Evans the lawyer, who would contemplate with resignation the intrusion into his home of the absurd, seemingly useless piece of junk, which, to cap it all, was a symbol to his new wife of her vanished husband. I pictured him unable to sleep at nights, circling the machine, pressing the fake buttons and moving the glass lever, to satisfy himself it did not work, and wondering what mystery was contained in the object his wife referred to as the time machine, and why the devil it had been built. I was sure Jane would have explained nothing to him, considering the machine part of a private world that Evans the lawyer had no business knowing about.
When, many years later, George Pal began preparations for his film, he ran into a problem: he did not find convincing any of the designs his people had come up with for the time machine. They were clunky, grotesque and over-elaborate. None of the models bore any resemblance to the elegant, stately vehicle in which he envisaged the inventor travelling across the vast plains of time. That was why it seemed to him nothing short of a miracle when a woman named Selma Evans, close to bankruptcy after squandering the small fortune she had inherited from her parents, offered to sell him the Strange object her mother had dusted every Sunday in a languid, ceremonious manner that had made little Selma’s hair stand on end.
Pal was stunned: this was exactly what he had been looking for. 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 travelled 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: ‘Made 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, so he persuaded the production studio to buy it. That was how your machine gained the fleeting immortality of the silver screen.
Ten years later, the studios organised 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 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 12 April 1984 I kept my appointment at Olserts Department Store. There she was, confused and scared, and it was I who whisked her out from under the noses of the press, 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 travellers from the future, who would doubtless be searching for her under orders from the government, which had decreed to sacrifice her was the only way to eradicate 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 traveller from the future who had proclaimed himself the saviour 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 three or four materialised 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. 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 that years, or possibly centuries, later would enable man to travel in time. Yes, the epidemic of time travellers Rhys had told us about would quietly originate in that secluded house, I said to myself, stooping to pick up the piece of puzzle, an unconscious gift from our son.
I kept this fragment of the future in the 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 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 a 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: I travelled 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 was 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 travellers, 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 26 November 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 to go back and do things differently.
