It was beautiful and majestic and had the same lively air as the toboggans he had ridden as a boy. He remembered the wind whipping his face as he sped down the slopes, a wind that had taken on a magical quality over time, and he imagined if you traveled through time in that machine you would feel the same wind lashing your face. But what really decided him was the little plaque on the control panel that said: manufactured by H. G. Wells. Had the author really built it himself? And if so, why? This was an insoluble mystery, as Wells had disappeared in 1896, just as he was becoming famous. Who knows how many more remarkable novels he might have given the world? However, although he did not know why the machine had been built, Pal sensed it could not be put to better use than in his film, and so he convinced the production studio to buy it. That is how your machine gained the fleeting immortality of the silver screen.
Ten years later, the studios organized a public auction of scenery and other props from several of its productions, including the time machine. It sold for ten thousand dollars, and the buyer went round the United States showing it in every town, until finally, after getting his money’s worth from it, he sold it to an antiquarian in Orange County. And that was where Gene Warren, one of the technicians on Pal’s film, stumbled on it in 1974. It was sitting in a corner, rusty and neglected, with all the other junk. Its seat had long since been sold. Warren bought it for next to nothing, and set about lovingly restoring the toy that had come to mean so much to everyone working on the film: he repainted all the bars, repaired the broken parts, and even made a replacement seat from memory. Once fully restored, the machine was able to continue its journey, being displayed in fairs and events with a science fiction theme, and even occasionally being driven by an actor dressed as you. Pal himself appeared sitting on it on the front cover of Star Log, smiling like a boy about to ride his toboggan down a snowy slope. That year, Pal even sent out Christmas cards to his friends of Santa Claus riding on your time machine. As you can imagine, I followed its progress like a loving father contemplating the adventures of a son who has lost his way, knowing that sooner or later he will return to the fold.
And on April 12, 1984, I kept my appointment at Olsen’s department store. There she was, confused and scared, and I was who whisked her out from under the noses of the press, by holding her hand and whispering in her ear, “I believe you because I can also travel in time.” We left the store through the emergency exit, taking advantage of the ensuing chaos. Once in the street, we scrambled into the car I had hired and made our way to Bath, where a few weeks before I had acquired a charming Georgian house. There I intended us to make our home, far from London and all those time travelers from the future, who would doubtless be searching for her under orders from the Government, which had decreed her sacrifice as the only way of eradicating the root of the problem.
At first, I was not sure I had done the right thing. Should I have been the one to rescue her from Olsen’s, or had I usurped the role of another time traveler from the future who had proclaimed himself the savior of the Madonna of Time? The answer came a few days later, one bright spring morning. We were painting the sitting room walls, when suddenly a little boy of about three or four materialized on the carpet, gave a loud chortle, as though tickled with joy, then disappeared again, leaving behind a piece of the puzzle he had been playing with on the carpet. Following that brief and unexpected glimpse of a son we had not yet conceived, we understood that the future began with us, that we were the ones who would produce the mutant gene which, years, or possibly centuries later, would enable man to travel in time. Yes, the epidemic of time travelers Marcus had told us about would quietly originate in that secluded house, I said to myself, stooping to pick up the piece of puzzle left behind on the carpet, like an unconscious gift from our son. I kept this fragment of the future in the kitchen larder, among the tins of beans, knowing that in a few years” time it would help me understand the puzzle someone would give to the boy I had glimpsed on the carpet at the precise moment they were supposed to.
After that, there is not much more to tell. She and I lived happily ever after like the characters in a fairy tale. We enjoyed life’s small pleasures, attempting to live as quiet and uneventful life as possible so that neither of us would suffer an inopportune displacement that would separate us in time. I even indulged myself and bought your time machine when Gene Warren’s son put it up for sale, although I had absolutely no need of it, because I traveled through time like everyone else now, letting myself be swept along by the delightful flow of the days, while my hair began falling out and I found it more and more difficult to climb the stairs. I suppose a mark of the calm happiness we enjoyed were our three children, one of whom we had already met. Needless to say, their gift for time travel was far greater than ours. They were never in complete control of their ability, but I knew their descendants would be, and I could not help smiling when I saw our genes begin to propagate as they went out into the world. I did not know how many generations it would take before the Government finally noticed the time travelers, but I knew it would happen sooner or later. That was when I had the idea of writing you this letter with the aim of entrusting it to one of my grandchildren, who in turn would pass it down to one of his, until it reached someone who would be able to carry out my request: to deliver it to the author H. G. Wells, the father of science fiction, on the night of November 26, 1896. And I imagine that if you are reading it now, then I was right about that, too. I have no idea who will deliver this letter to you, but as I said before, he or she will be our own flesh and blood. And when that happens, as you will have guessed, these words will already be the voice of a dead man.
