The Map of Time Collection, page 177
“Where have you been, my dear? You were grinning like a little girl on a merry-go-round.”
“Oh, I connected with a young twin of mine who was about to fall in love with her biology teacher.” She smiled significantly as she remembered. “As in many parallel worlds, they, too, were in the habit of walking to Charing Cross station together to catch their respective trains. But if the majority of your twins used the time to impress mine with their sparkling wit, this Wells was much . . . bolder. As we walked past a little gated garden, we slipped inside, and there, hiding behind a hedge in the moonlight we . . . Oh, Bertie, it was wonderful . . .” Jane noticed her husband gaping at her and thought it best not to go into any more detail. “And what about you, dear?”
“Er . . . well, I’m afraid the twin I connected with wasn’t up to such exploits.”
• • •
BUT THE FACT THEY had finished The Map of Chaos did not mean their work was done. On the contrary, the most difficult part remained: to make sure the book found its way into the hands of one of the Executioners. But how? Those ruthless killers weren’t in the habit of strolling through the city, smelling flowers in the park, or traveling by tram, nor did they leave a visiting card after eliminating cronotemics. The only way Wells and Jane could see Executioners was when they were hunting down one of their twins, and even then they couldn’t communicate with them. Nor could they wait for one to come looking for them, since they weren’t Destructors. They might develop the disease in the future, but equally they might not. However, they were convinced there had to be at least one Executioner on their adopted stage who was pursuing a cronotemic, or there would be at some point. And a book called The Map of Chaos, especially if it had the same eight-pointed star on its cover that adorned their cane, was bound to catch the attention of any Executioner. Therefore, all they had to do was to ensure that the book became popular enough to appear in every bookshop window and newspaper in England for as long as possible. Yes, it had to enjoy the same success as Dodgson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or the novels of Wells’s own twin or, better still, the adventures of that pompous detective Sherlock Holmes.
However, after two weeks traipsing round London, knocking on every publisher’s door, they were forced to admit defeat. Regardless of whether it contained the key to saving the world, no one wanted to publish a complicated mathematical treatise entitled The Map of Chaos that was impossible to make head or tail of. Wells had to be satisfied to have his rejected manuscript bound in fine leather with the silver Star of Chaos embossed on its cover. He had devoted a year of his life to the absurd task of writing an indecipherable book, a map that would only make sense if a pair of inhuman eyes alighted on its pages, which seemed most unlikely.
Back home, they placed the one existing copy of The Map of Chaos on the table and sat down in their armchairs to try to think up some other way of making sure it reached an Executioner. But the problem seemed insoluble.
“Maybe we should turn the search on its head,” Jane suggested after a few moments’ reflection.
“What do you mean?” asked Wells.
“Instead of trying to find an Executioner in order to give him the book, we should let them come to us. We could find a twin who has become a Destructor and give him the book.”
Wells looked at her in astonishment.
“You mean . . . entrust our mission to them?”
Jane nodded, although she didn’t seem all that convinced either.
“Yes, I suppose we could . . . ,” Wells mused. “But it would have to be a cronotemic who is active enough to attract the Executioners but whose mental and molecular decline hasn’t set in and who is young and healthy enough to pass the mission on to another twin when the initial symptoms of degeneration start. In short: we would have to find the Perfect Twin. He or she would be the only one to whom we could safely entrust the book.”
They both agreed they needed to find the Perfect Twin, but how? They could look for as many as they wanted without moving from their chairs, but that would be of no use. They had no way of communicating with them, and if they accidentally jumped into their world, they would lose all trace of them immediately, because they were incapable of infiltrating the mind of any double occupying the same stage as they. That would mean searching all over London, as they doubted the poor wretch would stay put wherever they appeared, waiting for them to turn up. And that was assuming they arrived at the same place they had left from, for there was always the possibility they might be sucked up by a Maelstrom Coordinate and spat out in the Himalayas or the Sahara Desert or some other equally remote corner of the universe . . . It was then that the Supreme Knowledge illuminated their minds as one.
“The Maelstrom Coordinates!” they exclaimed.
Why hadn’t they thought of it before? There was no need for them to tramp blindly around the city. They only had to wait beside one of those whirlpools for a cronotemic twin to land in their world and hope that he or she was the Perfect Twin. Then they would hand him or her the book, explaining that it contained the key to saving the universe. They trusted they could convince him or her without too much difficulty. After all, they should know their own doubles better than they knew anyone. It would be like convincing themselves, or so they hoped. But they would worry about that later. First of all they had to find a Perfect Twin.
“I’m afraid, my dear, that we will have to become devotees of spiritualism,” said Wells.
They both smiled at that, remembering how they had pitied people who went to séances to communicate with their dead relatives.
