The Map of Time Collection, page 51
Then I heard a familiar voice behind me, a silky voice that could belong to only one person: “Seeing is believing, Mr. Wells.” Marcus was leaning against the wall, clutching his rifle. I looked at him as though he had stepped out of a dream. “This is the only place I could think of to look for you, and I was right to follow my instinct: you are the traveler who alerted the Vigilance Committee which then captured Jack the Ripper, changing everything. Who would have thought it, Mr. Wells? Although I imagine that’s not your real name. I expect the real Wells is lying dead somewhere. Still, I’m beginning to grow accustomed to the masked ball time travelers’ actions have transformed the past into. And the fact is I couldn’t care less who you are, I’m going to kill you anyway.” With that, he smiled and aimed his gun very slowly at me, as though he were in no hurry to finish me off, or wanted to savor the moment.
But I was not just going to stand there and wait for him to blast me with his heat ray. I wheeled round and ran as fast as I could, zigzagging down the street, playing the role of quarry to the best of my ability in that game of cat and mouse. Almost at once, a ray of lava shot over my head, singeing my hair, and I could hear Marcus’s laughter. Apparently, he meant to have some fun before murdering me. I continued running for my life, although as the seconds passed, this felt like an ever more ambitious endeavor. My heart was knocking against my chest, and I could sense Marcus advancing casually behind me, like a predator intent on enjoying the hunt. Luckily, the street I had run down was empty, so no innocent bystanders would suffer the deadly consequences of our game. Then another heat ray passed me on the right, shattering part of a wall; after that, I felt another one cleave the air on my left, blowing away a streetlamp in its path.
At that moment, I saw a horse and cart emerge from one of the side streets, and, not wanting to stop I speeded up as fast as I could, just managing to pass in front of it. Almost at once, I heard a loud explosion of splintering wood behind me, and I realized Marcus had not hesitated to fire at the cart blocking his way. This was confirmed to me when I saw the flaming horse fly over my head and crash to the ground a few yards ahead of me. I dodged the burnt carcass as best I could, and leapt into another street, aware of a wave of destruction being unleashed behind me. Then, after turning down another side street, I caught sight of Marcus’s elongated shadow thrown onto the wall in front of me by a streetlamp. Horrified, I watched him stop and take aim, and I realized he was tired of playing with me. In less than two seconds I would be dead, I told myself.
It was then that I felt a familiar dizziness coming over me. The ground beneath my feet vanished for a moment, only to reappear a second later with a different consistency, as daylight blinded me. I stopped running and clenched my teeth to prevent myself from vomiting, blinking comically as I tried to focus. I succeeded just in time to see a huge metal machine bearing down on me. I hurled myself to one side, rolling several times on the ground. From there, I looked up and saw the fiendish machine continue down the street while some men who were apparently traveling inside shouted at me that I was drunk. But that noisy vehicle was not the only one of its kind. The whole street thronged with the machines, hurtling along like a stampede of metal bison. I picked myself up off the ground and glanced about me, astonished but relieved to see no sign of Marcus anywhere. I grabbed a newspaper from a nearby bench to see where my new journey in time had brought me, and discovered I was in 1938. Apparently, I was becoming quite skilled at it: I had traveled forty years into the future this time.
I left Whitechapel and began wandering in a daze through that strange London. Number 50 Berkeley Square had become an antiquarian bookshop. Everything had changed, and yet happily it still seemed familiar. I spent several hours wandering aimlessly, watching the monstrous machines crisscrossing the streets; vehicles that were neither drawn by horses nor driven by steam—whose reign, contrary to what people in your time imagined, would end up being relatively brief. No time had passed for me, and yet the world had lived through forty years. Yes, I was surrounded by hundreds of new inventions, machines testifying to man’s indefatigable imagination, despite the fact that the director of the New York patent office had called for its closure at the end of your century, because, he claimed, there was nothing left to invent.
Finally, weary of all these marvels, I sat down on a park bench and reflected about my newly discovered condition as time traveler. Was I in Marcus’s future, where there would be a Department of Time I could turn to for help? I did not think so. After all, I had only traveled forty years into the future. If I was not the only time traveler there, the others must have been as lost as I was. Then I wondered whether if I activated my mind again, I could travel back to the past, to your time, to warn you about what was going to happen. But after several failed attempts to reproduce the same impulse that had brought me there, I gave up. I realized I was trapped in that time. But I was alive, I had escaped death, and Marcus was unlikely to come looking for me there. Should I not be happy about that?
Once I had accepted this, I set about finding out what had happened to my world, but above all, what had become of Jane and all the other people I knew. I went to a library and after hours spent searching through newspapers, I managed to form a general idea of the world I was living in. With great sorrow, I discovered not only that the world was moving stubbornly towards a world war, but that there had already been one some years earlier, a bloody conflict involving half the planet in which eight million people had died. But few lessons had been learned, and now, despite its graveyards piled with dead, the world was once more teetering on the brink. I recalled some of the clippings I had seen hanging from the map of time, and understood that nothing could prevent this second war, for it was one of those past mistakes which the people of the future had chosen to accept. I could only wait for the conflict to begin and try my best to avoid being one of the innumerable corpses that would litter the world a few years on.
