Time and Time Again (45 page)

Stanton and Katie travelled by train across Europe. Katie maintained her guise as a man wearing a suit of clothes that Stanton bought her. She refused point blank to wear the women’s clothing of the time, maintaining not unreasonably that it was ridiculous and would severely restrict her fighting ability.

Due to her lack of papers they were not able to cross borders by train but instead got out at the last stop before each one and hiked out into the country to find a suitable point to cross. By such a manner the two Chronations crossed Europe north to south and returned once more to the city where both their adventures had begun.

Once more Stanton took rooms at the Pera Palace Hotel and that evening in the dark of night, for the final time, he made his way to the house that Isaac Newton had bought when first the business of Chronos began.

‘I wanted to ask you,’ he said to Katie as they reconnoitred the street, ‘was it really necessary to kill the doctor and the nurse when you came out of the cellar?’

‘The woman in the room in the corridor heard my footsteps,’ Katie answered. ‘My boots were too heavy, and steel shod.’

‘Didn’t you think to come in rubber soles?’

Katie stopped in the darkened street and turned to Stanton.

‘Those boots were donated by a soldier who probably paid with his life for losing them. Without them I would have come to this time either barefoot or at best in canvas moccasins. You have no comprehension of the utter poverty of the world you created, Hugh Stanton.’

Stanton kept silent after that. Together they broke into the hospital building using Stanton’s skeleton keys and crept down into the cellar.

It was just as Stanton had left it, with the two sets of footprints and the chair and the table on which lay the letter to the future that Stanton had left.

‘Your history,’ Katie said. ‘The one I found.’

‘No,’ Stanton corrected. ‘The one you found was left at the beginning of the century in which you were born, the century I created which disappeared the moment you entered the past and rebooted history all over again. This letter was left in the new version of the twentieth century, the one that you are creating. The one in which you’ll die. That letter is the same letter as the one you found down to its last molecule but it exists in a different version of time.’

‘Well, let us hope there’s only ever one version of mine,’ she said.

Katie approached the table and put a second envelope beside Stanton’s. The history of her own twentieth century. A catalogue of utter misery, written out during the long hours they had spent travelling on the train.

Two different versions of the future lying side by side. Both terrible but one vastly more terrible than the other.

‘So, it’s done,’ she said. ‘Now if another traveller passes this way at least there’s a chance they’ll know all that we know.’

‘But if we succeed in our mission,’ Stanton replied, ‘if we’re able to prevent the German revolution, perhaps there won’t be another traveller.’

‘Perhaps,’ Katie said.

Stanton turned his torch beam from the table where Katie was standing to the shadowy arches where the ancient dusty bottles were laid down.

There were the footprints he had left, halfway between Katie’s and the arches. Stanton played his torchlight into the darkness of the vault.

A thought occurred to him.

One which made his soul shiver with dread.

He stepped towards the darkness.

‘Where are you going?’ Katie asked.

‘Towards the past,’ he said. ‘Your footsteps are ahead of mine. I came here to change history and I did. A century passed and then you came for the same reason, but time had slipped a little and the sentry box had moved. Just like Sengupta said,
As each loop of space and time progresses, space and time are gained
.’

‘Sentry box?’ Katie asked. ‘Sengupta? What are you talking about?’

Stanton didn’t reply. He was under the first arch now.

He turned his torch to the floor. Were there marks? He thought perhaps there were but the dust was so thick he couldn’t be sure. He shone his light once more on the bottles, sooty black upon their shelves.

‘Perhaps I wasn’t the first,’ he said. ‘After all, why should I have been?’

And then he saw it.

Wedged in among the rows of bottles.

An envelope.

He reached out and took it from its place.

Then he walked a little further into the catacomb. McCluskey had said it stretched back away under the street and the next house along.

After a few more steps Stanton found another envelope.

Then another.

And another.

Five, six.

Nine, ten.

