Time and Time Again

7

THE MORNING RAIN and hail had long since turned again to snow as Stanton and McCluskey made their way across the Cam towards King’s College chapel, which rose up before them through the icy mist cloaked in white.

‘Did you ever see anything so fine?’ McCluskey remarked as they paused for a moment on the King’s Bridge. ‘Doesn’t it lift your soul just a little?’

‘Sorry,’ Stanton replied. ‘Just makes me think how much Cassie would have loved it.’

‘Ah yes.’ McCluskey sighed. ‘Such is the terrible irony of bereavement, turning every familiar joy to misery. Each smile a twisting knife. Each thing of beauty an added burden of pain.’

‘Thanks.’

The service was indeed agonizingly beautiful. Like a second funeral. The many flickering candles. The swelling voices of the choir. The readings in the mighty poetry of the King James Bible, strangely moving even to a non-believer. The unbearable majesty of a ritual that had remained almost unchanged for three hundred Christmas Eves.

After the service McCluskey didn’t take Stanton straight to the lodge at Trinity as he had expected but instead she put her arm in his and led him through the freezing wind across the quad to the Great Hall. Stanton noticed that quite a number of other members of the King’s congregation were heading in the same direction, all venerable College figures, stooped with age, holding their various forms of fringed and tasselled hats to their heads while their gowns billowed in a gale that threatened to blow the frailer ones away.

Two porters were standing at the entrance to the Hall and others had taken up positions around the Great Court. They wore the traditional bowler hats (made somewhat ridiculous by the compulsory high-vis jackets) but something about their manner suggested to Stanton they weren’t porters at all. Too focused, too likely looking. Stanton had briefed enough security details in his time to know one when he saw one.

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!’