I also found an article that both bewildered and saddened me. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Bram Stoker and Henry James, who had died attempting to spend the night confronting the ghost in number 50 in Berkeley Square. That same night another equally tragic event in the world of letters had occurred: H. G. Wells, the author of The Time Machine, had mysteriously disappeared and was never seen again. Had he gone time traveling? the journalist had asked ironically, unaware of how close he was to the truth. In that article, they referred to you as the father of science fiction. I can imagine you asking what the devil that term means. A fellow named Hugo Gernsback popularized it in 1926, using it on the cover of his magazine Amazing Stories, the first publication devoted entirely to fiction with a scientific slant in which many of the stories you wrote for Lewis Hind were reedited, together with those of Edgar Allan Poe, and, of course, Jules Verne, who competed with you for the title of father of the genre. As Inspector Garrett had predicted, novels that envisioned future worlds had ended up creating a genre of their own, and this was largely thanks to his discovery that Murray’s Time Travel was the biggest hoax of the nineteenth century. After that, the future went back to being a blank space no one had any claims on, and which every writer could adorn as he liked, an unknown world, an unexplored territory, like those on the old nautical maps, where it was said monsters were born.
On reading this, I realized with horror that my disappearance had sparked off a fatal chain of events: without my help, Garrett had been unable to catch Marcus and had gone ahead with his plan to visit the year 2000 and arrest Captain Shackleton, thus uncovering Gilliam’s hoax, resulting in his being sent to prison. My thoughts immediately turned to Jane, and I scoured hundreds of newspapers and magazines, fearing I might come across a news item reporting the death of H. G. Wells’s “widow” in a tragic cycling accident. But Jane had not died. Jane had gone on living after her husband’s mysterious disappearance. This meant Gilliam had not carried out his threat. Had he simply warned her to convince me to cooperate with him? Perhaps. Or perhaps he just had not had time to carry out his threat, or had wasted it searching for me in vain all over London to ask why on earth I was not trying to discover the real murderer. But despite his extensive network of thugs, he had failed to find me. Naturally, he had not thought to look in 1938. In any case, Gilliam had ended up in prison, and my wife was alive. Although she was no longer my wife.
Thanks to the articles about you, I was able to form an idea of what her life was like, what it had been like after my sudden upsetting departure. Jane had waited nearly five years in our house in Woking for me to come back, and then her hope ran out. Resigned to continuing her life without me, she had returned to live in London, where she had met and married a prestigious lawyer by the name of Douglas Evans, with whom she had a daughter they named Selma. I found a photograph of Jane as a charming old lady who still had the same smile I had become enamored of during our walks to Charing Cross. My first thought was to find her, but this of course was a foolish impulse. What would I say to her? My sudden reappearance after all this time would only have upset her otherwise peaceful existence. She had accepted my departure, why stir things up now? And so I did not try to find her, which is why from the moment I disappeared, I never again laid eyes on the sweet creature who must at this very moment be sleeping right above your head. Perhaps my telling you this will prompt you to wake her up with your caresses when you finish reading the letter. It is something only you can decide: far be it from me to meddle in your marriage. But of course, not looking for her was not enough. I had to leave London, not just because I was afraid of running into her or into one of my friends, who would recognize me immediately, since I had not changed, but purely for my own self-protection: it was more than likely Marcus would carry on trolling the centuries for me, searching through time for some trace of my existence.
I assumed a false identity. I grew a bushy beard and chose the charming medieval town of Norwich as the place where I would discreetly start to build a new life for myself. Thanks to what you had learned at Mr. Cowap’s pharmacy, I found work at a chemist’s, and for a year and a half I spent my days dispensing ointments and syrups, and my nights lying in my bed listening to the news, alert to the slow buildup of a war that would redefine the world once more. Of my own free will I had decided to live one of those redundant, futile lives that I had always been terrified my mother’s stubbornness would finally condemn me to, and I could not even compensate for its simplicity by writing for fear of alerting Marcus. I was a writer condemned to live like someone who had no gift for writing. Can you imagine a worse torture? Nor can I. Yes, I was safe, but I was trapped in a dismal life, which made me wonder at times whether it was worth the trouble of living. Happily, someone came along to brighten it up: she was called Alice, and she was beautiful. She entered the chemist’s one morning to buy a bottle of aspirin—a preparation of acetylsalicylic acid marketed by a German company that was very popular at the time—and when she left, she took my heart with her.
