The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(122)
“Whatever caused the wound, besides badly scorching the skin around the edges, pulverized everything in its path, including part of the sternum, the rib cage, the mediastinum, the lungs, the right ventricle of the heart, and the corresponding section of the spinal cord. What little survived, like some pieces of lung, fused with the thoracic wall. I have yet to carry out the postmortem, but this hole was clearly the cause of death,” the pathologist pronounced, “only I’ll be hanged if I know what made it. The poor wretch looks as if he’s been pierced by tongue of flame, or if you prefer, by some sort of heat ray. But I don’t know any weapon capable of doing this, except perhaps the Archangel Michael’s flaming sword.” Garrett nodded, struggling with his rebellious stomach.
“Does the body present any other anomalies?” he asked, by way of saying something, feeling the sweat begin to pearl on his forehead.
“His foreskin is shorter than average, barely covering the base of the glans, but without any sign of any scarring,” the pathologist replied, flaunting his professional knowledge. “Apart from that the only anomaly is this accursed hole big enough for a poodle to jump through.” Garrett nodded, disgusted by the image the pathologist had conjured up, and with the feeling he knew more about the poor wretch than was necessary for his investigation.
“Much obliged to you, Dr. Alcock. Let me know if you discover anything new or if you think of anything that may have caused this hole,” he said.
At this, he hurriedly took his leave of the pathologist and walked out of the morgue, as upright as he could. Once he reached the street, he dove into the nearest alleyway he could find and brought up his breakfast between two piles of refuse.
He emerged, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, pale but recovered. He paused for a moment, gulped air, then breathed out slowly, smiling to himself. The singed flesh. The grisly hole.
He was not surprised the pathologist was unable to identify the weapon responsible for this ghastly wound. But he knew exactly what it was.
Yes, he had seen brave the Captain Shackleton wielding it in year 2000.
It took him almost two hours to persuade his superior to sign an arrest warrant for a man who had not yet been born.
As he stood outside the door to his office, swallowing hard, he knew it was not going to be easy. Chief Superintendent Thomas Arnold was a close friend of his uncle, and had accepted him with good grace into his team of detectives, although he had never shown him anything other than distant politeness, with an occasional outburst of fatherly affection whenever he solved a difficult case. The young inspector had the feeling when his superior walked past his office and saw him with his head down, that he was smiling at him with the same discreet satisfaction as if he were looking at a coal stove in good working order.
The only time his affable smile faded had been the day Garrett went into his office following his trip to the year 2000 to recommend an urgent ban on the production of automatons and the confiscation of those already in circulation, which he said should be stored somewhere, anywhere where they could be watched, in a pen surrounded by barbed wire, if necessary. Chief Superintendent Arnold thought the idea was completely ludicrous.
He was only a year away from retirement, and the last thing he wanted was to make life difficult for himself by advocating preventative measures against some far-fetched threat he himself had not foreseen. But because the new recruit had more than proved his astuteness, he reluctantly agreed to ask for a meeting with the commissioner and the prime minister to discuss the matter. On that occasion, the command that had come down to Garrett from the hierarchy was a clear refusal: there would be no halt to the production of automatons or any attempt to prevent them from infiltrating into people’s homes under the guise of their innocent appearance, regardless of whether a century later they were going to conquer the planet or not. Garrett pictured the meeting between those three unimaginative men incapable of seeing further than the end of their noses. He was sure they dismissed his request amid scathing remarks and guffaws. This time however, things would be different. This time they could not look the other way. They could not wash their hands of the matter, arguing that by the time the automatons rebelled against man they would be resting peacefully in their graves, for the simple reason that on this occasion the future had come to them: it was acting in the present, in their own time, that very part of time they were supposed to be protecting.
Even so, Chief Superintendent Arnold put on a skeptical face the moment Garrett began explaining the affair. Garrett considered it a privilege to have been born in an era when science made new advances every day, offering them things their grandparents had never even conceived of. He was thinking not so much of the gramophone or the telephone as of time travel.
Who would have been able to explain to his grandfather that in his grandson’s time people would be able to journey to the future, beyond their own lifetimes, or to the past, back through the pages of history? Garrett had been excited about traveling to the year 2000 not so much because he was going to witness a crucial moment in the history of the human race—the end of the long war against the automatons—but because he was more conscious than ever that he lived in a world where, thanks to science, anything seemed possible. He was going to travel to the year 2000, yes, but who could say how many more epochs he might visit before he died? According to Gilliam Murray, it was only a matter of time before new routes opened up, and perhaps he would have the opportunity to glimpse a better future, after the world had been rebuilt, or to travel back to the time of the pharaohs or to Shakespeare’s London, where he could see the playwright penning his legendary works by candlelight. All this made his youthful spirit rejoice, and he felt continually grateful towards God, in whom, despite Darwin’s policy of vilification, he preferred to continue to believe; and so each night, before going to bed, he beamed up at the stars, where he imagined God resided, as if to say he was ready to marvel at whatever he deigned to show him. It will come as no surprise to you, then, that Garrett did not pay any heed to people who mistrusted the discoveries of science, still less to those who showed no interest in Gilliam Murray’s extraordinary discovery, as was the case of his superior, who had not even bothered to take time off to visit the year 2000.