The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(22)
“What’s this? Some kind of joke?” he asked, waving the piece of paper in the air. “Where did you have it printed?” Charles shook his head.
“It’s no joke, cousin. Murray’s Time Travel is a real company.
The main offices are in Greek Street in Soho. And, as the advertisement says, they offer the chance to travel in time.” “But, is that possible … ?” stammered Andrew, taken aback.
“It certainly is,” replied Charles, completely straight-faced.
“What’s more, I’ve done it myself.” They stared at one another in silence for a moment.
“I don’t believe you,” said Andrew at last, trying to detect the slightest hint in his cousin’s solemn face that would give the game away, but Charles simply shrugged.
“I’m telling the truth,” he assured him. “Last week, Madeleine and I traveled to the year 2000.” Andrew bust out laughing, but his cousin’s earnest expression gradually silenced his guffaws.
“You’re not joking, are you?” “No, not at all,” Charles replied. “Although I can’t say I was all that impressed. The year 2000 is a dirty, cold year where man is at war with machines. But not seeing it is like missing a new opera that’s all the rage.” Andrew listened, still stunned.
“Even so, it’s a unique experience,” his cousin added.” If you think about it, it’s exciting because of all it implies. Madeleine has even recommended it to her friends. She fell in love with the human soldiers” boots. She tried to buy me a pair in Paris, but couldn’t find any. I suspect it’s too soon yet.” Andrew reread the leaflet to make sure he was not imagining things.
“I still can’t believe …” he stammered.
“I know, cousin, I know. But you see, while you’ve been roaming Hyde Park like a lost soul, the world has moved on. Time goes by even when you’re not watching it. And believe me, strange as it might seem to you, time travel has been the talk of all the salons, the favored topic of discussion, since the novel that gave rise to it all came out last spring.” “A novel?” asked Andrew, increasingly bewildered.
“Yes. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. It was one of the books I lent you. Didn’t you read it?” Since Andrew had shut himself away in the house, refusing to go along with Charles on those outings to taverns and brothels which he hoped would restore him to life, his cousin had started bringing him books when he went to see him. These were usually new works by unknown authors, inspired by the century’s craze for science to write about machines capable of performing the most elaborate miracles. They were known as “scientific romances”— the English publishers” translation of Jules Verne’s “extraordinary voyages,” an expression that had taken hold with amazing rapidity, and was used to describe any fantasy novel that tried to explain itself by using science. According to Charles, these scientific novels captured the spirit that had inspired the works of Bergerac and Samósata, and had taken over from the old tales of haunted castles. Andrew remembered some of the madcap inventions in those novels, such as the antinightmare helmet hooked up to a tiny steam engine that sucked out bad dreams and turned them into pleasant ones. But the one he remembered best of all was the machine that made things grow, invented by a Jewish scientist who used it on insects: the image of London attacked by a swarm of flies the size of zeppelins, crushing towers and flattening buildings as they landed on them, was ridiculously terrifying. There was a time when Andrew would have devoured such books, but much as he regretted it, the worlds of fiction were not exempt from his steadfast indifference to life: he did not want any type of balm, he wanted to stare straight into the gaping abyss, making it impossible for Charles to reach him via the secret passage of literature. Andrew assumed that this fellow Wells’s book must be buried at the bottom of his chest, under a mound of similar novels he had scarcely glanced at.
When Charles saw the empty look on his cousin’s face, he shook his head theatrically. He gestured to him to sit back down in his chair and drew up the other one. Leaning forward slightly, like a priest about to take confession from one of his parishioners, he began summarizing the plot of the novel that according to him had revolutionized England. Andrew listened skeptically. As he could guess from the title, the main character was a scientist who had invented a time machine that allowed him to journey through the centuries. All he had to do was pull on a little lever and he was propelled at great speed into the future, gazing in awe as snails ran like hares, trees sprouted from the ground like geysers, the stars circled in the sky, which changed from day to night in a second … This wild and wonderful journey took him to the year 802,701, where he discovered that society had split into two different races: the beautiful and useless Eloi and the monstrous Morlocks, creatures that lived underground, feeding off their neighbors up above, whom they bred like cattle. Andrew bridled at this description, making his cousin smile, but Charles quickly added that the plot was unimportant, no more than an excuse to create a flimsy caricature of the society of his time.
What had shaken the English imagination was that Wells had envisaged time as a fourth dimension, transforming it into a sort of magic tunnel you could travel through.
“We are all aware that objects possess three dimensions: length, breadth, and thickness,” explained Charles. “But in order for this object to exist,” he went on, picking up his hat and twirling it in his hands like a conjuror, “in order for it to form part of this reality we find ourselves in, it needs duration in time as well as in space. That is what enables us to see it, and prevents it from disappearing before our very eyes. We live, then, in a four-dimensional world. If we accept that time is another dimension, what is to stop us from moving through it? In fact, that’s what we are doing. Just like our hats, you and I are moving forwards in time, albeit in a tediously linear fashion, without leaving out a single second, towards our inexorable end. What Wells is asking in his novel is why we can’t speed up this journey, or even turn around and travel backwards in time to that place we refer to as the past—which ultimately is no more than a loose thread in the skein of our lives. If time is a spatial dimension, what prevents us from moving around in it as freely as we do in the other three?” Pleased with his explanation, Charles replaced his hat on the bed. Then he studied Andrew, allowing him a moment to assimilate what he had just said.