Love blossomed between us amazingly quickly, outstripping the war, and by the time it broke out, Alice and I had much more to lose than before. Luckily, it all seemed to be taking place far away from our town, which apparently presented no threat to Germany, whose new chancellor intended to conquer the world under the dubious pretext that the blood of a superior race pulsed through his veins. We could only glimpse the terrible consequences of the conflict through the ghastly murmurings carried to us on the breeze, a foretaste of what the newspapers would later report, but I already understood this war would be different from previous ones, because science had changed the face of war by presenting men with new ways of killing one another. The battle would now take place in the skies. But do not think of dirigibles firing at one another to see who could burst the enemy’s hydrogen balloons first. Man had conquered the skies with a flying machine that was heavier than air, similar to the one Verne had envisaged in his novel Robur the Conqueror, only these were not made of papier-mâché glued together, and they dropped bombs. Death came from above now, announcing its arrival with a terrifying whistle. And although, because of complex alliances, seventy different countries had been drawn into the atrocious war, in no time England was the only country left standing, while the rest of the world contemplated, astonished, the birth of a new order.
Intent on breaking England’s resistance, Germany subjected our country to a remorseless bombardment, which, while to begin with was confined to airfields and harbors (in keeping with the curious code of honor that sometimes underlies acts of war), soon spread to the cities. After several weeks of repeated bombing, our beloved London was reduced to smoking rubble, from which the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral emerged miraculously, the embodiment of our invincible spirit. Yes, England resisted, and even counterattacked with brief sallies over German territory. One of these left the historic town of Lübeck, on the banks of the River Trave, partially destroyed. In angry retaliation, the Germans decided to increase their attacks twofold. Even so, Alice and I felt relatively safe in Norwich, a town of no strategic interest whatsoever. Except that Norwich had been blessed with three stars in the celebrated Baedeker guide, and this was the one Germany consulted when it resolved to destroy our historical heritage. Karl Baedeker’s guide recommended visiting its Romanesque cathedral and its twelfth-century castle, as well as its many churches, but the German chancellor preferred to drop bombs on them.
The intrusion of the war took us by surprise as we listened to Bishop Helmore’s sermon in the cathedral. Sensing it would be one of the enemy’s prime targets, the bishop urged us to flee the house of God, and while some people chose to remain—whether because they were paralyzed by fear or because their faith convinced them there could be no safer refuge, I do not know—I grabbed Alice’s hand and dragged her towards the exit, fighting my way through the terrified crowd blocking the nave. We got outside just as the first wave of bombs began to fall. How can I describe such horror to you? Perhaps by saying that the wrath of God pales beside that of man. People fled in panic in all directions, even as the force of the bombs ripped into the earth, toppling buildings and shaking the air with the roar of thunder. The world fell down around us, torn to shreds. I tried to find a safe place, but all I could think of as I ran hand in hand with Alice through the mounting destruction was how little we valued human life in the end.
Then, in the middle of all that frenzied running, I began to feel a familiar dizziness stealing over me. My head began to throb, everything around me became blurred, and I realized what was about to happen. Instantaneously, I stopped our frantic dash and asked Alice to grip my hands as tightly as she could. She looked at me, puzzled, but did as I said, and as reality dissolved and my body became weightless for a third time, I gritted my teeth and tried to take her with me. I had no idea where I was going, but I was not prepared to leave her behind the way I had left Jane, my life, and everything that was dear to me. The sensations that subsequently overtook me were the same as before: I felt myself float upwards for a split second, leaving my body then returning to it, slipping back between my bones, except that this time I could feel the warm sensation of someone else’s hands in mine. I opened my eyes, blinking sluggishly, struggling not to vomit. I beamed with joy when I saw Alice’s hands still clasping mine. Small, delicate hands I would cover with grateful kisses after we made love, hands joined to slender forearms covered in a delightful golden down. The only part of her I had managed to bring with me.
I buried Alice’s hands in the garden where I appeared in the Norwich of 1982, which did not look as if it had ever been bombed, except for the monument to the dead in the middle of one of its squares. There I discovered Alice’s name, among the many others, although I always wondered whether it was the war that killed her, or Otto Lidenbrock, the man who loved her. In any event, it was something I was condemned to live with, for I had leapt into the future to escape the bombs. Another forty years: that seemed to be as far as I could jump.
The world I now found myself in was apparently wiser, intent on forging its own identity and displaying its playful, innovative spirit in every aspect of life. Yes, this was an arrogant world that celebrated its achievements with a child’s jubilant pride, and yet it was a peaceful world where war was a painful memory, a shameful recognition that human nature had a terrible side which had to be concealed, if only under a façade of politeness. The world had been forced to rebuild itself, and it had been then, while clearing the rubble and gathering up the dead, while putting up new buildings and sticking bridges back together again, patching up the holes that war had wreaked on his soul and his lineage, that man had become brutally aware of what had happened, had suddenly realized that everything which had seemed rational at first had become irrational, like a ball at which the music abruptly stops. I could not help rejoicing: the zeal with which those around me condemned their grandfathers’ actions convinced me there would be no more wars like the one I had lived through. And I will tell you I was also right about that. Man can learn, Bertie, even if, as with circus animals, it has to be beaten into him.
