The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(179)

During their trip in search of the airship, he was obliged to invent an extravagant story to explain to Reynolds why he had insisted on enlisting on the Annawan, a tale so preposterous and unintelligible he almost thought he deserved to be expelled from the future Society of Authors on grounds of incompetence. Then he was forced to search for the possible pilot in the area around the spaceship, fully aware of what this pilot could do to him.

How alone and ridiculous he felt on board that illfated ship, unsure what exactly he had to do to prevent the inevitable from happening! During one of his exhaustive explorations of the ship in search of anything he might use as a weapon against the Envoy, given that he knew from experience that bullets could not harm him, he discovered several crates of dynamite in the powder store. He realized straightaway that this was the only thing on board the Annawan capable of finishing off the Envoy. Wells had never handled dynamite before, but he did not think it could be too difficult, though he realized the monster would not stand still while he threw a few bundles of it at him from far enough away so as not to be killed himself. He did not fancy sitting down and waiting calmly for the monster to come for him, as Murray had done seventy years later in the London sewers. Especially as there was no beautiful young woman on board who could embrace him at the crucial moment. This was when Wells’s eye fell upon one of an assortment of harpoons in the armory. It occurred to him that if he strapped a few bundles of dynamite to it and hurled it at the Envoy with sufficient force and accuracy, he would have a slim chance of skewering him, and this was better than nothing.

Two days later, while Wells was busy trying to think up a more effective plan than the one involving the dynamite and the harpoon, Dr. Walker was disemboweled by the monster from the stars. He was attacked in the sick bay just as he was preparing to amputate Carson’s right leg. This attack confirmed to Wells not only that the Envoy was inside the ship, but also which sailor’s appearance he had usurped. Everyone was alarmed, and on the orders of an increasingly anxious MacReady, the crew scoured the ship from top to bottom in search of the hole through which the monster must have slipped aboard: to no avail, of course. They concluded that, like the demon it was, the monster was somehow mysteriously able to enter and leave the ship unnoticed. But Wells did not believe in demons. What is more, he even considered denouncing Carson. In fact, he considered one by one the many possibilities opening up before him, none of which satisfied him. Informing his fellow crew members that Carson was not Carson, but rather a Martian who had taken on Carson’s appearance, or killing Carson in cold blood at the first opportunity, perhaps by placing a stick of dynamite in his long johns while he was asleep, and then using the same argument during the trial that would inevitably take place once his crime had been discovered seemed to Wells the surest way to get himself locked up as a madman or a murderer, or both. Clearly he must carry on waiting, staying on the sidelines. The time would come for him to intervene. And so Wells tried to keep calm and watch Carson’s every move as discreetly as he could, even as he wondered where the real Carson’s body might be. No doubt it was lying somewhere out in the snow. As Wells watched him, he thought it strange that despite their conversation in the sewers of London the Envoy did not recognize him, did not pick him out from the rest of his companions. And he had to remind himself that none of all that had happened yet, however fresh in his memory it was.

The day he was on starboard watch and saw Reynolds running back shouting that Carson was dead, that he had stumbled upon his body close to the airship, Wells knew the climax was approaching. When Reynolds saw that the supposedly deceased Carson was at that very moment on guard duty aboard the ship, Wells observed the two exchange a few words while the dogs barked frenziedly. Wells realized that the Envoy, suspecting he might have been discovered, could put an end to the masquerade and adopt his true appearance. Following the conversation, the explorer had headed for his cabin without even glancing at Wells, leading the author to think that for some strange reason, he had foolishly decided to keep his discovery to himself. At all events, Reynolds’s intended strategy mattered little to him. There was every sign that the slaughter was about to commence, for the explorer was playing with a time bomb, which would presently blow up in his face. And that, as you know, is what happened.

Later, after the apocalypse had been unleashed on that remote patch of ice, Wells had been incapable of focusing on anything except avoiding at all costs activating the mysterious mechanism lodged in his brain, which threatened to hurl him once more into the abyss of time to God only knew where. Perhaps it was the almost obsessive attention he applied to this that also helped him avoid being overwhelmed by panic. He was able to press his gun against the proud MacReady’s temple, forcing him to do as Reynolds said, and afterward make his way to the armory, navigating the blazing inferno of the ship, as though the devil himself had assured him safe conduct. Once he had tied the sticks of dynamite carefully to the harpoon, he emerged on deck and leapt onto the ice without losing his astonishing composure, not even when he contemplated the final blast that reduced the Annawan to a twisted mass of metal surrounded by mutilated bodies and realized that, regardless of whether or not he succeeded in his mission, his slim hopes of returning to civilization had just been blown to smithereens.

Imagine him now, facedown on the ice, hidden among the victims of the explosion, dazed and in pain. The blast had deafened him, and the surrounding landscape now seemed shrouded in a primordial silence, the innate silence in which the world had dwelled before humans polluted it with their manmade noises. Slowly, the flames enveloping the remains of the ship began to die down. Wells remembered that in order to end up frozen in the ice, the Envoy must have survived the explosion, and so he carefully surveyed the debris strewn over the snow, until his eyes rested on a mound that was stirring imperceptibly. It was about thirty yards away from where he was, but even at that distance, the moment the figure rose to its feet, Wells could see that it was no human survivor. Flames were clinging to its strange casing, turning it into a kind of living torch, though it did not appear to be in any pain. Afraid the creature might see him, Wells rested his head on the snow and lay motionless, pretending to be dead, as he watched what the creature was doing. To his relief, the hideous insect begin heading in the opposite direction, where Wells could make out two other figures hurriedly standing up from the ice. It looked like Allan and Reynolds, who just then ran over to the dog cages. Wells smiled to himself. As soon as Reynolds unlocked the cage door, a pack of frenzied dogs hurled themselves at the Envoy, who retracted his armor, exposing his sharp talons, and with one fell stroke sliced through the first of the dogs. As soon as the Envoy had finished slashing through the rest of them, he directed himself toward Allan and Reynolds, who had apparently decided there was no point in delaying the inevitable and had given up trying to flee. Coming to a halt five yards from them, the monster let out a roar of triumph. Wells knew he would never have a better opportunity to try to skewer the Envoy with his harpoon. If he did not act now, the Envoy would end up somehow frozen in the ice by Allan and Reynolds, which would not ultimately prevent the invasion, as he well knew. He had to put the Martian out of action for good, not temporarily. That was why he had traveled through time and space.