Throughout the following year, Wells and Jane visited every medium practicing in England at the time, as well as with any who included the British Isles in their European tours. They attended séances conducted by C. H. Foster, Madame d’Esperance, William Eglinton, and the Reverend Stainton Moses, to name but a few. In rooms plunged into a reddish gloom, they sat around tables touching fingers with those next to them while the medium of the day levitated above their heads, held up by wires concealed beneath his or her tunic or conjured some ectoplasmic materialization made from a painted chiffon veil. They also visited several supposedly haunted houses in England. But the results of their exhaustive search were less than encouraging. Among all those charlatans it was hard to discover a genuine medium who also contained a Maelstrom Coordinate, and on the rare occasions that they did, none of the cronotemics that emerged from their bodies were the Wellses’ twins, but instead some half-translucent wretches whose minds had gone and who simply recited pathetically whatever the medium had told them. Only once they thought they recognized a boy of six or seven who materialized in the middle of a séance looking sadly neglected and grubby, like an Oliver Twist of the multiverse, and crying out that he wanted his mummy. At Borley Rectory they also found a demented eighty-year-old twin of Jane’s whose appearances were responsible for the rector’s daughters’ claims that the house was haunted. Those futile encounters were all they had managed to achieve with their desperate plan.
And so it was no wonder that, as the months went by, each became secretly convinced that this strategy wasn’t going to work either. However, neither of them dared to put it into words, so as not to demoralize the other completely. But then, one afternoon, events took over. They were on their way home after attending a séance conducted by a medium who had turned out to be a fake, and as they walked Wells railed continuously against that bunch of charlatans who used their cheap tricks to take advantage of other people’s unhappiness.
“They are wasting our precious time!” he fumed. “Not to mention our money!”
Jane felt equally angry, but as they entered Charing Cross station she told her husband to keep his voice down.
“Return to a state of calm, Bertie, unless you want to draw attention to yourself with your shouting.”
But that only incensed Wells more, and he repeated his vociferations as they descended the stairs to the concourse. All of a sudden, Wells came to a halt, pallid and stiff as a snowman. After struggling for breath for a few seconds, he raised a clawed hand to his chest and fell in a heap on the steps, on the exact same spot where dozens of his consumptive twins had collapsed in various parallel worlds. However, Wells’s diagnosis was very different: his frustration and rage over their fruitless search had formed a ball of anguish that had blocked one of the arteries in his heart.
Had he had access to drugs from his own universe, Wells would have made an instant recovery. However, medicine was still in its infancy in his adopted world, and he was prescribed only an extract of the herbaceous perennial digitalis and several weeks’ rest. Laid up in bed, stymied by that rudimentary medicine, Wells felt more powerless than ever. What further could he and Jane do? They had found the solution to the problem, but that didn’t seem to be enough to atone for his sins.
For her part, Jane momentarily forgot the fate of the universe, as she was far more concerned with that of her husband. Seeing him collapse like that while walking along, she had feared the worst, and afterward she devoted herself to caring for him as tenderly as ever, infinitely grateful that her husband had resisted death’s first approach. She prepared vinegar compresses for him and occasionally in the afternoons she would read him adventure novels by authors from their adopted universe who simply invented things with words, such as Stevenson, Swift, or Verne. When he had fallen asleep, she would begin to weep silently. Jane knew that this first attack was only a stab in the dark and that very soon another, possibly fatal thrust would come. And although she had often thought about death, it had never crossed her mind that she and her husband might die separately. They had always done everything together, by mutual agreement; why change things now? But Bertie apparently planned to precede her in that final adventure, and she found it inconceivable, shameful almost, that she should carry on living in a world without him. She found devastating not only the pain but above all the shock of no longer being two. She and Bertie had been together for longer than she could remember, and she did not think she could go on living with such a wound to her heart. But she would have no choice, for if that happened, then, frail and diminished as she was, there would be no one else standing between the universe and its annihilation.
Fortunately, as the days went by, Wells appeared to recover. His cough was gradually abating, and some color returned to his cheeks. However feebly, he still clung to life. One afternoon, when he was feeling stronger, he called out to Jane. She entered that room reeking of old age, medicaments, and deferred death and sat down in the armchair beside his bed. Wells tried to speak but instead began to whoop joyously, as though ascending the musical scale. Jane took his hand and waited for the coughing fit to subside, contemplating him with a tenderness that time had smoothed, as water polishes pebbles on the riverbed. She couldn’t bear to see the man with whom she had shared her life so vulnerable, so exposed to death, that man who had loved her with the rationality decreed by the Church of Knowledge and with the passion dictated by his heart, and who had been responsible for offering her whatever happiness life had allotted her.
“I’ve been thinking, my dear,” she heard Wells say in a reedy, almost childlike voice when she had regained her composure, “and in my opinion we shouldn’t go to any more séances. It is getting us nowhere.”
Jane was taken aback. She had assumed that when her husband recovered they would resume their search, no matter how unpleasant they both found it, incapable of shirking the responsibility they had taken on.
“What other options are there?” Jane asked, aware that giving up wasn’t one of them.
Wells took a deep breath before replying. “I think the only thing left to do is . . . give the book to them.”
“To them? But, Bertie, we decided not to involve them in this, to let them get on with their lives, remember?”
“Of course I remember, my dear. But I fear we have no choice. Look at the two of us. We don’t have much time left. You and I will soon . . . disappear, and if before then we haven’t given the book to an Executioner, or entrusted someone else with that mission, we might as well never have written it. And the entire universe will die without ever knowing it had a tiny chance of being saved.”
