The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(178)

Staring into space, Wells stroked his whiskers for a few moments, as he had seen the Envoy do. He imagined his face showed an air of melancholy resignation, like heroes forced to sacrifice themselves to save their fellow men. A timid smile of contentment began to play over his face. For he was sure that wherever Jane was, she would be proud of him for embracing his fate with epic humility, and this made him discover within himself, if not the courage he needed, then at least something that helped him laugh in the face of fear. Wells nodded resolutely and strode valiantly toward the docks, ready to do his duty. No, his gift, this thing he carried around in his head, certainly wasn’t there to make the tomatoes in his garden grow bigger. It had a different use altogether.





XXXIX

OFFERING TO WORK FOR NOTHING DURING THE crossing, Wells had no trouble being taken on as a crew member on a ship bound for America with a cargo of timber. The boat crossed the Atlantic as leisurely as if it were being drawn by a pair of mules, and Wells, understandably, spent the entire journey in a state of considerable anxiety, afraid that if he arrived too late all his efforts would be in vain. Finally the ship dropped him in New York, with only a few hours to spare before the Annawan set sail, and so he was forced to use all his powers of oratory to convince the captain, a fellow with a fierce demeanor and a ruthless look in his eye, to let him join his already complete crew: Wells was not very strong but a hard worker, and he would only take no for an answer if the captain could assure him the provisions in the hold had been calculated to feed precisely twenty-seven mouths for four months. If not, one more mouth would make no difference. And besides, he had the appetite of a bird and if necessary could live off the rats in the hold. As for the space he might take up, the captain could see he was a small man who could curl up anywhere. He insisted he had to sail on this ship and if need be he was prepared to make any number of sacrifices. The captain appeared to find him amusing, or perhaps he agreed to take him on simply to teach him a lesson. Perhaps he thought the younger man would enjoy witnessing the everyday hardships of life on the high seas, which had chiseled the captain into the brawny sailor he was and would undoubtedly destroy this puny individual as soon as he boarded ship. And so, less than an hour later, Wells found himself surrounded by a group of rough and ready sailors who stank of rum, sweat, and wasted lives.

The time has come to reveal to you, dear reader, that, as a few of you already suspect, Wells did not give his real name when he enlisted on the Annawan. Instead, he gave the name of Griffin, the main protagonist of his novel The Invisible Man. For that was his mission: to remain invisible. And to do this he had to go unnoticed, avoid contact with the crew, and above all behave like a child in a museum and touch nothing, for fear that the slightest gesture, however trivial, could distort time, could change the natural order of events. And so it was that the Annawan, a whaler with a glorious past, whose hull had been reinforced with African oak to prepare her for the South Polar ice, set sail from New York with an extra crew member on board, a sailor who was as scrawny as he was reserved and who gazed at the horizon with a strange unease, as though he already knew what awaited them.

To go unnoticed and to touch nothing were Wells’s priorities during the voyage. And he respected them, despite discovering to his astonishment that the author Edgar Allan Poe was also among the rabble on board ship. At that time, Poe was a pale young man who had not yet written Al Aaraaf. Apparently, he had joined the Annawan as a gunner in order to flee West Point, and while nothing would have pleased Wells more than to spend the tedious crossing conversing quietly with the man who would in time become one of his favorite authors, letting the gunner’s every word and gesture enchant him, he limited himself to speaking with him only when necessary, so as to reduce the likelihood of being found out. For if anyone in that coarse crowd could discover that he came from another time, it was undoubtedly Poe, future author of the detective stories based on the deductive powers of Auguste Dupin.

His only distraction during the voyage consisted in drinking rum and forcing himself to laugh at his companions’ crude jokes, and later, in contemplating Captain MacReady’s strenuous efforts to steer the Annawan out of the ice, knowing in advance the ship would become trapped. When the old whaler finally did become icebound, Wells nodded to himself, like a theater director content with his actors’ performances. The crew appeared to accept with calm resignation this misfortune that might well lead to their deaths. All they could do now was wait for the ice to thaw without wasting provisions or losing their grip on reality. Given the circumstances, there was little else they could do, even though Reynolds, who was in charge of this peculiar expedition, kept insisting to the captain that they explore the surrounding terrain for the passage to the center of the Earth, which he was convinced was hollow before Verne had even written his famous novel.

But Wells was not expecting any of that, of course. He was only waiting to see what—a week later, just when he was beginning to think nothing would happen—finally fell out of the sky. When it appeared, Wells had the strange sensation that he was the one who had arranged this air show to surprise his fellow crew members. He looked just as bewildered as they did, watching the ship fly through the air, then crash: after all, Wells had never seen it fly. And he realized that from that moment on, everything would happen as it had already happened, above all if he managed to stay sufficiently on the sidelines to safeguard events. The arrival of the airship in this desolate landscape made the crew uneasy, and the author could not help giving an amused grin when a few of them claimed it was a meteorite. The Envoy had arrived with British punctuality for their encounter on this remote, frozen island.