The Map of the Sky (77 page)

The boy observed him with a flash of interest, though Wells knew at
that age he had still not decided to be an author. He loved reading, yes, but he was still unaware of his talent for emulating his favorite authors. Not until he entered the Royal College of Science in London, where Professor Huxley taught, would he begin to draft his first stories, in that clumsy, graceless handwriting he would later improve when he went to teach at the Holt Academy in Wrexham. For the moment, the months he had spent at Midhurst, watching Horace Byatt deliver his classes, had aroused in the young Wells a vague fascination for the role of teacher, a vocation incomparably more beneficial to society than that of writer.

“And did you succeed?” the boy asked abruptly, rousing Wells from his momentary reverie.

“What?”

“In being a writer?”

Wells looked at him silently in the growing darkness, pondering his reply.

“No, I’m a simple chemist,” he lamented. “I lead a very ordinary life. This is why I allowed myself to offer you some advice, my lad, because I know there’s nothing worse than leading a life you don’t like. If you think you have something to give to the world, fight for it tooth and nail. Otherwise you’ll end up a sad, embittered chemist who never stops daydreaming, inventing stories he’ll never write.”

“That’s too bad,” the boy said, without bothering to appear sympathetic. A few minutes passed, and then he added, rather diffidently: “Why didn’t you take your own life, then, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The question startled Wells, though it should not have, for it was simply an early example of his own pragmatism.

“Oh, well . . . ,” he extemporized, “books are what keep me going.”

“Books?”

“Yes, reading is my only pleasure, and there are so many books left to read. For that reason alone it is worth going on living. Books make me happy, they help me escape from reality.” Wells contemplated the sea in silence, smiling slightly. “Writers perform an extremely important role:
they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be a more important job in life than that?”

With these words, Wells fell silent, vaguely ashamed of the defensive tone in which he had spoken, which, moreover, did not seem to have overly impressed the boy. Wells deduced from the faint grimace of disdain on his lips that he could think of countless things more important for society than books, though he hadn’t the strength or the inclination to challenge Wells. Perhaps he did not care what this stranger thought and limited himself to feeling secretly sorry for Wells. The boy picked up a small stone and tossed it into the sea, as though hinting to Wells that as far as he was concerned the conversation was over. At this point the author noticed that the boy had a small bandage on the side of his chin, which until then he had not been able to see properly.

“What happened?” he said, signaling the boy’s chin.

“Oh, I tripped on the stairs this morning carrying some bolts of chintz. Sometimes I try to take more than I should so I can finish quickly, but I went too far this time,” the boy replied, somewhat absentmindedly. “I’m afraid it’ll leave an ugly scar.”

Wells remained silent for a few seconds, scouring his memory in vain for this accident. At any rate, the boy would clearly have no scar, for the simple reason that he himself did not have one beneath his bushy beard.

“I wouldn’t worry about it, my lad,” he said reassuringly. “I’m sure it looks worse than it is.”

The boy gave a cold smile, as though deep down he did not care, and Wells decided it was time to steer the conversation toward the real reason why he wanted to speak to his earlier self.

“Do you want to know the last story I made up?” he said in a casual voice.

The boy gave a contemptuous shrug, as though this was of little interest to him either, and Wells had to make a supreme effort to stifle his irritation. He tried to appear nonchalant as he gestured toward the now starry night above their heads and said, “You see that sky, my lad? Have
you ever thought there might be life on some of the millions of planets that make up our universe?”

The boy hesitated. “No . . . Yes . . . I don’t know . . .”

“I have. On our neighboring planet Mars, to go no farther. Did you know that the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli discovered a complex system of canals on the surface of Mars that can only have been built artificially?”

Wells knew the boy knew, and so he was not surprised when he nodded, vaguely intrigued.

“Good. Now imagine there are such things as Martians, whose scientific knowledge is far greater than our own. Imagine, too, that their planet is dying, because in the course of their long existence, the Martians have exhausted all its resources. They are faced with a dilemma: they must move to another planet or become extinct. Earth is the planet with the conditions that are most favorable to them, and so they decide to invade it.”

