From time to time, he would take a carriage to witness parts of his real life: he saw himself as an infant in Bromley, where his parents owned a small china shop. He saw himself slip from the innkeeper’s son’s hands and break his leg as he fell onto one of the beer tent stakes, and then, in his convalescence, reading The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe. He saw himself dazzling Mr. Morley, who ran a college in Bromley, with his lively intelligence; wilting in the heat inside the Rodgers and Denyer draper’s shop in Windsor, where his mother had sent him to work; and excelling at Midhurst Grammar School, from where, aged only fifteen, he was sent as an apprentice to Mr. Edwin Hyde’s Southsea Drapery Emporium.
Wells observed all this from a safe distance, torn between compassion and nostalgia, taking great care not to alter the chain of events, letting his double do exactly what he had done, to the letter. But when the time came for his double to begin an apprenticeship at the Southsea Drapery Emporium, Wells decided this was the moment for him to show himself, because there was one thing in his life he had long wanted to alter. He had given the matter a great deal of thought, studying every possible ramification his intervention might entail, before concluding that it was probably not significant enough to cause any major change. And so Wells traveled to Southsea, where, planted opposite the drapery shop in which his twin was languishing, he allowed his memories to come flooding back. He remembered his unhappiness and bewilderment at his mother’s insistence on keeping him out of school and university and forcing him to learn the accursed trade of draper, which he was supposed to exercise until the end of his days, as if it were the most commendable job in the world. Unless he ventured inside, or peeped through the shop window, Wells could not see himself, but he imagined his double smoothing out the fabric after showing it to the customers, folding and unfolding lace curtains, realizing how hard it was to roll up a bolt of linen, or dragging mannequins back and forth in accordance with Mr. Hyde’s enigmatic intentions, and doing all this with a book sticking out of his overall pocket, which would soon earn him a reputation as a daydreamer and an idler.
Wells was immersed in these memories one evening when he saw himself emerge from the building, exactly at the hour he remembered, and trudge wearily toward Southsea Pier, a downcast expression on his face. Quietly he followed the boy until he saw him pause before the murky waters, where he used to remain for almost an hour, toying with the idea of suicide, thinking that if this was what his life was going to be, then he preferred no life at all. He felt compassion for this pale, skinny lad whom life had cheated. In fact, if he remembered correctly, he had never considered suicide a very honorable solution, but the cold embrace of the sea, compared to the barren existence that awaited him, did not seem like such a dreadful alternative. Wells shook his head at the boy’s suffering, which had been his own. He knew that happily, things would look up for him in a matter of months, when he at last resolved to rebel against his mother and wrote to Horace Byatt asking for help, whereupon Byatt offered him a job as assistant teacher at Midhurst Grammar School on a salary of twenty pounds a year. However, the tormented boy staring into the sea was as yet unaware he would succeed in escaping this tedious life as a draper’s apprentice and construct a pleasant life as a writer. Wells strolled over to himself on the pier, preparing to burst in on his own adolescence in order to speak with himself. He hoped the fifty years that had left his face furrowed with wrinkles would prevent the youth from recognizing him, but above all he hoped his calculated intrusion in the flow of events would not provoke a landslide bigger than the one he intended.
“Suicide is always a possibility,” he said in a soft voice, catching his double’s attention, “and so it’s advisable to exhaust all others first.”
The boy wheeled round, startled, and gazed at Wells suspiciously. And for the few moments his scrutiny lasted, Wells was also able to study himself. So this was what he had looked like aged fifteen, he reflected, astonished by the boy’s eyes that had seen so little, his lips still devoid of their characteristic ironic grimace, his exaggeratedly tragic mannerisms. He found his earlier self painfully fragile and vulnerable, however much the boy, possessed of youth’s absurd bravado, considered himself somehow invincible.
“I’m not thinking of—” Wells heard the boy start to say, only to break off abruptly and add, in a tone of puzzled defiance: “How did you know?”
Wells smiled at him as amiably as he could, hoping this friendly gesture would favor an easy exchange between them.
