Time and Time Again, page 34
The pen was descending fast, its nib closing on his right eye, the ball of which it would pop before travelling on into his brain.
Stanton turned his head in time. The nib tore into the top of his earlobe and crumpled against his skull. The trajectory of her dive completed, the woman crashed down on top of him, her whole body against his, toe to toe, head to head, together in the easy chair.
This was Stanton’s chance, an opportunity to use his greater weight. He rolled her, and even in this moment of extremis he was clear-headed enough to try not to land her on her injured arm. He wanted her well enough so that he could persuade her to stop trying to kill him.
The two of them rolled out of the chair, tipping it over on top of them as they hit the carpet. This time Stanton was on top, an advantage which he put to immediate use by pinning her.
‘Stop this!’ he spat in English, the language she had used to him. ‘I’m your friend. I saved you.’
‘You shot me!’ she snarled. It was the first time he’d heard her speak since the moment in the hospital when she’d imagined in her delirium that he was trying to rape her. Did she sound Scottish?
‘You shot me!’ Stanton heard himself protesting.
‘Because you were about to kill the fucking Kaiser, you fuck!’
‘Because of Chronos,’ he grunted, struggling to keep her pinned. ‘I’m a Companion of Chronos. I know what you are. I know about Chronos. I’m from Chronos too.’
To Stanton’s astonishment she actually smiled, stopped struggling and smiled.
Except it wasn’t a smile of pleasure or fun, it was bitter and cold, really more of a sneer.
‘I know. Asshole,’ she said. ‘I know you’re from Chronos.’
‘You know?’
Stanton was so astonished he momentarily relaxed his grip. Fortunately she didn’t detect the half second of weakness, or if she did she decided not to exploit it.
‘How do you know?’ he asked.
‘We read your letter.’
It was the last thing he’d expected. In fact, with all the distraction of discovering that he was not the only visitor from the future and of then establishing contact with his counterpart, he’d forgotten all about his letter. It had only ever been the longest of long shots that it would survive. A desperate throw of the dice, a nod towards history.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘It was still there?’
‘Yes, it was there. We found it on the night we entered the cellar. On the night I journeyed back in time.’
Now it was her body that relaxed. She no longer seemed predisposed to fight.
‘So … can we talk?’ Stanton asked. ‘If I release you from this pin-down will you go back to bed, let me check you haven’t done yourself any harm trying to kill me and let me order some tea so we can talk?’
She thought for a moment, then nodded.
Warily he released her and got to his feet. Reaching down he offered her a hand. He could see the thought process in her mind. This was a woman who clearly viewed every moment and every gesture with maximum suspicion. But she was still weak and her violent strike at him had tired her.
She took his hand and he drew her to her feet. She sat down on the bed but didn’t get in.
‘So, talk,’ she said.
There was so much to discuss. Stanton decided to start with the most recent astonishing revelation.
‘You actually read my letter? It was still there? After a hundred and eleven years?’
‘Yes, it was still there. In the time that I come from Istanbul had been a dead town for nearly a century.’
‘Dead?’
‘It was cleared in the great starvations of the 1930s. All the cities of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor were. Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Istanbul. The Party couldn’t feed them so instead they drove the people out into the country to make war on the peasants for what could be found. They died of starvation in their tens of millions, which of course was what was intended. Those that survived tried to fight back and the Party responded using chemical warfare. They poisoned everything south of the Danube. When the Master and I entered Newton’s cellar, no one had been near the place in eighty years. The cellar was still locked.’
Stanton’s mind was reeling. Chemical warfare? Mass starvation? Cities dead for decades? What sort of world had this woman come from?
He tried to focus his questions. Start with the most immediate. Like in all good fieldwork, deal with the most pressing issue first.
‘Why did you try to kill me just then?’ he asked. ‘Surely you can see I’ve tried to help you?’
‘It’s my mission to kill you,’ she replied.
