Time and Time Again, page 6
Inside the five-hundred-year-old building, however, the peace and serenity of the fusty old College remained. In fact, it felt to Stanton almost as if he was attending a second Christmas Service. A string quartet was playing seasonal music and there was the same atmosphere of whispered reverence. Lines of chairs had been set out before a little lecture platform like pews set before an altar. And once more there were many candles, although these seemed only to increase the gloom, failing entirely to illuminate the beams of the great ceiling, which lowered above them deep in the shadows.
When McCluskey, who had been bustling about with a clipboard, had satisfied herself that everyone was present she led Stanton to the place reserved for him in the centre of the first row in front of the podium. Then she mounted the little platform and turned to address the room.
‘Good evening, everyone, and a merry Christmas to you all,’ she boomed. ‘Each one of you knows the purpose of this gathering save for our newest and last Companion, Captain Hugh ‘Guts’ Stanton, late of the Special Air Service Regiment and renowned webcast celebrity. Captain, your fellow Chronations bid you most welcome.’ There was polite applause, which Stanton did not acknowledge. He did not feel remotely that he had joined any order or that he was a companion to any of these people. ‘Captain Stanton has been very patient with me,’ McCluskey went on. ‘I have told him scarcely half the story, so far being scarcely qualified to do so. I now call upon Amit Sengupta, Lucian Professor of Mathematics here at Cambridge and Newton’s direct successor, to explain the matter further.’
Stanton knew of the corpulent Anglo-Indian academic who now rose from his chair and took the stage. Everybody in Britain knew Sengupta because besides being an eminent physicist he was also, as so many eminent physicists are, an appalling media tart. A man who appeared regularly on news and documentary shows commenting on any matters even remotely related to science and the cosmos. He was always introduced in the most breathless and epic terms as ‘the man who has looked into the eye of God’ or ‘the man who has travelled in his mind to the edge of space and the beginning of time’. Sengupta himself, of course, always affected amused modesty at this sort of hyperbole, looking uncomfortable and claiming that he had in fact only journeyed back as far as fifteen seconds after the beginning of time and making it very clear that the first quarter minute of the life of the universe remained as much a mystery to him as it would to his driver or his cook. Professor Sengupta was also a hugely successful writer, having produced a work of ‘popular’ physics called Time, Space and other Annoying Relatives, which purported to explain relativity and quantum mechanics to ‘the man in the pub’ and of course didn’t. In scientific circles it was said of Sengupta’s book that it was easier to find a Higgs Boson particle without the assistance of a Hadron Collider than it was to find anyone who’d got past the third page.
The professor waddled up on to the stage like a seal taking possession of a rock. He wore a pinstripe suit beneath his gown and a yellow-spotted bow tie of the type favoured by professors who like to be thought of as a bit mad. On his head was his trademark Nehru hat, to which he had pinned a badge that said ‘Science Rocks’. Sengupta opened his briefcase and made a great show of arranging certain papers on a small table before taking a quite deliberately long, slow sip of water. Finally he began.
‘Newton’s great leap of the imagination,’ he said in his pedantic-sounding, sing-song voice, which was half Calcutta lecture theatre and half London gentlemen’s club, ‘was to understand, hundreds of years before Einstein, that time is relative.’ Here he paused for theatrical effect and also to dab rather primly at the water on his lips with the enormous, brightly coloured silk handkerchief he kept stuffed flamboyantly in the breast pocket of his suit. ‘Time is not straight or linear. It does not progress in a regular and ordered fashion, and the reason for this is because it is affected by gravity. Yes! Just as are motion and mass and light, and indeed all the properties of the physical universe. It is, of course, generally believed that Einstein first proposed the idea of universal relativity but we in this room and we alone now know that in fact the first man in the world to make this leap of thought was our own Sir Isaac Newton. And we know also that Newton leapt further and with surer foot than Einstein ever did. For just as Newton showed the world that gravity explained the circular and elliptical courses of the planets, he also understood that time moved in a similar manner, twisting and ever turning, shadowing the expansion of the universe, bound by the gravitational pull of every atom contained therein. To put it plainly, Newton saw that time was coiled, and just as an understanding of gravity allowed him to track and map the course of planetary motion, it also enabled him to track the movement of time. And so predict its course.’
