When he reached them, he offered the girl his hand, still brandishing the gun.
“Miss Harlow, allow me to help you,” he said gallantly.
The girl appeared to hesitate, then finally stood up, leaning her weight on his hand. She stood behind Murray, shaking the mud from her dress as she glanced about in a dazed fashion. Still pointing the gun at the porters, Murray gestured to Wells and Miss Harlow to climb aboard.
“Hey, Gilliam . . . ,” Wells whispered behind his back.
“What is it, George?”
“I think you’ve forgotten Inspector Clayton.”
Without lowering his weapon, Murray glanced over his shoulder and saw the inspector’s body lying on the ground where he had left it. He blurted out an oath between gritted teeth and turned his attention back to the group of thugs, who leered at him, and then once more to his companions, his gaze resting tentatively on the girl, who was still standing beside him, a bewildered expression on her face.
“Very well,” he said, making a decision. Then, handing Emma the gun, he said softly, “Miss Harlow, would you be so kind as to hold these gentlemen at bay while Mr. Wells and I lift the inspector into the carriage? Forgive me for asking, but do you believe you can manage that?”
Emma gazed with puzzlement at the weapon Murray was holding out, and then peered at him. Murray gave her a smile as warm as it was encouraging. This instantly roused the girl’s anger once more.
“Manage? Why of course, Mr. Murray,” she snapped, grabbing the weapon with her slender hands. “I don’t think it will be too difficult. You should try wearing a corset sometime.”
As the weapon changed hands, the porter who had attacked the girl let out a howl of laughter and took a step forward. As the girl aimed the revolver at him he stopped in his tracks.
“I’m warning you, my friend, one more step and I’ll do more than knock you to the ground,” she declared fiercely.
“Oh, I’m quaking in my shoes,” the porter mocked, turning to his band of men. “The little lady wants us to believe she can—”
However, he was unable to finish his sentence because Emma, with a sudden movement, lowered the gun and shot him in the foot. The bullet pierced the toe of his boot, a jet of blood spurting out. The porter fell to his knees cradling his foot, his face contorted with pain.
“You damned bitch!” he cried.
“Right,” the girl said, addressing the others. “Next time I’ll aim for the head.”
Fascinated, Murray gazed at the girl, astonished at her pluck. Wells was obliged to tap him on the shoulder to remind him about Clayton. Between the two men, they heaved the inspector into the carriage. Then the millionaire approached the girl and asked her for the gun, with an admiring smile.
“Nice job, Miss Harlow,” he congratulated her. “I hope you can forgive me for putting you in such a perilous situation.”
“You’re very kind, Mr. Murray,” she replied sarcastically as she handed him the pistol. “However, I should point out that you were the one taking the risk by entrusting the weapon to me. I’m sure you believed those ruffians might wrest it from me.”
“Oh, not for a moment.” The millionaire grinned. “Remember, I’ve taken tea with you.”
“Ahem . . .” Wells gave a little cough from inside the carriage. “Forgive me for interrupting, but remember that the Martians are heading this way.”
“Quite so, quite so,” Murray said, helping the girl into the coach. Then he turned to the mob, gave a little bow, and said, “Thank you, gentlemen, you’ve all been most kind. Unfortunately, this carriage is too grand to accommodate your lowly posteriors.”
With these words, Murray climbed in a leisurely manner onto the driver’s seat and, once installed, gave a crack of the whip.
“The insufferable bighead,” Wells muttered.
“I agree. He’s the most conceited man in the world. But thanks to him we recovered the coach,” the girl acknowledged grudgingly.
She was right about that, Wells reflected, as the carriage moved away and through the window he watched the band of aggressors grow smaller in the distance. If Murray had not kept his calm, he himself would almost certainly have taken a beating, and they would be the ones left behind at the station watching those brutes make off with Murray’s coach.
They took the Chertsey road to London almost at a gallop, causing Clayton, whom they had propped up in front of them, to slump sideways on the seat. The violent jolting of the carriage made his arms jump about, and his head flopped from side to side, like a man in the throes of drunkenness. Wells and Emma tried not to look at him, ashamed to witness an intimate moment in the inspector’s life that few would ever see.
