The Map of Time

I have given a great deal of thought to what might happen if you decide not to go to the meeting with Rhys tomorrow. If you do not go, no one will point a gun at you, your brain will not be activated, and you will not travel through time. Therefore you will neither bring about the Ripper’s capture, nor meet Alice, nor flee the German bombardment, nor rescue any woman at Olsen’s Department Store. And, without you, the mutant gene will not be created, so there will be no time travellers and no Rhys to travel into the past to kill you.

I imagine everything that happened from the moment he murdered the tramp in Marylebone will disappear from the time continuum as though a huge broom had swept it away. All the coloured strings dangling from the white cord of the map of time will vanish, for no one will have created any parallel universe where Jack the Ripper had been caught, or where Her Gracious Majesty went around with a squirrel monkey on her shoulder. Good God, the map of time itself will disappear! Who will be there to create it?

As you can see, Bertie, if you decide not to go you will annihilate an entire world. But do not let this put you off. The only thing that would remain unchanged would be her appearance at Olsen’s Department Store in 1984, although no one will take her by the hand and lead her away to a beautiful Georgian house where she will live happily ever after.

And what will happen to you? I imagine you will go back to the moment just before your life was altered by your own time travelling. Before Murray’s thug chloroforms you? Almost certainly, because if Rhys never travelled to your time and did not kill anyone, Garrett would never suspect Shackleton, and Murray would not send his thug to abduct you so that you could save his bacon. Therefore no chloroform-soaked handkerchief would be placed over your face on the night of 20 November 1896. Be that as it may, however far back you go, I do not imagine you will experience any of the physical effects of time travel: you will simply disappear from one place and reappear in another as if by magic, without being aware of any transition, although, of course, you will remember nothing of what you experienced after that moment.

You would not know that you had travelled in time, or that parallel universes exist. If you decide to change what happened, this is what will occur, I fear: you will know nothing of me. It would be like reversing the moves in a game of chess until you find the one that began the check mate. At that point, if instead of the bishop you ought to move you decide to use your rook, the game will take a different turn, just as your life will tomorrow if you do not go to the meeting.

And so everything depends on you, Bertie. Bishop or rook? Your life or mine? Do what you believe you have to do.

Yours ever,

Herbert George Wells

Chapter XLI

And what about predestination? Wells wondered. Perhaps he was fated to travel in time, first to 1888, then to the beginning of the atrocious war that would involve the entire planet, and so on, exactly as he had told himself in the letter. Perhaps he was fated to produce the first race of time travellers. Perhaps he had no right to change the future, to prevent man being able one day to travel in time because he refused to sacrifice his own life, because he wanted to stay with Jane in the past it had taken him so long to arrange to his liking. For wanting to go on being Bertie.

However, this was not only a consideration about the morality of his choice, but about whether he really had a choice. Wells doubted he could solve the problem simply by not turning up at the meeting, as his future self had suggested. He was certain that if he did not go, sooner or later Rhys would find and kill him in any case.

In the end, he was sure that what he was about to do was his only choice, and clutched to him the manuscript of The Invisible Man, as the cab skirted Green Park on its way to Berkeley Square, where the man who intended to kill him was waiting.

After he had finished reading the letter, he had put it back in the envelope and sat for a long time in his armchair. He had been irritated by the tone of mocking condescension that the future Wells had used to address him – although he could hardly reproach him for it, given that the author of the letter was himself. Besides, he had to recognise that if he had been in the future Wells’s shoes, considering all he had gone through, he would have found it difficult to avoid that patronising tone towards his callow past self, someone who had scarcely taken his first steps in the world.

But all that was immaterial. What he needed to do was assimilate as quickly as possible the astonishing fact that he himself was the author of that letter, in order to focus on the really important question: what he should do about it. He wanted his decision to take into account what he thought was the almost metaphysical principle of the matter. Which of the two lives branching off beneath him was the one he ought to live? Which path should he venture down? Was there any way of knowing? No, there was not. Besides, according to the theory of multiple worlds, changes to the past did not affect the present, but created an alternative present, a new universe that ran alongside the original, which remained intact. Accordingly, the beautiful messenger who had crossed time to give him the letter had slipped into a parallel universe, because in the real world no one had walked up to him outside his house. Consequently, even if he did not go to the meeting, in the world in which he did not receive the letter he would. His other life, then, the one in which the jocular future Wells had lived, would not disappear. It was redundant therefore to regard the act of not bowing to fate as some sort of miscarriage of time.

He must simply choose the life that most appealed to him without splitting moralistic hairs. Did he want to stay with Jane, write novels and dream about the future, or did he aspire to the life of that distant, future Wells? Did he want to go on being Bertie, or to become the link between Homo sapiens and Homo temporis? He had to admit he felt tempted to surrender quietly to the fate described in the letter, to accept that life punctuated by exciting episodes such as the bombardment of Norwich, which – why deny it? – he would not have minded experiencing, secure in the knowledge he would come out of it alive. It would be like rushing around calmly while bombs dropped out of the sky, admiring the terrifying force of man’s insanity, the hidden depths of beauty in that display of destruction. Not to mention all the wonders he would be able to see on his journeys into the future, brimming with inventions even Verne could not have imagined.

But that would mean giving up Jane and, more importantly, literature, for he would never be able to write again. Was he prepared to do that? He thought about it for a long time, before finally making up his mind. He went up to the bedroom, woke Jane with his caresses and, in the anguished, oppressive darkness of the night, which felt exactly like being down a mole hole, he made love to her as if for the last time.

‘You made love to me as if for the first time, Bertie,’ she said, pleasantly surprised, before falling asleep again.

And hearing her breathe softly by his side, Wells had understood that, as so often happened, his wife knew what he wanted much better than he did, and that if only he had asked her, he could have saved all that time he had taken coming to a decision that, in addition, now proved to be the wrong one. Yes, he had told himself. Sometimes the best way to find out what we want is to choose what we do not want.

He pushed aside these thoughts when the cab pulled up in front of number fifty Berkeley Square, the most haunted house in London. Well, the moment had finally arrived. He took a deep breath, climbed out of the carriage