containing a bookcase on one wall filled with dusty tomes, a couple of dilapidated chairs and a ramshackle bed. Wells wondered whether this was the bed in which Sir Robert Warboys, Lord Lyttleton and the other plucky young nobles had boldly confronted the ghost, but before he had a chance to search the skirting board for signs of a bullet, Rhys pulled a lamp attached to the wall and the bookcase opened in the middle to reveal a spacious room beyond.
The traveller waited for his henchmen to scuttle through the shadows and light the lamps in the room before he beckoned them in. As James and Stoker seemed reluctant to do so, Wells took the lead, and ventured into the mysterious place with cautious, mouse-like steps. Next to the entrance he discovered two huge oak tables piled with books, annotated notebooks and newspapers from the period; no doubt this was where the traveller examined the face of the century, in search of possible inaccuracies.
At the back of the room he glimpsed something that aroused his interest far more. It was some kind of spider’s web, made of multicoloured pieces of cord, with a collection of newspaper cuttings hanging from it. James and Stoker had also noticed the network of strings, towards which the traveller was now walking, jerking his head for them to follow.
‘What is it?’ asked Wells, drawing level with him.
‘A map of time,’ replied Rhys, beaming with pride.
Wells gazed at him in surprise, then stared once more at the shape the coloured strings made, studying it carefully. From a distance it looked like a spider’s web, but now he was closer to it, the design was more like a fir tree or fish bone. A piece of white cord, approximately five feet above the floor, was stretched from wall to wall. The ends of the green and blue strings hanging from it were tacked to the side walls. Each one, including the master rope, was festooned with newspaper clippings. Wells ducked his head, venturing among the news items, hanging like washing on a line, and browsed some of the headlines. After Rhys nodded his approval, the two other writers followed suit.
‘The white cord,’ explained the traveller, pointing at the master rope, ‘represents the original universe, the only one that existed before the travellers began meddling with the past. The universe it is my task to protect.’
At one end of the white cord, Wells noticed a photograph shimmering faintly. Surprisingly it was in colour and showed a splendid stone and glass building towering beneath a clear blue sky. This must be the Library of Truth. At the other end a cutting announced the discontinuation of the Restoration Project and the passing of a law prohibiting any change in the past. Between these two items hung a forest of clippings, apparently detailing important events. Wells was familiar with many and had lived through some, like the Indian uprising and so-called Bloody Sunday, but as the cord stretched further into the future the headlines became more and more incomprehensible. When he realised they related to events that had not yet happened, that lay in wait for him somewhere along the time continuum, he felt dizzy.
Before resuming his examination, he glanced at his companions to see whether they were experiencing the same mixture of excitement and dread. Stoker appeared to be concentrating on one particular cutting, mesmerised, while, after an initial cursory glance, James had turned his back on the map. Perhaps this frightening, incomprehensible future was too far beyond his control, unlike the reality he inhabited and in which he had learned to navigate like a fish in water. The American appeared relieved to know that death would preclude him from having to live in the terrifying world charted on the map of time.
Wells also tried to tear his eyes away from the rows of cuttings, fearing his behaviour might be affected by knowledge of future events, yet a perverse curiosity compelled him to devour as many headlines as he could. He was aware that he had been given an opportunity many would kill for.
He could not help pausing to read one news item in particular, concerning one of the first ever cases of spontaneous time travel, or so he deduced from the esoteric title of the journal. Beneath the sensational headline ‘A Lady Time Traveller’, the article described how when employees at Olsen’s Department Store had gone to open the shop on the morning of 12 April 1984, they had discovered a woman inside. At first they thought she was a thief, but when asked how she came to be in the store the woman said she had just appeared there. According to the article, the most extraordinary thing about the case was that the unknown woman claimed to have come from the future, from the year 2008, to be exact, as her unusual garments confirmed. The woman maintained her house had been broken into by burglars, who had chased her into her bedroom, where she had managed to lock herself in. Terrified by the battering on the door as her assailants tried to break it down, she had suddenly felt giddy. A second later, she had found herself in Olsen’s Department Store, twenty-four years earlier, stretched out on the floor and bringing up her supper. The police were unable to interrogate the woman because, following her initial, rather confused declarations, she mysteriously disappeared. Could she have gone back to the future? the journalist speculated darkly.
‘The government suspects it all began with this woman,’ Rhys announced, almost reverentially. ‘Have you asked yourselves why some people and not others are able to travel in time? Well, so has the government, and genetic testing provided the answer: apparently the time travellers had a mutant gene, a concept still unknown to you. I think it will be a few years yet before it comes into use after a Dutch biologist coins the phrase. But it seemed very likely this gene was responsible for the travellers’ ability to connect with an area of the brain that, for the rest of the population, remained switched off. Research showed that the gene was handed down from generation to generation, meaning all the travellers shared the same distant ancestor. The government never managed to discover who the first carrier was, although they thought it might have been this woman. It is widely believed she had a child with a man who was also possibly able to travel in time, and that their offspring inherited a reinforced gene, establishing a line of time travellers who, by mixing with the rest of the population, would, decades later, trigger the epidemic of time travellers. Every effort to find her has failed. The woman hasn’t been seen since she vanished from the department store, as the article says. I won’t deny some of us time travellers, including myself, worship her like a goddess.’
Wells smiled, peering affectionately at the photograph of the ordinary-looking woman – obviously confused and afraid, unable to believe what had happened to her – whom Rhys had elevated to the status of Goddess of Time Travel. No doubt she had suffered another spontaneous displacement and was wandering around lost in some other distant era, unless, faced with the prospect of losing her mind, she had chosen to kill herself.
‘Each of the other strings represents a parallel world,’ said Rhys, requiring the writers’ attention once more. ‘A deviation from the path that time ought to have taken. The green strings represent universes that have already been corrected. I suppose I keep them for sentimental reasons because, I have to admit, I found some of the parallel worlds enchanting, even as I was working out ways of restoring them to the original.’
Wells glanced at one green string from which dangled several celebrated photographs of Her Gracious Majesty. They looked identical to the ones he had seen in his own time, except for one small detail: the Queen had an orange squirrel monkey perched on her shoulder.
‘This string represents one of my favourite parallel universes,’ said Rhys. ‘A squirrel monkey enthusiast had the eccentric idea of persuading Her Majesty that all living creatures radiate a magnetic energy that can be transmitted to other beings to therapeutic effect, in particular the squirrel monkey, which, according to him, worked wonders on people suffering from digestive problems and migraines. Imagine my surprise when, browsing the newspapers of the period, I found this startling addition to the photographs of the Queen. But that was not all. Thanks to Her
