any more than he had in the previous one.
The only new card on the table was Shackleton, whom Wells had enlisted in his battle with fate. Garrett’s presence, therefore, could only have been determined by Shackleton, leading the writer to conclude that he was the person the inspector had followed there.
And, incidentally, he was correct in this assumption, for I, who see everything, can confirm that not two hours before, after a delightful stroll in the company of Miss Nelson, Garrett had bumped into an enormous fellow in Piccadilly. Following the violent collision, the inspector had turned to apologise, but the man was in too much of a hurry even to stop. His strange haste was not the only thing that aroused Garrett’s suspicion: he was also puzzled by the curious solidity of his body, which had left his shoulder smarting painfully. Such had been the force of the blow that Garrett had even thought the fellow must be wearing a suit of armour under his long coat.
A minute later, this thought had not seemed so foolish. Gazing down at the stranger’s bizarre footwear, he had realised with a shudder who he had just bumped into. His jaw had dropped – he was scarcely able to believe it. Trying to keep calm, he had begun to tail Shackleton cautiously, his trembling hand clasping the pistol in his pocket, unsure of what to do next. He had told himself the best thing would be to follow Shackleton for a while, at least until he discovered where he was going in such a hurry. By turns excited and calm, Garrett had followed him down Old Bond Street, holding his breath each time the dead leaves rustled like old parchment under his feet, and then down Bruton Street, until they reached Berkeley Square.
Once there, Shackleton had paused in front of what looked like a deserted building. Then he had scaled its facade until he disappeared through a window on the top floor.
The inspector, who had watched his climb from behind a tree, was unsure how to proceed. Should he follow him in? Before he had time to answer his own question, he noticed a carriage pull up in front of the dilapidated building and, adding to his surprise, out of it stepped the author H. G. Wells, who walked very calmly up to the house and went in through the front door. What was going on between Wells and the man from the future? Garrett was perplexed.
There was only one way to find out. He crept across the street, scaled the front of the building and climbed in through the same window Shackleton had used moments before. Inside the darkened building, he had witnessed the entire scene unnoticed. And now he knew Shackleton had not come from the future in order to perpetrate evil with impunity, as he had first thought, but to help Wells do battle against the time traveller named Rhys, whose wicked plan, as far as the inspector could tell, had been to steal one of Wells’s works.
Wells watched the inspector kneel beside Tom’s corpse and gently close his eyes. Then Garrett stood up, grinned his inimitable boyish grin, and said something. Wells, though, could not hear him, because at that very moment the universe they were in vanished as if it had never existed.
Chapter XLII
When he pushed the lever on the time machine forward, as far as it would go, nothing happened. Wells only needed to glance about him to see that it was still 20 November 1896. He smiled sadly, although he had the strange sensation that he had been smiling like that long before he touched the lever, and confirmed what he already knew: that despite its majestic beauty, the time machine was simply a toy. The year 2000 – the genuine year 2000, not the one invented by that charlatan Gilliam Murray – was beyond his reach. Like the rest of the future, in fact. No matter how many times he performed the ritual, it would always be make-believe: he would never travel in time. No one could do that. No one. He was trapped in the present from which he could never escape.
Gloomily, he climbed off the machine and walked over to the attic window. Outside, the night was quiet. An innocent silence enveloped the neighbouring fields and houses tenderly, and the world appeared exhausted, terribly defenceless, at his mercy. He had the power to change the trees around, paint the flowers different colours, or carry out any number of outrageous acts with total impunity for, as he gazed out over the sleeping universe, Wells had the impression that he was the only man on Earth who was awake. He had the feeling that if he listened hard enough he could hear the roar of waves crashing on the shores, the grass steadily growing, the clouds softly chafing against the membrane of the sky, and even the creak of age-old wood as the planet rotated on its axis. And his soul was lulled by the same stillness, for he was always overcome with an intense calm whenever he put the final full stop to a novel, as he had just done with
He was back at the point of departure, at the place that filled writers with dread and excitement, for this was where they must decide which new story to tackle of the many floating in the air, which plot to bind themselves to for a lengthy period. And they had to choose carefully, study each option calmly, as though confronted with a magnificent wardrobe full of garments they might wear to a ball, because there were dangerous stories, stories that resisted being inhabited, and stories that pulled you apart while you were writing them – or, what was worse, fine- looking clothes fit for an emperor that turned out to be rags.
At that moment, before reverently committing the first word to paper, he could write anything he wanted, and this fired his blood with a powerful sense of freedom, as wonderful as it was fleeting, for he knew it would vanish the moment he chose one story and sacrificed the others.
He contemplated the stars dotted across the night sky with an almost serene smile. He felt a sudden pang of fear. He remembered a conversation with his brother Frank a few months before, during his last visit to the house in Nyewood where his family had washed up, like flotsam. When the others had gone to bed, he and Frank had taken their cigarettes and beer out on to the porch for no other reason than to stand in awe under the majestic sky studded with stars like a brave general’s uniform.
Beneath that blanket, which allowed them a somewhat immodest glimpse of the universe’s depths, the affairs of man seemed painfully insignificant and life took on an almost playful air. Wells swigged his beer, leaving Frank to break the atavistic silence that had settled over the world. Despite the blows life had dealt him, whenever Wells came to Nyewood he always found his brother brimming with optimism, perhaps because he had realised it was the only way he could stay afloat; he sought to justify it in tangible ways – for example, in the pride any man should feel at being a subject of the British Empire.
Perhaps this explained why Frank had begun to extol the virtues of colonial policy, and Wells, who detested the tyrannical way in which his country was conquering the world, had felt compelled to mention the devastating effects of British colonisation on the five thousand aborigines in Tasmania, whose population had been decimated. He had tried to explain to an inebriated Frank that the Tasmanians had not been won over by values superior to those of their own indigenous culture, but had been conquered by a more advanced technology. That had made his brother laugh. There was no technology in the known world more advanced than that of the British Empire, he had declared, with drunken pomposity.
Wells did not bother to argue, but when Frank had gone back inside, he remained gazing uneasily up at the stars. Not in the known world, perhaps, but what of the others?
He studied the firmament once more now with the same sense of unease, in particular the planet Mars, a tiny dot the size of a pin-head. Despite its insignificant appearance, his contemporaries speculated about the possible existence of life on the red planet. It was shrouded in the gauze of a thin atmosphere, and although it lacked oceans, it did have polar ice caps. Astronomers everywhere agreed that, of all the planets apart from Earth, Mars
