The Map of Chaos Read Online Free Page A

saluting the excited audience, which immediately began chanting his name to loud cheers. He saw Jane and his team applauding and embracing one another in the box of honor, while Charles’s wife remained in her chair, hands folded in her lap, oblivious to the surrounding uproar. Her eyes were fixed on her husband, who had lowered his head in defeat. Wells would have liked to comfort him, but the gesture would have been tasteless. Frey signaled to Wells, who walked over to him and allowed the chairman to raise his right arm as the audience cried out his name. Above the clamor, only Wells could hear Charles muttering angrily behind him:
    â€œEppur si muove.”
    Wells chose to ignore the reference to Galileo and instead gave a beaming smile, basking in the adulation of his supporters, who had started to descend from the rows of seats. A group of young girls climbed onto the stage and asked him to autograph their science textbooks. He did so with pleasure as he located Jane amid the crowd gathering to congratulate him in front of the stage and gave her a conspiratorial smile. Wells did not see Charles turn from his lectern and walk toward the dressing room door, nor did he notice the huge man who intercepted him before he was able to slip away. He was too busy drinking in his success. Charles could say what he liked, but Wells was the one who whose task it was to save mankind. That was what had been decided.
    It took Wells eight months to hit on the magic potion that would enable the human race to flee to a neighboring universe without the need to dig any tunnels. Eight months, during which he and Jane and the rest of the team worked day and night, practically camping out in the state-of-the-art laboratory they had set up with the Commission’s money. When at long last they thought they had synthesized the virus, Wells asked Jane to fetch Newton, the Border Collie they had acquired three months before. Wells had decided they should give a dog the honor of leading mankind’s intended exodus rather than a rat, a guinea pig, or a monkey, for whilst the intelligence of the latter was more celebrated, everyone knew that dogs had the most developed homing instinct of any species and could find their way back even over great distances. So, if the leap was successful, there was a slight possibility the dog might follow its own scent and leap in the other direction, and if that happened, they would be able to study any unforeseen side effects of the virus, as well as the physical toll it might take on the animal. Jane had regarded as less than scientific her husband’s belief in the popular idea of canine loyalty, but when she first saw the puppy cavorting in the shop window, with its eager little eyes and an adorable heart-shaped white patch on its forehead, any doubts she had melted away. And so, little Newton arrived at the Wells’s house, with the mission of vanishing into thin air a few months later, although before that happened nothing prevented him from being simply a pet.
    When Jane appeared with the puppy, Wells placed him on the laboratory bench, and, without further ado, pinched his haunch and injected him with the virus. Then they shut him in a glass-walled room designed for that purpose, and everyone on the team observed him. If they weren’t mistaken, the virus would travel through the bloodstream to the puppy’s brain, where it would pierce the cells like a needle, introducing new elements that would heighten the brain’s sensitivity to the point where, to put it simply, the dog would be able to see the thread that joined it to that other part of itself drifting on the far side of the universe.
    They took turns doing six-hour shifts outside the glass-walled room, although Jane preferred to keep watch inside, playing with the puppy and stroking it. Wells advised her not to become too attached to the animal, because sooner or later it would disappear and she would find herself caressing the