who give public demonstrations in the amphitheatres,’ Dr Alcock declared. He was a believer in bold incisions, long, deep cuts that tested the resilience of an arm or a shoulder’s musculature. After heading off the interruption, the doctor drew back the sheet covering the body on the slab. He did so without ceremony, like a magician wearily performing a trick for the thousandth time.
‘The subject is a male aged between forty and fifty,’ he said, in a flat monotone. ‘Height five foot seven, fragile-boned, with reduced amounts of subcutaneous fat and muscle tissue. The body is pale in colour. As for the teeth, the incisors are present, but several molars are missing. Most of those remaining contain cavities and are covered with a darkish layer.’
After presenting his report, he paused, waiting for the inspector to stop staring at the ceiling and to look at the corpse.
‘And this is the wound,’ he declared enthusiastically, attempting to coax Garrett out of his passivity.
Garrett gulped air and allowed his eyes to descend slowly towards the cadaver, until his eyes came to rest on the enormous hole in the middle of the chest.
‘It is a circular opening, twelve inches in diameter,’ explained the pathologist, ‘which you can look straight through as if it were a window – as you will see if you lean over.’
Reluctantly, Garrett bent over the huge hole and, indeed, was able to glimpse beneath it the table the body was stretched out on.
‘Whatever caused the wound, besides badly scorching the skin around the edges, pulverised everything in its path, including part of the sternum, the ribcage, the mediastinum, the lungs, the right ventricle of the heart and the corresponding section of the spinal cord. What little survived, like some pieces of lung, fused with the thoracic wall. I have yet to carry out the post-mortem, but this hole was clearly the cause of death,’ the pathologist pronounced, ‘only I’ll be hanged if I know what made it. The poor wretch looks as if he’s been pierced by a tongue of flame or, if you prefer, by some sort of heat ray. But I don’t know any weapon capable of doing this, except perhaps the Archangel Michael’s flaming sword.’
Garrett nodded, struggling with his rebellious stomach. ‘Does the body present any other anomalies?’ he asked, by way of saying something, feeling the sweat begin to pearl on his forehead.
‘His foreskin is shorter than average, barely covering the base of the glans, but without any sign of scarring,’ the pathologist replied, flaunting his professional knowledge. ‘Apart from that, the only anomaly is this accursed hole, big enough for a poodle to jump through.’
Garrett was disgusted by the image the pathologist had conjured up. He felt as though he knew more about the poor wretch now than was necessary for his investigation. ‘Much obliged to you, Dr Alcock. Let me know if you discover anything new or if you think of anything that may have caused this hole,’ he said.
Hurriedly he took his leave of the pathologist and walked out of the morgue, as upright as he could. Once he reached the street, he dived into the nearest alleyway and brought up his breakfast between two piles of refuse. He emerged, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, pale but recovered. He paused, gulped air, then breathed out slowly, smiling. The singed flesh. The grisly hole. He was not surprised the pathologist was unable to identify the weapon responsible for that ghastly wound. But he knew exactly what it was.
Yes, he had seen brave Captain Shackleton wielding it in the year 2000.
It took him almost two hours to persuade his superior to sign an arrest warrant for a man who had not yet been born. As he stood outside the door to his office, swallowing hard, he knew it was not going to be easy. Chief Superintendent Thomas Arnold was a close friend of his uncle, and had accepted him with good grace into his team of detectives, although he had never shown him anything other than distant politeness, with an occasional outburst of fatherly affection whenever Garrett solved a difficult case. When his superior walked past his office and saw him with his head down, the young inspector had the feeling he was looking at him with the same discreet satisfaction as if he were a coal stove in good working order.
The only time his affable smile faded had been the day Garrett went into his office following his trip to the year 2000 to recommend an urgent ban on the production of automatons and the confiscation of those already in circulation; he had said they should be stored where they could be watched, in a pen surrounded by barbed wire, if necessary. Chief Superintendent Arnold thought the idea was completely ludicrous. He was only a year away from retirement, and the last thing he wanted was to make life difficult for himself by advocating preventive measures against some far-fetched threat he himself had not foreseen. But because the new recruit had more than proved his astuteness, he reluctantly agreed to ask for a meeting with the commissioner and the prime minister to discuss the matter.
On that occasion, the command that had come down to Garrett from the hierarchy was a clear refusal: there would be no halt to the production of automatons or any attempt to prevent them infiltrating people’s homes under the guise of their innocent appearance, regardless of whether, a century later, they were going to conquer the planet. Garrett pictured the meeting between those three unimaginative men incapable of seeing further than the end of their noses. He was sure they had dismissed his request amid scathing remarks and guffaws. This time however, things would be different. This time they could not look the other way. They could not wash their hands of the matter, arguing that by the time the automatons rebelled against man they would be resting peacefully in their graves, for the simple reason that on this occasion the future had come to them: it was acting in the present, in their own time, that very part of time they were supposed to be protecting.
Even so, Chief Superintendent Arnold put on a sceptical face the moment Garrett began to explain the affair. Garrett considered it a privilege to have been born in an era when science made new advances every day, offering him things his grandparents had never even conceived of. He was thinking not so much of the gramophone or the telephone as of time travel. Who would have been able to explain to his grandfather that in his grandson’s time people would be able to journey to the future, beyond their own lifetimes, or to the past, back through the pages of history? Garrett had been excited about travelling to the year 2000 not so much because he was going to witness a crucial moment in the history of the human race – the end of the long war against the automatons – but because he was more conscious than ever that he lived in a world where, thanks to science, anything seemed possible. He was going to travel to the year 2000, yes, but who could say how many more epochs he might visit before he died?
According to Gilliam Murray, it was only a matter of time before new routes opened up. Perhaps he would have the opportunity to glimpse a better future, after the world had been rebuilt, or to travel back to the time of the pharaohs or to Shakespeare’s London, where he could see the playwright penning his legendary works by candlelight. All this made his youthful spirit rejoice, and he felt continually grateful to God, in whom, despite Darwin’s policy of vilification, he preferred to continue to believe. Each night, before he went to bed, he beamed up at the stars, where he imagined God resided, to indicate that he was ready to marvel at whatever He deigned to show him.
It will come as no surprise to you, then, that Garrett paid no heed to people who mistrusted the discoveries of science, still less to those who showed no interest in Gilliam Murray’s extraordinary discovery, as was the case with his superior, who had not even bothered to take time off to visit the year 2000.
