The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(127)

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.