The Map of Time (54 page)

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 Invisible 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.

43

Wells contemplated the ornate façade of Murray’s Time Travel and wondered again how this modest theater could possibly contain the vast stage set Tom had described to him of a devastated London in the year 2000. Sooner or later, he would have to try to get to the bottom of the mystery, but for the moment, he must forget about it if he did not want his adversary’s unarguable shrewdness to put him in a bad mood. Determined to push the thought aside, he shook his head and stood admiring his work for a few moments. Then, satisfied at a job well done, he began walking in the direction of Waterloo Bridge. He knew of no better place from which to observe the beautiful spectacle of morning.

Cracks of light would soon begin to appear in the dark sky as dawn broke through, and there was nothing to stop him dallying for a few moments to witness the colorful duel before going to Henley’s office.

In fact, any excuse was good enough to delay his meeting with his editor, for he felt certain Henley would not be overly pleased with the new manuscript. Of course, he would agree to publish it, but this would not spare Wells from having to listen to one of Henley’s sermons aimed at steering him into the fold of authors destined to pass into the annals of literary history. “And why not accept his advice for once?” he suddenly thought. Why not give up writing for naïve readers easily convinced by any adventure story, or any story that shows a modicum of imagination, and write for more discerning readers, those, in short, who reject the entertainments of popular fiction in favor of more serious, profound literature that explains the universe to them and even the precariousness of their existence in the centuries to come. Perhaps he should resolve to write another kind of story altogether, one that would stir his readers” souls in a different way, a novel that would be nothing short of a revelation to them, just as Henley wanted.

Immersed in these thoughts, Wells turned down Charing Cross Road and headed for the Strand. By that time, a new day was slowly dawning around him. The black sky was gradually dissolving, giving way to a slightly unreal dark blue that instantly paled on the horizon, taking on a soft violet tint before turning orange. In the distance, the author could make out the shape of Waterloo Bridge growing more and more distinct as the darkness faded, slowly invaded by the light. A series of strange, muffled noises reached his ears, making him smile contentedly. The city was beginning to stir, and the isolated sounds hanging in the air would soon be transformed into the honest, relentless flow of life, an earsplitting din which might reach the outer reaches of space transformed into a pleasant buzz of bees, revealing that the third largest planet in the solar system was very much inhabited.

And although as he walked towards the bridge Wells could see nothing beyond what was in front of him, somehow he felt as though he were taking part in a huge play which, because every single inhabitant of the city was cast in it, seemingly had no audience. Except perhaps for the clever Martians, busy studying human life the way man peered down a microscope at the ephemeral organisms wriggling around in a drop of water, he reflected. And in fact, he was right, for as he threaded his way along the Strand, dozens of barges loaded with oysters floated in eerie silence along the ever more orange-tinted waters of the Thames, on their way from Chelsea Reach to Billingsgate Wharf, where an army of men hauled the catch onto land. In wealthy neighborhoods, fragrant with the aroma of high-class bakeries and violets from the flower sellers” baskets, people abandoned their luxurious houses for their no less luxurious offices, crossing the streets that had begun filling up with cabriolets, berlins, omnibuses, and every imaginable type of wheeled vehicle, jolting rhythmically over the paving stones, while above them, the smoke from the factory stacks mingled with the mist rising from the water to form a shroud of dense, sticky fog, and an army of carts drawn by mules or pushed manually, brimming with fruit, vegetables, eels, and squid, took up their positions at Covent Garden amid a chaos of shouts. At the same hour, Inspector Garrett arrived before finishing his breakfast at Sloane Street, where Mr. Ferguson was waiting to inform him rather anxiously that someone had taken a potshot at him the night before, poking his pudgy thumb through the hole it had made in his hat. Garrett examined the surrounding area with a trained eye, searching among the bushes around Ferguson’s house, and could not prevent a tender smile spreading across his face when he discovered the charming kiwi bird someone had scratched in the dirt.

