Time and Time Again

44

STANTON WAS PRETTY sure he could spring the woman, if she were still alive. Hospitals were never secure, no matter what efforts were made to make them so. Too many people coming and going, too many gowns and facemasks, too many emergency cases scurrying about. Hospitals hadn’t been secure in the twenty-first century and Stanton was confident that they would be considerably less so a hundred and eleven years earlier.

But getting her out was just the first problem. Next, she would have to be concealed while she recovered. Hiding a sick, possibly unconscious woman who had been sprung from protective custody while also providing her with the care she’d need would require preparation.

He’d known from the start that if he could find his target at all they would probably be very sick, which was why he had secured a double-room suite at the hotel, just as he had been forced to do for McCluskey on their first night in Constantinople. He hadn’t realized, of course, that this new charge would also be a woman. A fact which would require an explanation if he didn’t want to arouse the interest of the hotel detective. He imagined she’d be too young to pass for his mother, as McCluskey had done. A sibling was called for.

‘My sister will be joining me from Dar-es-Salaam,’ he announced at reception, having returned to his hotel after questioning the journalist Fiedler. ‘Her health is delicate and she has been ill, a hunting wound sustained in the bush. We have come home to the Fatherland for her hospital treatment and now she must convalesce. She is to occupy the second room in my suite. I trust your hotel can offer every comfort in such a situation?’

The hotel manager (to whom Stanton had insisted on speaking) assured him that they could, and to Stanton’s relief did not ask for a second set of papers. The sister of a German officer wasn’t required to submit any. Stanton’s ID would cover them both.

Next Stanton hired an automobile, a beautiful maroon-coloured Mercedes Benz four-cylinder town car. He absolutely loved it. Squatting down in front of the radiator grille and turning the crank handle to start the engine, he forgot the intensity and emotional turmoil of his situation and allowed himself a moment of sheer joy. No electric starting motor for this baby. If a man wanted to start it he had to pump the crank.

As the great machine shuddered into life, throbbing violently, he climbed in behind the wheel and sat back on the hard-sprung leather seat. Running his hands over the polished mahogany instrument panel, he could scarcely believe that this was the first time he’d been behind the wheel of a car since leaving the twenty-first century. In happier circumstances, classic wheels would have been the first thing he’d have treated himself to. To drive a vintage car when it wasn’t vintage at all but cutting-edge technology was about as good as it got for Stanton. And to drive it on near empty roads, with motor roaring, leather, brass, rubber and steel rattling. A huge primitive Neanderthal machine with its own unique personality. And difficult to drive. No power anything, no synchromesh, just man against metal.

Experimenting with the gears and clutch as he guided the car out into traffic, Stanton swore that if ever he got off the time-warp roller-coaster he was on he’d buy half a dozen. Never mind women, he’d have cars! And bikes too. British bikes. He’d tour the country on a state-of-the-art 1914 Enfield. He’d take a Norton to the Isle of Man and win the next TT Race.

Maybe take a Triumph round Ireland and drop in on …

But he couldn’t think about that now. Bernadette must wait. There was a new woman in his life. A time traveller from the future.

He’d come to 1914 imagining that with the death of the Kaiser his business with Chronos would be over. But with the arrival of a second agent of Chronos and the realization that perhaps he hadn’t ‘fixed’ the century after all, he knew that he could not retire from active service yet.

He was still a soldier and he was still on duty.

Stanton drove his Mercedes through Berlin. A map on his knee, searching out a medical supply store that he’d located from the phone book at the hotel. He found that he was smiling. Just the sensation of driving a car made him feel better, like he was finally back in control and getting on with things. Playing with the clunky, chunky controls and feeling the throaty thunder of the hand-made engine as it vibrated under the huge shining bonnet gave Stanton his first moments of pleasure since he’d fallen asleep in Bernadette’s arms.

And once again she was on his mind. It seemed to happen every few minutes.

He wondered if he had sought her out in the century that had now disappeared from time, the one where the death of the Kaiser truly had signalled the end of his mission. He felt sure he must have done. Never mind Shackleton and Everest and all the bloody cars in Birmingham. He wanted Bernadette. He wanted her now and he knew that he’d have wanted her the last time the world had passed this way. Perhaps he had won her back, somehow getting her to Cambridge and showing her Newton’s box, which even now must lie in the attic of the Master’s Lodge. That would convince her, surely. It was perhaps the only proof that would, and it was currently in the care of the Master of Trinity … He’d have only to break in and …

Had he done that once already? In that now lost century and life? Had he tracked her down, taken her to Cambridge and produced in triumph the evidence that would make her love him once again? Make her make love to him again? It was a confusing and extremely frustrating thought.