“Oh, it’s not so hard to figure out,” Wells replied with relaxed joviality, “above all for someone who as a youth entertained the same thoughts when gazing into these waters, with the same anguish you feel now.” He shook his head vigorously, showing how painful it was for him to look back on that now. “But first you have to fight, to try other ways. If your life displeases you, my lad, try to change it. Don’t give in to defeat so easily. Death is the only sure defeat. It is the end of everything.”
For a few moments, the boy contemplated him in silence, still with some mistrust. What did this stranger want? Why had he come up to him and spoken to him like this?
“Thanks for the advice, whoever you are,” he responded coldly.
“Oh, I’m nobody.” Wells shrugged, pretending to be distracted by the gentle ripple of the waves. “Just a stranger who has watched you come here too often. You are an apprentice at Mr. Hyde’s draper’s shop, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” the boy replied, visibly uncomfortable to learn that this stranger whose intentions he could not fathom was spying on him.
“And doubtless you think you deserve more in life than to be a simple draper’s apprentice,” Wells went on, trying to sound as friendly as possible. “You shouldn’t feel guilty about it. I had the same thoughts at your age, my lad. I was forced into an equally thankless job that neither satisfied nor fulfilled me. I dreamed of being a writer, you know.”
The boy observed him with a flash of interest, though Wells knew at that age he had still not decided to be an author. He loved reading, yes, but he was still unaware of his talent for emulating his favorite authors. Not until he entered the Royal College of Science in London, where Professor Huxley taught, would he begin to draft his first stories, in that clumsy, graceless handwriting he would later improve when he went to teach at the Holt Academy in Wrexham. For the moment, the months he had spent at Midhurst, watching Horace Byatt deliver his classes, had aroused in the young Wells a vague fascination for the role of teacher, a vocation incomparably more beneficial to society than that of writer.
“And did you succeed?” the boy asked abruptly, rousing Wells from his momentary reverie.
“What?”
“In being a writer?”
Wells looked at him silently in the growing darkness, pondering his reply.
“No, I’m a simple chemist,” he lamented. “I lead a very ordinary life. This is why I allowed myself to offer you some advice, my lad, because I know there’s nothing worse than leading a life you don’t like. If you think you have something to give to the world, fight for it tooth and nail. Otherwise you’ll end up a sad, embittered chemist who never stops daydreaming, inventing stories he’ll never write.”
“That’s too bad,” the boy said, without bothering to appear sympathetic. A few minutes passed, and then he added, rather diffidently: “Why didn’t you take your own life, then, if you don’t mind me asking?”
The question startled Wells, though it should not have, for it was simply an early example of his own pragmatism.
“Oh, well . . . ,” he extemporized, “books are what keep me going.”
“Books?”
“Yes, reading is my only pleasure, and there are so many books left to read. For that reason alone it is worth going on living. Books make me happy, they help me escape from reality.” Wells contemplated the sea in silence, smiling slightly. “Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to
dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be a more important job in life than that?”
With these words, Wells fell silent, vaguely ashamed of the defensive tone in which he had spoken, which, moreover, did not seem to have overly impressed the boy. Wells deduced from the faint grimace of disdain on his lips that he could think of countless things more important for society than books, though he hadn’t the strength or the inclination to challenge Wells. Perhaps he did not care what this stranger thought and limited himself to feeling secretly sorry for Wells. The boy picked up a small stone and tossed it into the sea, as though hinting to Wells that as far as he was concerned the conversation was over. At this point the author noticed that the boy had a small bandage on the side of his chin, which until then he had not been able to see properly.
“What happened?” he said, signaling the boy’s chin.
“Oh, I tripped on the stairs this morning carrying some bolts of chintz. Sometimes I try to take more than I should so I can finish quickly, but I went too far this time,” the boy replied, somewhat absentmindedly. “I’m afraid it’ll leave an ugly scar.”
