The Map of the Sky

by Félix J Palma

  Tired from walking for so long, Wells sat on a bench and tried once and for all to accept that what he was seeing was not a fake backdrop but the real 1829, where time ended, for on the other side was an abyss. Incredible though it seemed, the tomorrow he had traveled from had yet to happen. And now he was adrift in a time where he did not belong, where none of the people he knew had been born, and from which he had no idea how to return, or whether such a thing was even feasible. He had traveled there because of the tension that seemed to set in motion the strange machinery lodged in his brain. He was not sure he could reproduce this effect through suggestion. But even if he could, what good would it do unless he was able to choose his destination? He would be traveling blindly and might end up even farther back in time, something that horrified him, for the deeper into the past he ventured, the more alien and hostile the world would seem to him. It was best to stay where he was, in 1829, and wait for something, he knew not what, to happen.

  But how was he to survive? To whom could he turn for help? He doubted anyone would believe his story, unless they had an extraordinarily open mind; perhaps a fellow writer. He searched his memory, dusting off his literary knowledge of the period. If he remembered correctly, Byron had died some years before, Charles Dodgson—better known as Lewis Carroll—had not yet been born, Coleridge must have been living by then in Dr. Gillman’s house, recovering from his opium addiction, and the young, as yet unpublished Dickens had just started working at the offices of an attorney-at-law, where for the time being he was content to let his dreams of becoming a writer bubble in the cauldron of his mind. Yes, the future author of Oliver Twist might help him. He heaved a sigh, surprised at how quickly he had accepted that he would have to stay where he was.

  Feeling calmer, he began to wonder about his companions’ fate. What had become of them? What had become of Jane? He assumed the Martians had captured them. Suddenly he felt as if he had left them in the lurch, as if he had deliberately betrayed them. This thought made him miserable. He ought to be there, seventy years in the future, suffering with them, sharing their fate.

  For a while, Wells was content to gaze at the passersby, a rueful smile playing over his lips. They all believed they were fashioning the future with their actions, unaware that the future had already been made, because this puny man shivering on a bench had seen it. As he gazed at the crowd, he recalled with a shudder that the Martians had for a long time been living secretly among them. According to what the Envoy had told them, the Martians had arrived on Earth in the sixteenth century. All that time they had been passing themselves off as humans, watching over the Earth, waiting for the Envoy to arrive and begin the invasion of the blue planet that they had been infiltrating for centuries. Could one of these people be a Martian? It was impossible to know, of course, and so Wells immediately stopped staring at them with the inquisitive expression he had almost instinctively adopted. With a feeling of bitterness he recalled that he was to blame for everything that had happened seventy years later. He wished he had not brought the Envoy back to life with his blood, since the Envoy’s fellow Martians would have died one by one, poisoned by Earth’s atmosphere. But he had. Or he was going to, given that he was now living in the year 1829. Yes, the Wells who would be born in 1866 would do everything he had done to the letter: he would write everything he had written, suffer in the same way he had suffered, fall in love the same number of times and with the same women, and when the time came, he would donate his blood to the Envoy, dooming the planet for all eternity. But this had yet to happen, which meant it could still be prevented, he thought, excited by the possibility of putting right his mistake. All he needed to do was talk to himself, convince himself not to enter the Chamber of Marvels with Serviss or, failing that, forcibly prevent himself. But this would not happen for another sixty-nine years, and Wells was already thirty-one and doubted he would reach a hundred, however well he looked after himself.

  But, if he could not prevent the invasion, then why had he traveled back to this absurd 1829? And why the devil did this date sound so familiar? The answer came to him in a flash. He remembered that the Envoy had arrived on Earth in 1830, and as he himself had explained, his airship had malfunctioned, deflecting him from his mission and causing him to crash in the Antarctic. Wells felt his face draining of blood. Somehow, unconsciously, he had retained this precise date in a dark recess of his mind, and when Clayton had shouted to him that he had to travel back to a time before the inevitable happened, his memory had regurgitated it. Was this why he had emerged in this year and not another? Had he somehow managed to direct his journey through time, erring only by a few months? Clayton had suggested this was impossible, but apparently that was exactly what Wells had done: he had chosen his destination, even if he had done so almost involuntarily.

