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17: Victorian World of 1892
As I became conscious, I panicked briefly—I was underwater, struggling to swim.
Then I realized I didn't need to struggle—I was buoyant and virtually weightless.
Immediately after that, I realized that the adjustments just made were helping me breathe underwater. The Membrane not only makes changes, but often leaves a trace memory in the mind, like a technical writing with charts and diagrams. The Membrane 'explained' that we had been 'adjusted' and sent to a random though suitable (by the Membrane's logic) station in the network: London in 1882.
With my improved body, I felt a new sense of strength and capability as I swam up toward a greenish, wavering blob of light. I saw the dark silhouettes of Sindi and Trini making similar motions on either side of me. They appeared to be in no more trouble than I was. I was actually amused to watch the large, quicksilver bubbles of my own breath floating above me. Together, the bubbles and the women and I shot toward the terminus of this pleasant experience.
I broke surface and immediately felt my eyebrows sizzle into a frozen state. The air was frigid, and the water on my skin iced over in a moment. My hair solidified into a helmet of icy pain. "Oh Gods," I said as we three regarded each other with stunned eyes and wide-open, shocked mouths.
"You there!" said a clear, crisp voice in what I would soon learn was an upper-class British accent. "Are you absolutely insane?"
It was a wonder that my heart hadn't stopped. I struggled to move toward the shore of this backyard paradise, but my muscles were becoming solid and sluggish. Talk about a test of my newly adjusted body! The three of us just managed to drag ourselves from the water. What had looked warm and green from below was an absinthe-colored layer of ice a quarter inch thick, reflecting the wild array of tropical plants in the greenhouses in back of Mr. Darby Tatnall's mansion on the northern outskirts of London.
As the three of us crawled up through the snow toward the building, a tall man in a house coat bore down on us holding an old revolver. He was a wiry young man just starting to show the first signs of gray in the thick black hair above his ears. He wore thick leather slippers lined on the inside with fur, dark corduroy trousers, and a dark red woollen smoking jacket over a collarless white shirt. His breath came in tatters of vapor.
Another man's voice behind him said: "Is everything quite all right, Tatty?"
"You can watch over me from the porch with the squirrel gun, Herbert, if you don't mind." He looked at us uncertainly, as anger and apprehension turned to pity. "Drunken lot, are you? You picked a hell of a night to fall in my pool."
The man named Herbert appeared on the porch among the ivies and bromeliads, the trumpet vines and potted ficus. He was a slight, blond man of about 25 or 26 and he walked with a trace of a limp. When he saw us, he cried out in astonishment: "I say, there's two women with him. Do you suppose they are having some sort of feminist demonstration?"
"More likely ruddy drunk, the lot of them. Come up here and warm up while I think about calling the police."
Herbert said: "They have ice on their backs. Quick, Tatty, get them before a fire or they'll die of cold."
"Oh Gods yes, please," the three of us said as we stumbled up the snowy, grassy lawn from the swimming pond below. Ahead was a brick house glowing with light and warmth and comfort. A glance back revealed the black pond, glittering under starlight, with an enormous planet sitting smack dab over the turrets, domes, and chimneys of the city. I managed one more shocked glance at this planetary apparition, the likes of which I'd never seen or imagined. There seemed to be a face on it, which made me wonder if this was all a dream. I was violently shivering by now, and my teeth rattled in my skull so that my ears started to hurt.
"You're in bad shape, aren't you," said the man called Tatty as he put the gun aside and helped us one by one into his home.
"Thank you, thank you," was all we managed to stammer while shivering.
"Here, by the fire," said Herbert as he took Sindi and Trini by the elbows and guided them to a potbellied stove in the corner. Its burnished steel cylinder glowed almost red, and Herbert added more coals and rattled them about inside with a poker. Meanwhile, Tatty guided me to a large brick fireplace and threw a blanket over me. "You can turn toward the fire as you peel off those soaked things," he said. He turned to the women. "Ladies, modesty compels me to tell you that there are blankets in the chest under the window. Mr. Wells and I will absent ourselves from the room for a few minutes to give you time to change out of your wet clothing and wrap yourselves in warm blankets. It is the best we can do for now. If you'll excuse us, we will bring hot tea and brandy. Have you eaten?"
