The Map of the Sky (73 page)

•   •   •

N
ATURALLY, THE CAPTAIN DIDN
’
T
find Claire the following day, or the day after, or any of the many days that carried on silently piling up until they had become another year. But that is another story, one I hope you will forgive me for not having time to tell you now, because our story is about to take a different tack. Perhaps on another occasion, in which case I shall do so with pleasure. However, before we leave the brave Captain Shackleton in his cell dreaming of his beloved Claire, allow me to be so bold as to request that, despite the scene I have just described to you, you do not think badly of him. I am sure that during the course of this tale, many of you, just like Charles, will have been unsure what to think of Captain Shackleton. Influenced by Charles’s incessant doubts, you will have asked yourselves over and over whether this man is the real Captain Shackleton, who in the year 2000 will save the world, or on the contrary whether he is an impostor, an opportunist who passes himself off as the captain in order to win the heart of a beautiful, rich young woman who would otherwise be unobtainable. Did this man travel from the future for love, or did love force him to invent a past? Is
this the real Captain Shackleton, who made up a story so Charles would die a happy man, or is he a charlatan who felt pity for his dying friend? Is he a fraud or a hero? At the risk of upsetting you, I shall take the liberty of not telling you now. As I said, one day I may be able to tell you the captain’s extraordinary story, and the amazing adventures that still await him, and if so, I promise then to reveal the mystery of his identity.

In the meantime, all I will say is whether or not he is an impostor, this man now sighing in his cell, imagining that he might find his beloved on the morrow, is obviously a true hero. But not because in the future he may or may not behead the evil Solomon with his sword, thus saving the human race. There are other, more subtle ways of being a hero. Is it not heroic to make a dying man dream of a better world as he has just done for poor Charles? As Charles Winslow was dying, through the veil of death he glimpsed a victorious planet Earth, rebuilt by the captain and his men, a world more beautiful than the one he had known. Ought we not to consider someone a hero who succeeds in creating a perfect world, if only for a single moment and for one man? And was not Murray also a hero for making Emma die with a smile on her lips? And so were Richard Adams Locke and many others who, through their imagination, have managed to save hundreds of lives. Indeed, and among these heroes should be included the false or the real Captain Shackleton, who chose to give his dying friend Charles his own Map of the Sky, a sky where the sunset would at last possess the longed-for colors of his childhood.

XXXVIII

M
ORE THAN SEVENTY YEARS BEFORE
Charles’s soul dissolved into the void, another soul emerged from the void. And although the birth took less than a second, Wells felt as though an invisible hand were reconstructing the whole of him piece by piece, hastily screwing together his various bones to create a skeleton, garlanding them with veins, arteries, and ligaments and then scattering a handful of organs around the improvised framework, finally wrapping it all up in the packaging of his flesh. Once the finishing touch of his skin was in place, Wells was suddenly struck by feelings of cold, tiredness, nausea, and other miseries characteristic of the body he had been dragging around with him for as long as he could remember, and which fastened him to reality like an anchor. Then he found himself submerged in murky, foul-smelling water, only to be ejected a moment later by the force of the current, which sent him flying through the air to land in a calm stretch of water.

Once he realized he was not going to be dragged anywhere else, Wells managed to swim up to the surface. He gasped several times and looked around, bewildered, unable to comprehend where he was or what had happened. Gradually, as he began to see and think more clearly, he guessed he had been spat out into the Thames through a sewage pipe, but try as he might he could see no sign of the others. Where the devil were they? He waited in case they floated up to the surface but soon found it too cold in the water. He felt suddenly dizzy and began vomiting copiously into the Thames. This was enough to make him abandon
his role as guest of the river, and so, exhausted and shivering, he swam clumsily toward the nearest quay, hauling himself out of the water as best he could. Once on dry land, he tried to collect his thoughts. He had managed to escape the Martians, but this was no cause for celebration, because it was clear his victory was only temporary: at any moment they could emerge from somewhere and capture him once and for all and open up his brain, as the Envoy had promised.

