‘Be that as it may, the study of those affected did succeed in throwing some light on the strange phenomenon: it was discovered, for example, that the time travellers did not move through the time continuum at a constant speed until the inertia of the impulse was used up and they came to a halt, as in the case of Mr Wells’s machine. Instead they moved instantaneously from place to place, leaping through the void, as it were, only able to control whether they landed in the past or in the future through intuition, as with the initial leap.
‘One thing seemed clear: the further they travelled, the more their energy was depleted after the journey. Some took several days to recover, while others remained in a comatose state from which they never awoke. They also discovered that if they concentrated very hard, they could transport objects and even people with them on their leaps through time, although the latter proved doubly exhausting.
‘In any event, once they had understood as much as they could about the mechanism in the mind that enabled people to travel in time, the most pressing question, the one that had given rise to heated debates even before time travel became a reality, still remained to be answered: could the past be changed or was it unalterable?
‘Many physicists maintained that if someone travelled into the past, say, with the intention of shooting someone, the gun would explode in their hands because the universe would automatically realign itself. They assumed the universe must possess some sort of self-awareness designed to protect its integrity, which would prevent the person from dying, because they had not died. However, by means of a series of controlled experiments, based on making tiny adjustments to the recent past, they discovered time had no such protective mechanism. It was as vulnerable as a snail without its shell. History, everything that had already taken place, could be changed. And this discovery, as you can imagine, caused an even bigger uproar than time travel itself. Suddenly, man had the power to modify the past.
‘Unsurprisingly, most people saw this as God’s way of giving humanity a free hand to correct its mistakes. The logical thing was to prevent past genocides and afflictions, to weed out the errors of history, so to speak, for what lies ahead, gentlemen, is truly dreadful, far worse than in your innocent tale, Mr Wells. Imagine all the good that time travel could do for humanity – it would be possible to eradicate the plague that devastated London, causing a hundred thousand deaths, before the fire of 1666 ironically stamped it out.’
‘Or the books in the library at Alexandria that could be saved from the flames,’ suggested James.
Rhys gave a derisive smirk. ‘Yes, a million and one other things could be done. And so, with the blessing of the people, the government called on a group of doctors and mathematicians to analyse the set of aberrations that made up the past in order to decide which acts deserved to be wiped out and to predict how this would affect the fabric of time – there was no reason to make things worse.
‘However, not everyone was happy, and voices were instantly raised against the Restoration Project, as it was called. Some considered this happy manipulation of the past that the government was about to embark on unethical, and one section of the population did everything it could to try to sabotage it. This faction – let us call it conservative – which was gaining more followers by the day, argued that we must learn to live with the mistakes of the past, for better or for worse. Things being as they were, the government found it more and more difficult to continue with the project.
‘Then everything ground permanently to a halt when the time travellers, fearful of becoming the target of a new wave of xenophobia, began fleeing through time in all directions, creating an inevitable wave of panic throughout society. All at once, the past had become soft clay in the hands of anyone who felt like altering it for personal gain or simply by accident. Suddenly, the history of the world was in jeopardy’
‘But how can we know when someone has altered the past if in so doing they change the present?’ asked Wells. ‘We have no way of knowing whether someone is manipulating history. We would experience only the consequences.’
‘I applaud your perspicacity, Mr Wells,’ said Rhys, pleasantly surprised by the author’s question. ‘According to the laws of time, the consequences of any change to the past are transmitted along the time continuum, modifying everything in their path, like the ripples from a stone tossed into a pond. Consequently, as you have pointed out, it would be impossible to detect any manipulation because the ripples produced by this change would affect our present as well as our memories.’ He paused, then added, with a mischievous grin, ‘Unless of course we had a back-up copy of the world with which to compare it’
‘A back-up?’
‘Yes, call it what you will,’ replied the traveller. ‘I’m referring to a collection of books, newspapers and other material documenting as exhaustively as possible everything that has happened up until the present, the whole history of mankind. Like a portrait of the true face of the universe, you understand, one that enables us to detect at once any anomaly, however small.’
‘I see,’ murmured Wells.
‘And this is something the government has been working on since the first epidemic of time travellers, with the aim of preventing anyone from unlawfully manipulating the past,’ Rhys declared. ‘But there was one problem: where could such an archive be kept safe from the harmful ripples caused by any changes?’
The writers gazed at him, enthralled.
‘There was only one possible place.’ The traveller answered his own question. ‘At the beginning of time.’
‘The beginning of time?’ asked Stoker.
Rhys nodded. ‘The Oligocene epoch, the third epoch of the Tertiary period in the Cenozoic era, to be precise, before man had set foot on the Earth, when the world was the preserve of rhinoceroses, mastodons, wolves and the earliest versions of primates. A period no traveller could go to without linking various leaps – with all the risk entailed – and where there was no reason to go because there was nothing to change.
‘In tandem with the project aimed at training time travellers, the government had, in the strictest secrecy, organised what we could call an elite team, made up of the most gifted and loyal travellers. Evidently, the team’s mission was none other than to transport the world’s memory back to the Oligocene epoch. After countless journeys, the chosen travellers, of which, as you will have guessed, I was one, built a sanctuary there to house the world’s knowledge.
‘The place was also to become our home, for a large part of our lives would be spent in that epoch. Surrounded by immense grasslands we were almost afraid to step on, we would live and bring up our children, whom we would teach to use their talent, as we had done, in order to travel through the millennia, keeping watch over history, that time line which began in the Oligocene epoch and ended at the precise moment when the government decided to scrap the Restoration Project.
‘Yes, that is where our jurisdiction ends, gentlemen. Any time beyond that moment is unguarded, for it is assumed that the physiognomy of the future can absorb any changes the time travellers might bring about because