Here Sengupta paused briefly for another sip of water. He knew he had a sensational story and clearly did not intend to rush it.
‘So what? I hear you asking yourselves,’ he continued. ‘Coiled or straight, time progresses and there is nothing we can do about it. Why in the blinking blazes was old Isaac getting his knickers in a twist? I will tell you why! Because gravitational pull is not uniform! Just as the planets deviate slightly from the perfect symmetry of their ancient courses, so it is with time. We must think of it not as a perfect spiral but more as a disobliging Slinky in which, once in a while, coils get crossed. Time will, on rare occasions, pass through the same set of dimensions twice. The coils of the Slinky touch only for a moment, within the most limited parameters, after which the spiral of time continues on its merry way. No harm done … But what, Newton asked himself in the tortured journeying of his fearful imaginings, if someone were present at that point in space–time when the coils of the Slinky touched? That person would exist at both the beginning and the end of a loop in time. And so now the spiral does not continue on its merry way. It turns back on itself. For simply by drawing breath, our intrepid time-straddler reboots the loop. All that had been in the past is now once more yet to come. History is unmade. The loop is begun again.’
Sengupta mopped his brow with his handkerchief and took yet another sip of water. The flickering of the candles cast a ghostly ripple across his face. The assembled Companions of Chronos leant forward on their walking sticks and Zimmer frames, hanging on the great physicist’s every word.
‘And Newton really did his sums,’ Sengupta continued. ‘It is scarcely possible to credit but this divine genius, working alone and without modern equipment, was able to tell us when and where time would next cross its own path. No wonder he went a bit loony. I think I’d be looking for secret codes in the Bible myself if I’d just written a map of time when everybody else was just starting to think about mapping Australia. Sir Isaac’s conclusion was most specific. He calculated that the next closed loop in the space–time continuum would be one hundred and eleven years long, and that the point at which the beginning and the end would cross would occur at midnight on the thirty-first of May 2025 and at a quarter past midnight in the very early morning of the first of June 1914. I’m sure all of you can see the reason for the fifteen-minute time lag.’
Stanton couldn’t see it, nor did he imagine that many other people in the room could either. Professor Sengupta had the self-satisfied habit common to many academics of pretending an intellectual equality with his audience in order to happily demonstrate his own superiority.
‘It is, of course, because, as I have explained, gravity is not even or 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. And of course one hundred and eleven years before. Ha ha.’
Sengupta grinned broadly as if he’d made a great joke. There was a sycophantic murmur of forced mirth in reply, in which Sengupta allowed himself to bask for a moment before continuing.
‘The contact of these two separate moments in time will be minimal and fleeting. It will last for less than a second in time, and the spatial juxtaposition will be, to employ Newton’s own delightfully colourful phrase, “no bigger than a sentry box outside St James’s Palace”. Any person standing in that imaginary sentry box in 2025 would also be standing in it in 1914, instantly wiping out the previous reality and beginning the creation of an entirely new one. The whole one-hundred-and-eleven-year loop will be begun again. And the location where that notional sentry box will stand, the spatial coordinates where the twisted Slinky of space–time will cross itself, occurs in Istanbul.’
‘Constantinople!’ McCluskey shouted, unable to resist jumping up. ‘In Europe! I mean, come on! Is that fate or what? The place is barely seven hundred miles from Sarajevo! Fifteen hundred from Berlin! Newton’s coordinates could have dumped our man anywhere: the summit of Everest, the middle of the South China Sea—’
‘The burning superheated core of the planet,’ Sengupta interjected. ‘Space–time is no respecter of physical mass.’
