Time and Time Again (12 page)

‘I know deep down you don’t actually believe any of this, Hugh,’ McCluskey remarked.

‘Look, I’m prepared to accept that
something
might happen,’ Stanton conceded. ‘Newton obviously believed it and he was pretty much the cleverest man who ever lived. Perhaps I’ll be vaporized by a thunderbolt. Or else gravitational pull will tear me in half or suck me up into a black hole.’

‘But you don’t believe you’re about to embark on a journey to the past?’

‘Well, come on, do you? The Great War started
a hundred and eleven years
ago this August. Do you really think we can stop it now?’

‘All I know is that I pray we can.’

They both lapsed into silence but Stanton could see that evangelical zeal still shone in McCluskey’s eyes. She really believed. They all believed, those crazy old men and women who called themselves Chronos; imagined that they were all going to be genetically reassembled, young and lusty once more in the sun-lit uplands of a Britain reborn.

‘Time will tell, eh?’ McCluskey said, almost under her breath.

‘Yes,’ Stanton agreed, ‘so you keep telling me. Time will tell.’

They flew from Farnborough by private plane. Most of the equipment Stanton had been supplied with travelled with them. But the weaponry was already waiting in Turkey.

‘Even we Chronations can’t get a telescopic-sighted rifle through airport security,’ McCluskey explained.

The flight took almost four hours, during which McCluskey ate everything that was offered and as ever drank considerably. Then she managed to get herself stuck in the tiny loo.

‘You know, they had one of the most famous seasons ever at Drury Lane in 1914,’ she said once the stewardess had freed her and she’d waddled somewhat shakily back to her seat. ‘The Diaghilev Company came from Russia and just blew London away. They did ten operas and fourteen ballets through the spring and summer and nobody had ever seen anything like it. Or, in fact, ever would again. Sets and crowd scenes on a truly epic scale, impossible to do today, nobody could afford it. You really ought to try and see a couple, maybe even slip one in before you go to Sarajevo. You’ll have a month to kill, after all. But I’d send a telegram ahead from Istanbul if I were you because it was a very hot ticket. You’ll probably need to go on the list for returns.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ Stanton said.

‘And
Pygmalion
’s just opened at His Majesty’s. Imagine it! You can go to the very
first ever production
of
Pygmalion
. With Mrs Campbell as Eliza and Shaw himself directing! Isn’t that almost too wonderful to imagine?’ McCluskey had a faraway look in her eye. ‘The London Theatre in 1914,’ she whispered almost to herself, ‘now that
is
a dream.’

Then she fell asleep and didn’t wake up till they’d arrived in Istanbul.

They were driven to the Hotel Pera Palace on the Grande Rue de Pera where rooms were waiting for them. As the porters helped McCluskey out of the car she paused for a moment and looked up at the imposing building.

‘They restored it a few years ago,’ she said. ‘Got it right back to its original glory. So in fact this is just how it’ll look tomorrow whatever happens. Whether you’re in 1914 or boring old 2025.’

‘I’m sorry to say I really do think it’ll be 2025,’ Stanton said, ‘because there’s no such thing as time travel, as we’ll be forced to accept at midnight. When you and I are feeling pretty stupid standing alone in a cellar in the old dockland quarter of Istanbul.’

‘Well, if that’s the case we’ll just have to find a late bar to toast Sir Isaac Newton and the fact that even geniuses can get it wrong.’

It was mid-afternoon and having checked in and deposited their bags in their rooms, Stanton and McCluskey returned to the lobby where they met up with members of a local security company who had been engaged to take them to the property the Companions of Chronos had recently purchased.

‘I thought we should have a bit of a reconnoitre while there’s still some light,’ McCluskey said. ‘Don’t want to be stumbling around in the dark tonight with no idea where we’re going.’

They were driven over the Galata Bridge and down into the old dock area of Stamboul. There they found a street filled with houses that had once been wealthy but were no longer so. They pulled up outside a derelict building that in its heyday must have been an impressive city mansion.

A security man stood at the front door ready to let them in.

‘Just one guard,’ McCluskey explained. ‘Don’t want to be ostentatious. There’s nothing here worth stealing and it wouldn’t do to draw attention to ourselves.’

