The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(152)
Then I heard a familiar voice behind me, a silky voice that could belong to only one person: “Seeing is believing, Mr. Wells.” Marcus was leaning against the wall, clutching his rifle. I looked at him as though he had stepped out a dream. “This is the only place I could think of to look for you, and I was right to follow my instinct: you are the traveler who alerted the Vigilance Committee which then captured Jack the Ripper, changing everything. Who would have thought it, Mr. Wells? Although I imagine that’s not your real name. I expect the real Wells is lying dead somewhere. Still, I’m beginning to grow accustomed to the masked ball time travelers” actions have transformed the past into. And the fact is I couldn’t care less who you are, I’m going to kill you anyway.” With that, he smiled and aimed his gun very slowly at me, as though he were in no hurry to finish me off, or wanted to savor the moment.
But I was not just going to stand there and wait for him to blast me with his heat ray. I wheeled round and ran as fast as I could, zigzagging down the street, playing the role of quarry to the best of my ability in that game of cat and mouse. Almost at once, a ray of lava shot over my head, singeing my hair, and I could hear Marcus’s laughter.
Apparently, he meant to have some fun before murdering me. I continued running for my life, although as the seconds passed, this felt like an ever more ambitious endeavor. My heart was knocking against my chest, and I could sense Marcus advancing casually behind me, like a predator intent on enjoying the hunt. Luckily, the street I had run down was empty, so no innocent bystanders would suffer the deadly consequences of our game. Then another heat ray passed me on the right, shattering part of a wall; after that, I felt another one cleave the air on my left, blowing away a streetlamp in its path. At that moment, I saw a horse and cart emerge from one of the side streets, and, not wanting to stop I speeded up as fast as I could, just managing to pass in front of it. Almost at once, I heard a loud explosion of splintering wood behind me, and I realized Marcus had not hesitated to fire at the cart blocking his way. This was confirmed to me when I saw the flaming horse fly over my head and crash to the ground a few yards ahead of me. I dodged the burnt carcass as best I could, and leapt into another street, aware of a wave of destruction being unleashed behind me. Then, after turning down another side street, I caught sight of Marcus’s elongated shadow thrown onto the wall in front of me by a streetlamp. Horrified, I watched him stop and take aim, and I realized he was tired of playing with me. In less than two seconds I would be dead, I told myself.
It was then that I felt a familiar dizziness coming over me. The ground beneath my feet vanished for a moment, only to reappear a second later with a different consistency, as daylight blinded me. I stopped running and clenched my teeth to prevent myself from vomiting, blinking comically as I tried to focus. I succeeded just in time to see a huge metal machine bearing down on me. I hurled myself to one side, rolling several times on the ground. From there, I looked up and saw the fiendish machine continue down the street while some men who were apparently traveling inside shouted at me that I was drunk. But that noisy vehicle was not the only one of its kind. The whole street thronged with the machines, hurtling along like a stampede of metal bison.
I picked myself up off the ground and glanced about me, astonished but relieved to see no sign of Marcus anywhere. I grabbed a newspaper from a nearby bench to see where my new journey in time had brought me, and discovered I was in 1938. Apparently, I was becoming quite skilled at it: I had traveled forty years into the future this time.
I left Whitechapel and began wandering in a daze through that strange London. Number 50 Berkeley Square had become an antique bookshop. Everything had changed, and yet happily it still seemed familiar. I spent several hours wandering aimlessly, watching the monstrous machines crisscrossing the streets; vehicles that were neither drawn by horses nor driven by steam—whose reign, contrary to what people in your time imagined, would end up being relatively brief. No time had passed for me, and yet the world had lived through forty years. Yes, I was surrounded by hundreds of new inventions, machines testifying to man’s indefatigable imagination, despite the fact that the director of the New York patent office had called for its closure at the end of your century, because, he claimed, there was nothing left to invent.
Finally, weary of all these marvels, I sat down on a park bench and reflected about my newly discovered condition of time traveler. Was I in Marcus’s future, where there would be a Department of Time I could turn to for help? I did not think so. After all, I had only traveled forty years into the future. If I was not the only time traveler there, the others must have been as lost as I was. Then I wondered whether if I activated my mind again, I could travel back to the past, to your time, to warn you about what was going to happen.
But after several failed attempts to reproduce the same impulse that had brought me there, I gave up. I realized I was trapped in that time. But I was alive, I had escaped death, and Marcus was unlikely to come looking for me there. Should I not be happy about that? Once I had accepted this, I set about finding out what had happened to my world, but above all, what had become of Jane and all the other people I knew. I went to a library and after hours spent trawling through newspapers, I managed to form a general idea of the world I was living in. With great sorrow, I discovered not only that the world was moving stubbornly towards a world war, but that there had already been one some years earlier, a bloody conflict involving half the planet in which eight million people had died. But few lessons had been learned, and now, despite its graveyards piled with dead, the world was once more teetering on the brink. I recalled some of the clippings I had seen hanging from the map of time, and understood that nothing could prevent this second war, for it was one of those past mistakes which the people of the future had chosen to accept. I could only wait for the conflict to begin and try my best to avoid being one of the millions of corpses that would litter the world a year from then.