The Map of Time

by Félix J Palma

  “Are you afraid of my nice automatons? But how can you be scared of such an unconvincing future?” Gilliam asked sarcastically.

  Murray walked slowly towards the automaton at the front of the group, and, grinning deliberately at Wells, like a child about to perpetrate some mischief, placed his fleshy hand on its shoulder and gave it a push. The automaton keeled over backwards, crashing noisily into the one behind it, which in turn toppled onto the one next to it, and so on until one after the other they collapsed onto the floor. They fell with the fascinating slowness of a glacier breaking off. When it was finally over, Gilliam spread the palms of his hands as if to apologize for the din.

  “With no one inside, they’re just hollow shells, mere disguises,” he said.

  Wells gazed at the pile of upturned automatons, then looked back at Gilliam, struggling with his dizzying feeling of unreality.

  “Forgive me for bringing you to the year 2000 against your will, Mr. Wells,” apologized Murray, feigning dismay. “If you’d accepted one of my invitations, it wouldn’t have been necessary, but as you didn’t, I had no alternative. I wanted you to see it before I closed it down. And so I had to send one of my men to chloroform you while you were asleep, although from what he told me, you occupy your nights with other things. He got a real shock after he’d climbed through the attic window.” Murray’s words shed a welcome light on the author’s whirling thoughts, and he lost no time in tying up the necessary loose ends.

  He realized immediately he had not traveled to the year 2000, as everything appeared to indicate. The machine in his attic was still just a toy, and the razed city of London was no more than a vast stage set designed by Gilliam in order to hoodwink people.

  No doubt, on seeing him enter the attic, Gilliam’s henchman had hidden behind the time machine and waited, unsure of what to do, perhaps weighing up the possibility of carrying out Murray’s orders using force. But fortunately, he had not needed to resort to an ignoble act of violence, as Wells himself had given the man the perfect opportunity to use the chloroform-soaked handkerchief he no doubt had at the ready by sitting in the time machine.

  Of course, once he realized he was standing on a simple stage set and that he had not undergone some impossible journey through time, Wells felt greatly relieved. The situation he found himself in was by no means pleasant, of course, but at least it was logical.

  “I trust you haven’t harmed my wife,” he said, not quite managing to sound threatening.

  “Have no fear,” Gilliam reassured him, waving a hand in the air, “Your wife is a deep sleeper, and my men can be very quiet when they have to be. I’m sure that the lovely Jane is at this very moment sleeping peacefully, oblivious to your absence.” Wells was about to make a riposte but finally thought better of it. Gilliam was addressing him with the rather overblown arrogance of people in high places who have the world at their feet. Evidently, the tables had turned since their last meeting. If during the interview at the author’s house in Woking, Wells had been the one wielding the scepter of power like a child brandishing a new toy, now it was Gilliam who held it between his fleshy fingers. Over the intervening months, Murray had changed: he had become an altogether different creature. He was no longer the aspiring writer obliged to kneel at his master’s feet, he was the owner of the most lucrative business in London before whom every one grotesquely bowed down. Wells, of course, did not think he deserved any kind of adulation, and if he allowed him to use that superior tone, it was because he considered Murray was entitled to do so: after all, he was the outright winner of the duel they had been fighting during the past few months. And had not Wells used a similar tone when the scepter had been in his hands? Gilliam Murray spread his arms wide, like a ringmaster announcing the acts at a circus, symbolically embracing the surrounding devastation.

  “Well, what do you think of my world?” he asked.

  Wells glanced about him with utter indifference.

  “Not bad for a glasshouse manufacturer, don’t you agree, Mr. Wells? That was my occupation before you gave me another reason to go on living.” Wells could not fail to notice the responsibility Gilliam had so happily chosen to ascribe to him in the forging of his destiny, but he preferred not to comment. Undeterred by Wells’s frostiness, Gilliam invited him with a wave of his arm to take a stroll through the future. The author paused for a moment, then reluctantly followed Murray.

