The Map of Time (42 page)

36

Not even the touch on the skin of the delicious breeze heralding the arrival of summer, nor caressing a woman’s body, nor sipping Scotch whiskey in the bathtub until the water goes cold, in short, no other pleasure Wells could think of gave him a greater sense of well-being than when he added the final full stop to a novel. This culminating act always filled him with a sense of giddy satisfaction born of the certainty that nothing he could achieve in life could fulfill him more than writing a novel, no matter how tedious, difficult, and thankless he found the task, for Wells was one of those writers who detest writing but love “having written.” He pulled the last folio from the carriage of his Hammond typewriter, laid it on top of the pile, and placed his hand on it with a triumphant smile, like a hunter resting his boot on a lion’s head, because for Wells the act of writing was much like a struggle, a bloodthirsty battle with an idea that refuses to be seized.

An idea that nonetheless originated with him; and perhaps that was the most frustrating thing of all, the eternal yawning gap between the fruit of his efforts and his initial goal, which admittedly was always more instinctive than deliberate. He had learned from experience that what he succeeded in putting down on paper was only ever a pale reflection of what he had imagined, and so he had come to accept that this would only be half as good as the original, half as acceptable as the flawless, unachievable novel that had acted as a guide, and which he imagined pulsating mockingly behind each book like some ghostly presence. Even so, here was the result of all those months of toil, he told himself; and it felt wonderful to see transformed into something palpable what until he typed that last full stop had been no more than a vague premise. He would deliver it to Henley the next day and could stop thinking about it.

And yet such doubts never arose in isolation. Once more, Wells wondered, as he sat beside his pile of typed folios, whether he had written the book he had been meant to write. Was this novel destined to figure in his bibliography, or had it been engendered by accident? Was he responsible for writing one novel and not another, or was this also controlled by the fate that governed men’s lives? He was plagued by doubts, although one caused him particular distress: was there a novel lurking somewhere in his head that would allow him to express the whole of what was really inside him? The idea he might discover this too late tormented him: that as he lay on his deathbed, before his last gasp, the plot of an extraordinary novel he no longer had time to write would rise from the depths of his mind, like a piece of wreckage floating up to the sea’s surface. A novel that had always been there, awaiting him, calling out to him in vain amid the clamor, a novel that would die with him, for no one but he could write it, because it was like a suit made to measure just for him. He could think of nothing more terrifying, no worse fate.

He shook his head, driving out these distressing thoughts, and glanced up at the clock. It was past midnight. That meant he could write November 21, 1896 next to his signature on the end page of the novel. Once he had done this, he blew lovingly on the ink, rose from his chair, and picked up the oil lamp. His back was stiff, and he felt terribly tired, yet he did not go into the bedroom, where he could hear Jane’s steady breathing. He had no time for sleep; he had a long night ahead of him, he told himself, a smile playing across his face. He padded down the corridor in his slippers, lighting his way with the lamp, and began to climb the stairs to the attic, trying to avoid making the steps creak.

Waiting for him, shiny and magnificent, shimmering in the celestial moonlight filtering in through the open window, stood the machine. He had grown attached to his secret ritual, although he did not know exactly why he derived such enjoyment from the silly, harmless prank that consisted of sitting on the machine while his wife was asleep below him. Perhaps because it made him feel special, even though he knew it was only a sophisticated toy.

Whoever made it had reproduced every last detail: the machine might not be able to travel in time, but thanks to a clever mechanism, any date could be set on the control panel, the fictitious destinations of impossible passages through the fabric of time.

Until now, Wells had only set the date to distant times in the future—including to the year 802,701, the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks—times so remote that life as he knew it could only appear completely alien, painfully incomprehensible—or in the past he would like to have known, such as the time of the druids.

But that night, with a roguish grin, he adjusted the numbers on the control panel to May 20 in the year 2000, the date on which the impostor Gilliam Murray had chosen to stage the greatest ever battle of the human race—that pantomime which to his astonishment all England had been fooled by, thanks in part to his own novel. He found it ironic that he, the author of a novel about time travel, was the only person who thought it was impossible. He had made all England dream but was immune to his own creation.

