The Map of the Sky

by Félix J Palma

  DIARY OF CHARLES WINSLOW

  17 February, 1900

  For several minutes, the Martians, with the priest at the fore, led us through endless galleries until we reached a place where the tunnels intersected. On one side there was a closed gate. The priest walked over to it, still beaming at us amiably. He opened the door and ushered us through into a spacious room furnished like one of our offices: in the middle, standing on a soft rug, was a heavy mahogany desk buried in books and files. Among these a sharp letter opener glinted next to a globe with a gilt base, and a desk lamp; covering the walls were maps of the Earth’s continents, and dotted about the room there were a few chairs in the Jacobean style, tables of varying sizes and shelves containing papers.

  “Kindly wait here, please,” our guide asked politely. “The Envoy will arrive presently.”

  After saying this, he gave Wells a look of profound admiration.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Wells, even in such circumstances as these,” he said courteously. “I’m a great admirer of your work.”

  His comment surprised us almost as much as it did Wells, who, once he had recovered from his amazement, replied with as much bitterness as he could muster: “Then I hope that when my work becomes extinct, along with everything else, you’ll lament it as much as I.”

  The priest paused for a few moments, looking at Wells pensively.

  “It will be one of the things I most lament, I assure you,” he avowed at last, shaking his head sorrowfully. Then he contemplated Wells with a compassionate smile. “Grieving for the death of beauty is a very human idiosyncrasy. Do you know, Mr. Wells, when a star dies, the light from it goes on traveling through space for thousands and thousands of years? The universe remembers for a very long time whatever dies, but it doesn’t grieve. It is natural for things to die. Yet I’ll grieve for you when you’ve gone, for the beauty you are capable of creating, sometimes unconsciously.” He cast a pained eye over the group. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you greater solace, the solace a priest offers his flock. But all of us are subject to the laws of the Cosmos.”

  He smiled a sad farewell and went out, closing the door quietly behind him as if he had just tucked us all into bed. We could hear him outside giving orders, presumably to the men who were to guard the door, how many we did not know.

  “I don’t suppose you ever imagined you’d have such a universal readership,” Murray quipped once we were alone.

  Wells didn’t laugh; in fact, none of us did. Instead, in what seemed like a rehearsed gesture, we all took a long, deep breath, as though testing our lung capacity, and breathed out in unison, in the form of a loud sigh. We all realized the game was up: we were shut in a room waiting for the Envoy, who was apparently in charge of the invasion and whom the others held in almost reverential esteem. We had no idea why he wanted to meet us, but we were clearly at his mercy. I wondered what he would look like, recalling the garbled description my companions had given me of the Martian they had seen. But I instantly realized any attempt to visualize his appearance was pointless, for he would certainly greet us cloaked in human form, especially if what he wanted was to talk to us.

  “So, this is the hiding place used by those who had been infiltrated before the attack taking place aboveground,” said Wells. “That explains how the Martian who fell into the blind alley at Scotland Yard could have disappeared without a trace!”

  “Yes, he escaped down a drain hole,” said Murray.

  “Good, we’re exactly where we wanted to be!” exclaimed Clayton, who, during what to me was Murray and Wells’s incomprehensible exchange, had been pacing obsessively round the office, inspecting everything. “There couldn’t be a more ideal venue for our plan.”

  “What plan, Inspector?” Murray asked. “If my memory serves me correctly, our plan was to flee London.”

  “It was, Mr. Murray, it was,” replied the young man, jabbing a finger at him. “However, the paths we choose don’t always take us where we want to go. Sometimes they take us where we need to go.”

  “Would you mind getting to the point, Inspector?” said Wells, before we all lost our patience.

  Clayton nodded and gave a sigh, as though our continual demands were beginning to weary him.

  “Naturally I was referring to the plan I devised while those adorable children were leading us here,” he replied, beckoning us over while he glanced warily at the door. Once we had gathered round him, intrigued, Clayton raised his metal hand, pulling back his sleeve with the other one, like a magician wanting to prove he had no aces hidden up there. “Observe. This hand contains a bomb powerful enough to destroy the whole room if detonated.”

