The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(160)

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.