  Wells stood up from the bench. If he really had traveled to this time by some means that could not be attributed to mere chance, then it could only be to try to stop the invasion before it happened, before the Envoy was shipped to London in a block of ice and the Wells who would be born in 1866 brought him back to life with a drop of his blood. He could achieve this only by joining the crew of the Annawan and killing the Envoy. In the logbooks and cuttings he had been able to glance through during his visit to the Chamber of Marvels, he had read that this was the name of the ship whose charred remains had been discovered surrounded by her dead crew on an island in the Antarctic, close to where the Martian’s airship and frozen body were found. No one, including Wells, knew what had happened during that tragic expedition, but everything pointed to their having received a visit from the Envoy. So, if he wanted to find him, he obviously had to board the ship that had set sail from New York on October 15, 1829, that is to say, in three weeks’ time. Yes, this was the best way he could think of to put right his mistake, and the most feasible, even though it was, of course, the one that most terrified him. For a few moments, Wells toyed with the idea of forgetting this foolish idea and staying in London. He could begin a new life there, a life that, although he sensed it would be filled with misgivings and frustrations, would at least be a secure life, for he knew he would die a natural death long before the invasion began. Though tempted by the idea, he ruled it out before he had time to give it any serious thought, for he knew deep down that if he shirked his responsibility and failed to board that doomed ship, he would feel too guilty to begin a new life. Alternatively, if he joined the Annawan and killed the Envoy, he would prevent the invasion and save the planet. His companions had all played their part, and now everything seemed to depend on him playing his. This is what he would do, he told himself. Only he must not delay, for he had just enough time to board a boat bound for America and join the crew of the Annawan the moment he arrived.

  Staring into space, Wells stroked his whiskers for a few moments, as he had seen the Envoy do. He imagined his face showed an air of melancholy resignation, like heroes forced to sacrifice themselves to save their fellow men. A timid smile of contentment began to play over his face. For he was sure that wherever Jane was, she would be proud of him for embracing his fate with epic humility, and this made him discover within himself, if not the courage he needed, then at least something that helped him laugh in the face of fear. Wells nodded resolutely and strode valiantly toward the docks, ready to do his duty. No, his gift, this thing he carried around in his head, certainly wasn’t there to make the tomatoes in his garden grow bigger. It had a different use altogether.

  XXXIX

  OFFERING TO WORK FOR NOTHING DURING THE crossing, Wells had no trouble being taken on as a crew member on a ship bound for America with a cargo of timber. The boat crossed the Atlantic as leisurely as if it were being drawn by a pair of mules, and Wells, understandably, spent the entire journey in a state of considerable anxiety, afraid that if he arrived too late all his efforts would be in vain. Finally the ship dropped him in New York, with only a few hours to spare before the Annawan set sail, and so he was forced to use all his powers of orator
y to convince the captain, a fellow with a fierce demeanor and a ruthless look in his eye, to let him join his already complete crew: Wells was not very strong but a hard worker, and he would only take no for an answer if the captain could assure him the provisions in the hold had been calculated to feed precisely twenty-seven mouths for four months. If not, one more mouth would make no difference. And besides, he had the appetite of a bird and if necessary could live off the rats in the hold. As for the space he might take up, the captain could see he was a small man who could curl up anywhere. He insisted he had to sail on this ship and if need be he was prepared to make any number of sacrifices. The captain appeared to find him amusing, or perhaps he agreed to take him on simply to teach him a lesson. Perhaps he thought the younger man would enjoy witnessing the everyday hardships of life on the high seas, which had chiseled the captain into the brawny sailor he was and would undoubtedly destroy this puny individual as soon as he boarded ship. And so, less than an hour later, Wells found himself surrounded by a group of rough and ready sailors who stank of rum, sweat, and wasted lives.

  The time has come to reveal to you, dear reader, that, as a few of you already suspect, Wells did not give his real name when he enlisted on the Annawan. Instead, he gave the name of Griffin, the main protagonist of his novel The Invisible Man. For that was his mission: to remain invisible. And to do this he had to go unnoticed, avoid contact with the crew, and above all behave like a child in a museum and touch nothing, for fear that the slightest gesture, however trivial, could distort time, could change the natural order of events. And so it was that the Annawan, a whaler with a glorious past, whose hull had been reinforced with African oak to prepare her for the South Polar ice, set sail from New York with an extra crew member on board, a sailor who was as scrawny as he was reserved and who gazed at the horizon with a strange unease, as though he already knew what awaited them.

  To go unnoticed and to touch nothing were Wells’s priorities during the voyage. And he respected them, despite discovering to his astonishment that the author Edgar Allan Poe was also among the rabble on board ship. At that time, Poe was a pale young man who had not yet written Al Aaraaf. Apparently, he had joined the Annawan as a gunner in order to flee West Point, and while nothing would have pleased Wells more than to spend the tedious crossing conversing quietly with the man who would in time become one of his favorite authors, letting the gunner’s every word and gesture enchant him, he limited himself to speaking with him only when necessary, so as to reduce the likelihood of being found out. For if anyone in that coarse crowd could discover that he came from another time, it was undoubtedly Poe, future author of the detective stories based on the deductive powers of Auguste Dupin.