  The rest of us exchanged startled looks, wondering whether the inspector was intending to blow us all up forthwith, to spare us any possible suffering.

  “Oh, don’t worry. My plan isn’t to kill you,” he reassured us. “My hand also has a smoke capsule built into the forefinger. When the Envoy arrives, I’ll unscrew it, creating a smoke screen that will allow you to escape. Once you’re safely out of the room, I’ll detonate the bomb, killing the Envoy and myself.”

  A stunned silence descended on the room. In the end it was Murray who broke it, capturing everyone’s bewilderment in a single question.

  “Are you out of your mind, Clayton?”

  “On the contrary, Mr. Murray,” the inspector replied, unruffled.

  Murray having opened the way, we all began expressing our doubts about this monstrous idea.

  “For the love of God . . .”

  “He’s not serious, is he, Bertie?”

  “Did he say he’s going to create a smoke screen?”

  “Of course he isn’t, Jane. Honestly, Clayton, this is hardly the time for jokes!”

  “I’m afraid he did, sir. And in my humble opinion, I don’t think it’s—”

  “And he’s going to sacrifice himself in order to kill the Envoy?”

  “—a very good idea, because the smoke will get in our eyes and—”

  The inspector suddenly raised his hands.

  “Quiet, everyone! You heard me. I’ll explode the bomb, killing the Envoy and myself instantly,” he repeated, with an alarming display of disregard for his own life.

  “But what about the guards in the passageway?” asked Murray, seemingly unmoved by Clayton’s proposed act of altruism.

  Clayton addressed Shackleton.

  “You’ll take care of them, won’t you, Captain?” he said. Shackleton opened his mouth, but did not know how to respond to the inspector’s exaggerated confidence in him. “If you move quickly enough, you can surprise them before they have time to transform themselves, which will make it easier to overpower them. They don’t amount to much as humans, I’ve noticed. I suppose Mr. Murray, Mr. Winslow, and the coachman . . . and even Mr. Wells can help you. After that you have to lead them all out of the sewers.”

  “For God’s sake, Clayton!” Wells interjected, with a mixture of anger and frustration. “Have you forgotten your colleague at Scotland Yard? There must be at least five or six of those monsters out there . . . possibly more. What chance does Captain Shackleton have against them, with or without our help?”

  “You’ll just have to be quick,” the inspector replied, shrugging his shoulders, as though this part of the plan wasn’t his concern and he was doing us a special favor discussing it. “Remember, the element of surprise will work in your favor: the Martians won’t be expecting you to break out of here; you’ll catch them off guard. However, I don’t think the difficulty of the plan lies in these details, do you? Not if you consider the role I’ll be playing,” he concluded, slightly dismayed.

  Wells, Murray, and Shackleton sighed as one. Harold shook his head in the same way he might if Clayton had worn the wrong suit to a reception. The women seemed on the verge of tears or hysterical laughter. I simply stared at the inspector, bewildered. Part of me wanted to believe in him: wasn’t this what I’d been longing for from the moment I discovered the ca
ptain in my uncle’s basement, what I’d tried to argue for in the face of the others’ skepticism: a plan that would halt the invasion? Yes, and here it was. At last, our path had been mapped out for us . . . but another part of me, the supposedly rational, intelligent part, was protesting loudly that this couldn’t be the long-awaited plan, that we would quite simply be placing ourselves in the hands of a maniac if we did what Clayton suggested.

  “Forgive me, Inspector,” I intervened, attempting to clarify things a little, praying that Clayton’s plan only appeared impractical on the surface, and that by digging deeper we’d discover the genius behind it, “but what good will come of killing a few Martians in the sewer when there’s a powerful army up there, doubtless invading the entire planet as we speak?”