Wells remained silent for a few seconds, scouring his memory in vain for this accident. At any rate, the boy would clearly have no scar, for the simple reason that he himself did not have one beneath his bushy beard.
“I wouldn’t worry about it, my lad,” he said reassuringly. “I’m sure it looks worse than it is.”
The boy gave a cold smile, as though deep down he did not care, and Wells decided it was time to steer the conversation toward the real reason why he wanted to speak to his earlier self.
“Do you want to know the last story I made up?” he said in a casual voice.
The boy gave a contemptuous shrug, as though this was of little interest to him either, and Wells had to make a supreme effort to stifle his irritation. He tried to appear nonchalant as he gestured toward the now starry night above their heads and said, “You see that sky, my lad? Have you ever thought there might be life on some of the millions of planets that make up our universe?”
The boy hesitated. “No . . . Yes . . . I don’t know . . .”
“I have. On our neighboring planet Mars, to go no farther. Did you know that the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli discovered a complex system of canals on the surface of Mars that can only have been built artificially?”
Wells knew the boy knew, and so he was not surprised when he nodded, vaguely intrigued.
“Good. Now imagine there are such things as Martians, whose scientific knowledge is far greater than our own. Imagine, too, that their planet is dying, because in the course of their long existence, the Martians have exhausted all its resources. They are faced with a dilemma: they must move to another planet or become extinct. Earth is the planet with the conditions that are most favorable to them, and so they decide to invade it.”
“How terrifying,” the boy said, with genuine interest. “Go on.”
“Imagine the Martians arrive on Earth,” Wells went on, seeing the boy’s expectant face, “crossing the forty million miles of unimaginable space that separates them from us, in cylinders fired from their planet by a powerful cannon, and once here, they begin to build fighting machines that could raze our cities to the ground. With machines like that, the Martians could conquer us in a matter of weeks, even days.”
“I’d like to read that story,” the boy declared with a mixture of fear and excitement.
“Then I’ll give you the idea as a present,” Wells said jovially. “You can write it whenever you feel like it. That way I’ll be able to read it, too.”
The boy shook his head and smiled uneasily.
“I’m afraid I don’t like writing,” he avowed.
“Perhaps you’ll learn to in time,” Wells said. “And who knows, maybe you’re destined to become an author, lad. What’s your name?”
“Herbert George Wells,” the boy replied. “It’s a long name for an author.”
“You can always shorten it,” Wells said affably, proffering his hand. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, George.”
“Likewise,” the boy said, returning the gesture.
And beside the dark waters on the front at Southsea, a man shook hands with himself, without the universe blowing up or seeming to register the anomaly in any other way. After Wells had said good-bye to himself with a nod, he headed toward the other end of the pier, still feeling the warmth of his own hand in his. He had only walked a few paces when he turned once more to the boy.
“Incidentally, one last thing,” he said with a smile, pretending that what he had most wanted to say to the boy had slipped his mind. “If one day you write that story, don’t have the Martians triumph, no matter how much you want to criticize British colonialism.”
“But I’m not going to . . . ,” his double started to protest.
“Please write an ending where the Martians are defeated. Don’t take away your readers’ hope.”
The boy gave a skeptical chuckle.
“All right, I promise. But . . .” He paused. “What could defeat those powerful Martian machines?”
Wells shrugged.
“I haven’t the faintest idea, but I’m sure you’ll think of something. You have plenty of time left before you write it.”
The boy nodded, amused by the stranger’s request. Wells doffed his hat and left the way he had come, but that did not prevent him from also staying where he was, surrounded by the black murmuring water under the pier, an ironic smile appearing on his lips for the first time.