As he gazed out of the window, Wells realized night had fallen. A large part of the landscape outside the window was now plunged into darkness. On the horizon he could make out a cherry-red glare and a plume of smoke rising lazily up into the starry sky. From the distant woods of Addlestone came the disturbing boom of cannons, muted and sporadic, which made him think that the army was doing battle with the tripods somewhere.
“Oh my God!” exclaimed Emma.
The girl’s gaze was fixed on something happening outside the window. Alarmed by the look of horror on her face, Wells leaned over her shoulder and peered into the night. At first he saw nothing, only a pine forest immersed in blackness, but then he glimpsed, slipping through the dense shadows, the vision that was terrifying her. A huge bulk was moving swiftly down the slope parallel with the carriage. When he managed to make it out against the darkness, Wells could see that it was a gigantic machine held up by three slender, jointed legs, advancing in great strides like some monstrous insect. Giving off a deafening metallic grinding sound, and swaying ominously, the shiny metal machine moved clumsily yet resolutely through the pine forest, casually crushing the trees underfoot as it went. Wells could see that the uppermost part of the device closely resembled the Martian cylinder he had described, but that the rest of its structure was very different—more like a vast round box covered with a complex mesh of plates, which reminded him of a hermit crab’s shell. He also glimpsed a cluster of jointed tentacles, slender and supple, which moved as though they had a life of their own. Taller than several houses, the moonlight glinting on its metal surface, the thing was marching implacably toward London, opening a pathway through the stand of trees.
The machine suddenly tilted its hood slightly toward the carriage, and Wells had the uneasy feeling that it was watching them. His suspicions were confirmed when a second later the device deviated slightly from its path and began approaching the road. From the sudden jerk of the carriage, Wells deduced that Murray had seen it, too, and was trying to gain some distance by urging the horses on even more forcefully. Wells swallowed hard and, like Emma, gripped the seat to keep himself from being thrown into the air by the coach’s violent shaking. Through the rear window he could see how one of the legs of the tripod emerged from the ditch and planted itself on the road. Then, dragging a clump of splintered pine trees, the other two also appeared. As soon as it was steady on its three legs, the thing set off in pursuit of the carriage. Its huge strides echoed in the night like booming thunderclaps, as the mechanical monster gained on them. His heart beating furiously in his chest, Wells watched as at the top of the machine the strange apparatus that launched the heat ray began its familiar cobralike movement as it took aim.
“That thing’s going to shoot at us,” he shouted, grabbing Emma and forcing her to the floor of the carriage. “Get down!”
There was a loud explosion a few yards to their right. The blast shook the carriage so violently that for a few instants its wheels left the ground, and when it landed again the shock threatened to shatter it to pieces. Surprised to find he was still alive, Wells struggled up as best he could and tried to glance out of the rear window again. Steadying himself against the wild sway of the carriage, he wondered whether Murray was still up on the driver’s seat or had fallen off at some moment during the
chase so that they were now speeding on in a driverless carriage. Through the window, Wells saw the small crater the blast had left in the roadside. Behind him, the tripod was still bearing down on them with ominous leaps and bounds, rapidly reducing the twenty yards or so that separated it from the carriage. His heart leapt into his mouth as he saw the tentacle that spat out the ray snaking through the air in preparation for a new strike. It was obvious that sooner or later it would hit them. At that moment, the coach shuddered to a halt, throwing him forward onto the crumpled body of Inspector Clayton. Wells rose and helped the girl up from the floor before returning to his seat. He felt the carriage start moving again. Through the window he could see they were turning. Startled, he poked his head out of the left-hand window and found that Murray had swung round to face the tripod, which continued its ungainly advance toward them.
“What the devil are you doing?” he shouted.
The reply was a whiplash, urging the horses on. The coach rattled forward to meet the tripod.
“You’ve gone mad, Murray!” he cried.
“I’m sure that thing can’t turn as quickly as we can,” he heard the millionaire cry above the wheels’ infernal screeching.
As the coach began hurtling toward the tripod, Wells realized in astonished disbelief that Murray was hoping to pass beneath the colossus as if it were a bridge.
“Good God . . . the man is insane,” he muttered, seeing how the tripod had halted to take aim at them.
