Weaver (3 page)

‘I was in Seville when it all kicked off. The Civil War. The city fell to Franco’s Nationalists within days. The bloodshed was worse after the cities fell, as the Nationalists took reprisals. So I fled north, to the Republican areas.’

‘And there he met you?’ Julia asked Ben.

Ben said reluctantly, ‘I had already seen enough of the fascists in Germany. I went out to fight in the International Brigades. I never went back to Austria after that. I got some help from the Americans in my brigade, and they eventually got me into the country, and a place here at Princeton to continue my studies.’

Julia said briskly, ‘I’ve never been terribly impressed by the Spaniards. They had all that wealth, a global empire, gold from the Incas and
the Aztecs. And they blew the lot on dynastic wars within a century of Columbus. As for their Civil War, what a pointless conflict that was!’

‘Three hundred and fifty thousand died,’ Rory said angrily. ‘Many of them to German and Italian bombs and bullets.’

‘New ways of fighting wars were rehearsed. An imperial nation was reduced to a testing ground for the weapons of superior powers. So much for Spain!’

Ben snapped, ‘You’re damn cold, Julia.’

Julia laughed. ‘No. Just realistic. Were you lovers?’

They spoke at the same time. ‘No,’ said Rory, and, ‘Only once,’ said Ben, more wistfully.

‘And it was in pillow talk in Spain, I suppose, that you began to dream of time machines.’

‘It was a pooling of interests,’ Ben said.

Rory said, ‘Studying history, I had come to feel a vast dissatisfaction. It need not have been this way! All the suffering, all the blood spilled - especially that provoked by religions, by prophets of peace. I wondered if it need be so - I longed for it not to be so.’ He glanced at Ben. ‘Then there was Ben’s idle talk of Godel, this eccentric mathematical genius who twisted Einstein’s equations and imagined it might be possible to reach out, around what he called “closed timelike curves, to touch the past...’

‘That and my dreams,’ Ben said.

Julia eyed him. ‘What dreams?’

‘I have always had intense dreams. Often they are like memories of visits to scenes in the past - and the future. Once or twice—’

‘Go on.’

Rory said, ‘There was one dream, of the bullet which nearly killed me.’ He touched his neck.

‘You are precognitive,’ Julia said to Ben.

‘So John William Dunne might say. He might speak of my animus floating free in a multidimensional spacetime.’

‘Is that what you believe?’

‘No.’ He sighed. ‘I’m one of the most rational people you’re likely to meet, Julia. I don’t even believe in God. And yet others believe such powers of me. Isn’t that an irony?’

‘And so from all this,’ Julia said, ‘from hints of precognition, from Gödel’s speculation about travel into the past, you began to design a time machine.’

‘Not a machine,’ Rory said. ‘Though we gave it a machine-like name.’

‘The Loom.’

‘Yes. But it’s a method, really.’

‘A method for touching the past. For changing it. Is that right? And after Spain you came to this institute, where you worked together on realising your “method. You went so far as to wangle time on a calculating engine in Massachusetts. And you, Rory, began to work out,
if you
could make a change to the history that you found so unsatisfactory, exactly
what
change should be made.’

Rory fell silent. Ben stared at him.

‘Oh, come now. If you don’t tell him, I can - and will.’ She patted her briefcase.

‘Very well,’ Rory blurted. ‘It was Nicea.’

Ben was bewildered. ‘Nicea?’

Julia smiled. ‘You’re clearly not as intimately acquainted with Christian history as your little friend here, Ben. Nicea, 325 AD. Where the Emperor Constantine convened his great Church council.’

‘Constantine!’ Rory spat. ‘It was all his fault!’

‘Ah, the Romans,’ Julia said. ‘They were Aryans, you know, without a doubt. Hitler has the scholarship to prove it ... Before Constantine,’ she sneered, ‘Jesus was a god of the slaves. By establishing the Church as the state religion of Rome, Constantine saved Christianity for the future.’

‘Only by making it into a reflection of Rome itself! And it is that Roman autocracy and intolerance that has been at the root of the evil done in Christ’s name ever since.’

‘And so you had the temerity to cook up a plan. Didn’t you? A scheme to use your Loom of time to unpick a few threads of history.’

‘You told me none of this,’ Ben accused Rory.

‘Of course not,’ he said miserably, still avoiding his eyes. ‘Because you would have stopped me.’

‘He worked out a message to send to the past,’ Julia said brightly. ‘A sort of retrospective prophecy, yes? You meant to send it to the age of Emperor Claudius, I gather, and his invasion of Britain. It was going to contain news about the future - and a little comical nonsense about democracy—’

‘The republican age was the best of Rome,’ Rory said defiantly. ‘It inspired America centuries later. I wanted to give them hope.’

‘Who?’ Ben demanded.

‘You know how it works, Ben. We can’t target an individual in the past. We can only broadcast. And hope there are minds as receptive as yours - natural radio receivers, waiting to pick up news from the future.’

Julia said, ‘You put in the prophetic stuff as a sort of lure, didn’t you, Rory? You sent it back beyond Claudius to the year of Christ’s birth, to catch the attention of the early Christians. You hoped to snag your dupe in the past by giving him a bit of foreknowledge that could make him powerful or rich, for instance about the building of Hadrian’s wall. And you hoped that that power would be used as you intended: to fulfil your ultimate command.’

‘To do what?’ Ben asked.

Julia grinned. ‘Why, to
kill
the Emperor Constantine!’

Ben found himself on the edge of panic. ‘Rory - we discussed the dangers - what gives you the right to make such choices?’

‘What gives us the right
not
to use such a gift?’