‘Yes, but you failed. Your mission was to kill me before I killed the Kaiser. Why bother now?’
She looked at him and suddenly the fire reignited in her eyes.
‘Because you ruined my fucking century, you stupid fucking cunt!’
She lifted her nightdress, all the way to above her breasts revealing the length of her tortured body. ‘You did this to me. You did it to millions and millions of people. Billions. You killed my children!!’
And suddenly the rage was on her again. As she dropped the nightdress hem he saw her abdominals tense into rigid corrugated iron. One foot was moving backwards, preparing to anchor a second spring at him.
‘Stop!’ he said. ‘Don’t do it! I’ll win and you know it. Maybe not on your day but this isn’t your day. You’re weak. You’ve been bedridden for a month and lost whatever weight you had. You can’t beat me, so stop. You’re just not well enough to fight me yet.’
She paused and looked at him hard.
‘You’re right. I’m not well yet,’ she conceded. ‘But soon I will be.’
She sat back on the bed and Stanton went into the vestibule where the internal telephone was situated. He ordered some tea and coffee and food.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked when he returned.
‘They call me Katie.’
‘Short for Katherine?’
‘No. K-T. Short for KT503b678.’
‘I’m Hugh Stanton.’
‘I know your name.’
‘From my letter?’
‘No. I’ve known it since I was six years old. All young pioneers learn it. You’re in the history books.’
That certainly took him aback.
‘Really?’
‘Of course you are. We all learn of the unbalanced bourgeois British zealot who unwittingly lit the spark of revolution by trying to frame honest Socialists. How you were sheltered by the Irish whore Burdette, but that you betrayed her and ran like a coward, leaving her to the Fascist Monarchist police.’
Stanton swallowed hard.
‘Well,’ he said, trying not to think of Bernadette or what might have happened to her after the police realized she’d let him go. ‘You know now that I’m not a zealot and I’m not unbalanced. I am just like you. I was brought to Cambridge in 2024. I presume you were brought to Cambridge too?’
‘I heard the Master use that name,’ Katie conceded. ‘It’s a bourgeois name. The place has a number now.’
‘I was brought there by the Companions of Chronos.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you, we read your letter.’
‘Well, then you know something about the terrible events of my own century,’ Stanton said. ‘You know that I killed the Kaiser to prevent the most terrible war in history. A war that marked the beginning of a terrible century. A century in which humanity learned to murder on an industrial scale. Whole populations died in the 1930s and 1940s, the Jews, the Gypsies, the Poles, the Ukrainians, all slaughtered. All slaughtered by Russian Soviet Communism.’
Now she really did smile. A broad wide smile that stretched fully across her face. And yet still a smile with not a single gram of joy in it.
The smile of a corpse.
‘I know,’ she repeated. ‘I read your letter. I know about your “terrible” war, your “Great” War, which began with the killing of an archduke at Sarajevo … Tell me, Hugh Stanton, how long did it last? This war that so corrupted and cursed the century into which you were born?’
‘Eleven years,’ Stanton replied. ‘1914 to 1925. The Great War lasted eleven years.’
‘Oh, eleven years,’ Katie replied with bitter sarcasm. ‘And tell me, Captain Stanton, how long did the Second World War last?’
Stanton was confused.
There had been no Second World War in the century from which Hugh Stanton had come.
The century which McCluskey had sought to correct.
In Stanton and McCluskey’s century there had been only one world war. The Great War.
‘One was enough,’ Stanton asserted. ‘More than a decade of deadlocked butchery. A butchery that ruined all the great nations of Europe utterly. Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia.’
‘But not America,’ Katie sneered. ‘They didn’t fight in this terrible war, did they? This war which you call Great?’