Looking up and down the street to make sure no one was watching, he quickly erased it with his foot before emerging from the bushes, shrugging his shoulders. Just as he was telling Ferguson with an expression of feigned bewilderment that he had found no clues, in a room at a boardinghouse in Bethnal Green, John Peachey, the man known as Tom Blunt before drowning in the Thames, embraced the woman he loved, and Claire Haggerty let herself be wrapped in his strong arms, pleased he had fled the future, the desolate year 2000, to be with her. At that very moment too, standing on top of a rock, Captain Derek Shackleton declared in a grating voice that if any good had come of the war it was that it had united the human race as no other war had ever done before, and Gilliam Murray shook his head mournfully, telling himself this was the last expedition he would organize, that he was tired of fools and of the heartless wretch who kept smearing his building with dung, that it was time to stage his own death, to pretend he had been devoured by one of the savage dragons that inhabited the fourth dimension, dragons between whose razor-sharp teeth Charles Winslow was that very instant being torn to ribbons in his dreams, before waking up with a start bathed in sweat, alarming the two Chinese prostitutes sharing his bed with his cries, at the same time as his cousin Andrew, who was just then leaning on Waterloo Bridge watching the sun rise, noticed a familiar-looking fellow with birdlike features coming towards him.

“Mr. Wells?” he called out as the man drew level.

Wells stopped and stared at Andrew for a few moments, trying to remember where he had seen him before.

“Don’t you remember me?” said the young man. “I’m Andrew Harrington.” As soon as he heard the name, Wells remembered. This was the lad whose life he had saved a few weeks before, preventing him killing himself thanks to an elaborate charade that had allowed him to confront Jack the Ripper, the murderer who had terrorized Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888.

“Yes, Mr. Harrington, of course I remember you,” he said, pleased to see the young man was still alive and his efforts had not been in vain. “How good it is to meet you.” “Likewise, Mr. Wells,” said Andrew.

The two men stood in silence for a moment, grinning idiotically.

“Did you destroy the time machine?” enquired Andrew.

“Er … yes, yes,” stammered Wells, and quickly tried to change the subject. “What brings you here? Did you come to watch the dawn?” “Yes,” the other man confessed, turning to look at the sky, which just then was a palette of beautiful orange and purple hues.

“Although, in actual fact I’m trying to see what’s behind it.” “What’s behind it?” asked Wells, intrigued.

Andrew nodded.

“Do you remember what you told me after I came back from the past in your time machine?” he said, rummaging for something in his coat pocket. “You assured me I’d killed Jack the Ripper, in spite of this newspaper clipping contradicting it.” Andrew showed Wells the same yellowed cutting he had presented to him in the kitchen of his house in Woking a few weeks before. “Jack the Ripper Strikes Again!” the headline announced, going on to list the ghastly wounds the monster had inflicted on his fifth victim, the Whitechapel prostitute whom the young man loved. Wells nodded, unable to help wondering, as everyone did in those days, what had happened to the ruthless murderer, why he had suddenly stopped killing and had disappeared without a trace.

“You said it was because my action had caused a bifurcation in time,” Andrew went on, slipping the cutting back in his pocket.

“A parallel world I think you called it, a world in which Marie Kelly was alive and living happily with my twin. Although, unfortunately, I was in the wrong world.” “Yes, I remember,” said Wells cautiously, uncertain what the young man was driving at.

“Well, Mr. Wells. Saving Marie Kelly encouraged me to forget about suicide and to carry on with my life. And that is what I am doing. I recently became engaged to an adorable young woman, and I am determined to enjoy her company and to savor the small things in life.” He paused and looked up at the sky again. “And yet I come here each dawn to try to see the parallel world you spoke of, and in which I am supposedly living happily with Marie Kelly.

And do you know what, Mr. Wells?” “What?” asked the writer, swallowing hard, afraid the young man was about to turn round and punch him, or seize him by the lapels and throw him into the river, out of revenge for having deceived him in such a childish way.

“Sometimes I can see her,” said Andrew, in an almost tremulous whisper.

The author stared at him, dumbfounded.

“You can see her?” “Yes, Mr. Wells,” the young man affirmed, smiling like one who has had a revelation, “sometimes I see her.” Whether or not Andrew really believed this or had chosen to believe it Wells did not know, but the effect on the young man appeared to be the same: Wells’s fabrication had preserved him, like a bed of ice. He watched the young man contemplating the dawn, or perhaps what was “behind” it, an almost childlike expression of ecstasy illuminating his face, and could not help wondering which of them was more deluded: the skeptical writer, incapable of believing the things he himself had written, or the desperate young man, who in a noble act of faith had decided to believe Wells’s beautiful lie, taking refuge in the fact that no one could prove it was untrue.