  “I don’t know whether you’re aware that glasshouses are a most lucrative business,” said Gilliam once Wells had drawn level with him. “Everyone nowadays sets aside part of their garden for these cozy spaces, where grown-ups like to relax and children play, and it is possible to grow plants and fruit trees out of season.

  Although, my father, Sebastian Murray, had, as it were, loftier ambitions.” They had scarcely walked a few paces when they came to a small precipice. Unconcerned about taking a tumble, Murray began trotting absurdly down the incline, arms stretched out at his sides to keep his balance. The dog bounded after him. Wells let out a sigh before beginning the descent, taking care not to trip over the mangled bits of pipe and grinning skulls poking out of the ground. He did not wish to fall over again. Once was quite enough in one day.

  “My father sensed the beginning of a new future in those transparent houses rich people erected in their gardens,” Gilliam shouted out to him as he went ahead down the incline, “the first step towards a world of translucent cities, glass buildings that would put an end to secrets and lies, a better world where privacy would no longer exist!” When he reached the bottom, he offered his hand to Wells, who declined, not bothering to conceal his impatience at the whole situation. Gilliam seemed not to take the hint, and resumed their stroll, this time along an apparently gentler path.

  “I confess that as a child I was fascinated by the glorious vision that gave my father’s life meaning,” he went on. “For a while I even believed it would be the true face of the future. Until the age of seventeen, when I began working with him. It was then that I realized it was no more than a fantasy. This amusement for architects and horticulturalists would never be transformed into the architecture of the future, not only because man would never give up his privacy in the interests of a more harmonious world, but because architects themselves were opposed to the glass and iron constructions, claiming the new materials lacked the aesthetic values that they claimed defined architectural works. The sad truth was that, however many glass-roofed railway stations my father and I built up and down the country, we could never usurp the power of the brick. And so I resigned myself to spending the rest of my life manufacturing fancy glasshouses. But who could content themselves with such a petty, insignificant occupation, Mr. Wells? Not I, for one. Yet I had no idea what would satisfy me either. By the time I was in my early twenties I had enough money to buy anything I wanted, however whimsical, and as you might expect, life had begun to feel like a card game I had already won and was beginning to tire of. To cap it all, around that time my father died of a sudden fever, and as I was his only heir I became even richer. But his passing also made me painfully aware that most people die without ever having realized their dreams. However enviable my father’s life may have seemed from the outside, I knew it hadn’t been fulfilling, and mine would be no different. I was convinced I would die with the same look of disappointment on my face. I expect that’s why I turned to reading, so as to escape the dull, predictable life unfolding before me. We all begin reading for one reason or another, don’t you think? What was yours, Mr. Wells?” “I fractured my tibia when I was eight,” said the author, visibly uninterested.

  Gilliam looked at him slightly surprised for a moment, then finally smiled and nodded.

  “I suppose geniuses like you have to start young,” he reflected.

  “It took me a little longer. I was twenty-five before I began exploring my father’s ample library. He had been widowed early on and had built another wing onto the house, probably in order to use up some of the money my mother would otherwi
se have helped him to spend. Nobody but me would ever read those books. So I devoured every one, every single one. That was how I discovered the joys of reading. It’s never too late, don’t you agree? Although I confess, I wasn’t a very discerning reader. Any book about lives that weren’t my own was of some interest to me. But your novel, Mr. Wells … your novel captivated me like no other! You didn’t speak of a world you knew, like Dickens, or of exotic places such as Africa or Malaysia, like Haggard or Salgari, or even of the moon, like Verne. No, in The Time Machine you evoked something even more unattainable: the future. Nobody before you had been audacious enough to visualize it!” Wells shrugged off Murray’s praise and carried on walking, trying not to trip over the dog, which had the irritating habit of zigzagging across his path. Verne, of course, had beaten him to it, but Gilliam Murray need not know that. Murray resumed, again heedless of the author’s lack of interest: “After that, as you know, doubtless inspired by your novel, a spate of authors hastened to publish their visions of the future.