Perhaps you would have preferred it if I had not written you any letter. Perhaps you would have liked it better if I had let you meet your fate unprepared. After all, what awaits you is not all that bad and even contains moments of happiness, as you have seen. But if I wrote to you, it is because somehow I feel this is not the life you should live.
Indeed, perhaps you should stay in the past, living happily with Jane and turning me into a successful writer who knows nothing about journeys through time, not real ones anyway. For me it is too late, of course; I cannot choose a different life, but you can. You can still choose between your life and the life I have just recounted to you, between going on being Bertie or becoming me. In the end, that is what time travel gives us, a second chance, the opportunity go back and do things differently.
I have given a great deal of thought to what might happen if you decide not to go to the meeting with Marcus tomorrow. If you do not go, no one will point a gun at you, your brain will not be activated, and you will not travel through time, and therefore you will neither bring about the Ripper’s capture, nor will you meet Alice, nor flee the German bombardment, nor rescue any woman at Olsen’s department store. And without you, the mutant gene will not be created, and so there will be no time travelers and no Marcus to travel into the past to kill you, and I imagine everything that happened from the moment he murdered the tramp in Marylebone will disappear from the time continuum as though a huge broom had swept it away. All the colored strings dangling from the white cord of the map of time would vanish, for no one would have created any parallel universe where Jack the Ripper had been caught, or where her gracious Majesty went around with a squirrel monkey on her shoulder. Good God, the map of time itself would disappear! Who would be there to create it? As you can see, Bertie, if you decide not to go, you will annihilate an entire world. But do not let this put you off.
The only thing that would remain unchanged would be her appearance at Olsen’s department store in 1984, although no one will take her by the hand and lead her away to a beautiful Georgian house where she will live happily ever after.
And what would happen to you? I imagine you would go back to the moment just before your life was altered by your own time traveling. Before Murray’s thug chloroforms you? Almost certainly, because if Marcus never traveled to your time and did not kill anyone
, Garrett would never suspect Shackleton, and Gilliam would not send his thug to abduct you so that you that you could save his bacon, and therefore no chloroform-soaked handkerchief would be placed over you face on the night of November 20, 1896. Be that as it may, however far back you go, I do not imagine you will experience any of the physical effects of time travel: you will simply disappear from one place and reappear in another as if by magic, without being aware of any transition, although of course you will remember nothing of what you experienced after that moment. You would not know that you had traveled in time or that parallel universes exist.
If you decide to change what happened, this is what will occur, I fear: you will know nothing of me. It would be like reversing the moves in a game of chess until you find the one that began the checkmate. At that point, if instead of the bishop you ought to move, you decide to use your rook, the game will take a different turn, just as your life will tomorrow if you do not go to the meeting.
And so everything depends on you, Bertie. Bishop or rook. Your life or mine. Do what you believe you have to do.
Yours ever, Herbert George Wells.
41
“And what about predestination?” Wells wondered. Perhaps he was fated to travel in time, first to 1888, then to the beginning of that atrocious war that would involve the entire planet, and so on, exactly as he had told himself in the letter. Perhaps he was fated to produce the first race of time travelers. Perhaps he had no right to change the future, to prevent man from being able one day to travel in time because he refused to sacrifice his own life, because he wanted to stay with Jane in the past it had taken him so long to arrange to his liking. For wanting to go on being Bertie.
However, this was not only a consideration about the morality of his choice, but about whether he really had a choice. Wells doubted he could solve the problem simply by not turning up at the meeting, as his future self had suggested. He was certain that if he did not go, sooner or later Marcus would find him and kill him in any case. In the end, he was sure that what he was about to do was his only choice, he said to himself, clutching the manuscript of The Invisible Man, as the cab skirted Green Park on its way to Berkeley Square, where the man who intended to kill him was waiting.
After he had finished reading the letter, he had put it back in the envelope and sat for a long time in his armchair. He had been irritated by the tone of mocking condescension the future Wells had used to address him, although he could hardly reproach him for it, given that the author of the letter was he himself. Besides, he had to recognize that if he had been in the future Wells’s shoes, considering all he had gone through, he would have found it difficult to avoid that patronizing tone towards his callow past self, someone who had scarcely taken his first steps in the world. But all that was immaterial. What he needed to do was assimilate as quickly as possible the astonishing fact that he himself was the author of that letter, in order to focus on the really important question: what he should to do about it? He wanted his decision to take into account what he thought was the almost metaphysical principle of the matter. Which of the two lives branching off beneath him was the one he really ought to live? Which path should he venture down? Was there any way of knowing? No, there was not. Besides, according to the theory of multiple worlds, changes to the past did not affect the present, but created an alternative present, a new universe that ran alongside the original, which remained intact. Accordingly, the beautiful messenger who had crossed time to give him the letter had crossed into a parallel universe, because in the real world no one had walked up to him outside his house. Consequently, even if he did not go to the meeting, in the world in which he did not receive the letter he would. His other life, then, the one in which the jocular future Wells had lived, would not disappear. It was redundant, therefore, to regard the act of not bowing to fate as some sort of miscarriage of time.