He bought a surgeon’s gown and mask at the medical supply store and then drove on to Leipziger Platz, across which his epoch-changing bullet had sped on its journey into the Emperor’s brain. He parked directly outside Wertheim’s. The place had been teeming with shoppers and jammed with traffic the last time he had been there but it was almost empty now. Two uniformed doormen leapt forward eagerly and guided him in to a parking place. Their help wasn’t needed; there were no other cars trying to park.

This previously bustling monument to Berlin’s economic miracle was a very different place to when last he’d exited it, scattering forged Socialist pamphlets behind him. It was sombre and quiet now. The great female statue in the centre of the atrium had been draped in black as if in penance for the store’s unwitting role in the national tragedy. Black banners hung where previously there had been coloured silks and chandeliers. Every member of staff had on a wide black armband. But no amount of ostentatious mourning was going to turn round the fortunes of Wertheim’s department store now. It was a ghost shop, forever tainted by its grim association with the Empire’s darkest day. The massive deductions and almost desperate promotions being offered were shunned by even the most committed bargain-hunters. Stanton reckoned he was one of only half a dozen shoppers in a store that had previously served thousands by the hour.

Three members of staff approached him at once.

‘I need a lady’s nightdress and cap. Loose, plain and simple – my wife is an invalid. Also a day dress and items of undergarment.’

He was led to the second floor where the ladies’ clothing department was located, the centre of a small crowd of overly attentive staff. He was at once asked the most obvious question.

‘And what size is Madam?’

Stanton cast his mind back to the footprints in the cellar … those working boots would have been perhaps a UK size six. Glancing at the female staff lined up in front of him, he selected one on shoe size.

‘Perhaps like you, miss,’ he said.

After making his purchases he drove back to the Kempinski and hung the lady’s day dress in the closet of the spare room, placing the underwear in a chest of drawers. Then he put the surgeon’s mask and gown and the nightdress and cap into his bag and slipped some sedatives and his gun into his pocket.

On his way out of the hotel he approached reception.

‘I hope to be bringing my sister from hospital this afternoon,’ he explained brusquely. ‘You will oblige me by having a wheelchair waiting at my disposal.’

He drove his hired car to the Berliner Buch hospital, the place where Bernadette had sat her vigil over his unconscious and poisoned body. There were some parking places available in an area reserved for senior staff and ambulances and Stanton took one. Towing and clamping were blights of the future. He’d be happy to pay a fine.

He walked up the great stone steps of the building, through the colonnaded entrance and into the hospital. Once inside he ducked into the first lavatory he found and put on his surgeon’s gown. Then, unchallenged, he wandered further into the hospital and found a porter. He enquired about the whereabouts of the female police prisoner, explaining that he’d heard she was something of a circus freak and he wanted to get a peek.

The porter was happy to oblige, giving directions and saying that he didn’t think the Herr Doktor would be disappointed.

Stanton made his way to the correct floor, picking up a wheelchair on the way. He left the chair at the entrance to the lift and sought out the correct room. The door was guarded by two uniformed men whom Stanton approached without breaking his stride.

‘I must check the patient’s pupil dilation for signs of diaspora,’ he said, making up a condition as he spoke. ‘The process will take only a few seconds. Kindly accompany me into the room so you may witness that the inspection has been performed and that the patient remained secure in your care at all times.’

There was hesitation on the faces of the officers. Stanton pressed on before they could articulate it.

‘If you allow me to be in the presence of your charge unsupervised I shall be forced to report you to your superiors,’ he snapped. ‘The police have entrusted this hospital with this woman’s care and I shall not allow myself to be placed in a position which compromises your own security protocol. I insist that you secure your charge while I am required to lay my hands upon her.’

The bullshit worked. Once more the prevailing German predisposition to obey authority stood him in good stead. The two guards dutifully followed Stanton into the room, where he swiftly immobilized them, spinning round and hitting the first man in the temple with his left, followed by a right upper cut to the second man’s jaw. Both went down and Stanton administered the same sedative he’d been forced to give Bernadette a week earlier.

Then he turned to the figure lying on the bed, feeling quite suddenly almost overcome by the momentous nature of the meeting.

Two time travellers from different versions of the universe meeting in a third.

She was unconscious, as he’d expected her to be. Her wounded arm and shoulder were heavily bandaged and looked badly swollen. Her blood was poisoned just as his had been and without twenty-first-century medicine she would surely slowly die.

He put his hands on the coverlet.

There was no time to dwell any further on the incredible nature of the encounter. That he was about to touch the skin of a being from another age. After all, he was just such a being himself.

He pulled back the coverlet. She was dressed in the usual hospital standard open-backed nightshirt. He produced his pocket multi-tool, cut the straps and pulled the garment off her.

He gulped and almost looked away. He’d never seen such damage done to a body. He’d seen bullet scars before, he had a couple himself. And whip scars and knife scars and the faded marks of bone-splitting bludgeons, but never all on the same body.

