credit. Then, among the crowd out in the street, I glimpsed young Harrington. Pale as a ghost, he was stumbling through the throng, a dazed expression on his face, burbling incoherently and shaking his head. I understood that he must just have discovered the disembowelled corpse of his beloved. He was the image of despair.
I wanted to comfort him; I even took a few steps towards him, but I stopped when I realised I had no memory of having performed this kindly gesture in the past. I confined myself to watching him until he disappeared at the end of the street. My hands were tied: I had to follow the script, any improvisation on my part could have had an incalculable effect on the fabric of time.
Then I heard a familiar voice behind me, a silky voice that could belong to only one person: ‘Seeing is believing, Mr Wells. ‘ Rhys 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 traveller 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 into which time travellers’ actions have transformed the past. 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 savour the moment.
But I was not 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 Rhys’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 endeavour. My heart was knocking against my chest and I could sense Rhys 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 cleave the air on my left, blowing away a streetlamp in its path. At that moment, I saw a horse and cart emerge from a side street 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 realised Rhys 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 burned carcass as best I could, and leaped into another street, aware of a wave of destruction being unleashed behind me. Then, after turning down another side street, I caught sight of Rhys’s elongated shadow thrown on to the wall in front of me by a streetlamp. Horrified, I watched him stop and take aim. I realised 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 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 saw the fiendish machine continue down the street while some men who were apparently travelling inside it 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 Rhys. 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 travelled fifty years into the future this time.
I left Whitechapel and began wandering in a daze through that strange London. Number fifty 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 criss-crossing 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 fifty years. Yes, I was surrounded by hundreds of new inventions, machines testifying to man’s indefatigable imagination, even though the director of the New York patent office had called for its closure at the end of your century. 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 of time traveller. Was I in Rhys’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 travelled fifty years into the future. If I was not the only time traveller 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 realised I was trapped in that time. But I was alive, I had escaped death, and Rhys 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 trawling 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 entire world was moving stubbornly towards war, but that there had already been one some years earlier, a bloody conflict involving half of the planet in which eight million people had died. 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 that 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 millions of corpses that would litter the world a year from then.
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 at number fifty 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 travelling? 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 coined 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
