HERBERT GEORGE WELLS: "UN ITINERARIO HACIA SU MISTERIO Y SU GRAN SECRETO FUTURISTA"
Apareció la señora Higgins, su ama de llaves, que había encendido ya algunas de las luces de la casa:
-¡Dios mío, señor Wells, que espantosa niebla! Resulta imposible dar un solo paso ahí fuera- Exclamó llena de desaliento y terror- Ah, el busto del señor Darwin... se ha caído.
-Era un mamarracho que me sacaba de quicio, un estorbo,... que más da.
-He creído oír los pasos de siempre... esos ruidos inexplicables que se repiten cada noche, señor Wells,... en el invernadero, en el jardín... No podría precisarlo. Pero lo cierto es que estoy aterrada. No me atrevía a salir de mi gabinete.
-Pues, siga usted allí, y no salga de él, oiga lo que oiga.
Herbert George Wells se concentraba ahora en un nuevo pensamiento: "La extensión, el tiempo, el espacio, la substancia inteligente"
Observó a la señora Higgins y se dijo para sí: "Un día u otro desaparecerá la forma. ¡Pero la esencia no perece! La materia es indestructible, aunque ese cuerpo que está ahí, frente a mí, por así decirlo, ¿qué es? No es más que un ropaje o más bien una máscara ridícula. He de huir... Mi mundo racional y científico es lo único real. Sí, lo único real es mi idea"- Y añadió, dirigiéndose a la confusa mujer:- ¡Buenas noches!... Y cuídese esa máscara.
La señora Higgins, aunque impresionada como de costumbre, le observó ahora sin extrañarse demasiado. Siempre le había tomado por loco.
-¿Se retira usted a su laboratorio?- Inquirió.
-¡Sí, sí,... y no quiero ser molestado bajo ningún concepto!... Espero que no hayan visitas en una noche como ésta... Pero, si alguien apareciera, no estoy para nadie. ¿Me entiende? ¡Para nadie!... Me voy...
-Pero ¿y esos ruídos?- Volvió a las andadas la aterrorizada mujer.
-¡Para nadie, ya me ha oído!... ¡Para nadie!
La señora Higgins prácticamente se encogió de hombros. Aunque sin entenderlo, le temía... alguien le dijo alguna vez que la ciencia de estos hombres tan inteligentes era peligrosa para la sociedad. En lugar de responder, hizo un gesto afirmativo con la cabeza, y se dirigió a su gabinete.
Entonces el corazón de Herbert George Wells se colmó de nuevo de aquellas aspiraciones desordenadas, de aquellos espacios luminosos que él pronto exploraría. Sus delirios probablemente sobrepasaban los límites de la Naturaleza. ¿Pero quién los conocía en verdad? Él magnetizaría esos espacios, los recorrería ahora. Su gran "Máquina del Tiempo", a la que había dedicado, para su construcción, años de durísimos estudios, era el anuncio de una nueva aurora. Le permitiría conversar con los espíritus de los que ya desaparecieron. Todo lo que ahora resultaba intangible se haría real. Volaría en el tiempo, de la tierra a los astros, de los astros a la tierra; un vaivén gigantesco, una nueva transmisión de la historia, un intercambio continuo con el progreso o el retroceso del mundo. Se puso manos a la obra.
Observó la ciudad semi a oscuras, caliginosa, y se rió de ella: "¡Te desafío mundo!", exclamó. Y luego con aire enfático dijo: "Tengo el tiempo en mis manos... y el espacio me pertenece. ¡Os desafío hombres absurdos!"... Creyó oír voces imaginarias salir de las paredes, y se rió de nuevo: "¡Sí, os desafío a que lo crucéis, a que lo crucéis como voy a cruzarlo yo a partir de hoy... para no volver jamás!"... Hasta tal punto le descorazonaba ahora la fealdad del mundo conocido!: "El tiempo me aguarda... La tierra, la vida humana, será más bella... Hallaré un mundo más armónico. Y aunque la historia antigua es oscura por falta de documentos, yo abundaré en ella,... y también en la moderna, la futura y desconocida. Voy a conocerla más profundamente, a estudiarla"...
Había dotado a su "Máquina del Tiempo" con un detector maravilloso de fechas que jamás embrollarían los hechos. Todos los guarismos se transformarían en figuras reales. Los sucesos, las acciones, facilitados por la mágica memoria indagatoria de su "Máquina", se relacionarían a la perfección con cada una de sus partes, incluso las más abstrusas. La historia del mundo abriría ante él su auténtico árbol genealógico, y él podría, por fin, elegir con cual quedarse.