‘No, they kept out of it. That was why it went on so long. Woodrow Wilson would have brought them in but he was shot on the steps of Congress by Isolationists. So the war dragged on in deadlock until in the end both Germany and Russia had Communist revolutions. Germany’s under Luxemburg; Russia’s under Stalin. You know what happened then from the letter I wrote. Stalin was stronger. He betrayed Luxemburg. He had her and Liebknecht murdered in the streets. The Russians spread their ‘revolution’ west, through the Ukraine and Poland, through Germany and into France and on to Spain. By 1930 only Britain remained free, holding out under Winston Churchill. Isolated, alone, with the Russians on the Channel. The rest of Europe and all of Asia was enslaved under Stalin’s paranoid genocidal regime … a regime which murdered millions and millions of people, right up until 1951 when the Americans produced their bomb and destroyed Stalin’s Soviet Empire in a single day. All those decades of misery for half the globe stemmed from the terrible Great War. The war I stopped.’
‘Yes, you stopped it all right,’ Katie agreed. ‘Because of you, in my century there was no war in 1914. Germany was not destroyed. So Rosa Luxemburg didn’t have her revolution in 1925 in a nation exhausted by a great war; instead she had her revolution in 1916. As a reaction to the brutal police state you brought about by killing the Kaiser. Her revolution didn’t begin in a nation blighted by poverty and starvation and war exhaustion, like in your century. It began in the richest, most developed country on earth with the biggest army and the most advanced technology. In my century, the Russians weren’t the top Communists, the Germans were. The German USSR that Luxemburg established in 1916 was a global colossus. So when the vermin Strasser had her killed and made himself German Soviet dictator, he was the most powerful man in the world. A red kaiser. The revolution spread to Russia and was unstoppable. Then Strasser began his war and along with his Russian servant Stalin he took over all of Europe, including Britain. There was no “Churchill”, whoever the fuck he was, to “stand alone”. Britain wasn’t fit to fight anyone; it and its Empire had been fatally weakened and divided by the Civil War over Ireland. Strasser’s “revolution” spread to China, India, South America. Soon only America remained outside German Soviet control. But they didn’t save the world. Because when the atomic bomb was finally developed, it was Germany not America that had it. Berlin ordered a nuclear strike. I was one of the soldiers that occupied the rubble of New York. The globe was conquered! You think you lived in a shit century? With your one war, a bit of genocide and a half-arsed little nuclear strike. And after that nothing to worry about but something called global fucking warming, whatever that is. Try living in a century where the entire planet is ruled by a fourth-generation Communist lunatic. Where the entire planet is one vast network of prison camps. Where love is treason and they make you drown your own babies and every person in the world is an ant, a drone, a robot. Beaten, murdered. Dying in the mines, starving in the fields. Or doing mass synchronized dances in the Red Squares of Berlin, London, Moscow and Washington. Thousands prancing about with red ribbons in their hands while the Party fossils stand on their platforms and gloat. A world where there is no freedom. No individuality. No joy of any kind. That’s the world you bequeathed us, when you shot the Kaiser and sparked a revolution. You stupid bastard. You stupid stupid bastard. Your century was paradise! Why didn’t you leave well alone?’
She burst into tears.
Stanton was completely taken aback. In the short time he’d known Katie he’d come to presume that her heart and soul were constructed out of the same stuff as her body. He’d never imagined she could cry.
He tried in vain to justify what he’d done. To explain why the Companions of Chronos of his world had tasked him to do what he had done.
‘Katie, you read my history. The Russian USSR killed tens of millions before it was beaten.’
‘But they were beaten! In the end they were stopped. How could you have thrown away a century where the killing actually stopped and what’s more had been stopped for seventy years?’
Stanton could not meet her eye. The dawning realization that his whole mission, the mission which had begun with the murder of his own family, had actually resulted in the enslavement of the whole world was too much to bear.
46
IT TOOK KATIE another week to fully recover, during which time she and Stanton agreed an uneasy truce and formed an equally uneasy alliance. Sitting together in their suite at the Kempinski, they made a plan.