The tattoos were also unnerving, a tangled mass of poorly executed and extremely violent imagery in a naïve, amateur style that reminded Stanton of Russian prison tattoos. The disfiguring scribbles were punctuated with official-looking numberings and what appeared to be some form of medical record, listed under the woman’s right breast. There was also a series of messy Caesarean scars at the bottom of her stomach.

He took the nightdress from his bag and leant forward to lift the woman’s shoulders from the pillow and put the gown over her head.

Then, quite suddenly, the woman’s left hand shot upwards and took hold of his throat in a vice-like grip, a grip Stanton recognized as practised and one that would collapse his larynx in seconds. He resisted the instinctive urge to grab at the wrist of the attacking arm, fully aware that in a tug of war the advantage lay with her. She had her grip established and he had only seconds left.

Her eyes were open.

He was sure she’d been unconscious. She was deeply fevered and her body was wasting away and yet some primeval survival instinct had jerked her from unconsciousness at the feel of an alien touch and lent her incredible strength.

‘Nobody rapes me,’ she snarled in English.

The pain in Stanton’s throat was intense. He could feel the various cartilages in his larynx collapsing; his voicebox was about to be forced into his trachea. He’d never known a grip like it, and this was a woman, and a sick one at that.

He had no choice. His hands had been on her shoulders. He let go, drew both his hands back and then chopped them into either side of her neck.

The grip didn’t slacken at all. Not a millimetre.

It was incredible.

He’d held back on the blow certainly, but only very slightly, because he didn’t want to actually kill her. She was now very close to killing him.

He double-chopped her again. And again. Her neck was like steel cable. It was as if he was karate-chopping a lamppost.

His head was swimming. He was starting to black out. This was ridiculous. Impossible. Ten seconds earlier he had been about to remove a helpless woman from her hospital bed. Now the same woman was squeezing the last breath of life out of him.

He remembered the multi-tool with which he’d cut the straps on her gown. He’d put it on the cabinet beside her bed. He flailed an arm towards where he thought it would be and found it. The scissor function was still extended. He swung it round and plunged it deep into the woman’s extended arm.

It gave him less than a second. He felt a momentary slackening. She hadn’t let go but there was the tiniest fall in pressure. Her eyes had widened too. He did not believe that she was fully conscious but the stab in her arm had brought her a little closer to the surface.

He hit her again.

The eyes flamed for a moment. Then they closed.

She slipped back into unconsciousness.

And as she did so, slowly the vice opened.

Stanton had no time to dwell either on the agony in his throat or the appalling shock of this woman’s savagery. She had nearly killed him, from a prone position on a hospital bed, weakened by infection and with one arm completely disabled. Tattoos or not, it seemed perhaps that those other Companions knew what they were doing when they chose her after all.

She seemed genuinely unconscious now but nonetheless Stanton was wary. He thought about administering a sedative but not knowing what drugs were already in her body decided he couldn’t risk it. But he kept a needle ready just in case. He tore a length of sheet and bandaged the scissor wound he’d made, then he wrestled the nightdress on to her naked body and finally placed a lady’s bed cap on her head.

It was a strange moment because with the cap on her head and the white ruff at her collar, this snarling savage was transformed into a picture of innocence and calm. Apart from one or two small scars, her face was unmarked and seeing it framed in white linen was a revelation. She looked gentle. Stanton could hardly recall the skinny, sinewy, scarred and disfigured warrior’s body that lay beneath her gown.

He gathered her up in his arms and, stepping over the prostrate guards, crossed to the door and took a look outside. The corridor was empty. That was all the luck he needed. As long as he could get from this room unseen he felt confident he could brazen out the rest. He marched out of the room and towards the lift. He looked neither right nor left and held his head high. A nurse appeared in front of him. Instantly he barked an order.

‘This patient is dehydrated and has fallen into a faint. Fortunately I was on an inspection round or she would be prostrate on the floor right now. But we will speak about that later. For the moment there is a wheelchair by the lift. Bring it immediately.’

It was agony for him to speak after the damage that the woman had done to his larynx. Perhaps his rasping voice was even more intimidating because the nurse jumped to attention and almost saluted. It wasn’t her job to enforce security or to ask questions. Quite the opposite. Her job, which had been drummed into her since first she began her training, was to obey doctors. She scurried off at once, although in fact Stanton was walking so purposefully that despite her panicky desire to please they arrived at the wheelchair at the same time.

‘Thank you, nurse, that will be all,’ he said, gently lowering the woman into the chair.

While in the lift, he pulled off the surgeon’s gown and stuffed it into a cavity under the seat of the wheelchair. Now he was a fond husband collecting his wife from hospital. When the lift doors opened on the ground floor he wheeled the chair confidently towards the front doors.

‘Soon have you home, my dear,’ he said as he passed the reception area.

Then straight through the front doors and out into the open air. There was a wheelchair ramp to the left of the stone stairs and moments later Stanton was putting his fellow Chronation into the Mercedes.