Miniseries based on the collection of short stories by political philosopher and science-fiction writer H.G. Wells. Combines the real-life story of Wells with some of the stories he wrote between 1894 and 1897 dealing with the potential of technology to be used for good or evil. The stories, including "The Crystal Egg," "The New Accelerator" and "Brownloe's Newspaper," are woven together by a fictional storyline in which an 80-year-old Wells is interviewed in London in 1946 by a young reporter, Ellen McGillivray. The interview focuses on his earlier days at the Imperial College of London, incorporating the respective short stories which are shown in the telefilms as flashbacks.Expecting to hear of the events and people who formed Wells' prophetic imagination, reporter McGillivray is informed of a world in which known scientific boundaries no longer exist. It begins a half-century earlier at London's Imperial College of Science, where Wells meets Jane Robbins, a scientist equally fascinated by unnatural phenomena, and a woman who immediately captures Wells' heart. Through midnight experiments and secret investigations into the paranormal, through the follies of chance and the miracles of fate, Wells and Robbins find themselves slipping into whirlpools of time, both past and present, they never thought possible. Since this mysterious universe cannot be shared with the world, this becomes a wondrous secret that binds them forever.
To Wells's surprise, Ellen accepts his outlandish tales of traveling through time. She then admits that she is not a journalist, but an underground government agent who has inherited a puzzling artifact that only Wells could possibly identify: a crystalline orb said to contain the mysteries of the universe, our relationships to other planets and our past encounters with them. What Ellen is about to discover is that at the heart of the mysterious orb is buried the equally mysterious heart of Jane Robbins, the one who inspired H.G. Wells to tell the amazing truth in the form of science fiction.