Sitting on the quayside like a vagabond, breathless from fatigue and anxiety, Wells glanced about and was amazed to see no trace of the havoc wreaked by the Martians. Where was all the damage the tripods had caused? he wondered, studying closely what he could see of London. But the absence of any destruction was not the only oddity; there was something else. This was undoubtedly London, yes, but not his London. The majority of buildings were only one or two storeys high, and he could not see Tower Bridge. Not because it had been destroyed, but rather because it had not yet been built. Filled with disbelief, Wells saw that only a handful of bridges (Waterloo, Westminster, and one or two others) joined the two sides of the river. With astonishment he noticed that the new London Bridge was under construction some thirty yards away from the old one. Wells leapt to his feet and stared in bewilderment at the narrow, decaying structure of the original bridge, still in use while it was waiting to be pulled down. As if that was not enough, the Thames, which was navigated by paddleboats, now flowed past dark, gravelly beaches, with their small boat builders, private fishing grounds, and jetties belonging to a few luxurious mansions. The author heaved a deep sigh. Everything looked unfinished.

For a long time, he stood contemplating this incomplete London in a state of numb disbelief, until he realized this was no mirage resulting from mental exhaustion. His final conversation with Clayton started coming back to him, still tangled in his confused memories of the previous hours: the desperate flight through the sewers, the death of Gilliam and Emma, the awful fall through the tunnel. What had Clayton shouted to him before they both plummeted into the basin? Acting on
an intuition as sudden as it was fleeting, Wells went over to a wastepaper bin, and from among the refuse he dug out a discarded newspaper to verify the date: it was from September 23, 1829. His discovery left him perplexed. He was in the London of 1829! he told himself. He shook his head, half horrified, half exhilarated. It would be eight years before King William IV died and the archbishop of Canterbury presented himself at Kensington Palace to inform the king’s niece Victoria, who had just turned eighteen, that she had succeeded to the throne of the most powerful country on Earth. God, he himself would not be born for another thirty-seven years! How could that be?

God, he had traveled in time!

Like the inventor in his novel, only without any cumbersome machine. Apparently, he had done so using his mind, exactly as Clayton had told him he could in his basement only a few hours before. Well, to be precise it would be sixty-nine years before the inspector made this startling disclosure to him, while the Martians were destroying London above their heads. A London that looked nothing like this one, a London of the future. Then, like timid shooting stars, the last words he and Clayton had exchanged as Wells dangled in midair, held aloft only by the inspector’s good hand, began to dart across his befuddled brain, slowly illuminating it. At that moment, terrified by the possibility of plunging forty feet and being sucked down into the furious whirlpool below, Wells had been unable to pay the inspector too much attention. But now Clayton’s words came back to him with surprising clarity, as though the inspector were once more beside him, shouting above the roar of the water, even though it would be several decades before Clayton was born into that incomprehensible world, disposed to lose a hand in his eagerness to understand it.

“Wells!” Clayton had cried, as the author thrashed his legs anxiously in the air. “Listen to me! You’re the solution! Do you hear?
You’re the solution!
”

“What?” Wells had replied, puzzled.

“Remember what the Envoy said?” The inspector had resumed yelling,
while the author became aware, panic-stricken, that his hands were slipping out of Clayton’s.

Wells tried to cling on more tightly, but the moisture made it impossible. He was slipping, inexorably. Then he heard Charles’s voice but dared not turn toward him, given the precariousness of his grip. In any event, Charles had sounded too far away: he would not arrive in time to seize hold of him.

“Clayton, do something! I’m slipping!” he cried, petrified.

But the inspector persisted with his absurd discourse.

“If you listen to me, damn it, you’ll save all our lives!” he cried. “The Envoy admitted he was afraid of you. And I’m certain it’s because of what I told you in my basement!”

“Don’t let go, Clayton!”

“Don’t you see, Wells?” the inspector went on. “The solution is in your head! The Envoy is afraid of you, Wells, because he senses you’re the only one who can stop the invasion . . . by preventing it! That’s what you have to do, Wells!
Prevent it from happening!
”

Clayton scarcely had a grip on Wells’s fingers now. Out of the corner of his eye, Wells thought he saw the captain coming toward them from the other side, clutching the guardrail.

