The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(60)

But for the next nine years at least, the length of time in which Reynolds was able to check the news, the Martians did not revisit the Earth. Afterward, of course, Reynolds could not know what might happen. Perhaps his children or his grandchildren would see those strange flying machines descend from the sky. But that would no longer be his responsibility, nor that of Allan, MacReady, the brave Peters, or any of the shipmates who had lost their lives in the Antarctic attempting to kill the demon from the stars. It would fall to others to fight them. He and his companions had played their part. After his death, there would be no man left alive who, while his wife gazed up at the night sky straining to make out the constellations, would look down surreptitiously at the strange burn mark on his hand, afraid that if he stared into the abyss of space, something would stare back at him from the other side.

What Reynolds could not know was that more than twenty years after his death, another expedition to the South Pole would stumble upon the burnt-out hull of the missing Annawan. They would find its charred remains ominously surrounded by skeletons, and at the foot of an enormous range of icebergs they would discover an amazing flying machine entombed in the snow. But the most astonishing discovery of all would be a strange creature buried in the ice, a creature unlike any they had ever seen on Earth, and which in their eagerness to examine they would transport back to London in the greatest secrecy, where Wells would discover it. For let us not forget that in this tale no mysterious sailor by the name of Griffin ever boarded the Annawan. And therefore, no one blasted the Martian to smithereens. The monster from the stars simply sank into the Antarctic ice, on a remote isle, which, after Jeremiah Reynolds’s marriage, would appear on the maps as Josephine Island.





PART TWO

IS THERE STILL A SMILE ON YOUR FACE, INTREPID READER, OR HAVE THE HORRORS OF THE FROZEN ANTARCTIC LEFT YOU QUAKING IN YOUR COMFORTABLE CHAIR?

IF YOU YEARN FOR FURTHER ADVENTURES, I INVITE YOU TO PLUNGE WITH YOUR CUSTOMARY FEARLESSNESS INTO THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW, WHERE YOU WILL WITNESS A GENUINE MARTIAN INVASION. THIS TIME, I SHALL NOT ALERT YOU TO THE TERRIFYING EVENTS AWAITING YOU. BUT THIS MUCH I WILL SAY: IF YOU PAY ATTENTION YOU WILL GLIMPSE THE VERY BEST AND WORST OF HUMANITY.

THOSE OF A SENSITIVE NATURE MAY PREFER A LESS DISTURBING KIND OF READING MATTER.





“IT’S LUDICROUS OF YOU TO SUSPECT ME OF HAVING SOME CONNECTION TO THE MARTIANS SIMPLY BECAUSE I WROTE A NOVEL ANNOUNCING THEIR INVASION!” WELLS SUDDENLY DECLARED, AS IF TO HIMSELF.

THE AUTHOR’S OUTBURST MADE THE INSPECTOR JUMP.

“AS LUDICROUS AS SOMEONE RE-CREATING A MARTIAN INVASION TO WIN A WOMAN’S HEART?” HE RETORTED WITH A GRIN.





XIV

EMMA HARLOW WOULD HAVE LIKED THE MOON TO BE inhabited so that she could stroke the silky manes of the unicorns grazing in its meadows, contemplate the two-legged beavers building their dams, or be borne aloft by a man with bat’s wings, and gaze down upon the lunar surface dotted with thick forests, oceans, and purple quartz pyramids. However, on that radiant spring morning in 1898, Emma, like all her contemporaries, already knew that the Moon was uninhabited, thanks to a new generation of powerful telescopes, which, together with numerous other scientific inventions, had robbed the world of the magic it had once possessed. And yet, only sixty years before, fantastical creatures beyond Man’s wildest dreams had inhabited the Moon.

In the summer of 1835, long before Emma had been born, a man had looked at the Moon and thought it might make a good repository for the magic that human beings needed to make life bearable, the magic that was being slowly but surely eroded by progress. Since no one could examine it and therefore prove otherwise, the Moon seemed like the perfect place for dreams, that powerful restorative of humanity. And who was this champion of dreams? He was Richard Adams Locke, an English gentleman who, after graduating from Cambridge, had moved to New York, where he became chief editor of the New York Sun. As regards his appearance, he had a pockmarked face, which scarcely deterred the ladies, who were attracted by his willowy, noble bearing. In addition, his eyes gave off a calm luminosity, a serene sparkle characteristic of those lofty spirits who invariably act as a guiding light to others. However, nothing could have been further from the truth. For Locke was not the sort of person whose eyes were windows onto his soul: concealed beneath the English gentleman’s benign, almost priestly appearance was a truly mischievous spirit. What did Locke see when he cast his majestically solemn gaze over the world? He saw Man’s folly, his astonishing inability to learn from his mistakes, the grotesque world he had built up around him, and, above all, his excessive zeal to imbue the most preposterous things in life with a transcendent meaning. And although Locke secretly delighted in all that, such collective madness also made his blood boil when he realized it was not very flattering to the species of which, unhappily, he was a member.

He had left England for America convinced that after a difficult birth and a few faltering first steps, the United States had produced a nation guided by the light of reason and universal freedom. He had hoped it would represent the ultimate flowering of everything that the old, tired Europe had failed to achieve, even after the auspicious rupture brought about by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. However, to his astonishment, he had found a country infected with religiosity, where the customary European superstitions flourished side by side with a host of newfangled ones. Was America discovered merely so that it could be turned into a pale imitation of England? Locke wondered, greatly troubled. For the new society seemed as convinced as the old one that everything visible to the naked eye bore the mark of God’s Creation. The imminent arrival of Halley’s comet was no exception: who but the Creator could organize a fireworks display of that magnitude in the September skies? And so, numerous telescopes had been set up in parks throughout New York, to enable everyone to admire God’s pyrotechnic manifestation of His own existence, to the delight of His faithful followers. Contradictory as it might sound, that faith lived side by side with a blind belief in progress and in scientists, with the result that anyone proposing the first crazy idea that came into his head was liable to be taken seriously. Such was the case with the Reverend Thomas Dick, whose works enjoyed great popularity in the United States around the time Locke first arrived there. In one of his most successful books, the Reverend had calculated that there were 21,891,974,404,480 inhabitants in the solar system, a number that may appear somewhat exaggerated, although perhaps less so if we take into account that according to the same calculation, the Moon alone had a population of 4,200 million. Those and other foolishnesses convinced Locke that the Americans were a people in dire need of being taught a lesson. And who was better placed to do that than he? Thus, Locke’s initial intention was less to care for the dreams of humanity than to teach his new neighbors a lesson, and to amuse himself as much as possible in the process. He decided to invent a sensational story, which would poke fun at this and the many other outrageous astronomical theories that had hitherto been published, thus obliging the American public to reflect upon the flimsiness of its beliefs. It would also boost sales of the Sun, the best platform for his scheme he could have hoped for, as the newspaper boasted a mass circulation, distributed as it was not through subscription but by an army of children who in exchange for a miserable cent went round the streets advertising its lurid headlines at the tops of their voices.