The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(26)
“To the Autumn of Terror?” asked Murray, taken aback.
“Yes, to the night of November seventh, to be precise.” Gilliam studied him in silence for a few moments.
Finally, without trying to conceal his annoyance, he opened one of the desk drawers and took out a bundle of papers tied with a ribbon. He set them down on the desk wearily, as if he were showing them some tiresome burden he was compelled to suffer in silence.
“Do you know what this is, Mr. Harrington?” he sighed.
“These are the letters and requests we receive every day from private individuals. Some want to be taken to the hanging gardens of Babylon, others to meet Cleopatra, Galileo, or Plato, still others to see with their own eyes the battle of Waterloo, the building of the pyramids, or Christ’s crucifixion. Everybody wants to go back to their favorite moment in history, as though it were as simple as giving an address to a coachman. They think the past is at our disposition. I am sure you have your reasons for wanting to travel to 1888, like everyone who wrote these requests, but I’m afraid I can’t help you.” “I only need to go back eight years, Mr. Murray,” replied Andrew. “And I’ll pay anything you ask.” “This isn’t about distances in time or about money,” Murray scoffed, “if it were, Mr. Harrington, I’m sure we could come to some arrangement. Let us say the problem is a technical one. We can’t travel anywhere we want in the past or the future.” “You mean you can only take us to the year 2000?” exclaimed Charles, visibly disappointed.
“I’m afraid so, Mr. Winslow,” Murray apologized, looking forlornly at Charles. “We hope to be able to extend our offer in the future. However, for the moment, as you can see from our advertisement, our only destination is May 20, 2000, the exact day of the final battle between the evil Solomon’s automatons and the human army led by the brave Captain Shackleton. Wasn’t the trip exciting enough for you, Mr. Winslow?” he asked with a flicker of irony, giving him to understand he did not forget easily the faces of those who had been on his expeditions.
“Oh yes, Mr. Murray,” Charles replied after a brief pause.
“Most exciting. Only I assumed …” “Yes, yes, I know. You assumed we could travel in either direction along the time continuum,” Murray interposed. “But I’m afraid we can’t. The past is beyond our competence.” With this, Murray looked at them, a look of genuine regret on his face, as though he were weighing up the damage, his words had done to his visitors.
“The problem, gentlemen,” he sighed, leaning back in his chair, “is that, unlike Wells’s character, we don’t travel through the time continuum. We travel outside it, across the surface of time, as it were.” He fell silent, staring at them without blinking, with the serenity of a cat.
“I don’t understand,” Charles finally declared.
Gilliam Murray nodded, as though he had been expecting that reply.
“Let me make a simple comparison: you can move from room to room inside a building, but you also can walk across its roof, can you not?” Charles and Andrew nodded coldly, somewhat put out by Murray’s seeming wish to treat them like a couple of foolish children.
“Contrary to all appearances,” their host went on, “it was not Wells’s novel that made me look into the possibilities of time travel. If you have read the book, you will understand that Wells is simply throwing down the gauntlet to the scientific world by suggesting a direction for their research. Unlike Verne, he cleverly avoided any practical explanations of the workings of his invention, choosing instead to describe his machine to us using his formidable imagination—a perfectly valid approach given the book is a work of fiction. However, until science proves such a contraption is possible, his machine will be nothing but a mere toy. Will that ever happen? I’d like to think so: the achievements of science so far this century give me great cause for optimism.
You will agree, gentlemen, we live in remarkable times. Times when man questions God on a daily basis. How many marvels has science produced over the past few years? Many such as the calculating machine, the typewriter, or the electric lift, have been invented simply to make our lives easier, but others make us feel powerful because they render the impossible possible. Thanks to the steam locomotive, we are now able to travel long distances without taking a single step, and soon we will be able to relay our voices to the other side of the country without having to move at all, like the Americans who are already doing so via the so-called telephone. There will always be people who oppose progress, who consider it a sacrilege for mankind to transcend his own limitations. Personally, I think science ennobles man, reaffirms his control over nature, in the same way education or morality helps us overcome our primitive instincts. Take this marine chronometer, for example,” he said picking up a wooden box lying on the table.
“Today, these are mass-produced and every ship in the world has one, but that wasn’t always the case. Although they may appear now always to have formed part of our lives, the Admiralty was obliged to offer a prize of twenty thousand pounds to the person who could invent a way of determining longitude at sea, because no clockmaker was capable of designing a chronometer that could withstand the rolling of a vessel without going wrong. The competition was won by a man called John Harrison, who devoted forty years of his life to solving this thorny scientific problem.