They picked their way in the gathering gloom through the ruin, stepping over shattered glass and bits of broken furniture. Quite recently the place had been squatted and there was much graffiti on the walls. Since then only tramps and vandals had ventured in and now the place reeked of piss. Not a single window remained whole in its frame.

Guiding themselves by torchlight they found their way via a precipitous stairwell down to the cellar, a much larger space than they had expected, with arched vaults disappearing into the darkness.

‘It extends beneath the next house,’ McCluskey explained. ‘It was a wine cellar when Newton’s agents bought the place and they just locked and barred the door. The wine was still there when the hospital closed after the war. It will still be there when you arrive tonight. Revolting, of course, after two hundred years but you should try one for fun. I know I would. Not many people get the chance to taste wine laid down in the early eighteenth century. Imagine that. Wine laid down more than a generation before Marie Antoinette was born.’

Stanton didn’t reply but instead took out a satellite navigation device and, following it, found his way to a place about seven metres from the door they’d entered by, halfway between it and the deeper darkness of the wine vaults. Then, using the coordinates Sengupta had supplied, he took a piece of chalk and marked out the relevant surface area.

‘Newton’s sentry box,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ McCluskey said. ‘Bit bloody tight, better mark the centre.’

There was a broken chair nearby and in the torchlight Stanton took it and placed it carefully in position.

‘So this is where you’ll be standing at midnight,’ McCluskey said. ‘Just think how pleased old Isaac would be to know that his message got through and that somebody acted on it.’

Standing in the silent cellar in the light of just two torch beams it suddenly all seemed very real to Stanton. As if this place really could be the gateway to another universe.

McCluskey seemed to read his thoughts.

‘It has to be true,’ she said firmly. ‘Mankind deserves a second chance. A better twentieth century than the one we were born into.’

‘Well,’ Stanton said, ‘I don’t agree we deserve it. But right now I truly do hope that we get it.’

HAVING COMPLETED THEIR
reconnoitre, Stanton and McCluskey retraced their steps through the now darkened building and returned to the hotel. That evening they met at the Orient Bar then went through to supper in the restaurant. Once again McCluskey made the most of the food and wine, determined to enjoy what she referred to as her ‘last supper’. Stanton, on the other hand, ate lightly and drank only water.

‘I suppose on the off chance that Newton’s right I should have my wits about me,’ he remarked. ‘Don’t want to time-travel under the influence.’

After they’d eaten, Stanton left the professor to her coffee and cognac and went to his room to change. Looking at himself in the mirror he reflected that he would cut a fairly unusual figure in Istanbul that night, wearing the socks, knee britches and thornproof tweed of an early-twentieth-century man of action. But then Istanbul was a renowned party town so he doubted anyone would notice much. Next he checked his kit, which he was carrying in one large holdall bag, plus a smaller one with an emergency version of the same. He had guns and explosives, medical supplies, his computers, IDs, and a great deal of money in various currencies and government bonds. These last had all been expertly forged from originals taken from museums and bank archives.

At 10 p.m. he met McCluskey in the lobby and once more they took a limousine across the Galata Bridge. The streets by this time were full of evening revellers so their progress was slower, which was why they had allowed themselves plenty of time.

Stanton stared out of a car window and decided that nothing was going to happen that night. The twenty-first century was just too
real
, too solid. It was the weekend and the city was in a party mood. Music could be heard through the doorways of restaurants. There were smiling, laughing faces everywhere. It didn’t seem possible that so much living, breathing,
tingling
life could suddenly cease to exist on the stroke of midnight.

Once more McCluskey seemed to read his thoughts. Perhaps they mirrored her own.

‘The world looked solid and unchangeable in the summer of 1914 too,’ she said. ‘Never more so. People thought no world had ever been more secure or enduring. But it evaporated into thin air. It disappeared from the universe within a few short summers. Don’t you think this one could vanish just as suddenly?’

‘Their world was destroyed by hot lead, poison gas and high explosives,’ Stanton replied.