  “We won’t simply be killing a few Martians, Mr. Winslow. Among them will be the Envoy. Oh, please . . . Weren’t any of you listening to what the children said? They’ve been waiting for him, for generations. The invasion didn’t start until he arrived on our planet. Or should I say until he . . . woke up,” he said mysteriously. “But that’s not important now. What’s important to us is that his presence is vital to the invasion. Therefore, we must assume that after his death the Martian army will be in sufficient disarray for any rebellion you might lead to succeed, Captain Shackleton.” With these words, the inspector turned to me once more and, with what struck me as the smile of a madman, said, “This will be how we defeat the Martians, Mr. Winslow. And we both know my plan will succeed, because it already has.”

  I looked at him, bewildered. What could I say, when my own words and arguments sounded like the ramblings of a madman when issuing from his mouth?

  “Inspector Clayton,” Wells cut in, addressing him with infinite calm, “I admire your altruism, but we can’t possibly allow you to sacrifice your life in order to save ours. I’m sure if we study the situation carefully we’ll find another way to—”

  Clayton interrupted him with equal equanimity. “Mr. Wells, that night in my refuge, I could have chosen any one of my prostheses. As you’ll recall, I have many of them, all with their particular advantages. And yet I specifically chose this exploding hand I had made a couple of years ago, because with my experience I knew that sooner or later my enemies would place me in a situation where I’d rather die than fall into their hands. I now see clearly why I had it made, and why I decided to use it today of all days. All our actions have a purpose; nothing is random, as Mr. Winslow has so rightly understood,” he said, gesturing toward me with both hands, as though I were part of a freak show. “In fact, he’s the only one of us who has seen our destiny clearly from the beginning. You’ve been an inspiration to me, Mr. Winslow.” I shifted awkwardly under my companions’ accusing gaze. “The fact we are here is no accident. I don’t know what role each of you will play. You’ll have to discover that for yourselves. But I know what I must do: clearly I must destroy the Envoy. And, as in chess, the game is over when the king falls. If I don’t do this, the invasion will continue, and then I’m afraid no one will have the power to stop it. See for yourselves.”

  With these words, Clayton pointed at a pair of maps hanging on a wall. Mystified, we went over to take a look. One was of London and showed the advance of the tripods marked by numerous red crosses. This chart confirmed what we had already glimpsed from Primrose Hill: they had taken the entire city. But the other one terrified us still more, for it was a map of the world. Here the crosses spread like a red rash over the entire planet. The Martians hadn’t only conquered the British colonies of Australia, India, Canada, and Africa, where the sun never set, but a host of other countries, too. Within a few weeks, they would have taken over the entire planet, and as Clayton had said, no one could stop them then. Paralyzed with horror, we stared at the map in silence. The Martians were destroying our planet. And I think this was when it really struck me. Despite all that I’d been through, despite seeing the mighty tripods spitting out their rays only yards from me, destroying buildings, ships, and people with preposterous ease, nothing made me more aware of what was happening than seeing that simple piece of paper. We were all going to be exterminated, wiped off the face of the Earth. The human race was going to vanish as if it had never existed.

  Clayton contemplated us solemnly, as though defying us to continue raising objections to his plan, or possibly to come up with a better one, but we simply stared back at him forlornly. To some extent he was right. Yes, his plan was preposterous, but what else could we do? The inspector called our attention to a strange contraption on the far side of the room, and we all walked over to it, intrigued. On a small oak table lay a rectangular object, approximately the size of a book, from which a bluish mist arose, like smoke from a bonfire, forming a kind of vaporous egg. We gazed in awe at the shimmering indigo sphere, unable to believe our eyes, while inside it particles of light and strange phosphorescent squiggles darted about.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A map of the universe, if I’m not mistaken,” Clayton said, still possessed by the blaze of inspiration that had come upon him since he entered the office.