“How terrifying,” the boy said, with genuine interest. “Go on.”

“Imagine the Martians arrive on Earth,” Wells went on, seeing the boy’s expectant face, “crossing the forty million miles of unimaginable space that separates them from us, in cylinders fired from their planet by a powerful cannon, and once here, they begin to build fighting machines that could raze our cities to the ground. With machines like that, the Martians could conquer us in a matter of weeks, even days.”

“I’d like to read that story,” the boy declared with a mixture of fear and excitement.

“Then I’ll give you the idea as a present,” Wells said jovially. “You can write it whenever you feel like it. That way I’ll be able to read it, too.”

The boy shook his head and smiled uneasily.

“I’m afraid I don’t like writing,” he avowed.

“Perhaps you’ll learn to in time,” Wells said. “And who knows, maybe you’re destined to become an author, lad. What’s your name?”

“Herbert George Wells,” the boy replied. “It’s a long name for an author.”

“You can always shorten it,” Wells said affably, proffering his hand. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, George.”

“Likewise,” the boy said, returning the gesture.

And beside the dark waters on the front at Southsea, a man shook hands with himself, without the universe blowing up or seeming to register the anomaly in any other way. After Wells had said good-bye to himself with a nod, he headed toward the other end of the pier, still feeling the warmth of his own hand in his. He had only walked a few paces when he turned once more to the boy.

“Incidentally, one last thing,” he said with a smile, pretending that what he had most wanted to say to the boy had slipped his mind. “If one day you write that story, don’t have the Martians triumph, no matter how much you want to criticize British colonialism.”

“But I’m not going to . . . ,” his double started to protest.

“Please write an ending where the Martians are defeated. Don’t take away your readers’ hope.”

The boy gave a skeptical chuckle.

“All right, I promise. But . . .” He paused. “What could defeat those powerful Martian machines?”

Wells shrugged.

“I haven’t the faintest idea, but I’m sure you’ll think of something. You have plenty of time left before you write it.”

The boy nodded, amused by the stranger’s request. Wells doffed his hat and left the way he had come, but that did not prevent him from also staying where he was, surrounded by the black murmuring water under the pier, an ironic smile appearing on his lips for the first time.

XLII

I
T WOULD BE SOME YEARS BEFORE THAT BOY,
whom stubborn Fate had made a writer, published his book
The War of the Worlds
. When at last he held a copy of the book in his hands, Wells contemplated the pages he knew so well with the same melancholy he had contemplated each day of his new life, for during those years, he had watched the boy on the pier happily leave the draper’s shop in Southsea to work as Byatt’s assistant, gain a scholarship to the Royal College of Science in London, marry his cousin Isabel knowing he would soon divorce her to go and live with Jane at Mornington Place, cough up blood on the steps at Charing Cross Station, publish
The Time Machine
, curse in front of Murray’s Time Travel, and move to a house with a garden in Woking. And all this had happened exactly as it was supposed to, without Wells having perceived the slightest change in events. Now, with the novel in front of him, he would at last find out whether the precarious conversation he had held with himself on the pier at Southsea had been of any use.

The real Wells’s novel was almost identical to the one he had written, but he was relieved to discover that it differed in two respects: the Martians did not attack the planet with airships shaped like stingrays, but with tripods that looked like sinister insects, which would shock the reader more because it brought the terror closer. Indeed, these pages even made him relive the fear he had felt as he fled the real tripods. However, the replacement of airships with tripods was an insignificant detail. The main reason why Wells had risked talking to his fifteen-year-old
self was to convince him to change the ending, and he was pleased to see the boy had kept his promise. In his version the Martians had conquered the planet and taken the few remaining survivors as slaves; in his temporal twin’s novel, they were defeated mere days after the invasion, though not by Man.