Ben thought fast. ‘But this is just fantasy. Just talk. For Constantine was not cut down before Nicea, was he? And the Church was
not
restored to some state of innocence. The Pope still sits in Rome.’

‘Rory failed,’ Julia said.

‘Well, I can’t deny that,’ Rory said.

‘But
he made the attempt
, Ben.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘No.’ She smiled. ‘I have proof.’

Rory’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘The Party has a rather good research institution. It’s called the Ahnenerbe - it reports to Himmler, you know. Some quite innovative research into racial origins. I wrote to them ...’ She opened her briefcase and extracted a battered volume. It was a history of Rome.

Her Nazi scholars had not been able to retrieve Rory’s testament in full. But elements of it had been recorded in an autobiographical work by the Emperor Claudius. That work too was lost, but there were references to it in other histories, from which, with a little care and some guesswork, some of Rory’s lines had been reconstructed. She passed her book to Ben, opening it at a marked page. He read in disbelief, the text pale on old, yellowed paper:

‘By all that’s holy,’ Ben said, his heart hammering.

Julia smiled. ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. How delightfully gauche!’

‘It seems I did it,’ Rory said, his own eyes wide. ‘These are my own words, cooked up in 1940, transmitted through the centuries, and now written down in this battered old history book. I never saw the proof before. I failed in my plan - Constantine survived -
but the Loom works.’
He laughed, but it was a brittle sound.

‘You could not have done this,’ Ben said weakly. ‘I am an integral part of the Loom - my supposed precognition—’

‘He drugged you,’ Julia said simply. ‘Drugged you, and used you in your sleep. Would you have stopped him?’

‘Of course I would.’

‘Why? Because you’re a fan of Constantine?’

‘No.’ He looked at Rory with gathering horror. ‘Because I have come to believe that the Loom, if ever operated, is a monstrous danger. The Loom is a weapon that destroys history, not creates it!’

‘Yet it works,’ Rory said flatly.

‘Yes,’ Julia said. ‘Hitler despises Christianity, you know. He says it amounts to the systematic cultivation of failure. I think he’ll rather approve of your attempts to destabilise the faith, Rory.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ Rory snapped.

‘I really believe the Ahnenerbe is the place to carry forward this project of yours, don’t you think? With proper funding and some decent researchers - not some half-trained Irish monkey and a mixed-up Jewish dreamer - with a better calculating machine than the antiquated gadget at MIT—’

‘You want to give a time machine to the Nazis?’ Ben felt weak. ‘Oh, that’s a good plan.’

Rory asked, ‘So you’re planning to support Hitler?’

Julia shrugged. ‘What do you care? Ireland is neutral in the war.’

‘But your own country isn’t.’ Rory stood up. ‘You English aristocrats are all the same. You and your bloody empire. Now it’s better Hitler than a Labour government, eh? Well, you’re not going to give my work to that gang of thugs.’ He raised a fist and closed on her.

It happened in an instant. From somewhere Julia produced a gun. Ben had time to notice how small it was, how exquisitely made, how expensive it looked. She raised the pretty, silver-plated pistol. She shot Rory in the heart. Rory looked surprised, and he stared down at the bloody mess of his chest. He shuddered; he crumpled and fell.

‘Well, that’s a bit unfortunate,’ Julia said. ‘We have made rather a mess of the apartment, haven’t we? I don’t need him. No doubt everything’s here among these books and papers. But, of course, I need you. She turned to Ben and smiled. ‘You and your dreams.’

‘You want to hand me over to your Ahnenerbe. To the Germans.’

‘They’re here already. All around the building.’

‘They’ll love you in Nazi Germany,’ he said.

‘Oh, they will. They do! Now, will you come with me quietly or—’

He was still holding the heavy history book. He slammed it as hard as he could against her temple. He moved suddenly, giving her no notice at all. She fell, even more quickly than Rory, her gun spilling from her hand.

Ben looked at the mess, Julia sprawled across Rory’s legs, the silver gun on the floor. He ought to destroy any evidence of their work. Take the gun. Kill Julia.

He knew he could not. His head was filled with flight, nothing more. All he wanted was to run until he could run no further, out of Princeton, out of America - all the way to England, perhaps, where at least he could be sure there were no Nazis.

But first he had to survive this day, uncaptured. He headed for the door, watching for Julia’s German supporters.

I

Mary Wooler heard about the desperate evacuation from France on the evening of the Friday, 31 May, on the BBC news. It was the first time the public had been told about it. The operation had already been underway for five days.

She spent a sleepless night, mostly on the phone to the War Office, trying to find out what had become of her son. It sounded as if the struggle to evacuate the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk was failing. It was chaotic, an unfolding disaster. Nevertheless she was told that elements of Gary’s division were scheduled to be brought back to Hastings, on the south coast, if they made it back at all. So that was where she had to be.

On the Saturday morning she set off from her rented apartment in London in her hired Austin Seven, with its white-painted bumpers and plastic visors on the headlamps, to drive down to the coast.

The drive ought to have been simple enough. Her plan was to head roughly south-south-east, passing through Croydon, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells, before cutting through the Sussex countryside until she came to Hastings via a little place called Battle, where the English had once faced the Normans. That was the theory.

But she never knew where the hell she was. Even as she drove she saw gangs of workmen cutting down direction markers, and unscrewing metal plates with village names. No names! She was a journalist and historian who had always made her living from words, and she thought how odd it was that to protect their country the English were stripping it of its words, of the layer of meaning that gave the landscape its human context: words that were a mish-mash of Norman French and Norse and Old English and even a bit of Latin, relics of other tumultuous days, words like bullet holes. Well, it might or might not confuse General Guderian and his Panzers, but it sure as hell confused Mary.