“It’s been a pleasure meeting you again, Mr. Wells,” Andrew suddenly said, turning to shake his hand.

“Likewise,” replied Wells.

After they had said good-bye, Wells stood for a few moments watching the young man cross the bridge unhurriedly, swathed in the golden light of dawn. Parallel worlds. He had completely forgotten about the theory he had been obliged to make to save the young man’s life. But did they really exist? Did each of man’s decisions give rise to a different world? In fact, it was naïve to think there was only one alternative to each predicament. What about the unchosen universes, the ones that were flushed away, why should they have less right to exist than the others? Wells doubted very much whether the structure of the universe depended on the unpredictable desires of that fickle, timid creature called man. It was more reasonable to suppose that the universe was far richer and more immeasurable than our senses could perceive, that when man was faced with two or more options, he inevitably ended up choosing all of them, for his ability to choose was simply an illusion. And so, the world kept splitting into different worlds, worlds that showed the breadth and complexity of the universe, worlds that exploited its full potential, drained all of its possibilities, worlds that evolved alongside one another, perhaps only differentiated by an insignificant detail such as how many flies were in each, because even killing one of these annoying insects implied a choice: it was a insignificant gesture that gave birth to a new universe all the same.

And how many of the wretched creatures buzzing around his windows had he killed or allowed to live, or simply mutilated, pulling off their wings while he thought about how to resolve a dilemma in one of his novels? Perhaps this was a silly example, reflected Wells, as such an action would not have changed the world in any irreversible way. After all, a man could spend his entire life pulling off flies” wings without altering the course of history.

But the same reasoning could be applied to far more significant decisions, and he could not help remembering Gilliam Murray’s second visit. Had Wells not also been torn between two possible choices, and, intoxicated with power, had he not opted to squash the fly, giving rise to a universe in which a company offering trips to the future existed, the absurd universe in which he was now trapped. But, what if he had opted instead to help Murray publish his novel? Then he would be living in a world similar to the one he was in now, only in which the time travel company did not exist, a world in which one more book would have to be added to the necessary bonfire of scientific novels: Captain Derek Shackleton, The True and Exciting Story of a Hero of the Future, by Gilliam F.

Murray.

And so, since an almost infinite number of different worlds existed, Wells reflected, everything that could happen, did happen.

Or, what amounted to the same thing: any world, civilization, creature it was possible to imagine already existed. And so, for example, there was a world dominated by a nonmammalian species, another by birdmen living in huge nests, another in which man used an alphabet to count the fingers on his hand, another in which sleep erased all memory and each day was a new life, another in which a detective called Sherlock Holmes really did exist, and his companion was a clever little rascal called Oliver Twist, and still another in which an inventor had built a time machine and discovered a nightmarish paradise in the year 802,701.

And taking this to its limit, there was also somewhere a universe governed by laws different from those Newton had established, where there were fairies and unicorns and talking mermaids and plants, for in a universe where anything was possible, children’s stories were no longer inventions, but copies of worlds their authors, by some quirk of fate, had been able to glimpse.

“Did no one invent anything, then? Was everyone merely copying?” Wells wondered. The writer pondered over the question for a while, and given it is becoming clear this particular tale is drawing to a close, I shall use the time to bid you farewell, like an actor waving good-bye to his audience from the stage. Thank you very much for your attention, and I sincerely hope that you enjoyed the show … But now let us return to Wells, who recovered with a start owing to an almost metaphysical shudder running down his spine, because his wandering thoughts had led him to pose another question: What if his life were being written by someone in another reality, for instance in the universe almost exactly like his own in which there was no Time Travel company and Gilliam Murray was the author of dreadful little novels? He gave serious thought to the possibility of someone copying his life and pretending it was fiction. But why would anyone bother? He was not material for a novel. Had he been shipwrecked on a tropical island, like Robinson Crusoe, he would have been incapable of even making a clay gourd. By the same token, his life was too dull for anyone to transform it into an exciting story. Although undeniably the past few weeks had been rather eventful: in a matter of a few days, he had saved Andrew Harrington’s and Claire Haggerty’s lives by using his imagination, as Jane had taken care to point out in a somewhat dramatic manner, as though she had been addressing a packed audience he could not see in the stalls.