The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(177)

But how was he to survive? To whom could he turn for help? He doubted anyone would believe his story, unless they had an extraordinarily open mind; perhaps a fellow writer. He searched his memory, dusting off his literary knowledge of the period. If he remembered correctly, Byron had died some years before, Charles Dodgson—better known as Lewis Carroll—had not yet been born, Coleridge must have been living by then in Dr. Gillman’s house, recovering from his opium addiction, and the young, as yet unpublished Dickens had just started working at the offices of an attorney-at-law, where for the time being he was content to let his dreams of becoming a writer bubble in the cauldron of his mind. Yes, the future author of Oliver Twist might help him. He heaved a sigh, surprised at how quickly he had accepted that he would have to stay where he was.

Feeling calmer, he began to wonder about his companions’ fate. What had become of them? What had become of Jane? He assumed the Martians had captured them. Suddenly he felt as if he had left them in the lurch, as if he had deliberately betrayed them. This thought made him miserable. He ought to be there, seventy years in the future, suffering with them, sharing their fate.

For a while, Wells was content to gaze at the passersby, a rueful smile playing over his lips. They all believed they were fashioning the future with their actions, unaware that the future had already been made, because this puny man shivering on a bench had seen it. As he gazed at the crowd, he recalled with a shudder that the Martians had for a long time been living secretly among them. According to what the Envoy had told them, the Martians had arrived on Earth in the sixteenth century. All that time they had been passing themselves off as humans, watching over the Earth, waiting for the Envoy to arrive and begin the invasion of the blue planet that they had been infiltrating for centuries. Could one of these people be a Martian? It was impossible to know, of course, and so Wells immediately stopped staring at them with the inquisitive expression he had almost instinctively adopted. With a feeling of bitterness he recalled that he was to blame for everything that had happened seventy years later. He wished he had not brought the Envoy back to life with his blood, since the Envoy’s fellow Martians would have died one by one, poisoned by Earth’s atmosphere. But he had. Or he was going to, given that he was now living in the year 1829. Yes, the Wells who would be born in 1866 would do everything he had done to the letter: he would write everything he had written, suffer in the same way he had suffered, fall in love the same number of times and with the same women, and when the time came, he would donate his blood to the Envoy, dooming the planet for all eternity. But this had yet to happen, which meant it could still be prevented, he thought, excited by the possibility of putting right his mistake. All he needed to do was talk to himself, convince himself not to enter the Chamber of Marvels with Serviss or, failing that, forcibly prevent himself. But this would not happen for another sixty-nine years, and Wells was already thirty-one and doubted he would reach a hundred, however well he looked after himself.

But, if he could not prevent the invasion, then why had he traveled back to this absurd 1829? And why the devil did this date sound so familiar? The answer came to him in a flash. He remembered that the Envoy had arrived on Earth in 1830, and as he himself had explained, his airship had malfunctioned, deflecting him from his mission and causing him to crash in the Antarctic. Wells felt his face draining of blood. Somehow, unconsciously, he had retained this precise date in a dark recess of his mind, and when Clayton had shouted to him that he had to travel back to a time before the inevitable happened, his memory had regurgitated it. Was this why he had emerged in this year and not another? Had he somehow managed to direct his journey through time, erring only by a few months? Clayton had suggested this was impossible, but apparently that was exactly what Wells had done: he had chosen his destination, even if he had done so almost involuntarily.

Wells stood up from the bench. If he really had traveled to this time by some means that could not be attributed to mere chance, then it could only be to try to stop the invasion before it happened, before the Envoy was shipped to London in a block of ice and the Wells who would be born in 1866 brought him back to life with a drop of his blood. He could achieve this only by joining the crew of the Annawan and killing the Envoy. In the logbooks and cuttings he had been able to glance through during his visit to the Chamber of Marvels, he had read that this was the name of the ship whose charred remains had been discovered surrounded by her dead crew on an island in the Antarctic, close to where the Martian’s airship and frozen body were found. No one, including Wells, knew what had happened during that tragic expedition, but everything pointed to their having received a visit from the Envoy. So, if he wanted to find him, he obviously had to board the ship that had set sail from New York on October 15, 1829, that is to say, in three weeks’ time. Yes, this was the best way he could think of to put right his mistake, and the most feasible, even though it was, of course, the one that most terrified him. For a few moments, Wells toyed with the idea of forgetting this foolish idea and staying in London. He could begin a new life there, a life that, although he sensed it would be filled with misgivings and frustrations, would at least be a secure life, for he knew he would die a natural death long before the invasion began. Though tempted by the idea, he ruled it out before he had time to give it any serious thought, for he knew deep down that if he shirked his responsibility and failed to board that doomed ship, he would feel too guilty to begin a new life. Alternatively, if he joined the Annawan and killed the Envoy, he would prevent the invasion and save the planet. His companions had all played their part, and now everything seemed to depend on him playing his. This is what he would do, he told himself. Only he must not delay, for he had just enough time to board a boat bound for America and join the crew of the Annawan the moment he arrived.