‘What are you doing?’ He heard Katie’s voice behind him. ‘If we’ve done what we came to do we need to clear out.’

Stanton returned to where she was standing. He was carrying the brittle, yellowing papers in his hands. He had twelve, perhaps there were more; the cellar went further back and deeper than he had gone.

‘It’s what I feared,’ he said quietly. ‘I wasn’t the first. There have been many.’

He put the bundle of papers down on the table beside his and Katie’s own.

They sat together on the floor and by the light of their torches began to read.

The stories of a dozen centuries. A dozen
twentieth
centuries.

The same hundred and eleven years repeated over and over again beginning each time in 1914. Sometimes the authors came back to save or to kill the Archduke. Others to save or kill the Kaiser. Others came with their sights set on some different figure altogether, monsters in the making, too young as yet to have committed the crimes they were destined to commit if left to live. But each time the result had been the same. A nightmare catalogue of human brutality and human misery. War and genocide. Bigotry and fear.

Some versions, like Stanton’s own century, had resulted in some kind of human progress, although never it seemed enough to persuade the Chronations of those times to leave well alone. Others, like Katie’s, were simply unmitigated nightmares descending ever further into a hellish darkness, the type of which only humanity is capable of inventing.

Sitting together in the beams of their torchlight, Stanton and Katie read of dictators and secret policemen. Of terrible science and murderous disease. They read of Communism corrupted over and over again. And also of something called Fascism, of which neither of them had heard but which had sometimes gained the upper hand, although the result was just the same.

The name Hitler came up in four separate histories.

Stanton didn’t know him at all; the Austrian fanatic had played no part in his century, but Katie knew him as one of Strasser’s henchmen.

In other centuries, however, it seemed this terrible man had been able to make himself the boss, a monster the equal of Stalin and Strasser. Harnessing Germany’s might to conquer half the world and murder half the people in it. Two previous Chronations had come back specifically to kill him while he was still a penniless dosser, painting his watercolours in Vienna.

Hours passed. Time was moving on. Soon the hospital above them would be up and bustling. Stanton laid the papers back on the table all together.

‘I think perhaps we’re the first Chronations to meet,’ he said. ‘Those who came before us simply rebooted the previous one’s creation and the loop went round again. You were supposed to kill me but instead we met.’

Katie nodded, still staring moist-eyed at the papers she’d been reading.

‘So many other women forced to kill their babies,’ she whispered.

‘This can’t go on,’ Stanton said firmly. ‘The twentieth century can’t spin in time for ever, a howl of pain ringing across the universe into eternity. Same century following same century, a planet and a race lost in loop, destined to suffer alternative versions of the same nightmare for ever.’

‘No,’ Katie said quietly, tears glistening on her cheeks now. ‘It can’t go on.’

‘So, after we’ve killed Rosa Luxemburg,’ Stanton went on, ‘and done what best we can to give this new century a chance, we have to go to Cambridge.’

‘Yes,’ Katie said, ‘and destroy Newton’s box. There can be no more Chronations. I must be the last.’

KT503B678 NEVER GOT
the chance to go to Cambridge and close the loop in time, but she died ensuring that Stanton might.

The Turkish police were waiting for them when they tried to leave the house. They’d lingered too long reading ancient histories in the cellar and been overheard by the night nurse on duty.

As they opened the front door of the building, car headlamps were turned on and a warning shouted. The street was full of police, crouching behind cars and wagons.

Katie made her decision without hesitation.

‘I will engage these people,’ she said. ‘You find another way out.’

‘But—’ Stanton began to protest but Katie stopped him.

‘You can survive much better in this civilized world than me,’ she said, ‘and besides, it’s time for me to die. I always swore that I’d never take my own life, that the Party would have to kill me, that I’d die fighting them. Well, this way I will. Because if my death helps you escape, then perhaps the Party will never even exist. Besides, it’s time. Time for me to join my babies.’ Her eyes were bright and far away. ‘Go. Do what you can for this last twentieth century. Then go to Cambridge. You
have
to go to Cambridge, Hugh. Make it so that finally history can move on.’

