Time and Time Again (40 page)

Finally Bentley’s smug reserve deserted him.

‘Proof? What proof can I give beyond the fact that logic requires it?’ he said, his voice rising. ‘Time is time. It ticks away from the beginning until the end.’

‘But it doesn’t, you damned fool!’ Newton exclaimed. ‘Am I really the only person on earth to have grasped this fact? Time is not linear. It does not go along on a steady course like a road from London to York. It does not
have
a beginning and it does not have an end, nor is it the same to one person as it is to another, nor to two planets or a million stars. It is different in
all circumstances
. Because it is
relative
.’

‘Sir Isaac, I beg you calm yourself!’ Bentley implored, alarmed at Newton’s passion and regretting having allowed himself to be drawn into it. He did not want the most famous scientist in the world dying in his sitting room. ‘No man on earth is more sensible of your genius than I, but what is
relative
about it? Time is time. Listen to the clock, you hear it ticking? Each second recorded, the same to all men. Seconds that were once in the future and now lie in the past. Seconds which progress, one after another, be they noted or ignored, here, there and everywhere. Tick tock – another gone! In this room. On the sun. Amongst the stars. In heaven and in hell. Tick then tock. And so God’s Universe moves on second by second from Creation until Judgement Day.’

‘Tick tock tick tock! What are you
talking
about, you imbecile!’ Newton shouted, actually staggering to his feet and shaking his fist. ‘The thing your clock records, Mr Bentley, and which announces itself with its tick and its tock, is quite obviously an
invention of man
. An essential convenience to give order to his day. It lends an
imagined
shape to the
experience
of time within the
vicinity
of the clock. Surely that must be blindingly obvious, even to you! Your solid and unchanging second is in fact nothing of the sort. It is a mysterious and flexible thing. It is different everywhere it exists. Because it is
relative
.’

‘So you keep saying, Sir Isaac!’ Bentley snapped, rising to his feet also, once more giving way to his own irritation. ‘But relative to what?’

‘To the conditions in which the person who is experiencing it finds himself.
Where
he is. Whether he is in
motion
. How
fast
he is going. If he is travelling
towards
something or
away
from it. Whether that thing is
also
in motion. And beyond all that you must factor in the position and parameters of every other atom in the universe because every single one of them is
relative
to absolutely every other one.’

The two men were face to face now, Newton’s spilled wine on the rug between them, his great nose almost touching Bentley’s chin.

‘Please, Sir Isaac,’ the Master said finally. ‘Can we not debate this in a civilized manner?’

‘There is nothing to debate,’ Newton replied, collapsing back into his chair, old and tired once more. ‘I understand what I am talking about and you do not. You are to be forgiven. None understand it but I, and I curse a cruel fate which has given me the insight to do so. I have discovered how to change the future. Only God should be able to do that. And yet God has given me the key. I cannot ignore what I know, what
God
has revealed to me. Even if it drives me mad. And so, Master Bentley, I bequeath to you and your successors these letters and this sealed box.’

STANTON STARED AT
the footprints for a long time.

He examined each one with his torch. Almost pleading with his eyes to see a different story than the one that lay before him. But there could be no doubt about it. The footprints started in the middle of the room and headed for the door.

Just as his and McCluskey’s did.

His mind simply reeled at the dawning realization of what this must mean.

Someone had followed him through time.

But that couldn’t
be
. He’d seen the equations. Professor Sengupta had been quite specific. The timing was absolute, the junction in time lasted less than a second. The Chronation traveller must leave at midnight on the night of 31 May 2025 and arrive at fifteen minutes after midnight on 1 June 1914. There was no chance to sneak through afterwards. No next bus that would be along in a minute.

He turned off his torch for a moment and allowed the darkness to envelop him, concentrating on computing all known facts. What Sengupta had explained. What he had experienced. The new evidence on the dusty floor before him. The truth was hurtling towards his consciousness like a battering ram at an already half-smashed door.

The next bus hadn’t come along in a minute.

It had taken one hundred and eleven years.

More than a century had passed since he and McCluskey had first left their footprints in the cellar.

That was the awesome truth.

And now
that
century had been consigned to oblivion just as his own had been. The loop had been rebooted for a second time. This was now the
third
version of the century, not the second. Another agent had come visiting from another future, from the future
Stanton had created
.

That agent had come to change the past.

The past
Stanton had created
.

And through which he had lived.

His mission had failed. Whatever had happened during the century that had unfolded after he had saved the Archduke and killed the Kaiser must have been terrible. Perhaps not as terrible as his own but terrible enough for another generation of Chronations to gather in a different 2025 and seek to use Newton’s calculations to change history.

Stanton wasn’t making history any more. He was just part of the history another agent of Chronos had come to make.

Stanton sank to his knees in the dust. His torch falling from his hand.

He had lived a
whole second life
. And yet he knew nothing about it because he and the whole world had been rebooted. From the moment this second Chronation arrived in 1914, Stanton’s second life had disappeared from history just as his first had disappeared at the moment of his own arrival.

What had
happened
to him?

Had he found Bernie again? Had he had children? How long had he lived? How had he died?

Perhaps it had been no life at all. Perhaps the last time he had passed this way he had dropped off his envelope on the little wooden table, gone down to the Galata Bridge and thrown himself into the Bosphorus.

None of it mattered because none of it had happened. History had begun again not for a second, but for a
third
time.

His
life
was now beginning for a third time, in a third version of the twentieth century. And Cassie had only been in the first of them.

Yet in his mind she’d been dead less than a year.