  His only distraction during the voyage consisted in drinking rum and forcing himself to laugh at his companions’ crude jokes, and later, in contemplating Captain MacReady’s strenuous efforts to steer the Annawan out of the ice, knowing in advance the ship would become trapped. When the old whaler finally did become icebound, Wells nodded to himself, like a theater director content with his actors’ performances. The crew appeared to accept with calm resignation this misfortune that might well lead to their deaths. All they could do now was wait for the ice to thaw without wasting provisions or losing their grip on reality. Given the circumstances, there was little else they could do, even though Reynolds, who was in charge of this peculiar expedition, kept insisting to the captain that they explore the surrounding terrain for the passage to the center of the Earth, which he was convinced was hollow before Verne had even written his famous novel.

  But Wells was not expecting any of that, of course. He was only waiting to see what—a week later, just when he was beginning to think nothing would happen—finally fell out of the sky. When it appeared, Wells had the strange sensation that he was the one who had arranged this air show to surprise his fellow crew members. He looked just as bewildered as they did, watching the ship fly through the air, then crash: after all, Wells had never seen it fly. And he realized that from that moment on, everything would happen as it had already happened, above all if he managed to stay sufficiently on the sidelines to safeguard events. The arrival of the airship in this desolate landscape made the crew uneasy, and the author could not help giving an amused grin when a few of them claimed it was a meteorite. The Envoy had arrived with British punctuality for their encounter on this remote, frozen island.

  During their trip in search of the airship, he was obliged to invent an extravagant story to explain to Reynolds why he had insisted on enlisting on the Annawan, a tale so preposterous and unintelligible he almost thought he deserved to be expelled from the future Society of Authors on grounds of incompetence. Then he was forced to search for the possible pilot in the area around the spaceship, fully aware of what this pilot could do to him.

  How alone and ridiculous he felt on board that ill-fated ship, unsure what exactly he had to do to prevent the inevitable from happening! During one of his exhaustive explorations of the ship in search of anything he might use as a weapon against the Envoy, given that he knew from experience that bullets could not harm him, he discovered several crates of dynamite in the powder store. He realized straightaway that this was the only thing on board the Annawan capable of finishing off the Envoy. Wells had never handled dynamite before, but he did not think it could be too difficult, though he realized the monster would not stand still while he threw a few bundles of it at him from far enough away so as not to be killed himself. He did not fancy sitting down and waiting calmly for the monster to come for him, as Murray had done seventy years later in the London sewers. Especially as there was no beautiful young woman on board who could embrace him at the crucial moment. This was when Wells’s eye fell upon one of an assortment of harpoons in the armory. It occurred to him that if he strapped a few bundles of dynamite to it and hurled it at the Envoy with sufficient force and accuracy, he would have a slim chance of skewering him, and this was better than nothing.

  Two days later, while Wells was busy trying to think up a more effective plan than the one involving the dynamite and the harpoon, Dr. Walker was disemboweled by the monster from the stars. He was attacked in the sick bay just as he was preparing to amputate Carson’s right leg. This attack confirmed to Wells not only that the Envoy was inside the ship, but also which sailor’s appearance he had usurped. Everyone was alarmed, and on the orders of an increasingly anxious MacReady, the crew scoured the ship from top to bottom in search of the hole through which the monster must have slipped aboard: to no avail, of course. They concluded that, like the demon it was, the monster was somehow mysteriously able to enter and leave the ship unnoticed. But Wells did not believe in demons. What is more, he even considered denouncing Carson. In fact, he considered one by one the many possibilities opening up before him, none of which satisfied him. Informing his fellow crew members that Carson was not Carson, but rather a Martian who had taken on Carson’s appearance, or killing Carson in cold blood at the first opportunity, perhaps by placing a stick of dynamite in his long johns while he was asleep, and then using the same argument during the trial that would inevitably take place once his crime had been discovered seemed to Wells the surest way to get himself locked up as a madman or a murderer, or both. Clearly he must carry on waiting, staying on the sidelines. The time would come for him to intervene. And so Wells tried to keep calm and watch Carson’s every move as discreetly as he could, even as he wondered where the real Carson’s body might be. No doubt it was lying somewhere out in the snow. As Wells watched him, he thought it strange that despite their conversation in the sewers of London the Envoy did not recognize him, did not pick him out from the rest of his companions. And he had to remind himself that none of all that had happened yet, however fresh in his memory it was.

  The day he was on starboard watch and saw Reynolds running back shouting that Carson was dead, that he had stumbled upon his body close to the airship, Wells knew the climax was approaching. When Reynolds saw that the supp
osedly deceased Carson was at that very moment on guard duty aboard the ship, Wells observed the two exchange a few words while the dogs barked frenziedly. Wells realized that the Envoy, suspecting he might have been discovered, could put an end to the masquerade and adopt his true appearance. Following the conversation, the explorer had headed for his cabin without even glancing at Wells, leading the author to think that for some strange reason, he had foolishly decided to keep his discovery to himself. At all events, Reynolds’s intended strategy mattered little to him. There was every sign that the slaughter was about to commence, for the explorer was playing with a time bomb, which would presently blow up in his face. And that, as you know, is what happened.