‘I will,’ Stanton replied.

Then he leant forward and kissed her on the cheek.

To his surprise she reached out and put her arms round him. Drawing him to her in an embrace. It was the first physical contact of any sort that they had had since she had leapt from her sick bed at the Kempinski hotel in an effort to kill him.

The hug lasted only a few seconds but it seemed to Stanton that in those seconds there was a world of sorrow. Her body quivered as she gripped him tight and laid her head on his shoulder.

When she stepped away, her eyes were glistening with tears.

She produced a gun from each of her pockets.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

‘Goodbye.’

Stanton turned away and made his way back through the house. There were doctors, nurses and patients peeking out of doors but he ignored them and they didn’t try to stop him.

Once more he was heading for a rooftop escape and he realized that for the second time he was leaving behind him a woman about whom he had come to care deeply.

He made his way up the various flights of stairs. The sound of rapid fire behind told him that Katie had engaged the police. He knew that she would make sure he had enough grace to make his escape. It wouldn’t be their choice when to kill her but hers when to die.

He found a skylight in the attic of the building and made his way out into the night.

Alone once more.

He was never to return to the house of Chronos in Constantinople.

Instead he made his final trip to Berlin.

He knew where to find Rosa Luxemburg. The history of her time of struggle and the glorious revolution that followed had been holy writ to Katie and her fellow Communist pioneers. During their time together travelling across Europe she had been able to give Stanton the address of the safehouse in which Luxemburg and Liebknecht had gone underground during the months of persecution. That house had become a shrine in Katie’s century, a place of pilgrimage for high Party officials. Stanton intended to ensure that in this century it would be remembered only as the place where a briefly notorious Social Democrat had been shot by an unknown assassin.

And then … then?

Stanton knew what then. He had thought of nothing else during his final train journey from Istanbul.

He would find Bernadette Burdette. Whether she was in custody in Berlin or home in Ireland or somewhere else altogether, he’d find her. He would make her travel with him to Cambridge, at gunpoint if necessary. Then, he would take her to the Master’s Lodge at Trinity and somehow he would show her Newton’s box. Then once she had seen it and knew that he had not lied, he would destroy it, closing the loop in time for ever.

And then he and Bernadette could face the last ever twentieth century together. Her riding pillion on his 1914 Enfield.

That was Stanton’s plan. It was Guts Versus Newton.

End game.

And so from his hotel room at the Kempinski Stanton equipped himself for another assassination. He had no body armour this time, having left it in the apartment he had shared with Bernadette, but he had one of his Glock pistols, which he checked and loaded carefully, although he knew he would require only one bullet.

He made his way to the secret Socialist safehouse and lay in wait, hiding in the car he had hired for the job. Katie had told him that Rosa Luxemburg was known to emerge each day, heavily disguised, ready to go about her business of agitation and revolution.

As expected she emerged from the house. Liebknecht wasn’t with her but she was flanked by two bodyguards. Stanton hoped he would not have to kill them also. He doubted it would be necessary; he had a clean shot.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, he wound down the window and, resting his pistol on his arm, took aim. He didn’t need a rifle; the range was close enough and the Glock an accurate weapon.

Then he heard a noise behind him. Turning he saw that a man was leaning in through the passenger window, which was open thanks to the late summer warmth. The man was pointing a gun at Stanton. A gun Stanton recognized as a type not known in 1914, and which, like his own weapon, was made of polymer, a substance not yet invented.

And Stanton understood.

Another century had passed.

A century in which he’d killed Rosa Luxemburg but must then have died himself because he had not been able to destroy Newton’s box.

For here was another visitor from the future.

A man come to prevent the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg.

Stanton thought all this in the moment his eyes met his brother Chronation.

And he wanted to cry out: ‘Kill me if you must but for God’s sake go to Cambridge and destroy the box.’