Time and Time Again

42

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.