  Suddenly, the bookshop windows were crammed with science fiction novels. I bought as many as I could, and after several sleepless nights spent devouring them in quick succession, I decided this new genre of literature would be my only reading.” “I’m sorry you chose to waste your time on such nonsense,” muttered Wells, who considered these novels a regrettable blot on the fin-de-siècle literary landscape.

  Taken aback once more, Gilliam glanced at him before letting out a loud guffaw.

  “Oh, I know these potboilers have little merit,” he agreed, when he had stopped laughing, “but I couldn’t care less about that. The authors of this nonsense, as you call it, possess something far more important to me than the ability to create sublime sentences: namely a visionary intelligence that amazes me and which I wish I had. Most of these works confine themselves to describing a single invention and its effect on mankind. Have you read the novel about the Jewish inventor who devises a machine that magnifies things? It’s a truly awful book, and yet I confess the image of an army of giant stag beetles swarming across Hyde Park truly terrified me. Thankfully, they are not all like that. Such ravings apart, some present an idea of the future whose plausibility I enjoyed exploring. And there was something else I couldn’t deny: after enjoying a book by Dickens, for example, it would never have occurred to me to try to imitate him, to see whether I was able of concocting a story about the adventures of a street urchin or the hardships of a boy forced to work in a blacking factory, because it seemed to me anyone with a modicum of imagination and time would be able to do that. But to write about the future … Ah, Mr. Wells, that was different. To me, that seemed a real challenge. It was an undertaking that required intelligence, man’s capacity for deduction. “Would I be capable of creating a believable future?” I said to myself one night after finishing another of those novels. As you will have guessed, I took you as my example, because, besides our common interests, we are the same age. It took me a month to write my novel about the future, a piece of science fiction that would display my insight, my powers of invention. Naturally, I made every effort to write well, but I was more interested in the novel’s prophetic side. I wanted my readers to find my vision of the future plausible. But most of all, I valued the opinion of the writer who had been my guiding light. Your opinion, Mr. Wells; I wanted you to be as intellectually stimulated by my novel as I had been by yours.” The two men’s eyes met in a silence broken only by the distant cawing of crows.

  “But as you know, it didn’t happen like that,” Gilliam lamented, unable to prevent himself shaking his head in sorrow.

  The gesture moved Wells, as he considered it the only sincere one Murray had made since they set off on their walk.

  They had come to a halt next to a huge mound of rubble, and there, hands dug into the pockets of his loud jacket, Gilliam paused for a few moments staring down at his shoes, clearly distressed, perhaps waiting for Wells to place his hand on his shoulder and offer words of solace, which, like the shaman’s chant would soothe the painful wound Wells himself had inflicted on Murray’s pride that afternoon long ago. However, the author simply studied him with the disdain of the poacher watching a rabbit struggle in a trap, aware that while seemingly responsible for what was happening, he was a simple mediator, and the animal’s torment was dictated by the cruel laws of nature.

  Having realized that the only person capable of alleviating his hurt seemed unwilling to do so, Gilliam smiled grimly and carried on walking. They went down what to judge by the grandiose wrought-iron gates and the palatial remains of the buildings amid the rubble, was a luxurious residential street evoking a life that seemed incongruous amidst all that devastation, as though man’s proliferation on the planet had been no more than a divine blunder, a ridiculous flowering, doomed to perish under the elements.

  “I shan’t try to deny that at first I was upset when you doubted my abilities as a writer,” Gilliam acknowledged in a voice that seemed to ooze with the slowness of treacle from inside his throat. “Nobody enjoys having their work pilloried. But what most vexed me was that you questioned the plausibility of my novel, the future I had so carefully contrived. I admit my response was entirely unacceptable, and I wish to take this opportunity to apologize for having attacked your novel the way I did. As I’m sure you’ll have guessed, my opinion of it hasn’t changed. I still consider it the work of a genius,” Gilliam said, laying a faintly ironic emphasis on the final words. He had recovered his conceited smirk, but Wells had glimpsed a chink in his armor, the crack that from time to time threatened to bring this powerful colossus crashing down, and in the face of Murray’s intolerable arrogance, Wells felt almost proud to have been the cause of it.