XLII
IT WOULD BE SOME YEARS BEFORE THAT BOY, whom stubborn Fate had made a writer, published his book The War of the Worlds. When at last he held a copy of the book in his hands, Wells contemplated the pages he knew so well with the same melancholy he had contemplated each day of his new life, for during those years, he had watched the boy on the pier happily leave the draper’s shop in Southsea to work as Byatt’s assistant, gain a scholarship to the Royal College of Science in London, marry his cousin Isabel knowing he would soon divorce her to go and live with Jane at Mornington Place, cough up blood on the steps at Charing Cross Station, publish The Time Machine, curse in front of Murray’s Time Travel, and move to a house with a garden in Woking. And all this had happened exactly as it was supposed to, without Wells having perceived the slightest change in events. Now, with the novel in front of him, he would at last find out whether the precarious conversation he had held with himself on the pier at Southsea had been of any use.
The real Wells’s novel was almost identical to the one he had written, but he was relieved to discover that it differed in two respects: the Martians did not attack the planet with airships shaped like stingrays, but with tripods that looked like sinister insects, which would shock the reader more because it brought the terror closer. Indeed, these pages even made him relive the fear he had felt as he fled the real tripods. However, the replacement of airships with tripods was an insignificant detail. The main reason why Wells had risked talking to his fifteen-year-old self was to convince him to change the ending, and he was pleased to see the boy had kept his promise. In his version the Martians had conquered the planet and taken the few remaining survivors as slaves; in his temporal twin’s novel, they were defeated mere days after the invasion, though not by Man.
What defeated the powerful Martians were the humblest things God in His infinite wisdom had placed on the Earth: bacteria. When all of men’s weapons had failed, these microscopic creatures, which had taken their toll on humanity from the beginning of time, invaded the Martians’ bodies, invisibly, tenaciously, and lethally, as soon as they landed on our planet. Given the absence of microbes on Mars, the Martian organism was defenseless against them. It could be said that the Martians were doomed before they even set foot in our world. Wells was pleasantly surprised and had to admit that the boy on the pier had successfully risen to the challenge, inventing a rather original and unexpected way of defeating the Martians, in defiance o
f their powerful fighting machines. He had no doubt that readers of this novel, in contrast to his own, would finish it with a hopeful smile playing on their lips. Just as Serviss had wished.
• • •
AND SO, TWO MONTHS later, when his twin met Serviss for lunch at the Crown and Anchor, Wells was pleased to see that the steely glint of reproach in the American journalist’s eyes had vanished. In the world Wells inhabited now, which was not his own, although it looked suspiciously similar, The War of the Worlds related an unforeseen and terrible Martian invasion, but one from which humanity was rescued at the last moment by the hand of God, which was as invisible as the microbes He had sprinkled over the planet. It was a much more relevant and subtle criticism of the excesses of British colonialism, Wells had to admit, even though the ray of hope his twin had added at the end had not prevented Serviss from writing Edison Conquers Mars, intended as a sequel to The War of the Worlds. In it, the insufferable Edison led an expedition to Mars in search of revenge. Wells had originally gone to the tavern with the aim of upbraiding Serviss for this audacity, as well as to demolish his work in no uncertain terms and even to tell him his true opinion of that scoundrel Edison. And hidden behind his beard, long hair, and wrinkles, Wells had watched the meeting between the two authors from his corner table. A meeting his twin had imagined would be like two stones knocking together and making sparks fly, but which turned out quite differently. By the time lunch was finished, the endless succession of beer tankards had worked its magic, and the two looked for all the world like a couple of old friends. Wells went after them as they staggered merrily out of the tavern. But once they were in the street, instead of taking a carriage straight to the museum, as Wells remembered, the two men bid each other a fond farewell and went their separate ways. From the doorway of the tavern, Wells smiled and felt an immense wave of relief. All these years he had been wondering whether he had changed the future, and now, at last, he knew that he had: the two men had not gone to the museum because the Envoy was not there. He had blown him to pieces on the remote icecaps of the Antarctic; he had obliterated him. It was possible his airship was still languishing among the hundreds of objects crammed inside the Chamber of Marvels, but clearly Serviss did not consider it as important as the Martian, which had brought so many consequences in its wake. Good, Wells said to himself, as he walked breezily toward the nearest station to catch a train to Weybridge. From now on, everything that happened to his twin would also be a surprise to him.
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