‘Exactly,’ McCluskey went on exultantly. ‘Instead it’s “Who’s for a cup of Turkish coffee and a bit of belly dancing?” This is divine intervention, I tell you – it’s got to be. God gives us one shot at changing history and puts it exactly where it’s needed most.’
‘Let us be clear, Professor McCluskey,’ Sengupta said sternly, ‘whatever may be your religious beliefs, this is all about science. Newton, as I say, did the maths. He places his junction in space and time in Istanbul and his coordinates are fantastically specific. The crucial point occurs in the cellar of an old residential palace in the dockland area of the city. Newton secretly arranged for the purchase of the building, endowing that a hospital be established in it and ordering that the cellar henceforth remain forever locked.’
‘Bet that cost a pretty penny,’ McCluskey observed excitedly. ‘Now we know what the sly old bugger was doing at the Royal Mint all those years.’
‘Yes, well, be that as it may,’ Sengupta said firmly, clearly irritated at McCluskey’s constant interruptions. ‘The great man’s hope was that the cellar would still be locked in 2025, thus enabling a traveller from that time to enter the sentry box unimpeded. It was a long shot given the turbulence of history but in fact he nearly made it. It was only in the chaos that followed the Great War that Newton’s hospital finally was closed. Thus in 1914 the cellar was still locked under the terms of Newton’s endowment.’
‘But the cellar’s still there!’ McCluskey cried out.
‘Yes, yes, Professor McCluskey.’ Sengupta positively snarled. ‘I was coming to that. The palace above it fell into disrepair and has been redeveloped many times but the foundations remain—’
‘And we’ve bought it!’ McCluskey shouted, now jumping up and joining Sengupta on the stage. ‘It belongs to us. It will be waiting for us on the thirty-first of May next year. Waiting for you, Hugh. Waiting for Captain “Guts” Stanton.’ She pointed her stubby, nicotine-stained finger towards him. With all the talk of 1914 Stanton found himself thinking of the famous Lord Kitchener recruiting poster. Perhaps McCluskey was thinking of the same thing.
‘Your country needs you, Hugh. The world needs you!’
8
‘COME ON, CHOP chop. Christ, what a country! I said coffee and cognac. And breakfast. Got any eggs? Fresh, mind.’
He’d heard that voice before.
His head had been bowed, his eye focused on Cassie’s emails. Now, quietly, he folded them away in his wallet and put it back in his pocket. Then, as much by instinct as intention, his right hand slid down beyond his pocket and dropped down into the bag at his feet, fingers closing round the handle of his little polymer machine pistol.
Although God knows he couldn’t use it.
Discharging a weapon like that with its awesome and currently unimagined capabilities could scarcely fail to raise the interest of every intelligence agency in the city. And as any student of military history knew, there were more spies than dogs in pre-Great War Constantinople.
‘I said coffee! And a drink! Dammit, what’s the bloody Turkish for booze?’
It was a curious voice, very clipped with short vowels, but the tone took Stanton back to Sandhurst. To officer training and all those private-school boys with their effortless sense of entitlement.
‘Lazy kaffir’s probably on some carpet praying,’ the voice went on. ‘They never stop praying, do they? If they spent less time praying and more time doing, then the country wouldn’t be such a bloody basket case, would it?’
But it wasn’t just the tone he recognized. He’d heard this specific voice before.
How could that possibly be?
He gripped the weapon tighter.
And then he remembered. His fingers relaxed around his gun.
How stupid. How very stupid. Of course he’d heard the voice before. Not in another century but scarcely an hour ago.
It was the idiot from the Galata Bridge, the driver of the Crossley 20/25.
He turned and glanced. It was them all right, the men in the car. All five of them. Early twenties. Boaters, blazers, flannel bags. Swagger sticks and old school ties. Smart enough but with bloodshot eyes and sweaty, pasty faces. Still half drunk. Hooligans. Wealthy ones but hooligans nonetheless. You got them in any age, any class. Swap the boaters for hoodies and they could have come from the twenty-first century.