  “That afternoon, however, I was unable to defend myself other than like a cornered rat,” Wells heard Gilliam justify himself.

  “Happily, when I finally managed to recover, I could see things in a different light. Yes, you might say I experienced a kind of epiphany.” “Really,” commented Wells, with dry irony.

  “Yes, I’m sure of it. Sitting opposite you in that chair, I realized I’d chosen the wrong means of presenting my idea of the future to the world; in doing it through a novel, I was condemning it to being mere fiction, plausible fiction, but fiction all the same, as you had done with your future inhabited by Morlocks and Eloi.

  But what if I were able to put my idea across without confining it to the restrictive medium of the novel? What if I could present it as something real? Evidently, the pleasure of writing a believable piece of fiction would pale beside the incredible satisfaction of having the whole country believe in the reality of my vision of the year 2000. “But was this feasible?” the businessman in me asked.

  The conditions for realizing such a project seemed perfect. Your novel, Mr. Wells, had sparked off a polemic about time travel. People in clubs and cafés talked of nothing else but the possibility of traveling into the future. It is one of life’s ironies that you fertilized the ground for me to plant my seed. Why not give people what they wished for? Why not offer them a journey to the year 2000, to “my” future? I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull it off, but one thing was certain: I wouldn’t be able to go on living if I didn’t try. Purely by accident, Mr. Wells, the way most things happen in life, you gave me a reason to carry on, a goal which, were I to achieve it, would give me the longed-for fulfillment, the elusive happiness I could never obtain from the manufacture of glasshouses.” Wells was compelled to lower his head in order to conceal his sense of sympathy towards Murray. His words had reminded Wells of the extraordinary chain of events that had delivered him into the loving arms of literature, away from the mediocrity to which his not so loving mother had sought to condemn him. And it had been his way with words, a gift he had not asked for, that had spared him the need to find a meaning to his life, had exempted him from having to tread the path taken by those who had no idea why they had been born, those who could only experience the conventional, atavistic joy found in everyda
y pleasures such as a glass of wine or a woman’s caress. Yes, he would have walked among those redundant shadows, unaware that the longed-for happiness he had scarcely glimpsed during his fits of melancholy lay curled up in a ball on the keys of a typewriter, waiting for him to bring it to life.

  “On my way back to London I began thinking,” he heard Murray say. “I was convinced people would believe the impossible if it were real enough. In fact, it was not unlike building a glasshouse: if the glass part of the structure were elegant and beautiful enough, nobody would see the solid iron framework holding it up.

  It would appear to be floating in the air as if by magic. The first thing I did the next morning was to sell the business my father had built up from scratch. In doing so, I felt no regret, in case you were wondering, quite the opposite if anything, because with the money from the sale I would be able literally to build the future, which, ultimately, had been my father’s dream. From the proceeds, I purchased this old theater. The reason why I chose it was because right behind it, looking out over Charing Cross Road, were two derelict buildings which I also bought. The next step, of course, was to merge the three buildings into one by knocking down the walls in order to obtain this vast space. Seen from the outside, no one would think it was big enough to house a vast stage set of London in the year 2000. Yet in less than two months, I created a perfect replica, down to the smallest detail, of the scene in my novel.

  In fact, the set isn’t nearly as big as it looks, but it seems immense if we walk round it in a circle, don’t you think?” “Is that what they had been doing, walking round in a circles?” Wells thought, containing his irritation. If so, he had to acknowledge that the intricate layout of the debris had taken him in completely, for it made the already sprawling stage set appear even more gigantic, and he would never have imagined it could fit inside a tiny theater.