"... La "Máquina" parecía una enorme sopera decorada con extraños cerrojos dorados que cerraban dos portezuelas vidriadas a ambos lados. Tras ella se alzaba una especie de rueda con aspas monumentales, ocultas por unas rejillas, que recordaban el colorido ramillete redondeado que viste, por detrás, a los pavos reales. El morro ofrendaba todo el aspecto de una monstruosa tortuga que cobijara la totalidad de su caparazón en un estañado cobrizo del que sobresalía un verdadero torbellino de tornillos. La parte baja parecía una cuba al revés con cuatro extraños tubos en forma de bocina de la que habrían de partir terroríficos chorros rojos de electricidad, que serían arrastrados por el gran ventilador trasero a través de un torrente de cables pareados. De toda esta lamentable fisonomía amarronada, de crecida concha estriada, partían dos amplias alas de malla igualmente metálicas que acababan en forma de talón. El interior de la cabina era como un manto escarlata, en que se aposentaba una especie de chocante y redondo sillón; y frente al mismo, se extendía una gran placa plateada que casi chocaba con las rodillas del probable viajero del tiempo que habría de tripularlo. Innumerables botones de colores afirmaban que existían una inmensidad inexplicable de uniones internas, capturadas en una oscuridad misteriosa que tan sólo su artífice, creador del artefacto, conocía. Una adornada palanquilla de oro, que apuntaba hacia el navegante espacial como una bayoneta de punta roma, se hendía en una ranura que parecía un ojo entrecerrado entre pestañas de cobre, portadoras de probables canalizaciones eléctricas. Y junto a la palanqueta, se mostraba una pantallita cuadrada en la que habría de ir desenrollándose un interminable cilindro de pergamino, sobre cuya alba carilla, una vez emprendido el viaje, se iría plasmando, merced a una plumilla tintada que poseyera la facultad hechicera de un dedo mágico, un cúmulo de fechas, años y noticias escritas, en grandes letras mayúsculas. Dos enormes anillas sujetadas por cadenas a las paredes, y una especie de recortado y argentado tubo de chimenea, que parecía conformar un extravagante respiradero, aguardaban con languidez que aquella especie de sarcófago abombado cruzara el espacio real y se difuminara misteriosamente en el titánico ábside del tiempo..."
"... Londres desconocía al asesino somnoliento. No obstante, Jekyll-Hyde y Herbert George Wells vivían enfrentados por una distancia tan endeble que no tardaría en desencadenar sobre ambos nuevas imprudencias. Jekyll imploraba y Wells seguía rehuyendo la esclavitud... La siguiente nota me hizo temblar en el silencio. No daba crédito a lo que leía. Una oleada de repugnancia me invadió: Louis Jekyll comunicaba a su "gran amigo Herbert George Wells" su próximo enlace matrimonial con Miss. Beatrix Emery, hija de Henry Emery, uno de los más honestos y preclaros diputados del Parlamento Londinense, joven de extraordinaria belleza, excelente reputación, y cuya dulzura e inocencia brindaban uno de los más exquisitos ejemplos éticos frente a la inclemencia social del gran Londres"
"... Pero Louis aún quiso asestarme un último golpe de gracia. Y no tan sólo a mí, sino a todo Londres. Recibí una carta (copia de su puño y letra escrita con la misma tinta sanguinolenta de sus anteriores escritos) de otra enviada a Scotland Yard, y que Louis había expedido al inspector George Lusk el 16 de octubre de 1888: "Mando la mitad de un riñón que he arrebatado a una mujer y que he guardado especialmente para usted. La otra mitad la he frito y me la he comido"... En el sobre que me remitió indicaba: "Para Herbert George Wells desde el infierno."
"... Conservad ese despliegue emocional de la
benevolencia, de la fraternidad humana y de la más benigna sinceridad
del sentimiento. Todo ello debe movernos por toda la eternidad hacia la
comprensión entre los hombres. Y a la razón de la no violencia. Huid de
toda contingencia de futuras dificultades... Abarcar toda la Extensión y
todo el Pensamiento del amor es englobar una serie de términos
indisolubles vinculados entre sí por leyes de una necesaria
magnanimidad..."
"-Profeta de la inmortalidad... -murmuró
despreciativamente el ser Bosswellyes, acometido por un profundo
malestar- No eres más que una apariencia... ¡Nada!... Acabemos..."
"... Porque ¿qué es la vida sino una eterna despedida?...
La
frase de Herbert George Wells se fue tras el último fotón de luz de la
proyección holográfica, ahora conmutada por la criatura Bosswellyes. La
vida mortal, su esperanza, y su tiempo brumoso jamás parecieron tan
lamentables.

La novela “El Misterio y El Gran Secreto de H.G. Wells” escrita por Tassilon-Stavros se erige como un fascinante exploración del legado de uno de los más influyentes autores de la ciencia ficción. A través de una prosa cuidada y evocadora, Tassilon Stavros nos invita a adentrarnos en un laberinto de ideas y reflexiones que trascienden lo meramente literario, adentrándose en una parte inventada de la vida íntima y compleja de un Wells tan innovador como desconocido 100 años después de su paso por la existencia.
