville, in the south of Spain; later it was moved to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic (supposed to be the site of Columbus's first landfall in the New World), still later to Cuba, and finally, in 1898, his bones were returned to the cathedral in Seville. Ford remembered that Mark Twain had written about a museum where a guide showed him two human skulls, a big one and a small one. The guide had said the larger one was Columbus's skull. And the smaller one? "That is his skull when he was just a child."

In 1550 the Valladolid Debate had argued morality—was it justified, was it Christian, to enslave the native populations of the Americas? Christian or not, Spain exploited the mineral wealth of the New World and became the richest nation in all of Europe, if not the world.

And, of course, these . . . these documents, some unread for five hundred years! Ford carefully sorted them, patiently looking through thousands of pages. Nothing in the first box. Very little in the second—some financial records of Columbus's second voyage in 1493, with the pay record of a young Juan Ponce de Leon, who was among the 1200 colonists, explorers, and sailors on the expedition, which discovered Puerto Rico.

Eight hours into his researches, Ford struck pay dirt: a tattered, ribbon-wrapped bundle of time-browned handwritten papers. A somewhat more recent, and yellow, page identified the contents: R. Delgado y Ramos, Registro de tres expediciones a América. Beneath that, in ink faded to a coppery brown, was the notation Introducido por Alfonso Márquez, S.J. / Mayo 1832. "Record of three expeditions to America," that said. "Catalogued by Alfonso Marquez, Jesuit, May 1832."

Carefully, Ford tried to untie the ribbon—and it crumbled to nothing. The dry air had not been kind to the fabric. Ford made a note of the accident. He saw why the cover sheet disagreed with his information about the manuscript's title: the first page, or perhaps even several pages, of Delgado's manuscript—they were not numbered—was missing. Ford began to read.

A long time later, a gentle hand shaking his shoulder awakened him. "My son," Father Mendez said kindly, "you have slept here all night!"

"Have I?" Ford asked, yawning and groping on the table for his glasses. He found them, put them on, and stood on numb legs. "I must have dozed off!"

"The guard should have awakened you," Father Mendez said. "He was to close the basement at midnight, but he is young and careless sometimes and must have forgotten. No harm done. Come, have breakfast with me. Refresh yourself. You may leave the papers as they are until you return. No one will disturb them."

"Thank you," Ford said. "Ah—first, is there a restroom upstairs?"

"Certainly," the priest said with a chuckle. "We are only Jesuits, you know—we are not angels!

Despite his lack of sleep—Ford had dozed sometime after five a.m., and Fr. Mendez had shaken him awake at seven—after a hasty breakfast of pastry and hot chocolate, Ford dived back into the underground vault.

He was filling his camera with photos. Before striking the sections he was looking for, he had found accounts of where treasure ships had sunk in storms, and, knowing that Stanley would be interested, he had photographed them. And then at last he discovered the exact pages he needed.

They were even better than he'd hoped. With halfway decent luck, he thought he could pinpoint the location he and Stanley were searching for. He photographed these pages, backed the photos up to not one, but two different memory cards, and then Fr. Mendez brought a new grosgrain ribbon to rebind the old manuscript. "No one has looked at these pages," he said, "for almost two hundred years! I am glad you found a use for them."

"I did, Father," Ford said. "Again, I must thank you for your generosity."

"We are scholars," the older man said with a gentle shrug. "We are the memory of humanity."

It was three o'clock in the afternoon, or about that. After saying his goodbyes, Ford strode through the streets of Valladolid feeling energized. However, when he opened the hotel room door, though, Stan grabbed him and pulled him inside. "Pack! We're leavin'!"

Ford had a sinking feeling. "Stanley—what have you done?"

Stan finished closing his suitcase, which lay on the bed. "I think the local cops are after me! Come on, come on, pack!"

Ford frowned and crossed his arms. "Did you rob the casino?"

"No! Come on, let's go!"

Instead of risking public transportation, they rented a car—though neither was a particularly good driver, and they definitely did not know Spanish traffic laws—and dropped it off in Madrid, having managed not to ding or scratch it. Not too badly, anyway. They updated their airline tickets at an extortionate rate and managed to get business-class seats on a flight to Heathrow airport in London.

"What did you do?" Stanley asked.

"Nothin'!" Stanley insisted. "Only I'm pretty sure they thought I was cheatin' at blackjack!"

"The casino—called the police?"

"Yup."

"Were you cheating?"

"Stanford!" Stanley said as they took their seats on the airliner. "What a question!"

"Were you?"

"Nah. But I can count cards!"

"Isn't that illegal?"

"Not if you don't get arrested," Stanley said with a grin.

Stanford sighed. "How much did you lose?"

Looking depressed, Stanley said, "Well—ya remember that 1200 Euros?"

Stanford heaved a deeper sigh. "Yes. How much more?"

Muttering, Stanley said, "I kinda lost count, but I think it was about 122,972."

"Stanley!"

"And I didn't lose 'em," Stanley said, grinning. "Won 'em! Got 'em in my suitcase! By the way, when we get to London—I gotta buy me some new clothes."