He fell back into the coach and held the girl as tightly as he could.
“He’s going to pass under its legs,” he explained in a voice choked by fear.
“W-what?” she stammered.
“He’s crazy . . .”
Emma clung to him desperately, trembling. Wells could feel her fragility, her warmth, her perfume, her womanly shape pressing itself into the hollows of his body. He could not help but lament the fact that the only chance a man like him would have to hold a woman like her was when they were fleeing a Martian invasion together, even though this was a fleeting notion that had no place at a moment like this, when both of them were being thrown at high speed against this metal monster, which in a few seconds would reduce them to ashes with its heat ray. But while waiting for death, in those few seconds when their lives extended beyond any reason, Wells had time to realize that the quandary in which they found themselves could not only make one a hero or a coward but also drive one insane.
XXIII
AND WHILE THE REAL WELLS’S HEART WAS racing fearfully, that of the other Wells, of whose existence he was completely unaware, was beating calmly, like a gentle melody on a xylophone. For the invasion he was heading was going according to plan. In a couple of hours, the tripods would arrive at the gates of London, where the brave and admirable British army waited behind their Maxim guns, unaware they were about to be slaughtered. Studying the map of the planet pinned to the wall of his headquarters, the other Wells smiled as he imagined the coming massacre.
I hope that despite the time that has elapsed, you will not have forgotten about the creature that adopted Wells’s appearance and that, like the conductor of an orchestra, is currently directing the attack from his hiding place. How did he get there? you will ask. Let us go back a few weeks, to the point where we left our story to travel to the Antarctic wastes, and peer inside the copper-riveted sarcophagus lying forgotten in the basement of the Natural History Museum. There, amid the industrious sounds of shifting flesh and bone, a being from another planet is rearranging its physiognomy by taking on that of the author H. G. Wells. Wells has just been steered out of the chamber by another, less brilliant author named Garrett P. Serviss. Both authors left the building unaware of the fatal consequences of their actions, in particular Wells’s fleeting stroke of the extraterrestrial’s arm. That gesture of timid admiration deposited on the creature’s skin was the greatest gift Wells could ever have given it: a minuscule and insignificant drop of his blood, which nevertheless contained everything he was. And everything the creature needed in order to come back to life.
And so, in the seclusion of its coffin, like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, the being from outer space slowly took on a human appearance, nurtured and guided by Wells’s blood. The creature’s spine had shrunk to the length imprinted in Wells’s blood, and while its skull was reforming at one end, at the other a narrow pelvis was sprouting two rather short femurs, brittle as twigs, which were instantly attached to two tibias and fibulas by a pair of knee joints. Gradually the creature fabricated the framework of a skeleton, cloaking it in a mantle of flesh, nerves, and tendons. Once the sternum and ribs were in place, the spongy lungs appeared, emitting through the narrow conduit of the newly installed trachea a puff of vapor that filled the urn with the moist novelty of breath. The liver and intestines were formed, while the deltoids, triceps, biceps, and other muscles threaded themselves around the bony frame, like armor plating. Through the intricate calligraphy of veins and arteries a furtive current of blood now flowed, fed by the heart, which was already pulsing in the chest cavity. From a blurry mass of skin on the thing’s face emerged the birdlike countenance of the author, an exact replica of Wells upon the carbon paper onto which the hazy features of a few sailors from the Annawan, and even those of another author, Edgar Allan Poe, had previously been imprinted. A freshly formed mouth gave an almost triumphant, fierce smile that betrayed a festering desire for revenge, decades old, while a slender pair of pale human hands clutched the chains binding it before snapping them with an otherworldly strength. Then the lid of the coffin lifted from inside with an ominous creak, shattering the surrounding silence. Yet had anyone happened to be in the room to witness the miraculous resurrection, they would not have seen a sinister creature of the Cosmos rising from its tomb, but rather H.G. waking up following a drunken spree that, God only knew how, had ended with him in that coffin. However, despite its ordinary appearance, what emerged from that box was a deadly creature, a fearful being, or, if you prefer, Evil incarnate. Evil in all its glory, bursting once more into the world of rational man, as it had done before in the form of Frankenstein’s monster, or of Count Dracula, or any of the monsters with which Man had disguised the intangible horror that haunted him from birth; that unnerving darkness that began poisoning his wretched soul from the moment his nanny blew out the candle shielding his cradle.
