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Page 42.
 What I did find interesting was that the first inklings of a technology similar to the Membrane was taking shape as people networked these little toys. Sitting at their keyboards, borrowed from typewriter technology of H. G. Wells' time, and their screens, borrowed from 1950s television technology, and so on, they looked very self-important but reminded me of kids sitting around pretending to talk through tin cans connected with string. We learned that the atomic terror had given way to a new religious terror in which various people wanted to murder each other in the name of their loving deities. I would not have believed this about my own culture until I'd heard of Balesso and the plotters in King City. There is a saying among the Americans, who rule during the millennial period: "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
Tatnall learned that he had been forgotten by history, but that Wells had become famous as the immortal scrivener of great books—including one called The Time Machine. Tatnall, to my knowledge, never told Wells. It would take all the fun out of life, obviously, if there were no surprises. Among those surprises would be the list of Wells' liaisons with beautiful and famous women while remaining married to the faithful Catherine. Nor would it serve any purpose to tell him she would predecease him in 1927 at a young age, while he would live on to died in 1946, having outlived the Blitz. Adrift in the world after the passing of Catherine (or Jane, as they would style her), he looked dourly from the ruins of London during the Luftwaffe savaging of the Battle of Britain. It must have reminded him of the destruction he foresaw in his later imaginative novels, a gloomy vision of the future indeed. In fact, it was foreshadowed on a chilly October night in 1917 when he and several other literary lions were having dinner and brandy at the house of J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, and Arnold Bennett were all at the table together, when Zeppelins of the Kaiser's canvas-and-wood air fleet sailed silently overhead and dropped bombs. Barrie and his guests all went up on the roof to watch the dreadful excitement. This was near the Victoria Embankment of the Thames by the Charing Cross Station bridge. Thus, the Blitz in 1941 must have seemed like not only Götterdämmerung, but déjà vu. Of all this and much more, Tatnall was aware in 1892, and he mercifully kept it from his friend. Speaking of friends, Conan Doyle was not far away on Wimpole Street by now, composing the first Sherlock Holmes stories while running his ophthalmology practice. Like the Time Traveler, Holmes is a creation of reason, the last Newtonian before the chaos of Relativity. My observations, of course, are based on extensive reading and audio, and I was delighted to find a growing wealth of such materials as our path carried us forward in time. It was an excellent way to utilize my stern training under the Abbot, with materials that seem remarkable for their poverty now that I have the wealth of all Earthly (Erdithly, the Martians might say) learning overflowing my lap and rolling around my feet.
The journeys we took forward, eventually with the reluctant Wells on board, told the two Englishmen the dire future of their world. There would be pandemics and terrorism. There would be natural disasters, some caused by man and others just consequences of nature. There would be further wars, further killing, all of it incomprehensible a generation or two later. All this would deeply influence Wells and inform the social reforms he would ever espouse. The journey forward taught us our history, finally, so that we learned what NASA really was, and that there were no godpods but hardy little tin cans tossed from earth with a few brave souls on board risking everything to kick start a barren Red Planet into becoming a second earth. We learned, surprisingly, that a wave of dark conquerors would sweep in from the galaxy a few centuries hence and make our system a backwater of interstellar trade. More surprisingly these alien rulers would be gone within a few centuries for reasons yet to be understood, but in the meantime they would leave their ruins behind, and mankind would rise anew from the ashes. Most surprising of all, however, was the connection between the far past and the distant future. Of the future there is not much room to write in this book, and the telling of the explorations of Wells' friend Darby Tatnall (The Time Traveler, as the owner of villa and laboratory is named in Wells' novel) are best left to Wells.
Our story takes us where Tatnall and Wells did not go—the distant past.
Victorian London had a few charming moments. The dirt and poverty were appalling. The social inequities were enough to make one cry out in anguish. Some of the people here wore eyeglasses—if they were lucky enough to afford them. Sophisticated eye surgery was unheard of, and a good thing because with the septic conditions in operating rooms it was likely you'd lose both eyes and die of a brain infection. More than once, seeing a face in a crowd, I was reminded of that odious little man on the zeppelin above Olympus Mons, whom I had dubbed Flash. I wondered what alley he lay in, bleeding, after having propositioned some young tough like the one who stole my wallet near the Holy City. It was hard not to make comparisons, but the grime and poverty of London seemed by far worse than anything I'd seen on Mars.
Like most timeless metropolises, London of Victoria's age looked better through a distant glass. I have seen cities whose glittering skyline was a beacon of wonderment, which seemed to vanish as I walked their littered and crime-ridden streets. From ancient Rome to Victorian London, from Paris in the Middle Ages where wolves roamed the streets at night during bitterly cold winters, to Berlin between the last feeble Junckers and the first wild-eyed Nazis where people starved to death, or else froze in their unheated apartments after they had finished burning their books and furniture to keep warm—I have seen it all. I call it skyline syndrome. Nevertheless, I must remark that it was in London, in 1816, that the first feeble gaslight flickered into life, and by the time we stayed with Tatnall, the streets were a picturesque scene that engraved itself on the human psyche, one might say upon the racial DNA, so profound was the effect on the imagination of coming from the countryside into the city, and seeing such a sea of lights. These were not the torch lights to which people had been accustomed since the beginning of human time, but artificial lights. The gaslamp era only lasted a quarter century at most, but it was part of that great transition out of the literally dark ages. Gas was dangerous, causing many sudden fatal explosions, but it had charm. Its softly sighing light was seductive. It did not flicker, as candles and burning wood do. It was steady as burning oil, but brighter. It enabled people to start living at night. It opened new vistas of the imagination in theater, writing, philosophy. It added hours to the day so that people could be more productive. It added new mythologies about cozy holidays, starting with Dickens' publication of A Christmas Carol in 1843. When all is said and done, just as ordinary people will ever continue to be fascinated by the Rome of the ancient emperors, so the British found their moment during the age of Victoria. I resolved to return here again, and to visit the Time Travelers—to see what really happened during their journey 8,000 centuries into the future, which Wells would sanitize in his story.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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