  We looked with amazement at the inspector and then studied the shimmering image. We were awestruck to discover that this wasn’t simply a globe made of beautiful, ever-shifting smoke, but a replica of the Cosmos. Each speck of light inside the bluish vapor represented a galaxy with its thousands of millions of stars floating in rows or clusters. They were shaped like wondrous whorls of light, radiant purple roses, luminous sea snails, and some even looked like hats or cigars. Mesmerized, Wells stroked the object tentatively with his forefinger, and the gaseous map grew in scale. Suddenly, the firmament enveloped us like a glistening veil. We gazed at one another, our shoulders sprinkled with constellations, as we let ourselves be gently pierced by comets. I saw Emma balance a nebula on the palm of her hand like a sparkling butterfly, Jane with a star cluster snarled in her hair, Murray’s jacket speckled by the Perseids. Like a curious child, Wells moved his finger in the opposite direction, and the map suddenly shrank, curling up like a frightened animal, until it reached a size that allowed us to admire the Cosmos in all its splendor and detail. I noticed our solar system, with its brightly colored planets orbiting round the sun, mere specks of dust dancing around a ball of light. And there we were, on the third speck nearest the Sun, in a backwater of the universe, believing ourselves to be the masters of something whose dimensions exceeded our imagination. I confess that when I saw the vastness of space, the immensity of the garden stretching beyond my window, I felt suddenly insignificant. Then Wells, apparently unable to keep still, stroked the object again, and a red line, like a silky crimson thread, emerged from the mist, joining each of the planets, which lit up, then dissolved before our eyes. We realized that this line traced the passage through the universe of the invading race as it conquered and consumed planet after planet in what seemed like an endless migration. A cosmic exodus, which, to our horror, ended on a small blue planet in our own solar system.

  This was when we realized definitively that judging from their lengthy journey through the eternal night of space, the invaders did not come from Mars, but from a far more remote and unimaginable place. And yet to this day we still had been referring to them as Martians, perhaps out of habit, perhaps because this infantile refusal to recognize our conquerors’ true greatness was a final act of rebellion, or simply because in order for Man to understand horror he has to contain it within familiar, nearby borders. Be that as it may, the word “Martian” represents everything we now fear and detest, and this is why I have used it to refer to them throughout this diary.

  But let us return to the office where that pulsating universe revealed that crimson thread extending to the Earth, staining it red. It filled me with a mixture of fear and sorrow, yet, to be honest, what upset me more was a sense of what I can only describe as our cosmic humiliation. There we were on our insignificant planet, caught up in our wars, boasting of our achievements, completely oblivious to the m
ajesty of the Cosmos or the conflicts that convulsed it.

  “This is the true Map of the Sky,” Emma said. “I think my great-grandfather would have felt very disappointed.”

  “No one could have envisaged it like this, Emma,” Murray hastened to assure her. “Except Mr. Wells, of course.”

  “Only you envisaged such a universe, George.” Murray addressed Wells with a hint of derision. “Do you remember the conversation we had two years ago, when I asked you to help me publish my novel? You told me the future I’d described could never exist because it wasn’t credible. I had great difficulty accepting those words, because I longed to be able to imagine what the world would be like in years to come. Yes, I wanted to be a visionary like you, George. But I can tell you now, I don’t envy your ability to—”

  “I’d give my right arm to have been wrong, Gilliam,” Wells replied coldly.

  “And I’d give my right arm to be able to tell you that Man’s imagination is considered one of the treasures of the universe,” said a voice behind us, mimicking Wells, “but I’d be lying.”

  We turned toward the door where a dark shape stood. My companions shuddered as one, like a bush touched by the wind, for we knew this could only be the Envoy, entering the room in an undeniably human guise, just as I had imagined.

  “I’m afraid no one but you considers it as such,” he went on, without moving, “which is logical, for you have only yourselves as a reference. Yet the universe is inhabited by many species, which possess all manner of qualities, the majority inconceivable to you, and compared to which I can assure you Man’s imagination isn’t prized sufficiently for its loss to be a source of regret. You ought to travel more.”

  We remained silent, not knowing how to respond or whether the Envoy even expected a reply. And although he was still lurking in the shadows, I could see he had chosen to walk around on Earth in the guise of a rather feeble, emaciated-looking fellow. A weakling, to put it bluntly. But something made me uneasy: his voice sounded incredibly familiar.