We got it all sorted out, by and by, and soon enough we were sitting at a square oak table with the two men. The older man, who was about 30, introduced himself as Darby Tatnall. He'd made his fortune in various engineering ventures, including machine parts for the newest steamships of the Royal Navy (the British Navy, he explained, as we looked puzzled). The other introduced himself as a teacher of biology who happened also to fancy himself as being a writer.
Wells said: "You speak heavily accented English, and we can barely understand you."
"I understand you very well," I said. The Membrane floated an understanding of all this through me, but I said nothing of that. It seemed our language and that of Tatty and Wells were distantly related, and when I spoke, my mouth was forced into unfamiliar gyrations to put out speech these two men would recognize.
"Where are you from?" Tatnall asked.
"Mars," I said.
Tatnall and Well sat back with a start. For a moment their eyes bulged. Then they slapped the table and started laughing. They nearly laughed themselves unconscious. They had already had some brandy with their tea, and this lubricated their sense of humor.
The women had said very little until now. They were a brainy pair, well in command of their situation as they kept their tartan blankets wrapped around themselves and stirred honey into their teas.
I smiled. "It can't hurt to tell the truth."
This brought more gales of laughter. "You three are really too much," Tatnall said. He held his chest and gasped. "Oh God, Herbie, I haven't screamed like that in a long time."
"Really," Wells said. There was something in his eyes that intrigued me, a mix of melancholy and intelligence, buoyed by a determined spirit. He also had an eye for the ladies, and the robust attractiveness of the two priestesses did not escape his twinkling, mischievous eyes. The two women were very dedicated to their chastity, however, and no amount of winking and writhing by Wells could get any sort of positive response from them. There was one brief lmoment where he put his hand on Trini's shoulder in a rather sensuous way, and she deftly, without straining herself, put a pain grip on his wrist that made him turn silently purple with pain and terror. All she said, very quietly, was "No." Both men got the message, and that was the end of that. I was not under priestly vows anymore, since my expulsion ceremony included defrocking, but some habits die hard.
Tatnall was a bit more reserved that Wells, I found, but obviously a man of considerable qualities. A self-made millionaire at 30, as well as a professor of engineering, he was an accomplished man of his time and place. "We are dying to know more about the two Martian ladies who have deigned to grace our table this evening. Are you ladies beginning to recover from your chilly ordeal?"
"We are recovering nicely, thank you," Trini said.
I myself was beginning to become more aware how they must look to strangers. Trini, with her dark red hair, and Sindi, with her blonde hair, both had a scrubbed, fresh, youthful attractiveness.They were well-trained not only as priestesses, but in the combat arts of the Swat Guards. They were not women to trifle with, in short, but they carried themselves with soft-spoken gracefulness. The adjustment had made us shorter and squatter than we had been on Mars, and we seemed to fit in quite well in their world. That thought led me to ask: "Say, what is the name of your planet?"
This brought on renewed howls of laughter, as I had half expected it would.
Through tears rolling down his cheeks, Tatnall wailed: "Our planet! Oh that's rich. That is so good."
"We dwell on the planet Earth," said H. G. Wells with mock solemnity before bursting into renewed, helpless laughter. It went on and on like this for some time.
