“Have you brought an assassin with you, Wells?” James exclaimed, scandalized by the bloody spectacle taking place before him.
Wells ignored him. He was too busy following Tom’s movements. Marcus finally responded. Wells saw him retrieve one of his men’s weapons from the floor and aim it at Tom, who, gripping his bloody saber, was that very moment turning towards him. They stood at least four paces apart, and Wells realized with horror that the captain would be unable to cover this distance before the other man fired. And he was not mistaken: Tom barely managed to take a step before receiving the full blast of the heat ray in his chest. The captain’s armor shattered, like a crab shell hit by a hammer, and he was thrown backwards, his helmet flying off as he fell. The force of the shot sent him rolling across the floor until he finally came to a halt, a smoldering crater in his chest, his handsome face lit up by the nearby candelabra. Blood trickled from his mouth, and only the candle flames glinted now in his beautiful green eyes.
Marcus’s roar of triumph broke the silence, forcing Wells to take his eyes off Tom and fix them on him. Marcus surveyed the three corpses strewn around him with amused incredulity. He nodded his head slowly for a few moments, then turned towards the writers huddled together on the far side of the hallway.
“Nice try, Wells,” he said, walking over to them with his springy gait, a ferocious grin on his face. “I have to admit you took me by surprise. But your plan has merely added a few more bodies to the count.” Wells did not reply. He felt suddenly dizzy as he watched Marcus raise his weapon and point it at his chest. He assumed it was the feeling announcing he was about to travel through time. So he would be going to the year 1888 after all. He had done his best to prevent it, but apparently his fate was sealed. There probably did exist a parallel universe where Shackleton had been able to finish off Marcus, and where he would not travel in time and could go on being Bertie, but unfortunately he was not in that universe.
He was in one very similar to that of the future Wells, where he would also travel eight years into the past, but where Captain Shackleton had died, pierced by a heat ray.
Realizing he had failed, Wells could only smile sadly, as Marcus slid his finger towards the trigger. At that very moment, a shot rang out, but a shot fired from an ordinary pistol. Then it was Marcus’s turn to smile sadly at Wells. A moment later, he lowered his weapon and let it drop to the floor, as though he had suddenly decided it was worthless. With the languid voluptuousness of a puppet whose strings have been cut one by one, Marcus slumped to his knees, sat down, and finally toppled over onto the floor, his blood-spattered face still smiling. Behind him, a smoking gun in his hand, Wells saw Inspector Colin Garrett.
“Had the inspector been following him all along?” he wondered, bemused by the young man’s sudden appearance. No, that was impossible, for if Garrett had been spying on him in the original universe, that is to say in the universe where Wells would inevitably travel in time and would write himself a letter, the inspector would have burst in and seized Marcus once Wells had vanished into thin air, and even if Marcus had succeeded in escaping, whether through time or space, Garrett would have discovered everything, whereas Wells knew this was not the case because his future self had read a news item reporting the strange deaths of the authors Bram Stoker and Henry James after a night spent in the haunted house at Berkeley Square. Evidently, if Garrett had seen what happened, that article would not have existed. Accordingly, Inspector Garrett had no business being in that universe any more than in the previous one. The only new card on the table was Shackleton, whom Wells had enlisted in his battle with fate.
Garrett’s presence, therefore, could only have been determined by Shackleton, leading the writer to conclude that he was the person the inspector had followed there.
And, incidentally, he was correct in this assumption, for I, who see everything, can confirm that not two hours before, after a delightful stroll in the company of Miss Nelson, Garrett had bumped into an enormous fellow in Piccadilly. Following the violent collision, the inspector had turned to apologize, but the man was in too much of a hurry even to stop. This strange haste was not the only thing that aroused Garrett’s suspicion; he was also puzzled by the curious solidity of his body, which had left his shoulder smarting painfully. Such had been the force of the blow that Garrett had even thought the fellow must be wearing a suit of armor under his long coat. A minute later, this thought did not seem so foolish. Gazing down at the stranger’s bizarre footwear, he realized with a shudder who it was he had just bumped into.
His jaw dropped, scarcely able to believe it. Trying to keep calm, he began tailing Shackleton cautiously, his trembling hand clasping the pistol in his pocket, unsure of what to do next. He told himself the best thing would be to follow Shackleton for a while, at least until he discovered where he was going in such a hurry.
By turns excited and calm, Garrett followed him down Old Bond Street, holding his breath each time the dead leaves rustled like old parchment under his feet, and then down Bruton Street, until they reached Berkeley Square. Once there, Shackleton had paused in front of what looked like a deserted building and then began scaling its façade until he disappeared through a window on the top floor. The inspector, who had watched his climb from behind a tree, was unsure how to proceed. Should he follow him in? Before he had time to answer his own question, he noticed a carriage pull up in front of the dilapidated building, and, adding to his surprise, out of it stepped the author H. G. Wells, who walked very calmly up to the house and went in through the front door.
