The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(49)

Hidden in amongst the coats and hats, he stroked the wicker for hours on end, like Aladdin trying to bring back the power of his magic lamp.

This may have seemed an absurd, desperate, or even pathetic strategy, but the fact is that the day after he performed this rubbing of the basket, Lewis Hind, the literary editor of the weekly supplement at the Gazette sent for him. He needed someone capable of writing stories with a scientific slant, short stories reflecting on and even predicting where the relentless onslaught of inventions bent on changing the face of that century would lead. Hind was convinced Wells was the ideal man for the job.

What he was proposing, in fact, was that he resurrect his childhood dream and have another stab at seeing whether he could become a writer. Wells accepted, and in a few days drafted a story entitled “The Stolen Bacillus,” which Hind was delighted with, and which earned Wells five guineas. The story also drew the attention of William Ernest Henley, editor of the National Observer, who promptly invited him to contribute to the pages of his journal, convinced the young man would be capable of producing far more ambitious stories if he had more room to experiment. Wells was delighted and terrified in equal measure at being given the chance to write for such a prestigious magazine, which at that time was publishing a serialized version of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” by his idol, Conrad. This was no longer writing news items, articles, or short stories. He was being offered the space for his imagination to run wild, the freedom to be a real writer of fiction.

Wells awaited his meeting with Henley in a state of nervous tension bordering on collapse. Since the editor of The National Observer had asked to see him, Wells had been rummaging through his large mental stockpile of ideas in search of a story original and striking enough to impress the veteran publisher, but none of them seemed to live up to his offer. The rendezvous was drawing near, and Wells still did not have a good story to show Henley. It was then that he turned to the basket and saw that, although it looked empty, it was actually brimming with novels, a cornucopia that only needed a gentle nudge in order to pour forth its torrent of ideas. This extravagant image was of course Wells’s way of wrapping up in poetic language what really happened when he saw the basket: inevitably he remembered his conversation with Merrick, and to his amazement, he discovered, like a nugget of gold lying at the bottom of a muddy stream, another idea that could be made into a novel. Whether deliberately or by accident, it was as though Merrick had supplied him with enough ideas and plots to last several years while they pretended they were only having tea. He recalled Merrick’s disappointment at Dr. Nebogipfel being so uninterested in traveling into the future, in venturing into the unknown world of tomorrow, and this omission appeared worth rectifying now that he had the experience of writing all those articles.

And so, without a second thought, he got rid of the unsavory Nebogipfel, replacing him with a respectable, anonymous scientist in whom any inventor could see himself portrayed, and who even embodied the archetypal scientist of the dawning new century. Endeavoring to create something more than just a na?ve fantasy out of his idea of time travel, Wells gave it the same scientific veneer he had given the stories he wrote for Hind, making use of a theory he had developed in his earlier essays published in the Fortnightly Review: the idea that time was the fourth dimension in a universe that only appeared to be three-dimensional. The idea would be far more impressive if he used it to explain the workings of the contraption his character would use to travel through the time continuum. A few years earlier, an American medium called Henry Slade had been tried for criminal deception. Besides bragging of his ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead, he would drop knots, conches and snails” shells into his magician’s hat and then pull out identical versions, only with the spirals going in the other direction, as if he had plucked them out of a mirror. Slade maintained that hidden in his hat was a secret passageway to the fourth dimension, which explained the strange reversal the objects underwent. To many people’s astonishment, the magician was defended by a handful of eminent physicists, including Johann Z?llner, professor of physics and astronomy, all of whom argued that what might appear to be a fraud from a three-dimensional point of view was perfectly feasible in a four-dimensional universe. The whole of London was on tenterhooks during the trial. And this, together with the work of Charles Hinton, a mathematician who had come up with the idea of a hypercube, a cube out of phase with time that contained every single instant of its existence, all occurring at the same time—something that, naturally, man’s current obsolete three-dimensional vision prevented him from seeing—made Wells realize that the idea of the fourth dimension was in the air. No one was sure what it involved, but the words sounded so mysterious and evocative that society longed for, positively demanded it to be real. For most people, the known world was a tiresome, hostile place, but that was because they could only see part of it. Now, people were consoled by the notion that, just as a bland roast of meat is made tastier by seasoning, the universe improved if they imagined it was no longer reduced to what they were able to see, but contained a secret hidden component that could somehow make it bigger. The fourth dimension gave their dull planet a magical feel; it conjured up the existence of a different world, where desires that were impossible in the three-dimensional world might be realized. And these suspicions were backed up by concrete actions such as the recent founding of the Society for Psychic Research in London.

Wells was also forced to endure becoming embroiled almost every day in tiresome debates on the nature of time with his colleagues at the Faculty of Science. One thing led to another, as they say, and as every thinker was turning the fourth dimension into his private playground, Wells had no difficulty combining both ideas in order to develop his theory of time as another spatial dimension through which it was possible to travel in exactly the same way as the other three.