(Comment aside from one who has traveled in time and can now append information then lacking at Tatnall's evening study: none of us realized it on this frigid November 1892 night, but within two years there would be quite a stir about Mars. The sciences in general, and nature, were being much discussed. Darwin's biological postulations that supplemented the geological discoveries of Lyell and others were upsetting long-established dogmas. In 1883, nature had shown her power by blasting aloft the tropical island of Krakatoa, so noisily that church bells rang in London hours later when the blast reached around the world. The Frenchman Jules Verne was a generation ahead of Wells in publishing scientific adventures. The world had watched in awe as the Americans fought the 'first modern war,' so much so that Verne, impressed by American advances in artillery, had in 1865 published From the Earth to the Moon, citing American technology. In 1894, Mars was due to swing very close to the Earth, and the world's latest telescopes would be trained on the Red Planet—notably Schiaparelli. This leading astronomer, working from Berlin and the observatory at Brera in Italy, had begun making the most detailed studies of the Martian surface ever, from the 1870s onward. His theories on canali ('channels', not 'canals') led romantics to depict entire civilizations like those of Ray Bradbury in the mid-20th Century. The eccentric astronomer Nicolas Flammarion, in Paris, had already published a bestseller kindling worldwide interest in extraterrestrial beings. Percival Lowell's observations at Flagstaff would take Schiaparelli's work a great leap further in postulating an advanced Martian civilization. In 1894, a French observer would claim he had seen lights on Mars. Vast changes in human history took place at precisely in this era. Most notably, the human population skyrocketed due to new advances in sanitation, lower infant mortality rates, food preservation, technological advances, and the like. Simple things like hygienic plumbing and public health awareness would cut cholera and other diseases dramatically. Air travel and the automobile revolutionized not only the coming and going of people, but the carrying and bringing of things. Chesterton had remarked upon the tendency of Utopians to devote endless discussion to the means by which bread should be delivered to their ideal societies (by balloon, carriage, or whatever) and all too little time to how the bread would actually be gotten. The age of rapid transportation and free capital solved such questions in a grimy but efficient manner. The late 1800s were an age that had been at relative peace for some decades, and its denizens tended to be more optimistic about technology and the future, than had they known about the looming nightmare of the century with its endless butchery and terror.)
What we did not realize was that our lives, and theirs, and in fact the world's, were about to change in a matter of minutes. The Membrane wasn't done sorting through the calculations of what it had to do all up and down the line of its local transit stations. It is remarkable, really, how networked this entire organic entity is when you think about it. What an accomplishment on the part of the Laars, but we knew almost nothing of them at this point. In that sense, we were almost as much in the dark as these two Victorian gentlemen who had been enjoying a quiet evening of brandy and cigars on a frosty November night while snow blew about the gaslit streets. It would be some time before we pieced together who we were, much less that they would understand who we were.
"Are you with some sort of circus or theater company?" Tatnall said as he opened a box of Cuban cigars. I didn't know what they were, and took one out. I sniffed it, while the two Londoners watched with smurks and hilarious eyes. When I tried to bite into it, thinking it was food, the started laughing again. The taste of that thing was so strong, and so vile, that I threw it down and ran to the kitchen, where I retched into the sink. Moments later, as I stood pastily looking out over Tatnall's pond outside, they came strolling after me. Each had thumb hooked in a suspender, and a lit cigar in the other hand. "Care for a puff, old man?" said Tatnall. They had had a bit more brandy than I'd given them credit for, and they burst into little puffs of laughter. I was puzzled as they inhaled smoke from these brown cylinders. The smoke had an odd smell I have a hard time describing. It was not entirely unpleasant, and of course these were the finest, mildest cigars a man could buy. It was a sort of smell that filled a room and made it cheerful, I thought, as I slowly puffed on Wells' cigar and began to like it if I just took tiny draughts of it. I still turned green and retched again, but they did manage to teach me this deadly habit, and I had some difficulty later divesting myself of it—the less said about that, the better. The two women found it distasteful, and did not smoke.
As we stood in the kitchen, we three men, there was a crash in the pond. The house shook, rolled, rumbled, and we each clung to the nearest piece of furniture.
"Earthquake," said Tatnall, who had served as a youthful infantry private during the Second Afghanistan War that ended disastrously for the British in 1880, as all Afghan adventures over time seem doomed to end.
"Impossible," Wells said, "tidal wave."
"Nonsense," Tatnall said, then dropped his cigar on the floor as he turned white and pointed outside. "My God, what is that?"
I turned to look, and saw a remarkable object protruding from Tatnall's pond. Good thing we weren't in there at the moment, or we would have been crushed.
"A train or a circus wagon," Wells said. "Maybe a gypsy cart."
"I'm not so sure," Tatnall said. "My God, should we go out again, or send for a constable?"
"Both, I'd say," said Wells, "but first let's go out and see if there are lives to be saved. Isn't there a railway track nearby?"
"Oh, that's several streets over," Tatnall said, "and this couldn't possibly be a car that derailed." The women came into the kitchen to see what was going on. All in a babble, we moved as a group to the rear door. "Does this have something to do with you people?" Tatnall demanded.