What was going on between Wells and the man from the future? Garrett wondered, perplexed. There was only one way to find out. He crept across the street, scaled the front of the building, and climbed in through the same window Shackleton had disappeared through moments before. Once inside the darkened building, he had witnessed the entire scene unnoticed. And now he knew Shackleton had not come from the future in order to perpetrate Evil with impunity, as he had first thought, but to help Wells do battle against the time traveler named Marcus, whose wicked plan, as far as the inspector could tell, had been to steal one of Wells’s works.
Wells watched the inspector kneel beside Tom’s corpse and gently close his eyes. Then Garrett stood up, grinned his inimitable boyish grin, and said something. Wells, though, could not hear him, because at that very moment the universe they were in vanished as if it had never existed.
42
When he pushed the lever on the time machine forward as far as it would go, nothing happened. Wells only needed to glance about him to see that it was still November 20, 1896. He smiled sadly, although he had the strange sensation that he had been smiling like that long before he touched the lever and confirmed what he already knew, that despite its majestic beauty, the time machine was simply a toy. The year 2000—the genuine year 2000, not the one invented by that charlatan Gilliam Murray—was beyond his reach. Like the rest of the future, in fact. No matter how many times he performed the ritual, it would always be make-believe: he would never travel in time. No one could do that. No one. He was trapped in the present from which he could never escape.
Gloomily, he climbed off the machine and walked over to the attic window. Outside, the night was quiet. An innocent silence enveloped the neighboring fields and houses tenderly, and the world appeared exhausted, terribly defenseless, at his mercy. He had the power to change the trees around, paint the flowers different colors, or carry out any number of outrageous acts with total impunity, for, as he gazed out over the sleeping universe, Wells had the impression of being the only man on earth who was awake. He had the feeling that if he listened hard enough he could hear the roar of waves crashing on the shores, the grass steadily growing, the clouds softly chafing against the membrane of the sky, and even the creak of age-old wood as the planet rotated on its axis. And his soul was lulled by the same stillness, for he was always overcome with an intense calm whenever he put the final full stop to a novel, as he had just done with The In
visible Man. He was back at the point of departure, at the place that filled writers with dread and excitement, for this was where they must decide which new story to tackle of the many floating in the air, which plot to bind themselves to for a lengthy period; and they had to choose carefully, study each option calmly, as though confronted with a magnificent wardrobe full of garments they might wear to a ball, because there were dangerous stories, stories that resisted being inhabited, and stories that pulled you apart while you were writing them, or, what was worse, fine-looking clothes fit for an emperor that turned out to be rags. At that moment, before reverently committing the first word to paper, he could write anything he wanted, and this fired his blood with a powerful sense of freedom, as wonderful as it was fleeting, for he knew it would vanish the moment he chose one story and sacrificed all the others.
He contemplated the stars dotted across the night sky with an almost serene smile. He felt a sudden pang of fear. He remembered a conversation with his brother Frank a few months before, during his last visit to the house in Nyewood where his family had washed up like flotsam. When the others had gone to bed, he and Frank had taken their cigarettes and beers out onto the porch, for no other reason than to stand in awe under the majestic sky studded with stars like a brave general’s uniform. Beneath that blanket, which allowed them a somewhat immodest glimpse of the universe’s depths, the affairs of man seemed painfully insignificant and life took on an almost playful air. Wells swigged his beer, leaving Frank to break the atavistic silence that had settled over the world. Despite the blows life had dealt him, whenever Wells came to Nyewood he always found his brother brimming with optimism, perhaps because he had realized it was the only way he could stay afloat, and he sought to justify it in tangible ways, for example, in the pride any man should feel at being a subject of the British Empire. Perhaps this explained why Frank had begun to extol the virtues of colonial policy, and Wells, who detested the tyrannical way in which his country was conquering the world, had felt compelled to mention the devastating effects of British colonization on the five thousand aborigines in Tasmania, whose population had been decimated. Wells had tried to explain to an inebriated Frank that the Tasmanians had not been won over by values superior to their own indigenous culture, but had been conquered by a more advanced technology. This made his brother laugh. There was no technology in the known world more advanced that of the British Empire, he declared with drunken pomposity. Wells did not bother to argue, but when Frank had gone back inside, he remained gazing uneasily up at the stars. Not in the known world perhaps, but what of the others? He studied the firmament once more now with the same sense of unease, in particular the planet Mars, a tiny dot the size of a pinhead. Despite its insignificant appearance, his contemporaries speculated about the possible existence of life on the planet. The red planet was shrouded in the gauze of a thin atmosphere, and although it lacked oceans, it did have polar ice caps. Astronomers everywhere agreed that of all the planets apart from Earth, Mars possessed the conditions most advantageous for the creation of life. And for some this suspicion had become a certainty when, a few years earlier, the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had discovered grooves on its surface that might be canals, undeniable evidence of Martian engineering. But what if Martians existed and were not inferior to us? What if, unlike the indigenous peoples of the New World, they were not a primitive people eager to welcome a missionary visit from Earth, but a more intelligent species than man, capable of looking down their noses at him in the same way he did at monkeys and lemurs? And what would happen if their technology allowed them to travel through space and land on our planet, motivated by the same conquering zeal as man? What would his compatriots, the great conquerors, do if they encountered another species that sought to conquer them, to destroy their values and their self-respect as they did those of the peoples they invaded, applauded by people like his brother? Wells stroked his moustache, reflecting on the potential of this idea, imagining a surprise Martian attack, steam-propelled cylinders raining down on Woking’s sleepy commons.
