The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(185)
“But I’m not going to . . . ,” his double started to protest.
“Please write an ending where the Martians are defeated. Don’t take away your readers’ hope.”
The boy gave a skeptical chuckle.
“All right, I promise. But . . .” He paused. “What could defeat those powerful Martian machines?”
Wells shrugged.
“I haven’t the faintest idea, but I’m sure you’ll think of something. You have plenty of time left before you write it.”
The boy nodded, amused by the stranger’s request. Wells doffed his hat and left the way he had come, but that did not prevent him from also staying where he was, surrounded by the black murmuring water under the pier, an ironic smile appearing on his lips for the first time.
XLII
IT WOULD BE SOME YEARS BEFORE THAT BOY, whom stubborn Fate had made a writer, published his book The War of the Worlds. When at last he held a copy of the book in his hands, Wells contemplated the pages he knew so well with the same melancholy he had contemplated each day of his new life, for during those years, he had watched the boy on the pier happily leave the draper’s shop in Southsea to work as Byatt’s assistant, gain a scholarship to the Royal College of Science in London, marry his cousin Isabel knowing he would soon divorce her to go and live with Jane at Mornington Place, cough up blood on the steps at Charing Cross Station, publish The Time Machine, curse in front of Murray’s Time Travel, and move to a house with a garden in Woking. And all this had happened exactly as it was supposed to, without Wells having perceived the slightest change in events. Now, with the novel in front of him, he would at last find out whether the precarious conversation he had held with himself on the pier at Southsea had been of any use.
The real Wells’s novel was almost identical to the one he had written, but he was relieved to discover that it differed in two respects: the Martians did not attack the planet with airships shaped like stingrays, but with tripods that looked like sinister insects, which would shock the reader more because it brought the terror closer. Indeed, these pages even made him relive the fear he had felt as he fled the real tripods. However, the replacement of airships with tripods was an insignificant detail. The main reason why Wells had risked talking to his fifteen-year-old self was to convince him to change the ending, and he was pleased to see the boy had kept his promise. In his version the Martians had conquered the planet and taken the few remaining survivors as slaves; in his temporal twin’s novel, they were defeated mere days after the invasion, though not by Man.
What defeated the powerful Martians were the humblest things God in His infinite wisdom had placed on the Earth: bacteria. When all of men’s weapons had failed, these microscopic creatures, which had taken their toll on humanity from the beginning of time, invaded the Martians’ bodies, invisibly, tenaciously, and lethally, as soon as they landed on our planet. Given the absence of microbes on Mars, the Martian organism was defenseless against them. It could be said that the Martians were doomed before they even set foot in our world. Wells was pleasantly surprised and had to admit that the boy on the pier had successfully risen to the challenge, inventing a rather original and unexpected way of defeating the Martians, in defiance of their powerful fighting machines. He had no doubt that readers of this novel, in contrast to his own, would finish it with a hopeful smile playing on their lips. Just as Serviss had wished.
? ? ?
AND SO, TWO MONTHS later, when his twin met Serviss for lunch at the Crown and Anchor, Wells was pleased to see that the steely glint of reproach in the American journalist’s eyes had vanished. In the world Wells inhabited now, which was not his own, although it looked suspiciously similar, The War of the Worlds related an unforeseen and terrible Martian invasion, but one from which humanity was rescued at the last moment by the hand of God, which was as invisible as the microbes He had sprinkled over the planet. It was a much more relevant and subtle criticism of the excesses of British colonialism, Wells had to admit, even though the ray of hope his twin had added at the end had not prevented Serviss from writing Edison Conquers Mars, intended as a sequel to The War of the Worlds. In it, the insufferable Edison led an expedition to Mars in search of revenge. Wells had originally gone to the tavern with the aim of upbraiding Serviss for this audacity, as well as to demolish his work in no uncertain terms and even to tell him his true opinion of that scoundrel Edison. And hidden behind his beard, long hair, and wrinkles, Wells had watched the meeting between the two authors from his corner table. A meeting his twin had imagined would be like two stones knocking together and making sparks fly, but which turned out quite differently. By the time lunch was finished, the endless succession of beer tankards had worked its magic, and the two looked for all the world like a couple of old friends. Wells went after them as they staggered merrily out of the tavern. But once they were in the street, instead of taking a carriage straight to the museum, as Wells remembered, the two men bid each other a fond farewell and went their separate ways. From the doorway of the tavern, Wells smiled and felt an immense wave of relief. All these years he had been wondering whether he had changed the future, and now, at last, he knew that he had: the two men had not gone to the museum because the Envoy was not there. He had blown him to pieces on the remote icecaps of the Antarctic; he had obliterated him. It was possible his airship was still languishing among the hundreds of objects crammed inside the Chamber of Marvels, but clearly Serviss did not consider it as important as the Martian, which had brought so many consequences in its wake. Good, Wells said to himself, as he walked breezily toward the nearest station to catch a train to Weybridge. From now on, everything that happened to his twin would also be a surprise to him.