Trini said: "If it does, we don't know what."
Wells had his service revolver again, and Wells the bird gun, as for the second time in as many hours they trod carefully down the snowy lawn out from under the glass roof of the greenhouse. Meanwhile, the carriage that had fallen from the sky had bobbed upward somewhat and sat askew. One end rested on the lawn, while its other end floated in the water.
(More comments aside: From my later adventures, I might now say it looked remarkably like one of those RV Recreational Vehicles driven by Americans of a century later—but this was not American, nor British, nor Martian—this was an artifact from far in the future. It is worth noting that H. G. Wells wrote his first best-selling imaginative novel, The Time Machine, shortly after these events occurred, and published it in 1884-5. None of us had any way of knowing these things on that night when three real Martians arrived on Earth, an event H.G. Wells would in l898 embellish into War of the Worlds, and which Orson Wells, no relation to H.G., would make into a disastrously famous radio play in 1938.)
"What is that bloody thing?" Tatnall said as the two Brits stood looking at a thing resembling a railroad car but streamlined, in a manner not yet known at the time.
"Looks a bit like a bullet," Wells said.
I pointed to the symbols on its side. "We've seen that before." It was the enigmatic diamond-shape one encounters in every Temporale transfer station.
"What does it mean?" Wells asked.
Sindi spoke up: "We have no idea. I think it has some sort of navigational significance, maybe—" She suddenly clamped up as Trini nudged her, and I knew she'd been about to say 'in outer space.' That's all these two gentlemen needed. But it was too late.
They whirled and regarded us with faces as pale as the snow at their feet. "Among the planets?" they said. Wells said 'planets' and Tatnall said 'stars.' Same idea.
"You really have come from Mars," Wells said marveling.
Tatnall hesitated whether to raise or lower his gun. "It's like sitting with ghosts and not knowing it. We've been socializing with those, what does Jean Reynaud call you, 'people of the air.'
"We are flesh and blood like you," said the practical Trini. "Now come inside before we have to wrap you in blankets."
"I want to explore that thing," Tatnall said excitedly. He rushed past us and, while the rest of us returned to the table, he dressed warmly and hurried outside with a tool box in one hand and a carriage lantern in the other.
"Don't damage it!" Wells and I both shouted after him.
"I wouldn't dream of it," said Tatnall.
We went inside and sat around the table. Wells said: "So, Martians, how are things on Mars?"
What played out was a conversation of loose ends. Not only were there holes in our knowledge, but we had no idea what it was we didn't know. At the same time, Wells could not have foreseen fixed wing flight, much less space travel and much else besides. Give him plenty of credit, while asking why: he mentions in The Time Machine (1884) that time is a fourth dimension, beating Einstein to the punch by 21 years or so. In the same vein, Wells' agile mind quickly leapt from the slowly disintegrating half-life of radium, discovered in the 1890s, to the idea that if all the energy could be dissipated at once, you'd have an atomic bomb. That inspired leading physicists around the world to start building one, on a path that led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. So the conversation ended with Wells thinking we had come from the Red Planet of his day, and we didn't realize that Wells and his universe had perished more than twenty centuries before our time.
The important thing was that we agreed to keep our presence a secret for now. Wells actually was eager to publish something, anything, but he deferred to the older Tatnall—luckily. This was also the age of the Hague Peace Conferences, in whose naïve and social optimism a sincere effort was made to abolish the progress of warfare. Until that point, men had largely met on the field of battle and beaten each other with clubs or stabbed each other with sharp objects. In recent centuries, they could also shoot each other with things that went pop. The trouble was that the things that went pop got bigger and bigger and went boom. Forward thinkers like the Fabians and other proto-hippies wanted to avoid those things going from boom to KA-BOOM or worse.
Therefore, when Tatnall walked in a few hours later, muddy and dirty but grinning from ear to ear, and announced he had a time machine in his backyard, the immediate consensus was to keep mum about it. We all shook on that, and kept our word, and we have kept our word to this day.
CLass="break">* * * *
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.
CLass="break">* * * *
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 mothern-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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