Clearly the century in which they were both now living was heading for utter disaster. Katie had failed to stop Stanton killing the Kaiser and so history was developing as it had done in her century, hurtling towards a global totalitarian misery without end.
If nothing else was changed, the whole dreadful sequence of events that would lead to four generations of psychopathic dictators ruling the earth would play out exactly as before.
Both Stanton and Katie could see that it was imperative for them to try to influence the shape of this third loop in time using their unique knowledge of the previous two. They had to try to find a way to prevent things from taking the course that they had in the second loop, and perhaps beginning a history which was preferable to even the one in the first loop, the one Stanton had been born into. And which he had helped throw away.
This last thought was still a very sore and sensitive subject for Katie. She still could not begin to understand how the Chronations of Stanton’s time could have imagined that a century in which global totalitarianism had been defeated could ever be improved on.
‘I suppose we wanted a century in which it had never existed at all,’ Stanton tried to explain, ‘and also, after that we wanted a world where the applications of human ingenuity didn’t develop on such crass and environmentally disastrous lines.’
But the more he heard about the world from which Katie had come, the more he understood how utterly and criminally deluded McCluskey and her crew of smug geriatrics had been. How deluded he had been. People made history and people screwed it up, that was what McCluskey had always maintained, and she sure had been right about that. Incredibly, she had ended up proving her own thesis. She screwed up.
If only Newton hadn’t been so damn clever.
But all that was in several pasts now. There was only one present, the here and now, and they had to make a plan.
Sitting up together late at night, Katie ravenously devouring every delicacy she could find to be delivered to their suite, they decided what they must do.
They would kill Rosa Luxemburg.
At first Katie had wanted to kill Strasser. He, after all, had been the one to hijack and corrupt Luxemburg’s revolution. He had fathered the hellish dynasty that spawned generations of homicidal demi-gods to lord it over a global population of synchronized puppets.
But Stanton disagreed.
‘Strasser was a thug,’ he argued. ‘He stole something noble, even beautiful, and debased it. Anybody could do what Strasser did, and if we take him out of the equation somebody else will take his place. Stalin or one of the other members of Strasser’s Central Committee.’
Katie had by this time explained her history in detail and Stanton recognized many of the names included in it from his own century: Goebbels, Röhm, Zinoviev. Others he had never heard of: Beria, Kamenev, Hess. Adolf Hitler.
‘Anyone can destroy something,’ Stanton went on, ‘but to create it takes talent and I’d suggest that to make a successful revolution takes genius. Luxemburg is a uniquely talented individual, a political visionary and a truly great communicator. I know, I’ve met her. She’s more special than any of the dull bullies who followed her. And without her there’d have been nothing for them to follow. We need to remove the shovel, not the shit.’
Stanton didn’t like the idea. In fact, the plan he was advocating pained him deeply. He knew Luxemburg. She was a good woman. A kind woman … and Bernadette loved her. But he also could see that taking her out of the German equation was his best shot at putting right the wrong he’d done. At preventing the German revolution from happening and hence preventing its disastrous corruption followed by its world domination.
‘So we kill Luxemburg,’ Katie said, tearing at steak and sausage with her fingers.
‘Yes.’
‘And then I’ll kill Strasser.’
‘That’s your choice. Right now he’s only twenty-two years old.’
‘I don’t care if he’s only twenty-two months, twenty-two days. I’ll tear him to pieces with my bare hands and eat his heart while it’s still beating. Then I’ll kill the rest of his committee,’ she said, ‘even the ones who are only children now. Then I’ll find the parents of the ones that haven’t yet even been born and I’ll kill them too. And I’ll kill them horribly. In revenge for the crimes that will now never be committed.’
Katie drank deep at water from the jug. She took no alcohol, explaining that remaining in control while others did not had proved useful to her in the past.
‘And maybe,’ she went on, wiping her mouth with her sinewy, ink-blackened arm and looking hard at Stanton, ‘maybe I’ll kill you as well because the truth is that all of this, all of this, is your fault.’