What defeated the powerful Martians were the humblest things God in His infinite wisdom had placed on the Earth: bacteria. When all of men’s weapons had failed, these microscopic creatures, which had taken their toll on humanity from the beginning of time, invaded the Martians’ bodies, invisibly, tenaciously, and lethally, as soon as they landed on our planet. Given the absence of microbes on Mars, the Martian organism was defenseless against them. It could be said that the Martians were doomed before they even set foot in our world. Wells was pleasantly surprised and had to admit that the boy on the pier had successfully risen to the challenge, inventing a rather original and unexpected way of defeating the Martians, in defiance of their powerful fighting machines. He had no doubt that readers of this novel, in contrast to his own, would finish it with a hopeful smile playing on their lips. Just as Serviss had wished.

•   •   •

A
ND SO, TWO MONTHS
later, when his twin met Serviss for lunch at the Crown and Anchor, Wells was pleased to see that the steely glint of reproach in the American journalist’s eyes had vanished. In the world Wells inhabited now, which was not his own, although it looked suspiciously similar,
The War of the Worlds
related an unforeseen and terrible Martian invasion, but one from which humanity was rescued at the last moment by the hand of God, which was as invisible as the microbes He had sprinkled over the planet. It was a much more relevant and subtle criticism of the excesses of British colonialism, Wells had to admit, even though the ray of hope his twin had added at the end had not prevented Serviss from writing
Edison Conquers Mars,
intended as a sequel to
The War of the Worlds
. In it, the insufferable Edison led an expedition to Mars in search of revenge. Wells had originally gone to the tavern with the
aim of upbraiding Serviss for this audacity, as well as to demolish his work in no uncertain terms and even to tell him his true opinion of that scoundrel Edison. And hidden behind his beard, long hair, and wrinkles, Wells had watched the meeting between the two authors from his corner table. A meeting his twin had imagined would be like two stones knocking together and making sparks fly, but which turned out quite differently. By the time lunch was finished, the endless succession of beer tankards had worked its magic, and the two looked for all the world like a couple of old friends. Wells went after them as they staggered merrily out of the tavern. But once they were in the street, instead of taking a carriage straight to the museum, as Wells remembered, the two men bid each other a fond farewell and went their separate ways. From the doorway of the tavern, Wells smiled and felt an immense wave of relief. All these years he had been wondering whether he had changed the future, and now, at last, he knew that he had: the two men had not gone to the museum because the Envoy was not there. He had blown him to pieces on the remote icecaps of the Antarctic; he had obliterated him. It was possible his airship was still languishing among the hundreds of objects crammed inside the Chamber of Marvels, but clearly Serviss did not consider it as important as the Martian, which had brought so many consequences in its wake. Good, Wells said to himself, as he walked breezily toward the nearest station to catch a train to Weybridge. From now on, everything that happened to his twin would also be a surprise to him.

On the train, the author wondered whether, by killing the Envoy, he had also saved his companions. He knew his action had rescued Jane from that reality, for he had occasionally followed her through the streets of London when she visited her favorite stores, or rode her bicycle in the environs of Worcester Park, and when he saw her go home and fall into the arms of his twin, he could not help feeling a strange mixture of jealousy and contentment. Wells had saved Jane’s life so that his other self could enjoy her, and more than once he had to remind himself that he, too, was this other Wells, and therefore he ought to be as happy that
he loved her the way he did as he would doubtless be sad if, over time, he ceased to love her, which could still happen, regardless of his having risked his life to be able to spend the rest of his days with her.

He realized in time that he had also saved Charles, whom he liked to chance upon in theater foyers, simply to watch the elegant young man flash his dazzling smile and perfect teeth at his acquaintances, and even to walk by and overhear one of his droll comments on the state of the nation or other current affairs, as if by doing so Wells was trying to erase his last memory of Charles, filthy and bedraggled, fleeing through the London sewers, pursued by hideous monsters. He had saved Murray and Emma as well, along with Captain Shackleton and his beloved Claire, and Inspector Clayton, and the coachman whose name escaped him. Yes, wherever they were, happy or not, they could go on with their lives without having to suffer a Martian invasion.