“Try to hang on a bit longer!” Charles’s voice appeared much closer now. Hold on, yes. Wells made a supreme effort to tear his thoughts away from the roar of the water, from his physical discomfort, from the anguish beginning to overwhelm him as he realized he could not see Jane anywhere, and above all from Clayton’s hysterical shouting. He tried instead to focus only on his hands, his two pale, slender writer’s hands, which were ill equipped for their present task of clinging desperately to the inspector’s one good hand, resisting the inevitable slide.

“You have to travel back to a time before the inevitable happens! Try to remember your dream at the farm, the nightmare that sparked off the journey I witnessed!” Clayton cried, his face turning purple. “Remember . . . and try . . . to do it . . . again!”

Then Wells lifted his birdlike face and looked at the inspector, the
tendons of whose neck were stretched to the snapping point and who looked back at him for an eternal moment during which Wells knew he was about to fall, that Clayton was about to let go of him, because what he saw in the inspector’s eyes was a farewell and an unspoken apology.

“Do it! Trust me, you can do it! Only you can save us!” he cried out for the last time.

Close by, Wells heard Charles’s voice ring out and even glimpsed an arm reaching out to him.

“Give me your hand, Wells!”

But he was too late. The inspector looked at Charles, smiling, and at that very moment Wells felt Clayton’s fingers go limp, releasing Wells’s hands and letting him plummet into the murky water. And as he flailed in the air, trying desperately to cling to nothing, Wells must have remembered the nightmare he had at the farm. Or perhaps he remembered it later, after he felt the brutal impact of the water and the force of the whirlpool dragging him toward the Thames, or in that no-man’s-land between the present and the past called the fourth dimension. He wasn’t sure. All these events had happened in such a confused, dizzying, unreal way. But he certainly remembered it, and it was the same recurring nightmare that had tormented him over the past few years, in which he was falling through an endless space, yet without the feeling that he was moving. This sensation had always puzzled him. But not any longer, he told himself, for at last he had understood that his body was moving solely through time. He was falling through time.

Wells shook his head, smiling to himself as he remembered how he had resisted the notion that he could travel through time, despite Clayton’s having assured him he had seen Wells vanish for four hours into the time continuum. However, he had no choice now but to accept it: he, H. G. Wells, author of
The Time Machine,
could travel through time thanks to the mechanism Clayton had assured him was lodged in his brain, the same one to which the Envoy had referred, something he must have activated because of all the accumulated tension, as he had done while asleep at the farm. But, whereas that time he had traveled
only four paltry hours, now he must have activated it with the force of a colossus, for he had tumbled almost seventy years down the precipice of time.

Still unable to believe it, Wells threw the newspaper back into the bin and, like a bewildered ghost, began traipsing through the unfinished city, trying to assimilate the fact that he was now in the past, more than half a century before the time to which he really belonged. He ambled almost mechanically through the streets of his city, feeling the same fascination Murray’s time tourists must have felt when he sent them to the year 2000. Captivated, Wells glanced around him with a strange feeling of incredulity and a certain unease, astonished to find himself in a London he knew only from history books and old newspapers. And his fascination intensified because he knew how the city would change over the years, into something that those now crossing its streets paved with Scottish granite or fired clay, where public transport was limited to a few mule-drawn omnibuses, could scarcely imagine. Wells walked for what seemed like hours, unable to stop, still refusing to accept the situation. He knew that the moment he did, his vague unease would give way to terror, because, much as this familiar yet alien landscape thrilled him, he could not forget he was stranded in the past, where things were very different from in his own time. London was reduced to the City and a few neighborhoods such as Pimlico, Mayfair, Soho, and Bloomsbury, and south of the river, Lambeth and Southwark. There were almost no buildings to the west of Hyde Park or south of Vauxhall Gardens. Chelsea was scarcely more than a village, linked to London by the King’s Road, and like a green tide, the countryside reached in as far as Islington, Finsbury Fields, and Whitechapel, right to the foot of the Roman wall. From Knightsbridge to Piccadilly, Wells found signs of a rural London that was still clinging on: everywhere there were farmhouses, orchards, stables, and even mills. Trafalgar Square was no more than an empty lot where the royal carriages were parked.