“What would the world really look like in a hundred years” time?” he wondered. He would have liked to travel to the year 2000, not just for the pleasure of seeing it, but to take photographs with one of those newfangled cameras so that he could come back and show the unsuspecting crowds queuing up outside Murray’s offices what the true face of the future looked like. It was a pipe dream, of course, but there was nothing to stop him from pretending he could do it, he told himself, settling back in his seat and ceremoniously pulling the lever down, experiencing the inevitable frisson of excitement he felt whenever he performed the gesture.

However, to his astonishment, this time when the lever had come to halt, a sudden darkness fell on the attic. The flecks of moonlight shining through the window seemed to withdraw, leaving him in total dark. Before he was able to understand what the devil was going on, he was overcome by a dreadful feeling of vertigo and a sudden giddiness. He felt himself floating, drifting through a mysterious void that could have been the cosmos itself.

And as he began to lose consciousness, all he managed to think was either he was having a heart attack or he really was traveling to the year 2000 after all.

He came to painfully slowly. His mouth was dry, and his body felt strangely sluggish. Once he could focus properly, he realized he was lying on the floor, not in his attic but on a piece of wasteland covered in stones and rubble. Disorientated, he struggled upright, discovering to his annoyance that each time he moved he felt a terrible shooting pain in his head. He decided to stay sitting on the ground. From there he glanced around with awe at the devastated landscape. “Was this the London of the future?” he thought. Had he really traveled to the year 2000? There was no sign of the time machine, as if the Morlocks had spirited it away inside the sphinx. After his careful inspection, he decided the time had come for him to stand upright, which he did with great difficulty, like Darwin’s primate crossing the distance separating him from Man. He was relieved to find he had no broken bones, although he still felt unpleasantly queasy. Was this one of the effects of having crossed a century in his time carriage? The sky was covered with a dense fog that left everywhere in a pale twilight, a gray blanket dotted with red from the dozens of fires burning on the horizon. The crows circling above his head were an almost obligatory feature of the desolate landscape, he reflected. One flew down, alighting very close to where he was sitting, and made a macabre tapping sound as it began pecking stubbornly at the rubble.

On closer examination, Wells saw with horror that the bird was trying to bore through a human skull with its beak. This discovery caused him to recoil a few paces, a rash response in that hostile environment. The next thing he knew, the ground gave way beneath him, and he realized too late that he had woken up at the top of a small incline, down which he was now unhappily tumbling. He landed with a thump, coughing and spluttering as he breathed in some of the thick dust cloud shrouding him.

Irritated by his own clumsiness, Wells rose to his feet. Luckily, he had no broken bones this time either, although as a crowning humiliation, his trousers had been torn in several places, leaving part of his scrawny white buttock exposed.

Wells shook his head. “What more could go wrong?” he thought, dusting himself down as best he could. As the dust settled, he stood stock still, contemplating aghast the figures slowly emerging from the gloom. Staring back at him in ghostly silence, he discovered an army of automatons. There were at least a dozen of them, all with the same inscrutable, intimidating expression, even the one standing slightly to the fore, who was wearing an incongruous gold crown. They looked as though they had halted in their tracks when they saw him roll down the incline. A terrible panic gripped Wells’s insides as he realized where he was.

He had traveled to the year 2000, and, amazingly enough, it was exactly as Gilliam Murray had portrayed it in his novel, for there in front of him, before his very eyes, stood Solomon himself, the evil king of the automatons responsible for the all the devastation around them. His fate was sealed: he was going to be shot by a mechanical toy. There, in the very future he had refused to believe in.

“I imagine right now you must be wishing Captain Shackleton would appear, correct?” The voice did not come from the automaton, although at that stage nothing would have surprised him, but from somewhere behind Wells. He recognized it instantly. He would have liked never to have to hear it again, but somehow, perhaps because he was a writer, he knew that sooner or later he would bump into Murray again; he knew the story they were both taking part in needed a satisfying conclusion, one that would not frustrate the readers” expectations. Wells would never have envisaged the encounter taking place in the future, though, for the simple reason that he had never believed in the possibility of traveling into the future. He turned around slowly. A few yards away, Gilliam Murray was watching him, an amused grin on his face. He was wearing a purple suit and a green top hat, like a human descendant of those beautifully plumed biblical birds of paradise. Sitting on its haunches next to him was an enormous golden-colored dog.

“Welcome to the year 2000, Mr. Wells,” Murray said, jovially, “or should I say to my vision of the year 2000.” Wells looked at him suspiciously, one eye on the eerily frozen group of automatons drawn up before them as though posing for a portrait.

“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.