HERBERT GEORGE WELLS: "A JOURNEY TOWARD ITS MYSTERY AND ITS GREAT FUTURISTIC SECRET"
... "That night the whole city offered a ghostly image, tiny and withered, behind a very thick fog. The London groves resembled spectral, dry masses, unrecognizable through the whitish silkiness of that sad winter haze that seemed torn from the cemeteries. And that same sadness of the horrible night accentuated the seriousness of his thoughts. In all the large windows of the mansion one could glimpse the immense livid tapestry of that insurmountable mist, whose stickiness ran along the glass like aged tombstones hanging from the cornices after having been forgotten in a space of unfathomable width that had itself lost all earthly sensation. He stumbled upon one of the busts at the entrance, perhaps that of Charles Darwin, dead for ten years, which stood in the great hall of the mansion. He kicked it, for he had wanted to get rid of it for a long time, Although I once admired his studies on the natural selection of living beings on the planet and his fundamental work "The Origin of Species."
"...The "Time Machine" was already sailing, as if fanned by a volcanic vortex, seething and exhaling a sharp, blinding, and renewed light in the frozen spaces that, as if balanced and dazzling, seemed to offer a restored celestial category to the infinite expanses in which it would move. The parchment cylinder was shearing off news and dates inside the glazed quadrilateral, behind which the inked quill pen would spread, pouring the palingenic ointment of historical vainglory into letters and words, carving before Wells with its nails the penitentiary bite of the written word, the vibrant syncope of the conscience and blood of the world, richly accommodated in the sumptuousness of its happening just as the wise man imagined. The quill pen began to shoot as if soaked in the anguished sweat of the events it would transmit..."
"For this very reason, I couldn't help but feel a distressing memory of Hyde's last victim: the prostitute Yvy Peterson. Wouldn't the young Beatrix Emery sooner or later suffer the same fate, unaware of the monster hiding behind the seductive image of Louis Jekyll?... A few days later, Mrs. Higgins announced the unexpected visit (he had finally decided to appear before me again!) of Louis Jekyll. It was a rainy morning, bitterly cold, and I had taken refuge in my small library by the comforting fire in the fireplace. Lately, I had hardly slept. I barricaded myself in my laboratory. My nights had no horizons other than those I gave to my project. Shunning sleep, my mind, which had yielded either through indifference, apathy, repugnance, or hatred (at least, that's what I intended) to the dullness that "material things" provided the world, deliberated, He struggled, wandered off, while the rest of humanity ate, drank, sang, prayed, or slept. I continued my scientific studies. The only luminous focus that shone on my existence was that of those prodigious, now almost definitive contours that my "Time Machine" had taken. For me, science was undermined throughout England. My era was summed up in a cataclysm. I wanted nothing more to do with anyone. Jekyll-Hyde was also part of my lost world. It was nothing more than a stormy sea with its ebb and flow of immorality and evil. And despite the repulsion that the announcement of his engagement had caused me, I also wanted nothing to do with him, nor with his evil dualism, nor with his supposed work in favor of science, an occupation of which he used to boast so much and which was clearly disastrous. His intellectual life—some adventure novel he had published a few years before—had never awakened in me either. I have the slightest curiosity. And finally, when I had him before me, I suffered a tremendous incitement: I would have "kicked" him out of my study (the first thing I did was hide from his vulture-like gaze some of my private corrections, scattered on my desk, concerning the project I was hiding in my laboratory). Our reunion represented such an intense moment of confusion that I didn't know how to smooth over all the difficulties it entailed. Louis hesitated. He was frozen and sat by the fire. He held in his hands a manuscript that, of course, I didn't know about. He watched the flames, fascinated and inert. The manuscript fell to the floor, and neither of us bothered to pick it up. "You're not interested, are you?" he gestured with a pained air, "But it's your price... the price Herbert George Wells must pay his benefactor Louis Jekyll." His threat didn't arouse the slightest unease in me. I knew well the wretched prerogatives with which he usually coated his so-called judgments of morality. His threat was worthy of that deceptive ethic. Louis had never had a virtue based on devotion and clemency. The chivalrous traits of his morality were always based on revenge. It was his most violent cult. With his satanic acts, he had sought to create history. But his history was Robespierrian: a suspicious historian who, proposing a new type of morality, simultaneously took revenge on it, guillotining it with his authoritarian tendencies over the society formed by his own worshippers... I didn't protest. I went to the window, behind which a harsh, icy wind blew. The sky was gray as usual in that arid London. Louis, faced with my indifference, trembled with fury. "Do you no longer want my help?" I watched him impassively. "Who asks for help from whom, if not you? Have you forgotten your first writing, the one in which you once again implored my friendship? All you needed was to kneel before me." "You know very well that it wasn't I, Louis Jekyll, who wrote that!" he said with an embarrassed gesture, "but..." "Hyde, of course," I didn't feel the slightest scruple about making it clear. Louis blushed, and now he pulled at the other thread, the strangest one, the one that had brought him to present himself before me: "Aren't you interested in my manuscript?"