He wondered whether he had stumbled upon the theme of his next novel. The buzz of exhilaration he felt in his brain told him he had, but he was worried about what his editor would say. Had he heard right? A Martian invasion was what he had come up with, after inventing a time machine, a scientist who operated on animals to make them human, and a man suffering from invisibility? Henley had praised his talent after the excellent reviews of his last book, The Wonderful Visit. Agreed, he did not do science the way Verne did, but he used a kind of “implacable logic” that made his ideas believable. Not to mention his prodigious output of several novels a year. But Henley seriously doubted whether books pulled out of a hat like that were true literature. If Wells wanted his name to endure longer than a new brand of sauce or soap, he must stop wasting his considerable talent on novels which, while undeniably a feast for the imagination, lacked the necessary depth to really impress themselves on his readers” minds. In brief: if he wanted to be a brilliant writer, and not just a clever, competent storyteller, he must demand more of himself than dashing off little fables. Literature was more than that, much more. True literature should rouse the reader, unsettle him, change his view of the world, give him a resolute push over the cliff of self-knowledge.
But was his understanding of the world profound enough for him to unearth its truths and transmit them to others? Was he capable of changing his readers with what he wrote? And if so, into what? Supposedly into better people. But what kind of story would achieve that, what should he write in order to propel them towards the self-knowledge of which Henley spoke? Would a slimy creature with a slavering mouth, bulbous eyes, and slippery tentacles change his readers” lives? In all probability, he thought, if he portrayed the Martians in this way the subjects of the British Empire would never eat octopus again.
Something disturbed the calm of the night, stirring him from his meditations. This was no cylinder falling from the sky, it was the Scheffer boy’s cart. Wells watched it pull up in front of his gate, and smiled when he recognized the sleepy young lad up on the driver’s seat. The boy had no objection to getting up early to earn a few extra pennies. Wells made his way downstairs, grabbed his overcoat, and left the house quietly, so as not to wake up Jane. He knew his wife would disapprove of what he was doing, and he could not explain to her either why he had to do it, despite being aware it was not the behavior of a gentleman.
He greeted the lad, cast an approving eye over the cargo (he had excelled himself this time), and clambered onto the driver’s seat.
Once he was safely installed, the lad snapped the reins and they set off towards London.
During the journey, they scarcely exchanged a few pleasantries. Wells spent most of the time silently absorbed in fascinated contemplation of the drowsy, defenseless world around him, crying out to be attacked by creatures from space. He glanced out of the corner of his eye at the Scheffer boy and wondered how such a simple soul, for whom the world probably only extended as far as the horizon,would react to an invasion of extraterrestrials. He imagined a small huddle of country folk approaching the place where a Martian ship had landed, nervously waving a white flag, and the extraterrestrials responding to the innocent greeting by instantaneously annihilating them with a blinding flame, a sort of heat ray that would raze the ground, leaving a burning crater strewn with charred corpses and smoldering trees.
When the cart reached the slumbering city, he stopped imagining Martian invasions to concentrate on what he had come to do. They drove through a maze of streets, each one more deserted than the last, the clatter of hooves shattering the silence of the night, until they reached Greek Street. Wells could not help grinning mischievously when the boy stopped the cart in front of Murray’s Time Travel. He glanced up and down the street, pleased to see no one was about.
“Well, my boy,” he said climbing down, “let’s go to it.” They each took a couple of buckets from the back of the cart and approached the front
of the building. As quietly as possible, they plunged the brushes into the buckets of cow dung and began daubing the walls round the entrance. The repellent task took no more than ten minutes. Once they had finished, a nauseating stench filled the air, although Wells breathed it in with great delight: it was the smell of his rage, the loathing he was obliged to suppress, the never-ending directionless anger bubbling up inside him. Startled, the boy watched him inhale the foul odor.
“Why are you doing this, Mr. Wells?” he ventured to ask.
For a moment, Wells stared at him with furious intent. Even to such an unthinking soul, devoting one’s nights to a task that was as eccentric as it was disgusting must have appeared ridiculous.
“Because between doing something and doing nothing, this is all I can do.” The lad nodded in bewilderment at this gibberish, no doubt wishing he had not ventured to try to understand the mysterious motivations of writers. Wells paid him the agreed sum and sent him back to Woking, telling him he still had a few errands to run in London. The boy nodded, visibly relieved at not having to consider what these might be. He leapt onto his cart and, after geeing up the horse, disappeared at the end of the street.
The Map of Time Page 53
