‘Two sides? What, America versus Britain again?’ said Sal. ‘Just like that time when the American Civil War didn’t finish?’
‘No, not so much countries, Sal. Ideologies: socialism versus capitalism.’
‘What does that mean exactly?’ asked Liam.
Maddy looked at him. ‘Oh, come on! Seriously? You must’ve read enough history books by now to know what those words mean, right? It’s the struggle of the worker versus the banker. The poor versus the rich. The idea of shared wealth versus personal wealth.’
‘Oh, right, that.’ He shrugged. ‘Aye, I knew that.’
‘On one side we have Russia,’ her finger ran across a colour-coded map of Europe, ‘which has its revolution in the 1920s. Germany, Britain, Poland, Austria… one after the other, by the look of these dates, they experience their own workers’ revolutions. And then on the other side we have America and Canada and some of the South American countries becoming one big “Free World Zone”. That’s what they call themselves.’
‘It’s an Atlantic divide, then?’ said Rashim. ‘The Americas against Europe?’
‘No, not exactly.’ Maddy flipped through some more pages until she found an entry she’d read earlier. ‘Ah, here it is… 1937: The DuMann/Roosevelt Accord. President Roosevelt and Congress approve a loan of several hundreds of millions of dollars to the French to help them invest in industry and weapons development. France is seen by the American public as one of the last major outposts of capitalist values in Europe.’
She checked an index at the front. ‘The rest of this century, it seems, is one long Cold War. Tensions rising on both sides. There’s a doozy of a quote right here at the front of this book.’ She flipped to the title page.
‘ The twentieth century will prove to be a century devoted to one purpose alone — preparation for an inevitable war. Almost a hundred years spent in a race for industrial and technological supremacy. A race in which the winning post will almost certainly be a brutal and catastrophic global war… and no country will emerge unscathed. ’
‘Jay-zus,’ muttered Liam. He recalled the strained look on that poor young girl’s face in the library. She’d seemed so worried, so haunted by looming events. And Liam reminded himself how he’d casually, glibly, batted away her concerns as if she was being silly. So easy for him to be devil-may-care. His was a fleeting visit. But she… she was stuck there waiting, like every other person in the country, to see how far the Americans were prepared to push their challenge.
The young lady had returned with his book and a mumbled apology for the awkward invitation she’d extended to him. She’d covered her mouth, her braced teeth, as she’d whispered, but he could have sworn she’d said something like, ‘ I just don’t want to be on my own… if… when… it happens.’
‘Everyone knew what was coming,’ said Liam. ‘They could see it coming, God help ’em.’
Maddy picked up one of the newspapers. She looked at the others, Rashim and Sal in particular. ‘They have nuclear weapons in this timeline, but they call them “atomics”. It looks like both sides have “atomics”. They’ve been stockpiling warheads for decades.’
‘We need to see how it turns out, Maddy.’
She nodded at Liam. ‘I think so. It didn’t look good. We need to go further forward, Rashim. Can we do it?’
He shook his head. ‘I said it before. We don’t have the power to send you any further, Maddy. Maybe remote-viewing. A pinhole-viewing.’
‘That’s fine. That’s all we need. How far forward can we go?’
‘I need to work it out.’
‘2070? Can you get us a look at that year?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ll work it out. Just give me a moment.’ Rashim took a chair at the desk and pulled up a program on the screen.
They waited silently, listening to him tap on the keyboard and mutter calculations under his breath.
‘It’s always the same,’ said Sal after a while. ‘One way or another, mankind ends up wiping itself out with some big weapon, doesn’t it? Why are people so completely stupid?’
‘It’s what we do best, isn’t it?’ said Liam. ‘Invent things that we can use to kill everyone. It’s what we’re good at, I suppose.’
‘That is correct,’ rumbled Bob. His eyelids were fluttering, revealing the rolled whites of his eyes. He was Bluetoothing data. One of his sporadic back-ups. ‘Mankind is essentially sociopathic,’ he continued. ‘That is probably why Homo sapiens became dominant and wiped out the Neanderthals and the other sapient species; your killer instinct was more clearly defined.’
‘Aye, we were tougher nuts than those apemen,’ said Liam.
‘Negative. Not tougher,’ said Bob, ‘just more ruthless.’
‘Thanks for that, Dr Phil,’ said Maddy. ‘Since when did you become an expert on the human psyche?’
‘I have files on — ’
Maddy raised a hand. ‘It’s OK, I was just being snarky.’
‘OK, I’ve got some rough figures,’ said Rashim. ‘We can’t project a pinhole field all the way to 2070, I’m afraid. It’s just not possible on the power we’re drawing in right now.’
‘Jesus!’ Maddy gritted her teeth. ‘We need to do something about that. This Holborn generator’s a pile of junk!’
‘I have some thoughts on this. We could do some reconfiguring, perhaps insert some kind of capacitor to build up a store of surplus energy — ’
‘Later. We’ll discuss that later. Just tell me how far we can go right now.’
Rashim looked at the scribbled notes on the desk in front of him. He sucked air through his teeth. ‘I think we can reach as far forward as the early forties — 2042, perhaps 2043. But not much more.’
Liam cocked his head. ‘Wasn’t that round about when Waldstein showed off his first-ever time machine?’
‘Yeah, round about then, I think.’
‘I wonder if this future has a version of him in it,’ said Liam. ‘Eh? That would be weird.’
Maddy shrugged. An intriguing idea — that another version of him lay ahead of them now, perhaps a version of him that was living a very different life. A happier life perhaps with his wife and his son? A life lived in blissful ignorance of time travel. An Einstein who remained a humble patent clerk; a Bill Gates who ended up a computer repairman.
Wouldn’t that be a thing, though? A timeline that survives this looming nuclear crisis and perhaps finds a peaceful future. But also a timeline without Waldstein’s displacement machine in it. Perhaps even a timeline without a Pandora. Wouldn’t all of that be a wonderful thing? She could only hope. ‘Rashim?’
He turned to look at her. ‘Yes?’
‘Do it. Set that up, please. Let’s go get a look at our future.’
Chapter 66
2043, the ruins of Piccadilly Circus, London
The dog, a small, virtually hairless thing that might, once upon a time, have been mistaken for a Jack Russell, chased the rodent through a dark maze of creaking wooden tables and desks — furniture that for many a year had held true until a decade ago a portion of the building’s roof had finally caved in. Ten years of wet summers and freezing winters had done its work and damp was rotting the wood.
The dog scurried between chair legs and desk legs in a desperate, ravenous pursuit. The rat was a good-sized one and yet fast. Its small feet skittered across a long-forgotten floor covered in grit and plaster; moistened by the damp, it was almost soil and in several places clumps of weed and moss thrived.
Out of the maze of the long-dead office, the rat scampered up a slanted fallen roof timber, on to a chair and over a stick-dry bundle of bones in rags slumped across the grit-covered surface of a service counter. Its body and beady dark eyes reflected all but briefly in a mildew-spotted oval of magnified glass. Along the counter now, it found a dark corner behind a rusting box spewing corroded wires.
A moment later the dog scampered past the counter in hot pursuit, out into a large hall of round wooden benches and long tables. As with the counter, there were other bundles of white bones and tufts of hair wrapped up in decaying fibres of clothing to be seen: lying along the benches, slumped on the reading tables, spread out on the floor. Shards of sunlight speared down into this place through the collapsed domed roof of the building, and a cheerful, welcoming blue sky was visible beyond, framed by the broken fingers of iron spars and crumbling masonry.