‘Gas. High explosives. Gravitational shifts in space and time,’ McCluskey answered. ‘All physical phenomena at a subatomic level. A single shell from a big gun in the Great War could vaporize any number of men. Literally reduce them to cellular level. Transform their matter and send them spinning across the universe. I suggest that your component parts are about to embark on a journey no more dramatic. Gravity is without doubt the most consistent force in the universe. Everything exerts it, everything is affected by it. Why should time be an exception?’

As they got closer to their destination the crowds began to thin. This was not a fashionable area. The shouting, smiling faces had disappeared and the noise of carefree youth and partying was ever more distant.

‘Nice and quiet,’ McCluskey muttered. ‘Just how we like it.’

But it wasn’t to be. As the car turned into their street they were confronted by throbbing trance music. The pavement outside the previously deserted building was pulsing with light.

‘Oh fuck,’ McCluskey said.

The single security man was standing outside in the street looking extremely sheepish.

‘I’m sorry, professor,’ he said. ‘They just invaded. It’s somebody’s twenty-first birthday. There must be two hundred of them inside.’

‘Oh Christ in a box,’ McCluskey said. ‘Flash rave. Pop-up party. Newton didn’t think of that.’

‘You want me to call the police?’ the guard asked.

‘No!’ McCluskey said quickly. ‘Absolutely not. No time. It’d take hours to shift this lot and there’d probably be a bloody riot if we tried. Come on, Hugh.’

They pushed their way through the stoned and loved-up partygoers who were milling around the front door and made their way into the house. It was completely transformed from the afternoon. There were strobing, flashing lights, pulsating music and dancing, kissing,
squirming
bodies everywhere.

‘You see, Hugh,’ McCluskey shouted, ‘it’s like I always said to those bloody Marxist dialectical materialists. History is about people. Coincidence and capricious chance. This bunch of pissed-up ravers may turn out to be the reason the Great War happens and Europe is destroyed. Because of a fucking
birthday party
! But not if we can help it. Come on.’

McCluskey pushed her way through the sweating throng. She was, as usual, carrying a large handbag. In fact, this particular item was more like a small holdall and she wasn’t shy in swinging it about to get people to move out of the way. Stanton followed on as best he could, struggling with his own heavy bags.

Finding their way was difficult; the rooms and corridors had all been hung with painted sheets and murals and looked nothing like they had done that afternoon. At least there was light, supplied by a generator that seemed to have been placed in the back garden since the cables were running out of the windows.

‘They’ve got it bloody well organized,’ McCluskey shouted back over her shoulder. ‘Can’t believe they’ve set this up since we were here. If they were as creative and innovative getting themselves jobs they wouldn’t all have to be bloody anarchists.’

Stanton could hardly hear her. There were speakers hung in every corner of the building and the DJ was not shy with the volume dial.

Eventually they found their way down into the cellar, descending the little stairwell towards the battered and broken door, still hanging on a single hinge. The same door that Newton’s men had locked three centuries before.

Any hope that the rave might have confined itself to the upper part of the house was quickly extinguished. There was a separate and if anything even wilder party going on in the basement. A different DJ, naked but for a tiny pair of glittering shorts, was dancing crazily behind his decks.

‘The guy upstairs was steady drum and bass,’ McCluskey shouted, ‘but this bloke is real old school Hi NRG trance. Fucking awful, if you ask me. All music was shit after the kids switched from spliff to E.’

Whatever drug it was that the revellers were on, they were certainly having a fantastic time. Bounding and leaping about and throwing shapes with absolute abandon.

‘My place-marker’s gone and the chalk’s been danced off the floor,’ Stanton shouted into McCluskey’s ear. He pointed at the broken chair, which had been kicked into a shadowy corner of the cavernous room. ‘We’ll have to re-establish the coordinates.’

If any of the young Turkish party people found it strange that an old lady in a woolly cardigan and a man dressed vaguely like a character out of
King Solomon’s Mines
were pushing their way among them staring intently at a satellite navigation device, then they did not let it show. This was a flash rave after all and there were no rules. People could act as they pleased. As if to demonstrate this very point, a young woman with a shaved and tattooed head leapt suddenly in between McCluskey and Stanton.