He picked up his torch and looked once more at the new set of footprints. They were smaller than his by several sizes but the boot was a tough, heavy-treaded working shoe with what he thought might have been steel heel and toe caps. There was no way a man wearing those boots could have got along the corridor upstairs without making a noise, no matter how loud the gramophone had been. Small wonder then that he’d disturbed the doctor and nurse and had had to take them out.

Pretty poor fieldcraft.

Studying the prints once more, it crossed Stanton’s mind that the second man had ‘landed’ in a different place to the point where he himself had arrived.

That was wrong, surely? Newton’s coordinates were so specific and his sentry box so small that the second arrival should have arrived at the same place as his own. His footsteps should be on top of Stanton’s own.

In fact,
he
should have been on top of Stanton. Surely this new Chronation, using the same coordinates that Newton had passed down, would have arrived in the same place and at the same time as he had done?

Stanton bit his knuckle in an effort to concentrate. Sengupta had talked of time as a disobliging Slinky, and that was how Stanton’s mind felt, trying to disentangle its crisscrossed coils.

He thought back to Christmas Eve 2024. To Sengupta’s lecture in the Great Hall at Trinity, seven months before.
Two
universes before. He heard once more the sing-song Anglo-Indian voice, explaining that the movement of time was like the movement of the planets, not quite symmetrical.

As each loop of space and time progresses, space and time are gained, just as in the case of leap years. And so although the two moments of departure and arrival are simultaneous, our time traveller will in effect arrive fifteen minutes after he leaves.

Space had slipped a little and so Newton’s coordinates had been in a slightly different place this time. A little further from the arches where the old wine still lay and the shadows were so deep even his torch could scarcely penetrate them.

And time had slipped too.

It had ‘leapt’ a quarter of an hour. In this version of the century, Stanton and McCluskey had been followed. After they had stumbled out of the cellar, past the nurse in the corridor and the doctor at the front door, another Chronation traveller had arrived minutes later and blundered after them, alarming the house and killing the nurse and the doctor.

Stanton tried to imagine the man who had made those other footprints. What was he like? What future had he come from?

What had he come back to change?

The century in which this other Chronation had lived had begun with a world in which the Archduke had survived but the Kaiser had died …

The Kaiser had died.

Assassinated in what was without doubt the most stunning event of the new century so far. Any future Chronations looking back on this time and presented with a chance to change it must surely choose the Kaiser’s assassination as the most influential moment. The point when things started to go wrong. Just as McCluskey and her crew had chosen the death of the Archduke.

It would be
that
they’d want to prevent.

The very thing
he’d
been sent from the past to do.

Those new footprints came to undo what he had done.

Stanton’s mind went back to the moment on the roof of Wertheim’s department store, the moment before he shot the Emperor. Remembering the impact of a bullet slamming into his body armour. Remembering spinning round and seeing a grey-clad figure.

Then the second shot hitting him above the heart, both shots supremely accurate. Only his armour saved him.

The truth was clear.

His attacker that morning hadn’t been a guard at all. He’d been a traveller from the future.

Stanton shone his torch once more on the footprints in the dusk. The man who’d made those was the man who’d tried to kill him in Berlin. But he’d reckoned without Stanton’s body armour. The second Chronation plot had failed. Stanton had assassinated the Kaiser for the second time and this time he’d also shot the man who’d been sent to stop him doing it.

What had happened to the man afterwards?

He cast his mind back to the evening of the assassination.

Going downstairs from his apartment and buying the paper … the first editions that bore the earth-shattering news. They had mentioned a man ‘thought’ to be a guard. The article had said that the extent of his injuries wasn’t known. That the police were waiting to question him.

Was his Brother in Time alive?

Stanton got up. He couldn’t stay in the cellar of the hospital all night.

By the light of his flashlight he found the ancient table and placed his written account on it. His account of his own century.

Which he must have done
before
.

He must have laid that same account on that same table in the previous loop in time. He wondered if this second generation of Chronations had found it. Had it survived in the cellar? Had they read it?

He hoped not with all his heart, because if they had, then
still
elected to try to change history, it could only mean that the history he’d created had been even worse than the one he’d been trying to fix.

He needed to know.

He needed to find the man from the roof of the store.

STANTON DETERMINED THAT
he would book a ticket on the following morning’s train to Berlin.

It would be risky. Clearly the police would still be hunting him and they had photographs, from his ID papers and also from the confrontation outside the SDP headquarters. And no doubt a detailed description from Bernadette.

On the other hand, he wasn’t entirely sure how much the German authorities
wanted
to catch him. He’d noted that there had been absolutely no mention of beautiful Irish girls or lone British assassins in the papers, so clearly the police were keeping this part of their investigation secret. In the meantime, the ongoing repression of the German Liberals, Socialists and Trade Unionists continued unabated. The police and the army were clearly still using the pretext of an investigation to settle old scores, and the emergence of an actual culprit, particularly a lone foreigner, would spoil all the fun. Stanton calculated that even if the police did find him they would keep quiet about it.

But he didn’t intend that they would find him. He had a pretty decent cover identity; he’d travelled incognito in tougher circumstances than this. At least in Berlin he wouldn’t have to worry about racial profiling as he had in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He’d been in the clothes he’d stolen from the hotel since leaving Berlin and so he spent the day in Constantinople buying a suitable wardrobe for his Ludwig Drechsler identity. Civilian but in military style, blazers and tight cavalry-cut trousers. He also bought a clear glass monocle, which for some reason were highly fashionable among German officers at the time. He calculated that even were he to bump into the British officers he’d encountered on his first morning in 1914, they’d be unlikely to recognize him behind his Prussian façade. He took care to speak only German.