He must simply choose the life that most appealed to him without splitting moralistic hairs. Did he want to stay with Jane, write novels, and dream about the future, or did he aspire to the life of that distant, future Wells? Did he want to go on being Bertie, or to become the link between Homo sapiens and Homo temporis? He had to admit he felt tempted to surrender quietly to the fate described in the letter, to accept that life punctuated by exciting episodes such as the bombardment of Norwich, which, why deny it, he would not have minded experiencing secure in the knowledge he would come out of it alive. It would be like rushing around calmly while bombs dropped out of the sky, admiring the terrifying force of man’s insanity, the hidden depths of beauty in that display of destruction. Not to mention all the wonders he would be able to see on his journeys into the future, brimming with inventions even Verne could not have imagined.
But that would mean giving up Jane, and, more importantly, literature, for he would never be able to write again. Was he prepared to do that? He thought about it for a long time, before finally making up his mind. Then he went up to the bedroom, woke Jane with his caresses, and in the anguished, oppressive darkness of the night, which felt exactly like being down a mole hole, he made love to her as if for the last time.
“You made love to me as if for the first time, Bertie,” she said, pleasantly surprised, before falling asleep again.
And hearing her breathe softly by his side, Wells understood that, as so often happened, his wife knew what he wanted much better than he did, and that if only he had asked her, he could have saved all that time he had taken coming to a decision which, in addition, now proved to be the wrong one. Yes, he told himself, sometimes the best way to find out what we want is to choose what we do not want.
He pushed aside these thoughts when the cab pulled up in front of number 50 Berkeley Square, the most haunted house in London. Well, the moment had finally arrived. He took a deep breath, climbed out of the carriage, and made his way slowly towards the building, savoring the aromas floating in the afternoon air, still with the manuscript of The Invisible Man tucked under his arm. On entering, he discovered Stoker and James already there, engaged in a lively conversation with the man who was about to kill them in the halo of light cast by the candelabra dotted about the hallway. From then on, every time he heard some columnist praising the American’s uncanny powers of observation, he would be unable to stop himself guffawing.
“Ah, Mr. Wells,” cried Marcus on seeing him, “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.” “Forgive the delay, gentlemen,” Wells apologized, glancing despondently at Marcus’s two henchmen, who were firmly planted at the edge of the rectangle of light on the floor, waiting for Marcus to give them the order to finish off the foolish trio.
“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” said his host, “the important thing is you’ve brought your novel.” “Yes,” said Wells, waving the manuscript idiotically.
Marcus nodded, pleased, and pointed at the table beside him, signaling to him to leave it on top of the two already there.
Rather unceremoniously, Wells added his own to the pile, then stepped back a few paces. He realized this placed him directly in front of Marcus and his henchmen, and to the right of James and Stoker, an ideal position if he wanted to be shot first.
“Thank you, Mr. Wells,” said Marcus, casting a satisfied eye over the spoils on the table.
He will smile now, thought Wells. And Marcus smiled. He will stop smiling now and look at us, suddenly serious. And he will raise his right hand now. But it was Wells who raised his. Marcus looked at him with amused curiosity.
“Is something wrong, Mr. Wells?” he asked.
“Oh, I hope nothing is wrong, Mr. Rhys,” replied Wells. “But we’ll soon find out.” With these words, he let his hand fall in a sweeping motion, although owing to his lack of experience at making gestures of this kind, it lacked authority, looking more like the action of someone swinging a censer. Even so, the person who was supposed to receive the message understood. There was a sudden noise on the upper floor, and they raised their heads as one towards the stairwell, where something whi
ch for the moment they could only describe as vaguely human came hurtling towards them. Only when the brave Captain Shackleton landed on the ground in the middle of the circle of light did they realize it was a person.
Wells could not help smiling at the position Tom had taken up, knees bent, muscles tensed, like a wild cat ready to pounce on its prey. The light from the candelabra glinted on his armor, the metal shell covering him from head to toe, except for his strong, handsome chin. He struck a truly heroic figure, and Wells understood now why Tom had asked his former companions to get him the armor, which they had stolen from Gilliam Murray’s dressing room that very morning. While the others were still trying to understand what was going on, Shackleton unsheathed his saber, performed a perfect flourish in the air and, following the movement through, plunged the blade into one of the two henchmen’s stomachs. His companion tried to take aim, but the distance between them was too short for him to maneuver, which gave the captain ample time to draw the sword from his victim’s stomach and swing round gracefully. The henchman watched with horrified fascination as Shackleton raised his sword, slicing the man’s head off with a swift two-handed blow. Still gaping in terror, the head rolled across the floor, disappearing discreetly into the gloomy edge of the circle of light.