Quite suddenly Stanton felt a terrible anger rising within him.
These could have been the four bastards who wiped out his family. They very nearly had wiped out a family.
‘I said coffee and cognac!’ the young man repeated loudly and unpleasantly as he and his companions slumped themselves noisily around one of the little tables, scraping back their chairs, lounging about and generally making it clear that they owned the place.
One of the others spoke up from behind a street map.
‘I’m sure it’s around here somewhere,’ he said. ‘Hey, you!’ the man barked at the cafe owner, who having disappeared into his kitchen was now emerging with a tray of cups and a coffee pot. ‘House of Mahmut – where is it? Girls? Dancing? House of Sluts? Where – Mahmut – House?’
The owner merely shrugged and shook his head.
‘Bloody idiot’s got no idea what we’re talking about,’ the first man said, ‘and he’s forgotten the brandy. Oi, you. I said coffee and cognac.’
The owner shook his head and turned away, which infuriated the Englishman, who banged the table in protest.
‘Don’t you bloody turn your back on me, you bloody dago! I said, where’s the bloody brandy?’
Stanton rose to his feet and picked up his bag. He knew he had to leave because he really wanted to confront these men and that would be a very stupid thing to do. His first and only duty was to pass the time until his business in Sarajevo as quietly and with as little impact as possible. His whole mission depended on the key events he was tasked with influencing remaining unchanged from when they had first occurred in time. Confronting gangs of semi-drunk posh boys in Old Stamboul was unlikely to affect the diary plans of the Austrian royal house, but it might.
The movement brought him to the attention of the five men.
‘You, sir,’ the man who’d been at the wheel of the car and who was the most vocal of the group said, ‘you don’t look Turkish. English? Français? Deutsch? We want some brandy. Do you speak dago?’
He should have just said no and walked out.
‘You’re in Stamboul,’ Stanton said quietly, ‘so have a bit of respect. This is a Muslim establishment. Obviously they won’t have brandy. It’s morning, so go back to Pera and sleep it off. But don’t try to drive or I’ll take your keys.’
For a moment the five young men stared in astonishment.
The leader collected himself first. ‘And you would be …?’
Stanton still could have turned around and left but he didn’t.
‘I’m a British army officer and I’m telling you that you’ll get no cognac here because alcohol is proscribed under Islam, as even imbeciles like you must know. So why don’t you just clear out and go home – but I warn you, don’t try to drive.’
Five jaws dropped open in front of him.
This was stupid and Stanton knew it. These men hadn’t killed Cassie and he was crazy drawing attention to himself.
‘I know who he is,’ another member of the party shouted. ‘He was on the bridge this morning. He’s the chap who nearly made us crash.’
‘So he is! Wish I’d damn well hit him now.’
‘I’m the chap,’ Stanton replied firmly, ‘who saved you from being under arrest for the manslaughter of a mother and her young children.’
Now finally he did try to leave, taking a step towards the door as if he’d said his piece. But he was already in too deep. The five young men were having none of it.
‘The wogs can’t arrest Englishmen,’ the leader said. ‘Or weren’t you aware of that?’
‘Funny sort of army officer,’ another remarked. ‘What’s your regiment?’
Stanton bit his lip. He knew from the research he’d done in Cambridge that Turkey had traded sovereignty for foreign investment. No British officer was going to rot in a gaol for knocking over a few locals and this comfortable arrangement would have been second nature to the British in the city.
‘Who are you, damn you?’ the leader of the group demanded. ‘I haven’t seen you before.’
‘I don’t think he’s army at all. I’ve never seen him. Anybody seen him?’
Stanton was feeling stupid. Why had he said he was a soldier? The foreign groups clustered around the embassies and hotels of the Pera district must inevitably be small and insular; the five men facing him would expect to know all their comrades in the city.
