Mars the Divine (Empire of Time Series) by John Argo

Page 40.

There is one matter on which I must speak. It was a painful, but illuminating one. Many of the Victorians are not especially religious in an impassioned sense, but most seem to pay homage to both Queen and Church. They have some Free Domish construct in which Palace and Temple are separate, but then the Queen is nominally the head of their religion, which is called the Church of England. This is part of a much larger set of beliefs called Christianity, which apparently involves many contradictions. For one thing, they love their God, but murdered him, and then felt bad about it, so the rest of their existence on Earth is to be spent atoning for this. Alternatively, they blame it all on a small group of people called the Jews, whom they have hounded for centuries, when it was the Roman occupiers who actually tortured and killed this human manifestation of their god. There is much that is confusing, like for example the fact that they are adamant about conquering and killing others—Britain in this era owns half the world—but their god, to whom they cling, forbids violence. They have until recently been slave owners, but they are supposed to love their fellow man. In short, they are a confusing lot of people, and there are so many of them! More painful to us, however, was the realization that much of what we were taught was simply a distortion of the truth viewed through primitive eyes. Until we set foot in the magnificent St. Paul's Cathedral, and heard the wonderful music there, and realized how much it resembled our colorful ceremonies on Mars, we had clung to a fundament of faith. Now the only question was: could any of it be salvaged? We wondered about speaking with their clergy, to see if we could straighten out the historical kinks and get things in line again. After all, our belief system had to be derived from theirs, just as theirs dated back to the beginning of recorded history. Consider only that one of the greatest debates raging at this time, which would go on for centuries yet in their former colony of America, was between modern science and an ancient Mesopotamian creation myth—one of the symptoms clearly pointing the way downhill as the Americans lost their edge and became just another checkered surface in a flat and equalized world. Realizing that there is a profound gap between the letter and the spirit, which can only be bridged by the double helix or twin ladder, of faith and reason, we three were near tears as we stood outside St. Paul's, held hands in a circle, bowed our heads, and silently renewed the vows of our faith in Mars the Divine.

Wells, at the same time, had fodder for his brilliant first novel. I should make haste to point out that the nice house and large greenhouse of Rod Taylor in the 1960s movie were entirely a fiction. Herbert George Wells at that time lived in cramped quarters with his mother-in-law and his cousin Isabel, whom he had married. It was a miserable marriage for him, and he often went for long walks or escaped to his friends' homes, as he had on this particular evening. At other times he might take the Underground to Pall Mall and thence to the Reform Club. Our arrival, it happens, triggered key events in his life that soon followed. He had come up the hard way—like Dickens, he'd had a brutal early experience with being an apprentice that marked him for years—and was now earning a pittance as a teacher in a commercial sort of night school. The only advantage of this position was that, through it, he was soon to meet his exceptionally beautiful young pupil, Amy Catherine, whom he would marry in 1895 after abruptly walking out on Isabel and her mother. Tatnall, incidentally, taught mechanical engineering at the Normal School of Science in London, where Wells had in the late 1880s studied biology under T.H. Huxley, but became bored and dropped out by 1887 without completing his degree. Wells had also studied with Tatnall, who was at one time a graduate assistant in the Biology department before switching completely to Mechanical Engineering, his true passion.

In The Time Machine, Wells writes fondly of a wonderful atmosphere in the dining room with soft flickering lights and shining silver. He writes of a spacious house with 'a long, draughty corridor leading to his laboratory.' He had, of course, no such thing in his tiny apartment, but guess what—he could have been describing elements of Tatty's manor in North London. I soon began to think that George Pal must have had this place in mind when he filmed the clubby dinner with George Kirby and the other merry-goers in their Holiday season, and that wonderful greenhouse/laboratory where the time machine comes and goes.

That brings us to this: once Darby Tatnall had figured out the general mechanisms of this time machine, there was no stopping any of us from experimenting a bit.

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