Like a blind man suddenly able to see, the false Wells studied the place he found himself in, crammed with bric-a-brac that meant nothing to him, relics of a fantasy world that belonged only to Earthlings. He felt an enormous relief as he glimpsed something familiar amid the plethora of nonsensical artifacts: his vehicle, raised on a plinth, considered as miraculous as the other objects in the room. The machine appeared intact, exactly as he had left it in the snow when he infiltrated the Earthlings’ ship, though it was still no doubt out of action: it did not take much intelligence to see that the humans had not even managed to open it. He walked over to the machine, halting a few yards from the plinth, and he narrowed his eyes in concentration. A chink slowly appeared in the machine’s domed lid. The bogus Wells climbed inside. Seconds later, he emerged carrying an ivory-colored cylindrical box, smooth and shiny save for the tiny symbols on its lid that gave off a coppery glow. In the box was what had forced him to fly through space to Earth, that faraway planet almost 30,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy, which the Council had chosen as the new home of its race. And although he had taken longer to get there than predicted, at last he was able to continue his mission.
He opened the door of the chamber and left the museum like any other human, mingling with the late-afternoon crowd of visitors. Once outside, he took a deep breath and glanced around him, testing his newly acquired senses even as he tried to ignore the thrum produced by the mind of the man whose body he had replicated. The din of the real Wells’s thoughts surprised him, as it was far more intense than that emitted by any of the men he had replicated in the Antarctic. But he had no time to enter into tha
t mind and rummage among its quaint ponderings, and so he tried to ignore them and to focus instead on perceiving the world through his own senses, not the rudimentary ones of the Earthling he was inhabiting. And then, all of a sudden, he was filled with an intense feeling of well-being, a serene and tender melancholy such as a man might feel when evoking scenes of his childhood. He had discovered that he was in the place where the colony had been established. Yes, his last memory was the ice closing over his head like the lid of a coffin, and now, after floating in limbo for many years, outwitting death by lowering his energy requirements to enable his body to enter a state of hibernation, he had awoken in London, exactly where he had been headed when his vehicle came down in the Antarctic. He did not know whom he should thank, but, unluckily for the human race, someone had clearly rescued him from the ice and brought him here.
He climbed one of the turrets of the Natural History Museum and from that vantage point narrowed his eyes and sent out another signal. And that call, inaudible to any human, soared across the late-afternoon sky, riding on the warm breeze to spread through the city. Almost instantaneously, in a rowdy Soho tavern, Jacob Halsey stopped washing up glasses, raised his head to the ceiling, and for a few moments remained motionless, heedless of his customers’ requests, until, all of a sudden, tears began to slowly trickle down his face. The same happened to a watchman, Bruce Laird, who for no apparent reason stopped in the middle of a corridor in Guy’s Hospital, as though he had suddenly forgotten where he was going, and wept with joy. A baker in Holborn by the name of Sam Delaney repeated the gesture, as did Thomas Cobb, the owner of a clothier’s shop near Westminster Abbey; a nanny watching over some children playing in a Mayfair park; an old man hobbling down a street in Bloomsbury; Mr. and Mrs. Connell, a couple strolling in Hyde Park feeding the squirrels; and a moneylender who had a shop on Kingly Street. They all looked up at the sky in silent rapture, as though listening to a tune no one else could hear, before stopping what they were doing, eyes brimming with tears, leaving glasses in the sink, business premises unlocked, young charges unprotected, and walking out of their houses and places of work to march slowly through the streets like a trail of ants. Gradually swelling in number, their ranks were joined by teachers, shop assistants, librarians, stevedores, secretaries, members of Parliament, chimney sweeps, civil servants, prostitutes, blacksmiths, coalmen, retired soldiers, cab drivers, and policemen, all moving in an orderly fashion toward the place to which the voice that had interrupted their thoughts was summoning them. It was a long-awaited call, heralding what their parents and their parents’ parents had yearned for: the arrival of the long-awaited one, the Envoy.
The Map of the Sky Page 31