... "I don't believe you are capable of inventing reasons that would interest me."... His finger violently pointed at the title of the manuscript that remained on the floor. "This plot may interest you, I assure you!" he rolled his eyes at me; his voice possessed the artificial and absurd impulse of a confidant, the perverse maxim that so well described the drama of any of his many intrigues. I took the manuscript. Upon reading its title, despite my stupefaction, I tried to keep the slightest displeasure from my face, although, inwardly, why deny it, I was ashamed of Louis's monstrous abjection. He looked at me with the same furious attention as before. "Who do you think it will hurt more when it comes out: you or me?"... "You're completely mad! I doubt very much that you dare publish this monstrosity," I declared with an emphasis of total indifference, even though a wave of disgust was once again washing over me. "Do you think so? Have you forgotten that I am a widely recognized writer throughout England? While you..." he smiled radiantly and virulently, "what have you ever been capable of creating? Your absurd and pretentious scientific studies have never managed to interest anyone! What would have become of you without my help... without my friendship, without my money? How can you, a poor pariah in this England crowned by the demands of the wealthy nobility, assume the right to consider my latest writing a monstrosity?" Louis's face was once again contorted, but despite everything, he watched me with a kind of vague terror at my indifference. "What else can those pages born of your deranged mind hide? Poor Jekyll, unfortunate Hyde!" I dropped the manuscript back onto the carpeted floor. The title of the same now stood out against the convulsive glow given by the flames of the fireplace: "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll, George Wells and Mr. Hyde"..."
"...But Louis still wanted to deal me one last coup de grâce. And not just to me, but to all of London. I received a letter (a copy in his own handwriting, written in the same bloody ink as his earlier writings) of another letter sent to Scotland Yard, which Louis had sent to Inspector George Lusk on October 16, 1888: "I am sending half a kidney which I took from a woman and which I have kept especially for you. The other half I have fried and eaten."... The envelope he sent me indicated: "To Herbert George Wells from Hell."
"... Preserve that emotional display of benevolence, of human brotherhood, and of the most benign sincerity of feeling. All of this should move us for all eternity toward understanding among men. And toward the reason of nonviolence. Flee all contingencies of future difficulties... To encompass the entire Extension and the entire Thought of love is to encompass a series of indissoluble terms linked together by laws of a necessary magnanimity..."
At the beginning, the author establishes an enveloping atmosphere, and also immerses us in a singular universe of nineteenth-century ideas and thoughts where, as already mentioned, the last invented stage of the life of the famous British author converge, until his first moments of creative intrigue unfold regarding the fictional invention of his "Time Machine".
In these first pages, the prose is characterized by its fluidity, full of nuances and vivid descriptions that capture the reader's attention from the start. The way Tassilon-Stavros then interweaves reality with fiction is masterful. Each chapter is like an invitation to discover hidden secrets that, although fictionalized, resonate with universal truths.
Consequently, the mirror of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries portrayed at the beginning of the novel comes spectacularly to life with characters also taken from nineteenth-century British literary fiction, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, whom the author turns into a victim of his own literary character, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," who in turn ends up metamorphosed into "Jack the Ripper," creating an atmosphere of London terror in which Wells will find himself unexpectedly involved. Also worthy of special mention, again resorting to fiction, are Wells's bold housekeeper, Mrs. Higgins, capable of confronting Mr. Hyde's domestic attacks, and his friendly young nephew, Mr. Mohorising, a declared admirer of Wells and ultimately disappointed at not being able to accompany his revered genius in his "Time Machine."
Then follow the inextricable expectations about the future of humanity, a recurring theme in Wells's work. And a harshly technological vision of the future of the human condition, which moves through a new exploration of the great futuristic secret that the novel holds. In this sense, Tassilon-Stavros achieves a balance between entertainment and profound reflection on two distant eras of life on our planet Earth and its imagined future civilization 3,000 years later in a new metaphysical reality known to Wells. This technological fiction becomes a literary feat that very few authors manage to achieve with such speculative depth.
In conclusion, “The Mystery and the Great Secret of H.G. Wells” is a work that not only pays homage to one of the great masters of science fiction but also raises pertinent questions about our own path to an afterlife that delves into the unknown with singular certainty through these pages. With her incisive prose and attention to detail, Tassilon-Stavros offers us a magical literary experience that opens the door to a new, unimagined mystery in H.G. Wells's legacy.