“Even so, Bertie, I don’t think we should make them shoulder this terrible burden,” Jane stammered. “They are still young; it will ruin their . . .”
“Their lives?” Wells said gloomily. “What lives? If we do nothing, no twin of ours in this multiverse will live to be old and decrepit like us.”
Jane nodded, and they both smiled sadly. Then Jane laid her head on her husband’s chest and let herself be lulled by his slow but tenacious heartbeat. It was the sound of a worn-out drum, but she didn’t want to go on dancing if it ever stopped. Presently, she heard Wells’s voice.
“Have you never wondered what was behind that feeling of urgency that made us move away from Oxford to be near them when they were born, that mysterious certainty we sensed that we had to be part of their lives?”
“Every day,” she admitted.
“And what conclusion have you come to?”
Jane sighed.
“That it was probably our instinct as Observers telling us that sooner or later they would be the ones to take over our mission,” she said with resignation.
“That is the same conclusion I reached, my dear.”
Neither of them uttered another word, content to remain silent, embracing each other with what they knew to be the last of their strength, feeling more marooned than ever as the sky darkened through the windowpanes.
29
AND SO, ONE WINDSWEPT AFTERNOON in late February 1900, when Wells was feeling strong enough to be able to walk without feeling dizzy, the Wellses went to Arnold House with the aim of entrusting the book to their twins in that world. Jane was carrying it in a small embroidered silk purse, which she clasped to her chest with one hand, while with the other she held on to her cloak to stop the wind from blowing it away. Standing at the tall entrance gate, they rang the bell several times, but no one came to let them in. Squashing his hat against his skull, Wells let out a curse. The journey by coach had almost pulverized their bones, and all for nothing. Where were their twins? They had stated very clearly in their message the time of their arrival. They were about to go back the way they had come when they saw the couple’s carriage approach.
“Professor Lansbury, Mrs. Lansbury, please forgive the delay!” the young Wells exclaimed as he stepped out of the coach and found them at the gate.
The four of them greeted one another effusively, for they had not met since the twins moved to Sandgate for the sea air, which was more invigorating.
“I’m so sorry we are late. Our excursion to Dartmoor took longer than we had expected, because on the way back we had a bit of a shock,” Wells’s twin explained. “Our friend Montgomery Gilmore and his fiancée had a slight accident when their Mercedes, one of those newfangled automobiles, veered off the road . . . Thank goodness, Gilmore managed to regain control of the fiendish vehicle.”
“I’m so glad to hear it,” replied Jane, somewhat shaken.
The Wellses asked their coachman to wait, with the vague promise of a mug of broth, and the two couples walked down the garden path leading up to the house. On the way, Wells noticed his twin glancing sideways at him and recalled how difficult it had been to befriend him back when he was still his teacher. Each time he tried to engage the lad in conversation, he seemed to shrink into himself, as though afflicted by a sudden colic, and, after exchanging a few pleasantries, he would hurry off under some pretext or other. Perhaps the poor boy had been suffering the effects of meeting himself. Fortunately, over time the inevitable kinship between them had developed into a mutual affection, which had eased the young man’s awkwardness with his eccentric teacher. Now his double was watching him surreptitiously, trying to hide the pity his doddering gait instilled in him. It was clear he was shocked at the dramatic changes that the past six years had wreaked on Wells’s body. But what did he expect? He, too, would grow old one day. His face would be lined with the same furrows he was now contemplating so wistfully, and his erect back would develop the same stoop, until finally he would leave the stage like everyone else, amid boos or applause.
After they entered the house, Jane’s twin went to the kitchen to prepare tea while her husband ushered them into the sitting room. He invited them to take a seat at the table while he lit the fire. Soon, Jane brought in the tea. As she began pouring it briskly, the old lady was filled with melancholy: How long had it been since she went about her chores with that familiar vigor? However, a deafening crash interrupted her musings. They all gave a start.
“How strange, I thought you told me you had fixed that attic window, Bertie,” Jane said, gazing up at the ceiling apprehensively.
“Why, yes, dear. I did it only last week. But clearly I have more of a flair for writing novels than fixing windows,” he jested, but as no one laughed, he quickly went on: “So . . . Professor, what is the urgent matter that brought you here on this inclement afternoon?”
Wells exchanged a meaningful look with Jane before clearing his throat. The moment had come when they must destroy their twins’ peaceful existence.
“Well, it is something we had hoped to keep from you, because we are aware that it will change your lives forever. And for the worse, I am afraid,” he added gravely. “But, alas, we have no choice.”
“You certainly know how to capture the attention of your audience, Professor,” the young Wells remarked wryly. “You would have made an excellent novelist.”
The old man responded to the compliment with a grim look and then sipped his cup of tea to buy a little time. Since he and Jane had resolved to go and see them, he hadn’t stopped thinking about where best to begin their story and had concluded that they must first tell them who they were. If they didn’t believe that, there would be no point in going on, and so he sat up as straight as possible and showed them his best side.
